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

FIG. 2: In Native Instruments’ FM8, a drop-down menu of column names lets you select “Author” as one of the columns. This allows you to group presets by the sound designer who created them, making it easy to audition everything made by someone whose tastes you find appealing.

Familiarizing yourself with the individual character of the components in each instrument is crucial. “One of the first things I do is listen to the oscillators — raw, on their own with no added filtering or effects,” sound programmer Boddy says. “This is one of the most difficult things to get right in soft synths. It's not essential for them to be exactly like a Moog or whatever, but I like to hear how they sound as that's the starting point and gives me a good idea of how rich and interesting I can make the sounds.

“After that, I explore the filters to see how they shape the sound,” Boddy continues. “These days, most filters in soft synths are pretty good except when it comes to self-oscillating stuff; they still seem to fall down at that hurdle. Once I know how the oscillators and filters sound, I can start to program patches.”

Persing also listens for an instrument's essential sound quality. “Is the overall character of an engine glassy or smooth sounding? Does it have an edge to it? The [Roland] D-50 would be an example where the high end of the synth is interesting: There's a raspiness to it, but it's musical. It's not a particularly fat-sounding synth, so I'm not going to spend a lot of time trying to get really fat synth basses out of a D-50; I'm going to put energy into getting the more glassy kinds of colors and ethereal things. There are other synths that really don't do that kind of stuff at all, but are great at a ‘squelchy’ thing, or do something wonderful when the filters are overdriven.”

Don't take the D.I.Y. focus of this article, or even Persing's comment about learning synthesis, to mean that exploring presets is not valuable to learning how to make your own sounds. After all, the presets are the result of people like Persing, Hotop and the rest going through the learning process themselves with that instrument.

“Companies usually hire a number of programmers to work on a new synth, and, if it's really a great synthesizer, every programmer that sits and approaches it is going to make it speak in a different way,” reasons Lehmkuhl. “It's not documented, but there's a way to set up the columns in Native Instrument's FM8 to list the programmer for each patch. Then you can click the programmer list and it will group all of a certain programmer's patches together, so you can go through, and say, ‘Oh, this guy did this really cool sound.’ Now you can go and find out what other sounds he did, and, chances are, those are the kinds of sounds that will really speak to you because they rang your bell in the first place [see Fig. 2].”

Hotop emphasizes asking yourself questions from the standpoint of usability. “Does it play well? Does it sound musical? Does it feel good playing it from a keyboard? You make the decision on what the music is calling for,” he says. “Is this sound working for me? Break it down, and say, ‘What aspect do I like about it? What works, what doesn't work?’ Think in terms of the music, the part that's being played, and always try to walk a mile in the other guy's shoes if you're dealing with emulative sounds. Synth stuff is a whole other strategy.”

Add Life to Sounds

The eternal quest for synthesists is to be able to produce sounds as responsive and expressive as acoustic instruments. As those qualities don't naturally exist with electronic instruments, there are a multitude of techniques sound designers use to add variation.

“It's important to understand the synthesizer as a musical instrument,” Jann says simply. “Music itself has been made for hundreds of years with things that generate sound by putting energy into materials that vibrate. A flute has a column of air, a guitar has a plucked string; it's always something solid and not variable. People have learned to make music with things that have a certain set of fixed parameters and very few variable parameters — to put it in the language of synthesis.

“So if I create a sound, it's very important for me to not make it too variable,” Jann continues. “I start with something fixed and add more and more parameters that I can control to make it a musical instrument that I can play. My experience is that if I have a sound that gives me the feeling I can learn to play it as a musical instrument, that helps me use it for my music. Conversely, a sound that doesn't fall into this category and makes me feel I can't control it because it has too many variable parameters is probably not as versatile or usable for me as a musician and composer.”

FIG. 3: A screen from the Korg M3 showing, in the second row of the EG Level/Time Modulation section, key tracking (in this case, filter key tracking) being applied to the decay, sustain and release of a marimba sound to give shorter decays for higher notes

Injecting life into sampled sounds often comes down to making every note sound different. “One of the most important things is enveloping,” Lehmkuhl states. “I've always loved Korg's envelopes because they have separate modulation of the levels and times of the envelopes. For instance, if you're making a marimba sound, you can change the time of the decay [with key tracking] to be long at the bottom of the keyboard and short at the top of the keyboard, which mimics the behavior of a real marimba. What's really critical for me, also, is to apply a little bit of the velocity values to the attack time of an envelope [See Fig. 3].” This tactic involves configuring the modulation such that higher-velocity values produce shorter attack times, so that harder playing results in sharper attack transients and gentler playing makes softer attacks.