#136 - 25th August 2024 - Breathe
I was in the mood for sound design today.
The synth sounds of The Prodigy were long on my bucket list.
There is this absolutely brilliant video made by Alex Ball on some of the classic Prodigy sounds and how they were made with the gear available at the time, like a JD-990, Korg Prophecy and of course a 303.
As a kid, and even before I became a guitar player, I always found The Prodigy‘s sound design fascinating.
That‘s because of this specific gnarliness under high distortion that is very similar to tonal qualities of a distorted electric guitar.
Another thing that makes their synth sounds so special, is the use of formant filters and high filter resonance that is modulated and gives the sounds a vowel like characteristic.
Something I find myself allured to all the time.
So how to approach this with common tools? The obvious path leads to Serum. Digital, powerful when it comes to modulation, and brutal.
And Sam Smyers even has a video in which he reproduces the lead sound in Breathe.
I tend to loose concentration when copying 1:1, so I mostly try to follow such videos as long as I can, but I would eventually digress a little here or there with different FX or modulation or filter settings.
Like stated before, what brings the sound across the finish line is not so much the synth itself, but FX processing.
I ran it into a guitar amp, NDSP Plini and it came out quite gorgeous :)