Comment by hasbroslasher | Hacker News Reader

Comment by hasbroslasher | Hacker News Reader

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You're right that it's a staggering amount of arcane knowledge. But starting out I always recommend experimentation over getting too deep into the theory. It does help to have some baseline understanding of:

1. Frequency 2. Harmonics 3. Oscillators/Waveforms 4. Envelopes 5. Filters

The only problem with the last part of your request is that even if you are to watch people design sounds for a couple of hours you might find that when you try to replicate that somewhere else it doesn't sound right. This is partially because every synth/softsynth is different and will produce different sounds and have different parameters. It can be infuriating to get a tutorial on how to produce that perfect "Bladerunner Blues" synth and come out with something that sounds totally flat and bad.

To make matters worse, there are apparently 0 good tutorials on the subject - I just googled for 15 minutes to no avail. The two below cover some of it but I personally can't bear listening to the people who make these videos.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TvQVQuV-Kys https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lJVlWdzoZ0w

I would even narrow that list down to one: Harmonics. Once it clicked in my mind that every sound is just a combination of sine waves, and that it's the intervals, amplitudes, and dynamics of those sines that make up everything we hear, it made sound design a lot clearer for me.

Of course, finding the right waveforms, filters, and envelopes required to get to a particular pattern of sines is still the challenge, but having that understanding of the medium underlying it all makes experimentation that much more productive (and fun).

Also people who have really hot Sound Tips generally don't want to give them away. If you can make a unique sound with some special trick you will have an advantage over your enemies (other musicians).

One problem is that every machine tends to be designed just a little bit differently. Therefore, tips on exactly recreating the sound might not necessarily translate well from one machine to another.

For instance, the "Blade Runner Blues" patch as I understand it is actually one of the brass presets on the Yamaha CS-80. (Bad recording but here: https://www.firsthomebank.com/personal-banking/deposit-produ...) The CS-80 has a pretty unique architecture for a polyphonic analog. (http://www.cs80.com/tour.html) To get a patch exactly right would require replicating layout, filter architecture and structure, etc.

Knowing basics synthesis, however, can get you pretty close. I have a patch on my Alesis Andromeda (which has some CS-80 type elements such as a ribbon controller, dual resonant filters, and an unfiltered sine that goes to the post-filter mix) that someone did in a user community -- it came out decently good. I was able to Google a book page that gives a good overview of recreating it on other synths. (https://books.google.com/books?id=Jz1JMnZNO88C&pg=PA74&lpg=P...)

Now, to really get the Vangelis Blade Runner type effect, you have to be able to play a synthesizer expressively. This is unfortunately is tougher on most synths compared to the CS-80, due to the CS-80's polyphonic aftertouch that most synths lack. That being said, there are other techniques people could do. I understand that Vangelis used pedals to manipulate filter and volume, and that is something that can be done on many synths that I don't see a lot of people taking advantage of. Don't discount playing technique when it comes to the art of sound design, in other words.

That's an understatement. Vangelis improvises whole soundtracks live, playing fairly simple melodic lines and counterpoints with his hands, but manipulating LOTS of pedals to arrange on the fly. By that, I mean more than ten pedals, arrayed in an enormous bank at his feet. It's staggering, and I can't think of a single other electronic musician with nearly that proficiency at foot-pedals.

I really like that you just went off on a huge tangent about this, no sarcasm. I really agree with your last line too, Kevin Shields is another example of this. By perfecting a unique playing style (holding the pitch bar while strumming) he was able to come up with a sound so unique that it spawned a subgenre

Only if your claim to fame is primary sound transduction and not, say, being a guru of giving other people tools and help with their ideas. My own career over the last ten years or so has been based on the latter.

I will say that I think the 'power-law' nature of that is not dissimilar to being a primary sound transduction artist. You don't get a large number of people being celebrities at tutorials, or of disseminating free plugins.

And yeah, I do mean to expand upon this: got a likely domain for it just yesterday. The trick there is that you need to be inter-disciplinary enough that you can produce a really wide range of content, that by definition a newbie couldn't possibly process. I can go from 'slew rates in op-amps in boutique guitar stompboxes' to 'exploiting unusual interpretations of the Circle of Fifths' (did you know the Four Chord Song can be read as a atomically contained minimum-area space in an extended diagram of the circle of fifths?) but a newbie wouldn't cover that range.

There are no secret weapons, just secret masteries: by that, I mean 'stuff that's sensible and obvious, but to the contextless outsider seems like black magic coming out of nowhere'. Any sufficiently deep context seems like magic to someone who has no idea of the scope of that context.

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