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Do you create synth patches from scratch while under a deadline?

musicalweather

musicalweather

Senior Member
Hi all, I’m wondering if anyone out there creates synth patches from scratch while working on a project under a deadline. I’m trying to improve my synth programming / editing skills with the dream that one day I can create patches that I want / need on demand. Sure, presets are great, but honestly, it takes so much time to go through them to find the ones that work. I imagine if I had top level synth programming skills, I might actually be able to create a patch faster than finding one among all the presets. So I’m just wondering if there are people out there who actually do this.

Some further context: I write music for video games and sometimes film. Right now my go-to synths are Omnisphere and Massive. I have NI’s KUCE, so I have all the synths in there… I recently dived into Razor, which I find really great. Also have Trillian. I don’t know much about synth programming, but am able to tweak sounds a little bit. I’m going through Syntorial and am learning a lot. Half way through and hope to finish it by June! I’ve enrolled in some courses on Omnisphere and Razor.

Thanks for any info.
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For sure... a big part of workflow is in the prep / R&D portion of your project. Often I will have entire days blocked off so that I can create a few dozen sounds for a given project, create samples, or find presets and tweak them.

If there's no time for that, on a smaller, fast paced project, I have go-to sounds already loaded up or in mind. I'm not a hugely synth-y composer however, if I use them they are nearly never the focus of the cue.
 
re201spaceecho said:
For sure... a big part of workflow is in the prep / R&D portion of your project. Often I will have entire days blocked off so that I can create a few dozen sounds for a given project, create samples, or find presets and tweak them.

If there's no time for that, on a smaller, fast paced project, I have go-to sounds already loaded up or in mind. I'm not a hugely synth-y composer however, if I use them they are nearly never the focus of the cue.
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Thanks for your reply. My problem is, I don't always know what I need until I'm in the thick of it.
 
I find myself writing for deadlines a lot these days, which is great, but usually doesn't allow for a lot of sonic exploration and sound design time. Like @HCMarkus mentioned, preset tweaking and layering are effective approaches in these situations.

Omnispere, Zebra, Diva, and Hive are my go-to synths, and I continually augment them with 3rd party presets. When I have downtime, I like to browse thru presets and add useful ones to Projects in Omni, or color-tag the u-he presets, creating a small focused pool of reliable sounds I know I can use.

But I find this approach is only helpful for very narrowly defined types of sounds. Pre-gathering a bunch of favorite general sounds is only marginally useful, at best, when I'm in the trenches... but YMMV.
 
re201spaceecho said:
For sure... a big part of workflow is in the prep / R&D portion of your project. Often I will have entire days blocked off so that I can create a few dozen sounds for a given project, create samples, or find presets and tweak them.

If there's no time for that, on a smaller, fast paced project, I have go-to sounds already loaded up or in mind. I'm not a hugely synth-y composer however, if I use them they are nearly never the focus of the cue.
Click to expand...
This for sure! Spending a few days doing sound design beforehand and making a palette so to speak for the tone of the project...even if it just a jumping off point, and tweak further in the moment. It's a lot easier for me to manage that way, making smaller adjustments than starting from scratch (especially with hardware). It also tends to make stuff unique to the project at hand. I also do this on a very regular basis in general, with a really wide variety to archive and pull from for stuff with even tighter deadlines that I don't have the luxury of the prep phase. Also separating these two processes works great for me...sound design days are just wide open with experimentation and then writing days are sharply focused starting with those jumping off points.
 
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