Four Ways You Can Add A Little Chaos To Your Production Process

The blog this month is all about experimentation. Sometimes we make the most satisfying discoveries by accident; if you are in full control of your workflow, you are never going to be surprised by any part of your production process.

Below we make some recommendations that can help you let a little chaos into your productions – you might like some of the results!

1. Extreme Time Stretching

PaulStretch is a legendary plug-in in electroacoustic music circles. It was developed to allow truly extreme time stretching – check out this version of A-Ha's 'Take On Me' slowed down 800% to get an idea of the kind of insane soundscapes that this plugin can create.

Now, developer Xenakios has created a free VST2/AU version called PaulXStretch which you can download here. You can feed pretty much anything into this, and emerge with some weird and wonderful results. It's difficult to predict precisely how your sound will be altered, and that is all part of the fun.

2. Randomization

A number of creative plugins come with a 'randomise' button included as one of their features. One example of this is Glitchmachines' free plug-in, Fracture, that we recently wrote about on our blog. It is sometimes worth taking advantage of features like this in order to open yourself up to new possibilities. You might also consider mapping your plug-in controls to a control surface and playing about with them in real time – this is another nice way of allowing something unusual to happen in your mix. 

3. Experimental Plugins

Of course there are many other plugins out there that actively encourage experimentation, and you should consider adding a few of them to your collection. Freakshow Industries make a couple of truly off-the-wall processors that are well worth investigating. Their Backmask and Dumpster Fire plugins only cost $20 each, and they even allow you to 'steal' them if you can't afford them at that price. In addition, we've covered plenty more weird and wonderful free plug-ins on our blog. Try checking out Hysteresis, DLYM, Driftmaker and Orbit to get you started. 

4. Resampling

So, you've created a weird and wonderful sound using our tips. How do you take things up a notch? How about resampling? Resampling is essentially 'sampling a sample', and it is fairly common in certain electronic music genres. It's a great way of putting a piece of audio through more and more FX processes, taking it further and further away from its original sound. It is simple to do; add FX to your audio, and then bounce this down to create a sample. You can then place further FX onto this sample and bounce it down again. Continue this process as many times as you like! You might end up with some truly mangled audio to use in your session. You can even consider making yourself a sample library of all of the unusual samples you create – which you can then raid for future productions.