Amon Tobin

“That was a combination of using noise reduction and EQ,” Tobin explains. “Some noise-reduction plug-ins [such as Sonic Foundry's DirectX, which has a Keep Residual feature] allow you to look at the dirt you're taking off a track; I just took that garbled noise from the drum track and ran it through the GRM Tools EQ plug-in, which seems to add a harmonic content when you adjust the different faders. I was left with this really metallic, liquid-y plastic type of sound; I mixed that with the original drum sound and balanced it out so that the drums have this strange sheen to them.”

"I used it in ISAM for a range of things from sound processing to sound synthesis. I’m still very much a student of the language and learning more all the time. It’s by no means the only thing I use, but it’s been getting more and more frequent as time goes on.

One way I’ve been using it is to make playable instruments from field and foley recordings. An audio source is analyzed into its spectral properties using the TAU editor, then assigned various morphing, pitch and timbre properties that react to MIDI CC events. Again, I have a video of some early experiments with this on my website."

Take a look at the list at the bottom of the article.

Mentioned in the list of equipment he used on Foley Room

Mentioned in the list of equipment he used on Foley Room

Mentioned in the list of equipment he used on Foly Room

Mentioned in the list of equipment he used on Foley Room

Amon Tobin records/samples some sounds from objects and patches and plays them across a full-sized Haken Continuum Fingerboard as demonstrated in the YouTube video (0:32s)

In this video, Amon Tobin shows some of the equipment in this studio. The Moog Minimoog Voyager appears at 00:10.

“More than a sampler, the Roland is a real-time time-stretching, pitch-shifting machine,” he explains. “It lets you do something that Kontakt does: You can replay the notes of a sampled instrument in real time, and it will keep the quality of the sound and the time intact, but you can change the melody. It is not the system that most time stretching uses, which is to separate the samples to space them out farther from each other so you don't get that frr-frr-frr sound when things get stretched. Roland VariOS really stretches the sound so you don't get the breakup. I use the Roland for time stretching and pitch shifting and Kontakt for laying out sounds.”

At 0:12 you get a quicck glimpse of his TI Snow next to his Continuum.

"Amon's studio setup is based around a Mackie D8b digital desk and an Akai S6000 sampler triggered by Cubase VST on a Mac"

"Amon's studio setup is based around a Mackie D8b digital desk and an Akai S6000 sampler triggered by Cubase VST on a Mac..."

It's a fairly old article though so he may be using a different setup by now.

"Kyma is a visual programming language for sound design used by musicians, researchers and sound designers. In Kyma, you program a multiprocessor DSP by graphically connecting modules..the Pacarana is the most recent incarnation of the processor Kyma runs on."

"Amon also uses a TC Fireworx multi-effects, which contrary to conventional wisdom, he doesn't place on an aux buss on his mixer, as he explains. "I don't like to have effects running in real time in the final mix, I like to have the sound already recorded with the effects in my arrangement. I suppose it's having the control of say, the modulation sweep peaking at an exact point and I know every time the sample is triggered, it'll be at that point.""

“What's funny is my particular Nagra is a bit of a dodgy unit,” Tobin quips, “so sometimes you can even just switch the thing off, and something cool will happen. I used it all the way through ‘Big Furry Head’ — there's kind of a chuuung! sound there that's just the Nagra being switched on and off. I thought it was a really wicked sci-fi noise, so we kept it.”

At 2:42 you can see his Eventide H8000.

At 2:42 You can see his Manley Massive Passive.

At 0:11 you can see his Maschine mk1 with an Apple Bluetooth keyboard on top.

at 0:11 you can see his API 2500 in the rack.

At 0:11 you can see his EMI Chandler Ltd TG1.

At 0:12 you can see his Soundplane with an Apple keyboard on top.

At the bottom of the article you can see the Mutator in the list of gear he used on Foley Room.

At the bottom of the article you can see the Lemur in the list of gear he used for Foley Room.

From an interview on the Steinberg website, Amon Tobin says, "I've used Cubase since I started making music."

"Tobin soon got his hands on a Nagra IV-S portable reel-to-reel tape deck — the latter-day descendant of the ever-reliable and rugged unit that has been used for decades on remote film shoots to capture ambient sound and dialog while on location. Supplementing that with a pair of high-definition microphones by Earthworks Audio, Tobin and Cousins were ready to dive in, criss-crossing the country on a quest to amass as many animal and machine-made sounds as they could get in roughly a nine-month period."

At 0:12 you get a quick glimpse of his Bluebird next to the Continuum.