DIY Dub Delays

Here's a way that you can make your own dub delay.

1. Send a track to a new bus

2. Add a simple delay to the bus, choose your delay times to taste and make sure that no filters are doing anything to the audio.  For this to work you want to keep the feedback between 0% and 10% - we'll be adding our own feedback loop later on.

3. Now add a distortion effect after the delay and a filter after that (I like either high passing or low passing but you could even go for band passing if you want).

4. Now to create the feedback loop, send your dub delay bus to itself (so if I'm using bus 1 for the dub delay, I send bus 1 to bus 1).  I'd recommend putting a limiter on either the master or at the end of the dub delay channel to avoid damaging your speakers and your ears (my mate blew his by turning up the feedback on Logic's tape delay a little bit too much.

That's the basics of it, but you can get creative with this technique and add other kinds of effects to the delay chain.

Here's a couple of Audio Examples of me messing about with this technique.

A different way to do rising build ups.

Ok here's a different method of doing rising builds ups that I nicked from a mate of mine.

First things first you select either the first beat or the first two beats of the section you want to build up into and bounce down a copy of this (you just need one or two beats - the picture below I just went for one).

Ok, import the bit of audio into a blank audio track and add a nice long reverb (try starting with 100% wet, sometimes this trick works better with a little bit of dry tucked in there are well), now bounce a copy of this snippet of the drop with the long reverb out.  In this picture I used a nice long reverb from Logic's Space Designer, but any nice nice sounding reverb will do the trick.

Now open up this new copy with reverb up in your sample editor of choice and reverse it (I'm using the one built into Logic), so it looks something like this.

Right now we're ready to position it so that it builds up into the drop (I had to chop a little bit off the front of my reverse reverb build up because it tailed off a bit) leaving you with something like this

I like this technique because it doesn't sound quite as rinsed as the band passed white noise sweep.  You can always experiment with further processing the build up (maybe a bit of subtle flanging or some other stereo modulation effect).

Edit: Here is an Audio Example of the reverse reverb build up

Hello World!

I'm making this blog to talk about my favorite music, production techniques, coding for Pure Data, maybe share my musing on music as a whole (I'll try not to talk too much rubbish when I do this) and also to share about my music and what I'm up to.

I will leave you all now with a fantastic tune, "My Angel Rocks Back and Forth" - by Fourtet