If you're getting into the audio industry these days there's almost a 100% chance you're going to end up working with synths. I don't mean the institute cloning your family and replacing them with robots (play fallout 4 sometime) I mean synthetic music and sounds. Before this course I had never played around with synthesis before and honestly had no idea what it entailed but I'm learning... slowly. I decided to try and focus my learning to help my latest project (Wild Machine) which incorporates a lot of synthetic sound within it's reference soundtrack. So I jumped on Pro tools my go to DAW (Digital audio workstation) and loaded Massive(tm) a synthesiser plugin.
Before I get too far into it let's talk about what is synthesis and how does it work? Basically it works like this, every sound we ever make is in some form or another a wave right? A synthesiser recreates these waveforms using either hardware or most commonly these days software like Massive(tm), Serum(tm) and many other programs that allow you to manipulate these waveforms to create different sounds. It can be as simple as an ordinary sine wave that sounds something like this, maybe skip to about 45 seconds...
These waveforms can be changed in numerous ways to completely change the shape of the waveform, you can add waveforms together, add filters which cut or boost specific frequencies, oscillate the signal or change how fast the wave plays what level is holds at and how long it lasts for. There are countless ways that one person can create their own sounds using these programs.
My goal was to recreate some synth sounds used my my reference track Colossal (See last blog and track tear-down). I'm still new to makings synths from scratch but I think I got pretty close to the feel of the sounds they use in the Horizon: Zero Dawn soundtrack. My first attempt looks something like this in Massive...
It's basically a square wave with a lot of modulation and some inserts changed the intensity of the waveform and sounds like this. Its heavily pitched down and also has an element similar to distortion. I was going for a low ominous feel almost like a dark kind of power source humming and droning on and on. In the right scenario whether it be a SFX for a game or video or even layered underneath a song I was pretty happy with how my first attempt went. Although it did take me quite a while to get my head around the controls as no one else in my class was using Massive so I learned as I went and by watching some tutorials but after playing around with switches and dials I achieved what I was after. I made a second SFX and unfortunately made something that was quite similar and it sounds like this. It looks more like this...
It's roughly the same with with a bit more buzz it's feels slightly more energetic but still has the same underlying theme. I changed the attack on this one so it kind of faded away after initially playing the note and it's needs a few more elements added for this one to be useful for my project. I still have a lot to learn when it comes to synth sound effects and experimenting with all the different plugins I have access to at home and on campus but ultimately I'm intrigued about how the entire process works and will continue to experiment and play around and add more Sound effects to my soundcloud.
References:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NI_Massive (accessed 11 October 2018)
https://www.sonicacademy.com/courses/how-to-use-native-instruments-massive (accessed 15 October 2018)
https://www.britannica.com/art/music-synthesizer (accessed 15 October 2018)
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