This was a total gamechanger for my sound design!

hey it's Andrew Huang in the last few years I've completely 180 don this approach to making music that I will admit I was late to the game on and a little bit closed-minded about basically it's the idea of doing pure sound design decisions not working on sounds for a purpose or for a specific project not even really trying to make music but just sitting down and making some cool sounds and maybe later in the future some of them might become useful in a piece of music but a lot of them I'll just never hear again and that's totally ok maybe you do this already but if you don't does that sound a little bit pointless or like a waste of time or not very productive that's what I used to think my approach to sound design used to always be in a 100 percent musical and purposeful context I would make the sound I needed for the song that I was working on and that's not a bad thing I definitely still do that but doing separate pure sound design sessions will add a whole other dimension to your musical creativity and so today I wanted to talk about why that is and also I will be sprinkling in some sound design tips and tricks that I've found really helpful so let's go if you do sound design on its own you can really get into it and have fun with it and for some people that's different than if you're in the middle of working on a track and you end up needing to create this super specific sound where it can feel a little bit more like work you have to achieve this thing and if you don't achieve it you feel bad and music wants to be alive it's like capturing magic and a lot of those magical moments those happy accidents happen through playing rather than working I think it comes through in a piece when there was some spontaneity and playfulness and surprise in the process so for example modular sound design session happening here I'm sending the audio to Ableton but it's just a project with one track in it and I'm letting the recording run while I make a bunch of sounds so anything that I do any discovery that I make any happy accidents are instantly documented I don't have to think about it at all later on there is the whole process of sifting through all your recordings and finding the parts that you liked if you did want to use them you can make that easier for yourself though this will work with any DAW that lets you set up a keyboard shortcut for creating markers so in Ableton I'm gonna hit command K and that lets you choose things to assign keyboard shortcuts to now I'm gonna click this set button which is what you use in Ableton to create markers and I'm just gonna sign it to the forward slash question mark key command K to leave that keyboard shortcut mode and now as the timeline plays if I hit that key it'll make markers so then as you're recording yourself making sounds whenever you come up with something that you want to hold onto you just reach over hit that key and keep going as a little bonus tip if you use a wireless keyboard that makes it even easier for you to position this where it's gonna be optimal for you to hit that key and set markers while you're playing maybe you're making sounds on your guitar and you could put it on the floor and tap it with your toe so the sounds I'm making here are with a few intelligent modules Intel a gel is one of the sponsors of our current giveaway you could enter to win tetrapod with the Teth expander or a quad rax tetrapod is a modular touch controller you can use these four touch pads as sliders as drum pads there's a keyboard mode there's an LFO mode and with the tet expander instead of having just one mode at a time you can have each touch pad be a different mode if you want you can configure them however you like and it also adds a sequencing mode as well as a gesture recording and looping mode quad racks is a super versatile cv generator it's got four channels that each give you a selection between different kinds of envelopes a really fun first generator and all kinds of LFO some really complex LFO shapes more info on the giveaway in the video description and maybe I'll put like a card up there that you can tap on these are highly multifunction modules they pack a lot into a small space so I won't do a full breakdown of them but here I'm using them to modulate a bunch of the sound parameters of shapeshifter and then I'm compressing everything with jelly Squasher this is another thing I used to be averse to and now I just go for it baking in compression or any effects really I used to think I wanted to capture the rawest purest form of a sound but everything that you use in a track ends up getting processed a little bit anyway so I've just started being okay with doing it on the way in I put my trust in my ears and you know if anything doesn't sound right while I'm giving my full attention to sound design i'll just tweak the settings maybe I'll take the effects off if it feels like the right thing to do so anyway I'm getting all these cool sounds some of them might inspire music that I make in the future I'm recording everything in Ableton I'm dropping markers on the stuff that I like the most and most importantly I'm having fun and that's the end of chapter 1 [Music] music is made of sounds did you know that I know you watch this channel for that hard-hitting production knowledge all other things being equal your composition your lyrics your performance if the sounds themselves are better however you measure better the music is gonna be better so if you take some time to focus on just making the best sounds that you can not the best song that you can not the best melody or best bassline maybe just the best bass sound that you can make and any music that you eventually make using that bass sound will be a little bit better than the same music with another bass sound that you didn't give as much attention to and you can totally craft those great sounds as you need them but sometimes things get in the way like if you're writing a bunch of parts and you're putting them together and you're fleshing out your track you don't want to interrupt that flow spending 45 minutes tweaking a bass patch and you can't always come back to those sounds later and finesse them but with timbre and texture becoming more and more important in modern music the way that you build upon your existing ideas will be largely informed by their actual sound if you're using a smooth base pad than what you pair with that is probably going to be a little different than if it were a plucky sound or a distorted sound so having a wide variety of preset options that you're familiar with because you spent hours designing them is super handy [Music] that familiarity is really key because instead of realizing that you need a certain type of sound and then either having to make it from scratch right there or scroll through a bunch of other people's presets at random hoping to find a good jumping-off point if you've spent a bunch of time designing sounds then your brain is gonna light up in those moments when they could be useful that's also why in addition to doing those fun audio sound design sessions like I was showing earlier it's a great idea to also sometimes just do sessions where you design synth patches designing sounds in audio is great because you are creating these very specific sounds that you can save exactly as they are and use them later but they're not ideal in all situations for instance playing a melody with a sample as you play higher and higher notes the audio needs to get sped up so it gets shorter and shorter and that's not always what you want and during your sound design sessions you probably don't want to record a sample of every possible note so having a bunch of synth presets that you're familiar with because you made them and that hopefully you really like because you made them lets you have these playable instruments at your disposal for any future tracks that you work on [Music] [Applause] well it's a whole new day turns out there was a lot I wanted to get into on this topic chapter 4 is pretty short and sweet but practice sound design like so many aspects of music is something you get better at the deeper you dive into it the more you spend time with it and I find I just don't go as deep when I'm meeting to design a sound for the song that I'm currently working on as if I just commit to spending like an afternoon just stretching out on sound design I learned my tools better I understand audio concepts more deeply I finessed my sounds more with the additional time and then in those moments where I do need to design something from scratch I can do it much more quickly because of the experience that I have minimizing the interruption to my workflow I did also want to mention samples and all this particularly found sound that I've used a lot of sometimes you just hear a really cool sound out in the world that can be really inspiring and if you've managed to capture it there are so many fun ways that you can play with that recording and make music out of it and I was part of what changed my mind about all this too like if I made a really cool track out of some bird calls well I didn't have anything to do with those bird calls I didn't craft those sounds I didn't even set out with the intention of finding those sounds I probably just stumbled upon them while I was wasting time on Twitter not even making music so if I'm willing to accept sampling and completely repurposing random audio from out in the world why wouldn't I be okay with making my own random sounds now my final tip for you kind of circles back to the first one that we talked about about recording everything and this is for if your DAW allows resampling you can set up a loop now if you make a new track and route the audio from your first track into the new track you can record while looping it and making any live manipulations that you want and now if I drag out this audio clip we have everything that I just did even if you are just working with parameters that you can draw automation in for you might want it as audio for instance let's look at this sound I'm gonna run that through this delay and record some of the shenanigans so if that was the sound that I wanted to create sure I could have that as just an automation move but because I have it in audio now I can do further manipulations on it so I can chop this up like maybe if I really like this particular piece you know I could just use that however I want versus this crazy thing at the end like we can kick drummer a Tom out of that you know getting things in audio gives you a lot more flexibility in some cases by the way this is also a giveaway item this is an eight-inch patch cable hanger from euro desk Zee will be including this with the modules for whoever wins the modules from IntelliJ there's also this larger model which didn't sound as good but also a really great cable hanger euro desks he made these specially in white for me so you can always get their standard ones in black I'm not sure if they're gonna make these more widely available but currently the white ones are only available in the giveaway there's so much available in the giveaway there's a focus right studio starter pack with a mic headphones and audio interface I've got five auto tune pro licenses to give away there's a chase bliss Warped vinyl hi-fi pedal and so much more click on this card if you want to go enter the giveaway my final point in this video is more of a philosophical thing which is that a lot of misgivings about taking this kind of approach to music are probably more of a weird psychological thing than anything else I don't know if you're anything like me but I was classically trained in music and for all the benefits of that it kind of put composition on a pedestal for me it was a serious deliberate thing you want to have a vision you wanted to create something with intent and so you'd be sitting there with your instrument working out your melodies and harmonies and dynamics and whatever but what is an instrument this beautiful thing is the result of centuries of design of many brilliant minds putting thought and care and labor into a physical object trying to make it sound as good as possible this is a preset expecting a little bit of pushback in the comments for that one by the way shadow defender this American ultra jazz master is also in our giveaway so now with modern technology allowing us to create new sounds so quickly I feel like in so many genres it's starting to become really important to have these really finely crafted and even highly original unique sound traditional instruments are already sound designed and so to get that level of expressiveness out of a synth patch it takes a lot of time [Music] [Laughter] [Music] so I hope this video was helpful for you and maybe encourage you to try some new things in your sound design I would love to hear any of your thoughts in the comment section don't forget to enter that giveaway and I'll see you in the next one [Music] as a little bonus tip if you use a wireless keyboard it makes it G's pressed play on that

Channel: ANDREW HUANG

Views: 544,533

Rating: 4.9575229 out of 5

Keywords: andrew huang, andrew, huang, music, musician, producer, song, canadian, canada, toronto, ontario, AndrewHuang, producing music, how to, how to make music, music producer, making music, ableton, learn music, sound design, sound design tips, sound design tricks, tip, trick, hack, workflow, synth, modular, intellijel, module, eurorack, phase plant, plugin, sampling, dubstep, edm, gamechanger, sound, design, audio

Id: GXQHiozYGTE

Length: 14min 3sec (843 seconds)

Published: Tue May 05 2020