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

I don't think I caught that one, until now! Though it doesn't surprise me that they made sure to use every bit of milage out of the samples they collected / made through that era. I still hold out hope that one day we'll have confirmation of what the Runaway sample was lol.

Listening to the Papercuts Instrumental release reminded me how cool the synths in the back of Crawling are, they add so much to the atmosphere.

 

Yeah I think it's cool how much they made use of sampling back in the early says, DIYing or reinterpreting their recorded stuff.

I think I've been able to place every one of the samples on Joe's Meteora vinyl at this point. There's some neat stuff like using a pitched vocal sample from By Myself for the scratches on Lying from You. You'd never hear it unless you knew what to listen for!

 

the synth at the start of "runaway" is from the korg triton. it's a combi (combination) preset.
patch name: || TRANSIT ||
patch number: B084
patch type: Motion Synth

example: https://vocaroo.com/1aHOU8d3lWSH

you can either grab a hardware triton yourself or get a VST version which has it on there also, under the category "Motion Synth". it's played starting on B, then G, A.

the actual sound in runaway is a sample of that preset though, because the bubbles play at different timings depending on the note and the attack/release is cut shorter, but the sound source is 100% the Korg Triton

EDIT: got a couple details wrong

 

Haha, wow! This is amazing, thank you so much!

That sounds like it's 100% it. Can't believe we finally got that resolved (I think discussion around that sample as been going since 2016 or something in this thread)

 

It's been many years but I have done some new work looking into Linkin Park samples and sound design from their albums again. It has been reawakened in me.

Some new things/things I found over the past few years:

• Papercut: there's these weird bass-y accent sounds in the outro that I thought had to be a synth or something for years. They don't follow the bass line at all. Turns out this is just weird harmonic overlay from the multiple trackings of the guitars, which for whatever reason are weirdly sloppy on Papercut in that they're not all doing the muted chords at the same time and the chords changes are sometimes off by a little bit. Weird!
• One Step Closer: the scratch sample is a vocal sample saying "yo", found about 17 seconds into the first track of Tasty Gas Station Breaks from the Orient. Thought it was a Chester vocal sample for years, recognized it almost immediately the other day plugging in my old faithful Numark controller for the first time in years and screwing around with the TGSB rip.
• Crawling: that intro scratch that Joe never does anywhere but the studio recording - thinking maybe that's just a synth tone like he scratches on And One rather than strings like I postulated for years.
• Lying from You: I very recently alluded to this, but the scratch sample is the Chester "Myself" scream from By Myself pitched up. It's on the "Mr. Hahn Fucks Up Meteora Style" stage vinyl LPCatalog got ahold of like...7 or 8 years ago? Weirdly placed among the Hit the Floor samples though.
• From the Inside: I did my classic amateur maneuver of inverting the stereo channels against each other to reduce the really prominent center-mixed stuff, and apparently the "Break" vocal from One Step Closer is sampled in the bridge at the top of every repeat of the guitar riff.
• Lost (!): Joe's scratches in the pre-chorus section use the "Ah" sample found toward the end of the Meteora Style vinyl. The droning sample at the very end of the same vinyl also seems to be used in the Lost bridge, in addition to its limited use under the guitar intro to Numb.
• Jornada del Muerto: samples the secondary guitar sample in the Wretches and Kings main riff (so if the primary is A, the first power chord sample you hear in WaK, this one is B, the higher-pitched one that comes after that, so A-A-A B-B). It fades in right about when the synth solo starts, panned a little to the right. It steadily repeats in an eighth note rhythm.
• Wretches and Kings: the scratch sample is the sound of the crowd cheering during Savio's December 2 speech at UC Berkeley. The crowd sample is lifted from a section just a little bit prior to where Linkin Park's playback sample of the speech begins (*crowd cheers*, "[And that brings me to the second mode of civil disobedience.] There's a time..."

Only now realizing years later that Sasuke linked to my horribly misinformed website on Webs

And on review using the Wayback Machine on the Internet Archive, it seems people actually looked at this. Wonderful

I had a ton of bad info on that site because I didn't understand the DAW or production side of things at all before going to college and actually working with audio technicians. I have seen a ton of the same bullshit in random places online that I put on that site based on my dumb limited understanding of synth work and my cheap Yamaha keyboard. Is this why I keep seeing the stupid things I used to say like the LFY intro being a viola, or FTI being a "charang" popping up all over YouTube (because 16 year old me had no conception of what a Peruvian charango was, or that the setting called "charang" on my keyboard was just a weird synthesized reproduction of one)?

Wow, what a trip.

 

anything new, @Christøffer ?

 

WOW thanks for asking Michele! As a matter of fact, I do have some new things on Hybrid Theory to share!

So I've spent a ton of time watching Joe perform in the Hybrid Theory era shows. I noticed Joe’s road case had a Boss GT-5 guitar effects processor to the side during that era. While not a new discovery, I haven't seen much discussed about it other than a brief mention by Astat earlier in this thread regarding the Papercut intro loop. Joe probably also ran his turntable setup through this pedal on studio recordings, as there's a lot of distortion and effects on his scratches. This would align with Mike's remark (that I can't seem to find now that I need it!) about Joe using more guitar gear than them.

Anyway:

Spoiler: Points of Authority

This song is a good example of what a scratch part heavy on the "drop" technique sounds like (meaning he lets the sample play out, also "release scratch"). Joe's intro and post-chorus scratch is letting that main sample play out, pulling the record back, letting it play out again, pulling it back again, over and over in different rhythms, with a couple of variations here and there. That's how he achieves that very rhythmic pulsing sound with his scratches here. The same sample is heavily effected and distorted when it's used at the top of the verses or in the chorus, whereas the one he scratches is much cleaner, with reverb and maybe very light delay rather than distortion.

Spoiler: Crawling

I'm almost certain at this point that the scratch you hear at the beginning (or in the cut bridge from the demo, or the Reanimation bridge) is just a straight synthesized tone. The pitch is somewhere around a C#, sounds very similar to And One, albeit with different pitch. On Crawling there's a good bit of reverb, and very noticeable panned delay.

Spoiler: Runaway

The drum loop you hear after the first chorus and in the bridge is scratched during the intro and verses. These scratches have minimal, if any, effects, and are just little baby scratches across the first bass drum hit in the loop. This is also the same drum loop you hear in the outro of Pictureboard!

There's also an aggressive whirring thing that is in between the PoA samples found on Tasty Gas Station Breaks (see here). Joe put some kind of tremolo effect or something on this to cut it up, as well as a huge helping of flange, which is how you get that sweeping guitar-like part in the bridge during the "I'm gonna run away, and never say goodbye" lines before the guitars kick in. He also scratches it at the end of the bridge, without the tremolo effect.

And then there's a sample I have yet to source that Joe is cutting quickly (creating that staccato effect like he does with the main Papercut sample) whenever the full band kicks in during the bridge ("Gonna run away gonna run away" portions). You can hear the isolated sample here (Joe definitely added some effects), if anyone knows any sounds that seem similar on TGSB or other sources. Otherwise, I'll keep searching for this one.

Spoiler: A Place for My Head

I think this song only uses one scratch sample, and it's the noise you hear at the very end of the song that pitch drops. Very hard to hear what's going on under the guitars in the outro, even trying to isolate frequencies. Joe uses one sample for this song live, so that's what I'm going with unless a multitrack leaks or something to prove me otherwise. Also the studio finals from May 2000 mix Joe a little higher, and it definitely sounds more like the same sample, assuming nothing changed after that.

The quick scratches you hear during the quiet part of the breakdown with just the strings sample are what are called "scribble scratches." They're fun little scratches you do as fast you can with really small movements. Almost like you're spasming in your wrist lol

Spoiler: Forgotten

That "woo-hah" sample in the back and forth hook part is also used in the scratch break after the first chorus. It's the same sample, just starting halfway through to cut off the "woo" part of the vocal sample. He let's that "hah" part of the sample drop, then does a slow reverse scratch to reset the sample, drops it again, and then does a few more of those patterns, also adding in a couple of cuts onto his scratches, before finally letting the sample fully play out (from the halfway point still) as the verse starts up.

Spoiler: My December

The only scratch sample is a little sample saying "dot Canada" that you can find on TGSB (here) and is also sampled on Kyur4 th Ich. Lots of echo effects and whatnot, and at the end of the song he moves from doing baby scratches with the sample to more complex rhythms, and you can hear the sample during some of the drops he does.

 

@Christøffer is there, or maybe you or some else have already done this, posted about the sounds of A Thousand Suns? What I mean is like, in that album there are so many of the same sounds throughout all the other songs, lyrics from other songs, etc.

I bring this up because, even though I already know about a lot of them, I'm sure I don't know all of them. I had the album on in the car, and as Fallout was playing, my 7 year old daughter picked up how the lyrics are the same from Burning in the Skies, so it would be cool if there was a thread about all the facts of how the album intertwines itself.

 

I don't think anyone has ever done a full review of the lyrical/sonic connections between the songs. It's mainly in the interludes where the bulk of the resampling/reprisals happen. Some of these are obvious, others are buried and I only figured out listening to the leaked multitracks online.

Spoiler: The Requiem

Prominently features the piano hits from Waiting for the End throughout.

Towards the beginning, also uses the higher pitched synth tone from the intro to Blackout. So not the main synth that starts Blackout, but the other one that accompanies it, mixed further back.

The offbeat electronic synth stab from Blackout's choruses, used toward the end going into The Radiance, pretty buried.

A chirp sound that also appears later in Jornada del Muerto.

And then obviously several tracks of Mike pitch-shifted up and vocoded, singing the lyrics of The Catalyst.

Spoiler: The Radiance

This one is pretty straightforward with that beat paired with the Oppenheimer sample and some atmospheric noise (remember that note), but it also features the synth you hear at the beginning of Jornada del Muerto in the background.

Spoiler: Burning in the Skies

Obviously tied to The Radiance since some of its more atmospheric elements start there.

Some of those intro elements are also resampled on Jornada del Muerto.

Lyrics are reinterpreted for Fallout.

Spoiler: Empty Spaces

Really just a collection of the more ambient sample elements from When They Come for Me, such as the cricket loop, the marching sample, the gun samples, the drill sergeant sample, and of course some alternate takes of Megaphone Español Brad™.

This also includes a "hold that line" college cheer sample from Jac Holzman's Authentic Sound Effects, Vol. 10, which was also used by John Lennon as one of the tape loops at a few points in Revolution 9 by the Beatles.

Spoiler: When They Come for Me

In the outro, this song uses the same vocal "ay" sample in the outro that you hear all over Wretches and Kings.

I'm not sure how the NoBraiN contributions worked, but it's probably from him. It might have been a sample in a collection they offered to him to put it together or something. It's not on the instrumental version of When They Come for Me, which excludes the NoBraiN elements, so that seems to imply that this was an addition made by him.

When They Come for Me obviously has all the samples that you hear in Empty Spaces, toward the end when Megaphone Español Brad™ is brought back.

Spoiler: Jornada del Muerto

This song does a lot of really cool stuff.

We have a couple of samples from Burning in the Skies: the super filtered/crushed heartbeat sound that begins at the end of The Radiance and continues into Burning in the Skies, as well as the distorted beep-y noise with delay in the Burning in the Skies intro when the piano starts (these are both very audible in the beginning of Jornada del Muerto, playing at the same time).

We also have the chirp heard throughout The Requiem.

Remember when I mentioned the added atmospheric noise behind Oppenheimer in The Radiance? It's not part of the sample of Oppenheimer, it's some added noise which appears at the beginning of this song as well.

The synth that starts this song is shared with the one underpinning The Radiance.

When the synth solo starts, one of the guitar samples from Wretches and Kings begins fading in (the second guitar sample in the Wretches and Kings hook).

One of my favorites is that this song uses the same main Virus TI2 patch from The Catalyst (the second synth voice of The Catalyst that starts just before the drums). But not only is Jornada del Muerto using that same synth voice, it's actually using it to play the opening melody from The Catalyst under the synth solo (transposed from D Minor to A Minor)! It's not the easiest to hear on the album because you need to know the notes you're listening for, but it comes in exactly when the synth solo does.

And of course, this little gem of an interlude also takes the lyrics of The Catalyst outro and translates them into Japanese: "mochiageru" being "lift up," and "tokihanasu" being "let go," conjugated into the -te form.

Spoiler: Waiting for the End

There are some synth swells throughout that sound remarkably similar to the ones we hear in the chorus of Wretches and Kings. They're a bit too short to really tell, but it certainly sounds like it.

The piano hits at the beginning and throughout are resampled in The Requiem.

Spoiler: Blackout

The synth tone accompanying the main synth of the outro is reused in The Requiem.

The offbeat electronic fuzzy thing in the choruses is used in The Requiem.

Spoiler: Wretches and Kings

The same "ay" sample you hear used all over this song was also used in the When They Come for Me outro.

Guitar sample reused for Jornada del Muerto.

Possibly shares the synth swells with Waiting for the End.

Spoiler: Wisdom, Justice and Love

This song doesn't sample anything else on ATS, but does use similar piano tone and chord-age to Iridescent, so I guess that's something? Maybe that's an intentional thematic choice?

Spoiler: Iridescent

Nothing other than some possibly intentional, possibly incidental piano part similarities with Wisdom, Justice and Love.

Spoiler: Fallout

Made completely up of other songs' parts.

Uses the lyrics to Burning in the Skies, sung by Mike with heavy vocoder parts.

Its only instrumentation is that opening synth used in The Catalyst, which carries directly into that song.

Spoiler: The Catalyst

Lyrics are reinterpreted twice, once in The Requiem, again in Jornada del Muerto.

Opening synth is shared with Fallout, where it directly segues from.

Highly speculative, but the piano hit in Waiting for the End may be resampled from The Catalyst, as there's a secondary piano part toward the end of the outro playing single note octaves back and forth.

And while we're on the topic of LP sampling themselves...slightly related since it was created during the writing process. I think New Divide may actually resample By Myself. I was listening to the leaked concert stems, and there's a very noticeable recurring stab thing every four measures in the chorus, plugged into the drum track. It sounds like that same sample in the chorus and main hook of By Myself.

If that's the case that would make By Myself the only song they've resampled on two different occasions for studio recordings. Once for the scratches on Lying from You, which uses a pitched vocal sample of Chester, and then here on New Divide, for the other main sampled element of By Myself.

 

Thanks, @Christøffer !

Random, but I remember reading that Mike reused the thunder sound from Breaking the Habit in Remember the Name.

 

I wish they'd use more interesting ambient background sounds and samples more often again

ATS is the only album post Meteora that really does it

 

Something interesting I've just found is that Joe uses one sample only for his turntable parts on Papercut when the band performs it live. It's the one I linked many many pages back, that appears in a loop on legendary DJ Qbert's Skratchy Seal series.

On the album version it seems there are actually three separate samples he's using. The one he uses throughout the verses and bridge with the cuts is different from the what he uses in the outro.

In the outro, the first one is a really stretched and effected sample that sounds similar to what they did at the end of Session. That one is used in the buildup scratch to the outro and then the following scratch part. The second sounds like that same sample without the stretching effects. There's a brief sample drop at the end of both scratch parts that are between Chester's lines. The delay/echo and distortion add some noise, but it's there.

It's purely logistical for live since there's no time at all to get to another sample after the last crossfader cut (on the album these parts actually overlap). So it's no wonder these samples haven't been looked at.

The samples appear in reverse order on TGSB at 10:16:


You can listen to those final scratches isolated from the leaked multitracks here:


I would post my takes as proof of this, but my cuts are hot garbage other than the sample drops so I need more practice runs first

 

Just catching this but the synth pads during the verses on IGYEIH are the same ones used in Tinfoil. I knew it sounded familiar. Does anyone know how to recreate them? I love how atmospheric and grainy it sounds.

Also just picking this up but the verses on IGYEIH also seem to have these very faint bleepy synth notes, they start in the first verse during the section where Mike first comes in. They're also in the 2nd verse immediately after the chorus ends. They're lot easier to notice with the vocals isolated.



Starts at 00:45. I don't understand why they're mixed that low because they'd have made the song sound even cooler sonically. The song in general feels like a mix of Meteora and Living Things which is awesome but these elements being mixed higher would've been cool. Even the industrial sounding percussion sample that's in the bridge is on the verses but they're not easy to hear with the vocals.

 

Have LP ever used any analog synths or drum machines or is all just samples and stuff?

 

Not sure honestly. If the multitrack names that are out there are anything to go by, it's possible. There are a few ATS songs with synth tracks labeled "Juno," but it could have been a software emulation of the analog Roland Juno synthesizers. Not sure if it's possible to sonically pick that out. By and large I believe they're using digital synths.

Mike also did pull out a Minimoog on some of his livestreams but I have no clue if he used that on any LP songs.

 

None, because Mike likes the computerized bleep bloops better, as evidenced by Living Things and Recharged.