White noise tips

[Mark1353]

One application to use it is to increase aggressivity in sounds without harshness. For example using it with a clap to increase its tail, density and aggressivity. How do you use white noise?

[OurDarkness]

1. Mixing very tiny amounts of noise with a signal increases its sense of depth or spatiality.

2. Modulating an oscillator's frequency with noise (depth < 2~3%) makes the oscillator sound more alive. Kinda like vintage stuff that never stays in tune.

3. Noise --> Phaser, swept through a slow LFO is ultra cool.

4. Noise being basically containing non-harmonic content lends itself to emulating sounds such as hi-hats, cymbals and so on. Snares are oftentimes just noise.

5. Pink noise can help equalize a room.

6. It can also be used for sound effects such as wind or waves.

[golden beers]

white noise through an amp-env and a modulating filter makes for good old skool percussion. eg if the filter is low pass mid Q and the modulation and amp-env is controlled by sequencer. and especially if your filter is analogue and your sequencer is also.

[shadowfac]

White noise (in very small amounts) is also used for dithering (reducing the word length) of digital signals. It helps reducing the harmonic distortion introduced by quantization.

Also, running white noise through a properly-tuned keyboard-following resonant bandpass filter, and layering with another sound (e.g., a pad or whatever), makes the sound more "airy" and "vocal". If instead of layering, you use the tuned noise as the modulator in a vocoder, you can make some interesting choir sounds.

Another typical use is running noise through a sample and hold to obtain a sequence of random values, which can then be used to modulate anything. One thing I like to do is using these sequences to trigger a sequencer or envelope. The sequencer or envelope will trigger randomly (only when the trigger value exceeds a certain threshold), but will still be synchronized to the S&H clock. Moreover, with some basic processing (e.g. adding a DC component to the noise signal) you can control the density of triggers in a given period of time. I've used this technique a few times to make hi-hat patterns, where I also modulate the decay/release of the envelope with a random signal (more noise through S&H) to open/close the hihats.

[bleepbleep]

Originally Posted by OurDarkness

5. Pink noise can help equalize a room.

what do you mean? are you talking about doing acoustic sweeps to determine room resonances/comb filtering etc with acoustic measurement devices?

[Mark1353]

Originally Posted by bleepbleep

what do you mean? are you talking about doing acoustic sweeps to determine room resonances/comb filtering etc with acoustic measurement devices?

You can output pinknoise from your speakers to room and record it with a measurement mic. Then compare it with the original pink noise sample and you see the effect your room does.

[esaias]

Originally Posted by shadowfac

Also, running white noise through a properly-tuned keyboard-following resonant bandpass filter, and layering with another sound (e.g., a pad or whatever), makes the sound more "airy" and "vocal". If instead of layering, you use the tuned noise as the modulator in a vocoder, you can make some interesting choir sounds.

Hey does anybody know where I could get such plugin, preferably free

if the plugin is just a filterm I guess I'd need a noise generator plugin too.

-Tomi

[shadowfac]

Originally Posted by esaias

Hey does anybody know where I could get such plugin, preferably free

if the plugin is just a filterm I guess I'd need a noise generator plugin too.

-Tomi

I do all this stuff with modular synths, so it may be possible to do similar stuff with the KarmaFX synth. It used to be free when it was in development, but I'm not sure if it still is.

Stuff like VAZ Modular, Tassman, and Reaktor should be capable, too, but more pricey.

One could do such things in Puredata (free Max/MSP clone), but it takes a while to learn it well.


But, the "noise through a properly-tuned keyboard-tracking bandpass filter" should be do-able with most VA's. You just need to use a bandpass filter with 100% keyboard tracking and tuned so that when you play an A note, you actually hear an A note when the resonance is high (e.g. self-oscillation). Once the filter is tuned, set the resonance at taste (not so high, to let some of the noise through) and run it through a slow stereo phaser and lots of reverb. For extra fun, add some mild modulation (e.g., an LFO) to the filter cutoff or run the output through a low pass filter (if your synth has dual filters in series). Then layer with another pad sound.

[bleepbleep]

Originally Posted by esaias

Hey does anybody know where I could get such plugin, preferably free

if the plugin is just a filterm I guess I'd need a noise generator plugin too.

-Tomi

get the freeware 'Minirator' - its a virtual version of the real hardware, google it or check out the realtraps site - they have the link there

[OurDarkness]

Originally Posted by bleepbleep

what do you mean? are you talking about doing acoustic sweeps to determine room resonances/comb filtering etc with acoustic measurement devices?

Yup.

[andrewsc]

This begs the question of all other types of noise sources, such as tape unpeeling, the noisefloor of various devices, or vinyl record noise, am fm radio noise, etc.

There are infinite noise sources so it's cool to try collecting them and substituting in some more interesting ones, cause white noise is useful but it can be tricky to make it sound particularly rich and interesting.

That being said I think experimenting with various well crafted low volume noise bits used in different ways (different amplitude shapes like fade in bits that precede percussion transients, tails like snare layers, filtering, volume, with or without reverb) can make tracks very interesting.

Noise can be good reverb material to hint at the spatial dimension as was said earlier. I also find noise feeding effects processors often can reveal the character of those effects in full.