Dance music 'Whoosh' effect

You can run a noise oscillator through a filter with resonance half up on almost any of the synths in Logic. Use an envelope with a slow attack and no decay or sustain and modulate the filter with the envelope.

jord

Jon,

Jord gave you the most succinct answer on synthesizing a sound I've ever seen. Kudos jord!

Having created a bunch of whooshes in my remix days, let me just mention something about filter types:

• boomy/woofy --> bright/full whoosh = lowpass filter
• the starts-out-deep-but-gets-thinner-over-time whoosh = highpass filter
• the mysterious phase-shiftery whoosh = notch filter (no resonance, tho)
• narrow-sounding, hypey whoosh = bandpass filter

The characther of your filters are going to change with the amount of resonance you use.

Want to get whoosh-creative? Record a whoosh using, say, a lowpass filter. Record a second one with the same settings but turn down the cutoff frequency of the filter just a tiny amount. Pan these hard left/right and have a listen. It'll bend your mind.

In addition to all the great advice above I'd also like to add that using a tape delay in a bus (with something like 52-54% feedback, 8th note 50%, high and low cut to taste but definitely much narrower than the original sound) is a big part of the "transition whooshes". Then if you want to make it pumping, add a compressor with a simple 4/4 side chain trigger after it and if you want to control the sound even more than the filters in the tape delay, put an eq after the compressor (delays and reverbs often muddy up the sound if you're not careful; low cutting them many times doesn't do harm, the delay/reverb brings the space/continued sound in most cases even when very thin). Of course you can automate all that, so for eg. with the incoming sweep the send is bypassed or the send is down and is swept up in the end, like during last 4th note of the sweep so the delay doesn't mess up the sound too early.

If you're thinking about club play of the track you're working on, remember that the fancy panned and stereo-widened effects which are fantastic in headphones and home hi-fi and your studio of course rarely are effective in a club system as they're often mono (or almost that, or only a handful of listeners are located in the sweet spot), so cool stereo fx or widening might actually make those things vanish in a club system almost completely (That's agrevating for me; I'm a producer and a live performer/dj myself and see this all the time, and ask the engineers all the time that why I should be playing my stuff produced in stereo in their backwards mono system. I do know the technical explanation, or opinion to that but it still ****** me off. A lot of info disappears, not only from the effect sweeps but lush synths etc when the sound is monofied. Grrrh. ;))

PowerMac G5 2,5GHz Quad Mac OS X (10.4.7) Motu 2408mk3+24i/o, AMT8

How do you run a noise oscillator thru one of Logic's synths? Sorry to be a bit simple but could you talk me through that a bit more step-by-step?

Many thanks.

Ville,

I think the term you're looking for is "phase cancellation". The effect I described, however, would be 100% mono compatible. Finallly, back in the heyday of big-budget remixes I was working for all of the top NYC-based DJ/Producers as a keyboard player/arranger/programmer, and none of them ever had a problem with wide-sounding tracks. They were not only making the records but playing them too and they never came back from a gig saying, "guys, we gotta make our records a little more mono from now on". Know what I mean? Ping-pong delay on vocals? A totally staple effect. Huge stereo swelling string pads, "goobers" with all kinds of delay making them bounce and swirl in stereo, and particularly, the HH slightly off to one side and the shaker off to the other.

Hmmm, iSchwartz (and the others),
actually, I did not exactly mean phase cancellation but I was not too clear or detailed in my post, sorry. But in my opinion that definitely applies, or you have to take into consideration if you're using a width processor trying to liven up a single track (be it an effect sound or a synth, vocal etc). Of course it'd be somewhat (I guess an impossible) coincidence if you'd get two different white noise recordings to cancel each other out as they're random.

I too pan my hats and shakers for eg. a little apart from each other, and frequency-overlapping synths might find more space, too, when separating them in the stereo field a little.

What I kinda mixed up in my thoughts and the post was the phase cancellation and mono-compatibility issue and just losing the left-right effect of my tracks in a mono system. Fluffy and lush pads or big leads often get their lushness or big sound from the reverb and delays (and eq, comp,...) and when monoed the track often becomes bland since all the "3d" space is now tucked in the center. Now that I think of it maybe I have had a reverb plug back in the day that does cheap tricks to widen stuff because I've even heard the reverb almost vanish when monoed. Anyway, like I said, for (mono) club play it doesn't really make too much sence to be anal about making that whoosh sweep for eg. left>right because it won't be heard that way. I know you guys weren't really talking about that, I just brought it up because I've experienced that myself.

Like the engineers say, it can be argued that the benefit of the mono club system might be greater than my grief of losing the full stereo field as so few people in a club would hear that anyway, and the loudness and bass that's felt and not only heard also makes you hear not so accurately (+ vodka or the extra chemicals some clubbers enjoy...). I don't know, but my (maybe a stupid) analogy is that I make my stuff stereo, it'd be nice if it was replayed and heard in stereo (in the home cd players and radios as well as clubs). When I've had the choice, I've at least monitored stuff in stereo when performing so I can fool myself to forget that the room hears mono... 😉

PowerMac G5 2,5GHz Quad Mac OS X (10.4.7) Motu 2408mk3+24i/o, AMT8

Hello Jon

you have here now some realy good advices how to do your own swoshes and swishes for dancetracks ! 😀

In case you're sometimes in a hurry and want some "out of the can" effects , i can realy recommend to have a listen to "mutekk media" sample cd's Line called "Vengeance" . This are the same people who brought the Vanguard sound architecture to us.

check here : http://www.mutekki.com/catalog/index.php?cPath=23&osCsid=467a18d60ecbf7953f8f1de d86ba97c0

And NO im not involved in any way with these companys , i just go trough a lot of dancemusic stuff , and this are top notch samples for this kinda genre 😀


Hope this helps a bit , and sorry for my lousy english 😀


Cheers Daniel



http://www.soniccube.ch

Dual 1.8 G5 Mac OS X (10.4.7) Logic Pro 7.2.1 | Logic Control | Motu 828MKII | Dynaudio BM6A

Jon,

one quick and simple "swish" is a reversed TR909 crash cymbal (or any longer cymbal), which of course you can further process with filters and delays etc. I haven't tried the sample cds referred to earlier but the Vanguard synth itself has some pretty awesome effect sounds, let alone the actual synth stuff.