Advanced Sound Design Course

This course will truly take your music productions to the next level whether you are producing killer dancefloor tracks or designing sound for multimedia. Experienced professional producer Danny J Lewis shows you how to reproduce contemporary sounds or create your own unique style. You will discover professional production techniques and some of Danny’s best kept secrets via the help of nearly 100 video tutorials!

Course Materials:

Weekly online masterclass with a pro producer

Up to 100 Quicktime video tutorials

300 pages of notes

350MB of 24bit audio samples

24/7 access to student / tutor discussion forums

Course Breakdown

Introduction to Sound Design

• The History of sound in film
• Creating sounds for films from real sounds
• The first synthesised soundtrack: ‘Forbidden Planet’
• Famous sound design icons
• BBC Radiophonic Workshop
• Sound design tools

Reaktor: The Basics

• Standalone mode
• Understanding the interface
• Instruments, Ensembles, Modules and Macros
• Loading a snapshot
• Reaktor as a virtual instrument/effect in Cubase, Logic and Ableton
• Saving the audio to a wav file using Recorderbox

Reaktor Ensemble Workshop

• Creating a library of introductory Ensembles
• Vintage Compressor
• Custom effect construction
• Wind machine
• Tape Deck
• Band and stereo filter

Building an Analogue Synth in Reaktor

• How to build an analog synth
• Envelopes
• Modulation
• Filters
• Oscillators

Creating Custom Presets

• Bass sounds
• Lead sounds
• Sound FX
• Pad/ string Sounds
• Stab/ chord Sounds

Foley

• The recording equipment you need
• How to create your own FX library
• Free download of the 318MB Library of 24bit Audio to use in exercises
• Audio editing
• Manipulating audio
• Foley exercises for different audio processes

Using Kontakt for Creative Sampling

• Introduction to creative sampling:
• Explaining the Kontakt interface
• How to build instruments
• Wave editor
• Script editor
• Mapping editor
• Sample modulation

Workshop: Kontakt Modulation

• Zone envelopes
• Filtering
• Gating
• LFO's
• Decay, breakpoint, decay
• Multiple processing: Pitch shift, effect send and Lofi

Exploring Pitch and Time

• Time Machine: elastic audio in Kontakt. Timestretching in real-time
• How to synchronise tempos
• Tone Machine: playing musical phrases with drumloops
• How to use legato mode
• Create your unique instruments

Rhythm Science

• Randomstepshifting in Reaktor
• The Beat Machine in Kontakt
• Creating unique drum sounds using groups
• Turning two short samples into a complete 'Electronic' drum kit

Recreating Sounds from Film

• Famous sonic textures
• How to analyse sounds and reverse engineer them
• Exercise: Recreating famous movie sounds
• A Sonic Texture from "War of the Worlds"
• A Sonic Texture from "Predator"
• A sonic texture from "Star Wars"

Final Project and Exam

• Project: To create sounds for key moments in a short movie (provided by us)
• Importing video into Logic, Ableton and Cubase
• Creating a mixture of foley and electronic sounds
• You compose the music
• Final Exam

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Tutor profile

Danny Lewis
Since his debut single, the club chart number one and national top 30 hit 'Spend the Night', Danny's music has been supported by the likes of Masters at Work, Gilles Peterson, David Morales, Kenny Carpenter, Todd Edwards, Todd Terry, and  Danny Rampling to name but a few.

Created on this course

This video shows an impressive final project in sound design for multimedia from online student Phil Ventre.