Anybody know any cool sound design tricks?

How to do this, that and the other. Share, learn, teach. How did X do that? How can I sound like Y?
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Been messing with granular and all the ableton warp modes, looking for new ways to create some interesting sounds, anybody have any suggestions?

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Try extreme noise reduction. That has always been a favourite with me.
SF noise reduction 2
Reafir
Mtransformer

Set block size (or buffer size, whatever it's called) to something high like 16k, and run some vocals through it.
Fine tune the draw graph for some proper spooky effects

edit:
oops, mustn't forget DTBLKFX (try and find the version without the popup sliders, if you can)

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Cool, i'll check this out and look into those plugins as well! Thanks

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modulating filter cut with low-passed noise is fun
-it can be real liquidy

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Random stuff. An LFO using sample & hold applied here and there, just to make things more interesting over time. My host also has a "humanise' function that randomises velocity quite nicely. Little things that make it sound slightly different on every note.
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Some FFT based processing might be worth exploring. Unfiltered Audio SpecOps is pretty userfriendly and has enough tooltips that you've got some idea what you're actually doing without having to go back and forth between the plugin and manual constantly, making it a great and fun place to start I'd say. ;-)

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_al_ wrote: Sun Apr 07, 2019 12:24 am Try extreme noise reduction. That has always been a favourite with me.
:tu:

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Passing your sound through a saturation/distortion effect and then mixing it with a phase-flipped copy of the dry signal will give you "only the fuzz," which can be useful sometimes. I'll use it to transform percussion into something with more bite, or to get just a ghost of a bassline.

Note that if you want to completely eliminate the dry sound, this almost always requires some adjustments for gain-matching, either in the output stage of the saturation or the inverted dry signal.

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Subtle, but quick pitch bend information at the start of hard struck orchestral notes adds a bit of more dynamics and snap. This is because striking a note harder will always sound slightly sharper initially.

It’s not really sound design, but it’s a trick that can be used when putting productions together. Not sure if Warp is capable of this, though.

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What do you mean with "interesting"? I´d recommend to really get into your Tools Potential and if you feel that somethin is missing dig a little deeper, try Layering and FX chains or get a Sampler!°

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cthonophonic wrote: Sun Apr 07, 2019 9:46 am Passing your sound through a saturation/distortion effect and then mixing it with a phase-flipped copy of the dry signal will give you "only the fuzz," which can be useful sometimes. I'll use it to transform percussion into something with more bite, or to get just a ghost of a bassline.

Note that if you want to completely eliminate the dry sound, this almost always requires some adjustments for gain-matching, either in the output stage of the saturation or the inverted dry signal.
Ohh thats neat. Never thought of that, thanks

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1) Frequency Shifter in the feedback path of a Delay. Very small shift, lets you crank the regen way higher than normal, for a very trippy effect.

2) Compressed vocal in the mix, but send the the uncompressed signal to the reverb and mix that in with the compressed vocal, reverb swells when singer belts it out, but actual vocal stays at a stable level. Or reverse that, so reverb swells when singer quiets down so it seems they move further away etc.

3) Split any signal into different frequency bands, process each band with something different, then mix them back together.

4) Turn a Stereo signal into its Sum & Difference components, process each separately, then encode back to Stereo. I used to do this with my my modular synth, if you have the Sum going through some crazy Envelope LP filtering, and the Difference being slowly modulated with a HPF or Frequency Shifter, then some REALLY crazy shit happens when you encode back to Stereo. Great on a whole mix if you want to get freaky and experimental. Days of fun.

5) Advanced feedback paths containing many elements (sound generators and sound processors in a crazy interconnected loop).

The sky's the limit with a modular host, just gotta think outside the box, and try things out.

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Modulate the filter cutoff with an envelope!

Just kidding.

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I experimented with slapping a ring modulator on a speech sample once. Turns out it works as a wonderful "sound quality retroifier".
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