Sound Design Course

Take your music production skills to the next level on one of Point Blank's sound design courses. Expert producer Danny J Lewis shows you how to reproduce contemporary sounds or create your own unique style. Whether you are producing tracks for the dancefloor or designing sound for multimedia, this sound design course will reveal music production secrets, professional tricks and techniques.

Sound Design Course materials include:

Up to 100 Quicktime video tutorials

Over 300 pages of course notes

350MB of 24bit audio samples

Personalised video feedback on your music

Weekly webchat with a pro producer

24/7 access to student / tutor discussion forums

Sound Design Course Contents

Week 1: What is Sound Design?

• Foley: creating sounds for films from real sounds
• Forbidden Planet: the first synthesised soundtrack
• The tools used for sound design

Week 2: Introduction to Reaktor

• Ensembles, Instruments, Macros and Modules
• Recorderbox - saving the audio to a wav file
• Reaktor as a VST/effect in Cubase, Logic & Ableton

Week 3: Reaktor Ensemble Workshop

• Building a small library of introductory Ensembles
• Tape Deck, Vintage Compressor & Wind machine
• Custom effect construction, Stereo & Band Filter

Week 4: Building an Analogue Synth in Reaktor

• Building an analog synth
• Oscillators, filters & envelopes
• Creative filter modulation

Week 5: Creating Presets for your Analogue Synth

• How to create lead, bass, stab and pad sounds
• Sound effects and creating your own FX library

Week 6: Foley

• Download a free 318MB Library of 24bit Audio
• How to edit and manipulate audio
• Foley exercises using a variety of audio processes

Week 7: Creative Sampling in Kontakt

• How to navigate the Kontakt interface
• Building instruments,
• Mapping, Wave & Script editors.

Week 8: Kontakt Modulation Workshop

• Zone envelopes, gating, LFO & filtering
• Multiple processing: Pitch shift, Lofi and effect send
• DBD

Week 9: Adventures in Pitch and Time

• Time Machine: Real-time timestretching
• Tempo synchronisation & legato mode
• Tone Machine: musical phrases with drumloops

Week 10: Rhythm Science

• Kontakt's Beat Machine, Randomstepshifting
• Using groups to create unique drum sounds
• Create 'Electronic' drum kit from two short samples

Week 11: Recreating sounds from Film

• Reverse engineering common sounds
• Recreating famous movie sounds
• Sonic textures from "Star Wars" and "Predator"

Week 12: Sound Design Final Project (add your sounds to the movie) & Test

• Create your own sounds for a short movie
• Create a mixture of electronic and foley sounds
• Final Test

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Tutor profile

Danny Lewis
Since his debut single, the club chart number one and national top 30 hit 'Spend the Night', Danny's music has been supported by the likes of Masters at Work, Gilles Peterson, David Morales, Kenny Carpenter, Todd Edwards, Todd Terry, and  Danny Rampling to name but a few.

Created on this course

This video shows an impressive final project in sound design for multimedia from online student Phil Ventre.