Audio Effects Quotes

There's this weird game called 'Blueberry Garden.' For that game an artist recorded some piano music, but evidently he only had a really terrible microphone on top of the piano, and I really liked it and wanted to experiment with that. So, I made piano recording and really mangled it, and kept experimenting with the technique.

I do most of my vocals - aside from a couple of little one-shot vocal samples. I record everything into the Saffire with an SM58 then scratch it with loads of plug-ins. I don't do much vocoding to be honest. All my vocals are usually done with Melodyne and a ton of other plug-ins to make it sound weird.

On 'Honeybabysweetiedoll' I used a Whammy, a Boss OC-3 octave box, a Sustainer and a Line 6 DL4 Delay Modeler. That's only on the intro, where all those weird noises are happening.

Anything can become a musical sound. The wind on telegraph wires is a great sound; get it into your machine and play it and it becomes interesting.

Distortion pedals are just fantastic for not only rehearsing quietly but also for all those moments when you are going to play in highly compressed environments like radio, television, or recording against compressed loops.

'No Bones' has some reverb that I kick around.

I like a good mono track, it's right up front. I don't need all the surrounds telling me there are birds in the neighbourhood.

Music turned to digital, and suddenly you had the possibility to make things louder than loudest, which boggles the mind but it's true, and what you have are all kinds of different ways of distorting your music.

My best monster bass sounds have come from FM8. People think they all come from Massive, but most of the ones that kids online are trying to recreate in Massive are actually from FM8. I also really like Sylenth1, my Tone2 Gladiator and some other granular soft synths as well.

The Marshall guitar amplifier doesn't just get louder when you turn it up. It distorts the sound to produce a whole range of new harmonics, effectively turning a plucked string instrument into a bowed one.

It's not about how loud you turn the amp up. That's not what makes it sound big. What makes it sound big is fooling around with different delays and reverb settings.

I usually create sounds and have different generators running over it. You know you can open a word-file as a picture or the other way round. I do the same with sounds.

One of the rules of the road is that if you want to create the sense of silence, it frequently has more pungency if you include the tiniest of sounds. By manipulating what you hear and how you hear it and what other things you don't hear, you can not only help tell the story, you can help the audience get into the mind of the character.

There's a lot of stuff you've gotta know about Auto-Tune before you can start using it, because it's the hot thing to do.

I'm very lazy when it comes to making the original sound. I don't go through amplifiers and different compressors and signal parts. I just grab something, whether its an old guitar or a children's toy that happens to be lying around, and record it straight into the computer.

The only technical things I know are treble, volume and reverb, that's all.

I love a little distortion across the bass; I think it kind of adds something to the sound of the band when the bass is a little overdriven.

Unless you use the vocoder the way Daft Punk use it, it is very limited. When they sing it's almost human. It sounds sexy. I just used it as an effect. It wasn't because I was not able to sing; I'm not a great singer, but I had some hits as a singer, too. It's a nice effect.

You can't just plug your guitar in your computer and make it sound like an old record.

Well, I think, I certainly used backward music in Sea of Monsters. I can't remember in the Sea of Time. I would tend to do that all the time, you know? I tended to do all sorts of weird things. Just to get effects.

I don't see anything wrong in using auto-tune.

I thought it was magic to be able to catch something identically on tape and then be able to play around with it, run it backwards; I thought that was great for years.

What Skrillex does with Ableton it's like being a little god. It's not just pushing loops - that's easy - but to do the effects he's a genius.

Oh my gosh! I can't tell you the number of times people have put autotune on my voice, and I'm like, 'Please take it off!' You don't even sound human; it makes you sound like a robot!

I was always fascinated particularly with synths: how they looked and stuff that when you're a kid you're like this is the most incredible thing in the world just to play.