Hello metal-gnar-chives.


I'm in a grind band that's trying to incorporate some really suffocating, deep, reverberated white noise for atmosphere during songs/between sets. Right now, we have a Korg Synth app that's actually pretty fucking cool for the iPad (hate all you want, we've already made some really crushing shit with it). But I'm not getting the exact sound I want, and I probably need to run through some serious reading to get what I need. We're debating what we should do next: learn more about the Korg, or switch over to another means of creating noise.

What would you recommend for someone who wants to generate noise?




We have a lot of really cool gear to fuck around with. Boss HM2 (the original, no fucking around here), a Peavy studio head, a Kustom head (this is used to round out our sound, it gives a lot of punch and sounds surprisingly good). We also run the guitar through a Pog octave pedal that goes to a bass full stack, small ampeg head with an ultrabass control. We like this thing a lot, we run it through a Line 6 distortion pedal of some sort. We also have a boss reverb pedal, and a volume pedal.

Sorry for not being specific, I'm the drummer of this band and don't know all the details on the gear we're using.

Anyway, using these items, is there anyway to get some sort of controllable noise out? Can we do it while we're playing? I'm not looking for feedback-noise in the way of Eyehategod, I want something more booming and consuming. I'm searching the web for answers, but I always check here to see what people say. Sometimes, it's way worth it.

Have you tried putting the iPad through a distortion pedal, or even several distortion pedals? But be careful of the level, headphone level is much, much louder than the electric guitar level.

I haven't, but I'll give that a shot. We wanted to run it through a reverb pedal, too. We don't really need the reverb on our guitars that much, because both of the heads have variables for reverb. So for any doom and gloom shenanigans, we'll just use the ones on the heads for the guitar sound, which would leave us that reverb pedal...

Thanks for the idea!

Yup, reverb and distortion pedals are definitely a good idea.

Is the program you’re using the Korg MS-20 app? I’m wondering because that one models a monophonic synth, which is not the best for creating atmospherics and noise. You can definitely do it, but many other polyphonic digital synths have tone generators for white noise and other features that would be useful for what you are trying to do.

Not exactly sure what sound you're going for, but I have managed to get an extremely ambient/atmospheric/drawn out-type sound. Using my guitar connected to my amp, and adjusting settings on my amp, making sure it's a clean sound with no distortion, I turned the reverb up to max and the delays to almost max (I got the delay as high as possible without being able to explicitly hear each plucked note over everything else). Then I just play on my guitar. If you pluck a single string and pluck it softly, you can get a pretty steady ambient sound. Of course you will have to keep plucking to sustain the sound but it shouldn't be a problem.

Again, I don't know if you want a clean, ambient, atmospheric sound like I described or more of a harsh, static-y, blank white sound. I dunno. Maybe you could get the harsher grimier sound with distortion added to it. You can try or what I said, or if you really want I can show you the sound I'm talking about, but I would have to record and upload something so only if this is the sound you think you want.

Corpsefister- Yeah, it is. We have one or two others, I think we have an app called the Droner. Or something like that, I'm not positive. We were actually able to do some really sick stuff with it already, but then again, there could be better things out there. I'll look into polyphonics, I must have just assumed it was polyphonic.

Indecency- Well, we're looking for both. Basically, the idea is to have a completely suffocating atmosphere, which would require a lot of reverb and delay. But we want it to be dynamic. Noise is great, but so many people really don't know how to use it. I think it's best used to create a tapestry of sound, and by that I mean using it to effect, not as an effect. You can slap white noise over anything and call it ambient doom/grind/whatever you're going for, but we want to actually make it musical. We're using the synthesizers because we want the noise to be going on while we play, too.

I'm sure you guys are familiar with like noisegrind or whatever, all of that stuff is bullocks to me.. But the methods used for it could be useful. I couldn't really find anything online, but only because I've been swamped with school and writing songs with this band before adding noise. Does anyone have any tutorials or explanations of those methods?