This is one of my favorite Andrew Huang videos.
Beyond their jokey aspects, Andrew’s videos make a profound point about just how flexible recorded sound can be. This is useful information if you want to break out of the cliches, if you have bad source material to work with, or if you just enjoy pushing your software to its limits. Every semester, I assign my music tech students to record environmental sounds with their phones and then turn them into music. Phone recordings usually have poor sound quality and are loaded with noise. But if you’re a creative producer, you can make literally anything work.
Here I’ll show you how to make drums and melodic synth sounds from any kind of noise using Ableton Live. To pick a random example, let’s use the sound of a book’s pages flipping, which you can obtain here, here, or here. To make drums, all you need to do is to drop your sample into a Simpler instrument, isolate a short piece of it, and then put lots of saturator and/or compressor on it.
If you look at the bottom left of the image above, you’ll see that Sampler has a Transpose control. If you pitch your sound down, it will sound like a kick. If you pitch it up by different amounts, you should be able to make snares, claps, or toms. Try playing with the decay/fadeout controls too. Gates are also extremely useful for turning noise into drums.
Making pitched sounds is even easier. Move the region markers as close together as you can. The loop will cycle so fast that it will merge into a continual thrum or buzz. Voila, instant melodic synth.
To make the sound less harsh, click the Controls tab in the upper right corner of the Simpler window and play around with the filter settings. Reverb can also mellow out a harsh synth sound.
In a way, all of the freedom that you have when you use a tool like Live can be a curse. In such an infinite universe of possibilities, how do you even begin to narrow them down? It can be creatively very useful to impose constraints on yourself. Take a single sample, a page flip or whatever, and see how far you can push it. You’ll learn a lot about how instruments and effects work, and you might also discover a signature sound of your own.