GAD 02: Laser Cannon
It’s time for another GAD! This time we’re going to check out the process behind making a Laser Cannon sound. This is something you’d find on an alien spaceship, or whatever they decide to call the 4th Death Star (yes, Starkiller Base is Death Star III, deal with it). Here it is:
As you can hear, this sound has a buildup representing the cannon charging up, and a big blast for the firing of the weapon. Now, for impact of the blast sound I followed a very similar process to my first GAD, and so for the sake of brevity I’m going to recommend you head over to GAD-01: Plasma Shotgun, to see the full description of how to create something similar. I will however, focus on providing insight into how I synthesized the blast, and a brief description of the charging up of the cannon.
Laser Blast
This is the meat of the sound, and so it has to sound huge. To achieve this effect I employed three layers, the latter two of which were direct clones of the first:
- Blast 1: the punch of the laser comes from this layer. I used a custom spectral wave table but the default spectral tables (and many others) will get you a similar sound. I used an Envelope to quickly drop the pitch by 24 semitones to get the punch (like a kick), then played with the wave-table position until I found it sounded robot-y and alien enough. After that, I added some effects to taste. What really helped with the character of this sound was the Reverb filter, found under Filters > Misc > Reverb. With a high drive and low cut-off setting the sound gained lots of texture. The cut-off is the knob that will affect the sound the most.
- Blast 2: this layer was absent from my first render, but then I realized that the sound needed a lot more variance throughout its duration because of the fact that it is a long holding sound. I duplicated the first layer and with the same settings, scrolled through wave-tables until I found one that I liked. At this point, I knew that to add texture I would have to modulate the wave-table position, and so I applied an LFO to the position knob, changed up the effects a bit, and cut out the bass and higher frequencies with an EQ.
- Blast 3: the main purpose of this layer is to add high frequencies and widen the stereo image. Once again, I cloned the first layer, then applied a quick high pass, and then went heavy on the FX: flanger, phaser, chorus, dimension expander, and detune. Note that “going heavy” means being generous on the “wet” knobs and NOT applying multiple instances of the same effect nor adding effects just for the sake of it. More often than not, less is more.
Unintentionally, this ended up being a low/mid/high setup. Keep this in mind if you’re working on a layered sound, and use it to your advantage: know that allowing a full frequency spectrum on all layers can cause the sound to become “muddy” and unclear. I’d like to mention again that for sounds like this where a note is being held for several seconds, it is essential to add variation and texture.
Charging the Cannon
The setup for this is very easy. Buildup 1 and 2 are random samples that I had lying around in my collection. However, if you have a collection of your own, or if you don’t, do not go looking for sounds that sound similar to the sound you’re trying to achieve, because you simply won’t find any. In this case, both samples were incredibly short (AKA one-shots), but I reversed them and played around with the pitch and time stretching parameters until they became something unique; after a bit of reverb I called it a day. Buildup 3 was quickly synthesized from scratch by automating the pitch rise with a simple curve, and modulating the low pass filter with an LFO speeding up over time, to give the impression of some sort of engine or machine revving up. Note that all the stray reverb was completely muted right before the impact, to shift the focus from this buildup sound to the sound of the weapon locking onto the target. It’s important not to leave reverb tails lying around where unnecessary.
Originally published at lfaltoni.wixsite.com.
