Sound-Dough

The amount of control we have these days over audio is incredible. We can easily achieve things in 2 minutes that took boffins with lab-coats and master's degrees weeks to figure out only a few years ago. Armed with any PC and an audio editing program like Music Morpher Gold, anyone can now do pretty much anything they like with sound.

Removing vocals? Easy. Make it all louder? No problem. Make it shorter, faster, closer, further, greener...?? It's all possible and not at all hard which has led me to come to the only sensible conclusion possible;

Sound is like Play-dough.

Anything you can do with Play-dough you can do with sound. Squeeze it, flatten it, bend it, cut it up or mix it all together into one big multicolor-mess. Most of this can be done with the default tools that come with your audio program, but there's some things that still need specialist tools. Just like the Kid up the road who was turning out beautifully molded Mickey Mouse heads with his full play-dough workbench, you'll need some extra bits and pieces if you want to create your own piece of audio magic.

Music Morpher Gold supports both VST and DirectX audio plug-ins (http://www.musicmorpher.com/free-tutorials/how-to-import-and-use-VST-with-MMG.htm) which in plain English means just about every software effect ever conceived. Plug-ins are the special-sauce that sound engineers and record producers the world over use to make their hits sound amazing.

Ever wondered how Pop stars always sing in tune? It's due to a plug-in called Autotune. Those amazingly huge Harmonies? That's a plug-in too! OK, so what about guitars? Surely they're real? Well yes, they are, but the huge amp they're using probably isn't. Reverbs come from expensive digital boxes right? Wrong! Pretty much everything that gets used in a professional recording studio is available as a plug-in. It's no wonder old-school studios are closing left, right and center.

I hope I've made it pretty clear that you can do pretty much anything you can or can't think of with the right plug-in. So, getting back to my Play-dough analogy...remember when you left the Play-dough out in the sun for the whole day and it tuned into a crumbly, crusty and sometimes tasty mess? Well There's a few plug-ins that can do that too. :) Enjoy.