Creating the sounds of Future City part 2

Part Two (two two two two)

To create some blips and bloops for FutureCity3000 I used a little app called SFXR by a genius guy called Dr Petter

Witness the majesty.

You can play around with the sliders and use the presets to generate different kinds of random sounds. It's heaps of fun!

I wanted to create a little Be-borp! type of sound so I generated a bunch of stuff saving each sound out. After I had some different retro boops saved out as *wav files I imported one into Ableton Live.

Bip!!!

You can use sounds out of SFXR as is for placeholder game sounds which is really badass, but sometimes you might want to throw a few FX on them to make them sound a bit cooler.

Bewwp!!

 Frequency shifter is can re-pitch the sound then mix it back in with the dry/wet control. I couldn't help adding a tiny bit of bitcrushing on before it :) I think this made it even more crackly which you may or may not want depending on how silly you're feeling,

Plate reverb preset I've saved.

A little reverb could be used to soften the sound if it's too harsh.

 SXFR (and bitcrushing) seem to add a lot of high frequency sounds that you might not want. I've rolled them off fairly high at 10K and cut out most of the stuff under 400Hz. I think this gives it a bit more of a speaker sound and helps it to fit better if there's music playing in the background. It's sometimes a good idea to roll off the extreme lows in a sample anyways in case there's some rumbley junk you don't want, but can't quite hear.

BipppBORP!

Finally to make more complicated sounds you could try exporting multiple sounds from SFXR (or your synth) and splicing them together to create something more original.

Try some stuff and see what works for you!