Unlock the Secrets of Musical Sound Design!

hello everybody today we're going to give you a quick introduction to the world of musical sound design you know all those kind of smooshy type things which make music more interesting more contemporary and all the rest of it there are some Foundation techniques which everybody needs to know um now if I was going to explain and demonstrate them all it would take quite a long time so you need to look at this more as a checklist than a sort of uh compact course but what we're going to do is look at the kind of way you combine these different techniques to produce interesting fun sounds and it is tremendous fun so you know if you've never done this or you've done this and you fancy stretching your legs a bit and finding some additional ways stay with me and if this is the kind of thing which floats your boat feel free to subscribe because then I can explain more at some future point right what I've got going here is uh Cubase first one we're going to look at is simple digital audio manipulation editing running things backwards stuff like that so here we have a Gong [Music] there you go that sounds that sounds more like a Gong right I'm just going to record a note in [Music] it nice and long now the first thing we're going to do with that is turn this into audio now regardless of what door you're working in all these techniques to some it will translate whether you're in logic Cubase um Ableton Reaper there's always a way to do this so although I'm going to be showing you the techniques in Cubase um you will need them to go and look up how to do it in your own particular door for example in Cubase if I where should I do this here we go if I right click on the um that and I go to render in place I think you can see that I can turn it into a piece of audio and then lo and behold there it is so this is a really important thing because you're going to be taking quite a lot of midi and things like that and turning it into a piece of audio now um what could you do with that you can do all kinds of things with that what I'm going to do first of all is a simple piece of layering so if we take a let's just record in a piano note as well [Music] okay let's turn that into a piece of audio as well right now what I can do get rid of that is we're going to start with a piano and then Crossfade into the uh into the goal so I'm going to go like that and like that let's see what this sounds like and when I say let's see what this sounds like this is a really important thing in the world of sound design trial and error what's that going to sound like maybe that would be interesting 19 times out of 20 it sounds pants but that one time that's all right it's not really flipping okay you know it's it's not rocket science is it I mean then you can start adding stuff onto it no I'll come on to that in a minute the other so that might have worked or you could do it the other way around it's very difficult to know sometimes which is going to be you know what's going to be the most what things are going to sound like until you do them so let's try this [Music] there we go [Music] okay that's yeah it's all right isn't it so that I mean that is it's most simple is the kind of thing you can get up to let's do another one um the next thing you would be looking to do with this um is to run it backwards um so uh a reverse sound is um an absolutely classic piece of um sound design and what's really interesting about reverse sounds and I think you could start to hear it there um is this bit right at what was the front and is now the back is very important because you get this little tiny thing here called the transit which is the the initial impact of the of the note and that is often very different to the rest of it so you can hear it do that kind of thing now you may or may want it not want it to do that so sometimes I take the end up so it doesn't click so so a reverse sound you can do the same thing with uh obviously with piano piano is very popular thing to do [Music] render the piano in place run the piano backwards you notice that okay so when I'm reversing things I'm just going I've already set up key commands to go command R for reverse in Cubase with these things which you use all the time and I would suggest probably stuff like that you're going to be using day in Day Out it's not a bad idea to set it up so it's nice and quick and easy to do I've also got a um I don't know if you can see this over on the right a stream deck which is really useful for this kind of thing as well so can feed all kinds of stuff into it so here we go we got piano and [Music] line them up so you can layering the two together sounds all right [Music] those are really really simple things to do and you can start um you can do you can introduce a different sort of texture with this one and just sort of Leap Forward a bit and add an effect to this one um so here's the goal let's add a choppy effect so I'm going to put transgate on this is a programmable gate which will make things go okay this is from killer hearts highly recommended now if you listen [Music] I put it on the wrong track didn't I obviously I put it on the wrong track that was my deliberate mistake just to catch you out just to make sure here we go let's try this you can hear already now what a lot of the time you might do is just introduce that that sort of choppy effect right at the end like that and that so that can sound quite interesting and or um you have two layers of the the gong so you take the gun you have big left gong and then you just bring that in at the end [Music] you see how that works let me just put that in the middle of the screen so you can see it easily um so all I've done here that's the choppy one that's the non-choppy one so I'm crossfading between the choppy one and the non-choppy one so it sounds like [Music] that and that sounds all right pretty cool I like that I mean it's the kind of thing you do a lot and you sort of hear this stuff and you go oh look right let's move on and as I said this was a checklist rather than a kind of D and then I getting deep into the weeds and I go whoa this is fun I'm going to do more of this okay okay so calm down guy do it properly right um let's start adding some some Pitch shifting to some of this because if we take um okay let's take the let's take the gun the right way around again so let me just go back to that here we go there's the gone okay oh interesting okay right okay get rid of him for the moment put that on uh get rid of the choppy thing we don't want the choppy thing anymore thanks very much mate goodbye you are the weakest thing right um so if we take this um here now this does vary a lot from one library to another um I'm going to go into processes pitch shift now a lot of the time a pitch shifting thing will look like that and it'll just simply allow you to pitch it down like this okay no Cubase has a really good thing which is this envelope so this I will go there's the there's the range 11 11 semitones and I can then draw this down and now it'll go which can be quite interesting or you can make it go up and down that's always quite fun and all kinds of stuff you can do with this so now interesting things to bear in mind here let me just try and zoom in here we go um and this applies to all pitch shifting algorithms like this do you see this thing time correction um when you shift a piece of digital audio up or down what is essentially is doing is speeding the playing it back either faster or slower if it plays a bit faster the pitch goes up plays it back slower the pitch goes down now suppose you've got something which is uh rhythmic something you know you've got you don't want it when you pitch it down to go if you want to stay in time so that's why this little button here time correction what that will allow you to do is to do the pitch shifting without messing with the um uh the the temp the tempo so it's just another thing to bear in mind um right checklist guy keep going keep going right um what we're going to be doing uh they're actually tell you what just one other thing on the um pit Shifty things um the uh where is it here we go go um one thing you can do let me just [Music] play it in Bounce It Out now um there is a um a really useful and not expensive plugin called sound shifter which is from waves and I know they've gone through some they'll be quite controversial at the moment but if you managed to buy this outright I completely support everybody who's saying that it's a really terrible idea to um just go purely subscription and this is really really useful it's just real time you can whack the pitch up and down and this is probably foreign [Music] and yet again I think I put it on the wrong track here we go gong one R1 now let's just make sure uh Gunk there there we go right so here we go let's get this up thanks very much right so if I pitch it up and down by it there's up by an octave it's real time or you can go and you can automate that that's really cool as well so this is quite a a useful way and then on top of that you can do the pitch shift uh envelope thing so it goes like that so you got [Music] so do that and you get all kinds of nice and interesting things going on right moving on um what you would do a lot of the time with these kind of things is um I mean it should be said that a lot of the time you're going to build up loads and loads of layers with different little Elements which go you know a little fluttery thing which something like that and you know all those kind of things so if you um but more often than not you're going to be putting uh multiple effects on the same thing until you so it's iterative okay that's quite a nice effect we've we've messed about with the pitch there what else can we do with this um so let's start adding one or two other effects to it what happens for example if what if again of course okay now there is a really nice piece of software called black hole from Eventide and it is this insane Reverb it's not really Reverb it's like granulous see what I mean now you can freeze it like and it just keeps the the sound at that level forever um that's quite good now what I might do um I'm quite fond of guitar effects Native Instruments Guitar Rig is wonderful there's lots of others and there's built-in ones in in most doors but you can do all kinds of quite extreme stuff with guitar effects pedals and things like that first time I've opened it up on this rig there we go so it's having a little thing um and here we go [Music] that was dull this is still dull good delighted to see it right okay just choose one at random [Music] [Music] thank you when you've got it you bounce it out again so you iteratively bouncing the thing out all the time [Music] okay what happens if I run it backwards or even um okay this is one I quite like doing make a copy run it the other way and then you can overlap them so that it does what I call them in and out so it go overlap let's go to equal oh God come on what am I doing here we go so you get something which doesn't work that well actually on this one um it actually might work better without the Guitar Rig stuff on it but yeah so you can run it backwards and forwards at the same time that's quite that can be quite fun [Music] um so that works pretty well what else are we going to look at um the modulation thing is important um we've already touched on that but let me just show you what I mean let's take uh where is this one that's okay it's running running the right way around again which one is he R1 r 1 oh okay so let's take some of these off okay so there's any number of ways you can use this kind of modulation I mean this is a transgate so it's not really much anything but but for example you can make it much much slower and have lots of attack on it and bring it down like that um which I quite like so you can play you know you can see how and again lots of this you can automate so it goes on things like that and all that kind of malarkey is quite fun as well one of the things which um uh works well another thing you can do if we delete some of these if we're getting hundreds of these well oh yeah okay say goodbye remove let's go back to the piano [Music] play a clustery thing in okay Bounce It Out and now all pretty much as far as I know all Samplers now have I'm all doors have this simple sampler track and all it allows you to do is without all the faff of loading up a proper sampler like contact you can put it into this and you can go [Music] so I'm now playing chords with chords [Music] I like that foreign and even within some of these samples you can see there there's quite a lot of stuff you can do um so there we are we've created a piece of sound which wouldn't have existed without the sampler and then on the sample a track sample R you know we can you know put in whatever weird and wacky stuff we want um flange it why not see what happens okay it's quite interesting go back to black hole again at um let's go in here Dreamscape yeah ah Dark Matter that's more what I had in mind here we go no um that's quite good okay then we can put the gong underneath it maybe [Music] um okay what happens if I um Pitch that down right down um so I go thank you a bit shift uh transpose what can I take it down octave at a time or can I go down more yeah maybe you can go down more right see how that it's kind of nice okay so where's my right line them up um and then so now you're starting to see how you end up using some of these all these things come together um so foreign effect I might put in here is a delay um ping pong delay if I've got one yep there will do that'll do this is just a straight out of the box one I think yeah and then one there we go eighth eight and that's a perfectly nice sound I mean so using combinations of these different techniques you can end up with some really incredible stuff this is not really incredible stuff this is just as I say this sort of sound design checklist so to speak and this is before we even get into um the whole business of um using synthesizers and stuff like that but if you combine this if you can find interesting ways of taking a sound like that and sort of blending it in with other stuff then you suddenly got a really I'm talking myself into doing this okay so let's get let's add a synth in underneath it uh let's go with my my go-to on 3 from synapse audio um it's just got a wonderfully Rich sound um uh what have I got going on here have I got my any of my user ones in no that's a shame ones I've actually made myself uh all right it's only 10 ounces there is a bit okay then we'll have another one of those up there then we'll add in [Music] I'm gonna do stuff with this um so we're gonna pitch him down a lot shift yeah he can go down too foreign [Music] let's put some yeah I don't know it's got that kind of little fuddy thing okay it doesn't have to be particularly rhythmic um no I don't like that um so we'll go for um what else am I going to put in here um contacts let's get something more interesting than uh just a straight normal piano oh my god um um okay you're up sonicature okay quite like this I like this a lot actually I use this one quite a bit um so now this needs this dot I'm it needs some Reverb on it but not the big one vintage verb thank you vintage verb yep [Music] right okay be quiet okay here we go foreign [Music] [Music] so I hope this has given you I'm just decided to stop there have you noticed I hope this has given you some kind of insight into the process I know I know a lot of you may well be familiar with this but I thought whoa what the hell let's just kind of roll it out and let you have a look and you know you can take something away which you haven't thought about before um but if you're on logic or Reaper or Ableton all of these have their own sort of Secret Sauce their own special extra thing that they do better than anything else and you know you need to dive in and find out what that is because although they'd all do the running backwards thing and they'll do pitch shifting thing and all that and there's normally stuff in there which you go oh that's good um ableton's particularly good for this because you've got this sort of drag and drop effects chain thing which is really good FL Studio is really good because almost every track is a sample of track so that's really cool so everybody has you know horses with horses look I hope you've enjoyed this um we run courses and sound musical sound does sound like this actually um so you can check it out on the website if you've enjoyed this video and you think this is uh your kind of thing then subscribe and I'll do more of them simple as that really what more do you want anyway thanks very much for your company I'll see you again very soon

Channel: Guy Michelmore

Views: 46,212

Keywords: thinkspace, education, music, film, scoring, games, television, composition, composer, guy michelmore, guy, michelmore, thinkspace education

Id: iNt_BX009o0

Length: 30min 30sec (1830 seconds)

Published: Fri May 05 2023