Knowing what guitar or drum sound you want is good. But how do you make that sound? 

Let’s look at sound and its components: timbre, tone, effects.

The timbre is the primary personality of a sound, the first way to describe a sound. Basically, each instrument has a different timbre. Let’s say you hear a recording with a trumpet with a reverb effect and a guitar with a distorsion effect; the most simple way to describe the different sounds in order to differentiate them would be to say “a trumpet” and “a guitar”.

The tone describes the register. Is it a low sound, a middle sound, or a trebble sound? Note that i am not referring to the note that it is actually playing but to the intrinsic quality of a sound. For example, two different guitars playing the same note will not have the same tone.; one will sound lower (muddier sound), one will sound higher (harsher sound), one will sound brighter (mid frequencies).

An effect is a modifier of the initial sound.  For example, a delay modifies all the sounds in a similar way, by repeating the sound over a certain number of times at a certain volume. Tremolo, distorsion and so on all modify the initial sound in a specific way. While you might not be aware of all the effects available, you will probably be familiar with quite a few of them, including reverb, delay, distorsion and chorus.

Finally, a sound might be a collection of sounds; double tracking is a common technique when it comes to recording guitars, and layering sounds is also very common for synths. Nowadays, you even encounter drum kits with multiple source sounds, typically a live drum kit mixed with samples. So that guitar sound you hear on a record might be in fact quite a few guitars.

When i hear a sound i want to record, whether i hear it on a record or in my head, i find the following analysis method useful to determine how to make that sound:

- timbre: which instrument does it sound like? While this is easy with traditional intruments, answering this question with “a synth” might not be refined enough. In the case of a synth sound, i will try to approximate the sound with a preset on my synth, as a basis to experiment from.

- tone: has it got a lot of low, mid or high frequencies? If this isn’t obvious to you, a good way to determine this is to compare the sound with a similar musical passage played on the instrument as determined by the timbre (guitar, bass, piano etc) and with no EQ added to the sound. Is it lower or higher? Is it brighter (mid frequencies)?

- effect: is there an effect modifying the sound? You can only answer this question if you know what a specific effect sounds like, so i can only encourage you to buy a cheap multi-effect pedal (like a Zoom 505 for guitar) and try each effect to familiarise yourself with. While i do not recommend this type of unit to record with (the sound quality of cheap multi-effect units is usually quite poor), it is a good way to inform yourself. You might realise that you have a favourite type of effect and you can then buy an effect pedal for that specific effect. Of course, if you can afford it, buying a good multi-effect unit is a good choice, but a cheap one is better than nothing, if only for its educational purpose.

- multi-layered: if after going through the timbre, tone and effect analysis, you feel like there is still something “missing”, it probably indicates that the sound you are hearing is a collection of sounds.

So far, we have studied sounds as if each instrument was on its own. For example, we have talked about how you’d like your guitar to sound, the drums, the bass and so on. But of course, a recording is about how all the sounds work together, which we will look into next monday.

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