The Bourbon hoover
From DNBWiki
Bourbon Biscuit’s Hoover/Reece/Whatever tip… This is a guide on how to distort the bass sound from renegade terrorist to accomplish sounds similar to Dark Soldier, Torpedo, and Locust and so on. This is just the basic idea and you should get to know it and then try experimenting further. You’ve heard tunes like the Dark Soldier remixes, you can clearly hear that it’s a bass sound that resembles the bass sound from renegade terrorist. (This was actually taken from a techno tune so I’ve heard…). But when you run the terrorist bass through distortion, you can’t get it right. Here is a way to create authentic rich distortion: Essential tools for this tutorial are:
- Sonic Foundry Sound Forge Version 6 or higher (because it has a new distortion effect in it that we’ll be using.)
- PSP Vintage Warmer DX/VST plug-in (Because this emulates the way analogue tape sounds when overdriven. This is a way to get that sound in the digital realm.)
- The tune “Ray Keith – Renegade Terrorist (PA Mix)”, either from CD or vinyl or whatever. It’s available on the CD “Vintage Dread 2000” which is probably worthwhile getting. The bass sound we’ll be using is available at my website http://members.lycos.co.uk/bourbonbiscuit/. That was taken from CD so is better than having it from mp3 or vinyl.
Take a listen to the file called “example_bass.mp3” in the zip you got this tutorial from. This is the Hoover I made using the method I’m going to show you. It resembles dark soldier’s bass, it’s even got that watery sound in there.
1. The first step is to run sound forge, and load up the terrorist tune or the one downloaded from the website above. Turn the “snap to zero” function on by going to “Options/Auto Snap to Zero”.
2. Find the bit where the bass is alone, play it. It has a repeating pattern of 3 notes, use the third one and select a loop from it. [img] http://www.dogsonacid.com/attachment.php?s=b6b584f7ee75f9d1658e710f448581c3&postid=5804900 [img]
3. Crop this loop and select edit/copy. Paste it 3 times at the end of the wave so you have a sound that repeats 4 times. Make a copy of this in a new window and minimise one so it’s out our way.
4. Choose PSP Vintage warmer from the DX Favourites menu. Set it up as follows:
- Knee to 0
- Speed to 50
- Release to 1
- Ceiling to 0
- Low to 0
- High to 0
- Mix to 100
- Output to 0
- ON
- Single Band
- Stereo
- Link On.
- Drive to 0
These settings leave the sound unaltered, it does not compress it or anything. These are important settings. If we crank the drive knob up full, we’re emulating that analogue tape overdrive. So turn the drive knob up to full and press ok. I want you to repeat the Vintage Warmer process 3 more times by pressing Ctrl+Y to repeat it. You might not want to play this now as it will be very loud.
5. Go to Process/EQ/Graphic. Go to the tab labelled Envelope. You will see a graph. Press reset and Click the box on the left of the graph and drag it all the way down to the bottom. Then Press OK. This leaves us with the Mids and Hi’s. [img] http://www.dogsonacid.com/attachment.php?s=b6b584f7ee75f9d1658e710f448581c3&postid=5804916 [img]
6. Copy this, now bring the minimised file back up, go to the start of the wave and select Edit/Paste Special/Mix. Adjust the volume levels for both the destination and clipboard till it sounds like a good balance. Don’t let it clip. I turned the destination down 4 dB and the clipboard turned down 1dB but set it up how it sounds good to you.
7. The last step is to select Effects/Distortion. I went through the presets and found one called “Wet Slew” I changed the Slew Rate value from 5 to 21. And pressed Ok. This is now done! Take a listen to “thefinishedhoover.mp3” to see how it turned out. Play some notes with your hoover to see how good it is, it can be useful to compare to another tune with a similar hoover to see how yours sounds in comparison.
Another thing to try is on step 5 after you EQ the thing to leave mids and hi, copy that and reverse it then mix it back on top of it at an appropriate volume balance. Then finally mix that on the minimised one and distort. You will get a harsher sound that way. This is just the basis for hoover distortion, I’ve achieved similar results to Locust and Torpedo by slightly varying things. Experiment… Hope this helps you.
