Subject Sound

12 Less-Usual Sound-
Design Tips
20 Unusual Sound-Design Tips SubjectSound

Expand your knowledge and creativity

Introduction
For me sound design is very similar to making music, where with music you use
existing notes and arrange them in a way which makes sense to us humans, with
sounds you essentially start with white noise (or any signal with a full spectrum)
and start carving away frequencies that you don’t want. This eventually makes
you end up with a completely new sound, subtracted from your starting signal.
It’s a beautiful process and I’m happy to share some of the techniques and
approaches I’ve found over the years.


My challenge for this guide was to come up with tricks that inspire you to think
differently about sound processing. My goal was to give you various ideas that are
not necessarily impressive on their own but that approach sound from a sound
designers point of view.

In other words, rather than thinking about what great tricks are, we’re thinking in
categories, like duration, frequency, timbre, transients, etc. and we know how to
alter all of these aspects of the sound.



Your challenge is to master them and use these techniques in new creative ways.

Now one last disclaimer, I’m usually not a big fan of the “less is more” approach
to life, in most cases more actually turns out to be more, however with your
volume, please go for the less option.

Some of these examples can cause extreme headache if not used with care,
always use a limiter on your master bus. Maybe even two, just to be save. They
don’t have to do anything, just protect you from the tyranny inside your machine
once you get going with these examples.






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Tip 1: Modulate a comb filter for metallic sounds

Comb-filters work by delaying the audio signal and feeding the delayed copy back
into the filter, thereby creating a difference between the two signals. This
difference can often produce complex & rich metallic sounds with a “flanging”
feel to them. You can make melodies by modulating the delay time, shorter delay
times give a higher pitched sound while longer times will sound lower.

You can make your own comb-filter using any stereo delay and setting a very
small offset on one side, use small delay times and high feedback settings to get
the effect going.
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Tip 2: Using Micro Tuning for depth and ambience

Micro tunings allow you to work on a scale smaller than one semitone. If you
think of chords as “a combination of 3 or more different frequencies” you can
create micro chords within one semitone!


To achieve this in a DAW you can use any synthesizer with plenty of oscillators
and detune them al a couple of Hz (depending on how high or low you play on
the keyboard, higher notes require a bigger distance between the different
frequencies).
You can also use specific tools for microtonal sounds, Metasynth would be a
great choice.
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Tip 3: Drive Input Gain

A lot of analogue modeled plugins will have a great distorted sound when you
“drive” them. Try a signal chain with a simple gain plugin, an analogue modeled
plugin and another gain plugin after that.


If you set the first gain plugin to + 20db or higher and subtract the same amount
in your last gain plugin you will get the color of the modeled plugin without the
speaker shattering volume!
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Tip 4: IR Files

Impulse response (IR) files are normally used to create realistic sounding reverbs
from recorded rooms, but since they are actually just audio files you can use
whatever sound you want for your “reverbs”.


Just find yourself a cool sound, a recording of a breaking window for example,
and load it in an IR/Convolution reverb plugin, good examples are Altiverb, NI’s
Reflektor, Logic’s Space Designer, HOFA IQ Reverb, and the (almost) free CM
Reverberate.
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Tip 5: Resonance



Experimenting with resonance is a great way to find new sounds, in fact in a lot
of cases resonance is a big part of what makes a sound.
One example would be physical modelling synthesis where a “force”(exciter) is
used to trigger a model of an “object” (often a string or a drumhead).

If this force is great enough you cause the object to resonate, in other words,
vibrate at a specific frequency.

If you find ways to control the speed of vibration (frequency) you’re well on your
way to making some awesome fresh sounds.


As a start try finding an analogue modeled filter, the Daft filter in NI Massive
would be one example, or some of the Fabfilter Volcano types. Now boost the
resonance very high and keep changing the cutoff frequency. Because the filter is
now self-oscillating, you will get different tones independent from the input.


Another example of a fun way to use resonance is to see how plugins respond to
it. The sounds of saturation/distortion plugins for example are highly dependent
on the input sound. Try making a very loud resonance peak before the plugin and
cutting that same frequency after the plugin, similar to our input gain example.

You’ll notice that the distortion sounds very different for different resonant peaks;
in fact, this is exactly what a phaser effect does. (Which is why a Phaser is a
popular effect to use before a distortion plugin)
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Tip 6: MIDI Editing

In a lot of cases when you are designing sounds you have little to do with MIDI,
maybe you sequence just on midi note or you are working on audio files entirely.

But besides all the disadvantages (non-reversable, non-stretchable) there are some
good things to say about working MIDI.



A tried and tested approach which I use a lot is setting up the sound in a sampler
and processing from there.

This means you can still reverse and stretch the sound while also having full midi
control.

Which means you have a lot more control over the trigger and pitch of the sound.

Now you can:
- Arpeggiate the sound
(Try setting a large octave range for extreme sounds)
- play chords with non-tonal sounds, using un-synced arpeggiators
(perfect for speeding-up/slowing-down effects)
- Use MIDI FX such as harmonisers, strummers, MIDI-delays, etc.
- Use external MIDI applications
(Max/MSP or Numerology are good examples)

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Tip 7: EQ

Well that sounds boring right?


If you think about is and equalizer is about the most advanced multi-filter you
can find, and they come in lots of different flavours!

You can try some of the analogue models and use them in ways that would
horrify every mix engineer.

Just see what they sound like when you abuse them, boosting 15db at 200Hz,
why not?



I also like EQ because it allows you to find the pitch of a sound.
Often we don’t realise that every little sound has some sort of pitch, even drums
and environments.

With EQ you can find the “main” pitch or fundamental that often characterises
the sound, it feels a bit like arriving at the center of the sound, where most of the
color lives.

Don’t be precious about it though, try processing it however you want.

To make this easier, you can split the sound using band pass filters, more on this
later.
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Tip 8: Delay for rhythm

Sounds too obvious? If you have a more advanced delay plugin you can actually
get pretty advanced with this, especially if it has one of those fancy resonating
;ilters inside (remember, comb-;ilters are delays!).



To make cool loops you can start out using a kick drum on every downbeat of an
8 bar loop and inserting a delay on that channel.

In some of the more sophisticated plugins you can draw your own rhythms, try
modulating the ;ilters as well.

If you really want to go crazy you can use multiple channels/sounds and multiple
delays on different timing settings.



Lastly, if you are using a delay on a bus you have even more options, you can
pitch-shift or phase the delayed sounds separately from the source, or put them
in a new space entirely with reverb.



Examples of really good delay plugins are, Logic’s Space Designer, SoundToys
Echoboy, Fab;ilter Timeless2, RP Delay and U-he MFM.



The last one is probably the most tricky to get your head around, but the options
are almost endless!






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Tip 9: Multiband Processing

In a lot of cases sound design is about control, more control equals more
possibilities. One great way to get more control is dividing the sounds in different
frequency bands. Sometimes this is almost a necessary thing to do, due to the
“input sensitive” nature of some plugins.

A common example would be the low frequencies of a kick drum triggering the
compressor while the highs of the snare are being passed uncompressed.



But besides that there is a way more creative use for separating frequency bands,
more control!

It allows you to use speci;ic effects on speci;ic bands of frequencies, here are
some examples:
- Using a chorus on the high frequencies (Or even tastier, low mids!)
- Apply reverb to only the mid frequencies
- Autopanner on the mids
- Delays on the low frequencies.


And these are still the basic examples, from a song making perspective you can
take this concept even further:
- Rhythmic gating the high frequencies
- Sidechain just the low frequencies (A common mix trick)
- A Pitch shifter on the mid frequencies (this will sound crazy, try it!)
- Gain Modulation on just one channel, great to cut out the bass for one
or two bars.
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Tip 10: Found Sound

Nothing spices up a sound more than recorded sound. Especially when you are
talking about Foley sounds, breaking glass, squeaky chairs, a broken washing
machine, etc. 

They feel very much like living things, something that is very dif;icult to get with
just signal processing.

You’d be surprised what a sample of a breaking vegetable can do to a kick drum,
just try it!




20 Unusual Sound-Design Tips SubjectSound

Tip 11: Think Transients



Transients are great to get things audible in a mix or to just introduce a new
sound, a sharp and clear transient always attracts the listeners attention.

But besides that they are great for triggering other sounds as well.
To do this you can use a sidechain trigger or “transient follower” which are
essentially the same for this approach.



Your ;irst step is to make two new tracks, one with your “trigger” sound, we’ll call
this signal 1. This is the sound with the nice transients! You can route this sound
to the outputs if you want to hear it, but the goal here is to use it as a modulation
source. For that reasons we’ll usually send it to a bus or aux that we can monitor.


The other track (signal 2) is for the ;ile you want to process.

Signal 2 is trickier to explain because there are so many options here.

The only requirement is that it has some plugin on it that has a sidechain input.

With this sidechain input you can “listen” to signal 1, you will not hear it, but the
plugin will and it will respond accordingly.

If you’re lucky your sidechain plugin has a threshold control which allows you to
tweak how closely the plugin on signal 2 is paying attention to signal 1.


A lot of different plugins have side chain options, one common example would be
to have a pad with a gate plugin that only opens when it receives a signal through
it’s sidechain input.

Or you could trigger a delay on signal 2 with the transients from signal 1.

Or perhaps a ;ilter that opens, a compressor that “ducks” the dry wet of a pitch
shifter, distortion, a chorus effect, whatever you want basically.




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Tip 12: Send & Return effects



There are some incredible useful things about doing your processing on a
different bus than the original sound.



Here’s one example:

Set up a track which sends to the main output and an aux.

On the aux insert a pitch shifter that shifts the sound one octave (or any other
interval), after that insert a reverb.

You will still hear the original sound close and dry, but it also has a shimmering
reverb effect one octave higher and thereby not ;ighting for the same
frequencies.

Pretty cool right?



Here’s another:

Use a resonator after a reverb on a bus! This is one of my favourite approaches to
tune reverbs and get strange sounds.