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Hey this is Mattias with Propellerhead Software and in this Reason Sound Design video
I'll show you five ways you can make your sounds bigger. When talking about music,
someone will eventually say something along the lines of, "Oh man that synth is fat." or...
"Wow that's one big-*** lead!" Often this refers to a sound that occupies a lot of space in a mix,
especially in terms of how wide the stereo image is or how much of an impact it has.
So how do we get something to sound big?There are a couple of ways to do this.
Let's start off with the UN-16 Unison Device. Unison basically simulates having multiple channels of
sound that are detuned. You can select a number of voices, how much they should be detuned from each other,
and mix the signal using the dry/wet rotary. One tip for using the unison effectively is to use it as a send effect.
This means you can blend in the wider sound with the original sound without removing much clarity.
Take this synth line here for example...
This is just a subtractor in plain old mono. I'll add a unison as a send effect. Then, in the mixer,
I'll activate the send on Subtractor and you'll hear the difference right away.
Another trick to fatten up your sound is to manually do what the Unison is doing. Just make a copy of the devices you're using
and tune them differently. This works especially well inside a combinator so you play all devices on the
same sequencer track. Here's a lone Malstršm in a combinator connected to a line mixer.
I can now simply duplicate the Malstršm and route it up to the line mixer. Check your levels here because
you're basically adding a lot of extra signal. If I now tune one Malstršm a bit differently you'll hear it immediately sounds fatter.
If I also pan them hard left and hard right, you get a really wide sound.
Another trick that James has already talked about in his "52 Tips" series is the Haas Effect.
This basically means you're slightly delaying the left and right channel of a sound, widening it considerably.
I'll use the same setup as last time and just create a DDL-1, while holding shift so it doesn't auto-route.
I'm gonna connect the right channel of the Malstršm through the left channel of the delay
and back up to the mixer. Then set the delay to milliseconds, adjust the delay time to a couple of
milliseconds, and remove all feedback.
This final tip is a bit of a bonus. Maybe you've seen that we announced the beta testing of Reason 6.5
and even some information on our own Rack Extensions. Well one of those devices is
amazing for making things sound fat and while I can't let you see anything, I can let you hear something.
And there you have it... A couple of ways to make your sounds bigger and fatter. A final word of caution, though...
Not every sound needs to be enormous. Think about what actually needs to make an impact and see if
you can get that sound right to begin with. If you make some big sounds based on these tips send us your patches.
Just attach them to an email and send it to productspecialist@propellerheads.se
Until next time...