sound design

How do you create an original synth sound in 2009?

Most people are familiar with the concept of sampling, but we tend to think of the process as grabbing whole sections and dropping them into our songs, like taking a beat from a 70's soul track and rapping over it. While this is a useful approach, things start to get more interesting when we break the sample down into smaller pieces.

Instead of swiping a melody whole from a track, we can grab one note of it, map the sound to our keyboard and play something entirely different with it. Or we could go ever farther.

Sampling a video

Watch one of your favorite movies sometime and pay attention to the sound. You'll catch all sorts of interesting moments that would sound great removed from their context: a character laughs, a spaceship lands, a trumpet wobbles lazily in the background, etc.

Using the same rationale as sampling a drum beat or a vocal melody, we can grab a movie sound with all of its noisy film grain and strange imperfections and make something musical with it.

For instance, let's take a film we all have some affection for: Star Wars. I'm going to sample a scene around the one-hour mark where Luke is practicing his lightsaber technique. On my Mac, I have DVD Player and Wiretap Studio both open. NOTE: You don't need Wiretap Studio for this tutorial. Anything that will let you record system audio will work!

1. First, I select "DVD Player" as the sound input in Wiretap's Controller window. Then I hit record, go back to the DVD Player and play the scene I want to sample. When I'm finished, I hit the stop button on Wiretap's Controller.

2. Since I've told Wiretap to stop recording, it presents the finished waveform in a new window. Here's what the full, unedited sample sounds like (download):

NOTE: if you have Wiretap Studio, or any other wave editor, feel free to download the clip and follow along from here.

I'm trying to sample only the lightsaber noise, so let's isolate it. If we listen to our recording while looking at the waveform, we can see around the 7-second mark that no one is talking, nothing else is happening except for the buzz of the lightsaber. That's what we want, so let's grab it.

Highlight the part of the waveform you want with your cursor and hit spacebar to hear it.

Now hit the Crop button (the hash mark-looking symbol to the left of the flag at the bottom of the window) to isolate the sample.

Now, hit Cmd-S to save your changes and open the Library window, which can be found under "Windows" in the menu bar.

3. Let's rename the file from "DVD Player_recording" to something more useful, like "lightsaber sample." Single-click the file name, and a text box should appear that will let you type a new name.

Now we'll export the file so we can work with it in our usual music-making software. Click on the hard drive icon at the bottom of the Library window that says "Local," and save the WAV file to your desktop.

Here's my exact crop of the sound, so you can drop it into Live if you'd like (download):

NOTE: You can change the audio file format under "Format" when you first open up the sample.

4. Now the fun part. Open up Ableton Live so we can get started making our lightsaber synth.

In the Live Devices section of Live, create a new sampler instrument by double-clicking "Simpler" in the Instruments folder.

The Simpler device says "Drop Sample Here," so we'll grab the audio file from the desktop and drop it in.

5. With the Simpler track armed to record, hit a key on your MIDI keyboard or your computer keyboard. Nice, right?

The sample was recorded a little on the quiet side, so the first thing we'll do is raise the volume on the right side of the window. 12 db seems to be a good level to work with. When you play the newly created sound, a key press triggers a one-shot sample. We're trying to create a synth sound, so we want the sample to play continuously as long as we have the key held down. The best way to do this is to put Simpler into Loop mode.

Push the "Loop" button next to the Fade knob, and hold down the key again. Now the sound plays continuously, but it sounds like a looped sample and not a single note. So we'll make some more adjustments.

Hit the "Snap" button to make Simpler snap to zero-crossings, which helps to prevent clicks and pops in our sound. Turn the "Length" knob back to 96%, and the "Loop" knob to around 87%. This selects an area of the sample which works well as a loop, and the weird fluctuations in the lightsaber sound like a continuous drone instead of choppy noise.

6. Now we can put the finishing touches on the sound to make it a usable synth and not just a curiosity.

Let's get rid of some of those high-frequency noises with a low-pass filter. I have the filter set to cut off around 549 Hz and gave it a resonance value of .55. I also rounded off the attack and upped the release to 1.18 seconds. Give it a little bit of portamento in the bottom-right corner..

and you have a usable, original synth sound to work with. Here's an example of a track I made using only this sample and some beats (download):

Now, go apply this technique to twist anything you hear and use it in your music. There are no limits to this stuff.