I'm loving Alchemy and loading my own samples, so now I'm considering getting a field recorder, getting some samples from around my place (cars, dogs, birds, etc.) and bringing them into Alchemy for processing into FX.

Does anyone have any "best practice" recommendations? I've read around in the manual and it was helpful, but I'm wondering if anyone else has tried this and what luck they've had.

I can save $200 on a field recorder if it's not a good idea..

field recorder...

its the same for the thread about iris... have to get field recorder have to get field recorder.
there is some really good websites for already recorded audio that people made of everything you can imagine so it feels a bit redundant to buy one for recording birds or whatever...

mjaiuuu

If I decide to make an Alchemy bank, I'd rather bot have to deal with getting usage clearances, thanks. If I sample it, the rights are mine from the start.

What about Royalties for the birdies (aka performers)?

no no..
go to freesound.org for example and its for anyone to use-
you dont need clearance and its just that private persons that did recordings with mostly field recorders.
its also searchable so its really easy to find what you are looking for...
and in either case if someone uses a sample of some sound and then process them its not that anyone would ever find out is it.

the only reason that i can find for recording is that the sounds would have a personal connection-
like me recording my daughter as i did...
then again is it really necessary to have perfect sound...
saw producer master class with kryptic minds and they are using a lot of samples on their last album recorded with their cell phone...
they actually liked the compressed sound they got out of it,
and plus that you would'nt get the same sound in alchemy because alchemy will process the sound and change the character anyway just by importing the sound into it.

by the way love alchemy!

mjiauuu

Original fIeld recordings are super-precious if it comes to designing your own sounds in Alchemy or any other sample mangler. I've done if for more than 2 decades now and the stuff I've found, also during collecting footage for documentaries in countries abroad really is totally treasurous.
Denoising and equing your field recordings the right amount is very important. Get a good denoiser, take the right footprint in the file to denoise and adjust to taste, a bit more than the usual helps making the final sounds in Alchemy becoming not too washy and noisy, especially when you want to resynthesize them e.g. with Alchemy's additive resynthesis. The background noise will make the resynthed file all blurry and ugly. Try denoising e.g. a file with some singing birds, totally denoise it so that you only keep the actual bird singing and have no more background noises like e.g. wind an whatever else there was. Then resynthesize it, stretch it exremely and turn the PitchVar paramater to 0 so the birds will be singing on a single note and the pitch changes will transform into changes in the spectral/harmonic structure.
Last edited by Sampleconstruct on Wed May 16, 2012 1:17 pm; edited 1 time in total

Here are some demos with some of my Alchemy patches made only from/with field recordings:
http://soundcloud.com/sampleconstruct/resynthed-factory-scap es-demo
http://soundcloud.com/sampleconstruct/kasachstan-split-demo- sb
http://soundcloud.com/sampleconstruct/steel-factory-demo-sb
http://soundcloud.com/sampleconstruct/atheist-church-pad-dem o-sound
http://soundcloud.com/sampleconstruct/train-scape-demo-sound -bank
http://soundcloud.com/sampleconstruct/industrial-wind-scape- demo-sb
http://soundcloud.com/sampleconstruct/degrees-of-thunder-dem o-sb
http://soundcloud.com/sampleconstruct/in-the-fields-demo-sb
http://soundcloud.com/sampleconstruct/industrial-nightmare-s plit
http://soundcloud.com/sampleconstruct/industrial-wind-scape- demo-sb
http://soundcloud.com/sampleconstruct/kasach-party-singer-de mo-sb
http://soundcloud.com/sampleconstruct/tokyo-street-seller-de mo-sb
Last edited by Sampleconstruct on Wed May 16, 2012 8:24 pm; edited 2 times in total

Simon makes a very good point of this. I've been doing post-production and field recording work for more three and a half decades in feature films. Original sounds are invaluable - the most precious - and the greatest source for sound design inspiration.

Ha! I only pay 'em chicken feed!

Wow, thanks for the advice! I have a lot to learn, I see...

..and your demos are cool! Very inspirational, thanks!

My pleasure - you don't have to learn but you seem to want to learn

Very interesting. Can you list some favorite denoising tools that work well for this kind of application?

Thanks!

Yeah, freesound.org is cool, but... Simon to the rescue!

I use iZotope RX (now version 2) for this, with it's denoising and spectral repair tools it does everything I need. It works in real-time in your DAW or in standalone mode, the latter offers some offline modes with even higher quality producing even less artifacts. As a surgical (line-phase) EQ I use Fabfilter's ProQ (mainly for cutting, nor boosting), often automating it as the unwanted frequencies in a field recording often change drastically over time. But sometimes boosting one or several very narrow bands in a field recording works wonders, like I often treated recordings made in factories with heavy machinery to enhance the (musically) relevant bands to e.g. create some sort of "Turbine Organ".

Concerning the denoising it sometimes helps to first isolate the actual noise with an EQ, then take the noise-footprint of that isolated noise and then to bypass the EQ again and proceed with the denoising. This way the denoiser will remove less of the wanted frequencies and produce less artifacts.

But of course the magic starts with the recording itself - what mics does one use, how good are the Mic Preamps of the used recorder (the better, the less groundfloor noise), where does one place the mics, what aspect of a sound is interesting, how patient can one be waiting for hours for something sonically interesting to happen and not leaving a given location too early.
I mainly use 2 long shotgun mics mounted on a Boom with proper windshielding, sometimes handheld recorders, sometimes binaural mics which I carry in my ears, sometimes handheld stereo mics.

The pic below was taken in Beijing in 2005 when we toured Asia together with the Berlin philharmonic orchestra for a cinema documentary about that trip. I did about 80% of the entire filmscore and the sound design with field recordings collected throughout Asia on that trip:

Last edited by Sampleconstruct on Wed May 16, 2012 8:37 pm; edited 3 times in total

Great insight, Sampleconstruct. I'm just starting making field recordings, and considering buying Alchemy too. It's very useful to learn what techniques people use to prep the sounds for use in Alchemy

Thanks!
Avi