T h e
sound
designer's h a n d b o o k
T h e
sound designer’s h a n d b o o k
CMUS60 2013
£6.50
600MB+ of samples and tutorial files on the disc, and exclusive videos to download!
PRINTED IN THE UK
Field recording / Found sounds
musicradar.com
Sampling / Synthesis / Effects
computer music special / editor’s letter <
Special 60 2013 Future Publishing Ltd. 30 Monmouth Street, Bath BA1 2BW Tel: 01225 442244 Fax: 01225 732275 Email: computermusic.special@futurenet.com Web: www.musicradar.com/computermusic EDITORIAL Editor: Ronan Macdonald Art Editor: Stuart Ratcliffe Tutorials and features: Tim Cant Disc Editor: David Newman Sub-editor: Kieran Macdonald Editor, Computer Music: Lee Du-Caine Editor-in-Chief: Daniel Griffiths Group Senior Editor: Julie Taylor Senior Art Editor: Rodney Dive Creative Director: Robin Abbott Design Director: Matthew Williams Editorial Director: Jim Douglas ADVERTISING Tel: 01225 442244 Fax: 01225 732285 Advertising Sales Director: Clare Coleman-Straw Advertising Manager: Amanda Burns Account Sales Manager: Leon Stephens CIRCULATION & MARKETING Group Marketing Manager: Lyndsey Mayhew Trade Marketing Executive: Matt Cooper PRINT & PRODUCTION Production Coordinator: Frances Twentyman Production Manager: Mark Constance LICENSING Licensing and Syndication Director: Regina Erak Image Library: To purchase images featured in this publication, please visit www.futuremediastore.com or email mediastore@futurenet.com FUTURE PUBLISHING LIMITED Publisher: Rob Last Group Publishing Director: Stuart Anderton DIRECT SALES Phone our UK hotline on: 0870 837 4722 Buy online at: www.myfavouritemagazines.co.uk
Printed in the UK by William Gibbons on behalf of Future. Disc duplicator: Software Logistics. Distributed in the UK by Seymour Distribution Ltd, 2 East Poultry Avenue, London EC1A 9PT. Tel: 0207 429 4000
welcome
In today’s technologically supercharged studio, the lines between sound design and music production are gloriously blurred. The majority of contemporary electronic music is defined as much by the quality and character of its sounds as it is the rhythm and melody – for example, the intense bass of dubstep, the intricate sonic landscapes of electronica, the atmospheric synths of techno… While it is, of course, possible to make perfectly passable music using just synth presets and prefab samples, if you really want your tracks to shine you need to be creating your own unique noises. Luckily for us, the modern DAW and its accompanying plugins serve as a near-omnipotent sound design platform, the power of which the fathers and mothers of sound design like Russolo, Schaeffer and Oram couldn’t have envisioned in their wildest dreams. With a Mac or PC, a few choice pieces of software and a bit of imagination, there are no limits to what can be achieved in the audio realm. Special, we aim to help you become a With this better sound designer. We’ll be exploring all of the disciplines involved, from field recording and sampling to spectral editing and synthesis. We’ve got advice and wisdom from the pros, videos bringing many of our walkthroughs to life, over 500MB of inspirational samples from Time+Space and more besides. So fire up your DAW, pump up the volume and prepare to get seriously creative. ENJOY THE ISSUE…
© Future Publishing Limited 2013. All rights reserved. No part of this magazine may be used or reproduced without the written permission of the publisher. Future Publishing Limited (company number 2008885) is registered in England and Wales. The registered office of Future Publishing Limited is at Beauford Court, 30 Monmouth Street, Bath BA1 2BW. All information contained in this magazine is for information only and is, as far as we are aware, correct at the time of going to press. Future cannot accept any responsibility for errors or inaccuracies in such information. Readers are advised to contact manufacturers and retailers directly with regard to the price of products/ services referred to in this magazine. If you submit unsolicited material to us, you automatically grant Future a licence to publish your submission in whole or in part in all editions of the magazine, including licensed editions worldwide and in any physical or digital format throughout the world. Any material you submit is sent at your risk and, although every care is taken, neither Future nor its employees, agents or subcontractors shall be liable for loss or damage.
We are committed to only using magazine paper which is derived from well managed, certified forestry and chlorine-free manufacture. Future Publishing and its paper suppliers have been independently certified in accordance with the rules of the FSC (Forest Stewardship Council).
Ronan Macdonald, Editor www.computermusic.co.uk computermusic@futurenet.com www.facebook.com/computer.music.mag www.twitter.com/computermusicuk www.youtube.com/computermusicmag
Computer Music special / 3
CMUS60.welcome.indd 3
5/24/13 9:41 AM
SPECIAL ISSUE 60
contents
06 THE ART OF NOISE
What exactly is sound design? We take a whistlestop tour through the past and present of this intriguing audio artform
54 LAYERING FOR BEGINNERS
Banish flaccid tones forever and bring heft and girth to your patches with our guide to stacking sounds
13 MASTERS OF SOUND DESIGN
We grill six of the best on their working methods, software and influences, and get them to give up their top tips and advice
60 BASIC SYNTHESIS FOR SOUND DESIGN
The modern sound designer needs to know their way around a synthesiser – we’ll show you the way
20 FIELD OF DREAMS
70 ADVANCED SYNTHESIS
24 THE CM GUIDE TO SOUNDWARE PRODUCTION
80 DRUM SYNTHESIS ESSENTIALS
All the buying and practical advice you need to get started in the sonically lucrative world of field recording
As well as putting your sound design skills to use in your own music, why not have a go at selling your patches and samples?
Once you’ve mastered the basics, it’s time to progress to the next level and learn how to do incredible things with four of the greatest synths on earth
Synths aren’t just for basses, leads and pads – they can also be used to make characterful drum and percussion sounds. Get your groove on with these walkthroughs
86 CREATIVE SAMPLING
Today’s software samplers enable you to do truly amazing things with captured audio – our step-by-step tutorial reveals all
92 WORKING WITH FOUND SOUNDS
Having followed the advice in our field recording feature, you’ll want to know what to do with your newly captured audio. We’ve got all the answers…
30 SPECTRAL EDITING
Harness the power of spectral audio editing applications to create sounds that simply couldn’t be made any other way
37 TIMESTRETCHING & PITCHSHIFTING
Take command of pitch and time to warp, mangle and generally transform your sampled sounds
46 DESIGNING FX FROM SCRATCH
Creating effects is one of the cornerstones of the sound designer’s art – find out how it’s done using nothing more than your DAW and a few plugins
98 CM DISC AND DOWNLOADS
Get all the tutorial files, samples, software and videos Special on the disc and at that accompany this vault.computermusic.co.uk!
COMPUTER MUSIC SPECIAL / 5
CMUS60.contents.indd 5
5/24/13 11:17 AM
THE ART OF NOISE Using sound to help convey ideas and evoke emotion is an art that’s been around for as long as humans have shared stories – but we’ve come a long way, baby…
Hearing can be an incredibly emotive sense – we’ve all jumped at an innocuous but unexpected noise and been moved to tears by a particularly beautiful piece of music. From plays to videogames, sound is used to heighten emotional experiences, enhance stories and make things seem larger than life. Often, the effect is subliminal: you might not consciously notice a horror movie’s use of a low, ominous drone to conjure up dread, but you can certainly feel it. Good sound design helps engage an audience, makes music sound better, and gives visual media more of an impact. But what, exactly, do we mean by sound design? In the broadest sense, sound design
means the creation of any noise for use in media or performance. By that definition, the art form has been around for much longer than the ability to record audio, with its roots in religious festivals and theatre. Banging drums to simulate thunder and rattling peas in a wooden box to conjure the sound of rain represented the state of the art until the beginning of the 20th century, which is when what scientist and analyst Vaclav Smill describes as “The Age of Synergy” came to a head. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, revolutionary discoveries like electricity, the internal combustion engine, the railroad, radio and telegraph, and audio reproduction changed the world forever. In 1913, futurist painter and
composer Luigi Russolo wrote his manifesto The Art of Noises, in which he argued that the human ear had become accustomed to the noise of the modern, urbanised soundscape, and that the composer’s existing sonic palette had become insufficient. He imagined that electronics and other technology would eventually “substitute for the limited variety of timbres that the orchestra possesses today the infinite variety of timbres in noises, reproduced with appropriate mechanisms”. Russolo was right on the money, of course, but he could never have predicted just how dramatically mankind’s ability to sculpt sound using technology would develop over the next hundred years.
6 / COMPUTER MUSIC SPECIAL
CMUS60.intro.indd 6
5/23/13 1:21 PM
“Warner Bros’ The Jazz Singer ushered in a new age of synchronised audio-visual media” real time, and required great skill to prevent the resulting audio track sounding incongruous when played alongside the picture. Foley is credited with essentially inventing the process of adding sound effects in post-production, and the technique was thus named after him. At this early stage, sound effect work was more about timing than creating exciting new sounds, but as the scope of cinema increased, so did the range of noises that Foley artists needed to create.
Roaring 20s
© Getty Images
The late 1920s saw more important developments in the history of sound design. In 1928, Léon Theremin patented his eponymous electronic musical instrument, and Maurice
Martenot invented the Ondes Martenot, which was designed to reproduce the microtonal sounds found in Hindu music. These were by no means the first electronic instruments, but they were much more practical than their predecessors: Thaddeus Cahill’s additive synthesis-based Telharmonium was patented in 1897 but didn’t catch on, probably because it was a little on the large side, with the most complex version weighing more than 200 tons and requiring 30 goods vans to be moved. Thankfully, as the 20th century progressed, electronic instruments and effects became much smaller while increasing in power. The basic elements of subtractive synthesis – oscillators, filters, envelope controllers, etc – were utilised in electronic instruments such as the Warbo Formant Organ and Hammond Novachord as early as the 1930s. However, these devices were still relatively unwieldy – for example, the Novechord contained 163 vacuum tubes and over 1,000 custom capacitors, and weighed nearly 500 pounds. World War II and the austerity years of the 1940s would see audio-related innovation take a back seat to more pressing concerns, although some advances in tape and stereo recording would be made. In the 1950s, though, the abstract sound of the theremin would truly come into its own, providing space-age sounds for science fiction movies. Film and radio’s demand for new sounds was growing fast, and it was at this stage that sound design really started to become an art in its own right. In 1957 the BBC commissioned its first piece of electronic music for a production of dramatist Jean Giraudoux’s Amphitryon 38, and in 1958 the BBC Radiophonic Workshop sound effects unit would be established to provide effects and music for radio. The Workshop quickly become renowned for its groundbreaking work in electronic music, most famously for the TV series Doctor Who. Its alumni included Daphne Oram, whose ‘Oramics’ work involved creating
The BBC Radiophonic Workshop broke new ground in music and effects production for television and radio
© Gamma-Rapho via Getty Images
With the advent of the gramophone, stage plays could utilise prerecorded effects, and in the late 1920s cinema got in on the act. The first widely released ‘talkie’, Warner Bros’ The Jazz Singer ushered in a new age of synchronised audio-visual media, and other studios were keen to emulate its success. Universal’s upcoming silent picture Show Boat became a musical, and a young Jack Foley was hired to work as part of the sound crew. Due to the limited recording technology available at the time, it wasn’t possible to record anything more than dialogue during the filming of the movie, so Foley’s team had to tape the sound effect track after the event. These recordings had to be captured in
Musique concrète pioneer Pierre Schaeffer innovated many of the recording and sampling techniques that we use today
Concrète jungle Musique concrète (literally ‘concrete music’) is a tape-based sonic art form that developed through the early and mid-20th century. It pre-dated the use of samplers by decades, and resulted in many technological innovations. In the 1940s, French composer and theoretician Pierre Schaeffer, inspired by the work of filmmaker Jean Epstein, began experimenting with the concept of “reduced listening” – that is, listening to sound for its own sake, divorcing it from the meaning of its supposed source. In 1948 he premiered five works for phonograph, collectively known as Cinq études de bruits (Five Studies of Noises). You can hear one at bit.ly/15BUvxb. Though it may sound naive now, this collage of noise represented a radically new way of working with sound. By 1950, magnetic tape had become a practical compositional tool, bringing with it the ability to make highly precise edits and loops. In 1951, Schaeffer, composer Pierre Henry and sound engineer Jacques Poullin established the Groupe de Recherche de Musique Concrète (GRMC). Schaffer and Poullin developed devices for expanding the creative potential of tape, including a keyboard-controlled machine to replay tape loops at 24 preset speeds. This kind of technology was used in keyboards such as the Chamberlin and Mellotron, analogue precursors to today’s software ROMplers. In 1970, the successor to the GRMC, Schaeffer’s Groupe de Recherches Musicales, created a new compositional tool that combined Moog and Coupigny synthesisers with a mixing desk, designed specifically for the creation of musique concrète. Though this analogue beast had no keyboard and its synthesisers were intended as sound event generators rather than musical instruments, it is nonetheless the ancestor of the DAWs we use today. COMPUTER MUSIC SPECIAL / 7
CMUS60.intro.indd 7
5/23/13 1:21 PM
The
guide to
Once you’ve become a sound design don, there’s nothing stopping you selling your own soundware products – but how do you make sample and patch libraries that stand out from the crowd? So you’ve honed your sound designing skills and now your hard drive is overflowing with amazing patches and samples. How can you capitalise on all this good stuff you’ve worked so hard to create? The obvious answer is to release your own commercial sample or patch library, but the competition is so intense in this market that there’s no sense in releasing something subpar. So how do you create something good enough to actually charge money for? Before you start work on your own product, do some market research and find out what else is out there. As well as the big distributors like Time+Space (www.timespace.com) and Loopmasters (www.loopmasters.com), there are hundreds of smaller producers out there flogging their wares independently. Have a listen to some demos to get an idea of the style and quality of the competition, how much content their libraries contain, how much they cost, and what formats they’re supplied in. You should aim to get an impression of how your work matches up in terms of quality, and hopefully find gaps in the market out of which you can carve your niche. Next, take stock of the material you’ve already got to hand. In an ideal world, you’ll have been saving out patches and rendering useful sounds as you’ve been creating them. If you have, and they’re sensibly organised, congratulations – you’ve just saved yourself an enormous amount of work! If you haven’t, you’ll need to go through your project files and locate any usable patches and audio. Once you’ve collated your material, the next step is to identify where your strengths and weaknesses lie, and begin to envision what sort of product you could work towards. Soundware comes in all kinds of shapes and sizes, from the very specific (eg, Dom Kane Presents Sylenth1 – House Leads & Bass, bit.ly/RjiKJ0) to
construction kits supplying complete productions as separate tracks (eg, That’s a Hit Pop Edition, bit.ly/16ok182), or even all roundgrab bags with loops, one-shots, multisampled patches and more (eg, Heavyweight Trap, bit.ly/ ZmQe8J). If you feel that the genre in which you specialise is ill-served by current offerings, that could be a good place to start. Having a specific vision for your library can really help motivate and guide you at this stage, although if you’re struggling to come up with an idea, you can just start creating material and see that happens.
“Before you begin actually constructing your library, you need to think about how you’re going to sell it” Publishing and distribution
Before you begin actually constructing your library, you need to think about how you’re going to sell it. There are essentially three paths you can take: publishing and distributing it yourself, publishing it yourself but having a company distribute it for you, or getting it published by an existing publisher. Each approach has its pros and cons. Publishing and distributing yourself is a bigger undertaking than just creating a library, but it also means you’ll have full creative control over the content and won’t have to share the profits with anyone. Publishing yourself but securing distribution through another company takes a lot of work
out of the equation, but means giving up a hefty share of the profits. Time+Space’s Joel Heatley explains how such a deal would work. “We only take on 100% finished product that has been formatted and is ready to sell,” he says. “We’d only consider working with a new producer if they had at least a few titles ready to go. Most sample libraries are digital-only these days, so we would advise against printing physical stock. If somebody gets in touch with a demo, we’d forward them on to [affiliated soundware developer] Zero-G, who would be able to work with them to get a finished product to market.” So, if you can get a publisher interested in a demo, they might help you develop the library and offer guidance that should get you on the road to a finished product. This can be a good way to learn about the market and get some expert advice, but it will mean splitting your profits with the publisher.
Creating your library
Now you’ve reached the stage at which the real work begins: creating the content for your library. Unless you’ve already got enough material for a complete package, this part is going to involve a lot of time and effort. Try to be as organised as possible in order to maximise your workflow – we recommend creating a toplevel working folder with subfolders for each kind of sound at the very least, and possibly dividing up what you create based on its worth/ merit. Naturally you want your library to be 100% top quality, but that doesn’t mean that the merely decent stuff won’t come in useful at some point, too, so keep those offcuts handy. If you come up with something exciting that doesn’t quite suit your current library, be sure to save it somewhere sensible so you can revisit it easily when you come to embark on another, perhaps more appropriate project.
24 / Computer Music special
CMUS60.library.indd 24
5/23/13 1:00 PM
soundware <
Making patches for synths like Sylenth1 can be a good source of income if you’ve got the necessary skills
Four decades after the original’s creation, Lyn Collins’ Think breakbeat still crops up on all manner of music and sample libraries
Copyrights and wrongs Some sample-based virtual instruments, like Omnisphere, require a special license to use them for soundware creation
9000
A good habit to get into is labelling your files clearly. It can be tempting to save samples out with meaningless names if you’re tired, but that’s going to cost you more time in the long run. Try and come up with a sensible naming convention that includes the type of sound, genre, key, chord, BPM, timbre and any other information you think might be pertinent. Come your next session, a file name like Pad – House – MellowSaw – Gmin7 – ‘125bpm.wav’ will tell you a lot more than ‘MyAwesomeSound347235.wav’. This applies to synth and sampler patches, too, and you can save yourself a lot of bother when using multiple plugins if you include the instrument or effect’s name in the filename of the patch itself. Saving patches in folders by plugin will also help you audition them easily at a later date. It’s also advisable to save your workin-progress projects, too, so that if you decide a sample or loop needs a minor change, you don’t have to recreate it from scratch. As you’ll know if you’ve been producing for any length of time, projects can sound very different last thing at night compared to first thing in the morning, and the same is true of sound design. Try to take regular breaks to keep your ears fresh, and leave sounds for a while before listening to them again and reappraising them. You’ll often be surprised at what you hear once you’ve had time to clear your head and allowed yourself to “forget” what something sounds like. Judging the quality of your own work objectively can be a difficult skill to learn, but if you’re too easy-going you’ll end up with a poor-quality product. If you’re too discriminating, on the other hand, you’ll simply never finish anything, even once you’ve developed your abilities to a high standard. If you feel like you’re struggling, maybe it’s time to take a break with a different project. As long as you have the discipline to return to your library work when you’re done, this can be a
CMUS60.library.indd 25
useful exercise, as it gives your mind a rest – and you might even come up with some new ideas for the library while you’re at it!
Quality control
When you feel as though you have enough material of a high enough standard, you can begin the process of whittling it down into the perfect package. To avoid alienating your customers, you’ll want to ensure that you don’t include any samples or patches that are duplicates or indistinguishable from others – this is a sure-fire way to come across like you’re
“Once you’ve got the contents of your library sorted out, you’ll need to make them presentable” trying to rip people off. That said, you’re free to include as much material as you like if you’re publishing your own library, so useful variations on sounds (with and without effects, different chords, alternative rhythms and so on) are worth including if you reckon the customer will genuinely benefit from them. Once you’ve got the contents of your library sorted out, you’ll need to make them presentable. Cut all your samples so that they start and end at the right places, getting rid of any dead space and ensuring that they’re as convenient for the customer to use as possible. Ideally, loops should loop seamlessly without any extra work required on the part of the user, and the samples should all be at a decent
When producing your own sample library, copyright is an important thing to bear in mind. Copyright is a legal concept designed to protect the authors of works from others duplicating their creations without permission. It’s complicated and often misunderstood, and a thorough discussion of how it relates to creating and selling your own soundware would take up the rest of this magazine. It’s certainly true that some commercially available sample libraries contain copyrightinfringing material: for example, sampled drum loops (breakbeats) such as the drum solos from The Winstons’ Amen, Brother and Lyn Collins’ Think (About It). Likewise, a huge amount of commercial music contains uncleared samples. The publishers of such material may never face any legal repercussions from such infringement, but if you want to be entirely sure that you’ll never have to worry about being bugged by lawyers, the easiest thing to do is not to use anything sampled from anyone else’s copyrighted work, and that includes film, TV, radio, records, CDs, tapes, YouTube and existing sample libraries, among others. If your sample folders are full of your own creations mixed in with snippets recorded from other people’s tracks, we’d recommend doublechecking your sources before attempting to sell the sounds as your own work. You’re also going to want to check the licensing agreement of any sample-based instruments you own, because some of them, such as Spectrasonics Omnisphere, specifically forbid you from using them to create soundware without a special license. However, when it comes to instruments that don’t use sample data, you’re the owner of anything you create with them. Computer musiC speCial / 25
5/23/13 1:00 PM