Every now and then, you as a sounddesigner, stumble upon new ideas, techniques, and small hacks which sometimes can take you one step in the right direction, and sometimes completely take you to the next level and blow your mind.
Then of course you may stumble upon new techniques that may not improve a certain sound or "your" overall sound as a designer or musician, but simply make you discover a new type of sound - and these are just lovely.
Today I learnt a new creative way to solve a possible issue, and then I learnt a thing I probably should have understood a long time ago.
Then of course you may stumble upon new techniques that may not improve a certain sound or "your" overall sound as a designer or musician, but simply make you discover a new type of sound - and these are just lovely.
Today I learnt a new creative way to solve a possible issue, and then I learnt a thing I probably should have understood a long time ago.
1st lesson
Sometimes you stumble upon these types of discoveries and realizations which makes you feel less good about yourself, that are not as comfortable to enter, especially as a very experienced sounddesigner - realizations where you have misunderstood a very, very basic concept.
What is this concept?
Well, it's simply the importance of deciding wether you should apply unison stereo spread or not.
Wait, how can this affect the sound in some way? It depends on what synthesizer you use, as well as what type of sound you want to create, but if you fall into the same spot as I did today, you'll realize that it actually matters.
If you have experimented with reese basses or some 2-voiced unison lead sound, you'll learn fairly quickly that if you use full stereo spread on the unison the sound will fall apart, the same goes with 3 voices, and can even happen to 4 voices.
But the same seems to go with patches where you've added even more voices, even from 8 voices and up.
Of course the sound doesn't fall apart as with way less unison voices, but it looses it's dense and solid nature when you spread the voices out across the stereo field, and then you will start compensating it with more detune and it will start sounding filthy and ringy, like that bad and amateurish sound of a producer who just entered the world of designing his or hers own supersaws.
Either that or you'll start spending extra time tweaking the synth because it just doesn't feel right - time that you could have avoided spending. You may even do this without noticing it.
What you instead could do is only have a hint of stereo spread enabled on the unison, and using other techniques at your disposal to make it stereo, such as different plugins, or simply layering another 1 or 2 instances to make it full stereo.
This doesn't apply to all synths as I said before, partly because of how the synth is "built". Since unisons can be a fairly complex system there are a lot of factors that can contribute to more unique unison colors among different synths.
So take a look at your favourite synths, and create a basic detuned patch, like a classic supersaw or so, and make it wide with full unison spread. Then copy the patch, remove all of the unison spread on this new one, and instead apply different other techniques to make the sound stereo.
Then compare the two patches - which sounds better?
On some synths you may not notice any difference at all in the detune itself (you will obviously hear a difference in the overall impression of the sound because you used different stereo techniques), while on other synths may be like night and day compared to each other. I discovered this on NI Massive, so users of this synth should definately keep this in mind.
Then I tested this on a few others synths, and some kept their richness as I increased the unison stereo spread, such as the Xfer Serum (all praise the almighty Serum!), while some lost their density.
2nd lesson
Ever made a patch, applied noise, and felt it never gets right? Like there's either too much, making the noise sound too obvious, or the sound feels dead because there's too little noise.
While there may be a few things to look into to get that perfect balance, I learnt a new one today - adding a pluck/stab envelope to the noise.
I made a sueprsawish lead in NI Massive for a Melbourne soundbank I'm currently creating, and I felt the level never got right, and then I came up with this idea I just mentioned.
I quickly made a pluck/stab envelope, like the one you would normally add to a lowpass filter, and then I just added it to the noise Amp by a smudge, not much. And all of sudden the noise cooperated much better in the patch.
The reason behind this is simply because the noise blends in much better in the patch right after you've hit a note or a chord, those first few milliseconds. But as you hold the note(s), the noise feels more obvious, so this method can make it more balanced as the noise level then follows the psychoacoustic impression.
Some lessons I learnt today, hope you find them useful!
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Sometimes you stumble upon these types of discoveries and realizations which makes you feel less good about yourself, that are not as comfortable to enter, especially as a very experienced sounddesigner - realizations where you have misunderstood a very, very basic concept.
What is this concept?
Well, it's simply the importance of deciding wether you should apply unison stereo spread or not.
Wait, how can this affect the sound in some way? It depends on what synthesizer you use, as well as what type of sound you want to create, but if you fall into the same spot as I did today, you'll realize that it actually matters.
If you have experimented with reese basses or some 2-voiced unison lead sound, you'll learn fairly quickly that if you use full stereo spread on the unison the sound will fall apart, the same goes with 3 voices, and can even happen to 4 voices.
But the same seems to go with patches where you've added even more voices, even from 8 voices and up.
Of course the sound doesn't fall apart as with way less unison voices, but it looses it's dense and solid nature when you spread the voices out across the stereo field, and then you will start compensating it with more detune and it will start sounding filthy and ringy, like that bad and amateurish sound of a producer who just entered the world of designing his or hers own supersaws.
Either that or you'll start spending extra time tweaking the synth because it just doesn't feel right - time that you could have avoided spending. You may even do this without noticing it.
What you instead could do is only have a hint of stereo spread enabled on the unison, and using other techniques at your disposal to make it stereo, such as different plugins, or simply layering another 1 or 2 instances to make it full stereo.
This doesn't apply to all synths as I said before, partly because of how the synth is "built". Since unisons can be a fairly complex system there are a lot of factors that can contribute to more unique unison colors among different synths.
So take a look at your favourite synths, and create a basic detuned patch, like a classic supersaw or so, and make it wide with full unison spread. Then copy the patch, remove all of the unison spread on this new one, and instead apply different other techniques to make the sound stereo.
Then compare the two patches - which sounds better?
On some synths you may not notice any difference at all in the detune itself (you will obviously hear a difference in the overall impression of the sound because you used different stereo techniques), while on other synths may be like night and day compared to each other. I discovered this on NI Massive, so users of this synth should definately keep this in mind.
Then I tested this on a few others synths, and some kept their richness as I increased the unison stereo spread, such as the Xfer Serum (all praise the almighty Serum!), while some lost their density.
2nd lesson
Ever made a patch, applied noise, and felt it never gets right? Like there's either too much, making the noise sound too obvious, or the sound feels dead because there's too little noise.
While there may be a few things to look into to get that perfect balance, I learnt a new one today - adding a pluck/stab envelope to the noise.
I made a sueprsawish lead in NI Massive for a Melbourne soundbank I'm currently creating, and I felt the level never got right, and then I came up with this idea I just mentioned.
I quickly made a pluck/stab envelope, like the one you would normally add to a lowpass filter, and then I just added it to the noise Amp by a smudge, not much. And all of sudden the noise cooperated much better in the patch.
The reason behind this is simply because the noise blends in much better in the patch right after you've hit a note or a chord, those first few milliseconds. But as you hold the note(s), the noise feels more obvious, so this method can make it more balanced as the noise level then follows the psychoacoustic impression.
Some lessons I learnt today, hope you find them useful!
Soundcloud
YouTube
Beatport