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ORGANIC SOUND DESIGN MASTERCLASS - Part 1: Introduction to Granulation and Layering with sv1

Added 2020-10-28 17:26:58 +0000 UTC

In this Lux Cache tutorial series, Texas producer and resident sound design god sv1 shows us a peek into achieving the hyper-organic synthesis methods and sound processing he is so known for in his productions. This three-part series has a huge focus on how to approach left-field sound design in an expressive and abstract way, creating the mindset to generate detailed sonics you intended and the beautiful ones you didn't.

This tutorial is available as both a Patreon text post and .pdf document format attached. We ask you kindly to not share Lux Cache content outside of the Patreon, our contributors rely on your donations. All preview sounds/clips mentioned in this tutorial can be found in this private SoundCloud playlist or this accompanying Google Drive folder.

I want to start with a bit of a thought before we get into this. Often I get asked what I use or what plugins I recommend. While that is helpful to some degree, I find that process and technique is way more important than x, y, or z device (also the short answer is that I use everything, and that’s not very helpful). This lesson will be going over techniques mostly in Ableton, however, it’s very important to understand that we can do all of this within **any** DAW, there are magic and quirks within all of them, I want to emphasize that no one daw is superior, so please, please, please, get clever within your own space even if it is or isn’t Ableton.

When I started out producing, I found it easy to copy recipes on YouTube tutorials and download presets, but the thing that always stumped me was how anyone came up or arrived at these sound design decisions. I think there’s a freedom to be had in knowing technique rather than getting stuck in the endless cycle of preset scrolling, as many of us do. So to provide a brief thought on how I arrive at some decisions, I would say that usually, my goal is to find out how to misuse plugins or use them in a manner that they’re not intended for. This is abstract, but it will start to make sense the deeper I get into this.

Here’s a list of concepts I’m going to go over with this lesson:

- Layering/Sampling

- Selection, Foley

- Sample Mixing/Randomization

- Granulation

- LFOs

- Live Input Granulation

- FM

- Grain Delay

- Texture Mode

- A List of Granular Devices I use

LAYERING // SAMPLING : Sample Selection, foley

To begin, the first and most obvious way to achieve organic sounds is just with foley. That’s usually where I start when I begin layering or even just starting a song. It’s good to have in mind what sort of sounds and textures we’re trying to invoke, just so we know where to start. I usually have several foley libraries I grab from, some of them are my own personal recorded ones, others are ones I’ve paid for, and some are just video game sound libraries (which many are available for free on the internet). From there I like to go over every single instrument/sound and retexturize them to bring out new colors in them. Obvious things to layer are snares/claps/percussion:

**1 - snare layers + full snare.wav**

This technique does not only have to be applied to snares it can be applied to tonal instruments, kick drums, even fx, always get creative with it.

LAYERING // SAMPLING: Sample Mixing, Randomization

This trick is one that has been pretty near and dear to me. Within most modern samplers we can load in numerous sounds at once and in Ableton’s sampler (not simpler) we can drag in 100s of samples at once, took me forever to figure out why someone would ever need this. Then select ‘Vel’ within the zone tab. Then we’ll right-click in the zone and click ‘distribute ranges equally’. What this does is make it so that when we change the velocity of our incoming midi note, it will trigger a different respective sample.

Normally, once we do this, all the samples will playback as soon as we press down on a key, and it’ll just be a loud mess. However, if we go into the ‘midi’ tab on the sampler, we can find a panel with a bunch of drop-down menus. One of these is labeled ‘velocity’, from there we’ll drag down on its respective drop-down menu and select the option ‘sample selector’ in ‘Destination A’, and turn the amount up to 100.

(Midi Panel in Sampler, Sample Selector mapped to Velocity)

**2 - sample selector randomizer.wav**

From here, we’re going to drag in an arpeggiator, and then a velocity midi device. The arpeggiator is going to control the rate at which we randomize the sample playback, so feel free to play around with the parameters in any way. Next, within the velocity device, we’re going to change the mode to ‘fixed’ and ‘out hi’ to 64, and ‘random’ to 64. This makes it so that every time the arpeggiator triggers a new midi note, that midi note will have an entirely random velocity.

(Midi Device Chain used to generate note triggers with random velocities)

So with that chain in place ahead of the sampler, once we play a note, the sampler will now play a different sample every time a note is played. I have this combination saved as a group (cmd/ctrl + g) because I often use this technique when I want to synthesize my own random foley cocktails.

Alternatively, instead of using many samples we can use a single sample and change the ‘midi’ panel to this setting so that instead of triggering a new sample like above, the sampler will instead begin playback at different points on the sample.

(Midi Panel in Sampler, Sample Offset mapped to Velocity)

**2 - sample offset randomizer.wav**

Also, applying Sample Offset to Destination A, and Sample Selector to Destination B in combination can yield another layer of randomness to our sampling, the list goes on! Don’t be afraid to get freaky and experiment, and use any combination of samples.

(Midi Panel in Sampler, Sample Offset, and Sample Selector mapped to Velocity)

**2 - sample selector + offset randomizer.wav**

GRANULATION

My go-to granulator is Ableton’s Granulator 1, many people prefer Granulator 2, but I find that Granulator 2 crashes on me quite frequently, so use either or, but there are also **many** different ones to choose from. Most DAWs have their own type of granulator. I’ve provided a list of all the different ones I like to use at the bottom of this article. If you haven’t heard of this technique before, granulation is the process of playing back small slivers of samples. Essentially what I did above could be considered granulation.

We can repeat the process above, by adding an LFO (free with Ableton suite) in front of our granulator and mapping it to ‘FilePos’ (File Position)

(M4L LFO being mapped to File Position)

The LFO is what’s going to most of the work here, I like to change the LFO from ‘Sine’ to ‘Random’ and turn up the ‘Jitter’ and ‘Smooth’ setting, this way we’ll get an even more random, and smooth playback of our sample. Here’s an example:

Source Sample:

**3 - source sample before granulator.wav**

Randomized Sample:

**3 - granular w random lfo.wav**

For me, this is usually a preliminary step, because although this is a great way to generate new sounds, once I start going crazy with effects **after** setting this all up, is where all the crazy sound design for me happens. I’ll go deeper into the effecting I do in a later tutorial.

I think what everyone who’s ever used a granulator has found, is that the magic in it, is just all the experimentation possibilities. I find all the craziest sounds from dropping samples that internally I think “shouldn’t” go inside of a granulator. At least for me, my gut reaction is to drop tonal pads into a granulator and continue making pads in it, but I found that when I started dropping drums, basses, full songs, literally anything else into granulator, was where all the magic in granulation was for me. I can’t emphasize enough the importance of experimentation in this. Here are some examples of unconventional granulation:

Bass in a granulator:

**4 - granulated bass sample.wav**

Drum Loop in a granulator

**4 - granulated drum loop.wav**

A Full Song in a granulator

**4 - granulated song.wav**

GRANULATION: Live Input Granularization

One of the hidden features of Ableton's granulator is its live input device, “ml.Granulator Input” or “GranulatorInput II”.

(ml.Granulator Input, GranulatorInput II)

How these work is that we put them on a channel or bus that we want to grab audio from. Once we’ve done that and have granulator loaded on a separate channel, we should see “Live In” and “Grab” turn on inside granulator.

(Live In section being turned on)

What happens now is that we press play and let the channel with the input device play audio for a period, and then once it has done that, we press “Grab” to send this audio into granulator. Here is an example:

**4.5 - LiveInputExample.wav**

One might ask why we would use this technique instead of just bouncing the audio and dragging it into granulator. This way allows us to automate what is inside our granulator even while our track is playing. See, we can automate the grab button and pull different things into our granulator at any point. We can even place this live input device in front of granulator. The input audio could be changing as well, this just gives us a further level of randomization and fluidity to our system. With this method, we could continuously generate new sounds with no end. It’s worth mentioning that all these sounds generated through granulation can be resampled and be used as layering material with any sounds and ought to be.

GRANULATION: FM in Granulator

One feature of granulator that offers really interesting results is the FM tab. We can enable this by clicking on the button that says ‘FM’. Frequency Modulation (FM) could be covered in its own tutorial, so for now, I’m just going to go over how I like to use it.

(FM turned on)

I find the FM feature most useful for creating basses, but of course experiment and find ways to use this feature that work for **you**. To create basses in granulator, I like to pull in heavily distorted samples, foley, synthesis, or otherwise. In the above screenshot, I’ve dragged in a very loud sample of a rock being crushed. Once I’ve done that, I like to make the grain size/rate very fast. This sort of creates a wavetable-esque approach similar to what we might see in a vst like serum. From there I like to pitch my sample way down and then slowly bring up the FM amount knob and the FM Frequency knob until I get a sound that I’m looking for. Here’s an example of some results without any sort of post-processing:

**5 - bass created with granulator.wav**

Generally, once I’ve found a bass tone I like, I go and then process it further, but as this whole tutorial has emphasized, experiment, and find what works for you.

GRANULATION: Grain Delay

One last device I’d like to touch on is Ableton’s Grain Delay. The gut response for granular devices or delay based devices, at least from my point of view, has been to use them to generate pad-like and dreamy sounds. While we can do this with this device, and every other device we’ve discussed prior, one thing I’ve found that grain delay can do is make some nasty and distorted sounds that are very interesting. The first technique I want to go over is something that could be applied to every instrument or effect, but one that I’ve found particularly interesting with this one. If we go and insert grain delay into a group, we can map all the parameters to one knob, like so:

(all parameters to one knob)

Automating this knob can yield a variety of different sounds depending on what sounds we feed it. I like to use it on sounds to make them sound sloshy or like they’ve been thrown into a tornado and spun about. Here are some examples:

**6 - grain delay one knob + source sample.wav**

The final technique I want to go over is one that can be implemented in many other delays, but the results it yields from this specific device are my favorite. You might have used delays before to create a metallic effect via some sort of combination of high feedback, low delay configuration. Here we’re going to create something similar. By turning up the ‘spray’ slightly to somewhere between 10ms and 40ms, and turning delay to 1.00 ms, dry/wet to 100%, and feedback to 95%, we can create a metallic effect that offers up various tones upon each hit. I love to layer this effect with kicks, snares, fx, foley, everything, the results are always really good.

**6 - grain delay metal trick + source sample.wav**

Some post-processing I like to apply to this especially with percussion related samples usually consists of an ott thrown on the end at 1000% time at 100% wet, just to wrangle the sound a bit, because it tends to get out of hand pretty quickly.

GRANULATION: Texture Mode

In Ableton, when editing clips, there are several warp algorithms to choose from. For now, I’m just going to be covering ‘texture’ and the tricks that can be accomplished with it. When we enable texture mode, two parameters will appear, grain size and flux. When warping a sample with this algorithm, the sample is parsed out into grains, grain size of course controls the size of the grains that appear, and flux controls the amount of randomness in the grains.

(texture mode, in clip view)

Similar to what we accomplished above, we can use texture mode to add metallic texture to our sounds. How I like to achieve this is by pitching up my sample somewhere between 1 and 12 steps, and then turning grain size all the way down to 2.00, and turning flux to 0.00. Also, sometimes I press the ‘*2’ button to add even more metallic texture. Grain size does not need to be left at 2.00, lots of cool sounds are found from turning up this value while pitching and stretching.

**7 - texture mode metal trick.wav**

One last trick I’d like to go over can be applied in any of the algorithms for interesting effect (and should be), but in particular, I enjoy the results it produces in texture mode. If we click on a yellow warp marker on our sample and then change the segment bpm to ‘999’, we can create a very textural and stretchy timbre within the sample. It’s also fun to apply the metallic effect we did above in combination with this one and then automating the grain size in the clip view.