You heard some sound (sound effect from the cinema, some interesting tone from the recording, whatever).
What steps do you take to reproduce the sound you liked?
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Sign up to join this communityYou heard some sound (sound effect from the cinema, some interesting tone from the recording, whatever).
What steps do you take to reproduce the sound you liked?
Great question!
It does depend on the sound somewhat, but my process involves all or some of the following:
Design a strategy for re-creating the sound. You can take a bottom up approach to this, generating components individually or a more brute force approach of throwing stuff together and trying to mould it all at once. The first is more thorough, more of a synthesists approach, the second is more like working on intuition I think. Both have their merits.
A-B the sounds, or different versions of the sounds. Analyse the two together.
Of course it is a bit boring and unoriginal to actually copy sounds others have designed, but I think it is a useful excercise as it uses all of your understanding of how sounds are formed. Along the way you will definitely learn some new techniques, and will no doubt take a different route to the final version than the sounds original creator.
The only extra I'd add to Mark's great answer is if you'd like to read a bit more on analysing and reverse engineering sounds so they can be synthesised, then you might want to look at The Synthesizer Cookbook by Fred Welsh. This is a patch book, but in the front of the book he describes how to consider (and view) sounds in both the time domain and frequency domain so they can then be synthesised (in the book using subtractive synthesis, but would be the same for some other types of synthesis).