extreme effects / cover feature 

Why settle for run of the mill when you can do something incredible? If this thought resonates with you and you’re ready to go off the beaten track, then read on…

Most music sits within tried and tested boundaries. This makes perfect sense as the vast majority of listeners don’t want their senses battered or their musical expectations tested whenever they listen to music. But despite these limitations, recorded music history is still littered with examples of people searching for something new that pushes the boundaries musically.

In this feature we’ll go beyond the everyday common sounds that make up the vast majority of music production, to look at the extreme ends of the spectrum. But extremes come in many shapes and sizes so although we’ll be looking at ways to create banging beats and tearing leads, we’ll also take time to focus on more creative territory, including how to get the most from reverbs, delays and the stereo image. Before we get into specifics, we’ll look at how we got here, starting with a quick spin through history, focussing on the people and production techniques that paved the way. We’ll look at how the equipment of the time influenced sounds and how people overcame technical limitations to achieve their vision.

Plugins are, of course, the mainstay of modern production and we’ll look at what’s out there, including the most powerful paid-for options. But we’ve also selected some of the best freebies, as well as a choice list from our very own Suite. Then it’s on to the tutorials. Here we’ve put together eight walkthroughs to demonstrate a range of creative and extreme techniques. What’s more, they all use our excellent Suite plugins, so all you’ll need to get started is a willingness to experiment…

Extreme effects

Contemporary music production is the culmination of decades of techniques and technological advancements, and much of what we now do in our DAWs exploits techniques that were developed long ago using very different equipment. That said, much of what we now view as standard practice was once seen as cutting edge. Listen to any number of Motown tracks from the 1960s, and it’s often the sound of the compressor audibly kicking in or the sound of the analogue tape saturating that adds the energy and flavour. Whether this was intentional or not is unclear, and the engineers at the time would have also been trying to achieve the best signal to noise ratio on the available tape. Either way, it certainly contributed to their signature sound and today using and abusing compression in audible ways is commonplace. At a similar time, engineers started sticking mics inside kick drums (this was initially quite frowned upon) or putting tea towels on snare drums. Both delivered a tighter sound and eventually led to a situation where close miking drums became standard practice. There are plenty of other examples, whether it be overloading analogue mixer channels or even master busses, using and abusing hardware processors such as reverbs or overdriving physical processors such as spring reverbs or tape delays. And you can couple these techniques with slightly out there production concepts such as recording a drum kit, one drum at a time (Martin Hannett), or simply turning a domestic setting into a studio (Joe Meek et al). Much of this seems pretty tame nowadays, but the examples reveal how necessity or simply taking a few risks resulted in music production techniques changing and evolving in creative and cutting edge ways.