Sound Design—Just how easy is it?

A good amount of times, I have seen “bedroom” producers start out with a pirated copy of a certain digital audio workstation, some sort of cracked synthesizer, and a plethora of professional presets. While pirating is not quite the best in terms of branching into professional production, I get why these people to all these things: to simplify music production and to sort of “try it out” in a way.

Laidback Luke claims that trying to do sound design as a starting producer distracts from creativity, and really lengthens the production process. Zen World, a popular sound designer, states exactly the same, even claiming sound design and production are different fields.

I have personal experience with sound designing and I personally say it depends. Some sounds are easier than others to (re)create, as I have found. For instance, progressive house leads are easier to make than the huge distorted saws heard in big room. Some of the biggest dubstep tracks’ growls are harder to recreate than others (it took me lots more time to create Zomboy’s sound than others).

I don’t claim to be an expert, but one tip for new producers is to not avoid free synths. The lack of presets seems daunting, but it won’t take much time to try and recreate the steps in the many sound design tutorials in your plugin. If you do indeed pirate synths, it’s still useful to get used to the synth and get comfortable creating your own sounds.

However, if you simply want to get music out, it’s not that harmful to use presets. Contrary to popular belief, you can still be creative with presets. It’s all a matter of how you use the presets, how you combine them. It’s the higher level of sound design.