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 Creating "airy" sounds |
Written on 27 August 2004 by Nifflas |
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I have found out a fantastic way to create "airy" sounds, with most analogue synths. This works, without actually using any oscillators. Instead, you play the filter cutoff frequency, with your keyboard, and let the filter resonance emphasis the notes, out of a noise.
Follow these steps, to create the basic sound, which you then edit to sound the way you like it. This guide is written to work with most synths, but you might need to do the things differently with different synths.
Step 1: Disable all oscillators
Step 2: Enable the noise generator, but keep it at a quite low volume level.
Step 3: Make sure the filter envelope, key velocity, or any LFO, does not affect the filter frequency.
Step 4: Set filter type to band pass. Set cutoff frequency halfway between the lowest and highest possible value. Set resonance to a very high value, but not neccecarly all the way up. Finally set keytrack (the Kbd knob in Reason), so the cutoff frequency follows the frequency of the played note exactly. Usually, you simply set filter keytrack to 100% to do this.
Step 5: Now when you play a note on your keyboard, you will hear a noisy tone from your synth. Enable one of the oscillators temporary, and "tune" the filter frequency to the oscillator, so they both play the same note. Then disable the oscillator again.
Step 6: Now you have the basic sound. An airy sinewave-like sound, which is created without actually using any oscillators. First, tweak the sound, by changing the resonance level. Then adjust the timbare by changing noise colour, filter type, effects, or anything you can think of. Reverb sounds very sweet on this sound.
Examples: From My Soul, at 1:47. Midnight Forest Trip at 2:12.
Hint: You can get very cool results, if you disable the noise, and route an external audio signal into the synth. This allows you to "play" specific pitches in your drumloops, synth pads, or anything you can think of. |
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