Sound Design Tricks: Using Finger Mics

Designing your own sounds can be the key to getting your own signature style of production, but it's not always easy to get started. In this short video from the course Sound Design 101: Diego Stocco's Creative Sound Design, sound designer Diego Stocco demonstrates an ingenious technique he came up with of using microphones attached to his fingers to capture sound in a unique way. 

Although initially conceived as a way to record quiet sounds out in nature, Diego shows how this technique can be translated to the studio to get some amazing results. You'll see how he gets ethereal and captivating sounds from a piano's sound board, moving around to dynamically capture different textures and tones instead of relying on a static mic. Be sure to check out the rest of the videos in this course on sound design to learn many more tips and tricks. 

Sound Design 101: Diego Stocco's Creative Sound Design

This three part course starts out with a collection of tutorials that explore rhythmic processing. Here, Diego shows you how to create a complete percussion ensemble from a single recording of guitar strings being struck with sticks. The audio processing chain that he's designed is a signal flow masterpiece. It’s like he creates something out of nothing. It’s truly magical.

Next, Diego takes you on a convolution journey. Here is where you learn how to create unusual and stunning impulse responses that become resonant models that you can use to further modify and convolve regular audio into morphed, spectrally sublime versions of the originals. This is not to be missed!

Part 3 of this course teaches you how to creatively capture, modify and perform sound in ways that open up your imagination like no other recording course anywhere. With his inventive microphone and acoustical recording techniques Diego, like a hi-tech, sonic surgeon, microscopically inserts microphones into places where sounds are born to capture their very audio essence. Watch and see how these close-up, molecular stereo miking techniques and acoustic processing strategies reveal audio landscapes and percussion sounds that cannot be produced any other way.

Want to be sonically inspired? Watch this course!