How To Remake Your Favorite Synth Sounds

is one of my favorite sounds I've heard all year and this is what it sounds like when I try to make that sound myself now let's go back in time before I had any idea how to make that synth I want to show you how I remake my favorite sounds then at the end I'm going to show you how to tweak them to make them your own so now we're back before I figured out how to make this sound and I've showed you the preview of what it sounds like so I'm going to try to make that main lead sound you hear so let's put 30 minutes on the clock and see if I can finish it before that before we start it's a few days later now and we actually just hit a hundred thousand subscribers so I wanted to give you guys something to celebrate for bigseesounds.com which has all my sample packs and preset packs I'm doing 50 off everything all you have to do is type in the code 100K at checkout Denver big Z courses.com which has my new music production course I'm also doing 50 off but for that one you have to use the specific link down below for it to automatically apply the discount at checkouts also now we've built this community of a hundred thousand people now that like to walk around and make computer music so thank you guys so much I'll remind you of all those details at the end so you can just keep watching the video anyway back to making the synth sound I threw my headphones on so it's easier to hear everything in the sound design let's start the clock right now so there's really four steps to remaking a sound and the first step is the setup so in the song I've already identified like what part I want to reference for the sound which is this part right here so I'm just going to Loop that one part so I can continually reference that back and forth so now the first thing I need to do before doing anything else even with this initial serum preset is just get the notes in there get the right midi notes in there so here I'm just listening back and forth to the original track to copy down the same Melody obviously that's the wrong octave and the reason for that is I always want to use the notes in the middle of the keyboard and change the octave in the synth not in the midi notes later when I'm finished this preset and I'm making a new song and I'm scrolling through presets I want all of the news presets that come up to be in the right octave already so I don't want anything to be like way too low or way too high when I'm testing out new sounds for a song so now everything is totally set up I can easily move back and forth from the reference to the synth and test out things to make this sound so the Second Step here is to shape the sound I'm going to use this envelope down here and also just a filter in the effects section to try to figure out what the shape of the sound is before we figure out the tone or the effects or anything else like is it a really short Plucky sound or is it more atmospheric sound with a really long release so this is where I always start when it comes to sound design so let's bring that back in and try to figure out the shape of the sound so it really sounds like there's not a sharp attack to it there's a smoother attack so I'm going to move this up also it's a lead sound so we want it in mono down here so let's uh attach that to this filter over here this filter cut off and see what happens it's a big lead sound so the filter is going to be wide open and here I'm just experimenting a little more to nail down the right shape we've still got a lot of work to do but that's going to be the base for the whole sound now we can move on to the third step which is experimenting with the wave tables so depending on the sound this part can take forever because sometimes it's really hard to find the right tone for a sound so this is usually when I just open up some wave tables and I just scroll through [Music] and try to find one that matches the character of the original sound now luckily for us a lot of sounds that electronic music are just saw waves in this case it really sounds like a saw wave to me good way to test this is we can open up an EQ in the master bus and really look at what this sound is doing so I'm just going to take out the bass and try to focus on the sound now if we go back to our synth that's definitely the wrong waveform so let me go back to a saw wave let's go to basic shapes then I'll go to saw wave right here so let's look at this waveform now now if I'm looking at like the Peaks the individual harmonic peaks of the frequencies in the original song it does look like it has a similar characteristics to the saw wave so I think that's a good starting point right there but depending on the sound this step can get really complicated because sometimes it's a mix between two different waves that you have no idea to try to find the right character for the sound or sometimes you're using like FM synthesis like I could do FM from B to try to find a different type of sound but luckily in this case it really just sounds like it's a straight saw wave so I'm just going to stick with that for now now another main character of The Sound I'm hearing is there's definitely white noise or some kind of noise involved so I'm going to open up this noise filter and first of all you can see in serum when you open up noise filter let's go to bright white noise there's all this low end white noise and that's just going to make our sound muddy so what I'm going to do in this case is just send this sound through a high pass filter so I'll go to High then I'll set up this filter to only go through the noise oscillator so you can see I can cut off the low end of that noise doing this trick so let's have this envelope also affect the level of the noise envelope let's just see how that sounds mixed in with the main oscillator and we can cycle through some different options for sounds [Music] I like this Alpha and Z noise it's kind of like a really thick white noise so let's just go with that for now so now we have a solid base for the syn sound now we can move on to step four which is adding effects and fine tuning and this is really the most important part is where you take your sound from Being Cheesy it's actually sounding professional so I haven't added any compression or Reverb or delay or anything yet so let's just start with some basic multi-bank impression I think that actually sounds good on this sound sometimes the multi-band compression in serum really messes up a sound but I think it sounds like in this case there is some kind of multi-band compression on the synth in the original version and we're going to need to tame some harsh frequencies that I'm hearing later let's just start with that for now and I'll add a Reverb And Delay also [Music] let's try a dotted eighth note that's kind of what it sounds like there's definitely some ping pong to lay going on so let's go to the dotted setting now I'm going to add some reverb when I add Reverb and serum I like to put the mix all the way up at wet so it's going to sound terrible but it helps us kind of hone in the right sound foreign a little more time here dialing in the Reverb now let's mix that in with the original signal [Music] my wave table right here just has one voice of Unison this is another thing I could have messed around with in the wave table step [Music] but honestly in this case it actually sounds like the lead just has one voice of unison but what we can do in the effects section is make it a little wider so I'm just going to use this Dimension expander to widen it up a little bit [Music] so that's sounding pretty good I'm just going to reference back and forth with an EQ to check out the tone because the tone just feels a little off at this point I knew I was getting closer but in sound design it always comes down to small changes that can take the synth to the next level so first of all I'm going to match the volumes by turning this up now you can see the low frequencies of the leaves are matching up in volume but there's definitely some harsh frequencies around this area like 3 500 Hertz another thing I'm noticing is this mid-range is kind of lacking in my synth compared to the other synth so I can actually fix that with the multiband compressor I just boosted up the mids a little bit we can also do that with an EQ so I'm going to get rid of those harsh frequencies I was hearing around like 3 500 Hertz so let's check those out I'm going to use this band over here bring it to 3 500. and actually for now I have a second screen over here I'm just going to move this EQ over the second screen you guys won't be able to see it but just know I'm referencing what the frequencies are looking like on that EQ so I just spent some time messing around the EQ to get a better tone so the EQ in serum isn't super detailed so you can barely see these lines but I think I've dialed in a good EQ to help the tone out a little bit so I've done is decrease the area around 3 500 Hertz by a couple DBS and I've boosted the super high end around like 12 000 Hertz so before and after just helps it sound a little more professional another thing I haven't done is add any distortions sometimes that can help the harmonic sound a little more pleasing so let's try it out so I just usually like to cycle through the different kinds of distortion [Music] here I'm just testing out all the different types of distortion that Distortion sounds pretty nice actually makes it a sound a little grittier and that white noise is running through it too [Music] at this point I just spent some extra time fine tuning all the effects so I've gone back and forth messing with it a little more and I really like how everything's sounding so obviously there's a couple more things we have to do in the original the cutoff of the filters being automated and I think I'm hearing the notes glide into each other so I'm going to go down to this portamento function [Music] and let's make a macro control that closes the filter so I'm going to grab that map it to the filter cut off and we can automate that also when it closes it sounds like the attack gets a little less smooth and a little sharper so let's do that as well that sounds pretty cool so let's automate that real quick here I'm just writing in the automation onto the track [Music] it sounds a little more open at the beginning in the reference so maybe I need to turn up the white noise or make something a little louder in the high end I actually ended up adding an EQ to the sound to finish it off because I felt like the mids and the super high end needed to come out a little more actually I think we pretty much nailed it within those 30 minutes with a little extra time to spare here's the original and here's my version so now we know everything is sounding professional we can use this as a template to create our own sounds out of it an easy thing to do would just be adding our layer so let's get like a uh I don't know let's use this random Square wave in here that sounds pretty cool I mean it's fun just to mess around adding new layers let's add two voices of Unison so it's wider I mean that almost sounds cooler than the original sound we could also change the whole shape of the sound so I'll just bring that down bring the Decay down or I could run all the oscillators through a crazy format filter so it's great to have a professional starting point that you can build whatever sound you want on top of if you don't feel like making your own sounds you can just use mine here are all the details again for the sale I'm doing to celebrate a hundred thousand subscribers I really appreciate every one of you guys that's ever watched the video or used one of my sounds or taken my course or had me mix one of your tracks thank you guys I've got big plans for the channel so hopefully the content just keeps getting better and better over time thanks for watching [Music]

Channel: Big Z

Views: 94,405

Keywords: how to make synth sounds, remake sounds, remake songs, how to remake your favorite synth sounds, Zedd, CamelPhat, big z, music production, tutorial, edm, electronic music, mixing, mastering, sound design, how to, make music, producer, DJ, serum, vital, synth, bass, Logic Pro, Ableton, FL Studio, masterclass, remake

Id: iq_3q1NljMg

Length: 13min 0sec (780 seconds)

Published: Sun Nov 27 2022