Regarding the title of this post - no, I haven't discovered a new synth which is geared entirely towards our trance pluck needs.
Which is probably a good thing - if we all started using the "ultimate pluck synth", we may quickly tire of those sounds appearing in many of the songs we hear.
No, today's post is about taking any of the synths we currently have in our studio and automatically turning every preset into a pluck. Or a bass. Or a pad. Or whatever.
A number of you have probably worked this out before now (and potentially there are some synths out there which make this process easy).
The way it's done is by using automation to "lock in" certain aspects of the sound. The parameters which are locked in are totally open to personal preference, though typically if the general "shape" of the sound should be retained, then the following parameters should be locked in:
Amplitude: Attack, Decay, Sustain and Release
Filter: Attack, Decay, Sustain, Release, Type, Cutoff Frequency and Resonance
Any other desired aspects of the sound (whether it should have delay/reverb applied, or unison, or whether the oscillator shapes should be retained, etc etc) can be locked in.
It takes a bit of time to set up all the automation - I use MIDI for my hardware synths, and set it to toggle slightly on the first 64th note of each bar - for example, from value 88 to value 89 - simply enough to trigger the parameter change.
Once the slightly tedious task of setting up is done, however, the synth opens up many more choices to us. We can enter (or copy/paste) in the notes and hit the play button, and any sound we turn to will take on our desired characteristics (at the start of each bar). These will be mixed with a wide range of other characteristics to create exotic new combinations, many of them ideally suited for our needs.
A great thing about this process is that these sounds are "original" (I don't want to get into a discussion about where originality begins and ends here...). Many of us (myself included) use presets and tweak them slightly, but don't deviate greatly from the original sound. Some of us (myself included) try to program our own sounds and get frustrated when they don't sound too good - sure, they're original, but so what? I could write an original atonal song with a random melody - originality for it's own sake is pointless. The process mentioned here allows us to become instant sound designers - using sonically pleasing aspects of sounds designed by talented sound designers, and combining them with many other combinations, to create sounds whose origins nobody will recognize.
I save all the MIDI clips in a single project so I can open it along with a new project and drag the desired clips across. Of course, another way would be to save each separate clip into a designated folder and import it into the project from there. I name them according to the synth and the original sound.
This process will probably work just as well with soft synths - in some ways, even better, since the parameters will likely be named (rather than referring to the manual for which of the 127 MIDI CC numbers control the desired parameter!) I haven't actually tried this with a soft synth however - it may not be as easy to drag the "automation clip" to a new project. It would depend on the DAW being used.
Well, that's all for this blog post. I hope it helps some of you who may have been getting tired of the sounds in a particular synth - this should inject it with some new life!
All the best,
Fabian
