When it comes to sound design, are you attempting to recreate sounds you hear in your mind or are you experimenting to make sounds that are interesting? If your goal is mimicking imagination, how skilled are you at recreating the sounds?

Complex sounds are never exactly realized for me. The act of editing the sound into existence will drastically change the final result and by that time, I won't be able to remember the original sound.

My goal is developing a holistic, synthesizer agnostic understanding of sound itself. I don't want to learn a proprietary synth/FX; I want to learn how to "hear" the same way artists learn how to "see". Learning all the parameters one by one and in combination, until you can correctly identify the behaviors of all parameters in any given sound.

I have an idea as to how it could be achieved, but it would take so much work to implement it. I don't know if such a program exists. Basically, it would be an ear training program for sound itself instead of musical intervals and scales and chord progression. I feel that it would also require a little bit of mathematical ability. Still, I'm not even sure if it's possible, honestly. For all I know, more sound design experience and knowledge experience could allow you to tinker in a more complex fashion to create beautiful sounds, but still won't allow you the ability to exactly recreate imagined sounds. What do you think/know about this?

Last edited by Anxieties on Nov-04-2011 at 00:41

load up a preset. Work backwords. REmember what you did. That is how one learns sound design.

___________________
"This is why Superman works alone." GC
old stuff from days gone by (2001-2004)
Mad For Brad's gay little contest

The thing I use to hear was to pick one synth and learn it inside and out.
So I did that more or less unintentionally and now I can make pretty much most basic sounds using v-station or z3ta or even sytrus and FM8 I tend to know pretty decently.

Although FM8 I don't think I will ever have mastered its such a complex synth to learn.

The problem with me though is I still hear lots of sounds that are simply not presets in anyway shape or form. I tend to be attracted to those wide distorted bass sounds like the one that dances in the back of Adam Nickeys - Callista.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-KYKGFeMAQ0&feature=fvst

And that goes beyond knowing how to learn a synth. I'm realizing now that I also need to learn how to use distortion. And a seasoned grasp of every fx unit too would be pretty helpful. And I have NO IDEA wtf it is I'm doing with ohmicide. There seems to be no science at all to distortion. Even just programming synths a lot of the time sure I know how to make a pluck or a saw noise bass or a super saw lead or a sync etc etc but there are still tons of sounds and tones I have no idea where to even start with.

Like again the distorted noisy saw bass in Callista. I have made a lot of sounds close to it. That rip pretty well through the track but the tone is just completely different. Because I am doing all the basic predictable things to get my sounds. I do not understand the finer complexities of synthesis or all the "tricks" I guess you would say. The things producers only learn in the studio producing with people who have been at it for decades and know all the trade secrets. Those are the things I want to learn.

But learning it on my own sucks. I mean seriously I'm gonna waste what 10 years learning how to use a distortion unit when other people can just sit down with someone who knows wtf they are doing and bam there is their sound. And then there is learning how to program FM sounds. That is where a lot of the magic lies for me in terms of those bright raw transient rich sounds. And g/damn FM is just one of the hardest fucking things in the world to do right. Again I can do the most basic sounds, but I hear SO MANY FM sounding sounds that I don't think I'll ever really know how to make. Like Andy Bluemans bassline in Sea Tides. NO CLUE where to even start with that sound.

It is certaintly not an easy sound to make. And unfortunately those are the only sounds I'm really attracted to in the first place. I wasted about 15 years of my life reading and learning chemistry, how to synthesize methylated alkaloids, how to synthesis mdma, how to synthesize meth, how to synthesize nitrogylcerin etc etc.

And I am drawing lots of parallels between that and sound synthesis. With chemistry you have to get the "recipe" read it over and over and become familiar with it. You have to understand every single step of the synthesis. I know that with chemistry and its all familiar to me. But I do not know that with sounds. And now I'm really understanding that sound synthesis is really just as difficult if not harder to have a true grasp on. For some reason I just did not think it would be that hard when I initially got into this. Each sound you need to know the recipe. You need to understand each step and why you perform them and why they are so important. And every single sound has a process sometimes a looong process you must go through and even then you don't always get the sound the exact way you want.

So if theres really anything I can decipher from all this its that synthesis really is a fucking hard skill to master. I'm honestly not sure if I'll ever master it that way I mastered chemistry. The shit is just really fucking hard to do. And not only that but the frustration when I try to step out the box and do something different sounding and I wind up creating some sad mess of shit. I can be one of the more frustrating things in the world for me sometimes. Mainly because my desire is so strong but I just do not have the patience or organization to know how to get where I want to be.

___________________
Sequencers: FL Studio 9XXL & Reason 3.
Main Synth Bass GTs - Pro-53, V-Station, Sytrus, Subtractor, Trilian, Blue, Sylenth & Z3ta.
Main Synth Lead/Pad GTs - Z3ta, Sytrus, Sylenth, Vangard, Albino & Nexus.
Main FXs GTs - Waves Plugins, Soundtoys, Volcano, FL Native FX.
Hardware - Truths, Echo Audiofire, Virus Snow, & Novation Xio Midi-Synth.

Last edited by DJ Robby Rox on Nov-04-2011 at 01:36

The listener is never going to know if you were successful in real-izing the sounds you had in your head, so I wouldn't fret about it too much. Sometimes the best sounds are found by accident, and more so how it interplays with other sounds.

@Robby: That song doesn't live from the bass at all. It complements the busy midrange (which is really stacked with its delayed midbass, the arpeggiated pluck and the pads), but it's definitely not the one thing you should be worrying about when trying to recreate that track. The bass doesn't sound "noisy" or "wide distorted" to me at all, so ohmicide (which I use for really hard compression mostly) might be the wrong plug-in to add the warmth to it.

Last edited by Morvan on Nov-04-2011 at 14:07

At the moment, I'm still at a stage where I will simply load up presets and tweak them until I find something that "does the job". It's a bad habit but I'm learning to get over it

Having said that I used to do a lot of sound-design stuff for bands on my local scene and each time I would use Absynth: I'd recommend it because it's very powerful and also relatively user-friendly.

Just play around, don't worry about "learning" how to create a sound. Tweak and tweak until you find what you're looking for!

quote:

Originally posted by DJ Robby Rox I have made a lot of sounds close to it.

Thing is though robby its the other sounds around it like the acidy fx, low/mid bass and even the kick that make it sound good. The sound your on about probably sits higher in the spectrum than you think. If I remember from your last posted example it wasn't far off what your aiming for (I think the delay and eq has a bigger part to play than distortion), but you didn't have the other ingredients to go with it, so it didn't sound as good. Your slowly getting there, don't stress out. It wouldn't surprise me if it turned out to be a sylenth preset after all

If I hear a sound and want to replicate it, I can usually come close. However, I rarely do that anymore. I used to do a lot of it, which is excellent practice for learning synthesis, but don't really have time for that anymore. As for envisioning a sound and making it, not so much. When I'm working on a track, I rarely envision an exact sound. I typically envision everything except for the timbre. In other words, I envision the role of the part (e.g., will it be a lead, supporting arp or pad, etc.), the general shape of the sound (e.g., long and sustained vs. short and plucky, etc.), the register of the sound (high vs low), and some specific qualities about the sound (e.g., dark, muted, light, airy, squelchy, breathy, harsh, aggressive, subdued, thick, etc.) and even the waveform or synthesis method (e.g., sawtooth-based vs. sine-, square, etc.-based; subtractive/analogue vs. FM, additive, etc.).

From there, it's a matter of just selecting the synth that I think will be best suited for the sound and dialing it in until it's close (or even flipping through some presets until I find a good starting point). Because I know what I generally want, I don't need to spend much time creating a starting point or preset hunting. Once I dial in something close, I listen to it in context of the song, then go back and tweak away - leaving what I like and changing what I don't until I find something that has a timbre that I like. So, it's very much an iterative process for me and, on occasion, I end up with something quite different than I would have expected. Most of the time, I can dial in a sound that's close within 10-20 minutes. But, I typically continue to tweak away at the sounds as the song develops and other parts are added.

___________________
cryophonik.com | facebook | soundcloud

Sonar Platinum | Ableton Live 9 | Logic Pro X | Access Virus TI2 Keyboard | Kurzweil PC3X | Nord Lead 4R | NI Maschine

I was just thinking about my next production and thought of this thread.

I think sometimes amp-simulation is great for a particular sound, especially for those bass layers that sit higher in the mix.

Use Native Instruments Guitar Rig on some sounds and see what you think. Often playing around with the cabinet settings/mic placements/etc can yield some surprising improvements!

peace,
PT

quote:

Originally posted by Looney4Clooney load up a preset. Work backwords. REmember what you did. That is how one learns sound design.

+1

quote:

Originally posted by DJ Robby Rox You have to understand every single step of the synthesis.

Just make good decisions every step of the way. That is all that a top chef does, whereas a lessor chef makes little tiny bad decisions which contribute to a less satisfactory whole.

I find my best sounds I can never emulate anyway, there are a billion permutations and ways of doing things so you will never emulate a particular Adam Ninkey sound.

Why not just make great Robby sounds - I'd bet you would come up with noises that no one could emulate.

Not being funny but I've come to the conclusion you can make a fantastic track starting with one sample pack of drums (which you alter) and 1 or 2 synths. No mystery or magic.

___________________
https://soundcloud.com/butlerrichard