Sound Design

[Sonarch]

I couldn't find any threads dedicated to sound design, so this one might be good to be used for general discussion. I will start by asking a question of my own. Being fairly new to the subject, I'd like to learn more about creating my own sounds, since i'm only using presets right now so I can work on composition. Can anyone help me out with this? Where should I go to learn more about it? I'd like to teach myself, but randomly turning knobs to see what they do doesn't really align with the way my brain works.

Other than the stuff that comes with a Producer copy of FL, I've got Massive, Synth1, and this little thing called AW Wavedraw.


Thanks!

[Symphon]

Well, the first thing you can do is to just read some of the guides for the synths you have and what to get interested in. It'd best to start with the simple ones, so use 3xOsc and Harmless. They're both simple synths that FL comes with and can still come out with some pretty decent things. Maybe look up some video tutorials for them as well.

And, surprisingly enough, randomly turning knobs may be the best way to go about learning. It may not suit your brain if you think about it some ways, but just turn a knob, one at a time, and notice how the sound changes, and then set that one knob back to normal so you can try the new knob on a clean slate.

[itroitnyah]

Your synths come with manuals (more than likely, if not, find one that was written by the company itself online). Read them, take notes on what every function does, practice playing with each function so you can hear what it's doing, and take notes on that as well. z3ta+2 is great because it shows you the waveform that you're using, and shows the waveform morphing as distortion is applied, so it's easy to learn how to use.

But the only thing that will help you out after that is practice. Just practice making sounds to be the certain way you want them to, etc. Also, learn to recognize which frequencies a sound is, such as when a person talks, learn to sorta think about what frequency range the person's voice is taking up. This can help when trying to replicate a sound (so you have a rough idea of what pitch the instrument is at) and when filtering. Or so I've noticed.

[ChocolateChicken]

Try looking at presets of your synths and taking them apart to see how exactly those sounds are achieved! That's really great for learning some useful sound design stuff like, "oh, doing this will make this sound, and that will make it sound more like this," ect.

And never neglect the power of POST-PROCESSING. While synths can make cool sounds, you should always see what some effects processing can do to your sounds!

[Mr. Bigglesworth]

I learnt Massive a lot from watching tutorials and fiddling with synths based off of what I saw. Ungodly amounts of trial and error were involved, but I know Massive like the back of my hand now. And once you have the basics of WT synthesis learnt from Massive ou can apply it to a lot of other synths.

[Captain Ironhelm]

I'm somewhat against just going in half-cocked with no knowledge and messing around with things you don't know what are, and expecting to get good results consistently.

I recommend learning what exactly each element does. In other words, learn the physics with how the oscillators interact, learn what an LFO is, what different filters and effects do, etc. Even the math behind it can be both fascinating and useful!

You can find all the info for free online (Wikipedia, blogs, google, etc.), or you can be a bozo like me and get this, which gives a nice little intro to synthing in the first chapter: http://www.amazon.com/Dance-Music-Manual-Tools-Techniques/dp/0240521072/ref=sr_1_fkmr0_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1376299396&sr=8-1-fkmr0

When first starting out with learning synthesis, read that crazy manual that came with the software!
I can recommend you focus on Massive at first and nothing else because you have it, and it gets the job done. It may seem a little intimidating at first with all kinds of knobs and charts everywhere, but when taken one element at a time, you may find yourself wishing it had more! Once you get a hang of how things work, new synths feel simply like driving a different car. There's no use synth hopping all over the place and never learning what you are doing.

Here's just a few ideas for learning your sound design:
Try to copy real-life sounds
Try to copy a sound you make up in your head
Practice.
Try to copy a favorite sound out of a record you love
Take your synth to the max! leave no oscillator, filter, or effect unused, no knob unturned just for fun.
Practice.
Evaluate a favorite preset and strip it back down to nothing. Then rebuild it with what you remember!
Open up two different synths, and try to copy one preset into the other synth to the best of your ability. You can try it with or without looking at the other synth.
Experiment! Try new things at a whim, or with previous knowledge, or both.
Don't be afraid of using presets as building-blocks for learning new aspects of sound design. Make sure you know how to evaluate what you are looking at.
Practice.
Read blogs and articles.
Watch youtube tutorials.
Soak up any information you come across.
Practice!

[colortwelve]

When in doubt, randomize. Eventually, this will give you a vaguely cool sound, at which point you just mess with knobs until it sounds usable. (Yes, this is all very technical ) Once you can salvage a randomized sound, you should have a general working knowledge of most parameters in the synth you're working with.

Deconstructing presets can also help out. A friend of mine has some pretty cool sound design in his tracks, and that's partially because a good deal of his patches started as presets and gradually morphed into almost entirely different patches. This method is good for learning as you go; for example, I never totally got what a comb filter did until the other day, when I opened up a sequenced percussive preset in Massive, screwed around with it a lot, and used what I got in a track.

Of course, I'm also trying to read through Synth Secrets, but that's long and I really do enjoy learning on the fly while in the middle of a track. So whatever works, I suppose.

[Sonarch]

Thanks to everyone who replied with advice, I appreciate all of it! I think I really should just spend more time using my synths, reading the manual, playing with settings, etc...

[Sonarch]

read the damned manual

haha yeah, I should mention i've been reading through the manual for Massive, I should really finish that up!

As for everything else, I would like to have an understanding of what the knobs i'm turning are doing on a technical level. Would you care to recommend a good FM synth to start with, or perhaps some of those books on stereo acoustics and digital synthesis?

[Symphon]

read the damned manual

haha yeah, I should mention i've been reading through the manual for Massive, I should really finish that up!

As for everything else, I would like to have an understanding of what the knobs i'm turning are doing on a technical level. Would you care to recommend a good FM synth to start with, or perhaps some of those books on stereo acoustics and digital synthesis?

FM8, Sytrus, and Toxic Biohazard are my favorite FM synthesizers, so I'm gonna recommend those.

[Ech-0]

https://www.dropbox.com/s/h4a8cvgqe29xr ... 20Bass.wav

Wow this site sure changed quite a bit..

Not entirely sure if this belongs here, but this is the sound design thread and this is sound that I designed so at the very least its semi-relevant.

I'm not looking for any feedback just wanted to share this sound cause sharing is caring. The major part of this sound is from portamento slide, flanging, and bitcrushing. Mostly flanging...yeah...lots of flanging. I then eq'd, compressed, and then fed it to a new channel for further fucking. Personally I think the BEST part is that THIS IS NOT MASSIVE. Its from one reese bass patch in T-Force Alpha Plus which ended up creating lots of formants overtime through flanging and slide. Sadly I only have a slight knowledge of what I was doing so a lot of this is just trial and error :<

List of Plugins Used:
T-Force Alpha Plus - for the main sound
Fruity Limiter - For clipping and loudness because fruity soft clipper was too hard to use. Don't judge me
Fruity Flanger x2 - Gives it the change over time
TAL Bitcrusher x2 - With heavy downsampling
Fruity Blood Overdrive - For loudness
Parametric EQ2 x2 - To trim the fat and accentuate the mid freq's
Compressor - for moar loudness.
Maximus - For multiband editing
Fruity Chorus - For width and depth.
Fruity Reverb 2 - For more width.
Gross Beat - for retrigger effect (if you take it off it turns into a kill the noise-ish bass)

I seriously hope this stands as a testament to the fact that you don't need $200 effects and VSTs to make awesome sounds. Just be like rusko. Learn your caveman gear.

For those who have FL and want to see exactly what I did (minus gross beat cause I don't own it *sadface*). I might post the flp later as I saved it. Feel free to sample, chop, distort, and layer it for your needs (i suggest layering with a sine sub for thickness).

[Sonarch]

FM8, Sytrus, and Toxic Biohazard are my favorite FM synthesizers, so I'm gonna recommend those.

I suppose I do Have Toxic and Sytrus in my FL as Demo versions, so nothing's stopping me from playing with them to learn how they work...

[Sonarch]

Unfortunately, it's also expensive and I'd prefer not to pirate such a thing. However, if I can grasp FM synthesis on other synths I could get the demo and see if I like it enough to justify buying it.

[Sonarch]

that's fair enough, I suppose.
what synth will you be going with?

Well I can experiment with both Sytrus and Toxic since I have them as demo versions in FL Studio, and I also looked into some freeware FM synths. And now I'm off to learn to use them!

[Sonarch]

My god i'm starting to comprehend how FM synthesis works

[Symphon]

My god i'm starting to comprehend how FM synthesis works

[Dabrenn]

I learnt Massive a lot from watching tutorials and fiddling with synths based off of what I saw. Ungodly amounts of trial and error were involved, but I know Massive like the back of my hand now. And once you have the basics of WT synthesis learnt from Massive ou can apply it to a lot of other synths.

This right here is my current strategy. Learn a particular synth inside and out. I'm still working with Massive, but I'm fairly decent with it these days.

As for making fun and interesting sounds, my only (extremely non-professional) advice is just to experiment and go crazy. For example, this is a sound I made yesterday, its not super unique but the way I got to it was, It comes at 20 seconds here:

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/s/rju ... groove.mp3 (warning, has had almost no real mixing done, may have to up the volume to really hear it)

I made a fairly basic lead synth in massive (actually the same one that's in the beginning), drew in a midi pattern, added effects, recorded it into audio, chopped it up manually, resampled it again, did some processing and tuning, then I pitched the sample down 12, put a 75% wet Vocoder on it to transcribe the pitch into a modified square wave, then I distorted it, added reverb, EQ'd it,bitcrushed it, and finally sidechain compression.

The sound itself isn't incredible but I liked the groove and now I think I may have the beginnings of a track, just from putting whatever I saw on it. Again, the first synth and the main hook synth both have the same overall base, one just has a stupid amount effects and re sampling going on.