The "How did LP make that sound" Thread - Research

I'll ask Mike about it on Twitter but I doubt he'll respond. He's never responded to any of the tweets I sent him before, granted I've only done it about 5 times. Probably gets swarmed nonstop.

I'm surprised no one has ever brought this up during an interview, for those publications that are about music production.

 

I've been trying to dissect some of LP's sound design for a while now, and I'd like to know how to make a few sounds.

-Does anyone know the specific sample that was used to create the Papercut intro "guitar" sound? I know it's something run through a distortion pedal, but I'd like to know exactly what patch was used to create it.
-How exactly was the guitar-ish synth on New Divide made? (It's the one that Joe plays live.) I can make a halfway decent approximation of it using a VA lead run through fair amounts of distortion and a hall reverb, but it doesn't really come as close as I'd like to the real thing.
-What instrument was used to make the Numb intro synth? I remember reading somewhere that Mike stated it was a keyboard, but he doesn't really give any information about what type...
-How does one make the electronic drum sound on some of LP's earlier recordings that sounds vaguely like scratching? (e.g. In The End, Pushing Me Away, the verses of Numb and the intro of Lying From You right before the heavy guitars kick in)
-What's the synth sample on Until It's Gone? I've heard something rather similar in some modern pop songs, so it might be a stock patch, but it definitely sounds manipulated in some way.

On a related note, here's some of my guesses as to some of the sounds in other Linkin Park songs:
-If you run a grand piano through a bitcrusher set at 8-bits or so IIRC and a 3x downsampling rate and then add on some light distortion, you pretty much get the effected piano synth from Breaking the Habit.
-I have a feeling that one of the samples in the intro to Burning In The Skies may be stock Warner Music property, or at least some sort of preset; I've heard a sample very like it in the Marina and the Diamonds song Lies (it comes in at around 0:06-ish in that song), and it just so happens that Marina's also on Warner.
-From what I can hear, the chorus samples in By Myself sound like manipulated and effected Chester vocal samples.
-I'm pretty sure that the chorus samples in P5hng Me a*wy were created in the same way the intro to Crawling was, i.e. effected guitar harmonics. They definitely sound extremely similar to the Crawling samples, if not exactly the same

I doubt it. If you look at live videos of In My Remains (the Monterrey live performance comes to mind), it's pretty clearly being triggered from Joe's MIDI Fighters. That being said, if you look closely, you can also see that his left turntable is spinning, so he might be scratching something at some point in the song. Considering how little scratching he's done lately, though, it seems unlikely. My guess is the intro sound is just Joe/Mike messing around with the filters on a synth to get that sort of "fluctuating" sound.

 

The intro synths for Numb and Until It's Gone are pianos effected in some way, don't know how specifically, but I've run some samples through different filters playing around and gotten a sound close to each of them.

 

The drums you're describing that are used in the intros of "Numb" and "In the End" are probably made by putting a beat through distortion and then filtering out all the low end. A lot of distortion plug-ins and effects can do this without an EQ chained though.

I think the "New Divide" sample is just a note played on guitar put through some effects. The sample is loaded onto whatever sampler Joe wants to play it on.

I don't have a good guess for your other questions. The "Until it's Gone" synth is probably a raw synth wave (square wave, sine wave, triangle wave, etc) that Mike manipulated. To me, it sounds like a sine wave with a lot of effects processing.

 

The sample is in the Stagelight packs. It's an effected piano.

 

Makes more sense.

 

That would explain why it sounded familiar; it IS a stock patch. Would you happen to know if it's included in any other pack besides the LP one?

On a side note, what other THP sounds are on the Linkin Park Stagelight packs?

 

From memory, I remember it includes the intro noise from Keys to the Kingdom; the drum loop from the second verse of All for Nothing; some synths from Guilty All the Same, Mark the Graves, Rebellion and A Line in the Sand; the drum loop that leads into Until It's Gone (I believe); drum loops from Final Masquerade; some guitar samples too if I remember correctly.

I used the sample from Until It's Gone to tinker around until I found something similar to Numb and I believe it's been said by others that it's an effected piano as well.

 

So here's some more stuff I've figured out about some of the sounds in various LP songs:

• There's a sample in Papercut that sounds a lot like a burglar alarm that plays during the "The face inside is right beneath your skin" bit on the bridge. Judging from the sound of the scratching in the song, I'm willing to wager that's the sample that Joe scratches throughout. What sounds like a pitch-shifted version of the sample also plays in the intro of Don't Stay.
• The scratch sample from "What I've Done" (it appears near the beginning of track 6 on Tasty Gas Station Breaks) is a vocal sample from "Get Me Back On Time, Engine No. 9" by Wilson Pickett (it appears at roughly 3:45 on the latter). The song is pretty commonly used for scratch samples--a horn stab from the song is among the first samples scratched on both "Fuck the Police" by N.W.A. and "99 Problems" by Jay-Z.
• The POA/BTH scratch sample also appears towards the end of "Eyeless" by Slipknot.

Also, does anyone know how they got the killer drum sound at the beginning of Don't Stay?

 

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  I have no clue what you're talking about but the Papercut scratch sample is a pitched-up version of this. It's cut from a rip from Skratchy Seal's Super Seal LP, a sample record. I have no idea where the original sample comes from or if Super Seal is the original source. It's not the same sample as in Don't Stay. Compare it to the sample from the Gas Mask vinyl that the LP community got a hold of. And if you want proof that the Super Seal sample is the one in Papercut, look no further than the Papercut video from Smokeout. I mean, it's probably easy to hear in other live videos, but Joe is right in the extreme front of the mix in the Smokeout video. As in you can't really hear much else.
  
  Also, not only is Get Me Back on Time sampled in both 99 Problems and What I've Done, but the same exact sample appears in both.

 

Actually, listening a bit more closely to Papercut, that is the sample I was talking about. And listening to it isolated, it... does not sound like a burglar alarm at all. Wow, I sure was off the mark on that one!

On a side note, I'm pretty sure that sample's on one of the first tracks on TGSB.

No, no, I'm not talking about the scratch sample (I believe Astat said it was a clip from Chester's scream at the end of the chorus). At the very beginning of the song, there's a sample playing under the drums that sounds like a burglar alarm. It's most audible before the right-panned guitar comes in.

 

A similar sample appears right before the Esaul siren (it's pitched lower and it has more of an oscillating effect), but there's no sample on TGSB that's the same as the one I linked.

 

Hey guys,

I have a few questions.

1. How do you achieve the intro of 'Runaway' the swirly effect right at the start.
2. How to I create the clicking metronome sound on 'crawling', 'Runaway' and 'pushing me away'.

These sounds are apparent on verses of crawling.

There's the metronome kind of clicks/beeps in the intro of 'Runaway' through the verses.

The first 3 seconds of 'pushing me away' has a similar sample. Can someone help me?

 

I managed to get this sound in my remix of "Guilty All The Same". I think the answer is very simple. It's normal plucked synth set as hi-hats. Just set in the program plucked synth acting as hi-hats, evenly on one note.

 

Hmm recreating flanged sound isn't as easy as I thought it would be. Thanks for the info

 

If it helps, I've postulated for a while that the Runaway main synth might be flipped like LP has done with a lot of their synth lines (Crawling, Shadow of the Day, Leave Out All the Rest). Maybe try that in addition to flanged effects.

Also please note I'm a complete amateur so I could be completely off the mark.

 

Already tried that. Its not reversed

 

I've done it as well and it sounded alright to me. Though I didn't go much further in replicating the sound.

 

If I remember correctly, the intro watery type pad sound on Runaway is from Rarefactions Textural Ambience. I no longer have the audio cd and I'm trying to inform off of pure memory but I believe it was called Ghella_02 or something along those lines. Very unique sound.
It was originally a sample playing a "C" note and I assume Shenoda or Joe dropped it into an mpc and messed with the pitches.
-Again, I may be wrong about the sample cd its contained on but I feel like it was Rarefaction.