Hey, paisanos!

Pacifism

Without warriors there can be no war.

Or any classic anime/kung fu sound effect in a DAW. Achieving the central spice of it anyway.

Preemptive warning: WATCH YOUR EARS. We are gonna be applying really high levels of resonance + some drive to this basic sound and it can hurt while fiddling, so do all this at a lower volume than usual.

Get ANY synth that can output white noise or even just a white noise sample you ripped from somewhere. Above I have Ableton's Analog synth with OSC 1 on only, set to noise, and the Amp envelope a straight block with all sustain, no release. The Amp level is set to 18 because you want a good ratio of noise to filter resonance, which you'll see what I mean by in a minute.

Then put on any low-pass filter with a lot of resonance and if possible a drive option. For this, I chose Ableton's default filter, with the PRD circuit emulation to allow me to apply drive. You can totally just copy my settings here, but the Envelope amount should be set to taste as it can vary how chunky or fresh the sound is. Remember what I said about the ratio of noise to filter resonance too, because if the noise sample is too loud, the SQUELCH of the resonance will be muddied. So if you feel like the sound is too "sandy" or flat white noise still, try reducing the source noise volume and upping the resonance.

Finally, for extra color, I've added an Overdrive plugin with low drive and wet% and a delay plugin with a fast delay rate. This could literally be anything you want to color up the sound--reverb, phaser, delay, heavier drive, whatever!

Now, have fun tweaking the frequency knob on the filter and watch this sound come to life. You can get anything from radios to laser blasts to hard crunchy punch sounds to exaggerated mech movement.

I absolutely love this sound element and use it in a lot of my sound design, you can make it the central focus or pare it back until it's just a layer. I spent years not knowing I had this right under my nose and was bowled over when I found out the key element of a lot of classic sound design was readily available. I prefer using Serum with all its modern possibilities to do this, but wanted to prove it could be done on the most basic tools too. Here's a video of me playing with the frequency knob and adjusting the envelope.

NOTE: in my vid, the resonance squelch lasts a little long after the sound for my taste. To reduce that, also automate the resonance knob and turn it down after the Anime Moment has been achieved

If you liked this buy my albums or something?

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