Anypony here use Presonus Studio One?

[EVBP 94]

Hi all,

It's been almost 2 years since I last posted in MLPForums! I'm glad to see it is alive and well!

I have a question for the dubstep (or complextro, or trap, or glitch hop, or whatever subgenreofasubgenreofasubgenre you identify yourself with) musicians in the fandom.. Do any of you use Presonus Studio One as your DAW? Asking for a friend, who coincidentally, is me.

I've looked on youtube, soundonsound and several other internet resources, but have failed to come up with a good guide for what I am trying to accomplish.

I want to make the harsh, sliding/portamento, staccato sounds you hear on tracks by brony musicians like Scraton (DJ Pon3), Strach Attack, Undreamed Panic and the like. I'm attaching a snippet of one of Scratons tracks, just to give you an idea of what I'm referring to.

I am looking into getting Serum (I've played around with it and it seems like a very capable synth VST... also I heard some brony musicians swear by it at BronyCon '17 ), but in the meantime I want to learn just what it is that I need to understand about sound design to get to where I want to go...

Sorry for the lengthy post. I just would really like to make some progress on figuring this stuff out!

scraton-snippet.mp3

[Courageous Thunder Dash 7,809]

Yes! I run my Focusrite Scarlett 2i2 through it. I make my scratch and wub sounds custom on my Korg Kronos. Sometimes, I run my Boss RT-20 through plain wave samples using the 4th function on the pedal, which when the settings are calibrated right, the RT-20 Leslie Speaker Simulator transforms into a Wub Machine. Other than that, you may have to create you own sounds using certain filters and effects. 

[BlueBrony 388]

I also run on Studio One, and unfortunately I have yet to attempt the kinds of sounds you are going for. If you want to try and figure out the sound design behind those techniques, you may still get some useful guides from youtubers using different DAWs. For instance, when I was making my own big festival synth, I followed the general techniques of the youtuber imamusicmogul, who built one from scratch using logic pro.

If you are talking general sound design, I would say your best bet is to do some research to understand the various tools that sound engineers use (EQ, delay, reverb, compression, mixing, automation, modulation, stereo imaging). I ended up buying a book that was essentially a guide to home recording studios, and there are a decent amount of youtube videos out there that can help explain some of the basics of mixing. Besides that, the best teacher for me is just experience. The more projects you make with your DAW, the better you will understand it and what you can do to make it better.

Does this give you some ideas or point you in the right direction?