How to create randomized Forest Psytrance synth sounds
Let’s look at a couple of techniques for creating randomized Forest Psytrance synth sounds in Serum and other plugins.
For these random Forest Psytrance synth sounds, there’s usually two ways I go about it.
The idea is to create random pitch modulation using sample & hold and playing with a variety of parameters to create different variations and movements in the sound.
In Serum, you can find the Sample & Hold settings under global, when you enable “S&H” the Chaos oscillator becomes a stepped modulation generator.
Setting the main oscillator to sine wave and sending the modulation from the chaos to the pitch, it creates the basis of the sound we’re going for.
The S&H in Serum sounds very clinical, and while it’s perfect for most modulations – I find that for a pitch it can be a bit unmusical, to fix this or at least add some variation is to use the noise oscillator as a modulation source.
When the pitch of the noise oscillator is turned down it turns it into a very nice modulation source that is a great compliment to Serum’s S&H generator. Much like regular FM in Serum, just switch the warp mode over to “FM Noise Osc”.
Using resonant filters…
Another great way of creating these random Forest Psytrance synth sounds is using the resonant characteristics of a filter.
This generally sounds best using a plugin with accurate analog-modelled filters, Arturia’s Modular V sounds great for this – it’s a software recreation of the Moog Modular systems.
It’s also super easy to do here, simply turn down the audio going into the filter, turn the resonance to the max and send modulation to the cutoff CV input.
Another great feature is due to the modular nature of the plugin, you can attenuate and modulate the modulation signals in various interesting ways.
Turning LFO’s into stepped modulation, creating ramps between steps and then further stepping those ramps – You can go wild here.
A liberal amount of delay and reverb will do wonders with both of these sounds, as usual!
For an in-depth walkthrough on both of these Forest Psytrance synth sounds, check out the tutorial videos here:
Serum:
[youtube_sc url=”https://youtu.be/xVW6HOvIHtc”]Arturia Modular V:
[youtube_sc url=”https://youtu.be/4UVdYp_bG10″]
