Melody & Drum Design - Build A Track Entirely In Absynth Pt 2

In this second week of “Making A Track Entirely In Absynth” we are going to make a melody with Absynth, we also look at programming some basic drums.

The key to making tracks that “work” often requires some thinking at the sound designing stage.

Here’s my thought process whilst making these sounds

For example – What kind of song do I want to make or what function does the sound have in the track?

I already know what kind of pad sound I have, so what does the melody in Absynth need to do?

I know the pad is pretty low in frequency so to let the melody have it’s own space I should make it higher in frequency, but I still want it to sound like the same song, so I could use the same Aetherizer FX to nicely glue the two sounds together.

Once we have that set up i would look at adding some drum rhythms to make our intro a little bit more interesting. We could program some kicks and snares but for this track acoustic drums suit better!

Therefore I used the granular mode to import samples. This gives us more control over the speed of the sample than using the “sample” mode.

The great thing about being able to control the speed of the sample is that you can build phat kick-drums this way!

Stretching samples is awesome!

I also add some hi-hats in granular mode. The cool thing about using Absynth to play back hi-hats is that you can easily pitch them in the piano roll to get some variation and liveliness, which makes your track more interesting and less sterile.

So next time you’re making sounds for a new track spend a little time to think through what you’re going to do!

That concludes this week’s Absynth tutorial, next week we are going to build our main verse – I’m psyched!

– Jor