5 Sound Design Tricks That Changed My Life

[Music] hey guys today I'm gonna show you five sound design tricks and I think every producer and artist should know and these tricks really do add the most life and excitement to my songs I'm just really excited to show them to you sound design in my opinion is one of the hardest skills of music production but I can guarantee you this that if you watch the entire video from beginning to end that I will have you feeling at least 20% better at designing some cool sounds by the end of this video but before we jump into that make sure you check out orbital 4x4 serum which just dropped a few days ago we're real is a sound bag for extra serum that I literally made to eliminate the need to have to go and buy expensive since like Nexus 3 and on the sphere too so if your producer a future bass future house or other melodic genres I really do think you would love orbital so go ahead and check it out let's go ahead and jump into this video okay guys so the first sound design trick that I want to go over with you is how to take your vocal chops from dead to exciting so when you make a raw vocal chop melody it's just gonna sound dry and really just dead and not that exciting so my vocal chopped melody that I want to show you is the one we used from last video but I really didn't describe what I did to make it sound too much better so here's our melody so the first thing I actually did was I up pitched it a whole octave so originally the vocals sounded like this and you could use it in that octave but I like high pitched melodies whenever I could pull them off now not all the time you're gonna pull off a high-pitched melody sometimes it just ends up sounding weird but if I could pull it off I'm gonna pull it off so step one transpose it up but octave or down an octave and see if you can get some really cool sounds step two is to alter the formant with some sort of formant or pitch shifter so I like using soundToys little altar boy a great free alternative to this is if you come into logic go to pitch and then vocal transformer it actually does something very similar but it in its own way and so the way that I like to use these pitch shifters and formant transformers is they start out at zero and they all have a mixed knob and this is where the magic really happens right here so by default the mix it's gonna be all the way up and when you change the format you're actually kind of making it higher pitched and more screaming but you're not it's not actually adjusting the pitch the pitch is here the pitch is the note so we can make it even higher pitch to listen how a high pitch that sound is that's a little high though like even though I like the format like I like the pitch of it is still a little high but what we do is you adjust the mix so that we get some of what it sounded like before altar boy and some of what it sounded like after altar boy so here's all the way wet and that is just how you get a multi-dimensional sound in your vocal chops so step two - making your vocals more brightest obviously to add reverb I like to use vintage Valhalla reverb which you don't need to use a third party reverb you could use your stock reverbs and you'd be totally fine step three is to add some saturation and this saturation just brightened up the reverb that's what I liked about it and then OTT which makes everything a bit bigger that's a lot going on now it's a big change from this to this this step is the most important I think and that's the side chaining side chaining there's a fine line between too much side chaining and not enough side chaining and what side chaining does it adds movement within your other instruments so in this case we have my kick every time the kick happens it ducks away the vocal chop that's what I do to take my vocal chops from dead tube right [Music] okay guys so sound design trick number two that you you just you have to know this one it's a reverse reverb trick now a reverse reverb trick you could use with any instrument you want and what they do is they just introduce the sound before the sound actually happens so we have a vocal here with a couple chords [Music] and let's just say that this is the intro of the song over here and I wanted to introduce these vocals without actually introducing them and so what a reverse reverb trick does is it hints the instrument before you actually bring the instrument in and I'm going to show you how to do a reverse reverb trick so that it sounds good every time what you don't want to do when doing a reverse reverb is get too many notes involved in the original sample so it's not like I could take this phrase it was familial and then add a reverb to it although sometimes it sounds good it's a lot easier just to take a single note juice juice juicy so right here when she says truthfully that's enough note that I can get a really good effect from so right there a single note and then we go ahead and add our reverb plug-in you can use any reverb plug-in to do this and they're all gonna have a slightly different character and you just pick the one that you like so I'm gonna take the chroma reverb which is the stock reverb FL Studio has a really amazing stock reverb plug-in and then able to no I'm not too sure about there a reverb plugins [Music] what I like about chroma reverb is that it keeps a lot of that high-end from high-frequency information now we can put our wet knob all the way up put our decay up which is the length of time that the reverb is actually going you know what I do is I give myself some gain here and then we're gonna make a little loop and we're just going to bounce this in place and so now we have our original sample but if we stretch it we could see the reverb tail so what I do is I cut off the original sample and then we just get this nice reverb tail and we're gonna go ahead and Lissa this real quick and what I like to do is I just like to fade in just so it doesn't we don't get that papi sound and I'm going to double click it click file functions and reverse and so then what we end up with is something like this a reverse reverb plug-in and to make these things really beautiful what I like to do is add echo and then some more some more reverb so that it's a very smooth transition from the reverse reverb signal to the original vocal obviously we got too much what there but then we do is we line this up with the front of the vocal this might take you a little bit to line it up just so it sounds smooth what I like to do is just overuse them if I can it doesn't always sound good Topher using blood and then you get that oh my god just stunningly beautiful sound for this next trick I'm going to show you how to make your bases really pop and just come to life and fill out the stereo image so there's two parts to this with designing your base there's getting the sub base right which is the monophonic signal which is the signal right in front of the stereo image and then there's the wide signal the optional wide signal that you can add on top of that sub base and just have this tag team of bases really bringing out in stereo image so step one with base design is to establish a good sub base foundation and then to build on top of it so if I had a base line here and this is the base in this song here [Music] always start with that solid foundation and then the reason I'm showing you this imager is if you look this is a completely monophonic sound it's just going straight to the center of the stereo image but to make this base really come to life we can add what I like to call a character base or just a higher-pitched base that we can fill out the stereo image with and so this second layer sounds like this mind you there is no low frequencies in this layer this is simply just a wider base sound that coupled with my original bass sound it sounds like this so without the wide base we get this a nice bass sound but with it it really adds all that dimension to it and I like to have two layers do this instead of one so that we can have this sub bass just being that foundational sound and then we can make it wider with the second layer and to show you how to actually make that layer simply just take your sub base if your sub bass you know sounds good enough you can go ahead and add a different layer but my sub bass sounded good enough so that I could just take it I could low cut it I could look at it like that and then just add a nice chorus plug-in to spread it out a bit and just like that you get a nice wide base layer that just sounds really really cool [Music] for this next Salazar trick I'm gonna show you how to add a bunch of excitement and character to your snares so we have a simple tick and snare line here and of course you could keep it like that if you want but what I always like to do is add layers to them to bring a lot of character so I have this [Music] and that just adds so much variation to each snare so the way we actually do this is you can get effects you could get claps you could get other snares you can get virtually whatever you want to get and throw it on top of that snare with a bunch of reverb and you can create something really cool so for instance I have this simple clap here and we can add this on to every other snare mute this one no we can do is we can add some reverb and what I like to do is just go crazy with this layered reverb and make it real short but high wet so short decay high wetness and then you could pick like some weird preset [Music] that wasn't intense enough then you could do something like that what I like to do is take it a step farther this is what I learned from listening to a lot of Elaine ian is that sometimes all four of his snares in the loop sound a little bit different from one another so what we could do is we could get some weird sounds and just throw them in there as well so I'm going to take this little reverse sound I'm going to put it in front of the third snare in the drum loop so that we'll get this that sounded really cool and so now our snares are really starting to come to life let's get one more sound and see if we can do something cool with it I'm gonna start to affect this time see something like this little weird crunchy sound I can just take this and add some reverb to it [Music] and then you can go ahead and just continue that for the rest of the snares in the line [Music] so for this final trick I want to show you its how to add a little bit of excitement to your bases especially in the melodic genres where the bass is driving a little bit more of the energy of the song so we have this drop here and I truly do believe that the bass bends did absolutely everything to bring like to this bass rather than not having these bends at all so it was a little decision like that that just added all the difference so the bass sounds like this and by default it was like this and of course you can keep your bases like that but I'm going to show you how to just add a little bit 10% more to them to get that excitement so I use silent to make these bases but you can use serum to make them you use whatever synth you want to make bending happen what you have to do is you have to find the mono legato switch on your synth of choice you have to turn that on this means that you can no longer play multiple notes at once you can only play one note at once and it will give you the option to bend them from note to note and what you have to do is you have to give yourself a portamento speed that is slow enough so that when these notes switch from note to note that you can actually hear the bend down to that switch and so so let's go ahead and take one of our I don't know whether cube 70 so let's take this and try it again I'm gonna take option and drag okay there we go and so what I like to do is a nice mixture of down bends and up bends so I'm gonna take this and bend it down so we get that nice bend right there and then the next bend that I like to do [Music] keep in mind I do like to bend my bases at the end of each show so we have the full note and then it bends down then we have the full note here and then it bends up so let's go ahead and listen to this now [Music] and it just makes it sound so cool and makes that bass come to life like instead of a stagnant bass it just makes the bass say hey I'm here alright guys if you enjoyed that video and would like to learn more about sound design melody writing chord writing and every elements of music production come join me in my EDM boot camp my EDM boot camp is not just a six-week course that will teach you everything about music production but it is also a back-end chat forum where you can ask me any questions you would like to and share as many of your songs with me as you would like so that I can give you feedback on them and continuously help you grow as a producer the link for the boot camp is in the top of the description below and I look forward to seeing you in there

Channel: Alex Rome

Views: 68,087

Keywords: sound design tutorial, how to sound design, sound design for beginners, how to make sounds from scratch, sound design avicii, sound design future bass, future house sound design, future electronic music, sound design, sound design xfer serum, sound design omnisphere2, sound design sylenth

Id: MCz-oJIwLBM

Length: 19min 34sec (1174 seconds)

Published: Tue Jul 07 2020

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