Making Electronic Sounds With Organic Textures and Foley Techniques
Do you want to create organic drums and samples when you write percussion parts, but can't figure out how other producers get this sound in their tracks? Today we're going to be exploring how you can achieve this using foley samples including our own foley sample pack, STONEWIRE.
Lets jump in!
What Exactly Are Organic Sounds In Music Production?
Generally speaking, organic textures and organic sounds refer to musical elements that were sourced from acoustic, natural sources as opposed to synthesized or electronic sources.
This can be anything from the sound of someone's fingernails scraping a guitar string to the sound of the wind moving through the trees to a full choir singing.
You'd be hard pressed to get the same answer from different producers, but many of them will specifically say that organic sounds allude to nature somehow. So, things like the sound of a rainstorm, the rhythms of the ocean waves crashing against the shore, or the ambient sounds of the rainforest.
What Organic Sounds Add To Music
Many electronic sound sources have a very precise, exact nature to them. Naturally sourced sounds tend to have lots of little imperfections, slight amounts of moving changes, resonances, bits of ambience that come and go, as well as lots of other small details that add a lot of interest.
You can emulate this to a degree with electronic instruments, but sometimes this is more more work because you need to tell the machine to make every little detail. An actual organic sound has all that detail already built into the sound without the producer needing to add anything.
Where To Find a Collection of Recorded Organic Sounds
There a lot & lots of collections of sounds for download if you look around but we're of course going to at least request you check out our foley pack STONEWIRE.
It is a library of sounds which is loaded full of one shots and percussion loops that are both processed and unprocessed. You get a large folder full of the raw foley sounds that include metal, wood, noisy, ambiences, tones, scrapes, crunches, shakers, and more all recorded entirely from real life sources. None of the raw sounds are synthesized and none of them around available anywhere else.
The more interesting part is we took these organic sounds and made drum beats and percussion loops with them. We applied very heavy levels of processing to the organic foley samples to make kicks, snares, textures, melodies, and basslines in a few different tempos.
How We Made Drum Beats From Organic Foley Samples
The way we were able to make a lot of electronic sounds from these organic textures in STONEWIRE was by applying lots of heavy effects processing to the starting samples.
Even though there are layers and layers of heavy effects on every sound, we're basically treating the starting sound like you would an oscillator on a synth and transforming it. If you go into the Ableton Live 11 set that comes with the pack, you can even see the complete effects chains we used to make every sound.
If you go through these effects chains step by step, you can start to see not only how to replicate this process yourself with your own sounds, but also hear the relationship between the starting product and end result. The cool part is even with extremely heavy processing the final samples retain some of the "organicness" of the starting samples.
Summary
Human being tend to connect with the natural and constant variations that are found in acoustically sourced sounds because that is what the ear is used to detecting. Electronic and other synthesized sounds can stick out to use in a bad because because they tend to be much more exact, precise, and unchanging than anything found in nature.
Although we can fake a lot of the subtle modulations present in a truly organic sound, this is a lot of work because a synthesizer or computer needs explicit instructions for every single thing that needs to happen. While this can be a fun challenge, sometimes for the sake of efficiency and maintaining inspiration in a music production environment, it's just simpler, easier, and more intuitive to source sounds directly from their natural source.
Our collection STONEWIRE is a foley sample pack that offers a diverse range of real-life recorded sounds. There are lots of variations on metallic, wooden, noise, ambient, and percussive sounds that are ready to use as is in a music track.
STONEWIRE also is a working example of how organic textures and percussion can be transformed into extremely electronic sounding musical elements, while maintaining the organic quality that makes them compelling in the first place.
By applying extensive effects processing, organic foley samples are creatively morphed into drums, melodies, and basslines, showcasing how these natural sounds can be foundational in their raw form and also serve as sources for innovative, processed audio in music production.
We hope that you check them out and consider picking up the pack!
