Use Aftertouch Inside Razor

Learn how to set up and use aftertouch in NI’s razor synth!

Making sounds in NI Razor is great fun, but how can we use those sounds in our tracks? Check out this week’s tutorial to learn how I use Razor sounds in my tracks.

There are always two parts to getting a great sound, the first one is making the actual sound inside a synthesizer or sampler, this is definitely my favorite part.
But after that you’ll need to find ways to use this sound inside your songs.
You need to find out where it fits, how loud it should be, and if it needs some extra mixing or effects.

This second part is often a bit harder, because your task is to make all these seemingly “random” sounds fit together and create one beautiful song
(Or one hard hitting insanely loud club banger for that matter)

My approach is usually to bounce the sound whenever I’m done synthesizing it, this has a few advantages.
First it is going to save you CPU, never a bad thing.

Secondly, you have now successfully committed to the synthesized sound, you can’t change those settings anymore.
You have to make thousand of small decisions when making a track, this will save you a few.

And third, but most important, we can mess with this audio file now in totally different ways. We can reverse it, stretch it, invert it and cut it up in different pieces.
This will open a new world of sonic possibilities, it will also bring back some of the decisions, but in a good way!

Once the file is bounced I lay it over a drumbeat or bass line, because it is an audio file I can now exactly see where the sound starts and ends, making it easier to fit this puzzle together!

This approach might not work for everyone, but for me it’s working very well, try to mess with it and see if it suits your music and work flow. Next week I’ll be back with a regular full-on Razor tutorial!