Asking Why + Making Waves. Two recorded lessons from Mastering Sound Design.
I used to think sound design was this difficult, technical thing standing between me and the music I wanted to make. I wanted to compose tracks, make records, play DJ sets. Learning to build sounds seemed like another expensive subject I was supposed to master before I could get on with any of that.
Then I started enjoying it. A lot.
Making a sound could be as creative as writing a melody. I could record something ridiculous, find a tiny moment I loved, and turn it into an instrument. The things I'd been avoiding became some of the parts of making music I was proudest of.
People had been asking me for a sound design course for a long time. When I built Mastering Sound Design, I wanted to get into that whole process: why you choose a sound, what happens inside it, how you play it, and how it becomes part of your music.
I'm ill.Gates, a producer, sound designer and the founder of Producer Dojo. If you've seen my Sampling chaos demonstration in Ableton's One Thing series, you've seen a little of the way I work. Record the experiment. Find the part that makes your ears light up. Give yourself a way to use it again.
The first two MSD lessons show how I teach. Asking Why gives your experiments a direction. Making Waves gets into the sound itself, from waveforms and interference to sampling and resampling.
Use a DAW you can already find your way around. If you can record audio, make a MIDI part and load a sampler or synth, you've got a useful starting point. The principles travel between DAWs; many of my demonstrations and downloadable tools use Ableton Live. You can follow the lessons without buying the tools.
If recording audio and making a MIDI part are new to you, practise those basics first so you can follow the practical exercises. And if you want a recipe for copying one particular bass patch, expect a wider subject here. We're building methods you can keep using as your taste changes.
What do you want your sounds to say?
Why does Asking Why come first?
You can spend hours improving a patch without deciding what it belongs in. More movement? More distortion? A longer tail? Those choices get easier when you know what the sound is supposed to do.
In the first lesson I ask you to draft a short style manifesto: why do you make music, what are you saying with it, and what is it about? One or two sentences can give you something useful to work toward. Then collect sounds that belong to that direction.
Try it with a folder of your own recordings or samples you're cleared to use. Write one sentence describing the world you want the music to suggest. Listen through the folder and keep a small selection that fits. For each choice, name the thing you heard: a brittle attack, a heavy pulse, a voice that sounds close enough to touch.
Now change one of those sounds. Does making it brighter bring it closer to the world you described? Does a long reverb help, or does it hide the detail that made you choose it?
You're giving your ears a question they can answer. The manifesto can change as you make music; it isn't a contract you signed with your past self.
Akira runs through this course because I love the film and its score. It's a world with an identity you can recognize immediately, and it gives us something more interesting to work toward than “make a technically correct noise.”
You'll see that enthusiasm all over the lessons. By the end of the course I'm asking you to make music for that world, then go exploring beyond your familiar musical traditions. We start with WHY because the technical choices eventually have to carry an idea.
Give the experiment room to get ugly
A mudpie is one way I find sounds I wouldn't have thought to design.
Take a lead sound, record its output, and push the effects far beyond the settings you'd normally use in a finished track. Change the order. Twist the modulation. Try to break the sound. Keep your monitoring low while you experiment, because aggressive processing can produce large level changes.
You're going to throw plenty of it away. That's part of the method.
Stop recording and listen back as an editor. Cut out the little articulations you want to hear again. A fraction of a second might become a fill, a syllable in a bass phrase, or the beginning of a completely different sound. Save those pieces separately so you can actually find them next time.
The experiment and the selection do different jobs. If you reject every strange setting while you're recording, you never give yourself the material to choose from. If you keep the whole take without choosing anything, you've given yourself another file to avoid listening to.
This also explains why using a sample pack and learning sound design can happily belong in the same session. In Asking Why I talk about the value of samples from instruments you don't own, and performances you couldn't record yourself. Start with something useful. Learn how to make choices with it.
Two sounds can add up to silence
Making Waves gives you a way to investigate what you're hearing.
A waveform shows amplitude changing over time. When two signals meet at a mixer, their values add together. Depending on their relationship, parts of the result can reinforce or cancel. That matters when you're layering basses, combining dry and processed audio, or wondering why an apparently bigger setup sounds smaller.
Try the null test from the lesson:
- Put a short audio recording on a track with no effects. Duplicate it to a second track, starting at exactly the same sample.
- Keep the levels, panning and routing identical. Turn off sends and any processing that could treat the copies differently.
- Invert the polarity of both channels on one copy. In Ableton, Utility provides separate left and right invert controls.
- Play both together. Identical, aligned copies with one inverted should cancel to silence. Solo either track and the recording returns.
- Change the gain of one copy slightly. The cancellation is no longer complete. Put the gain back, then try processing one copy and listen to the difference that remains.
That last step lets you investigate what a process changes. It doesn't tell you whether the change is good. A delay, level mismatch, latency or a moving effect can leave a difference too, so check the setup before blaming the processor.
The same lesson makes a bigger connection: a sampler is a sound-design instrument. Your source can be a recording, your movement can come from MIDI and modulation, and your effects can live anywhere in the session. You can start thinking of the DAW as a large modular instrument.
Record a sustained note from a synth you already own, including an effect you like. Put that recording in a sampler and set its root note to the note you recorded. Play a short phrase, then try a second version of the recording in the same phrase.
With ordinary repitched playback, the recorded effect moves with the sample. Play it an octave lower and it runs at half speed; the printed movement and tail become longer too. Time-stretching modes behave differently. One recording also changes character as you play far from its original pitch, which is one reason we go on to study multisampling.
In Making Waves I tell the story of sending Eprom an analog Reese sample, then seeing a video of the beat he'd made with it. I was thrilled. That's the sort of life a sound can have after it leaves your studio: somebody else hears a musical possibility in it and takes it somewhere you didn't.
Build sounds you can actually play
The full course carries those first experiments into twelve weeks of making tools and using them in music.
After Asking Why and Making Waves, Week 3, Managing Projects, introduces the sound factory. Export the track you're working on, open a separate project at the same tempo, and design sounds over that reference. Keep the original song safe and give the expensive processing its own space. Record the results and bring the useful audio back.
You can try that whenever a busy session makes experimenting miserable. Save the factory project as well as its renders: the audio gives you something light enough to arrange, and the project lets you return to the process.
Week 4, Making Multis, turns recordings into instruments. A sampler can choose different recordings according to the key you play, how hard you play it, or a sample selector. Those are different musical controls.
For example, make several variations of a hi-hat, put them into a sampler that supports cycling or round-robin selection, and listen to the same pattern with the variations cycling. Compare it with a single hit repeated. You can hear whether the changing attacks give the rhythm useful life or make it too inconsistent. More variation isn't automatically better.
The course also builds velocity ramps, where harder playing selects a more intense recording. That gives you a way to perform a change in character, beyond simply turning the same sample up.
In Week 5, Controlling Synths, we make an instrument definition: a reusable control rack for the important parameters of a synth. You'll investigate MIDI control changes, program changes, macro ranges and recording your experiments. The practical payoff is being able to play the controls you care about without continually hunting through the synth interface. Program-change speed depends on the instrument and your system, so we test it.
Week 6, Combining Elements, puts those pieces together. One assignment is an “X-Maker”: a rack that generates variations within a chosen sound category. Set useful ranges for a few macros, randomize them, and save results you like. A Kick Maker still has to make kicks you want to use! The ranges do the work. Then you take the new racks into a sound factory and mutate the lead of a track in progress.
Week 7, Controlling Time, explores inversion and delay, doubling, microtiming and rhythmic phase. You'll make tools and use them in three beat sketches. A tiny timing change can alter the relationship between two sounds; a larger, repeating change can become part of the rhythm.
Week 8, Curving Paths, gets into transfer curves and the shape of a change. You'll view distortion on an oscilloscope, investigate compressors with a recorded noise test, and build waveshaper presets. You'll also change envelope curves without changing their duration. The beginning and end can stay in the same places while the movement between them feels different.
In Week 9, Using Sequencers, you build a system you can perform: recall snapshots, change modulation depth and rate, and alter the notes or their probability. Earlier control racks become part of something you can steer while recording, rather than a collection of unrelated devices.
In the final three weeks, composing with the material you've made becomes the central assignment.
Week 10, Creating Scale, asks for an Akira-inspired piece with sound design, melody and negative space. No drum beat, no familiar EDM drop to do the work for you. Can you create a payoff through emotional intensity? You'll try your own impulse responses in convolution reverb and give the sounds enough space for the contrast to register.
Week 11, Changing Forms, brings in the dramatic sound-design drop. Introduce a sound with a recognizable identity, give it movement, and transform it. The assignment uses a masked dance as its organizing idea: the reveal matters because you've given us something to recognize first.
Week 12, Expanding Worlds, asks you to explore a musical tradition outside your usual Western twelve-tone tuning. Identify its characteristics before reaching for a giant folder of tuning files. Try appropriate microtuning and timing, then compose with what you've learned. Let the unfamiliar music change your methods instead of forcing it into the habits you already had.
That final assignment brings us back to the first one. What is your music about, and how much more can you hear now?
The library is there to be used
Paid MSD includes my ill.Gates Sample Library, organized into folders such as Faces, Sparks, Purple Cow, and the drum-rack categories Meat, Potatoes and Spice. There are longer recordings and material to chop as well. You can look for a starting idea, a sound with a memorable identity, or material to turn into your own multis.
The Infinite Drum Rack gives you a prepared collection of drum sounds to play and choose among. The ill.808 Bass Machine starts from a sub-bass foundation and builds upper character through distortion and frequency modulation. Its multisamples use velocity splits, with a sample selector for different distortion flavours. Try the same MIDI part through several settings and listen for the one that supports the phrase.
There are also Crazy Distorted 808s, Moog Subs, ill.Phatty Classic 5 patches and finger-drumming sound packs. These let you work with prepared bass and performance material while you're learning to build your own.
The Rack Pack contains reusable processing setups. Its Bass Splitter separates the sub and upper portion for different treatment; Check Mono lets you hear the summed result. The One Knob Racks put a focused process under a macro so you can perform it. Open a rack and follow the routing as well as turning the knob.
The 2020 Song Template is another prepared starting point. Study how it's assembled, then keep the parts that help your sessions. These are resources to learn from and adapt.
The Ableton racks and template need compatible Ableton devices; some older Rack Pack effects also require plugins such as Audio Damage Dubstation. The template notes identify GClip as a dependency. Sample audio is more portable, but an Ableton instrument or synth-specific patch won't open in every DAW. Check the individual download notes against your setup. Purchasing MSD doesn't supply licenses for every third-party tool demonstrated.
You can review the full course and its download library on the MSD course page.
Give the new sounds somewhere to go
Producer Dojo is the learning community I built around making music and helping producers develop their work. In MSD, each week has a lesson and an assignment; the course offer includes written feedback from me in the course Discord.
In Asking Why I recommend starting with a five-minute daily music habit and arranging weekly accountability with somebody who'll check in. Managing Projects asks you to reserve a longer weekly session too. The short sessions keep you practising; the longer one gives you room to make something with what you've learned. Those are practice recommendations from the course.
The assignments matter. Build the tool, make a short piece with it, and listen to what happened. A beat sketch that exposes a problem gives us something specific to discuss. Several later assignments ask for exploratory pieces, not a finished release every week.
Come hear what happens
The first two lessons give you a proper introduction to the way I teach: the creative questions, the waveforms underneath the sounds, and the fun of recording something you couldn't have planned.
You can watch the recorded lessons and pause to try an idea in your own DAW. There's no live appointment to catch. Start with the style question, try the null test, or put a sound you already like into a sampler and hear how differently you can play it.
I'd love to hear what you make with it.
lots of love,
ill.Gates
