Sound design, recreating real instruments.

[JonasEdenbrandt]

Some of the topics regarding sounddesign and recreating other peoples sound on this forum got me thinking a bit. I belive that recreating sounds is a great way for learning sounddesign. Maybe learning other peoples synthsounds is not the best way to go around this but recreating actual instruments i belive would be an amazing way. Does anyone have any tips on how to go about this or perhaps a link to a place that describes instruments timbre and harmonics?

[Ingemar]

here you go mate

http://www.soundonsound.com/search?url= ... Subject=12

and more specifically this one
http://www.soundonsound.com/sos/jul04/a ... ecrets.htm(linked in some other topic the other day)




but as for me, I try to treat synth's and real instruments as two different things, as in synths make synthie sounds and instruments you sample. Smacking a conga and recording it = 1 million times better than whatever synthesis if you want a real percussion sample, and on the other hand, it's hard doing a nice synth with a conga

[JonasEdenbrandt]

Thx a bunch it looks great.

Just one to get a thing straight I do quite alot of sampling on my own and i'm not looking to use synths sounding like real instruments in a track, but I wan't to be able to think "This sound needs to be more trumpet like" and knowing how to do that.

[steevio]

here you go mate

http://www.soundonsound.com/search?url= ... Subject=12

and more specifically this one
http://www.soundonsound.com/sos/jul04/a ... ecrets.htm(linked in some other topic the other day)




but as for me, I try to treat synth's and real instruments as two different things, as in synths make synthie sounds and instruments you sample. Smacking a conga and recording it = 1 million times better than whatever synthesis if you want a real percussion sample, and on the other hand, it's hard doing a nice synth with a conga

the synth secrets series in sound on sound ^^^ is an excellent way to understand synthesis, and while you have to ask your self why would i want to create a conga sound when i could sample it, you might not want to recreate a conga sound exactly, you might want to make a sound that is somewhere between a conga and a cowbell, or a vibraphone and a flute for that matter.

for me that is the advantage of synthesis, you can create your own instruments, even create instruments that morph from one thing to another. ( this is something i rarely hear talked about on this forum, moving away from one-dimensional sounds. )

that for me is what techno is all about, and if you understand how synthesis works in recreating real instrumants, you've got a head start.

the synth secrets series ran for many years, and i learned so much from it.

[Atheory]

here you go mate

http://www.soundonsound.com/search?url= ... Subject=12

and more specifically this one
http://www.soundonsound.com/sos/jul04/a ... ecrets.htm(linked in some other topic the other day)




but as for me, I try to treat synth's and real instruments as two different things, as in synths make synthie sounds and instruments you sample. Smacking a conga and recording it = 1 million times better than whatever synthesis if you want a real percussion sample, and on the other hand, it's hard doing a nice synth with a conga

the synth secrets series in sound on sound ^^^ is an excellent way to understand synthesis, and while you have to ask your self why would i want to create a conga sound when i could sample it, you might not want to recreate a conga sound exactly, you might want to make a sound that is somewhere between a conga and a cowbell, or a vibraphone and a flute for that matter.

for me that is the advantage of synthesis, you can create your own instruments, even create instruments that morph from one thing to another. ( this is something i rarely hear talked about on this forum, moving away from one-dimensional sounds. )

that for me is what techno is all about, and if you understand how synthesis works in recreating real instrumants, you've got a head start.

the synth secrets series ran for many years, and i learned so much from it.

yeah such an accesible way to understand synthesis, really invaluable.

interesting about the idea of morphing sounds into each other. i think its quite common with people who use samplers to trigger say 2-3 noises with one hit. changing the envelops/eq of each sound so they work together can be really effective. in some ways less control than actual synthesis provides, but you'd have to be pretty limited on the ideas/imagination front to not be able to get good stuff out of it with a little practice.

[steevio]

interesting about the idea of morphing sounds into each other. i think its quite common with people who use samplers to trigger say 2-3 noises with one hit. changing the envelops/eq of each sound so they work together can be really effective. in some ways less control than actual synthesis provides, but you'd have to be pretty limited on the ideas/imagination front to not be able to get good stuff out of it with a little practice.

of course there's so much you can do with sample layering, but its definitely a different animal, working with waveforms is on a different scale of resolution, there are effectively no limits.
i'm not saying one is better than the other, only that if you want to create morphing sounds without limits, you have much more flexibility working with raw waveforms.
both methods have their pros and cons, in practice ive found synthesis has freed me up. (my first EDM projects were made on a sampler)

[Atheory]

interesting about the idea of morphing sounds into each other. i think its quite common with people who use samplers to trigger say 2-3 noises with one hit. changing the envelops/eq of each sound so they work together can be really effective. in some ways less control than actual synthesis provides, but you'd have to be pretty limited on the ideas/imagination front to not be able to get good stuff out of it with a little practice.

of course there's so much you can do with sample layering, but its definitely a different animal, working with waveforms is on a different scale of resolution, there are effectively no limits.
i'm not saying one is better than the other, only that if you want to create morphing sounds without limits, you have much more flexibility working with raw waveforms.
both methods have their pros and cons, in practice ive found synthesis has freed me up. (my first EDM projects were made on a sampler)

indeed. i think working with waveforms is so much better and with more interesting results, (decent filters and even compelx envelopes can only do so much) but probably a little less accessable to everyone than ramming a few samples together.

it was just as i was writing the last post where i was struck by the idea that it should be like as unlimited as you want it to be. its nice to think of the samples as complex wave forms and take it from there.

i've noticed your hiatus from the forum hasnt been as severe as we feared. can we take it you nailed that track that was causing problems?

[steevio]

interesting about the idea of morphing sounds into each other. i think its quite common with people who use samplers to trigger say 2-3 noises with one hit. changing the envelops/eq of each sound so they work together can be really effective. in some ways less control than actual synthesis provides, but you'd have to be pretty limited on the ideas/imagination front to not be able to get good stuff out of it with a little practice.

of course there's so much you can do with sample layering, but its definitely a different animal, working with waveforms is on a different scale of resolution, there are effectively no limits.
i'm not saying one is better than the other, only that if you want to create morphing sounds without limits, you have much more flexibility working with raw waveforms.
both methods have their pros and cons, in practice ive found synthesis has freed me up. (my first EDM projects were made on a sampler)

indeed. i think working with waveforms is so much better and with more interesting results, (decent filters and even compelx envelopes can only do so much) but probably a little less accessable to everyone than ramming a few samples together.

it was just as i was writing the last post where i was struck by the idea that it should be like as unlimited as you want it to be. its nice to think of the samples as complex wave forms and take it from there.

i've noticed your hiatus from the forum hasnt been as severe as we feared. can we take it you nailed that track that was causing problems?

no i didnt nail it, but ive been distracted by other important issues recently, but its almost there.

yeah the samples as complex waveforms thing, yes and no, the thing is they are frozen in time, whereas waveforms can constantly evolve.
samples are a snapshot which you can effect with similar processes, but a waveform can effectively morph away happily to infinity depending on how you modulate it, and end up as something entirely different.

its two very different ways of making music. you chose which interests you more, i love the idea that i can basically create totally unique sounds with synthesis, with samples no matter what you do to the sample, its essence is still there, and for some people thats exactly what they want.
of course theres no reason why you cant combine both methods.

i had a lot of fun making music with a sampler, and combining it with analogue machines, but now i get the biggest buzz out of pure synthesis.