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How to Improve at Synthesis and Sound Design

Posted: Thu Jul 29, 2010 7:33 pm
by SunkLo
Everyone would like to get better at making sounds right?
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 :wink:

Peace


Tl;dr - Fuck around, twiddle knobs, record Star Wars noises, ???, profit.

Re: How to Improve at Synthesis and Sound Design

Posted: Thu Jul 29, 2010 7:44 pm
by staticcast
Great advice.

Two things I'd add:

1) Learn when to stop - when a sound is good enough, or when a sound is never gonna be good.
2a) Unless you really know what you're doing, piling FX onto a sound that's never gonna be good will probably not make it good.
2b) If you pile on a load of FX and manage to make a completely unrelated sound that happens to actually be quite good, resample it. Because you're almost certainly gonna tweak one of those parameters later and make it sound shit again.

Re: How to Improve at Synthesis and Sound Design

Posted: Thu Jul 29, 2010 8:11 pm
by corpu5
nice post!

Re: How to Improve at Synthesis and Sound Design

Posted: Fri Jul 30, 2010 1:14 am
by SunkLo
static_cast wrote:Great advice.

Two things I'd add:

1) Learn when to stop - when a sound is good enough, or when a sound is never gonna be good.
2a) Unless you really know what you're doing, piling FX onto a sound that's never gonna be good will probably not make it good.
2b) If you pile on a load of FX and manage to make a completely unrelated sound that happens to actually be quite good, resample it. Because you're almost certainly gonna tweak one of those parameters later and make it sound shit again.
Definitely good info. The point to this approach is to turn out as many good sounds as you can without spending too much time trying to make it better or fit into a track. Spending all your time trying to get a single patch to sound like something it's not instead of going back a few steps and redoing a part is a waste. It's much better to keep things flowing and then go back later and see what you can and cannot use. The technique is meant to improve your synthesis skills as well; you're not going to know how everything works on your synth if you only ever get practice making bass sounds that fit in with your style. Suspend your criticism and just create noises, things will flow much easier and you'll get some usable bits out of it in the end.

Re: How to Improve at Synthesis and Sound Design

Posted: Fri Jul 30, 2010 1:53 am
by yamaz
Big ups for this and a lot of this makes sense....but what doesnt is a few things for me. Ok so when bouncing these waves down, how long of a section do you take, for instance, 1, 2 bar or 16 bars or whatever the repeating section is that you've made? Also how in the hell do you organize this stuff or do you leave it all in the context of that song. I've been trying to figure out how to take these little bounced audio clips and organize it in a library where I can grab pieces out out but so far it just gets lost in a sea of samples?

Also another question I have is in regards to snapping back to a grid. Often when I mess around with a random melody or bass line I find that I'll be making something in some weird time sig like 4/5 or 9/16 and then when I try and fit it to a tempo and make it sound good, I get lost trying to fit other elements around it. It almost seems easier to have a click track/simple drum track in background to stay in time with...

Re: How to Improve at Synthesis and Sound Design

Posted: Fri Jul 30, 2010 2:30 pm
by daft cunt
Good topic Sunklo! One can never stress enough the importance of sound design :D
I don't agree with everything but each to their own, still a good read!

Re: How to Improve at Synthesis and Sound Design

Posted: Fri Jul 30, 2010 6:32 pm
by shaneynclan
interesting read.

Re: How to Improve at Synthesis and Sound Design

Posted: Fri Jul 30, 2010 8:05 pm
by SunkLo
yamaz wrote:Big ups for this and a lot of this makes sense....but what doesnt is a few things for me. Ok so when bouncing these waves down, how long of a section do you take, for instance, 1, 2 bar or 16 bars or whatever the repeating section is that you've made? Also how in the hell do you organize this stuff or do you leave it all in the context of that song. I've been trying to figure out how to take these little bounced audio clips and organize it in a library where I can grab pieces out out but so far it just gets lost in a sea of samples?

Also another question I have is in regards to snapping back to a grid. Often when I mess around with a random melody or bass line I find that I'll be making something in some weird time sig like 4/5 or 9/16 and then when I try and fit it to a tempo and make it sound good, I get lost trying to fit other elements around it. It almost seems easier to have a click track/simple drum track in background to stay in time with...
Well in terms of length it's whatever the sound needs, like it may take a certain amount of time for a phaser sweep or the ambience of something to truly fill out. When in doubt record a bit long, you can always fade it out. Part of it was keeping it away from bars and beats and just focusing on the sound itself. When you're counting off to a click track you're very conscious of how it's meant to be fitted into a musical piece, how it's going to sit rhythmically, etc. It almost puts you in a practicing piano scales sort of atmosphere. Whereas this approach is focusing your attention entirely on the sound itself. You could hear it at 40 bpm or you could hear it at 240 bpm but if it's an interesting sound it won't matter. When you're desigining the bare sound you want to be hearing it out of context. Otherwise you'll be too busy working towards something or tweaking it to how it would be conventionally implemented in music. Just let your inspiration run free and work out how to make it useable after.

There are, of course, many other situations where you'll want it to be tempo synced, fitting into a song, and have a predefined role in the music, played along to a click or jammed with your backing track, etc. This is just more of a free jazz improvisation approach. Half the reason of doing this is to explore new sounds and techniques so you can improve your sonic palette. You don't necessarily want something that's going to play nice with the rest of a song; you're going for the more eccentric sounds, then pulling them back a few notches if need be. :D

As for sample organization, unfortunately I don't have any good advice. A lot of producers have the problem of how to keep their samples filed nicely. Most cases it'll just be clips all recorded on to one track one after another. Then that track gets muted and all the best bits get dragged onto another track for more editing, till eventually you get something you bounce out and put into a tune. So you might have a project file that's all sound effects from a certain session that you could go through and pluck bits out of. Whatever is most convenient for you I suppose.

Dealing with odd time signatures can be feisty at times. Sometimes you can't fit in with anything no matter how you phrase it. Try humming out different parts while you tap your foot or something similar. Might help you figure out where you want the pulse to be.

Re: How to Improve at Synthesis and Sound Design

Posted: Fri Jul 30, 2010 8:22 pm
by back2onett
I spend so much time now with 3xOSC and a midi controller with the screen turned off, really helps. Annoying that sytrus can't really be used for this but I'm fine with 3xOSC as long as I'm not going into complex sounds in which case I'd have have the screen on anyway.

Re: How to Improve at Synthesis and Sound Design

Posted: Fri Jul 30, 2010 8:29 pm
by SunkLo
I've made some crazy sounds with 3osc. Sometimes I'll open up an old project and be like whoah where's that crazy synth coming from, all I see are 3oscs! <scroll down> oh uh... shit I guess that's it. Just goes to show how far you can get with layering basic sounds.

Re: How to Improve at Synthesis and Sound Design

Posted: Fri Jul 30, 2010 8:49 pm
by Anodyne Industries
As much as having a good knowledge of synthesis can produce some amazing sounds, never forget that using and manipulating samples of real world sounds can unlock entirely new worlds of audio for you.

Re: How to Improve at Synthesis and Sound Design

Posted: Tue May 17, 2011 3:53 pm
by Redderious
I've been looking to step up the complexity of my synths lately. I am currently using Albino 3 as well as NI Massive. Iv'e been trying to research on some alternatives, but so far no luck. I don't know if their is already a thread on this, but does anyone have some suggestions on some more complex synths out there, preferably with 4+ osc!

Re: How to Improve at Synthesis and Sound Design

Posted: Tue May 17, 2011 3:56 pm
by Redderious
ignore that, found one!

Re: How to Improve at Synthesis and Sound Design

Posted: Tue May 17, 2011 7:23 pm
by Redderious
Redderious wrote:ignore that, found one!
ignore this. Let's talk about synths!

Re: How to Improve at Synthesis and Sound Design

Posted: Tue May 17, 2011 9:51 pm
by raige
bookmarked. nice write up man, appreciate the help!

Re: How to Improve at Synthesis and Sound Design

Posted: Wed May 18, 2011 4:46 am
by Exert
Solid advice here. Definitely going to take some with me.

Re: How to Improve at Synthesis and Sound Design

Posted: Wed May 18, 2011 8:39 am
by RandoRando
For people using 3xosc, what parameters do you usually link up to your controller?

Re: How to Improve at Synthesis and Sound Design

Posted: Wed May 18, 2011 10:41 am
by silkpantsman
RandoRando wrote:For people using 3xosc, what parameters do you usually link up to your controller?
You dont want the parameters every1 else links to their controllers that ll teach you nothing. If you have a simple grasp of synthesis you ll know you want filter control osc selection and the amp envelope for control over the sound although this might change but its a good place to start. If you have to ask what to control your 'EAR' doesnt know/understand what everything does on the synth and thats ok keep practicing by making sure every session you map something different until your own taste shines through. Try mapping multiple things to the same knob and youll begin to c what compliments and contrasts as well as varying the increments of control.

Thanks for the post :W: mucho respect!!!

Re: How to Improve at Synthesis and Sound Design

Posted: Thu May 26, 2011 7:29 am
by Marrow Machines
Epic beyond proportion.

Re: How to Improve at Synthesis and Sound Design

Posted: Thu May 26, 2011 10:21 am
by RandoRando
silkpantsman wrote:
RandoRando wrote:For people using 3xosc, what parameters do you usually link up to your controller?
You dont want the parameters every1 else links to their controllers that ll teach you nothing. If you have a simple grasp of synthesis you ll know you want filter control osc selection and the amp envelope for control over the sound although this might change but its a good place to start. If you have to ask what to control your 'EAR' doesnt know/understand what everything does on the synth and thats ok keep practicing by making sure every session you map something different until your own taste shines through. Try mapping multiple things to the same knob and youll begin to c what compliments and contrasts as well as varying the increments of control.

Thanks for the post :W: mucho respect!!!
I know what you mean, i just find it hard to beleive people are making crazy shit with the 3xosc, i mean yeah ive made some decent stuff messing with the envelops and what not, just wanted to know if people like to automate envelope parameters or things link coarse, phase, etc