Another metallic sound thread

[officialcyanide]

Hello DSF, I know there have been too many threads regarding this wonderful sound, but no matter how hard I look, I just can't find my answer.
I am trying to make a certain metallic sound, Datsik, Getter, D-Jahsta and many more are famous for this sound, and I want to take my sounds, and modify it to sound metallic enough to my liking.

Here's some examples:

Sound starts @ 0:27
Soundcloud

Sound starts @ 0:55
Soundcloud

Sound starts @ 0:40
Soundcloud

I really like these basslines, and I really need help recreating them

[mromgwtf]

m5 the datsik era is over as well as the growl bass era

[audiowaves]

m5 the datsik era is over as well as the growl bass era

-

sooo? do we have to produce shit basslines like the ones in the beatport top 10 or what?

[mromgwtf]

m5 the datsik era is over as well as the growl bass era

-

sooo? do we have to produce shit basslines like the ones in the beatport top 10 or what?

i don't see any difference between producing shitty basslines from beatport top 10 and copying datsik's basslines

[officialcyanide]

m5 the datsik era is over as well as the growl bass era

-

sooo? do we have to produce shit basslines like the ones in the beatport top 10 or what?

i don't see any difference between producing shitty basslines from beatport top 10 and copying datsik's basslines

LOL, im not trying to COPY him, why do you think I threw this thread into The Production Thread, and not Sound Design?

If I were misleading, I was trying to say that I wanted to know how to take a sound and add the metallic juicyness.
so far, I learned about short delays and comb filters and phase filters, how do I put them in practice?

EDIT: One of the mods threw the thread over to Sound Design, maybe I can get better answers now

[Turnipish_Thoughts]

FM synthesis. (if you don't know how that works, check here)

You'll find best results with a sine wave modulator, play with different waveforms on your carrier oscillator (the osc being modulated by the sine wave osc) a basic square might be good. But depending on what synth you're using you may have a hefty selection. Have a play, find something that works nicely. What you're wanting to do at this point is find the sound you're after as it exists at it's most harmonically rich. In the case of this pluck sound it's what it sounds like at the very beginning of the sound. Aim for a metallic clanging drill type sound.

Play with the modulator signals amplitude, having it fairly low seems to give more metallic results as pushing it too high will move more towards a sharp saw tooth timbre and further still into noise territory.

Once you've got a nice gritty growly type sound the next thing is to make it pluck.

You can do this a number of ways but the basic process is to reduce the upper harmonics in a quick and sweeping fashion. The first thing you can do is use a low pass filter, 12 or 24 dB should do fine, a little resonance never hurts, but not too much, it's not the sound we're after here.

Set the cut off freq at 20Hz or as low as it'll go.
The trick here is to set the attack to it's quickest setting, completely pulled down if it's a fader, or turned all the way to the left if it's a knob, you don't want the filter sweeping in. Next set the sustain and release the same as the attack, and then pull the decay up to taste while hitting your key or playing a note back in your daw, play with the decay time till you start to get that pluck type sound.

The second way you can create and/or add to the pluck's presence is using the same filter settings on the amplitude of the modulator Osc in the FM process. It'll act upon the output in a similar way in terms of pulling off the harmonics, but it'll do it in a different way to squashing the harmonics out post oscillation. Play about with both, combine them with different weightings. See what sounds best to you.

That's about it for the pluck aspect of the sound.

Now to add a bit more metallic twang to it, Comb Filtering would do really nicely here. You want the Frequency set pretty low, but not too low. Think of the frequency setting on a comb filter as the point at which it begins it's filter feedback process. Too low and you get rumble, too high and it's too sharp with not enough body, so around the low to low mids, somewhere around 200-500Hz should be about right. Play with the feedback setting. The more feedback the more it'll sound a bit like really fast delay so find a balance between this, and the 'damping' function, if your comb filter has one of course. Damping attenuates the sensitivity of feedback pickup.

Fiddle with the settings on your comb filter for a bit with these pointers as a general guideline until you refine it down to giving the pluck a little sheen, the slightly delay type feel to the comb will also give it a bit of width on the tops.

One last thing you can try to really beef it up is to run it through a granular synthesis engine (Hourglass is great for this, and free). What exactly you do here is up to you, but you don't really want to mess with the over all timing. A good thing to do is to time stretch the twang sample, up the grain length until you get some interesting phasing type effects (if done right it should add some really interesting character to the sound). Bounce that out, put it back in your daw and stretch it back down to the original length of the clean twang, then layer it over the original and balance the amplitude of both to taste.

Not all of these different processes will work too well together, the devil, as it always is, is in the detail so depending on how you do it, it might sound shit, but it might sound epic, so play about and experiment until you've got a gnarly metalic pluck. Then come back and post it up, lets see what you get

Anymore questions just ask!

[officialcyanide]

FM synthesis. (if you don't know how that works, check here)

You'll find best results with a sine wave modulator, play with different waveforms on your carrier oscillator (the osc being modulated by the sine wave osc) a basic square might be good. But depending on what synth you're using you may have a hefty selection. Have a play, find something that works nicely. What you're wanting to do at this point is find the sound you're after as it exists at it's most harmonically rich. In the case of this pluck sound it's what it sounds like at the very beginning of the sound. Aim for a metallic clanging drill type sound.

Play with the modulator signals amplitude, having it fairly low seems to give more metallic results as pushing it too high will move more towards a sharp saw tooth timbre and further still into noise territory.

Once you've got a nice gritty growly type sound the next thing is to make it pluck.

You can do this a number of ways but the basic process is to reduce the upper harmonics in a quick and sweeping fashion. The first thing you can do is use a low pass filter, 12 or 24 dB should do fine, a little resonance never hurts, but not too much, it's not the sound we're after here.

Set the cut off freq at 20Hz or as low as it'll go.
The trick here is to set the attack to it's quickest setting, completely pulled down if it's a fader, or turned all the way to the left if it's a knob, you don't want the filter sweeping in. Next set the sustain and release the same as the attack, and then pull the decay up to taste while hitting your key or playing a note back in your daw, play with the decay time till you start to get that pluck type sound.

The second way you can create and/or add to the pluck's presence is using the same filter settings on the amplitude of the modulator Osc in the FM process. It'll act upon the output in a similar way in terms of pulling off the harmonics, but it'll do it in a different way to squashing the harmonics out post oscillation. Play about with both, combine them with different weightings. See what sounds best to you.

That's about it for the pluck aspect of the sound.

Now to add a bit more metallic twang to it, Comb Filtering would do really nicely here. You want the Frequency set pretty low, but not too low. Think of the frequency setting on a comb filter as the point at which it begins it's filter feedback process. Too low and you get rumble, too high and it's too sharp with not enough body, so around the low to low mids, somewhere around 200-500Hz should be about right. Play with the feedback setting. The more feedback the more it'll sound a bit like really fast delay so find a balance between this, and the 'damping' function, if your comb filter has one of course. Damping attenuates the sensitivity of feedback pickup.

Fiddle with the settings on your comb filter for a bit with these pointers as a general guideline until you refine it down to giving the pluck a little sheen, the slightly delay type feel to the comb will also give it a bit of width on the tops.

One last thing you can try to really beef it up is to run it through a granular synthesis engine (Hourglass is great for this, and free). What exactly you do here is up to you, but you don't really want to mess with the over all timing. A good thing to do is to time stretch the twang sample, up the grain length until you get some interesting phasing type effects (if done right it should add some really interesting character to the sound). Bounce that out, put it back in your daw and stretch it back down to the original length of the clean twang, then layer it over the original and balance the amplitude of both to taste.

Not all of these different processes will work too well together, the devil, as it always is, is in the detail so depending on how you do it, it might sound shit, but it might sound epic, so play about and experiment until you've got a gnarly metalic pluck. Then come back and post it up, lets see what you get

Anymore questions just ask!

You just made me the happiest person alive! Thank you!