@Downstate:
About Aron's (Failotron / Kanagawa) recording & production process, I remember him saying:
"I recorded with a reverb I decided I wasn't satisfied with. So I rented a church."
somehow picking this up:
For me, handling reverb and reverberations/reflections and echo is almost identical to architecture. You practically create spaces, relations, narratives of a landscape, composing not just in time, but in 3D as well. Reverberations have the extreme power to suddenly contextualize sound, since it scales out it's surroundings on a multitude of levels. This I think is really important to take into account. Using these tools will for sure completely strip your sound from any of those features associated with the algorithmic coldness of electronic music - but then again, perfect silence only exists inside the machine, so from the point on you play anything from any speaker or headphones you already have reverb.
What I see with a lot of artists, that they have absolutely no patience in getting into these tools, meanwhile using them all the time without any brain whatsoever. I'm not talking about the techy side, but rather letting the time to compose and build these spaces - playing with decay, diffusion, reflections, overtones and such, and alternate them throughout the soundpiece. If it's not done right, it's no different for me than an out-or-proportion architectural design or bad typography. The space between the elements is what truly makes your work awsum : 3
two practical advises:
> For warm, spacious sound, try putting your sounds in a space with acoustics you like and record them again with a mic. I used bathrooms, churches, concert halls, stables, gardens, hangars, a kebab joint, all sorts of silly things. It's a nice way to experiment and who knows, you might catch some funky extra sounds on the way.
> If you prefer using artificial reverb, I'd recommend going for a cheapo digital effect unit (early Lexicons, or even a Nanoverb), since these machines are not as delicately calibrated as the big guys - meaning you can tweak them more. If you are a tape/space echo nerd, I'm not gonna stop you - it has a fantastic sound for a lot of things, but it lack the flexibility to really compose in space.
hope this helped - wanted to say a few words about the 'why' rather than the 'how'.
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