sound design

[Instep]

I've been doing a lot of sound design. I have had some success in coming up with pretty boss sounds but they take forever to make and usually once i make them i forget how i did. or its just a process of tweaking such a large fx chain that its basically unintelligible and sucks up all my cpu..

so my problem is how do you make stark changes in a sound... say a saw waveform to "WRAHHHOIII WARHOII TEKTEKE SCREEECCHHH!" with using 50 plugins. like i said i can do it my just murdering the fx but it comes out unclean or just unusable.. Yet when i just use a filter or two the changes in sound are very subtle or boring. Are there ways to mangle the sound using but a few techniques?

[Hircine]

resampling, automation, bouncing 8 bars of your sounds and playing sample instruments. it's all over this forum.

[Tad]

Sound design is basically trial & error man.

Save presets, your presets and build from there.

[ehbes]

Learn what each effect you use does...

[Attila]

And for the love of god write down how you did shit and redo it multiple times. Repetition is the mother of learning. Accidentally coming upon sounds and learning how to make them are two different things.

[Instep]

i really wish there were more effective ways to modulate the sound.. osmetimes filters are just making it gooo weeeeoooo just on the resonance or sometihng..

and its so light and theres this whole brunt of the tone thats not even changing. I want some technique that could just mangle the sound fully

[Instep]

actually i just tried something in camel phat.. that made a big difference

make a bass sound in massive or w/e.. ok then open camelphat (if you have it) and set the high and low faders of BP filter and the cutoff knob of the mm filter to a macro knob.

then set the low to jump up to half way.. set the high to jump down to halfway and the mm cuttoff the sweep the entire frequency range with a high Q


ok so that sounds pretty crazy almost like the sound is talking and it keeps its balls as well..

I wish there were more plugins that could do that with one knob

[outbound]

Can do, sometimes you can get the results with just the flick of a switch, other times you need a full arsenal of plugins going full-blast to achieve what you're after. As said before it's about trial and error and learning exactly what everything does that you use on a sound so that you can recreate FX in the future.

[sunny_b_uk]

Are there ways to mangle the sound using but a few techniques?

i like your logic, its something i always used to wonder and took me a lot of practice to get good short fx chains that sound powerful.
a good way i found to save cpu and have good fx chains is to rely on the built in fx within my DAW + use a lot of distortion!
i tend to first EQ followed by heavy distortion + automate literally everything in both of them, next use a waveshaper and then more automated EQs after that.
after that u can add things like phasers etc early in the chain (since the distortion is heavy any subtle change early in the FX chain will sound drastic)
to master getting good at this restrict yourself using very basic waveforms & rely on tweaking only a few fxs and automate them carefully!
hope this might give some ideas!

[Attila]

Effect racks. Just throw one I made on and all I need are some minimal tweaks