Best VST plugins for sale? You’ll be surprised what you can do with basic ingredients. Start out with something simple – a small sine-wave snippet, kick or snare drum – and simply loop, process and affect it with the tools in your DAW, one by one. Not only will you discover more about the tools at your disposal, you’ll probably use effects you’ve never explored before and you’ll start to realise how limitless your sound-design options really are. It’s a scattergun approach, but you’ll learn more about your effects and processors by applying them to something simple. And now we’re going to turn that advice on its head…

This principle is often used in cinematic sound design techniques and is particularly useful for simulating the physiological impact of massive explosions and high-intensity gunfire (without inducing hearing-damage lawsuits). The ears’ reflex to loud sounds can be simulated by manually playing with fine dynamics of sound. You can make that explosion appear quite loud by artificially shutting down the sound following the initial transient. The brain will immediately perceive it as louder and more intense than the sound actually is. This also works well for booms, impacts, and even drops in a club or electronic track.

You’ll also probably want to tweak the levels of each side (relative to each other) to maintain the right balance in the mix and the desired general left-right balance within the stereo spectrum. You can apply additional effects to one/both sides, like applying subtle LFO-controlled modulation or filter effects to the delayed side. A word of caution: Don’t overdo it. In a full mix, use the Haas Effect on one or two instruments, maximum. This helps you avoid unfocusing the stereo spread and being left with phasey mush. There are limits to how well our ears can differentiate between sounds that occupy similar frequencies of human hearing. Masking occurs when two or more sounds sit in the exact same frequencies. Generally, the louder of the two will either partially or completely obscure the other, which then seems to ‘disappear’ from the mix. Read extra information at audio plugins.

Time stretching is a familiar trick for sound designers. Typically, the method is to take the sound and shorten or elongate it, which gives that glitch sounding electrifying effect. This process will change the speed or length of the audio signal while at the same time, not affecting the pitch. The process of time stretching in real time is very useful (especially when using certain DAWs). For example, the functionality of Ableton allows you to bend the laws of time in very creative ways. This in turn will give you incredible textures. To get even more variation, try using different stretching algorithms if your DaW has them.

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