Highly Strung

Sep 2, 2024

Highly Strung Cover Art
Highly Strung Cover Art. Credit: Sagihharius.

He Goes to His Room

This has the simple origin of my attempts at making make a Lords of Acid inspired song.  While looking for some inspiration in the form of things to sample, I found this video study from a children's hospital in Montréal in 1960.  What I found most interesting was the way the aggressive child's mother spoke.  She was also quite candid, all things considered.  However, something in me decided that her words could be construed into something more... salacious?  Well, the subject matter is what it is; take it or leave it.

Lords of Acid
Lords of Acid promotional photo.  Credit: American Recordings

Core Learnings

Cleaning Audio

The main learning here was dealing with poor quality audio; this most likely a copy of a copy of a copy which then got compressed by YouTube.  The audio has a continual hiss through out, and many of the levels of the speakers vary from quiet to overly loud on some syllables.  Here's how I tried to clean it up:

  1. Remove the hiss with Audacity.  I am not a fan of the user experience in Audacity but it does have some fairly powerful tools.  In this case, I was using noise reduction and, to use it effectively, you need to provide the tool a sample of the noise component only.  This wasn't too difficult because there are many sections of audio without any signal we care about.  In the end, it cleaned up the sound somewhat, but there still remained some hiss.
  2. Many of the sections I was interested in using featured pronounced S and T sounds from the speaker.  For this I used what is called a "DeEsser" (I am not making that up).  From my understanding, it acts as a limiter that targets a frequency range, dipping the amplitude when some threshold is met.  It took a fair bit of trial and error but, ultimately this made the audio listenable at higher levels without hurting one's ears.
  3. Because the amplitude of the samples varied a good deal, the quieter parts were difficult to hear simultaneously with the music.  A compressor can be used to boost the overall amplitude but then limit it above some threshold such that the louder sounds become suppressed.  You can adjust this suppression with an envelope which is useful when you have sharp, abrupt sounds, or want to trail the suppression off gradually to make the correction seem more natural.
  4. To kill off most of the rest of the high frequency noise I simply filtered it out with EQ; it did blunt the voice sound a bit but it was preferable to the hiss.

Highly Strung Logic Pro

Samples Used

From freesound.org:

From landr.com:

  • DBTV2 (stem) 1 - Am 115 bpm - Synth FX
  • CEF2-Elements 120bpm Am

Other: