8 Ways To Add ENERGY To BORING Sounds

hey everyone this is eight ways to add some energetic magic to your boring and flat sounds i don't care what genre of music you're working in i don't care if you're a cinema soundtrack guy hip hop electronic or pop producer flat and boring sounds take all of the life and energy out of even the best songs but the good news is you're about to learn a batch of new tricks to ensure you never run into a lifeless track again let's go ahead and jump into the video trick number one is to add a filter a little bit of reverb and a little bit of echo and this can transform any sound i love using this in chill and cinematic pieces the sound we're going to be transforming right here sounds like this it's just very very boring very dry we're going to wet it up by adding a basic eq filter for eq filters i just like using the stock eqs built in to your daw and i'm just going to add a high cut filter like this this removes the high frequency energy in that sound now i'm going to add a stock reverb plug-in just to add some space yeah sounds nice finally i'm going to add an echo plug-in and i'm using echoboy jr but you could also use stock echo plug-ins built into any daw because they all kind of work the same and at the end we should come up with this sound [Music] gorgeous this next trick is to use automation to build tension this is great for all you song builders and composers let's take this sound right here [Music] great sound great melody but it's got to change throughout this track otherwise it just sounds static so luckily i made this sound with a synthesizer and all synthesizers have cut off knobs like this and this so i'm going to do is i'm going to take this knob i'm just going to double click it and logic creates an automation point this process is a little different in fl studio and ableton but you can do this in both of those dolls and any other doll that you might be using so i'm going to add some movement to this sound by creating a point at the beginning of the run and then toward the end of it then i'm going to open it up a lot to the end right here let's listen to this in action [Music] [Music] this next trick is to add a reversed reverb swell to the front of your melodies or vocals it's a great way to add energy and a great way to spice up your music my vocal that i'm working with sounds like this is the more that i can say before we hang up for the night so you can see there's these big gaps in between each vocal phrase and these are great places to get creative so to pull off a vocal swell what we do is we grab the first word or phrase in any vocal phrase i'm going to take this word because i think it'll sound better with the reverb and what we do is we just duplicate that word and mute the vocal just to clean things up that's what it sounds like alone so now what i'm going to do is i'm going to grab a reverb plug-in you can use your reverb plug-in of choice i'm just going to use the stock reverb plug-in built into logic proact and to create a really nice swell we're going to add a longer decay time i'm gonna go around 10 seconds i'm also going to put the wet knob or the mix knob all the way up and then we're going to print the sound or bounce it out whatever you want to call it so i'm going to right click and bounce in place now we have a beautiful new sample of a vocal swell let's increase the gain and you can see it just kind of tapers off and what i'm going to do is i'm going to cut off just the front of it and then reverse it like that i don't need it to be this long so i'm just going to cut up to there and then i'm going to fade it in and then i'm gonna do a little bit of fade out so i don't get that pop sound and if i play this i love to add reverb to the reverb swell just to make it a little bit smoother when it ends i'm going to add some reverb here and curve the fade just a little bit and at the end this is what we should get this next trick is to add reverb and delay to anything and just watch it come alive these two plugins create space and sometimes a little space is all we need the sound we're working with sounds like this [Music] gorgeous little melody but we need to spice it up i'm going to use ableton's echo plug-in and by the way if you haven't noticed i've just switched from logic to ableton for this trick ableton has a beautiful echo plug-in it looks like this i'm just going to increase the dry wet knob with a time of 1 8. that means there's going to be eight echoes per one bar this is one bar in length right here from one to two two to three and that's just you know you get the point if i play this now [Music] and then what we could do is go to reverb residence and grab the reverb plug-in what i'm gonna do is just dampen this reverb by grabbing this eq right here i'm just gonna dampen it a little bit add a little bit of decay time and decrease the dry wet knob [Music] this next trick is an add-on to the last trick and what we do is we grab a free plugin called ott and just turn it on and listen to the magic happen this plugin just makes every sound bigger and more aggressive and it's so cool to mess around with so i'm going to add ott to my channel strip here my plug-in strip and unfortunately you can see it looks a little glitchy right now because it is i updated my computer i don't know what happened but it doesn't matter because we really only need one knob and we can see the knob pretty perfectly and that is this knob which is the depth knob so if we play our melody and we just increase the depth knob [Music] you can totally hear that melody come to life with just one knob on a simple little free plug-in called ott highly recommend getting that plug-in this next trick is to layer your vocals with harmony i know most of your producers and not all of you know how to sing that's fine i don't know how to sing either but you're a producer so you need to hire singers or you need to record singers you have to make sure that you request harmonies and doubles and good vocalists will know what that means let me show you i have a vocal here and it's one that i used in an earlier trick and this vocal sounds like this you could start a war inside my head now i'm overthinking everything things i never said yeah you so this is a hooks of the song sound really good when they're layered with rich harmony layers and doubles so instead of just having this you could start a war inside my head we can add a harmony that sounds like this [Music] and then another harmony it sounds like this is actually just an octave another low harmony or double you could start over and then a true double you could start now let's listen to that in action [Music] see how all of those layers of harmonies and doubles just add so much energy to that vocal now here's the good news about vocals vocals are notoriously difficult to come by because good vocalists are hard to find and good downloadable vocals on the internet are even harder to find i'm currently doing the dirty work for you and creating one of the biggest vocal packs that will ever be released to producers this vocal pack will have five full vocal top lines just like this one here including this one and tons of other really cool vocal sounds that will bring so much life to any music this vocal pack i've been hinting for a while but i promise it's almost done we are so close to the finish line on that and you guys will be the first to know when it is finished so keep checking in with me by watching my youtube videos and you will be the first to know when this masterpiece is released it will be released very very shortly this next trick adds an insane amount of energy to any sound and it's called layering and it's when you just layer a bunch of crap onto any sound and see what you get sometimes you'll end up with a bigger fatter sound when i first made this sound here [Music] it sounded cool and big [Music] but i got bored of it because there's not enough layers so i duplicated it added a low cut filter aka i removed the low frequencies to it because i didn't need them and i also spread it with a coors plug-in so i made it really wide and that added a lot of wideness to this boring baseline here it is without the wideness and here it is with it [Music] wow that's pretty sick but it didn't have enough punch to it so i went ahead and i found this tom which a tom is just a drum and i found this tom sample on splice and then i shortened it so by default it was like long like that but i shortened it up a little to look like this and watch what happens when i combine that and the baseline now we get a punchy bass line [Music] oh man that's so cool but i wasn't done there i had to add a little bit of high end harmonics so i created some chord sounds and i even layered them too because sometimes you can layer all day and i don't know where i was going with that but here's one of the layers so if i play this with our bassline wow that is so gorgeous and then i play it with this one we get that now let's listen to this big stacked bass line for like nine seconds and just enjoy it [Music] this next trick is how to use automation to add energy to your sounds right before the drop or the chorus in this case it'll be right before the drop and this is the transition from the chorus into the drop of the song let's give this a quick listen [Applause] [Music] what we do to make this trick happen is we have to automate this piece of vocal right before the drop and just make it sound really cool so step one is i'm going to grab a reverb plug-in turn on automation and i'm going to tweak this knob here and what we're going to do is just turn the mix all the way down for this part of the vocal like this so watch now our chorus will have some nice lush reverb on it save me from my see how it just got really dry right there so that's like one thing that you could do but you could also raise it one notch by adding a distortion plug-in and this is where things get really really weird so i'm going to use a paid distortion plug-in called saturn 2 but you're free to use whatever distortion plug-in you would like i'm going to jiggle this drive knob here we're going to start it at nothing but when we get to this part here we're going to have some nice distortion on this vocal and the type i'm just going to do some heavy saturation [Music] and now when we get to this transition here let's listen to what this vocal turns into [Music] isn't that awesome so let's go ahead and listen to it in action [Music] [Applause] [Music] there you go guys i hope you're able to take these tricks and add some serious magic to your music if you would like to learn every component of music production whether it's songwriting arrangement chords melodies mixing and mastering come join me in my music production bootcamp my production bootcamp is not just a course that teaches you all of those things but it's also an entire backend mastermind group with over a thousand students where you can receive unlimited track feedback on your music from me and the other students and ask me any music production question that you would like that sounds like something that interests you go ahead and check out the link at the top of the description below and i'll see you in there and of course as always stay tuned for next video [Music] [Music] you

Channel: Alex Rome

Views: 143,875

Keywords: sound design, how to design sounds, sound design energy, boring sounds

Id: 8jbwoAt8N-Y

Length: 16min 2sec (962 seconds)

Published: Mon Aug 16 2021