Extreme Effects

Effect processors are essential for all music makers, but if you’re just using them to mix or fix recording issues, you’re missing out on a vast world of sonic creativity. Let’s push those processors to the extremes and see how we can turn simple sounds into something unique. Let’s head down the rabbit hole...

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These days, with all the easy-to-use hardware and software music-making tools at our disposal, the creation of electronic music can become formulaic. Lay down beats, add a bassline, program some synths and samples over them, and you’ve got a basic club banger. Effects processors, used in traditional ways, help sweeten and polish those sounds to give you a tune that’s passably functional, but a bit generic.

So how can you push your productions past the formulaic and come up with ideas never heard before? By getting adventurous with sound design, of course! Take time to explore all those processors sitting in your plugins folder, push them to extremes, and you can quickly spin generic ideas into creative gold.

You don’t need a degree in complex sound synthesis, either – just fire up those processing plugins and morph existing signals!

Creative effects processing demands a slightly different workflow to traditional synthesis and sampling approaches. When crafting sounds with a synth or sampler, you build every sonic component from the ground up, giving you microscopic control over every aspect of the resulting sound, right down to the harmonic level. This demands a fairly deep level of synthesis knowledge – if you don’t know what you’re doing, things can get messy (or fall apart!) quickly. Alternatively, if you’re creatively processing existing sounds with effects, you already have some raw material as a starting point, which can guide your decisions and keep you on track. For example, if you’re starting with a sustained vocal sample, and the end goal is a tonal ‘drone’ or FX tone, some of the decision-making is already done for you – it’s just a case of trying out different sound-sculpting treatments over the raw ‘oscillator’ until you end up with something you like.