Rise and upsweep design tricks

When you’re in a rush for a rise, what do you do? Here’s a few tactics to try… > The good-old white-noise-lowpass-filter sweep is sounding a tad tired these days, but it doesn’t take much to refresh it. Try automating multiple filters (in series and in parallel); band-pass and notch filters; stereo filtering; distortion and bitcrushing; modulation effects like chorus, phasing and flanging; or whatever else you can find. >Another tried-and-true trick is to stuff an existing element of your track into a sampler then loop a short section before using pitchbend, automation, or a pitch envelope to make it rise in pitch throughout the build. > If you’ve found a great riser sample but it’s the wrong length for your build-up, break out the timestretch! Try every algorithm – sometimes a grainy or lo-fi result will actually sound better! And of course, downfaller effects become risers when reversed. > If your risers are drowning in reverb and delay, they will ring out over your edits/fills and on into the drop, which can sound messy. To prevent this, use automation to mute the track’s output when needed, or simply render the riser to audio and cut it at the precise point.