Begginer problems on sound design

T

Timeless Flows

New member
Greetings everyone.I am a begginer edm producer as many others and i am experiencing a huge problem in sound design. I don't know i can't get my head round it. I can't understand how a sound works. I've tried using Spire & Sylenth1 but the only thing i can do is edit some presets. It is awful not having the ability to make the right sound or at least finding it through your presets..
If someone could give me advice i would apreciate it a lot..
 
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Lots of people find it helps watching youtube videos that explain how the different parts of a synth work. I'm sure if you search for 'sylenth1 basics tutorial' or something similar there will be something to help you

Don't expect to learn sound design straight away, it takes a long time, months or years to get good at it
 
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scrapheaper said:
Lots of people find it helps watching youtube videos that explain how the different parts of a synth work. I'm sure if you search for 'sylenth1 basics tutorial' or something similar there will be something to help you

Don't expect to learn sound design straight away, it takes a long time, months or years to get good at it
Click to expand...

Totally agree. It takes time to understand sound and sound design. In addition to watching Sylenth tutorials, I suggest you learn how different waveforms sound (sine, saw, square, pulse...). Then learn how different synthesizer types work (subtractive, additive, FM...). This is what helped me a lot in understanding synths and tweaking them in a more analytical way.

Once you understand the basics it gets a lot easier and a lot more fun to tweak and create sounds!
 
just tweaking parameters isn't that helpful to learn synthesizer.
but at the end it is really simple.

try to grasp the ADSR concept.
that's the essence. Once you truly understand that, it comes down to the taste of your likes.
If you get deeper into music theory, harmonics will become important, but again, LISTEN!
 
I don't know if you play (other) musical instruments, but finding a suitable sound is not rarely a waste of time.
I play drums, have a Tama drumkit and Zildjan cymbals.
I do have a V-drum as well, but, most of the time that is hooked up to my MIDI-hell, and the pads are somewhere in a bag...
Anyway, if I want to play something, I have to play something, not worry too much about the sound of the drums. If I play a good groove, it will sound good, even if I played that same groove on a pair of buckets.
The same goes for guitar.
If I play something on my Ibanez guitar, it has to be well played. Only when I get the riff smooth, it is time to look for some guitarfx to give it some more depth.

I see a lot of people looking for the right sound, while they are really still looking for the right notes to play.

I spend a lot of time tweaking and tweaking synths to get that right sound, and yesterday I had a great idea.
Once again I started to just sample my MIDI gear's clean soundbank.

I did it before but wasn't able to get a good recording, so I used that other shit and still had to eq the noise out (which of course will never work 100%).
But now I have clear clean 96 kHz 24 bit samples, straight for a V-drum percussion model to use in samplers.

The beats just sound tight right away.
Don't even need no fx, just decent composing.

If you want good samples or soundbanks, go hardware!!
No BS about a cpu that's infected because you watch the kinky kind of porn between music making,
No mp3-quality cheap downloaded sample pack and no extra harddrive and the fun of not finding back that great sample you once saved.

Just buy some old Premium model. You know, the candy that used to cost more then you could dream about, but now is too old to shine in the stores.
They have great sounds. Every time you drop a MIDI note.
Vintage is the way.
And at the end we still use just squares, sines and triangles.. . .. . ..
and a cut off with some resonance.
That will never change.
 
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Samplecraze has a set of free tutorials, which include a 7-part intro into synthesis - these also do a bit of explaining about the fundamentals: how sound actually works. Good place to start, imo.
 
Also, a good and important thing to realize is the fact that all you really want to do, is create magnetic impulses that manipulate the motion of the speaker from the one who wants to listen to your 'music'.

So don't go too crazy and give the speaker the time to bounce both ways.

A MacWierdo meal at the Wendy's tastes good, but if you try to shove it down your throat all at once, you it will make you vomit. Just like speakers don't react nice when you push them to the limit all the time.

 
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There are two ways to look at this. If you have the most amazing sounds, then composing comes easier. But ... if you squander your moments of creativity wasting time tweaking a software instrument to perfection, you'll never be able to channel that creativity into the song that it should be. I've heard of people going to extreme lengths to customize the perfect sound. And I've heard that Drake's producer just uses Xpand, the default synth in Pro Tools. Funny.

So try it both ways.

I sometimes watch tutorials on YouTube. I sometimes just go for it, flipping through presets until I find something that's close. It's better to record quick while you have the idea, then tweak later.

Also, The Sound Design Show (a podcast) just launched. I'll be following this carefully. Check it out here: How to Make EDM - Interviews with EDM and Electronic Music Producers and DJs | Home of The Producer Podcast – Interviews With EDM DJs and Electronic Music Producers
 
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