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Design Toolbox #1 – Flangers

January 8, 2013 by Varun Nair

[This was originally posted a year ago and has been republished because it fits in with this month’s theme – Varun]

Inspired by Miguel’s ‘SFX Lab‘ series, I thought it would be nice to start a series on using conventional plugins to design sounds.

With many of us primarily working off DAWs with a mouse pointer and plugin windows, there isn’t much  room for ‘hands-on’ experimentation. Happy accidents are fun – accidentally turning a knob on a real (I mean hardware) piece of  equipment and finding that awesome sound (which usually also results in losing track of time!).

Today’s post is about using Logic’s test oscillator and flanger plugins. I usually open up a bunch of plugins, route their outputs to a track and record as I ‘perform’. I also make it a point to not think much and just turn knobs and sliders. It’s important to not monitor too loud as you could blow your ears if you hit (click) the wrong switch!

Here are a few sounds selected off a recording pass that lasted about 8 minutes (some of these sounds can be loud, so go easy on your volume control):
[soundcloud url=”http://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/25849964″]

Design Toolbox #1 – Flangers on SoundCloud

And here’s how the sounds were created:

[vimeo]http://vimeo.com/30759306[/vimeo]

Here’s a screenshot of the mixer window. The gain and limiter plugins helped keep the output of the flanger plugin in check. The send (bus 1) was for the recording track.

You can do something similar with a chorus, phaser or any other modulation plugin and get very different results. A different flanger plugin might sound completely different too. Chop these sounds up, tag them and drop them in to your library. I used a whole library of similar sounds when I worked on a bunch of in-flight-entertainment games last year. The best part is your ‘performance’ is never going to be exactly the same, so you end up with a different set of sounds on a different day. It’s even more fun if you have a MIDI controller and you drop in multiple plugins in series (or parallel or side-chain or…?).

UPDATE: I’ve created a signal generator rewire app that does a bit more than generating signals and might be useful in this context. More info here.

Filed Under: tutorials, videos Tagged With: Design Toolbox, flanger, logic, plug-ins 2013, signal generator

Comments

  1. Steve Urban says

    October 19, 2011 at 9:54 am

    Outstanding post, Varun! It totally got the brain firing. I love that sine sweep button on the oscillator. Sadly, no Logic in my box. Anybody know of a plug-in with a similar capability for PT? Signal Generator tears as you go from freq to freq.

    • Charlie says

      August 7, 2017 at 10:18 am

      Try Melda’s Oscillator : http://www.meldaproduction.com/MOscillator

  2. synthetic says

    October 19, 2011 at 12:38 pm

    Awesome, wow. Have to try this for myself with my modular synth. 

  3. Fluky says

    October 25, 2011 at 5:27 pm

    Steve: the mda TestTone VST does sweeps, if you just have a VST-RTAS wrapper.

    http://mda.smartelectronix.com/

  4. Tiana Hoosier says

    January 29, 2012 at 1:51 am

    Thanks for the blog.Much thanks again. Awesome.

  5. Alejandro Romero G. says

    January 8, 2013 at 5:26 pm

    Great video! Thanks for the share! I just have some awsome ideas!

  6. Robert Reilly says

    January 8, 2013 at 5:47 pm

    This is an awesome post Varun!  Definitely going to practice these techniques.  Thanks!

  7. Brandon Wells says

    January 9, 2013 at 12:51 pm

    This is great!! Im going to do this with so many synth and non synth stuff…lets see (or hear) what comes out!

  8. Jack Powell says

    January 10, 2013 at 4:30 pm

    Had good fun with this today. Awesome post!

  9. Tion says

    January 12, 2013 at 4:10 am

    It’s really refreshing to see thinking “outside the box” and real creative input which is more about emotion and meaning, playing around and enjoyment than predictable solutions.
    Thank you man, really inspiring post :)

Trackbacks

  1. A Sound Design Tool says:
    November 6, 2011 at 7:50 pm

    […] the ‘Design Toolbox – Flangers’ post I put together for designingsound.org and further inspired by Steve Urban’s comment about […]

  2. Design Toolbox #2 – Kontakt says:
    January 10, 2012 at 9:58 am

    […] this second post of the Design Toolbox series, I thought it would be nice to explore a sampler and it’s application in sound design. […]

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