How do you design your synths in ableton?

Performance & Techniques Music Production
1

How do you design your synths in ableton?

Hey guys! Im having a really hard time designing my own synths in ableton and was hoping i could get a few tips from you guys. Im fairly new to the production game so sorry if i dont get your terminologies sometimes. Thanks in advance! :smiley:

2

At the beginning I wouldn’t spend much time on sound design. Its a rabbit hole with a very steep learning curve. Use presets, nothing wrong with them, change some of the parameters if they sound too stock. But your main focus in production has to bee arrangement and actually finishing songs. Don’t get to lost on the sounds, if it doesn’t sound right in the first 5 minutes you have been messing with the parameters, chances are that your not going to arrive at anything with that sound.
My tips for the order of things you should learn in the production game are:

  1. Arrangement
  2. Movement and anticipation
  3. Collecting a library of sounds, presets or whatever, but that you really know how they sound.
  4. Making drums sound really good( Most electronic music is drum driven so if you get this right you have 40% of your song done)

I would start with that, sound design is a different world, and you wont get songs done if you get too much time tweaking parameters you don’t know what they are doing.

Hope this helps, cheers

3

Hey thanks for your time! I guess ill have a look through the folders in ableton. Also thanks for the bit of advice in making a composition!

4

You can try using presets and tweaking them to figure out what each control does, or follow some youtube videos for similar sounds to get a better understanding of sound design.

5

This series covers the basics of synthesis, start at the bottom and work your way up. Skip the complex math parts if you want, you’ll still learn a ton:

Ableton’s Analog will likely be the easiest to try to follow along with, but the concepts apply to many, many different synths.

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I have red the first part on soundonsound and it is very good, gonna have to read it all.

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try to become familiar with the components of a synth: oscilators, filters, LFO and envelope
learn to recognize the sound of a saw, square and sinewave
take some time to play around with it, get stuff done by starting with presets and tweaking them a little.
At some point you will know what effect each parameter has, for exemple “I wan’t to add a little more edge, let’s add a square to this sine”

8

I agree with stijn. Learn the main components. I had a great book on it that I learned from. I’m sure it’s pretty outdated.

It was by Steve DeFuria. It was called secret of analog and digital synthesis. Great book but I’m sure there’s more than enough tutorials and online material to learn from.

Once you understand those principles, that paradigm can be applied to most synths.