The stab is a very common element in all forms of dance music. It can range from very short and plucky (as often heard in more techy genres) to wide open and drowned in reverb (think deeper vibes like deep house & dub techno). Have a listen to these examples of some very different stabs:
Stabs can be made from anything, simply by shaping the envelope of the sound. They often come in your sound packs as finished one-shots and loops that you can throw into your mix.
But if you want to become a pro, you’ll have to learn to create your own chord stabs. By creating your own patches you gain a ton of options for manipulating the sound and breathing life into your productions.
Today we will show you how to create a lush chord stab in Sylenth1. You can follow along if you happen to own this synth plugin, but the settings that we use can easily be dialed into most other subtractive synths, provided you have a good understanding of how they work.
We need to start by synthesizing a sound and playing it as a chord. Our major first decision is how we want to trigger that chord. There are two options; we can simply write a chord in midi and loop it. Alternatively, we can also take the three pitch values that make up our chord and assign them to the individual oscillators in our synth.
We’ve opted for the second method here. One big advantage with this type of patch is that you can easily play all your minor chords simply by pressing only the root note on the piano roll. The downside is that if we want to play a major chord, we have to adjust the pitch values of the oscillators.
Designing the sound
Open up a fresh instance of Sylenth and choose your waves. We’ll stack three saw-waves on top of eachother to get a wider sound. We chose an e-minor chord for our chord stab, so go ahead and dial in the tones that we need which are 0, 3 and 7. We also mixed in a fourth oscillator here with white noise on low volume, just to add a little bite to the higher frequencies.
You can play with the poly setting to increase the amount of voices and get an even fatter sound. Detuning the individual waves slightly adds further interest to the sound.
After doing all this, we play the E on the synth, and this gives us a nice rich chorded saw sound:
That’s basically it for the sound-design. Easy, right? But.. the real magic of stabs does not lie in the sounds you use. 90% of a great stab comes from two other ingredients: filter envelopes and processing effects.
So, to turn this into an rocking stab, we also have to work on our envelopes. Sylenth’s volume envelope is used to manipulate the volume of the signal (duh). But since we want to manipulate the sound with our filter instead, we need it to output a continuous signal. To do this, we can just leave the signal all the way open with a little bit of a tail the end. Our filter envelope will be shaping the sound.
Apply the filter envelope
Time to make the magic happen. Let’s slap a low-pass filter on and turn it right down untill only the bass frequencies are left:
What we want now is to quickly open the filter up each time the sound gets triggered. The easiest way to do this is by applying an envelope to the filter. This filter envelope basically tells the filter what to do whenever the sound is triggered. We want this filter to quickly open up while the sound is playing, cause that’s what creates typical sound of the stab.
Filter envelopes for stabs usually have an attack close to 0. The delay can be left on 0. Sustain is the paramater that decides the length of the stab. This is where you make another major decision; do you want your stab to be long and lush or short and techy? Mess around with it untill you get the type of stab you’re looking for. Listen what happens to our stab when we gradually increase the sustain:
Finally, the release dictates how long the filter remains open after the sound stops playing. You can set this to 0 to ensure that the filter follows the same pattern every time a new sound is triggered.
Processing the stab
We now have our stab dialed in and the patch is pretty much done, but the sound is still far from finished. If you put this into a track as-is, it would probably sound pretty dull.
To get this sound to a pro quality (which is hopefuly where you want it to be), we need to add a few effects and automation. Reverbs and delays do a great job of blending the sound into your mix and giving it some life.
Sylenth has these effects built in, which allows us to easily experiment and find our desired setup. For this tutorial we have also used our own DAW’s native reverb and delay effects on the sound bus.
How much of these effects you apply is completely up to you. It also depends on the genre and/or type of track that you’re trying to produce.
Further things to experiment with
For this tutorial we just stacked a few slightly detuned saw-waves and white noise, but you can change the waveforms and add even more to get endless combinations of sounds.
You can also give your stab patterns a lot of extra power in the mix by adding spot reverbs and delays here and there. For example, check out this 8-bar pattern where we added a small chord progression, automation to gradually open up the filter, and a big splash of reverb towards the end:
This gives the listener something to anticipate and prevents the 8-bar loop from getting too repetitive.
Another cool thing you can try on stabs is adding chorus and distortion effects. These can add a lot of interest by bringing out extra harmonics in the sound.
While opted to use subtractive synthesis in this tutorial, you can also get some really great and very different results with other forms of synthesis like wavetables. These synths are a little more complicated to use though, so I suggest you try to get a handle on subtractive first before you move on to the more advanced stuff.
Finally, here’s some interesting parameters to automate on stabs: filter cutoff, volume, filter envelope sustain, delay times, reverb options, .
No responses yet