Designing sounds within an arrangement
Often, the best way to stockpile bespoke synth sounds and sharpen your synthesis skills is to set aside time away from your core track-writing sessions to design patches using your favourite virtual instrument. The only problem with this approach, however, is that by separating sound design from the creative process of composing an actual track, you can end up with a bunch of presets that sound fantastic in isolation, but don’t fit as well into a musical context as they would if they’d been created in the midst of a proper arrangement.
Therefore, to show you how to juggle sound design and composing at the same time, we’ll hit record and fire up our DAW, with the aim of designing a couple of synth patches while creating a mini breakdown-and-drop section. We’re not trying to produce a jaw-dropping record right off the bat here, but instead illustrate how it’s possible to flesh out basic musical and structural ideas that will influence the synth patches we design on the fly.
We’re using Ableton Live 9 as our host software, and Serum and Avenger synths to design our sounds, but the approach and techniques we use are pretty much universal, no matter what music apps and plugins you use. And of course, being a video-led session, we strongly advise you download the accompanying video tutorial from filesilo.co.uk/computermusic, seeing as there’s plenty more real-time techniques we couldn’t quite fit in here.