Hi !
Ever listened back to a track you’ve been working on and gone, “It’s okay but something isn’t quite right but I have no idea why”?
Or maybe you’ve spent HOURS layering a drum sound, or designing a synth patch to only think the same thing and just settle for a stock sample or preset instead?
The key to overcoming that is understanding the elements of form first, and then the audio tools you’re gonna need to manipulate those elements second.
When I first started out, I spent way too long tweaking knobs and playing with effects without knowing what I was doing and why- understanding what I’m about to tell you changed EVERYTHING for me.
So in a nutshell…
“Form” is made up of a bunch of elements that defines an object and our ability to tell it apart from its background/the foreground etc.
Things like shape/size/colour etc. all come into play in terms of how we perceive an object’s form.
How tf does this relate to audio you ask? Let's consider the example below.
Oftentimes a more aggressive sounding track with super distorted basses might require an equally punchy/snappy kick to complement the accompanying instruments/elements around it, but sometimes out of no fault of our own, our kick sounds dull and weak. Or maybe a track that wasn't necessarily 'aggressive' but had a fuller sounding, more impactful bass patch, was paired with a meh boomy kick.
Without any prior knowledge of form and how to identify and solve the issue, we get stuck thinking “I need this to be fatter and have more oomph”, but turning up the volume/throwing random compressors and EQs to boost the bass frequencies isn’t quite giving us what we’re looking for.
So…
Let’s take a look at the element of ‘shape’ in terms of a kick sound.
Most of the time kicks fall into one of two categories; round or boxy. And for the sake of this exercise let’s just say that round kick = not aggressive enough. But before I give you the solution, let’s think about a couple of things:
- What makes a shape round/a sphere? Rounded/curved/soft edges, right? (This is obviously not the exact definition of a sphere or a circle but bear with me.)
- What makes a sound have the opposite i.e harsh edges instead of soft ones? More high frequencies. Therefore we can probably assume, if more high frequencies = harsher edges, less high frequencies = softer edges (imagine taking a sound and removing all of its highs, it would probably sound muffled and take on a ‘rounder’ appearance)
- Generally speaking, the lows and low mids are also another thing that might make a sound, sound boomy/round.
So knowing all of that, if I am presented with a ‘round’ kick that lacks any oomph I can try the following:
- Compress the low mids 100hz-300hz with a multi-band compressor, short attack and short release times and threshold to taste. (Fab Filter Pro MB is my go to for this, if you don’t have it, you can just set up your own effect rack in Ableton or DAW of choice to split the frequencies up and just place a compressor on the band you want to be effected. Or you can just download the effect rack I've made for this purpose here for free.)
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- Distort the high frequencies (1khz and up) with something like Izotope Trash (same thing, if you don’t have it just split up the frequencies manually and put your distortion of choice on that band). This of course should be done to taste and only if the sound doesn't already have a lot of information in that frequency band. Distorting or saturating a sound adds harmonics to the sound, thereby adding more information to whatever frequency band you've assigned it to and making it more audible without having to crank the gain.
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- Tighten up the transient with a transient shaper like Izotope Neutron/SPL transient shaper. (Ableton has a native one in the Drum Buss effect) to make it punchier.
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- Saturation on the end to taste.
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You’ve now gone from this, to this.
Learning the tools is important, but without a way to identify what you’re actually hearing, all the plugins in the world can’t save you. Understanding the elements of form, and how that applies to sound is the first step in taking control of your music production game, figuring out which tools to use after is the easy part.
If this was helpful to you and you’d like to learn more, I’ll be covering all the elements of form and the necessary tools you’ll need to shape any sound into exactly what you need, in a course with Halfred and Re:Set on Future Music Academy from March 3rd - 31st.
Feel free to check out further details here.
Wishing you lots of inspiration and happy creating,
Arthur
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