How to get this sound ?

[djermaker]

hey guys, this is my first post here.. ;) seems like a nice community. ive been trying to learn as much as i can about mastering and production recently and ive found some great stuff here in the forums already.

i was wondering if anyone could help me out on this, ive been hooked on this sound ive heard in a few releases lately and id love to know how its done..

ill upload two samples on zshare so you know what im talking about.. its that squelchy, crunchy, ripped synth that im after :)

the first sample is from trentemoller - always something better (trentemoller dub remix) and the second i took from a track called Accomplished my Ludovic Vendi.

zSHARE - sample1.mp3
zSHARE - sample2.mp3

any ideas at all would be greatly appreciated!!

[djermaker]

guess im on my own eh ;)

[morbid]

Its hard to say exactly, I only make sounds by fiddling about, I dont have enough synthesis knowledge that I can hear a sound or picture it and then make that exact sound without tweaking around for a while - Im getting there slowly - what programmes are you using?

Id start with a fairly thick pad sound, crush it a little bit with bit reduction or some creative distortion or you could try running it through an amp simulator to give it that punchy / crunchy / crackly vibe - you might lose some of the lows / highs though so maybe thicken it up again with some saturation.

Then play around with cutoff and resonance untill you hit the right sort of tone you are after, you might need to automate these to get the squelching to sit how you want it on the attack or release - adjust the release / decay of the sound to give a little more tail and body. You might need to layer a few pads together to achieve the fullness you are after. Then EQ it and add some reverb to get it sitting nicely with your other sounds.

I only use abletons instruments and some plugins so the above is just how I would go about it.

FM Synthesis Bass Tutorial by Moogulator is a good tutorial for operator - I dont know what youre using though?

[djermaker]

nice one morbid, thanks for the tips and the link. i use ableton 8 as this works well for me ;) ill have a go with your suggestions today and see what i can come up with. i guess i should have experimented myself first before jumping the gun!

[BloodStar]

i guess it is some distorted/bit crushed multisaw or some kind of wavetable.

when starting from defualt sound on your synth, start with 3x saw, find nice dissonant tone, so tune the pitch on all 3oscs differently. then twist filter1 until you find the richest harmony for your tone. you can incorporate filter2 if you like, for cutting the lowend or hiend, whatever. then watch you amp envelope, set fast attack as you need this sound has impact,then shape the body using DSR. do same for filter envelope,.

once you have this done, you can think about adding some LFOs and FX. choose some parametr eg filter1 cutoff, or osc1,2,3, pw/intensity and put LFO1 on it (start with sine, and twist the rate until you find the best sounding one). remember, you can benefit from automating some of the LFOs parameters, in places where you wnat to change tonal balance of the sound. automating it let say in end of 4th or 8th bar,can sound interesting. experiment with adding another LFOs with different Rate on different synth parameters.

generally speaking, if you want very rich sound across the frequency spectrum, layer the same patch several times always using different filtering (LP, BP, HP) and different fx.

let say layer1 will be the warmth playing in the bottom, layer 2 can sit above it making the main interest, feel free to use delays distortion, reverbs, etc., and then layer3 can bring some texture sitting right in the top of your sound (asdd loads of distortion/bit crushing + reverb/delays. now you have 3 synths as layers which can be easily levelled to find right balance of low/mid/hi freqs according to rest of sounds you have got in your track.

hope it makes sense. :]

[djermaker]

thanks alot for the input, very much appreciated. i have a practical idea of what youre talking about, im only just beginning to learn the ins and outs of lfos/oscillators and how all that stuff relates to one another. atm i experiment more than fully understanding what im doing :) i will take all your advices on board and do my best to learn from it. cheers mate