i dont have any knowledge of microphones. i have a jez riley french c-series contact mic with the neutrik jack that i used a little here, plugged into the h5. otherwise yeah i just use the stereo mic that’s attached to the zoom. i think they sound really good at least compared to anything else i’ve used. i do focus on processing a lot though.
so first i’ll take the samples from the Zoom and put them into iZotope Rx8 and typically i leave a bout 30 seconds in the beginning of each recording to capture a noise profile. then i’ll use that noise profile to do spectral de-noise in rx-8 and set the strength and threshold according to how much i want to remove from the original source. sometimes i will use de-wind for transients because that works better in my case than de-rustle or de-click. then sometimes eq out the low frequencies in rx8 as well.
in ableton, i take a very small section of a texture that i like, process that with stock ableton effects like the compressor, frequency shifter, eq8, saturator, phaser, (sometimes) corpus, maybe grain delay. but just enough to kind of transform it into a new texture or enhance what i like about the recorded one. after that, sometimes i’ll layer two of those small pieces together but in most cases, i will move onto the next micro-audio clip and paste that right up against, a lot of times crossfading heavily into the last clip on the timeline. this way i can create new longer phrases or tactile surface layers that evolve and give some sense of movement by piecing together the smallest fundamental blocks of audio particulate that i can and sort of building up a new synthesized binaural space. that’s why it moves fast. each 2 seconds of audio probably took 30 minutes to edit. i also spent a lot of time moving those sounds around in space with various surround sound or spatializer plugins and the waves doppler. DearVr Pro is one of the best ones for that sort of thing, in my opinion
i was really happy when i developed that very detailed minimal process in ableton because it really cut out a lot of the excess audio i would typically add in to fill space or add ambience as a background. previously i was getting used to putting some reverbed tonal sound underneath these foreground sounds and letting that drift across a longer space in time but i wanted to make this album very precise and only include the sounds that i built deliberately from the ground up. but that was a while ago. and i think that, by now, i have figured out how to get even cooler textures from hardware synthesis whether it is digital or analog. it was mostly in an effort to get away from the computer at first but i’m finding that it’s even easier now to build entirely original highly textured organic-feeling sounds that way. and it’s more fun. but you can do a lot with just the simple stock plugins to manipulate recordings. i think i did use a little bit of granulator II on some of the sounds. maybe some m4l devices like samsara, grain scanner, and iota. but for the most part, it’s subtle frequency changes and transient shaping
