Sound Design Help

Discuss tips, tricks, and the creative process of music creation. Post HELP threads here

Re: Sound Design Help

Postby Indigo Spectrum » 20 Mar 2013 17:50

While I do think that sound design is an extremely important aspect of making music, I don't think it's the first thing you should tackle as a beginner imo. Learn composition and mixing first, your amazing epic sounds won't mean shit unless you properly know how to fit them into a track first. Look at Pendulum for example, their sound design (for the most part) is relatively simple, but they mix them and make it fit in with the track extremely well. Hell, they've even used plain square waves as leads before, but it sounds amazing simply because they know how to fit it in their track. Here's a really good in-depth guide to mixing, I highly recommend that you read it: http://www.scribd.com/doc/11995844/Guide-to-Mixing

But if you really want to start with sound design, it would help if you made your request more specific, "sound design" is an incredibly broad term, narrow it down to something like "How do I make this *insert specific sound here*?" or "How does subtractive synthesis work?" or something along those lines.

Oh, and if you're going to make music solely for being "brony famous" or something along those lines, please take the time to kindly delete your DAW and not touch music ever again until you've reevaluated yourself. You should make music simply because you LIKE it (oh and if you don't make music because you like it in the first place you're probably going to quit within the first 6 months or so anyway).

And saying that you don't see anything about sound design on this forum is some bullshit because I literally see like 5 different threads on creating a specific sound in the first page of the Technique section alone. There is even a search feature at the top of the site page, use it.
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Re: Sound Design Help

Postby Hawk » 29 Mar 2013 08:09

froggy wrote:There are two parts to learning sound design: learning the technical aspects of synthesis, and training your ear how to deconstruct sounds.


Does anybody know any other exercises or tutorials for the second part, except the book? I'm reading it right now and it's great, but I was wondering if deconstructing sounds with your ear is a skill that you'll only develop over time or you can also practice like for example chord identification?
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Re: Sound Design Help

Postby itroitnyah » 29 Mar 2013 13:49

Hawk wrote:I was wondering if deconstructing sounds with your ear is a skill that you'll only develop over time or you can also practice like for example chord identification?
You can do both, but even if you don't practice it it'll eventually just develop for you over time.
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Re: Sound Design Help

Postby Hawk » 29 Mar 2013 18:22

any specific practices I could do?
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Re: Sound Design Help

Postby Captain Ironhelm » 29 Mar 2013 20:17

open up two synths, load up a good preset in one, try to copy it in the other, with or without looking at the one with the preset loaded. Load a preset and start turning all the knobs back to init position. Try to copy sounds you like. Copy real life sounds you hear. Think of a new sound and try to copy it to the synthesizer. Absorb tutorials and articles on it. Experiment and let your imagination go wild.
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Re: Sound Design Help

Postby the4thImpulse » 29 Mar 2013 23:25

Kyoga wrote:
Hawk wrote:any specific practices I could do?
read a book.
seriously.

But before reading the book, read the manual.

And when you are not reading do this
Captain Ironhelm wrote:Try to copy sounds you like.
Copy real life sounds you hear.
Experiment and let your imagination go wild.
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Re: Sound Design Help

Postby Hawk » 30 Mar 2013 05:10

Kyoga wrote:
read a book.
seriously.

This is a good one



I'm reading froggy's book right now, once I'm done, I'm definitely gonna take a look at that one, thanks
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Re: Sound Design Help

Postby XXDarkShadow79XX » 01 Apr 2013 17:10

Honestly I don't think of sounds beforehand. I just think "I want to use parameter X" and I wing the rest.
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Re: Sound Design Help

Postby ph00tbag » 01 Apr 2013 20:22

My best advice for sound design is to pick two or three synths (probably two if you're just starting out) and learn everything you possibly can about what it is every knob and button does. Usually knowing exactly what sound every knob tweak corresponds to beforehand lets you get to the sounds you hear in your head with less tweaking in between, so you can get back to making the track itself.

It also makes it easier to learn new synths because you have a better idea of what the knobs on the new synth do.
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Re: Sound Design Help

Postby XXDarkShadow79XX » 01 Apr 2013 20:25

ph00tbag wrote:My best advice for sound design is to pick two or three synths (probably two if you're just starting out) and learn everything you possibly can about what it is every knob and button does. Usually knowing exactly what sound every knob tweak corresponds to beforehand lets you get to the sounds you hear in your head with less tweaking in between, so you can get back to making the track itself.

It also makes it easier to learn new synths because you have a better idea of what the knobs on the new synth do.


Have to agree. The best way to learn a synth is to constantly watch tutorials and learn what each knob does to the sound, not just what it does in a technical sense.
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Re: Sound Design Help

Postby the4thImpulse » 01 Apr 2013 20:30

XXDarkShadow79XX wrote:
ph00tbag wrote:My best advice for sound design is to pick two or three synths (probably two if you're just starting out) and learn everything you possibly can about what it is every knob and button does. Usually knowing exactly what sound every knob tweak corresponds to beforehand lets you get to the sounds you hear in your head with less tweaking in between, so you can get back to making the track itself.

It also makes it easier to learn new synths because you have a better idea of what the knobs on the new synth do.


Have to agree. The best way to learn a synth is to constantly watch tutorials and learn what each knob does to the sound, not just what it does in a technical sense.

Some people have different learning styles, the hands on approach is definitely the most important but reading a manual or a book on what those parameters do will help some people learn. They need to understand what a filter does before they want to try to mess around with one.
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Re: Sound Design Help

Postby XXDarkShadow79XX » 01 Apr 2013 20:33

the4thImpulse wrote:
XXDarkShadow79XX wrote:
ph00tbag wrote:My best advice for sound design is to pick two or three synths (probably two if you're just starting out) and learn everything you possibly can about what it is every knob and button does. Usually knowing exactly what sound every knob tweak corresponds to beforehand lets you get to the sounds you hear in your head with less tweaking in between, so you can get back to making the track itself.

It also makes it easier to learn new synths because you have a better idea of what the knobs on the new synth do.


Have to agree. The best way to learn a synth is to constantly watch tutorials and learn what each knob does to the sound, not just what it does in a technical sense.

Some people have different learning styles, the hands on approach is definitely the most important but reading a manual or a book on what those parameters do will help some people learn. They need to understand what a filter does before they want to try to mess around with one.


Well, it honestly depends on what you stumble upon. There are a few series and online resources that deal with synthesis in general, instead of individual ones.

Try: Synth Boot Camp.
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