The Most Important Sound In Electronic Music

Today, I'm going to show you how to make the most important sound in electronic music. This sound is so important because not only is it the most used go-to sound for any electronic artist, but just knowing how to make this sound will give you the ability to make any sound that you could ever imagine. So right before we jump into the sound design, don't forget guys, we have a huge guitar pack coming with hundreds of real guitar melodies. You can try that guitar pack out for free in the description below this video. Let's jump into the tutorial. To make this sound, I'm going to be using a really popular synth plugin called X for Serum and I'm using it because it's the most popular synth plugin and hopefully most of you have it. If you don't, it's super accessible. They do offer a free trial for this plugin. You can just search for it on Google or you can use splice.com and get a $10 a month rent to own plan. Let's jump into the design here. First step is you're going to want to open up a new instance of X for Serum. When I go into sound design, I like to have a melody or a set of chords that I can vibe with while I'm building the sound. So make sure you just write out a melody or a set of chords. Open up your instance of X for Serum. So the first step when sound designing is to go to menu and initialize preset just so you default every control within Serum. And then step two to make this sound is to turn on the filter and make sure your A here is selected. This tells Serum that you would like to filter oscillator A. That's what this A stands for. So if we press play, we should get that nice warm pad sound. But I like a really tight filter on my sound. So I'm going to turn this to MG low 24. The next thing I'm going to do is grab this cutoff knob and just pull it all the way down to zero. So now the sound will disappear when we press play. I'm going to come down to envelope 2 now and wrap this knob. And then if we press play, we get the full wall of sound. But if we pull down the sustain knob, now we're basically telling Serum that we would like envelope 2 to turn this cutoff knob at a rate of speed so fast that it creates this pluck sound. If we click envelope 2, we can alter the sound and make it a little bit more warm by pulling this blue ring down a little bit. That pluck is the most popular pluck sound in EDM history. So if we go to the effects tab and click delay on and then reverb on and just turn them up a little bit. Just because we have that sound doesn't mean that the design is over. Like I said earlier, that's a fundamental building block sound. So you can add on to the sound and do whatever you would like. I can turn it into a pad by increasing the sustain here. We can soften up the attack and make sort of like a wobbly pad just like that. Pull this sustain back down. Watch what happens now if I increase the unison here. We get a wider sound. But watch this guys. This sound is not just a pad. It's not just a lead either. We can use this same exact sound for a bass. So what I'm going to do is duplicate this layer here, make a new region, and then take these bass notes and paste them down here. Let's give ourselves a funky bass rhythm. Now let's take the same sound and add a lead arp. Now that we know how to make this sound, we can add a layer to those plucks and just make everything come to life. Okay, so let's take our instrument now, increase the reverb just a little bit, and now if we put that there and then the bass notes there and run this, we get a nice little start to a song. So now I challenge you guys to take that sound and make something dope. Hope you guys learned a lot from that video. If you would like to learn more about every element of music production, whether it's sound design, music theory, and song arrangement, come join me in my EDM bootcamp. My EDM bootcamp is not just a six-week course that teaches you every element of music production, but it's also an entire back-end mastermind community where you can send me your songs for track feedback and ask me any question that you would like regarding music production. If that sounds like something you're into, I have a link at the top of the description below. You can also check out my packs as well. It's down in the description, and I'll see you guys in the next video.