25
votes
Accepted
Can I turn any synthesized instrument into a bass by lowering the frequency?
when I'm picking a "bass" can I choose any instrument..?
Yes, you can. However, you might find that not all instruments work well to your ears as 'bass' instruments.
When you see 'bass' in a synth ...
- 46.1k
22
votes
Do I need 88 keys to produce film soundtracks?
No, you do not need 88 keys.
You could produce film soundtracks with 0 keys- everything can be programmed nowadays. Of course, many prefer to record MIDI, and 61 keys will be sufficient at that. How ...
- 9,673
20
votes
Accepted
How does pitch bending work on keyboard percussion
For those who are really curious and not afraid of math, there is a full research article about the subject.
The short summary is that pitch bending by pressing a flexible mallet against the bar works ...
- 3,473
15
votes
Do I need 88 keys to produce film soundtracks?
88 keys are very useful if you intend to PLAY the keyboard in a pianistic style. Otherwise your 61 keys will be fine. I wouldn't be surprised to learn of a modern soundtrack composer who didn't use ...
- 95.6k
14
votes
Blondie's Heart of Glass shimmering cascade effect
To my ears, that's a synth filter sweep. It's a whole bunch of high harmonics of a midrange synth chord, with a resonant filter sweeping through them. You could approximate that sound with a large ...
- 199
10
votes
In principle, is it possible to create the sound of an instrument from the waveform of a different instrument?
I don't exactly disagree, with Hoagie's answer, but fact is, that the original waveform is not of much help in case of such different instruments, where the waveforms exhibit no similiarity.
You save ...
- 11.4k
9
votes
Can I turn any synthesized instrument into a bass by lowering the frequency?
Simple as that. Bass refers to the range of the instrument, so electronically, turn a piccolo into a bass if you want. It's much harder with fish, though. Turning a salmon into a bass doesn't seem to ...
- 198k
9
votes
Is boosting all frequencies on an EQ equivalent to a flat EQ
The answer is as always: It depends. With classic analogue EQs you’d not be free in terms of response curve. Rather you’d have multiple bandfilters combined with pots cutting a part to ground (passive)...
- 23.1k
8
votes
Blondie's Heart of Glass shimmering cascade effect
I agree that it's a filter sweep. (Briefly, you vary the cutoff frequency of a filter on the fly - which removes/restores the top or bottom part of the sound spectrum - and the filter resonance. ...
- 937
7
votes
Blondie's Heart of Glass shimmering cascade effect
As others have said, this is a filter sweep on a synthesizer. The fundamental pitch of the chord tones does not change, so a glissando is not a good facsimile.
There are a few natural acoustic ...
- 3,128
7
votes
In principle, is it possible to create the sound of an instrument from the waveform of a different instrument?
Sort of. The sustain portion of most instrument sounds has a relatively simple, regular waveform which can be manipulated to sound like another instrument. I wouldn't call this 'synthesis', that ...
- 95.6k
6
votes
Accepted
Artificially Extended Drum Duration?
I don't know why I wrote all this but here goes:
Note duration in MIDI
The way most synthesizers and samplers (and other similar instruments) work is constrained by the conceptual model behind the ...
- 28.7k
6
votes
In principle, is it possible to create the sound of an instrument from the waveform of a different instrument?
I’m going to answer a qualified
No
You’d struggle to make the bass sound like a flute because while it does have a harmonic spectrum that could be filtered in some ways to be similar to a flute, it ...
- 58.6k
5
votes
Blondie's Heart of Glass shimmering cascade effect
Sounds like a Solina string ensemble through a mono phaser.
There's a stem-by-stem breakdown of Heart of Glass here.
This video suggests that it's a polymoog rather than a string ensemble.
- 12k
5
votes
What is an effect that changes one parameter depending on the rate of change of another parameter?
An envelope follower uses the volume from a sound to generate an envelope signal which can then be used to control a parameter of an effect. The most popular use for an envelope follower is to control ...
- 58.6k
5
votes
Do I need 88 keys to produce film soundtracks?
No, you don't need 88 keys. You do need continuous controllers mapped to MIDI CC 1 and MIDI CC 11.
The controller you linked to should be fine as long as you can map MIDI CC 11 to something ...
- 51
5
votes
Accepted
How to understand putting an LFO on its own parameter (especially) in Serum?
I don't have Serum, but I guess the answer is similar for any synthesizer.
Mathematically, LFO can be described as a function of internal phase of the oscillator
where func represents the oscillator ...
- 17.8k
4
votes
Artificially Extended Drum Duration?
When it comes to MIDI sequencing, a DAW (like cakewalk) sends MIDI messages to a MIDI synthesizer plugin. It's the job of that synthesizer plugin to decide how to respond to those MIDI messages.
Often,...
- 46.1k
4
votes
Which audio processing techniques lead to soft, warm, velvety, ASMR-like kind of sound?
I suspect that may aspects of sound that might subjectively be thought of as warm will (as so much in life) lie not in the extremes, but somewhere in the middle of the spectrum of various possible ...
- 46.1k
4
votes
Blondie's Heart of Glass shimmering cascade effect
Could be made in several ways. A very slow use of a wah pedal, or a phaser set at a slow speed, or as KFW says, made using a filter with a synth. Any of those would work. Failing that, try a coiled ...
- 198k
4
votes
Accepted
Song for Guy chorus synth sound
High resonance [Q], hi-pass filter sweep.
Likely playing one or more notes of the chord structure as it changes - this will be a significant part of the sound, switching up the inversions & spread ...
- 28k
4
votes
In principle, is it possible to create the sound of an instrument from the waveform of a different instrument?
What does make different instruments sound differently? How do you distinguish, say, a trumpet (sound) from a violin (sound)?
There are two (three) things the ear relies on: volume, but it would be ...
- 307
3
votes
Which audio processing techniques lead to soft, warm, velvety, ASMR-like kind of sound?
The most obvious thing is consistent levels. You don't want jumps in volume, and you don't want plosives.
Start with the recording. You need a good pop filter, and you want someone with the right ...
- 4,792
3
votes
Using Synthesis to Create Original Sounds
No.1 is easy to answer: every conceivable sound has a potential musical use, so of course that includes any possible synthesizer sound.
No.2 is unanswerable without a rigorous definition of what ...
- 22k
3
votes
Can I turn any synthesized instrument into a bass by lowering the frequency?
Part of the confusion here appears to be that ‘bass’ is (a) the name of a range (~16-256 Hz), (b) the name of a specific instrument, the double bass (similar to a violin, but much bigger), (c) the ...
3
votes
Distortion of AMP
If you simply want to connect two sources to the same speaker, this is usually a big no-no. The problem is that the two sources will also be connected to each other, and they will try to drive each ...
- 9,673
3
votes
Accepted
How does sound design affect musical composition?
Sound design serves almost exactly the same purpose in electronic music that instrumentation does in orchestral music. Orchestral composers will play with elements like giving different lines to ...
- 3,153
3
votes
Accepted
In principle, is it possible to create the sound of an instrument from the waveform of a different instrument?
By the Fourier theorem, every sound can be decomposed into a sum of pure sine waves. Finite duration or non-repeating sounds require summing an infinite number of sine wave to perfectly reconstruct, ...
- 645
3
votes
Is mixing and mastering part of making the music OR is it just creating a different performance or version of the music?
TL;DR: If a mixing or mastering engineer considers his/her contribution to be so significant that they actually contributed to the COMPOSITION or LYRICS or ARRANGEMENT enough to warrant composer, ...
- 28.7k
3
votes
How to understand putting an LFO on its own parameter (especially) in Serum?
In principle, doing this might be expected to cause an infinite loop, with the LFO stuck referring to both its own envelope and its own RATE in order to compute its own RATE. What is actually ...
- 28.7k
Only top scored, non community-wiki answers of a minimum length are eligible