Okay, that seems more cohesive. Yeah I don't like reverb across the full mix either. I could have reverb on every track, but always in specific doses per part. Really cool piece, thanks for sharing the process. I live in Youngstown, Ohio and there are abandoned steel mills everywhere, definitely see myself getting into some of this stuff.

If you can hear reverb on it, it's from the physical spaces I was in. (No digital reverb present at any point.)
Good examples would be the starting gong sound (recorded in a brewing kettle) and the filing cabinet jam around 14:30.

The piece was then assembled from hours or source material in cool edit pro. Some things, like the drums and guitar drones were recorded in my bedroom. At the very end you can hear garbage trucks passing outside, 20-30ft from my bedroom window - that's how sensitive the mics are.

I could have gone back and recorded the final mix in one of the buildings used, but I generally don't like applying one constant effect on a dynamic piece of music. If it was a pure drone, perhaps. I wanted the percussive elements to stay dry.

So at what point was the natural room used, and when did you use the binaural mics? It seems like you recorded sounds in the room and used single hits in a tracker/DAW to create this sort of minimalist droning. Did you then go back and record everything using the rooms again? Whole mix or did you bother with separating tracks?

Thanks!

I used these microphones (which for the price are unbeatable) as well as a standard 1990s minidisc recorder.
http://www.core-sound.com/lcmics/1.php

Playback on site was a cheap portable cd boombox.

Uh, so this is pretty amazing.

Reminds me of those spatial soundscapes in games like Portal. Very cool, gonna listen to this whole thing (for the music as well as recording process)

It can be amazing, but it all depends on your material and the space you're using.
The source material for this was all recorded in abandoned buildings in Montreal:

http://ilkae.bandcamp.com/track/spring- … om-pebbles

Not a chiptune. I would imagine that some awesome phase modulation could be attained using wet+dry chip sources though.

Live reverb is okay, but you tend to have to deal with the other noise present in the space (or cars going by outside, etc.).

If you take an impulse recording of the space, the noise isn't an issue (it's sort of orthogonal to the impulse), and you can apply it freely and more easily.

You can place your stereo pair of mics close or wide, also you can angle them narrow or widely. These both have different effects. You don't have to stop at two microphones either, unless you're out of microphones. Phase issues are usually easy to sort out in an editor later, though if you're unlucky you'll get some unfortunate phase in the echo. Theoretically you should not place your source in the very middle of a symmetrical room, but this is not a problem I've seen practical outside of artificial reverb simulation. You also don't want to place a microphone at a resonant node, but you'll hear that right away if you listen to the recording. You can walk around clapping in a room and eventually you'll find a place where the clap "rings" with a tone. Don't put the mic there (this is usually easy to avoid, these nodes tend to be few).

I put some mild reverb on some chiptunes once, but they were of classical music so I thought it was appropriate to do so.

lampshades over microphones

Herein lies the rub. There are no right or wrong answers.

I agree, however, over the top complicated techniques are a great way to build a sound in a way it might have been previously lacking. For example, my lsdj tracks for up to a year were very bland and discouraging until i found your tutorials on youtube. Spending a lot of time on my synths have turned bland tracks into bangers. But the same goes for everything. I intern with a grammy award winning producer and some of the stuff he does to his tracks is absolutely-mind-blowingly-incredible as far as processing goes. It's nuckin futs. I'm not saying composition isn't important. I wouldn't record something I didn't think was a masterpiece. I just think these extra tricks are gonna make it jump out from all the other amazing compositions. it really wraps it up all nice in a tight gift to the world of iphone earbuds and laptop speakers.

No I totally agree. I've just got the tunes already written and have been sitting on them a while, thinking of maybe some new angle to take them through in the mixing/mastering stage when the time is right.

(read: I have no idea what I'm going to do with such pure waveforms.)

Production aesthetic and composition are inexorably tied.  Composing without a mind toward an aesthetic is a quick way to get Yngwie Malmsteen-level blandness

Also, I like reverb a lot.  This thread gives me some awesome ideas!

Not so much unfortunately. You can buy mics that are placed in a mannequin head that are supposed to give you Binaural Sound, however its all just different EQ tricks and algorithms. The shape of our ears and other factors (glasses, long hair, body type, etc.) changes a lot in regards to how we hear things. I wish it was that easy:/

But going with this sort of approach you can follow these stereo mic techniques
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ORTF_stereo_technique
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NOS_stereo_technique
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blumlein_Pair

Myself not so much natural reverb, I don't have a nice sounding room. However I have re-amped my GB-Boy a few times, Nothing to serious, Just because I am an audio-nerd. I just took the output of my GB-Boy, Into a "Air-Guitar Rocker" toy amps and then close miced the amp.

I have also built a small "plate" reverb unit. Haven't used it with anything chip related yet.

My 2 cents.

It's usually way more worth the effort to spend the time writing a better song, rather than doing over the top complicated production techniques for some kind of aesthetic.  However if you do spend the time, you might learn a few production related things along the way.