Have you ever tried recording wind sounds before? If you have, you know it can be challenging to get a good usable sound, especially if you don’t have professional recording equipment. It’s usually too noisy or you just get that ugly, boomy wind noise hitting the microphone.
So, if you are on a budget or just don’t have the professional gear to record awesome wind sounds, I will show you how you can do just that using synths and a few plugin effects.
How exactly do you create wind sound effects with synths, then? Start off by loading a noise oscillator from your preferred synth of choice. Once loaded, apply a lowpass filter on it. There are two parameters to control that will get you the core wind sound you are looking for: the cutoff and the resonance. Assign both of those parameters to your midi controller and start to play a note and move the parameters around. With this setup, you now have your basic wind sound effect using a synthesizer.
Shaping The Wind Envelope
If you haven’t touched your amplitude envelope on your synth, you’ll notice that if you press a key on your midi keyboard, you’ll get a harsh attack. Since that is not suitable for a wind sound effect, we want to change that. You’ll also notice that as soon as you release the key, the sound dies right away. We want it to slowly decrease in volume after the release of the key.
Here are the settings I recommend for shaping the amplitude envelope:
Attack: around 1 second or more
Decay: all the way down
Sustain: all the way up
Release: 1.75 seconds or more
With that, you should now have a pad-like sound with a long attack and long release.
How To Add Variation To Your Wind Sound Effect
Add modulation to your sound.
You will want this to be subtle as too much modulation will be too obvious and ruin the wind sound effect. I like to very lightly modulate the cutoff with a random LFO (Low Frequency Oscillator) and have the depth of modulation very low.
Change the noise type
Experiment with changing the noise oscillator to a different type of noise such as brown noise, pink noise, or other types of noise profiles.
Change the filter
At the beginning of the article, I mentioned one of the first things to do is to load a lowpass filter. Feel free to experiment with different types of lowpass filters or just different filter types altogether.
Add effects to your sound
There are a few effects that work well with wind sounds. Here is a quick list of effects I like to use.
- Reverb. This adds space and can make the wind sound feel outdoors
- Delay. This can add a sense of space just as reverb does. It can also make the sound feel bigger.
- Saturation. This can thicken up the sound or just change the quality of the wind.
That’s it! It’s a pretty quick setup and you can have full control over your wind sound effect to design it just how you like. You can now take this approach and place the sounds directly into your game or use it as a layer to make magic sounds. Either way, I hope this was valuable to you.
If you have any further questions or suggestions, please feel free to leave them in the comments below! Thanks for reading!
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