{"id":265,"date":"2016-10-16T14:38:00","date_gmt":"2016-10-16T14:38:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/box5722.temp.domains\/~audioor1\/3-tricks-to-get-your-synths-just-right\/"},"modified":"2016-10-16T14:38:00","modified_gmt":"2016-10-16T14:38:00","slug":"3-tricks-to-get-your-synths-just-right","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/audioordeal.co.uk\/3-tricks-to-get-your-synths-just-right\/","title":{"rendered":"3 Tricks to Get Your Synths Just Right"},"content":{"rendered":"
Even with the most powerful, expensive synths, the sounds may not quite hit the spot. This isn’t through the synth’s lack of ability, it is simply because further processing and playing about may be needed. Remember, a synth can sound amazing when solo’ed but all of a sudden it holds no weight in a track. Here are three tricks to improve how your synths sound in the context of a track and some ideas to implement them.<\/p>\n
<\/a><\/p>\n <\/div>\n There are two types of panning which I will discuss:<\/p>\n A few things to note with dealing with stereo enhancement, whether it is via panning or a dedicated plugin, never widen your low frequencies. They should, for phase reasons, always remain in mono. This doesn’t affect the sound as bass is essentially omni-directional and so much harder to locate anyway.<\/div>\n An example of this is to add reverb to the synth bus instead of each individual synth. To see the reason for this, we must consider the reverb plugin as a virtual room with reflections and echoes. If we add reverb to each different synth and play them together, it would be like the sound of several different rooms mixed together.<\/p>\n We want the sound to be tight so we want all the elements to be present in the same, single “room”. With just one reverb, there is likely to be a lot more clarity (the mud that three reverbs will add can accumulate), and it will bind the sounds together.<\/p>\n In the same vein, adding a compressor to individual synths may be useful in some applications but by putting a compressor on the synth bus, again will glue the sounds together.<\/p>\n If you need to add a compressor to just one of the synths as well, do so but remember it can compress a lot gentler as it will be followed by a stage of compression<\/a> in the bus FX.<\/p>\n Bear in mind all the instruments which you want sidechained to the kick as you can group them into a bus for sidechain compression so only one instance of a compressor is needed.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
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<\/span>If you don’t already group instruments into busses\/folders I recommend you do. With this trick, you want to place all “like” synths into a bus for further processing. You can add some effects to each one individually (EQ is a good example) but adding certain effects to the group makes the sound a lot more glued.<\/p>\n