Using Layers to Make One Sound

Randy Thom Guest Author

Using Layers to Make One Sound
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I’m working on a project now that needs a certain kind of creature voice. It’s an animated film, and this particular creature character should sound variously grumpy, fierce, funny, and endearing. That’s a huge performance range. It isn’t a “language,” just animal sounds, but has to feel a bit like a language. The voice needs lots of character, but it also must sound like an animal. Most animals don’t have a wide character range. Big challenge!
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Characteristics like funny, endearing, and even grumpy are vocal qualities we normally associate with smooth “tonal” sounds: coos, whimpers, hums, etc. But they often don’t sound “animalistic.” The animal part usually comes from rough, glottal sounds with a big “noise” (complex, uncorrelated waveforms) component.

Layering: Getting the best of both worlds: tonal and noise.
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So how to get the best of worlds, the tonal parts and the noise parts, and make it seem like one thing? Layering. But simply finding a tonal vocal from a puppy (or a person trying to sound like a puppy), and a rough and raspy vocal from a cheetah, then playing them at the same time will rarely work. It will usually sound like two voices, not one. This is where some sound manicuring comes in.

Begin the experimenting by simply playing various raspy and tonal vocals at the
 same time. Line them up on adjacent tracks in ProTools or some other program, and just play them. It’s very likely that if you have twenty combinations like that, at least one or two will play together perfectly, at least momentarily, and that will give you ideas about how to make additional successful combinations.

Getting more meticulous and methodical about it:

Try starting the tonal and the raspy elements at exactly the same time, and/or ending them at exactly the same time.

Try fading either one in, or fading either one out, so that there is a gradual transition.

Having “attack” moments in both sounds will often be the main thing that makes them feel like two separate sounds rather than one unified sound.
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Try modulating the tonal element in a “granular” (bumpy) way that feels similar to the bumpiness happening in the raspy element. You can to this with a tremolo plug-in, or by doing lots of rapid volume graph manipulation.

None of this is quick, and quite a bit of your success will depend on accidents you didn’t anticipate, but that’s true of all art.
 
And this approach can be used when creating all kinds of sounds with combined elements: explosions, vehicle bys, laser blasts, wind, etc.
 
Have fun experimenting!
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