My method for designing textured synth sounds
• Louis Flynn

When designing sounds, it's good to have a framework in place so you don’t get lost/confused about where you are in your sound design process. This is especially important if you’re new to making synth sounds.

My method is to usually design sounds in 5 key steps:

  1. Oscillators / Sound engines
  2. Filters
  3. Amplifier envelope
  4. Modulation
  5. Effects

This is a very basic framework and should not be followed as a one-size-fits-all method but is a good guide to make sure you’ve covered all bases in making the sound unique. I cover the idea in more depth in this video on recreating sounds in a synth: https://youtu.be/1rWlrInQzh0?si=_HcsehaCIwvu-xDA

 

As an example of how you can follow this method, I’ll use the main sound from Young Nudy’s Peaches & Eggplants, which is his second highest streaming song on Spotify as of November 2024. We made the Counter Strike Loophole preset for the song using the DX7, but you can make this using most Analog and FM/PM synths:

  1. Start with a harmonically rich waveform
    • Could be a sawtooth/pulse wave on an analogue synth or any wave with a lot of high harmonics on a digital synth
      • This is so that the sound will have a lot of character, rather than using a sine wave that sounds a lot smoother
  1. Filter this wave out with a low-pass filter and increase the resonance a good amount (don’t increase too much, otherwise you’ll have massive peaks in volume when you don’t want them
    • Make sure to turn on filer tracking so you have a similar character with each note you press, rather than having low notes sounding different to high notes (especially important considering the high resonance)
  2. You want the sound to be a pluck that feels like it fades in slightly, so use the amp envelope to achieve this
    • For the pluck feeling, you’ll want the sound to have no sustain- that way no matter how long you hold down your keys, you’ll always just have a short burst of sound when you press them down
    • To make the pluck feel less harsh like the P&E preset, increase the attack a bit
      • This is so the sound fades in slightly and doesn’t have a sharp attack
      • Make sure it doesn’t fade in for too long or it’ll sound like a pad
  1. Time for modulation
    • The main thing giving the sound its unstable feeling is the vibrato- apply an LFO to the pitch to give it this distinctive sound
    • If your synth of choice can do this, apply a quick pitch envelope at the start of the sound to give it a laser-like zap quality, then seriously tone it down so it is barely affecting the pitch at all
      • This is just to emphasise that unstableness we were talking about earlier
    • If your synth can also do this, give it some unison detune
      • Most synths apply unison voices at the expense of voices of polyphony, but some digital ones can just add the unison effect without affecting the number of voices you can play
  1. Effects!!!
    • For the Counter Strike preset, there are really only two effects going on, but we used up all of the four fx slots available
    • Chorus and flanger are essentially two variations of the same effect, which is kind of layering voices slightly out of phase with one another and modulating them (as far as I understand)
    • The flanger and two choruses were used to give the pluck this spacey, washy feeling which lowkey adds to the unstableness created in the modulation stage
    • A small room reverb was also added to place the sound in context and make it feel quite small, but also add to the spacey nature of it
    • The effects and the modulation were used in tandem with each other to achieve this similar goal of creating an unstable, almost lonely sound

 

 

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