You can *add* noise to your recordings

Yesterday we talked about not reflexively editing noise out of recorded tracks. And today I want to take that thought one step further, with this suggestion:

If a song doesn’t have enough noise in it, you might want to add some!

A little bit of noise can be powerfully helpful in a music production. It can subtly smooth over performances. It can add atmosphere and vibe and emotional context.

And: you don’t have to rely on having gotten lucky in the recording process to have the right amount of noise in a recording — you can add it in yourself! Some suggestions for ways to get more noise into your recordings:

• Record an outdoors ambience with your phone’s voice-recorder app

• Find an ambient noise recording on the internet and steal it

• Lots of analog-modeling plugins make some amount of noise, and many of them these days have a knob to control the level of this noise — you can turn that knob up as well as down!

I don’t mean to suggest that your recordings should be blanketed in noise. That probably wouldn’t be great. But you might be shocked at how much more vibey and natural and interesting your recordings can be if you’re subtly adding some noise in at like -80 dB down! The noise floor is just another aspect of your recordings that you can exert influence over and use to your advantage.

Keeping things humming — jamie