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2. Efficient strategies for effective sound design
1 We all get sidetracked making synth patches or processing loops. Great sounds come out of the speakers, but you end up with nothing to show for it. Instead, set time aside for sound design, to create patches and samples for later use. First, let’s try the ‘live jam’ approach, where you record tweaks and modulations to audio in real time. We’re using Cubase here, but the principle applies in any DAW.
2 Here, we’ve loaded u-he Bazille CM in Cubase, and we’d like to tweak it in real time while recording to another track. We route Bazille CM to a group track called Record Bus, then add a new audio track with its input set to Record Bus. Some DAWs such as Ableton Live can record directly from another track’s output, with no group bussing necessary.
3 We add a Barricade CM limiter to the Bazille CM channel to prevent any clipping. You can add other effects before, of course – check out the video to see our processing chain – but remember that all effects become a permanent part of the sound. Now we can hit Record, play with the synth and effects, and everything we do will be captured as audio.
4 When you’ve got a good chunk of material, edit it down to just the best sounds. Add fades at the start and end if necessary, then render each chunk to an audio file to create a collection of readymade FX samples. To make sessions like these more meaningful, you could give each one a goal – for example, to produce 20 sounds in a single session.
5 For a more precise approach, we can design one sound at a time. In a new project, we’re making a multilayered synth pad, with a deep bass note, four-note chord, sampled bell, and a delay channel. We’ve used our very best effects processors and careful automation to animate the single chord over time. Doing this in a dedicated project saves CPU.
6 Once we’re happy, we give the sound a name, save the project, and render the sound to an audio file in our samples folder. We’ve put a lot of time and effort into just one sound, so to make the most of it, we render versions with and without effects like reverb and delay, and with any alternate layers we’ve cooked up. We do this for all 12 musical keys.