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What Is Your Most Unique (or favorite) Sound?
Perhaps I am not the guy to start a thread like this. I am, after all, a preset guy. But since no one else has, at least in the two years I have been here, I will ask... what is an “original” sound? And, how close have you come to making one? And, maybe, how do you do it?
Perforce, any sound we hear we can put into a family of sound. I think this can also be a disservice, cause then we say, oh, a string sound, or its percussive. Once we name something there is a tendency to no longer really listen... like a movie... Matrix... oh, I’ve seen that, great movie... or the Elton John sound... we don’t have to hear it any more... oh, it’s Mozart. Or, it sounds like Mozart.
Maybe focusing a bit on just the primal sounds can be satisfying or helpful in making music. I often think about the standard (unprepared) piano sound. It is tougher to hold in my mind when thinking about it than a string or horn sound. Maybe cause it’s a combo of percussion and tone. Anyway, for me it is totally unique and hard to hold onto... which might be why I am attracted to it so much.
When I first started hearing the panoply of synthesized sounds... saw, sine, square.... I guess there was a moment of shock and awe, but they quickly became recognized and categorized. After fifty years they have become all too familiar, but haven’t lost their luster. And there has been incredible development and variety. Can their be some new class of sounds that will be like the introduction of synthesized sound? Something peculiarly vibratory yet sonic-less, maybe? Would that even be a “musical” sound? More questions than answers, especially from me.
So... what is it that makes a sound “unique” if that’s possible.... and, what great sound have you made that you might post here? Unfortunately, not being even a tweaker, I can offer none myself.
Comments
A unique sound is in the eye of the beholder. Hard to say what other would be call unique.
I feel the most "unique" sounds i created myself are due to use of creative FX or some happy accidents when i played with a modular where the final sound was never intended.
But i guess for any sound which is unique for me there might be 1000 similar sounds or people saying that is nothing special.
A unique sound can be a sampled sound from nature or a very simple synth sound or a layer out of 100 different things.
I could maybe choose my Top 3-5 favorite sounds i created myself but not sure if they are really unique.
In general i like sounds which has a organic feeling but does not sounds really like a real instrument.
Maybe i just do not understand you question at all. Are you talking about just sound or a song?
However, interesting thoughts
The way I like to think of it is to bundle sound design into a musical aesthetic. Most popular musical eras and subcultures have their own sound and aesthetic: 50's rock and roll sounds different to 60s psychedelia, which sounds different to punk which sounds different to trance or techno. In jazz terms you might say bebop sounds different to bossa nova which sounds different to fusion.
Some of these differences in sound are driven by technology, for example fuzz pedals and tube amps gave guitars a more aggressive sound, but they are also driven by the aesthetics and tastes of the musicians and movements themselves. So I think it's down to a blend of the technology available at the time, and the artistic choices that the pioneers in each era make.
So IMO to purposefully engage in sound design, you need to have an aesthetic in mind, not just blindly tinker with sound. When I create presets for a synth, I'm always conscious to aim for a specific aesthetic, so that there is a cohesive sound that works for the genre you are catering for.
Sounds good. I just wonder why so many things are seems to "bound" to genres and subgenres. I stopped thinking about it and just mix what i like. Maybe because of that my music sucks mostly, lol.
Indeed i felt a lot creative when i did some obscure mixing years ago with NanoStudio 1 and i sampled the Diva Plava Laguna scene, a woodspecker and some other things into a cinematic, trance ambient hybrid thing.
Sometimes simple things can lead to wonderful things and i felt i sometimes lost track with too many tools but then new technology indeed let you do really new and innovative things and think outside a box as well and sometimes more choices simply can lead you to be more creative. Of course sometimes less is more is still a good rule if you found some tools you want to learn inside out.
At the end there are so much tools out there like never before to create millions of unique sounds in all kinds of genres.
I made some experiments to change from some weird atonal things into a more musical piece and vice versa. Mix microtonal with the usual western scale and whatever. Some things sounded very unique to me.
But unique is not good always
I also learned that i even explore new ways and sounds in tools i not use for months or even years and used them again.
@Clueless obviously the real innovators are the pioneers who first define a genre, and they are usually the ones that come up with the signature sound. Think Miles Davis and the Birth Of The Cool, or Jimi Hendrix, The Beatles etc...
Then others follow.
Indeed but i think such things does not happen anymore. And as great as these old guys were, no one would care today maybe. Yes, its getting harder to get a unique sound these days while we have more tools than ever, even in our pocket.
Probably not my most unique sound but I enjoy it nonetheless.
I've created this sound on an iOS synth, inspired by a discussion with @TrevorLlevelyn (ouch, hope I wrote his name correctly, I just found he's no longer here! 🤭) who found it unlikely that an iOS synth could replace hardware. I won't comment on that because hardware is not only about the sound, but at least it has left me with a sound that I would never have created otherwise 😊
Nice! Drambo?
Have a second guess.
Drambo wasn't even in beta when I did this.
Mhh, Model 15?
Zeeon!
Ah, indeed Zeeon is beside Model D my favorite for juicy analog pads.
It's simply wonderful.
I still enjoy making sounds on it a lot, even now that we have Drambo.
I still hope we see P900 for iOS which is by far my favorite. It even beats hardware for me
Like Model 15 but with a much better and organic sound. Almost better than the real thing.
I wonder what happens when Drambo gets the Zeeon filters. Will it replace it?
I doubt, since Zeeon also leads to unique sounds due to the mod-matrix and different workflow.
Billie Eilish has a distinctive and very modern sound. It's still possible. Finneas takes elements of trap, trip-hop, hip-hop and drum and bass and combines it all with his sister's voice to create something that is unique to today.
And good example. I still do not get the hype about Billie Eilish. Its more a marketing thing for me like all those boy groups. But then i am an old fart and what do i know
+1 for P900, a dream synth, yes.
Actually I have never tried to redo a P900 sound on Zeeon. Oh, if I only had more time 😉
I started off as a guitarist, so I guess I was spoiled. Basic synth waveforms never excited me, I had more fun as a kid ripping apart old analog smoke detectors, listening to emergency sirens or AM radio. Slightly more interesting was PWM, FM, RM, filter sweeps, yawn. It wasn't until I heard a PPG and its wavetable synthesis that I got excited. Most recently probably the WMD Synchrodyne.
Music genres confuse me. I tell people I make noise.
I tried it but often translating things into other (even if they could do similar routings) it mostly not the same.
Sometimes it can get close but then there is a reason for using several different tools. Combining them indeed can lead to very unique sounds.
F.e. i love the P900 brass sounds. More organic and vibrant as most other synths. Almost close to physical modeling but it is just subtractive synthesis with some audio rate stuff going on
Or a "simple" guitar. Just P900 again. Of course you can use a real guitar but i cannot play guitar or have not enough control in some sample libarires. So these sounds are unique for my personal usage at least.
Or an overblown harmonium
Or a whole track where everything is modular synthesis with some FX on top (and one string sample but not the one you maybe think it is here).
@Clueless Oh my, these sound wonderful! 😍
@Clueless What magic is this? These are great.
Did you set a goal to make these sounds similar to the actual instrument, or was this the result of endless nights of tweaking?
@rs2000 Yeah I followed that thread. You did a great job replicating the sound. I think I also asked you about sound design.
This thing can do really wonders. I hope the (new) developer is well since i heard nothing since the covid drama and the latest was that they wanted to port to JUCE and the derivate FX called Lunar Lander (the analog delay, plate reverb and saturation module from P900) should come for windows and iOS. It should be on beta which i wanted to join and also contribute to the next P900 update a preset bank but heard nothing since a while. P900 is a synth where not much talking about nor creating content, maybe since it is mac and AU only. But that might make it even more unique!
I must say that a lot things i created with it are like happy accidents and indeed tweaking around for hours. But once you know what you have to do it is easy to go from one sound to another and i saved me a lot templates rather than start always with a blank rack f.e. going from a heavy saturated hard hitting guitar bass to an almost natural sounding women soprano voice.
These things also getting more interesting always if you layer it with other stuff and also use extern FX to pronounce these sounds even more. So in general a unique sound for me start as raw sound but ends maybe totally different from what i wanted to do.
Also since i´m no master keyboard player nor a great composer i learned to do some tricks like using arps as performing tools which might not sound like an arp just held with some chord. Cheating? Maybe.
Do what you want and make it unique your way.
The first sound that made me stop in my tracks was that ringing power chord after the acoustic strumming in "Pinball Wizard."
But really? The human voice is the only unique instrument. And I say this as someone who was kept away from the microphone in pretty much every setting, my whole life. Alas.
Need an analog synth expert?
Ask the whale! 😅
Well, or use something like Virtual ANS straight from your phone.
But indeed spectral synthesis can sounds pretty like these things. Or use a phaser to make whale singing
Ha, I would have used filter resonance and FM to reproduce these but I'll better ask the whale.
Another way i like to get "unique" performances are just layering different things with each slightly amounts of randomizations, speed, setting in the space and so on.
F.e. here one of my personal favorite i often just play and can calm down (yes, at least for me).
It started as 3 simpler and dry presets you hear each at the beginning, then all 3 layered played at once. Then i added some FX (mainly delay, spatialization and reverb for each of them), saved that and at the end you hear just how it performs when i play some random chords which would sound different each time you would replay it as midi file
@Clueless Very cool. Do you sample your finished patches to make it universal? I've been thinking about doing that for IAA apps to use it in Audiolayer or Nanostudio 2.