Spice Up Those Static Sounds
While the core sounds in any track are of vital importance, we can develop them even further by making use of some clever techniques to spice them up
Think of this like cooking your dinner – mashed potato is great, but it tastes much nicer with salt and pepper added into the mix! By using the ingredients in our effects processing cupboard, we can add extra flavour and individuality to our music.
A simple example is using an envelope following modulation effect such as Soundtoys’ FilterFreak on a plain synth patch. Tuning the plug-in’s modulation amount, attack and release times carefully lets us amplify any modulation already present in the sound or impose our own – great for making warping D ’n’ B basses or adding subtle movement to a solid pad. Using the stereo width in a mix to its fullest is another great way of adding listener appeal and excitement; if you’re using any one-shot sound FX or vocal snips in your arrangement, try experimenting with panning them around the stereo field in a sequential order – this can either be done by automating your channel’s pan control or by drawing from one of the many auto panning plug-ins out there. There’s also a clever ’80s trick for adding stereo width to a mono synth; first, set up a mono delay or reverb send from the synth before panning the wet and dry signals left and right by equal amounts. This trick not only sounds unusual, but works well in mono too.
As well as processing sounds in their own right, we can create variations of a track’s signature sounds that can be woven into the arrangement to spice things up. A great example is a snare drum. By triggering your snare from a drum pad sampler such as Ableton Live’s Drum Rack or Native Instruments’ Battery 4 it’s simple to copy the snare to several blank pads before processing each variation differently. If you’re making choppy, Jungle-inspired drums then applying time-stretching, bitcrushing or pitchshifting will give a selection of snares that would sound great used for a drum edit or in a breakdown. Making more organic sounding variations is easy if you’ve got a MIDI controller handy; try assigning the pitch of your kick, snare or hi-hat to a knob for live tweaking – great for making trap snare rolls or pitched hat loops.
Another great way to make things sound more exciting is to apply some automation to send based effects such as reverb, delay or distortion. By manipulating the effects we commonly use when mixing, we can make the arrangement evolve and bring the song to life. An example of this is pushing the decay time of a vocal reverb up during a chorus to add an epic, soaraway feel to the song at that point – simple, yet effective. Equally, making the vocal reverb decay shorter during a stripped-back section of the song can give a more claustrophobic, dry sound that will add contrast to the arrangement. We can use a ping pong delay in a similar way too. Using a short delay time of 1/64th notes will add stereo width to our dry signal, while pushing the delay time down to 1/4th notes will give the traditional ping pong effect – a great one to dial in for certain sections of a track as an edit.
Distortion is also an amazing effect to experiment with – FabFilter’s Saturn is brilliant for this. Using some LFO modulation to push the distortion amount of a low mid frequency band up and down can give aggressive, snarling results; while dialling in a little automation of the effect’s wet/ dry amount will add further movement to the sound, making it sound like the distortion is pulsing or even tearing through the speakers when using more extreme settings.
Pushing the decay time of a vocal reverb up during a chorus adds an epic, soaraway feel