Hello guys, this week I want to share with you 5 You Tube videos that blew my mind at first sight. 5 videos to learn new sound design techniques that you can apply in your minimal house productions.

The cool thing is that they are from producers and you tubers completely out of the minimal house music scene! So you’ll need a little bit of fantasy to translate those tips to our musical genre: minimal house and micro house.

1 – Mr. Bill – Granular Synthesis

Granular synthesis is a well known technique even among house music producers; especially for micro house and rominimal producers, it’s a technique that allows to create very particular backgrounds, glitches and noises. And that’s a big part of micro house tracks. But how many ways do we have to create these sounds? Mr. Bill goes through some of them, starting from Ableton Max for Live device Granulator II, moving to very weird external plug-ins. And he shows how you can create sounds literally from anything, starting from your voice.

2 – ELPHNT – Sound design inspired by nature with these MAX for LIVE devices collection

In this video Elephnt showcases these 6 new Max for Live devices, part of the pack “Inspired by Nature”, included in Live 11. They basically are sound generators inspired by laws of physics. Perfect if you want to create complex organic sounds. In some of them, you can import your samples and then start playing around whit some features that look like granular synthesis. So you start from a sound and end up with something completely different. And that’s what we like, isn’t it? If you just upgraded to Live 11, this is something you wanna try! I watched this video before upgrading to Live 11. I did immediately after (lol).

3 – Sine wave percussion

This is a very simple way of creating sounds/textures that you can take to the next level just by adding more effects or using different percussive sound sources. For instance you could try by adding LFO on Auto-Filter and on Chorus, adding a Grain Delay, or some third party weird effects. Check out the video.

4 – 12 sound design tricks by Andrew Huang

How couldn’t I bring on Andrew Huang? Despite being one of the most popular You Tube music producers (and probably loved or hated), I think he is an extremely talented sound designer and experimenter. Here you can learn 12 of his favorite sound design hacks. Maybe you already know many of them, but it’s always good to watch them from a different perspective. I personally use many of them (layering, time stretching, envelope modulations etc.).

5 – Learning to use Ableton Sampler

Ableton Live is the most powerful tool we have. Most of its instruments have so much potential, and many times we overlook them in favor of external plugins. So let’s give credit to Ableton Live and learn to use Sampler better, Live sample player and synthesizer. Me too, i tend to use more Simpler, which is Sampler little brother, forgetting how many more possibilities I have with the bigger one. This video by EDMprod goes through all the functions, then is up to us being creative with them. Enjoy!

Bonus: my sound design tips

I have some sound design technique videos on my channel as well, and as you may imagine, they are specifically focused on minimal house and micro house music. Here is a recap of what you can find:

• micro timing delay technique – create the well know micro house tape delay modulation;
• time stretching technique – stretch your sounds and give them new life;
• percussive textures with vocoder – learn how to trigger drum sounds through a synth and a vocoder (the Sweely’s technique);
• minimal house and micro house backgrounds – learn how i create my backgrounds;
• minimal house and micro house textures – an easy way to create textures (my very first video – in italian, but you can understand by watching);

Hope you guys found interesting sources of knowledge on this article. If so, share this blog post on your socials and with your friends. I will be come up with new inspiring videos from other you tubers in the future, stay tuned!

Another great tool for sound designing is VCV Rack, here is my blog post to get started.

Also, consider subscribing to my You Tube channel. Thanks for your time!