Protohype Artist Accelerator · Week 3

How to actually
get better at
sound design

Take a preset apart. Find the one to three things making it tick. Then go build something new with them.

Why we are doing it this way

Watching me make a patch teaches you one patch

The tutorial trap

You learn to make one specific sound, and now you can copy one person. That has its place. It does not compound.

What we want instead

Understanding why things work. That transfers to every patch you open for the rest of your life.

Sound design has rules. Learn the rules, then break them on purpose.

First, the honest part

The problem is not that you use presets

Presets are a really good way to get really good at sound design. Better than a tutorial, if you know how to use them.

The real problem

A drop with eight presets in it will have a disconnect. They were made by eight other people, for eight other songs.

The middle ground

Jumping straight from "I cannot do sound design" to "I never use presets" is not realistic. Use presets to learn, then remake them yourself.

The method

Three steps, infinite times

01Find a preset you like. The Serum 2 presets on Splice are genuinely good now. Grab a stack of them.
02Turn things off until the patch loses its identity. Whatever you turned off is what was making it tick.
03Open a new patch and start with that one thing. Now you are learning the effect and building a sound at the same time.

Step three is the whole point. Step two is only the diagnosis.

What you are looking for

Every patch has one to three things

Complex or simple, it does not matter. There are always between one and three things doing the work that makes you like it.

The wavetable

Sometimes it is just the wavetable, and everything else is decoration.

A filter move

Most often a filter, or a filter being modulated by something else.

An effect

Or the chain after it. Frequently a combination of all three.

How to read a patch

Oscillator A is your anchor 95 times out of 100

Everything else is a layer sitting on top of it. Turn it all off, find the anchor, then bring things back one at a time. You will know exactly what each piece was contributing.

Tonight, live

What the two patches were hiding

Patch 1A sine wave underneath everythingStrip it back and it starts as a sine. One crunchy high layer sitting on a high pass. The noise was carrying real weight. The filter was barely doing anything.

Patch 2Coarse pitch modulationOne wavetable, and it still sounded complex. The signature move was coarse pitch jumping up a perfect fifth. Disable it and the patch is boring.

SmallestCoarse

ThenFine

ThenSemitones

LargestOctaves

Why presets look so complicated

The people who make them go way overboard on purpose

It has to sound insane for you to buy it off Splice, so a huge amount of what is in there is doing nothing. Your job is to find the part that is actually doing the work.

Finding out what does not work matters more than finding out what does.

Wavetables

The wavetable is the pan you cook in

Cook in a dirty pan with a bunch of crap in it and you will not get a good result. Sound design is combining ingredients until you get something you like eating, and there are not unlimited ingredients.

What makes a good wavetable

If you want tonal, the best ones look like sine waves

Tonal means you can hear the note. For that you want something simple, because you are about to add to it, and add to it, and then leave Serum and add more.

The favoriteReese Mess 3Looks like a sine wave, but there is more going on. Modulate the position slightly and it is already a bass.

Second favoriteKangarooFrom the Massive wavetables. Same story: simple shape, big results. The Massive set is free on Reddit.

Also iconicFrozen, Scrapyard, ChromePlus ICANN Has Kick, the classic Deadmau5 table. Dirty and simple.

That was a bass patch with no filtering and nothing added. We just chose a good wavetable.

Busy wavetables

Not bad. A different job.

Serum 2 with 19-Kangaroo in oscillator A and a busy table called bleep again in oscillator B — **Oscillator A** is running a wavetable called "19-Kangaroo": smooth, close to a sine, and it holds a note. **Oscillator B** is running one called "bleep again": pure chaos, and useless on its own. The simple one anchors the patch, the busy one modulates it.

Do not dodge the busy ones. A busy table in B feeding FM or phase distortion into a simple table in A is where a lot of the fun is. On their own they sound thin and need a sub under them.

Modulating wavetable position

Depends entirely on which kind you picked

Kangaroo wavetable with LFO 1 modulating WT Pos at 23 percent, range 83 to 141 — LFO 1 into WT Pos at 23 percent. Look at the range: **83 to 141**, not 0 to 255. You travel through the good part of the table and nothing else.

Simple wavetable Modulate it Draw a custom shape rather than using the default ramp. Keep the moves small.

Busy wavetable Leave it alone Fifty thousand patches live inside one busy table. Find the sweet spot and commit.

The sound you are making serves one specific role. It should do that one thing really well.

Phase distortion

FM from B in Serum 1 is PD in Serum 2

Carrier

Oscillator A. The sound you actually hear.

Modulator

Oscillator B. The signal doing the bending. In Serum you get to choose what that signal is.

The rule

Turn the level off on B. If B still has volume you are not really doing the FM thing any more.

A simple wavetable, phase distortion, a filter and a little reverb. Plenty of producers have built careers on sounds this simple.

The last big idea

Split your modulation into two jobs

Job oneMovementHow the sound moves. The wobble, the downbeat, the one shot, the legato screech. Decide this before you open the synth.

Job twoTimbre and toneWhat the sound actually is. Wavetable position, FM amount, filter colour.

Give them separate LFOs at different rates. Do not make one LFO do both jobs, and do not get your movement by wobbling the wavetable position.

A whole drop from one sound

Program bass like you program hi-hats

One long note, then draw different shapes at different points across the LFO. That is what Massive called the Performer.

Why it works

A drummer is not a robot. Nobody hits the hat with the same velocity every time. The same rule applies to bass, and almost nobody does it.

Go listen

Nintendo by Liquid Stranger. One bass, no layers, and listen to how much it evolves across the drop.

Post processing

What is actually in the Max Rack

Ableton chain: OTT, OTT, Glue Compressor, CamelCrusher on British Clean, Saturator, Reverb — Stacked OTTs with **no output on any of them**, because the stack is the output and they compound. Then a glue compressor on a quick attack, soft clipping the moment the red dot shows, and a saturator for drive. CamelCrusher is free and still does the job.

No time based effects inside Serum. Reverb and delay go after the rack, or you are OTTing your reverb.

The path

Three patches a day for twelve weeks is 252 patches

About 190 of them will suck. That is fine, that is the process. Somewhere in there the door opens and it stops being a fight. The best sound designers you know are just the ones who have failed at it the most.

This week

Your homework

01Fill out the Anatomy of a Preset sheet on every preset you take apart. Print it, or use the fillable version in any PDF reader.
02Make patches. Three to five every time you open Ableton, before you write anything.
03Drop at least one Serum patch in the Discord by Friday. Share the tricks. That is the whole point of a cohort.
04If you are not doing Primer yet, it is on your dashboard under Synthesis. It is ear training, and it is the fastest way through the fundamentals.

Your music will be mediocre until your sound design is not. Write bangers.