Sound design vs. Workflow
Have you ever had a great song idea, but by the time you start
attempting to create the sounds in your head you’ve lost the inspiration?
If so, you are in good company. This happens to the best of us.
Although there is nothing wrong with creating music with preset sounds,
it is often times not as inspiring. So what do I suggest for a better
workflow?
Separate your sound design & songwriting sessions to different days. Create sound design sessions completely devoted to experimenting with sounds with no intention of writing a song. This takes the pressure off of you having to create “that” sound for your particular song in progress and allows you to just enjoy
experimenting and tweaking sounds.
The reason sound design sucks for a lot of music producers is because even after devoting hours of our time to creating a specific sound, we often fall short of what we were going for close the whole session having not accomplished anything.
What most producers don’t realize is that the magic usually happens in the process of this pursuit. While going after something specific, there are often loads of interesting sounds that are ignored. My advice is to capture all of it.
Record all of your experimentation in full so you can cut up the good bits later. If you get in the habit of having sessions devoted to sound design, you will often find yourself inspired by some of the sounds you come up with and ready to work them into a song. Most of the time, the best sounds weren’t the ones you expected to get, but instead happy accidents.
If this sounds complicated to you, it’s really not. Let’s say you are trying to get a sound out of operator. You would start by dragging Operator & whatever effects onto a midi track, arm the track & then start attempting to craft a certain sound.
You’re going to do the exact same thing except you’re also going to create an audio track and set the “input from” to be the operator track. or if you solo the operator track, you can set the input on the audio track to “resample”. Finally you hold command (control on PC) and arm the audio track & start recording while you experiment with Operator.
Once you are done with your session you stop recording & are left with every sound you came across in your session. Now you can cut any interesting sounds in that session & save them as samples to use in your productions. You can also drop them in a simpler & play these samples across your keyboard for more interesting sounds & melodies.
Having this new collection of sounds & hopefully something close to the sound you were originally going after ready to go will let you get to the business of writing songs with fewer technical interruptions.
Keep this in mind anytime you are in a sound design session & it’ll really improve your workflow when you return to crafting your music. If you want to look over my shoulder, I go much deeper into this in my Idea Jams Masterclass.
Happy music making,
Jason
If you are benefiting from these posts, you will absolutely love my 2 bestselling books:
The Mental Game of Music Production
The Process for Electronic Music Producers
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Happy music making!
Jason