DAW: FL Studio 12.
I got this amazing soundscape in Omnisphere by mucking around with the user sound feature. I thought I would share this to maybe give some inspiration to any sound designers out there who need a pick me up, or whatever.
Alright here's the abridged story of how this happened. I was bored, essentially, so I saw a weather radio, and though I could take its alarm sound and turn it into something completely insane, and beautiful, and holy balls did I ever accomplish it.
So I'm going to include some of the things I did to make it sound the way it does. The original sound of the alarm is just a simple rising and falling sine-ish sound.
And So I was just mucking around in Omnisphere, and I ended up with this after about 45-50 minutes.
https://www.dropbox.com/s/ltzh4kktroqm3tp/SD_DM.wav?dl=0I'll try and explain this as best as I can. Using Omnisphere 2, oscillator 1 was the alarm sound effect, and the second was a conventional sinewave. The attack and release on each oscillator were respectively set; Attack was delayed slightly to give it more of a pad feel, release was held out for about 7.2 seconds to give it time to lean off.
The effects
"racks" I used are as follows:
Oscillator One: Innerspace, Pro-Verb, and Radio Delay. Harmonia Synthesis feature.
Oscillator Two: This isn't an effect rack, but I used the Granular synthesis feature.
Okay, so knowing that, try and follow along with the process here, and see if you can create some crazy shit, too, if you want.
So, using the innerspace effect can be very beneficial to those trying to create soundscapes, at least as far as I've observed, and for this, I utilized the Electro Bubblescape, and Tic Tacs on glass presets.
Do note, you can only use the presets in Innerspace, but they are very versatile. The Tic Tacs on glass created that wonderful high-end almost wind chime sound you're hearing. The Electro Bubblescape preset gave it the smoothness, and deep, entrancing sound. I did notice there was some slight distortion, so I toned down the output on Innerspace, and it was solved.
Using Pro Verb, with CPU load cranked all the way up on it, I tuned down the reverb time to prevent over-muddiniess in the sound, but it was still present enough to still give it that dreamlike atmosphere.
I added the radio delay to make the
"wind chime" sound you hear resonate throughout the entirety of the sound design so that it continued on, and tumbled its way through the sample you hear there, before gradually ending until the soundscape stops. (If you've actually listened to it yet, you'll get what I mean, hopefully).
And that's where it ends for effects. I did utilize the Harmonia feature to give the sound more low-end, and depth, and I'm not going to tell you just how I did that, because I want you to experiment yourself with at least
some stuff.
The second osc was as simple as possible, a sine wave mixed down so that it wasn't too abrasive, and I added some granular synthesis to give it some texture. You can really hear the sine wave on its own at the very end of the above sample.
So there! I figured I'd share some shit because why not? Even if you don't have Omni, do take some things from this if you can. Reverb and delay can really benefit in soundscapes if used properly, and the harmonia feature is basically adding polyphony, but that's all I'll say about that. Experiment yourself with this sort of thing, even without Omnisphere, if you don't happen to have it. There are some crazy things you can do with samples even if you have some basic VSTs laying around.
(
EDIT): The Sine waves introduced (C CHORD) (Hz) were 200, 170, and 130 respectively. This gave more lows and depth to the sound.
