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Hi everyone,
I'll try to make this question painless and short... I'm writing an electro-acoustic tape piece for a composition recital and (like a fool) I decided to "make" all of the sounds in it from a recording I have of a female speaker reading a poem. One of the things I'm trying to make that's driving me crazy is some nice metallic clashes (think swordfighting). Any advice for the best way to do this? Also I'm trying to get some nice, dragon-like creature sounds (the poem is Jabberwocky in case you're curious). Any hints you can give would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks,
Tyler

do you have any softwre based samplers? I have to say that to try to do all of that with just plugins will be very difficult. If you have reason chop up your audio and put it into the NNXT, or if you have kontakt even better. You could try time stretching your audio a lot and pitchshifting that gives pretty strange sounds + using DP's extras, ring mod but i have to really say that you will regret not ahving the sampler

Unfortunately I don't have any samplers... I'm using all plugins. I've created another tape piece this way but I was only trying to create weird sounds. Now I'm specifically looking to create metallic clashes and screeching animals.

In DP, try Sonic Modulator (is that the right name?). If you're not limited to DP, check out the freeware Soundhack for some crazy spectral tweaks. Thonk is also a great freeware app that take a sound input and creates totally unexpected results.

sounds like a plug in or v-synth with a ring modulator would be good, too

With DPs Ring Modulator there's a little drop down menu that says
"modulation source."
With That you can use the sound of another track with an effect on it
(say a metal gate clanging for example) set the output on that
track to bus 1+2 and the input on DP's Ring Modulator
"modulation Source" to input bus 1+2 and all sorts of fun may result.
Used in conjunction with DP's Sonic Modulator, the fun never ends.

You could probably dig up the foley you need for a nominal price (if not for free) if you scour the web. Try www.soundrangers.com for starters. They have a bunch of a la carte sfx you can download.

Or just record someone slapping some cutlery around, change the audio playback speed, then compress to taste.

Short of that, yeah, ring modulation can give sounds a metallic timbre, although it'll usually result in a more sci-fi flavor.

Also look into Izotope's Spectron. It has a number of metallic effect settings you could goof with.

Thanks guys!

Cool project! I did something similar once, and found it to be a very fun endeavor.
First thing I'd say is try time-stretching small bits of vocals to their limit. You can get all kinds of neat digital effects this way.
Tweak, tweak, tweak!
Also, try working with individual sylables.
The "s" in a word is a lot like white noise. You can try looping it several times and then sweeping a filter across it. Play with eq's.
Have fun! And when you're done, you should think about posting a link to the track here.