How to create Risers, Sweeps and other effects from scratch
Risers, sweeps and similar effects are a popular sound across almost every electronic music genre, so let’s create some from scratch.
One of the most common types of risers in electronic music production has to be the simple white noise effect, it’s effective and really easy to pull-off. I like using Serum for these effects, because it has a ton of different noise samples and it allows you to draw in a unique curve for your riser effect. You could potentially do this with your DAWs automation lane, however having an LFO that you can freely assign in your patch is a nice touch for creating a ton of variations on this sound.
The simple white noise riser can benefit from modulation-style effects like flangers and phasers, often they’ll have an internal LFO whose speed can be modulated by your main riser curve – this adds to the overall rising momentum of the sound. As usual I like to use delays and reverbs to round-off my effect’s sounds, if you’re creating your own samples to use at a later stage – it can be a good idea to leave the reverb tails in the sample, just in-case you want to use them in the future.
Creating Riser effects with samples…
Another great technique to use to create Riser effects, is to load up a one-shot sample into a Sampler Track and manipulate the pitch of the sample to create that rising motion. As the pitch in the Sampler Track rises, the sample plays back quicker and quicker. This is a great way of creating all sorts of crazy psychedelic Riser effects, and you’re not limited to creating Risers with this technique, you could apply LFOs or any interesting automation to create all sorts of different effects.
When using this technique on a Kick drum sample, the result is great for those Psytrance Kick build-ups and breakdowns. For an in-depth walkthrough of these techniques, check out the video here:
[youtube_sc url=”https://youtu.be/y1hBioIrixw”]
