UNUSUAL SOUND DESIGN ideas
Trying something a little unorthodox in your sound design creation process can really open the door for unexpected and new creativity to emerge…
Extreme distortion
Take a ‘distortion synthesis’ approach to extremes by sculpting entirely new tones and timbres using only simple sounds and distortion – for example, push a pure sine wave into a distortion stage to square off the waveform, and vary the input gain with volume modulation (ie, tremolo) to create wavering waveform change.
Generate ‘mistakes’
Sometimes it’s the sounds made by mistakes that really inspire – so create hardware malfunctions on purpose… Plug a cable into the wrong ports to generate buzzes/hums, crank up an empty mixer channel’s preamp gain to capture the amplified system noise, and pull a turntable’s needle off the record for scratches and pops. Now use these for sound design!
Get the bends
Some of the best Dance music basslines feature lip-curling pitchbends that add that special something – but drawing in specific bends via MIDI can be tedious. Instead, try and incorporate these movements at the sound design stage – create a cool bass patch in a synth, assign an LFO to global pitch, then print a bunch of live tweaks to audio as you alter this LFO’s speed. Once recorded, chop up and save out the various sections, then throw these segments into a track at the composition stage to inspire clever bends and twists.
Make an uber-sound
Max out your computer’s processing power by designing one single uber-sound! Stack up unison voices, go mental with modulation, and purposely assign everything to modulate everything. Once you’ve reached the limit of your computer’s processing power, resample the patch into a sampler and start the process again!
No ears!
Make music with your ears, not your eyes, right? Wrong! Fire up a synth’s init patch, turn off your speakers, then create an entire synth patch without listening to it! You can plan how it will sound by choosing waveforms by eye, or go crazy and hook up random parameters. It’s worth a try if you’re completely stuck for inspiration!