Musical Practice and Performance Stack Exchange
Musical Practice and Performance Stack Exchange

Questions tagged [sound-design]

Sound design concerns questions about the way of creating and modifying sounds.

Sound design is the art of creating or modifying sounds in order to match a certain purpose. This concerns sound synthesis but also the ways of modifying a recorded sound or a live performance to get the desired effect.

There is a StackExchange community about sound design.

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Can I turn any synthesized instrument into a bass by lowering the frequency?

In terms of electronic music, when I'm picking a "bass" can I choose any instrument, including leads, and just set that instrument to be of lower frequency (lowering the octave) in order to create a bass. Does a bass just depend on frequency and not…
user34288
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Blondie's Heart of Glass shimmering cascade effect

There's a ethereal shimmering cascading effect in the background of Blondie's song "Heart of Glass" at around 0:35 minutes in (in E major) and also moments later at 0:43 (in C# minor) and 0:50 (in C# major) --- also appears again at 1:19 and…
D.R.
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How does sound design affect musical composition?

For the purposes of this question, I'm using definitions commonly used in electronic music production: Sound design: The creation of single sounds, that can be used in a composition. For example, synthesizer patch design, sample selection, voice…
naught101
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How can I create a switchable filter in Pure Data?

I have watched a tutorial series on Pure Data, but I still feel uncertain about how to think about the "execution point" in a Pure Data patch evolving over time. Suppose I want to create a radio button with which the user can control which filter an…
user77468
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Artificially Extended Drum Duration?

I am watching a beginner's guide to music production using Cakewalk on Youtube. An interesting fact it points out is that adjusting a drum's note duration in the piano roll view has no effect, because the drum sound has a fixed duration. This…
user74664
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A Question about Avid Sibelius 2021 and Kontakt (.nki) instruments

Since Sibelius is just using a version of Kontakt in the background to play its own sounds, can I build Sibelius Soundsets that are based on nothing but the .nki files in my authorized Kontakt Libraries? For instance, could I create a "Piano and…
William Andrew Hainline
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Do the touch, feel and weight of the keys matter to play classical music?

My question is really about the importance of quality of piano keys in perspective of playing hardcore classical pieces (i.e.- gaspard de la nuit) like how much it matters - the touch sensitivity, feeling the vibrations through the keys, dynamics…
san van poor
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Arrangment/voicing vs EQ/production

When composing rock/pop music, I am wondering, when considering the timbre of the guitars, whether focus should be placed on voicings (power chords vs barre chords vs single notes etc) or simply on writing complete chords (including the root, third,…
286642
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Song for Guy chorus synth sound

I'm currently trying to reproduce the sounds of Elton John's Song for Guy as a learning project, and I'm stuck with the wind-like sound that accompanies each chorus (and the third and following repetitions of the initial song motif at the end,…
airman
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Sounds used by music instructors to induce pauses in people playing or singing

I would like to know whether it is common for music teacher instructors, and, perhaps, also with musical orchestra directors, but perhaps not, to introduce special sounds, in special ways, by means of some object, or even with their voice, to induce…
Joselin Jocklingson
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Reverse engineering tones - incremental approach

The context here is electric guitar but I think the question stands more generally: what kind of steps/questions should I be asking myself as I attempt to methodically reproduce a tone? I'm sure it's as much an art as it is science, but it would be…
Arash Howaida
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Which audio processing techniques lead to soft, warm, velvety, ASMR-like kind of sound?

The goal is to create as soft music as possible. It might be EQ, tube preamps, saturation, compression, recording on tape, tape delay, certain mic positioning, or something else. I just don't know from where to start this beautiful quest of making…
ZenBerry
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How to achieve this guitar sound and what's the playing technique?

Does this guitar playing technique have a name which is being looped in this short preview? I don't know how to produce this kind of sound and which effects to use to achieve this. Any ideas? https://www.dropbox.com/s/2u3jy1odgelppk1/cut.mp3
clementino
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Using Synthesis to Create Original Sounds

Many videos I've watched on synthesis aim at emulating physical instrument sounds (or sometimes physical sound effects), with the pursuit of realism as a guiding principle. At first, this struck me as something in the neighborhood of a skeuomorph. …
user79989
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Distortion of AMP

I have a question that is a little bit of "engineering nature". Why can't I plug an audio signal(music from computer) and bass/guitar in the same speaker if I somehow wire outputs together without some device or mixer? I know that these two signals…
Matija Stankovic
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