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  Mutable Instruments has a lovely history of making outwardly simple modules that do plenty of things under the hood. I’ve already written about Clouds and Rings, and now it’s Warps’ turn. Welcome to my definitive guide to Mmorph but in mono hardware form! In its default firmware, Warps is technically just 7 different effects,…

  When I tell people I do sound design using synthesizers, I usually get one of 3 responses: “show me what you’ve done,” “how?” and “what’s a synthesizer/what’s sound design?” That middle one is what today’s post is about: how exactly do you synthesize real sounds using synthesizers? What defines a synthesizer? It’s first worth…

  Waveguide synthesis. Sounds like something from a 70s sci fi movie, doesn’t it? It’s actually a form of physical modelling, and in some ways a form of rudimentary wavetable synthesis, in which a delay, or delay line, is used to model a physical object. The Beginning The most common, well-known, and easiest to perform…

  Allpass filters are weird. They don’t actually filter anything, but they do shift phase around. There’s also two types: allpass filters, that pass all frequencies but shift phase at the cutoff point like a normal filter, and pure phase modulators, which shift the phase of the entire spectrum. Both are useful in sound design…

  My Rings post got a lot of traction in the modular community, so I thought I would write a similar article on another generally nebulous Mutable Instruments module, Clouds – or, specifically, Monsoon, a variant of Clouds running the Parasites firmware, though I’ll try to discuss both equally. Typhoon is a larger, more complex…

  Rings General Rings can be a lot of things, but at its core it’s a modal resonator. Polyphony reduces the quality of each voice because they’re all sharing the 64 bandpass filters in the modal filter bank, so I largely don’t use it – not that we’re playing rings like a voice anyway, right?…

  In linear sound design, such as in film which is where I mostly operate, there’s a constant requirement for the audio to match what’s on screen and sound the same to every listener. Unlike in games, where spatialisation of sounds is handled in the game’s audio engine, film requires sounds to be spatialised before…

  A question I get somewhat often in how sound design for music differs from sounds in film or video games. Generally speaking, they’re very similar, just used slightly differently. In this post I’ll have some audio examples, so be sure to wear headphones or use speakers! Instead of playing scaled notes and regular rhythms,…

  This post goes a bit off-course in places to tie in other synthesis and sound knowledge and is more stream of consciousness than proper science Short answer: the spikes you see on a spectral analyzer after the tallest, lowest pitched one are harmonics. Long answer: every object has some amount of resonance, and depending…

  Equalisers, or EQs, are devices that use filters in an array to modify the levels of parts of the frequency spectrum. They’re amazing for reducing harsh frequencies, sculpting sounds, and to create more precise targets for further processing, such as for compression based on a set frequency band (common with sidechains) or distortion (like…