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Sound Design
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| Kosmos248 |
As I've gotten deeper and deeper into song writing and structure I've begun to realize that by planning a song out with all of its parts gives you an idea of which part you have to write first to appropriately layer your song and allow room for mixing...it's unfortunate that it takes away from some of the magic of music but I guess once I'm good enough I'll be able to follow that structure by instinct - but when it comes to sound design I am still a bit clueless.
I've got an access virus TI and to be quite honest I originally bought it because of the hype about it but I did want to learn how to design my own sounds (and you gotta give me some credit for getting it brand new for $1500)....I never really even used it that much until the new OS was released which has been much more stable for me especially since I wiped out one computer and installed a music version of Windows XP (perhaps that's why it's stable now :crazy: )... Anyways..I can pretty much design any sound I'm looking for, but it's never quite on point and it never layers well with other parts - I know some of the basics such as when you want a good deep baseline that's going to cut through the mix you may want to try layering a sine with a triangle but when it comes to all the different parts of sound design, I know what they do but I don't know which one to attack first (no pun intended). Soooooooooo after all that rambling, does anyone know of a good book, website, video, etc... that does a good job at teaching the order in which you should tackle sound designing (I'm guessing this may be different for the different layers of the song). Any advice would be well appreciated.
Cheers,
Kosmös |
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| WhatTF |
| I can highly recommend The Dance Music Manual by Rick Snowman. It goes in depth about sound design and sounds structure/layering. There isn't too much on exactly what you are looking for but its been pretty helpful to me. Normally if I have trouble finding sounds that sit well in the mix its due to too many similar attack/release settings or too many instruments sitting in the same octave range. If your not doing that and are still having problems, cut all of your effects and just run your oscilators and see if those sit well and then one by one add effects to see which one is giving you problems in your mix. |
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| Kosmos248 |
| hmm thanks for the advice - did already read that one but perhaps I didn't give it enough credit for being in depth enough - I will review again and see if that is helpful. Thx |
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| Theran |
You don't actually need a book. You can figure all these things out by yourself, you just have to understand the principles of the type of synthesis your working with. My advice is to try to find out how subtractive synthesis works. The principles are these:
As the word says, subtractive synthesis uses filters to 'subtract' frequencies that have been created with the oscillators to create a certain sounds. With the envelepes you can specify what the sound does over time. The LFO's are used to create a certain 'motion'.
As far as I know, the Virus TI works with subtractive and FM (Frequency Modulation) synthesis. FM sythesis works as following: The oscillators in a FM synthesizer are called 'carriers'. Each carrier influences the following carrier, and in that way, again, a certain sound is created.
The best way to find out how it works, is to duplicate sounds that you like. For instance, if you have a patch of the V-Station that you like. Wright down all the parameters of the controls, and try to recreate that patch from scratch. Doing so, you will learn what every control does. U can apply that same thing to you Virus.
Another tip is to turn off all the effects on your synth (delay, reverb etc), than you will hear the basic sound and after some practice, you can hear what type of waveforms are used to create that sounds.
Hope this helps you a little, it worked for me though. |
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| davidbuhau |
while you don't need a book, it never hurts to do some extra research...
david |
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