Greetings all!

What is "found sound?" Just what it says on the tin - sound that you found!

I love found sound. Found sound is FUN.

You'd be amazed at the kinds of sounds you can collect from our everyday environment. Especially when you take 'em home, feed them into your favorite DAW and start mashing 'em up.

One of the cool things I've found about working with found sound is that it gets me listening to what's around me in a new way. I start hearing all kinds of things I never noticed before...

You don't necessarily need a ton of gear. There are some portable or field recorders out there now that are very good value. A couple of good mics might help here too.

Found sound tips:

1) Develop a set of "found sound tools" for your sampling sessions. By this I don't mean audio tools... I mean things like a couple of drum sticks, some felt covered hammers, and various other things that you might use to strike, scrape, bow, etc. Notice how different the tone of something is when struck with a drum stick to when you hit it with your hand.

2) Process your found sounds and make 'em into loops. Some of the best effects can be had through simple pitch shifting. Done the "old-school way" i.e. without time correction - in the manner of the old samplers... so that a sound is played back at half speed to sound an octave down. Also, reversing samples and using other plugins can create some great results.

3) Combine your found sounds with "regular" instrument or drum sounds for phenomenal effects. Some of the true masters of this IMO are Future Sound Of London. They combine often-simple melodies with electronic sounds and found sound and create fantastic multi-layered "collages of sound" through this method.

4) Of course - don't "bootleg" other people's music or copyrighted content.

Example:

Last year a friend and I recorded a 4th of July firework display that was happening near to my studio. We then cut up the sounds, and through a combination of pitch shifting, reverb, reversing and slicing managed to create some great sounding drum loops! We couldn't believe how well our results had turned out.

It's one of those things that's a little bit "paint at the wall". You never quite know how its going to turn out.

But as they say... if you're not on the field, you can't score. And it's a great excuse to get out of the studio and go on an adventure... :)

With found sound, the only limit is your imagination.

Alex
PXR8