I hate sound design!

mguz11

New member
Where does everyone else get their sounds from? I mean Ive purchased komplete 10 which Ive been happy with but I hear all these professional sounds and I mean, it just gets frustrating. I've taken piano lessons, quit making beats for about a year just to focus on playing and learning technique. Idk It just sucks I guess I'm not good at sound design and don't want to sit there tweaking sounds.I cycle through all these presets and they all just suck so bad, Will someone please tell me what its about without being rude or overly blunt. Do I need to just sit and **** with sounds more or can someone recommend me sounds that just sound money right out the gate? I hear so many good sounds come from other people and mine take forever to get to. If there is a way someone please shed some light. I hope I'm not coming off as an ass or whatever just a frustrated musician. Trying to stay fresh lol. Love you guys
 
I wish I had komplete 10, I have reason 8 and studio one/kontakt and zebralette. with agml and usually sample old jazz and such.

Sound design is experimentation, and believe me when I say you definitely have way too many synths to not be satisfied with whatever it is you do :/
Reaktor's probably modular enough to create any electronic sound ever and that is only one synth from komplete.
 
If you want to design your own sounds, accept that they won't sound professional until you're as good as a professional and just try and make things as good as they can be. Watch lots and lots of youtube tutorials on 'how to make this sound' and make sure you understand the effect everything has when you're watching them. I learned because I constantly tried to replicate massive, sylenth tutorials etc in synthmaster because I didn't have massive. Quite often, I wouldn't be able to make the exact sound, but it was a really good way to learn.

If you find designing your own sounds boring and don't want to bother, I reckon you have enough presets in komplete to keep you going for the rest of your musical career. If not, you can buy more or download free ones. Then the challenge becomes finding a collection of original sounds that fit together rather than trying to create your own.

In both cases, you'll want to chain different plugins together to get a good sound. You might start off with a synth preset, then add some distortion from a distortion plugin and reverb.
 
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Thanks for the feedback guys. I guess I will just have to experiment more. I was just frustrated last night. I'm definitely grateful for all the sounds I have I just think sitting there tweaking a sound forever gets me off track on what I was actually trying to produce lol. But thanks for the input guys I'll continue to tweak until things work
 
maybe relegate tweaking to rainy days - days when you have no direct inspiration and you need to do something regardless - until you are more accustomed to thinking about how you want something to sound and know how to get it to sound like what you want - it only comes with time like most things we learn
 
write something really good as piano first then in your daw spend as much time as you want dialing in custom sounds. Look into layering.
 
Try Syntorial.

At first glance it seems a little expensive but if you look at it from the perspective that it costs about the same as 2 or 3 quality preset packs then you can see how it eventually pays for itself. Try the demo and see if it's for you. IMO it's the best tool for those wishing to learn basic to intermediate sound design.

Also try reverse engineering the presets that you already have until you figure out what makes them tick.
 
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Try Syntorial.

At first glance it seems a little expensive but if you look at it from the perspective that it costs about the same as 2 or 3 quality preset packs then you can see how it eventually pays for itself. Try the demo and see if it's for you. IMO it's the best tool for those wishing to learn basic to intermediate sound design.

Also try reverse engineering the presets that you already have until you figure out what makes them tick.
+1 on reverse engineering
 
It's a tough one. I get how you're feeling. That's how I ended up here lol! All be it several months late lol!

I'm getting quite frustrated too.

I've been tryna get my head around making sounds on plug-in / vst / in the box synths for over 3 years now and still end up just random tweaking and guessing half the time. I started my journey using Reason 6 and now use Reason 8.3 and have used Logic Pro 9 / X, FL Studio 10 and Ableton 9 also.

The subtractor and Thor in Reason are very very good synths for learning synthesis I might add. Especially Subtractor for it's ease of use and how it's laid out, quite easy to understand how each element works, pretty clear and also looks cool as well which is a bonus.

Anyway, for me, I understand how synths work:- broken down it's - oscillator to filter to amp, with modulation thrown in for good measure. I understand you use 2, 3 or more oscillators, how the oscillators vary in sound, sine - triangle to saw etc and that you layer them up and change the semitone perhaps. I understand you use the filter to cut off or open up frequencies and how ADSR works but really what I feel it comes down to, is knowing what sound you want to make in the first place. That's half the battle.

I make house (mainly) and I've gone back to presets really (Korg M1 - as they're great) but for me, there's no satisfaction in making an electronic track if the sounds aren't your own. So back to what I said, you have to really understand what kind of sound your after. If it's a bass sound, then what frequency range should the bass sit in (I guess), what timbre are you aiming for, does it need reverb, does it need distortion or anything else that that genre requires or has predominantly. So I'm going into now, getting my head 'round what sound house music is looking for in each element and trying to understand what the timbre / texture and overall feeling / purpose is for each sound the people who make sounds for house are aiming for when they make their sounds.

Some online stuff that may help:-

Look up the Petti Test on You Tube. The guy in those tutorials reverse engineers sounds using Reasons Thor and Sylenth I've seen him use as well.

I did the first free part of Syntorial as well, very good. One thing I picked up straight away, which you would've thought was obvious, but if you use the cut off to remove frequencies, then you should turn the amp volume up a bit to compensate. Also, that a square wave at high octaves, sounds very much like a saw tooth at high octaves. Say Octave 5 or higher, it doesn't at low octaves. Interesting. I would've paid for the full syntorial if I'd had the money, it was definitely working. I was definitely hearing things and understanding how the different waveforms (sawtooth, triangle, sine etc) sounded different, getting to hear them well. Think it's probably worth it's money to be fair.

Another thing that I was told to do ages ago (which I did try with Subtractor on Reason but took about an hour for each and found I didn't really learn or remember anything lol!) is to find a preset / patch you like, and then open up another of the same synth, and starting with the oscillators, adjust the parameters on the duplicated synth to make the same patch. I might try this again actually with a new approach. Try listening really attentively to how each element is altering / sculpturing the sound. Try and understand what each tweak / change is doing purposefullly.

It is a mindfield isn't it, lol!

Good luck
 
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+1 on reverse engineering

So for those here good at synthesis / synth sound design, if I wanted to reverse engineer a sound, what elements do I listen for? is there any tips / tricks / techniques that will help me better identify how to make that sound? This is one of my main problems really. Being able to identify what is is I need to make that sound. I don't know what oscillator it is (does this just come after about 7 years of synthesis? lol!) and what else I need to do to that sound to make it. I mean, I can identify things sometimes. If it's a hollow sounding lead sound for instance, it's probably gonna be a triangle or square wave perhaps, if it's a bit more buzzy then more than likely a sawtooth.

Thanks!
 
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when youre learning by reverse engineering you basically pick a section of a plugin you want to learn then make changes in that section, listen to the effect it has when you play back the sound then and try remember it. once you know one section go onto another. oscillators and filter cutoff for example are the most obvious changes youll hear but things like filter envelopes and velocity tracking mightnt be so obvious.
after a while youll start to hear things in other sounds and instead of hearing the sound itself, youll think ''i remember i got such and such when i moved that''. a pattern will eventually start to build in your head then youll know how what things you need to tweak to make your own stuff
 
Memorizing how filters and effects sound. Imo most important stuff to pay attention to is the

Osc
Filter
Effect
ADSR or ADR or AHDSR etc
Wavetables or if it's a predetermined wave for simplicity
additive or frequency modulated with something
 
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