[vimeo]http://vimeo.com/16202070[/vimeo]
Enrik Anton sent me a very cool video tutorial, where he shows how to use Native Instruments Battery for sound design. He show several things about building a palette of sounds in the sampler, grouping sounds, tweaking them, assigning different trigger options, layering, etc. He also put some kind words there:
This is a demonstration of how this software can be very useful for sound design work. I did it because I would like to return the effort that Miguel Isaza is doing in his blog “Designing Sound” that has been an inspiration to many of us.
Many thanks for the video, Enrik! Hope the readers enjoy it!
And what about you? Do you like to use samplers in your sound design work? Feel free to share your experiences with us!
This is really great! Thank you, Enrik. This reminds of the days when I used to use a Synclavier to cut and design sounds. The Synclav allowed you to load multiple samples that you could trigger and layer quickly to create new elements. I am going to definitely give your method I try!
I was actually hoping to find a way to make Battery work for sound design. This is awesome.
I’ve used a Z4 for things like weapons, the problem has been that it takes forever to program a sampler, and load the samples across, and tweak the envelopes and loops so you get something that sounds nice in repetition, and lately I’d been thinking, “If only I had a big soft grid layout like an MPC that I could page through…” Huh
awesome vid! love this idea! a total forehead slapper “why didn’t i think of that before”?! thx
That’s killer! I’ve been contemplating something like this for a couple of years but never actually did it, thanks for the inspiration. Now where’s that credit card?
Fantastic vid Enrik. You have put an amazing amount of time into your Battery templates to achieve a very natural results….thanks for sharing!
Battery’s name is sadly a bit improper, most people think it’s just a sampler drumsrack while it’s actually a very tidily packaged sounddesign layering beast very easy and quick to use. Not even mentioning the very good granular engine, the cool premapped envelopes, the modulation matrix easy to reach, etc.
I’m totally agree Lunat3. And actually its learning curve is not to complicated, but you can reach some really nice results, and the best thing is that you don’t need to have a “synth edit knowledge.” On the other hand, it may seem a bit extrange to built a sound outside you edit window, but it pays when you have to use it several times and the results are so immediate.
I was wondering which sampler would be good for something like this for years now! I’ve had battery as a part of NI Komplete, but never used it… now I have to dig in. Round-robin playbeck like shown here is exactly what I was looking for :-)
I have Battery and never thought of using it in this fashion. Thanks man, it’ll make my sound design a lot more streamlined :)
I’d like to chime in, very inspirational video, gives me lot of ideas to use on my own recorded material, definitely going to dig into this!
excellent!
I use protools Structure sampler for sound design extensively – it’s not nearly as robust as Battery.
as does structure and other samplers – this approach takes a lot of up front prep time. but can really save time on common tasks.
There’s one drawback I’ve experienced in using this approach: and that’s when creating and delivering individual assets (such as for a video game)
Revisions.
I’ve often created very cool, complex layered sound fx using similar sampler based methods to this – but when the producer notes come back asking to “reduce the level of the clacky sound in the robot bounce” you have to be able to go back and make that revision as quickly as you made the original sound.
Plus – this feedback and revision request can often be several days and weeks after the original sound was created.
When recording a stereo file of a sampler based performance – it’s often impossible to get the exact performance again – particularly weeks later.
2 ways I’ve worked around this.
I record the midi performance data along with the audio when doing any performance based sound design.
I also buss each layer of the sound I’m making out individual outs and record ALL the layers separately to it’s own track on the timeline.
This allows me to easily and quickly revise the sound based on feedback, no matter how many days, weeks or even months ago I made the original sound.
word
For this method of creating sound effects where your layers of sounds aren’t on the editor, but on the sampler, it seems the only way. The use of midi impulses recorded at the same time that you are performing with your sample soft., and so recording audio data, is very useful when dealing with complex actions, this allows you to re-edit just your midi notes to get that particular sound that otherwise would be very difficult to achieve by playing the keyboard and also lets you to redo that sound again and change whatever needs to be changed.