![]() Push their signals up with some gain to hear them more readily, and turn the noise into tones - stretch, pitch, add reverb, and use unison processing and granular resampling to tweak these sounds into something new. Similarly, analogue-aping effects like AudioThing Vinyl Strip and iZotope Vinyl generate their own sounds, too. Sweep the filter frequency with whatever’s available - whether the filter has LFO or envelope control, or can follow notes using keytracking, there’ll be a way to get a tune out of it. Push up the resonance and use the drive or saturation parameters in your particular plugin, if it has them. A self-resonating filter can be used as an oscillator. Who needs instruments to make sounds happen? Even effects plugins can generate their own sounds from nowhere. Repitch, add effects, use your instrument’s controls and muster all your production might to squeeze everything you can from this one sound source. With your different sounds loaded on different channels, it’s time to use them to construct a whole new piece of music. Scan through and find them all - sustained tonal parts, transient hits, weird reverberant tails… the list goes on. The loop should be interesting enough to contain a wide range of varied textures. Load a drum loop into a granular synth or sampler, then duplicate the track in your project several times. Have you ever listened deep into a loud, wideband sound - a vacuum cleaner or ocean waves, for example - and found your brain picking out a tune? Set a similar sound up in your DAW (eg, modulated filtered noise), then shut your eyes and try to pick out a tune.Įven better, set up a sidechain EQ on the noise signal to make sure the ‘notes’ you heard in the noise are dipped whenever you play them on an instrument. The brain is always looking for patterns. This back-to-front way of working makes you really think about what the different sections of tracks are made for, and what should occur when. Once you’re getting to the start, you can easily place aural ‘hints’ at what’s to come… because you’ve already created it! Craft a breakdown next - in a track this ‘harks back’ to what came before, but in your reversal, it’ll give you inspiration for what to program later on - or is that ‘earlier on’? Fashion high-intensity drops, then create build-ups by taking things away. Bar 1 should still be Bar 1, and Bar 119 should still be Bar 119 - just create the last parts first and the first parts last. Instead of starting with the intro, start with the outro, and build back from there. ![]() More advanced envelope formulas are also possible using sidechaining techniques. After setting up oscillators and envelopes from a synth itself, grab filter plugins to replace onboard filters, auto-filters to replace filter mod routings, and stack up effects. ![]() Most synths follow a somewhat standard signal path, so it’s not hard to build your own using effects plugins. Pitch it, distort it to add harmonics, stick it through ring and frequency modulation to mix it with other versions of itself, and you really can synthesise every element of a track from scratch. ![]() For a practical challenge, make everything from one source sine signal. Not only will this give you a completely different perspective on your existing track, it’ll also give you a different way of working and force you to commit to what you’ve made so far. Take out your razor (the tool in your DAW, we mean), and start hacking up the audio, timestretching it, pitchshifting it, and loading it into samplers. Take a track you’ve been working on, save a new version and render every single element out to audio. ![]() You’re the ultimate computer musician - a piano-roll hero wielding a mouse and a MIDI keyboard… but that can get old fast. Use your production skills to bring the sonics more into line with your chosen genre and you’ll likely find that the result is a more flavoursome piece of music. Maybe you’re making tech house tunes, but does that mean you absolutely need to use tech house sample packs? Instead, try a pack from a completely different genre and see how it changes the music you make. Are you an ardent sample pack aficionado? If you’ve spent hours trawling through soundware libraries like we have, you’ll realise just how blurred the lines can be between the sonic building blocks of two genres. ![]()
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