1. Breakfast on C905J86Y by ScotTunes.

(You can click here to go to his website and you can click here to hear other songs by this man.)

Of course I have to say a spent *far* more time than usual on this! The song was put together in about three hours, but I spent at least a week trying everything possible to coax a tone out of the noise heheh.

A few things I did that helped create actual tones:

- used a low pass filter, but boosted the Resonance to extreme one-step-from-self-oscillating type settings. Example, the kick. The big kick was done setting the Filter cutoff fairly low and adding crap-loads of Resonance. This, unfortunately, is where certain samplers will excel and others will fail since each has very different characteristics and Filter settings and levels. Some samplers don't have very good resonance and others have *none*. The new Alesis sample-workstation has many filters, and NONE of them have resonance. Remind me to avoid those at all costs! :)

- set the loop points to different values.. This made a really big difference. I found that if you loop any part of the noise but set the loop points exceptionally close together it produced a tone. For example just to demonstarte, if you put the noise in an editor, set the diplay to "Samples" instead of time and select any section of the noise but set the loop to exactly 25 samples you get basically an "A" note. If you double the length to 50 samples, you get an "A" note an octave lower. If you go to 100 samples that produces another A, etc., until you reach about 800 samples. Beyond that it starts sounding like noise again.
This worked great for the bell-like sounds and the techno-like melodic bit before the end.

- oscillated the Filter Cutoff - at the ennd of the song there's a bleepy-resonant bit. That was done by sustaing a loop of the noise and using a Random Osc as an LFO to the Filter Cutoff.

- layered sounds - the snare is two layers together, one to produce a very short tone and one to add the ambient "shhhh" sound that comes when you hit a snare and the snare springs on the snare head.

- used Amplitude Envelopes with Break poinnts, so I used ADBD2R envelopes instead of always just using ADSR envelopes. Especially good for high hat sounds.

- lots of panning, Chorus, and Flanger deppending on the sound to help thicken it and add spaciousness.

- used distortion on the "whacking" rhythmmic bit near the beginning. It seemed to make them much punchier and in yer face.

Anyways, I enjoyed it immensely and learned *alot*!

I'm just not the type to keep secrets. After all, it still takes skill to write a good tune regardless of how many expensive synths someone has. Anyone who thinks a sound design secret will give them an "edge" in the music business is sadly deluded (unless they work as a Sound Designer LOL).