The 9 Fundamentals of Sound Design

want to hook your listeners with new and exciting sounds drew here with musician on a mission and today you're going to learn the nine fundamentals of sound design so whether you're making a cool synth or crafting the perfect drums for your track these are gonna help you get it right every time I didn't take these from a text book or anything but I find myself drawing from these same principles with every project no matter if I'm writing a song or making sound effects for a short film so these are the fundamentals I'm thinking about that helped me make sure I get it right every time and they're gonna help you go into every project with a plan but before we get started if you're watching this video I'm guessing you used synthesizers quite a bit or you're looking to get into them be sure to check out my free synthesizer cheat sheet it's gonna give you a ton of tools for getting the most out of your synth so while you're making your own sounds you can get some help at a glance now before we go over the fundamentals you need to have a target in mind I used to just try to create sounds willy-nilly with no real direction I didn't have a goal for where I was going and I certainly didn't have a roadmap to get there and what I usually made wasn't very useful so before you start messing around with any sounds you need to make sure that you know what you're trying to create that's going to inform every decision you make along the way so let's pick our target for today as I go over all these fundamentals I'm gonna show you what I mean by creating a kick drum from scratch that way you can see all these ideas in action alright so fundamental number one is the amplitude envelope or as I like to call it more simply the adsr in my opinion this is the most important thing you need to understand for effective sound design everything else is important but this is really the foundation of your sound adsr stands for attack decay sustain and release it shows you how the volume of your sound changes over time basically it's how long it takes for a sound to get loud and how long it takes to become quiet again let me show you how it works with us in so here we've got a really basic synth sound it's just a square wave and down here we've got our adsr curve for it let's check out the attack first the attack is how long it takes for the sound to become loud so if it's got a fast attack it's gonna start immediately or if it's got a slow attack that's gonna gradually fade in next up are decaying sustain which are tied the sustain is how loud a sound is gonna be after the attack so if we've got a high sustain it's gonna stay just as loud or maybe even louder and if you've got a low sustain it's gonna fade out afterwards and the decay is how long it takes to go to that second volume so you know if I've got a really low sustain in a long decay it's gonna gradually fade out to that second volume or it's gonna and that sounds like nothing but as you can tell you know that's a short decay going to that second volume and finally you've got the release which is how long it takes for the sound to totally fade out so if we've got a really short release it's just gonna cut out right away or if you've got a long one it's gonna gradually fade out over time and you can use this to describe any sound for example plucking an acoustic guitar will have a fast attack in a long release and if we want to emulate a sound we need to think about its adsr curve this is actually a cool trick I learned from Brian's tunkel over at blip sounds he showed me that as long as the transients match up you can really make any source sound like something else so to recreate a kick drum from scratch we can take any sound that has these same characteristics you know a fast attack a high sustain and a fast release and we'll be able to turn it into a kick drum using effects so I've actually already recorded something for us to use here and it's just the sound of me dropping one textbook on top of another here's how it sounds right now done really sound like a kick but it's got that same amplitude envelope that same adsr curve as a kick would have so over the course of this video I'm gonna turn this into a kick using some effects as well as some other sounds sound design fundamental number two is pitch pitch can go a long way in getting you the sound you want for example if you're making a synth you could use a second oscillator and pitch it up or down an octave to fill out the tone if you're not sure what an oscillator is make sure to check out my video where I run through all the basics of synths that'll help you out a lot so let's see how we can get this book drop to sound a little bit more like a kick drum with pitch obviously we're gonna pitch this down but just for fun let's see how it sounds if we pitch it way up 36 semitones perfect oh my gosh it's flawless hold on let me hear that again yes it's exactly what I was looking for and the sounds done and we can all go home now thank you bye okay let's do our real job and pitch it down so I've pitched it down a little a little more than an octave and let's see how that is yeah still you know a little boo me er then I'd probably want a kick to be but that's a lot closer fundamental number three is layering layering sounds together it will help you get a fuller more realized tone and as long as the sounds are within 35 to 40 milliseconds of each other we're gonna perceive them as coming from this source so let's think about the characteristics of a kick drum we'd hear the click of the beater hitting the drum that characteristic thud around a hundred Hertz which I think this book drop will be perfect for the boom of some sub frequencies and some smack around one or two K so I've actually recorded another couple sources that we can use and I've got a snap in a clap so the snap I think we could use as the beater hitting the drum head and the clap I think could be that smack that I was talking about but what about those sub frequencies we're gonna have to make those ourselves so I'm gonna pull up a synth real quick and I'm just gonna make that I'm just gonna pitch this down a ton so we're just hearing the subs and switch this over to a sine wave and finally we're going to give it the adsr curve that a kick drum would have I want it to be really short so I'm actually gonna turn that sustain down and if you aren't listening with headphones or good speakers you might not hear this very well cuz it's very low but it is going to help us fill out the tone a bit more so let's hear how it sounds when you put those all together yeah so they aren't volume matched whatsoever but I think we've got a good foundation to build a kick drum fundamental number four is to keep it simple so before we start adding more effects we need to take a moment to think about what the sound really needs it can be really easy to go overboard throwing different effects on for no reason but I can actually make it sound a lot worse or at least harder to mix so keep things simple and only use what you really need for example now that I'm hearing it I'm not sure that we actually need all of these sounds you know I think we could maybe cut one of these out and I don't really know that we need the sound of the beater hitting the drum so I'm gonna mute the snap and I'm actually gonna hide it as well so I'm just not even worrying about it okay cool so we've cleaned things up a little bit we're keeping it simple and that's gonna help us not go overboard and in that vain fundamental number five is cleaning you need to clean up your sounds and make sure only got what you need and this is where filters become really handy so I'm actually going to add some fades to these that way were fading out any unnecessary noise and then I'm gonna use filters to just cut out any frequency ranges we aren't using when you're layering a bunch of sounds together it's really easy to make something that sounds great by itself but takes up too much space in a full mix if I were to take this kick as is and throw it into a mix it probably be pretty muddy so I want to use some filters and cut out things that aren't necessary in each of these sounds you know let's check out this book drop for example I want this to be the thud around a hundred Hertz so I probably don't need all of this that's going on here you know I can probably get rid of some of the sub stuff because I've already got a sub sound and then I also don't need these really boxy mids in already just by using filters this actually sounds closer to a kick drum so let's go ahead and clean up our clap as well this is really focused on getting the smack of the kick drum so I don't need a lot of this lower frequency content that's going on here let me roll that off and I'm actually going to take out some of these highs as well that way we're really just focusing it on this one to two K range and I'm realizing now that I actually didn't pitch shift this clap so I'm going to bump that up a little bit there we go that sounded a little bit better and I bet we've got that a little bit more in the 1k range I was talking about yeah there we go so yeah all that is to say make sure you're cleaning up your tracks that way you're not using unnecessary frequency ranges sound design fundamental number six is tone as you change your sound you'll notice that it feels different you're changing its tone so figure out what kind of tone you want there are tons of options it could be boo me snappy light crunchy the list goes on and there are all sorts of things you can do too get the right tone the layers you choose your EQ and compression settings and your effects can all change the tone right now this clap sounds kind of wimpy so I'm gonna use some distortion to give it a little bit more impact alright so this sounds quite a bit better to me but it's a little bit lower so I'm actually going to turn up the pitch a little bit more and let's go ahead and gain stage it to make sure that it's not way louder than it was before and what's weird here actually you'll notice it sounds as loud if not louder than it did before but it's actually quieter it's fewer dB cool little trick you can do with distortion so that adds a little bit of impact to the kick right now what I want to do is add a bit more texture as you change your sound you may notice it starts to feel less real so to bring things back down to earth you can use texture I'm a huge proponent of using noise oscillators to add texture and for anyone who doesn't know this is an oscillator inside your synth that will literally just generate noise here let me show you right now obviously it doesn't sound great by itself but it's a great tool for adding on top of your sound if something sounds too pristine noise is perfect for adding nice realism to it a lot of the time I'll throw a low-pass filter on a noise oscillator that way it isn't too harsh and abrasive and let's go ahead and roll off some of the lows as well okay so I've honed the tone a little bit more i volume balance things so that they're sitting together a little bit better I've turned up the tone of the distortion because it was a little too low for my taste and I've also added a transient designer to turn up the attack on the clap and turn down the sustain and with the noise oscillator I've changed the adsr curve so that we've got a moderate sustain and I've mixed that in a little bit all in all it's starting to sound a lot more like a kick drum maybe like a loaf by hip-hop kick drum can totally imagine some band-passed jazz piano over this [Music] fundamental number seven is sighs think about how large the sound should feel maybe you want it to be huge or maybe it should be laser-focused on one spot and then use effects to place it there obviously panning will be helpful for placement if you want it in the left or right but you can do more than that for example if you want the sound to be really small you can use a band pass filter to hack it down I kind of want this kick to be big so let's beef it up there are a number of ways I could do this I could use a chorus to make it feel doubled or maybe the Haas effect to widen it out though I'd have to be careful about any phase issues then but I'm actually going to use some more distortion and this time gonna distort this book drop so let's try it out okay so I've used some distortion around ninety Hertz to beef it up a little bit and it actually sounds a lot better to me now so here it is without the distortion and here it is with and we're getting a little bit more volume so let me turn that down there that's better but that sounds a lot cooler to me a lot bigger and beefier I as you can see I tried out at an overdrive first but I found that the regular distortion worked better so let me throw that off we're in the homestretch we're almost there fundamental number eight is movement a lot of time you might want your sound to have some movement one way to do that is automation I could automate some keyboard chords so that they pan from the left to the right or I could automate the volume on an arpeggio so it fades in and out to the beat envelopes are also really handy in this kind of situation so remember that adsr that amplitude envelope I was talking about that lets you change the volume of the sound over time you can use other envelopes to change other things over time as well let's try using an envelope to turn the pitch of the noise oscillator up for time so let me grab another envelope and just gonna do this I don't actually like it for this sound very much it's cool but I kind of like the direction of a more natural drum sounding for this so I'm gonna take that off nonetheless that's something you could use and is often really helpful in a lot of cases finally fundamental number 9 is depth never underestimate the power of reverb and delay I can't tell you how many times I've had a sound that's got the perfect transients it's almost exactly what I'm going for but it just feels flat there's no depth to it at all that's when I break out the reverb in the delay so if I had a synth lead that I wanted to feel really Airy really ambient I might use a lot of reverb on it or some long delays but it's a little bit different for a kick drum of course I could use some really ambient reverb to get a kind of kick drum in the cave sound but for this like I said I want to go for something a little bit more natural so I don't want something really reverb ii that being said this can still use some depth and i'm gonna focus on the clap aka the smack for the drum usually don't want a ton of reverb or delay on low-end stuff cuz it can make things sound really gross and muddy if you aren't careful but higher-end stuff like this is perfect for creating a sense of depth and right now i want to make it feel really close to the listener really in their face so i'm going to use a slap back delay for that this is a really common trick for getting in your face of vocals but right now we're gonna use it for this kick drum let's go ahead and grab our delay and a short delay time between 15 and 30 milliseconds is often really good for this so let's try something out in that range so I've got my slap back delay going and here's how it sounds obviously it's really subtle you know I've got that mixed in very lightly but here's how it sounds without it and here it is with it's subtle but it just adds a little bit of depth that pushes the high end of this kick forward and towards the listener and let's just do one last thing to this before we call this sound done I'm going to compress all of these sounds together so I've sent them all to a buss as you can see and on that bus I've got a buss compressor and I'm just compressing it all together and let me show you how it sounds without the compression and here's how it sounds compressing them all together and aside from bringing up the quietest stuff we're also just kind of gluing this all together you know by applying the same compression settings to it we kind of lock it in together and make it feel like one sound so you know it sounds it sounds pretty good it wouldn't be a great kick drum for a rock song but I think you could work for a loaf I hip-hop song really well you know if we threw a piano on here and then looped it like I've already done and then just freestyled crushing it that's perfect musicianship right there yeah if you layer this with some drums a snare you've got a pretty cool track right there all right and those are the nine fundamentals of sound design let's run through them one more time you've got number one the amplitude envelope aka the adsr number two pitch three layering sounds together four remember to keep it simple five cleaning six tone seven size eight movement and nine depth and like I said keep things simple just because these things are fundamentals of sound design doesn't mean every sound needs you to do something about it don't just use distortion because I mentioned it here any time you use an effect make sure you have an idea for how it's going to help the so those are the nine fundamentals of sound design but these are just one small part of creating great music from home you can be a sound design pro and still end up with mixes that feel lackluster so if you really want to get the most out of every mix make sure to check out this free workshop Rob mazes for a musician on a mission has made he goes over the seven steps to getting radio ready mixes and shows you his approach to home recording and mixing which will help you do all of this way faster thirty six thousand people have already done this workshop and it really only took a few days for them to start seeing results so check it out if you want to avoid wasting your time and money on the wrong things and learn the seven steps you need to make Pro mixes and also don't forget to grab my free synth cheat sheet one of the things I'm most proud of in it are the adsr graphs I lay out the right adsr settings for some of the most popular synth sounds out there so you can get the right sound in a matter of seconds and if you like this video don't forget to give it a like and if you really liked it and you're new here don't forget to subscribe okay that's all for me I'm drew Swisher with musician on a mission I'll see you again soon and remember create regardless [Music]

Channel: Mastering․com

Views: 15,074

Keywords: musician on a mission, rob mayzes, sound design, home studio, home recording, synthesizers

Id: nzcx2sm_g4Y

Length: 19min 53sec (1193 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 09 2020