We need to talk about this because it is a very good tip. When you take time in your sound synthesis journey to experiment, you don’t have an undo step. There is no revision system! Your Analog Four is not connected to Github. This would be great idea but i guess what we’re looking with a hardware synthesizer is to be far away from the computer.
Don’t forget when you do sound-design, sound sculpting is as addicting as tiring if it take quite some time
Save your iterations !
You will turn all knobs freely and trying things to get better results. Once you understand what each parameter does to your sound then you have a better idea of the sound you want to make. (If you are at this point with sound design then that’s great. Then this section can be ignored by you)
When starting at step 1 while experimenting with a certain (x) number of steps before you reach the desired sound. This could happen at step 11, you probably heard quite a few interesting sounds along the way that are different to the one you have in mind.
Save Iterations
Best practices are to save your work on any DAW or gear you are using. All it takes is for someone to tap you on the shoulder and you’ve turned off the machine without saving your progress. If you force yourself to save often you will have less regrets in what you do in a session. Along the way you hear an interesting sound save it. The Analog Four has a lot of save slots and you might as well take advantage of it.
LEt’s think of how we save our work in this scenario. For example if the bass sound I’m after is a “Lately Bass” maybe call your iterations Lately Bass 01, Lately Bass 02 etc. or call it Late01 Bass, Late02 Bass, Late03 Bass. Whatever order you want to name it make sure there’s a number involved in the naming process. Keep a notebook handy too when working in a session. Write what you’ve learned and your thoughts on each sound you make. You may make something that isn’t going to hit the subwoofer hard in your monitoring system, but you can take note of that because that sound will work with something like an 808 kick that has a lot of sub bass information. If you stare at a screen all day from work then paper is a good way to rest your eyes and take notes.
At some point you will have to purge your patches but don’t forget +Drive gives access to the +Drive Sound library, with the capacity of storing 4096 Sounds. That gives you plenty of room for your personalized “iterations” that you’ve made during each session.
