Recent forays into musical experimentation with various electronic devices, in particular a synth, has taught me a new concept: wet and dry sounds.
As I understand it, and simply, dry sounds are raw, clean and unprocessed audio coming directly from an instrument while wet sounds are sounds that have been enhanced with reverbs, echos, delays and other effects. The latter is usually achieved by the use of a guitar pedal or another pass-through devices that are controlled by a musician for deliberately altering, distorting and otherwise enhancing the source audio.
I bought a little low-budget synthesizer about a year ago and have had some enormous creative fun learning to first play it and more recently how to make music with the device. But dipping into a world of music that I had little previous experience—at least as a creator—meant that I often found I was edging up against creative barriers that I didn’t know how to understand or articulate.
Case in point: wet versus dry sounds.
My synth is dry. And I have since ordered a pass-through device, a pedal, that allows me to add some of those wet features that I have been missing.
My point: sometimes creating with what we know and what we have until such time as we reach a point when we notice the gaps is the best way to discover new concepts.
Terms FROm this POSt
- guitar pedal
- Many people who don’t play instruments might not know that much of the sounds of modern music are “wet” or in other words, passed through some kind of filter to enhance, shape or otherwise change the “dry” sounds that emerge from a musical instrument. One of the common ways to do this, especially in performance, is with a small electronic filter device that takes the audio in, alters it on the fly in real time, and passes it back out the other side as a changed audio signal. Many of these are in the form factor of a small box with a sturdy foot button on the top, intended to be used by a guitarist or other musician with their feet on a stage. They have a lot of other uses, but they are named for their primary function.
- synth
- Often mistaken for a piano, especially in my house where my spouse reminds me that we already have two pianos and I don’t need a third, synths are electronic sound engines that shape primitive audio waveforms through a various processes either analog or digital for which the result is a unique pitched “note” often “discovered” by the artist, and a form of musical instrument that has become the basis of many modern forms of music.
