Read about a technique from Noisia where they’d slightly bitcrush anything above 4khz to make the highs more pleasing. Haven’t tried it myself, generally I cut anything above 11khz on synths purely for preference. Think a lot of love for analog stems from the fact the higher range is degraded, those freqs can make soft synths sound really harsh and digital.
yep
This isn’t a technique from Noisia,this is a misguided/ill informed comment that the know where near in the same league Camo&Krooked made.if anybody actually thinks that murdering the dynamics of your hi-mids and top end is going to make them more sheeny and louder they must be smoking rocks.that would fully explain why alot of DNB and Dubstep has horrid mixdowns these days though,besides the elites of the genres.i don’t think it gets any more bloody than bitcrushing.what you hear as sheen i hear as noise floor as that is essentially what a bitcrusher does. decrease the disparity between the noisefloor and the program material via quantisation distortion
We are talking about is downsampling. Not changing the resolution from 24bit to 8bit or something. Downsampling does some really weird shit to your high end. On low settings (like bringing the value up one point), it magically balances the high end of the sound and if your sound doesn’t have much high end, it creates it out of nowhere. I don’t know shit about how it works, but it’s pretty amazing. You can have a kick drum that has all sorts of nasty peaks in high mids/treble range, then add some downsampling and the high end gets shaped into a flat wall of frequencies.
Probably got more to do with the way different VSTs are labelled and internally programmed.
Downsampling is when the apparent resolution of a photo or sound is reduced, generally by some constant factor of division. Bitcrushing uses this to create distortion in sound.
Btw, all of this is why I’m beginning to believe more and more that everybody should try to get some experience mixing on outboard gear, outside the box. The approach to headroom these days… Good lord. You can’t cram data that isn’t there into a box and then reinflate selected ranges to fill up the gaps.
it doesn’t get flattened into anything,you are adding sidebands (aliasing) into the series that are not related to the harmonic series of the sound.without any jitter (like how old samplers used to do it) this is just going to add static albeit high frequency resonant peaks into your audio.being shaped into a “flat wall of frequencies” is exactly what bit reduction solely would do,as sample rate reduction has no effect on the dynamic range of a signal (it can have an effect on a processor though)
You got any examples of Noisia doing this on drums?.i’m not hearing it to be honest
just a last note.samplerate reduction and bit reduction working in relation to one another is called “decimation”
Yeah I’m finding being aggressive with subtractional eqing working well, find that balance that sounds right. Cut frequencies out for other sounds to shine through.
wasn’t he simply suggesting to bitcrush your highs slightly to make them sound more pleasing? This makes perfect sense to me. It’s not about making it louder, it’s about adding subtle distortion to break up the sound a bit in order to make things sound more organic and sonicly-pleasing on your ears.
In the early days of electronic music, one of the goals was to make sounds more “perfect.” With a synth, you could produce technically ‘perfect’ soundwaves that lacked any analog degredation. However, people quickly began intentionally degrading sounds and adding distortion because they realized it simply doesn’t sound good to have everything mathematically linear and perfect
