Unleashing Creative Potential with New Tools

MUSIC & SOUND DESIGN PRACTICE

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Exploring New Tools for Creative Inspiration

Are you feeling stuck in a creative rut? Sometimes, all it takes is a little exploration and the right tools to reignite your creative spark....

With that cliche marketing pitch out the way.

I want to share my experience of how I discovered new tools that helped me create an engine sound effect using Massive X.

And the best part? I found a way to access these tools for just £8.99 a month!

Discovering MASSIVE X

As a creative, I go through ruts and burnout, as i'm sure many of you reading do as-well.

One day, I stumbled upon Massive X or atleast knew about it but never fully used it.

I've used massive before and wanted to actually try utilising it to create some sound effects as previously i was creating everything in either serum or cardinal synth using noise samples and envelope modulation so I decided to give it a try and get a fresh perspective & learn another synth in the process.

Crafting the Engine Sound

With Massive X, I started to mess around and decided to create an engine sound effect.

Through my university lectures in sound design for games, we chatted about engine sound design and it kinda got stuck in my head as if i could do it better than my previous attempts from years ago so, why not try?.

After an hour or so of tweaking and fine-tuning, I finally had a sound effect that felt right.

LAYER: OSC ONLY

LAYER YOUR SOUNDS

LAYER: NOISE ONLY

MODULATION PERFORMANCE

Being able to have a performance feature through utilising the mod wheel to input live modulation is a essential means of bringing life to an engine sound ....Plus it's pretty fun!

The oscillators layer is essentially the "body" of the sound with a mix of different waveforms and modes with the same range of pitching with modulation.

Massive X has some great oscillators with multiple waveforms and modes that really are great when you find a good combination. For this sound i used the Sin-Tri-Saw-SQ wavetable on OSC 1 and the SQ-Sin-Saw on OSC 2 and essentially only used some slight modulation between sine and triangle waveforms.

The mode used (Mirror) had a great sound which really gave the engine a rich texture.

The noise layer adds that extra life to the overall sound by giving it a sense of being within a space.

The noise layers consist of experimenting with different noise samples and finding one for the hi-end "wind" & one for the subtle mechanical noise and then adding simple modulation of the noise oscillators pitch through use of the mod wheel.

An extra element i wanted to include over the whole sound was the initial ignition sound of an engine.

I done this by experimenting and adding a simple envelope on the pitch of the noise oscillator, The mix amount of the Pulse modulation (1 &2) on the oscillators and the wavetable position of oscillator 1 .

(represented in blue)

LAYERS COMBINED

CONCLUSION

Finding ways of breaking a rut is always fun and can surprise you.

This sound isn't meant to be a fully fledged final product that I can use for a game or film but simply a demonstration of practicing my skills through learning how to better my capabilities of creating a desired sound with software I'm unfamiliar with and to essentially get myself out off a creative rut.

I hope you found something interesting through reading this blog, as I've stated before writing and expressing my thought process isn't something I'm great at but I can only try and get better.

Anyway thanks for reading and don't forget to subscribe to the newsletter down below, check out some more of my work by browsing around the site and yeah...Thanks!

Gameplay footage by JohnGodgamesHD on YouTube

Offroad Racing - Buggy X ATV X Moto - Nintendo Switch Gameplay (2020)

Link to original content: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ujYntShNsag&t=329s