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I really need to step up my sound design game but I don't know where to start.

I understand subtractive synthesis, ADSR, understand all of the parameters but I still can't make many sounds. There's no sticky for this section and I really want to do a lot of work so I can develop my capabilities.

If a few of you would be kind enough to just pretty much assign me homework, tell me things I need to read, tell me things I need to do, I'll do each and everything assigned. I'm a hard ass worker, I just don't know where to begin. I've been googling random things and watching tutorials but I feel like I'm missing vital pieces.

Thanks in advance.

Pick a song you really admire production wise and remake it.

apoplexy wrote:I really want to do a lot of work so I can develop my capabilities.

That's your answer right there mate! Do a lot of work! It really just is a case of experience and practice.... It took me around 4 years of hard work to finally realise the sounds I could hear in my head, so unfortunately there's no quick fix.

A tip, I'd pick one synth and master that, inside out. I chose Logic's ES2 at the time.

And try recreating sounds as mthrfnk suggests.

Roger.

Gonna do my best with Eptic - Like a Boss.

Synth of choice is Massive.

yeah Massive is obvs well suited to those sorts of midrange bass sounds.

Another tip you may find useful, is just work on sounds without putting pressure on yourself to arrange them into a track. This really gets me out of creative block sometimes. Make a bunch of atmos, drum, bass, lead sounds in an afternoon - then usually by the time I've done that the sounds have inspired me to arrange them into something, and that something usually works!

Definitely going to do that.

Also anybody who's willing to help a dude out once in awhile (a question here and there, I'm not socially retarded, I won't harass you) feel free to add to Skype: apoplexy17.

Try do training sittings. Like certain weeks you just focus on one thing (drums,bass, rhythm, composition). So one week dont do anything besides drum. Work on eqing, compressing, making a parallel compression, layering sounds and such. By that end of that long week session youll be a lot more confident and make them quicker doing them so many times. Im going to start that soon, i just need to attempt to finish a nero remake. I got all the notes spot on but need to download a good guitar plugin and a string ensemble. I dont want to resample everything. The songs me and you. Remake help a ton with making sounds, you listen to songs and think oh thats so simple? Why didn't i do that with phasing saws with massive reverb or whatever.

What I found to work was when youre having writers block just fuck about making patches and searching for samples to use later/when you come up with something. Thats where 90% of my sounds come from.

Just mess around with diffrent synths/fx/modulation types etc.
I replicated getter(ish) and that patch from boom(ish) not hard just mess around

Something i've got planned for myself this weekend as a production drill is to write an entire track using only one synth for everything. I'll be using Ableton's Operator and will make a basic kick, hat, snare, pluck, pad, and bass then arrange a full track making whatever else I need along the way.

Its not about the end product or quality of sound design but by repeating exercises like this you get very quick and comfortable with your sound design and workflow.

This is exactly what I needed to help with my weekend synthesis drill.

I go through periods where I focus on learning certain things. It's back around to sound design and I still suck. I've been trying to step up my game as well but the progress is so slow it's almost not there. All these tips/techniques on creating sounds. I just don't even know. It's almost at the point where I'm just going to only tweak already made presets and say fuck making anything from scratch.

One thing to remember is don't always expect to design one ultimate patch that sounds amazing on its own. Lets say you create a mid-range sound that's nothing special, just go ahead and copy the mid-range patch to a new track and tweak it to a bass/sub version. Then copy the mid-range patch again and tweak it to a high end stereo spread version and have them play in unison at different octaves. Its the layering of sounds, frequency splitting and use of FX plugins that take it to the next level.

That being said if your just making a simple pluck sound you don't need all the above stages, just slap on some EQ & re-verb after you've got the desired sound.

If you use Massive, I have a youtube series I recorded helping people make their own sounds in Massive