It's time for another GAD! This time we're going to check out the process behind making a Laser Cannon sound. This is something you'd find on an alien spaceship, or whatever they decide to call the 4th Death Star (yes, Starkiller Base is Death Star III, deal with it). Here it is:
As you can hear, this sound has a buildup representing the cannon charging up, and a big blast for the firing of the weapon. Now, for impact of the blast sound I followed a very similar process to my first GAD, and so for the sake of brevity I'm going to recommend you head over to GAD-01: Plasma Shotgun, to see the full description of how to create something similar. I will however, focus on providing insight into how I synthesized the blast, and a brief description of the charging up of the cannon.
Laser Blast
This is the meat of the sound, and so it has to sound huge. To achieve this effect I employed three layers, the latter two of which were direct clones of the first:
Blast 1: the punch of the laser comes from this layer. I used a custom spectral wave table but the default spectral tables (and many others) will get you a similar sound. I used an Envelope to quickly drop the pitch by 24 semitones to get the punch (like a kick), then played with the wave-table position until I found it sounded robot-y and alien enough. After that, I added some effects to taste. What really helped with the character of this sound was the Reverb filter, found under Filters > Misc > Reverb. With a high drive and low cut-off setting the sound gained lots of texture. The cut-off is the knob that will affect the sound the most.
Blast 2: this layer was absent from my first render, but then I realized that the sound needed a lot more variance throughout its duration because of the fact that it is a long holding sound. I duplicated the first layer and with the same settings, scrolled through wave-tables until I found one that I liked. At this point, I knew that to add texture I would have to modulate the wave-table position, and so I applied an LFO to the position knob, changed up the effects a bit, and cut out the bass and higher frequencies with an EQ.
Blast 3: the main purpose of this layer is to add high frequencies and widen the stereo image. Once again, I cloned the first layer, then applied a quick high pass, and then went heavy on the FX: flanger, phaser, chorus, dimension expander, and detune. Note that "going heavy" means being generous on the "wet" knobs and NOT applying multiple instances of the same effect nor adding effects just for the sake of it. More often than not, less is more.
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