FRMS Sound Design with a 'Thunder Toy'

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FRMS granular synthesizer with Frequency Modulation being used to make amazing sound from a Thunder Toy.

YouTube tutorials are back! After a brief hiatus, our tutorials return with a brand new video and a fresh new format for FRMS.

It’s a real journey of sound design from start to finish, showing the whole process of creating a multi-layered sound from scratch, combining granular and FM synthesis.

The inspiration behind the sound’s inception is a small percussive instrument, commonly known as a ‘Thunder Toy’, so called because it mimics the sound of rolling thunder, which provides a unique source for us to sample.

Sampled audio is rarely perfect of course, so after we’ve recorded our audio there’s some noise reduction and clean up taken care of by Audacity, before we load samples into FRMS.

Then the real sculpting begins. Oscillator layers are added to give us more of a musical tone and we introduce further movement by modulating the amount of FM synthesis with an LFO.

In the video Lucas is using two condenser microphones to record the audio, but you don’t always have to be tethered to a mixing desk when sampling; your tablet can be a convenient way to capture sound anywhere and record directly into FRMS' iOS or Android app.

We hope you enjoy watching us approach sound design from a different perspective in this video, and that it inspires you to get creative with your own samples.

Painting a picture with FRMS,
Team Imaginando

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