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(Page 1 of 1 pages for this article ) Tuesday, July 22, 2008Rolling Your OwnA free utility lets you assemble audio tools in an instant. It’s also fun to play with.
When I started, an audio room was a collection of tape recorders, rack-mount processors, and a console. (Software? You wore a cotton shirt so it would stay comfortable through an 18-hour session.)
The key to this all was the patchbay, a bunch of jacks and cords looking something like an antique telephone switchboard. That was where you controlled which processor did what to a given signal. And since the number of processors was limited, you got good at hooking up combinations of them for special effects:
...you get the idea. These days we reach for a single plug-in to achieve most of those effects, and pick a preset that came from its factory. But combining effects - or mashing them - is still a lot of fun, and a important part of making tracks that are interesting as well as realistic. There have been realtime DSP boxes to emulate patchbay-and-processors, but they can be expensive, and their software can be difficult for novices. (My favorite, the Eventide series, costs thousands of dollars and is found in elaborate post suites. It comes with more than a hundred prebuilt special effects I wrote for that company.) Recently I discovered an open-source project that lets you do the whole thing in a desktop computer, easily and for free. Best of all, after you’ve developed an effect, the program cleans up the cords and turns it into a standard plug-in. You can then use it from your editing software, exactly the way you would with any factory effect. SonicBirth was invented a few years ago by Antoine Missout, as part of a university project at a noted engineering school in Montreal. For a while he sold it, but now it’s free and part of the open-source movement. You can download it and a manual at Sourceforge. Since a lot of people can now contribute to its development, it’ll probably keep getting better and better. Under the Hood Open SonicBirth, and you get a workspace where you drop individual processor modules (there are hundreds to choose from). Then you can connect them with virtual “cords”. It looks like this:
It may look daunting at first, but if you’ve spent any time in a sound studio, it’ll become clear after a couple of minutes. It’s also totally interactive: you can add or delete modules, or change the wiring between them, while you’re playing sounds and hearing the result. This screenshot shows a mono-to-stereo simulator I threw together. It takes mono clips and gives them depth and width to fill the screen… without leaving any artifacts to disturb mono listeners. (The basic circuit is simple, and thoroughly explained in my Audio Postproduction book. A comb filter assigns alternate bands of a signal to alternate channels, spreading its harmonics. There’s a bypass for low frequencies, controls for width and timbre, and a couple of test switches.) If even part of this screenshot makes sense to you, you’re ready. Download the program. Examine some of its prebuilt circuits, and then start playing with your own. Once a circuit has been built, you never need to look at that pile of spaghetti again! With a few clicks, SonicBirth turns it into a plug-in:
This is how that same circuit looks when you’re ready to use it. The screenshot is from Bias Peak - in my opinion, the best utility editing/mastering program on any platform - but you can also call it from almost any other NLE or DAW. Nobody sells a plug-in that sounds quite like mine, but now it appears on the menu with all my other effects… and didn’t cost a cent. You can give the circuits and UI more pizzazz. Here’s a “16mm Projector” (also in my Post book) that adds the authentic distortions and noises of a classroom film, complete with chattering gate. It even has a motor that takes a few seconds to reach the right speed.
The idea of freeform audio DSP isn’t new. Aside from the Eventide boxes, there are programs that let you build effects to run in a host computer. But they’re much more complicated and cost money. Also, SonicBirth runs only on Macs (for now). But it’s very cool, fun to use, and - if you’re doing anything creative with sound - a valuable tool. --- Confession of a newbieIf there’s interest, I’ll post my SonicBirth data files for these two plug-ins (they won’t work unless you install the program itself, first). Let me know by posting a note in the comments fields below. I’m very new to this blogging thing. I’ve only been writing here for two weeks, and a week of that was lost to an eye injury that kept me off my computers. (My clients were very understanding: “You hurt your eye? Aw. Your ears are still okay, aren’t they?") So your feedback will tell me whether it’s worth setting up an area on my own web site, where you can get support files for these articles. Audio • Post Production • (Page 1 of 1 pages for this article ) 
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