Finding your sound: TIPS FOR ORIGINAL PATCH and SOUND FX PRODUCTION
"No where else in music are there so many different and musically accpetable sounds than in electronic music. In fact, the intensely original and novel sounds is part of what makes electronic music so special. It's in this light that I wanted to talk briefly about sound production with regards to PATCHES (this is the term I've adopted from Roland lingo to use for "instrument" sounds like bass, lead synth, pad, snare etc. that you program on a synthesizer) and FX.
Nothing gives a tune more uniqueness than programming (i.e. making/creating) your own sounds for it. I've taken two approaches to this that seem to work well in two different types of senarios.
The first type of senario is when you've already started a track and need a new patch or effect. I've recently come across this with the first track for Hampton's Very Bad Day. If you read the previous article, 'Starting a track without a play button: COMPOSING during early game dev' then you know that track was inspired by a Clav patch from my XP-30. While that instrument provided an phat rhythm synth line and digging throught the basses came up with a powerful, driving distorted bass patch, I needed a lead synth to put the icing on the cake. I had an idea for a sound in my head that I liked so I tried programming it on a virtual analogue synth made by Synapse Audio called Scorpion. While doing so I kept playing the lead synth melody line with the rest of the background sounds of the track. This resulted in a lead sound that was WAY different from what was originally in my head but that fit MUCH better with the rest of the sounds in the track. As an added bonus, the sound fit the other songs in the track even though they were of totally different styles! So I gotta lead for breaks and trance with one programming session!
The second senario is a fun one to be in. This is when you don't have a single note of a song. You just have a cool sound in your head or you want to build a bank of sounds to pull from at a later time. I was in this latter situation a few years back while I was working on my hard dance music. I liked the lead synth sounds on my XP-30 and I also like the sounds I heard in other hard dance tunes. What I wanted, though, was a bank of my own leads that I could pull from that had a hard dance flavor but were still unique and original. I went and listened to a bunch of hard dance tracks analyzing the underlying structure of the leads they used (i.e. saw, square, detuned saw with distortion, etc.). This wasn't to memorize, but more to get a starting point for the aura of the stuff that was out there. Then I went to my XP-30, and pulled up 4 saw waveforms into the patch (That's actually the synth structure for the XP-30. Each patch is made up of 4 waveforms that you can manipulate and connect together in different ways to make one sound). I started cycling through other waveforms that I thought would have the base sound of what my hard dance lead would eventually need. Once I got some cool inspiring waveforms, the tweeking began! By the end of it, I was no where near the sound I started with but had found a unique yet appropriate hard dance lead sound. I then modified this single patch to come up with an entire bank of e-leads! I'll be using one of these e-leads in two up-and-coming dance style tracks. I'll make sure I post the links in a reply below.
When it comes right down to it the running theme here is this: don't hold your creativity back. Even if you start with a sound in mind, don't let that be the end point. More likely than not an even better sound is waiting for you at the end of your tweeking sessions, and if you're programming during song production it will more likely fit you track. So open your mind, tune your ears, equip some patience, and push some buttons baby!"
e-effect
01-24-08