Letting Necessity Guide Your Sound Design

This time I’d like to focus on how an instrument or sound effect develops along with the composition. Last week I mentioned that many device presets contain too much frequency content to easily fit into a mix with other instruments. This generally means that judicious use of subtractive EQ is required to tame these complex timbres. These presets are in part designed to sell the instruments themselves: Companies hire sound designers to put together bombastic sounds that are guaranteed to grab the potential customer’s attention. These big patches show off the power of the instruments in question and are a lot of fun to reverse-engineer. However, when it comes to finding a patch that can be used in a composition, it might actually save you time to design your instrument from the ground up rather than fight against a preset using loads of EQ.

Rather than starting out with complex patches, I start writing by quickly creating some basic sounds that can be used to map out the composition. As the song begins to develop and I get ideas for transitions and other sections, the little flourishes of each patch naturally occur.

For instance, a bassline might sound too repetitive, but I’d rather not change its notes or timing because they work with the concept of the song. The logical thing to do in this situation is to add some timbral changes to the bass patch in order to change it up a bit while leaving the composition untouched. Perhaps I’ll add a filter sweep or LFO wobble on every other quarter note to make up for the lack of melodic variation.

This principle extends to sound design for film and video games as well. For example, I might be creating an ambient soundbed that will establish the sonic environment in a particular scene. There’s no point in starting with an incredibly dense, canned ambience only to later realize that it clashes with the dialogue track. Instead, I would start with something simple and build on it until I achieved just the right level of background interest while still leaving room for dialogue, foley, and other sound elements.The examples above serve to illustrate just how important it is to start simple. Let your sounds develop nuance in response to what the composition (whether it be a song or sound effects track) is calling for. Just because you have access to a hundred different morphing filter types and multi-step modulation envelopes doesn’t mean you need to use them all of the time. In my opinion, a really classy composition will show restraint so that the complex parts can really shine and exist with a purpose when it’s time to ramp up the intensity.