With electronic music where most of your sound is computer generated you can't rely on quality recordings to give your music a professional sound. The calibre of your sound depends almost entirely on your synthesis and effects skills. There's tons of tutorials on how to make this or that sound, and while imitating the techniques of others can help you learn, you are limited to the sounds others have already made. Experimentation is what will yield the most interesting results and consequently your skill as a synthesist will increase. Music is an art but it still requires practice, especially in a scenario such as electronic production where you don't necessarily have as much physical feedback from your instruments. I thought I'd post some tips on getting the most out of these practice sessions in terms of gaining experience on your synthesizer and producing some quality sounds that will be useful in your productions.
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You will need:
A decent all around synthesizer. Most people will have one of these in their arsenal; something that's capable of a few types of synthesis perhaps, with flexible modulation and routing options, and midi learn. Examples are NI Massive, Camel Audio's Alchemy, etc. Flexibility is key here.
You may also want some effects to supplement those built into your synth. Mainly creative modulation type effects are best. Something like Fabfilter's Volcano is great because it receives midi for use in its internal envelopes so you can stick it on your track after your synth and use it like it were a built in filter. Chorus, delay, reverb, flanger, waveshaper, compressor, etc. are all good for post processing.
Controller devices. The key to this is giving you physical control of the sound so you can play your synth like an instrument and not use it like a calculator. You will likely want a midi keyboard although most DAWs have the option for you to use your qwerty keyboard as midi input. Either way, you'll need some physical control over playing the notes into your synth. Second, if it's not built into your midi keyboard, you'll want a device with knobs and/or faders to use for modulating parameters. This is important as you can't always predict how different simultaneous changes in settings will couple together to create a certain effect. Using your mouse is not suitable for this; it restricts you to one parameter at a time, and forces you to look at the screen to see how you're adjusting things. It's much more intuitive to feel a knob or fader moving and be able to close your eyes or focus on something else other than the screen. There's lots of cheap options for knob and fader boxes. I've got the Korg NanoKontrol which is insanely cheap and provides 9 faders and 9 knobs, as well as some buttons and the ability to switch between 4 scenes for additional layers of control.
A DAW capable of easily recording audio and midi. Whether it's FL's Edison or Reaper's all in one recording, you'll need a quick and easy way to record what you're doing. It would also be beneficial to be able to easily edit audio after it's been recorded. Again, most programs do this, it's just a matter of familiarizing yourself with the process.
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Now down to the actual approach. Your goal here is to make interesting sounds. Not necessarily a bass patch or a lead that's going to kill in the club, just sounds that have interesting textures. You may produce something that's ambiguous in terms of how it would be used in a song as an instrument, but that's fine. To help keep yourself away from trying to fit your sounds into a musical context, turn off your metronome. No drums, no syncing things to bpm, etc. You may also want to change your DAW's timebase from beats and bars to minutes and seconds.
To start off you will possibly want to map some common parameters to your midi controller. Things such as filter type, cutoff and resonance, unison and detune, oscillator settings, etc. This will make it easier to intuitively grab a control and affect the sound without having to think too much about it.
Start with a basic source. This can be choosing an oscillator type as the basis of your sound or even choosing a type of sound or atmosphere you want to go for such as spaceship noises or an imaginary animal. Once you have your starting point you have a reference upon which to build and shape. This next process is down completely to experimentation. Mess with as many settings as possible and take note of how they affect the sound. Do they bring you closer to what you're going for? Does it affect the sound in an interesting way? Whenever you encounter an interesting sound, record it. You might want to record some midi first so you can use both hands for modulation. You can automate your modulation and keep layering more on top live with your controller. Once you're satisfied, bounce a few takes down to audio and move on.
Key points here are using your controller for intuitive physical control of the sound, and staying away from instrumental pigeon holes. Don't be looking at the screen the whole time, instead you can close your eyes or look at your controller or elsewhere. As long as you're devoting your attention to the sound itself, and not how you're going to go about programming the synth or fit this into a track. Ask yourself what qualities does it have? Where could it go? How would this sound evolve or where would it have evolved from? A lot of abstract sort of ideas, yes, but the point is to get away from the technical aspect and to draw inspiration from your imagination. When you're done you will hopefully have a sound close to what you originally intended or something that exceeds your expectations. You should also have a multitude of other sounds you recorded along the way. Not only will these be useful clips to drop into your productions, but they will also serve as a sort of evolutionary time-line for your end sound. This means they will likely share some sonic content, making them well suited to be combined and modulated together with your target sound.
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This would be productive enough but we can take things even further by processing these audio clips with our effects to produce more variations. Time stretching, waveshaping, modulation; all are very powerful tools for manipulating your samples. Remember to use your live modulation for inspiration on how these effects can change over time. Just because they're not built into your instrument doesn't mean they're static processors that you have to apply and leave alone.
Layering things up and editing them together, using envelopes, pitch shifting, etc. will be useful once you've got sounds you really like and are trying to combine them in different ways. This would also be a good stage to try and manipulate things back into a musical context. Load some things into a sampler, turn your grid back on and warp some rhythmic effects, start tuning some samples to a musical pitch with a comb filter. You may also want to go back and try to resynthesize some of your early samples to see if you can recreate them. This will be good practice for tightening up your skills and learning to work towards a sonic goal.
Now at the end of your session, you will be left with probably more samples than you would care to cram into a track, some musical, some more sfx oriented. More importantly you will have developed your skills for synthesis and effecting and modulating sound sources. This raw open-ended approach should keep you from being overly critical of sounds and restricting yourself to what you think will fit into music. Letting yourself run wild with creativity like this will result in a much looser flow of inspiration and will surely produce some killer samples that you can mine for musical purposes.
Now imagine having these sessions as often as a guitarist practices scales or a drummer practices rudiments. In a short time you will have learned many new skills and amassed a large home-made sample library. You won't be fighting for inspiration anymore and you'll probably have to step up your producing just to make use of all the new sounds you come up with.
Anyway, this is just a technique I've found helpful. It's an approach that might aid some new producers in developing their own sounds as well as some experienced producers in tapping some creativity and buffing their sample library. At the very least it should have increased your reading skills
Peace
Tl;dr - Fuck around, twiddle knobs, record Star Wars noises, ???, profit.
mucho respect!!!