Sometimes the best way to inspire new sounds is to go leftfield. Think outside the box with these tips…
Ban a sound
1Push yourself creatively by banning the use of a common element. Maybe try writing a dance track without any kick drums, hi-hats or cymbals. The key is to find creative ways to replace the role usually performed by whatever you’re missing, such as using a pulsing bassline in place of a kick rhythm or swirling noise effects to emulate the groove of hi-hats.
Distort reality
2Saturation and distortion are indispensable if you want to accentuate specific harmonics or create aggression within a sound. Whether you’re applying the circuits of an analogue signal path, or engaging a software solution, you’ve likely added bite to a clean sound before. Now it’s time to
Forget tuning
try pushing the ‘drive’ parameter to extreme values.
Take a ‘distortion synthesis’ approach to extremes by sculpting entirely new tones and timbres using only simple sounds and distortion – for example, push a pure sine wave into a distortion stage to square off the waveform, and vary the input gain with volume modulation (ie tremolo) to create wavering waveform change.
Make an uber-sound
3Max out your computer’s processing power by designing one single uber-sound! Stack up unison voices, go wild with modulation, and purposely assign everything to modulate everything. Once you’ve reached the limit of your computer’s processing power, resample the patch into a sampler and start the process again!
Be contrary
7The piano roll-centric world of DAWs and modern synths is heavily focused on the chromatic scale. Try making a track using tools that let you tune them manually – like analogue synth oscillators or pitchshifting plugins – and set the pitch entirely by ear. Microtonal tools are great for this too, such as Entonal Studio, which lets users manually adjust the pitch of notes or work with non-Western tunings, and can be used with external synths or plugins.
5Break rules when editing audio or piling on plugins. Compress the daylights out of something to genera
