ORGANIC SOUND DESIGN MASTERCLASS - Part 2: Envelope Following and Abstract Vocoding with sv1

In this Lux Cache tutorial series, Texas producer and resident sound design god sv1 shows us a peek into achieving the hyper-organic synthesis methods and sound processing he is so known for in his productions. This three-part series has a huge focus on how to approach left-field sound design in an expressive and abstract way, creating the mindset to generate detailed sonics you intended and the beautiful ones you didn't.

This tutorial is available as both a Patreon text post and .pdf document format. We ask you kindly to not share Lux Cache content outside of the Patreon, our contributors rely on your donations.

All preview sounds/clips mentioned in this tutorial can be found in this private SoundCloud playlist or this accompanying Google Drive folder.

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In this part of the Organic Sound Design Masterclass, I’m going to be going over three major sound design techniques that are near and dear to me: Envelope Following, Vocoding, and Morphing. I find that knowing how to use these techniques and tools gave me full control over my sound design and has helped me create sounds from a wide variety of environments in an organic way. Huge emphasis on the techniques I’ll be presenting here and please, please, please, don’t forget to experiment on your own with these.

Contents

Here’s a list of concepts I’m going to go over with this lesson:

-ENVELOPE FOLLOWING

-VOCODING

-MORPHING

-EFFECT CHAIN RECIPES

-A LIST OF VOCODER AND MORPHING DEVICES I USE

-ENVELOPE FOLLOWING: What is it?

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The first technique I’d like to go over in this lesson is envelope following. An envelope is the way sound changes over time, and that can be with respect to amplitude, pitch, or whatever parameter. For now, we’re going to be concerned with amplitude. We can use the amplitude of sounds to control parameters over time for both controlled and random results. This is otherwise known as envelope following. Many plugins have this feature built into them, below I’ve provided some examples:

(Ableton Phaser and Flanger feature a built-in envelope follower)

(Built-in envelope (audio) follower in Reason Sweeper)

In these examples, the envelope follower is used to modulate the frequency of the phaser or flanger according to the envelope of the sound being sent into it. This is a fairly common usage of this technique. To get a little weirder, Ableton has included a Max for Live device called ‘envelope follower’ as part of their stock library. This does the same thing as the above, but now we can map the follower to any parameter we choose as well as multiple parameters simultaneously, this can be particularly handy for several applications.

**LC sv1 pt2 - envelope follower example.mkv** (SOUND ON)

The four main parameters (gain, rise, fall, delay) are pretty self-explanatory, gain allows us to control the amplitude of the incoming envelope, rise and fall allow us to smooth out or sharpen the incoming envelope, and delay of course delays the incoming envelope.

One important thing to note is that, where we place the envelope follower in our signal path determines the incoming envelope. For instance, if we have an effect before the envelope follower, the affected sound will be what is represented in the envelope follower. Similarly, if we place the envelope follower before the effect, the dry signal is what will be represented in the envelope follower.

(Signal path effects what envelope is being represented)

Later on, I’m going to be discussing some ways I use it more in-depth, but please keep in mind that we can apply this to any effect and any parameter, built-in or 3rd party. Likely more unconventional applications will yield even weirder and more interesting results. Go crazy with it, the sky’s the limit.

ENVELOPE FOLLOWING: Envelope Following w/ sidechain

A really interesting technique that we can apply is envelope following with sidechain, meaning that the envelope we are using to follow does not necessarily have to be the one related to our effect chain. I wasn’t aware of how to accomplish this until recently, and am not sure how this could be applied to other daws, so this will be mainly an Ableton-specific technique. I’m going to provide the effect rack that we’re going to be constructing below, so if you don’t want to recreate this yourself, go ahead and download it and skip this part.

First, we’re going to want to drag in an audio effect rack and create two chains. Label one as ‘SIDECHAIN’ and then label the other as ‘DRY’ or ‘EFFECTS’. On the ‘SIDECHAIN’ chain, we’re going to drag in a compressor and an envelope follower **after** the compressor. On the compressor enable sidechain, and enable the blue ‘sidechain listen’ button. From here we will select what channel we will be sidechaining from. Also, turn off this channel's volume because we will not be wanting to directly hear the channel we will be sidechaining from. The rack should look like this once it’s been assembled so far:

(envelope follower with sidechain rack, sidechain chain)

On the parallel chain labeled ‘OUT’ or whatever you decided to name it, we can put whatever effect we want to apply the sidechained envelope follower to. For now, I’m going to put in a utility because that’s what I usually use this technique for. On the ‘SIDECHAIN’ chain, hit map, and then go into the other channel and click which parameter of our effect we want to modulate, when I’m using this, I apply it to the gain knob on my utility. Once we’ve done that, the rack should be complete, from there go in and apply whatever effects and save the rack.

I use this technique with a utility because it allows me to apply the amplitude of the sidechained waveform to a waveform I’m working with. This yields some really interesting organic and jittery results and creates a weird choppy effect, not sure how to describe it, but below I’ve provided an example to paint a better picture of why this is useful:

**LC sv1 pt2 - envelope follower with sidechain.mkv** (SOUND ON)

VOCODING: What and Why?

Vocoders are an effect I think we are all familiar with, we normally see it applied to vocals to add harmonization to them in the form of a robotic tonality. However, when applied to other sounds we can invoke sandy, membranous, slimy, wet, and even crystalline textures. The possibilities are endless. It’s an incredibly versatile tool with loads of sound design capabilities. On their own, vocoders are a really interesting tool but applied in combination with other effects we can start to generate some amazing sounds. I'll be going over some of my favorite effect chain recipes later on in this article.

VOCODING: Carrier and Modulator Signals

When working with the majority of vocoders, we’ll run across parameters that say ‘carrier’ and ‘modulator’ signal. With Ableton’s vocoder, we don’t have to worry about that so much, but with other ones, this is very important in the function of them. All vocoders rely on these two signals. The modulator signal typically is the vocal, it provides us the envelope that we’ll be using, similar to what we were talking about above. The carrier signal typically is the synth that’s applied to the vocal, it provides us the tonal content. If we want to use other vocoders that aren’t the one that comes stock with Ableton, for example, Melda MVocoder, we can route it like so:

VOCODING: Parameters

Some parameters I’d like to go over very briefly, but are very important/useful are the formant and depth knobs and the enhance button.

Formant controls how high or low the carrier signal is, without altering the pitch (increasing/decreasing the frequencies of the vocoder’s filterbank).

Depth is similar to the gain knob on the envelope follower device, at 1.00% depth, essentially the gain of the carrier signal is turned all the way up, and at 200% depth, the gain of the carrier signal is very low, and only transients/peaks affect the modulator signal.

Enhance normalizes the carrier signal (making the peaks hit 0 dB), thus making the signal brighter and a bit louder.

Automating any of these parameters always leads to really interesting results. I strongly recommend doing that when appropriate!

VOCODING: Bands

I’d like to discuss the ‘Bands’ and ‘BW ‘ (bandwidth). These are interesting as they can play heavily into the texture of our sound. The more bands we select the more liquid and fluid our sound will become, and the fewer bands we select the more dry and sandy our sound will become. Playing with values in between the bounds (4 to 40, with Ableton’s vocoder) can yield a lot of really interesting sounds. Bandwidth also allows more textural control over our sounds. Higher BW (200%) will create more membranous sounds while lower bandwidth will result in more crystalline textures. I always find it fun to automate between 10% and 100%.

**Bands - Low Bandwidth, High Bands.wav**

**Bands - High Bandwidth, Low Bands.wav**

VOCODING: External Mode

This ‘EXTERNAL’ algorithm is how typical vocoders operate. Generally, the carrier signal is the tonal element being sent in, and the modulator signal is typically some sort of vocal input. While that does produce nice sounding results, that’s just the tip of the iceberg concerning sound design capability. My favorite way to use this is to set up my mic and find some sample I want to affect. My mic input is what the vocoder will be applied to. The sample is what we’ll select in the ‘external’ drop menu. Though I am using a mic, I’m not necessarily singing or talking into it, usually, I’m hitting my desk or creating some sort of ruckus just to create natural envelopes. Also, we don’t necessarily need a mic to achieve this, we could more easily just drag some foley in, I just think this way is more fun for me.

**External Mode.wav**

VOCODING: Modulator Mode

Modulator Mode is very similar to external mode, but instead, the carrier and the modulator signal are the same. We can use this mode to invoke membranous, squishy, and just overall wet noises. Try it out on drum loops and bass hits especially. A personal favorite out of all of these, you can typically find this all over my production, applied to any and every sound.

**Modulator Mode - Dry Loop.wav**

**Modulator Mode - Wet Loop.wav**

VOCODING: Noise Mode

Noise mode is pretty versatile. A popular usage for this is to apply it to drums to fatten them up and make them richer on low D/W, similar to the Ableton effect ‘erosion’. If we select 4 bands, we’ll invoke drier, sandier sounds, and at a high number of bands say around 20 to 40 we’ll get wetter sounds, especially with high depth and fast attack and release. Noise Mode also features an XY pad on its menu. The x-axis represents the sample rate of the noise, and the y-axis represents the density of the noise (top right = smoother noise, vice versa).

**Noise Mode - Bottom Left xy pad.wav**

**Noise Mode - Top Right xy pad.wav**

VOCODING: Pitch Tracking

Pitch tracking mode is used to sort of act as an autotune, but playback the fundamental of the modulator signal (the most prevalent note being heard). This algorithm is most interesting to me when I automate the pitch parameter that appears in this menu. The trick with this algorithm is that, for it to function properly, the sound the vocoder is being applied to has to have a fundamental, or we have to trick the vocoder into thinking it has a fundamental. To do this, we can either play the sample out and wait for a fundamental to automatically be found, or I will find a dense portion of the sound I’m working with and then loop it for a bar and then play it back until the vocoder starts playing a pitch back:

**LC sv1 pt2 - finding a fundamental.mkv** (SOUND ON)

This technique is kind of tricky, however, because the moment we stop playing back audio, the vocoder will forget what fundamental it needs to latch on to, so if we want to re-do a take, or get it to work again, we have to loop that portion over again and then re-record.

MORPHING

One final technique similar to vocoding and envelope following is called morphing. At the moment I haven’t found too many tools that can accomplish this and none of them stock devices, but I've provided links to the tools I use below. This technique allows you to create hybrids of the two sounds you want to morph together, similar to envelope following and vocoding, but more literally. I’m not as familiar with the science behind it, but I wanted to just include this in the end because the sounds these two devices produce are really interesting and I don’t think too many people are aware of them. Here are some examples:

**Morphing - Example.wav**

EFFECT CHAIN RECIPES

• Vocoder + OTT
  • I’ve provided this Ableton rack with the tutorial, this is my secret weapon. What this one does is just append an OTT after the vocoder in order to brighten up and enrich my sound. I found myself always putting OTT after any instance of vocoder because the sound it produces is generally pretty quiet and dull. I’ve mapped macros to parameters I tweak regularly too in order to just speed up my process. In fact, every vocoder-related example above was made using this rack.

• Dynamic tube + Vocoder + OTT
  • Similar to the rack above, I often like to apply a Dynamic Tube right before my vocoder in order to create really crunchy and rusted sounds. I tweak the bias and drive knobs until Dynamic Tube starts to gate, and usually, at this point, the sound will be super crunchy. Another technique that’s all over my production.

**Recipes - dynamic tube + vocoder.wav**

• Granulator + vocoder
  • If you haven’t already read through part 1 of this series, I recommend at this point that you do. If you recall the Granulator + LFO recipe from the last tutorial, often I like to apply Vocoder on modulator mode at high depth (>100%)  right after to get randomized slimy and sticky sounds. Adding a little delay and reverb on the end always helps too with this one.

**Recipes - Granulator + Vocoder.wav**

List of tools I use related to this lesson:

• M4L Envelope Follower
• Ableton stock vocoder
• FL Vocodex
• Melda MVocoder
• Reason Stock Vocoder
• Melda MMorph
• Zynaptiq Morph

A selection of exclusive Ableton racks, as well as an accompanying Ableton project file ‘Bog’ by sv1 using these methods is available for Premium Subscribers and can be found in a post on our Patreon page.

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sv1 is a music producer and sound artist from Texas. His recent EP 'field study' is available on all streaming platforms.

You can follow him on Twitter @sv1___ and Instagram @sv1.earth