Going Beyond Presets

Jul 1, 2009 12:00 PM, By Larry the O

           
 

FIVE TOP SOUND DESIGNERS OFFER TIPS FOR GETTING THE MOST FROM YOUR SYNTHS

In the late '60s and early '70s, there were probably fewer than 20 synthesizers on the market, all costing in the tens of thousands of dollars. Today, life is good: There are hundreds of electronic musical instruments available, both virtual and hardware-based, employing a wide variety of synthesis and sampling technologies, and costing somewhere between nothing and a few thousand dollars. Yet, with this embarrassment of riches lying at our metaphorical (and, occasionally, literal) feet, most people barely do more than choose a preset closest to their needs at the moment.

Bonus Material

Bonus Material: The Panelists, Tips

There are, of course, reasons for this. People who are impatient or under deadline pressure (or both) don't have the motivation to spend time programming sounds. With so many presets available, many people don't see a need to learn how to program an instrument themselves. And then there is the double-edged sword of flexibility: The more options that exist in an instrument, the more parameters there are that must be dealt with. Further, the functions of some parameters are not particularly intuitive, making their uses harder to grasp.

In short, taking on a new electronic musical instrument usually generates tremendous excitement at the possibilities, but that excitement can be dampened by terror at how overwhelming it all seems. Still, while good presets are critically useful, there's more fun, musical richness and distinctiveness in rolling your own sounds.

To get some tips and perspectives that you can take into your own studio and use, I spoke with five experts who make their livings using, programming and, in many cases, even designing electronic instruments. My particular interest was the intersection of theory and practice — the point at which training and knowledge come in contact with creativity and instinct.

This article takes a fairly broad view of synth programming, but much more material, including instrument-specific tips and tricks, can be found at emusician.com/bonus_material. There you'll also find “EM's Panel of Synth Experts,” which offers background on the sound designers who are quoted in the story: Eric Persing, Jack Hotop, Ian Boddy, John Lehmkuhl and Martin Jann.

Start From Scratch

The interviewees were unanimous on several points, the first of which being, as Jann, the founder of Pixelsonic puts it, “Knowledge of technical principles is important. If you have a good camera but don't know anything about photography, you can try to make pictures and may have luck shooting a good one, but you can only make good pictures at a good rate if you know the principles and techniques of photography. I think it's the same with these kinds of instruments.” Sound designer Boddy seconds the thought, saying, “Being able to dissect a sound into its constituent pieces is important to knowing how to build up patches from scratch.”

Whether you have a hardware or virtual synth, the way to really begin understanding its sonic potential is to turn off its effects, remove modulations and generally simplify the complexity of the signal path to see how much you can get from its raw elements. “I think the way most people learn sound design is that they tweak presets,” explains Persing, the founder of Spectrasonics. “That's fine, but then they're working backward: They enter in from the finished sound. That's useful, but if you don't have some time where you do the ‘strip it down and see if I can re-create this sound that I heard or this sound in my head,’ then it's difficult to really learn the subtleties of what an instrument does or what it's good for, or to be able to apply the sound design knowledge you get from one instrument to another.”

Persing recommends Roland's classic Juno 60 synthesizer as a good launch pad for learning to program sounds. “If you look at the spec for the Juno 60, it doesn't have anything,” Persing says. “It has one oscillator, a sub oscillator, one Moog-like filter, a preset chorus with two switches and one envelope generator. That's it. There's a finite amount of things you can do with a Juno 60, but it's much more than what most people realize. So you turn off all of the effects and see how far you can go with one oscillator. Then you start to build onto that.”

This approach stems, in large part, from these sound designers having started out when there were no presets. “Growing up in the days of the birth of analog synthesis and having modular synths was a good learning experience for me that probably helped me find the niche that I'm in,” explains Hotop, a pre-eminent programmer at Korg.

“When I started, there was no title of ‘sound designer’; you played the synthesizer,” agrees Persing. “If you played the synthesizer, there was some level of sound design knowledge because there were no presets. The idea of separating out sound design as its own discipline is very new.”

Take Stock of Your Synth

Understanding your synth's resources can point you in the right direction and help you avoid wasting time trying to make an instrument do something for which it is ill equipped.

FIG. 1: In Native Instruments’ Absynth 4, the signal path is user-definable. Each of the three oscillators feeds two modules that can be defined as a filter, modulator or waveshaper. There are two definable modules in the Master section, as well.

“One of the things to look at is the instrument's architecture. Often, that can be found in the materials the manufacturer has online,” suggests programmer and PlugInGuru.com host John “Skippy” Lehmkuhl. “With Absynth 4, Native Instruments changed the instrument's signal path. It used to have an oscillator going into a filter, followed by a ring modulator, then a waveshaper at the last output stage that you could run sounds through, and finally another filter. Now it's got this modular concept in which the function of each one of these blocks can be interchanged, so that instead of being an oscillator going into a filter, you could change it to feed the waveshaper [see Fig. 1]. This is the case for each of the three oscillators in Absynth, so that gives you the idea that there's a huge amount of programming power in there.”