PROTOOLS MIX - RULERS

Another point that came up during my client feedback session was that the beginning of the track felt a little empty in terms of rhythmic/percussive elements. I had mentioned to my lecturer that I had been intending to use some everyday objects to create strange, percussive sounds such as rulers. He agreed that this was an avenue to explore so I ended up recording some ruler hits. I record 2 different versions, one of staccato hits and another where I hung a part of the ruler off the edge of a table, pulled and let it go making a rattling sound. I liked both of the sounds and decided to use them together. I used some compression on each hit, purely to control the peaks of the transients and control the dynamic range overall as I wanted the audio to ring out and this helped bring it into balance with the power of the original hit. I also used some EQ to rectify this as with the force of the initial hit it brought too much low end into a track that features in this frequency range heavily. It also created a weird “boomy sound” so I used a low-cut filter to control this. For the 2^nd ruler track, I also cut the high frequency as I wanted to solely focus on the mids which is where the sound was strongest. I left these open on the 1^st ruler however as when playing I would pull the ruler back along the table whilst it was rattling as it changed the pitch of this and wanted to leave that in.