futures_untold wrote:pengwavs wrote:HiggzBozon wrote:Nice thread!
I have one well.. several.. I'm a big fan of reso and always wondered how the fuck he makes those robot-apacalypse sounds
As an example check the sound at precisely 1:11 in this vid:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pk5SyY9o ... 82&index=3
Help me
US crack this
i would allso like to know how this sound is achieved, am i right in saying it kinda has something to do with with frequency modulation ? or more so a combination of several things ?
Pengwavs is on to it here by mentioning frequency modulation (FM). So to make this sound you need a synth capable of frequency modulation routing amongst its oscillators.
(For FM synthesis tutorials, click here --->
http://www.google.co.uk/search?hl=en&q= ... +synthesis)
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Breaking down this sound:
1> It sounds metalic, like a 'clank'-ey sort of sound
2> It has an odd timbre to it, and doesn't perfectly match any key exactly.
3> It has distortion on it.
4> It has a tight reverby kind of feel to it.
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Ok, first up, fire up you FM capable synth and set two oscillators to sine. Using sine waves is a good start, other waveform contains too much frequency content to be controllable. As you turn up the amount of frequency modulation between two sine waves, one quickly finds the tone 'metalic' & 'clanky'.
We don't want to much of our operator (oscillator 2) modulating our carrier (oscillator 1), otherwise it sounds harsh with to much high end frequency. Adjust the FM amount, perhaps to about 15% - 30% depending on your taste. (Less is more in this case).
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This part is the crucial bit, and the part that is easily over-looked. The fact that the sound doesn't match one note exactly on the keyboard means that more than one note is being played. Thus, we need to find which other notes are playing at the same time as our root note.
With a bit of A/B listening between the original and my own synth, I found the root note to be C1, and the second note to be G3, a perfect 7th up. (I think haha, not to sure on my scales). Set oscillator two to play two octave and seven semi tones up (31 notes up on your keyboard).
You should now have a fairly metalic starter sound that has that wierd 'alien/robot/machine' style vibe to it.
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We need to get the slight tail that this sound has. We'll do this in two ways.
The first way is to set your amplitude ADSR so that you have fast attack, max decay & sustain and a medium short release. The medium short release is what gives the sound the slight tail. Setting the release to long will make the sound fade out to slowly, thus giving the sound more of a pad type feel. Setting the release to short means the sound will cut out to abruptly.
The second way is to use a reverb tail. When 'small' reverb sizes/algorithms are used, reverbs make things sound metalic. Route your audio through a reverb effect. We don't need much reverb to make this effect sound good, so keep the dry wet fairly dry. (Maybe 30% dry, 50% being half wet/half dry)
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The final part of creating this sound is distortion. The distortion is fairly consistant but light. It doesn't have any high pitched squeals to it, ruling out feedback distortion (like the sound of a mic causing feedback on a PA). It also doesn't sound glitchy or digital, thus that rules out bit distruction. The distortion is also to soft to be hard clipping. The sound doesn't sound compressed, so tape distortion wasn't used.
I experimented with different distortion types, and found that overdrive distortion matched the sound of the original reference material best. As the sound isn't heavily distorted, I opted to use my distortion unit as a send effect. This gave me easy dry/wet balance controls using the send & return knobs on my mixer. Send around 15% - 25% dry signal to the distortion unit and return 100% wet. If that is too little or too much, adjust to taste!
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You should have a fairly similar sound by now, certainly enough to get you tweaking. Finally, worth mentioning is the fact that the sound changes as the track prgresses. You will need to automate your changes according to your own aims and tastes.
I hope that helps!
