6. Making one initial sound as interesting as possible

1 Load Stab.wav and Beat.wav from the Tutorial Files folder onto new audio tracks in a 148bpm project, and drop a D16 Frontier on the master bus. Mute the beats and loop bars 1-2. We’ll make this stab sound great in isolation, then we’ll create a bunch of cool layers and variations for use in our song. 2 For a retro ‘sampled’ vibe, put Vinyl.wav on a new audio track turned down to -28dB. Trim the vinyl clip so it starts and ends in sync with the two stabs. Route the Stab and Vinyl tracks to a group bus, and load a bitcrushing plugin with a fairly mild setting – we use D16 Group’s Decimort 2 with the CMII preset. 3 Let’s use parallel processing to create obvious ear candy around the core stab. Duplicate the Stab track and rename the copy RoomVerb. Load Reverberate CM, increase Stretch to 150% for a longer delay, and set Dry/Wet to fully Wet. Turn IR Gain down to -44dB. Now the stab doesn’t sound so bare and dry. 4 Duplicate the Stab track again, name it Shadow, and add Philta CM with Lowpass at 900Hz. Slide this track’s Stab clip earlier by 1/16 – shorten the start of the clip to do this. This gives a low-end ‘oomph’ just before the main stab, loosening up the groove. We like this layer pretty quiet, set to about -28dB. 5 Let’s create a wacky reverse delay. Duplicate Stab and name it Spin FX. Add cmDelay, with Input Gain at 24, FB at 150, and Glide on Fast. Click the Dry header to disable the dry signal, and set Wet to -27dB. Now automate Delay Time to go from 120ms to 0.1ms from beat 2 to 4 – the echoes now rapidly rise in pitch. 6 Render or resample the Spin FX track to audio, and reverse the resulting clip – now it morphs from the whistle into the reversed stab. Cut this up and place it before the main dry stab, so the clip goes silent as the stab begins, as shown. When finished, we bounce all variations to audio, then try different layer combos and edits.