Creating a weird psychedelic lead using LFO

How to emulate a typical psychedelic glitchy sound you hear in tracks from the artists like Imagine Mars, Tristan, Ajja, etc?

Zahaan

Zahaan, I don’t know for sure how these guys making their sounds, but I’ll share my thoughts on how to achieve something similar.

Formally speaking, this sound is very simple and it’s made of two key components: a bandpass filter and an LFO with a “Sample and Hold” waveform, all the rest is processing. Special thanks to my colleague Evgeniy Dolgih for hinting that specific LFO type, I probably wouldn’t figure it out myself.

Let’s try to recreate it from scratch. I going to use Sylenth1, but you can use any other synthesiser you have as long as it has an LFO.

Recommended synths

Initial preset. Single oscillator with Saw wave and one voice. Choose bandpass filter type and assign modulation envelopes to the filter cut off.

You should get something like this:

Initial preset with a few tweaks in the filter and envelopes sections

Now in the LFO section, assign it to the filter cut off and choose “Sample and Hold” waveform in the dropdown menu. Tweak rate and gain knobs up to your taste.

Here is what we’ve got:

Choosing LFO waveform in the dropdown menu

That’s pretty much it. You can play around with the LFO rate, add distortion, reverb, frequency shifter, or any other audio processing effects.

After spending a couple of minutes tweaking it, I’ve come up with this really weird sound:

And here’s how it sounds like in context:

Effects processing chain

Have fun tweaking yours!

P.S. I had a personal chat with Zahaan sharing these tips, and he eventually made the following sound using an extra phaser and distortion:

Well done!

 1973   2017   Advice   Production   Sound design

Since 2015, I’ve run an advice section giving my experience and answering readers’ questions on music production, DJing, performing, marketing, management, and other aspects of the music industry. The purpose of the series is to spread knowledge and cultivate professionalism in the music industry. The advice series works simply: you send me your questions, and I answer them with a blog post when I have something relevant to say. Send me your questions via the form.


Subscribe to receive future posts via email:


    Next
    7 comments
    Талян 2019

    Хороший трюк. Читаю и перечитываю до корочки все ваши статейки.

    Arseny 2019

    I believe Tristan and others are making these sounds with Access Virus. The core element of this sound is indeed a sample and hold LFO which in case of Virus is assigned to formant shift available in the Formant Complex mode, this gives that crispy metallic sound. It may also be emulated in certain wavetable synths having “sync” as a wavetable effect, such as Serum and Parawave Rapid. In such case the sync amount is the modulation target.

    In this short example Virus plays the first 6 seconds and the next 6 seconds is Rapid.

    https://soundcloud.com/recursion-loop/psynsects-sh-psytrance-sound-example

    patrick 2019

    can you show that with serum too please?

    Los 2019

    I’m doing almost the same but I’m getting something very different. The sound I made is more like random bleeps while Zahaan’s is pretty tight and well balanced. My problem is not about the sonic content but the rhythm. Am I missing something important?

    Arseny 2019

    @Los, Sample&Hold LFOs are meant to be unpredictable. Make sure your LFO is tempo-synced for starters (you need 1/16 resolution), then just bounce few bars of your sound into audio and select the fragments where you like the groove the most and use them as samples.

    Joao 2019

    Please don’t stop this website! You are a fucking genius! Thank you very much :)
    Hugs from Portugal

    Gabriel Cardoso 2019

    Saudações do Brazil irmão, seu site é ouro, queria muito ter mais contato contigo.

    © Daniel Sokolovskiy, 2024
    Powered by Aegea