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Get your hands dirty dirtying-up your sounds. (© Sagel & Kranefeld/Corbis)

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It's one of the great perversities of modern music production that, while we all celebrate the fact that we have the ability to record at pristine quality and keep our signal path clean, many of us also see it as desirable to damage our sounds or splatter them with a bit of dirt.

There are countless ways of doing this, and to get you started, we've got ten filthy-minded ideas below.

For a detailed guide to dirtying-up your sounds, check out the feature in the Autumn edition of Computer Music magazine (CM170) which is on sale now.

The sound of silence

In sparse tracks - especially ambient or orchestral ones - the background sound of near-silence in between instruments playing can be layered into the mix to increase the authenticity of the recording or add some warmth.

Orchestrator David Hearn - whose credits include The Chronicles Of Narnia - produces orchestral mock-ups for directors in post-production, in which he always includes the low-level room ambience of an orchestra simply sitting in their seats.

Try this trick yourself by taking a portable digital recorder and capturing the 'silence' in some real spaces of your own with friends. You might feel a bit stupid standing there saying nothing while the recorder does its thing, but try hard not to make noise for the sake of it. The recordings will never be truly silent, and this barely discernible ambience can really help to create a more realistic soundscape.

Contrast is key

If your whole track is particularly grimy, give the listener a break by with a few seconds of 'clean' audio, perhaps on a breakdown or bridge section. Removing all the nasty effects and using acoustic instruments for a short time provides a good contrast and will make the return to a dirty section very effective.

Boost your chances

Try boosting or normalising very quiet samples - or even just quiet release tails – in extreme ways to bring out the low-level hum and distortion already present in the sound. This works particularly well with release/reverb tails that have been recorded in their typical acoustic environment, like string or guitar ROMplers with natural room reverb.

In and out

Playing samples out of your speakers and recording them back into your DAW via a microphone makes for a cheap and easy way to create a rough, gritty sound. Indeed, it'll be even more effective with any blown speakers you may have lying around. Just point the microphone at your monitors and hit record, but keep an eye on your levels to prevent feedback - or, alternatively, crank up the volume to amplify it!

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