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4. Processing a simple sawtooth Reese

1 Let’s soup up our sawtooth Reese with processing. Create a new return track in your DAW, then send the Serum channel’s signal to it. By applying effects in parallel via multiple send/return setups, we can maintain the original sound’s solidity and sprinkle additional flavours on top of that.

2 We can crisp things up with distortion. Load your favourite overdrive, guitar amp or distortion on the return, then drive the Reese’s midrange and top end. For extra movement, load a tremolo plugin before the distortion plugin and wobble the input signal’s level in different ways.

3 Delay-based modulation effects such as chorus, flangers and phasers are ideal for adding sinewy motion to Reeses. We’ll call up a second return with a PSP cmDelay chorus preset loaded, then send both our Reese and distortion channels to it. Carefully balance the return to bury this blurred effect under the other sounds.

4 This processing brings out lots of midrange movement and treble brightness, but this has exposed the sound’s sub and low-mid inconsistency, so we go back to the original synth and beef those areas up with multiband compression. A sub and low-mid band pin down dynamics, then we use both bands’ Output levels to bring those areas up in level.