Production Master Class: The Whoosh

Production Master Class: The Whoosh

24 December, 2008 | 12.00PM

• Written by: francispreve
• Filed under: Music News: production tutorials

One of the most requested class topics to date involves something producers affectionately refer to as “The Whoosh.”

That’s just a fun, onomatopoetic way to refer to those transitional sounds that are reminiscent of wind, waves and other assorted natural (and unnatural) rises and falls.

In honor of the wintry season that’s upon us, our holiday lesson in production techniques will focus on creating the sound of The Whoosh.

[Cue transitional effect]

Richard Dinsdale

I love doing the ‘whoosh’ white noise in my tracks to create a great build up.

A great technique is sidechaining a kick to the ‘whoosh’ so that it sounds as though the track is throbbing.

An easy way of doing this is by selecting a compressor on a Bus Channel (say Bus 1), putting a kick drum to an audio channel (e.g. Audio 4, sidechain the compressor on Audio 4), and then selecting the whoosh plug-in that creates the whoosh sound on Bus 1 - which gives it this great suction sound!

This technique also works really well on basslines and leads to get that suction sound without having to put your whole mix through a huge compressor.

MySpace link: www.myspace.com/richarddinsdale

Wolfgang Gartner

There are a lot of ways to create whooshes and transition / emphasis effects. 

The most common one that’s been used in dance music since the disco days is just white noise put through a lowpass filter, but people have gotten extremely creative with them over the past decade with all of the advances in synthesis and technology. 

I use a lot of different techniques these days, so I’ll pick out a couple of them here and explain. 

Reverb:  with the right ‘verb, you can pretty much turn any sound into a whoosh.  For example, in ‘Wild Card’, one of the whooshes was created using a Walrus sound effect, just drenched in a very long reverb and filtered down. 

Another good technique is a pitch envelope on a synthesizer; take any sound - like a simple saw wave - put a very steep pitch envelope on it (like 2 or 3 octaves), and make it sweep downward or upward depending on what you are trying to do. 

Then add onto that with a bit of pitch LFO, some reverb, maybe another oscillator on top of it doing the same thing but an octave lower, and you can really fatten it. 

I like to do a little trick by creating a whoosh on the left channel, copying it to the right channel, and changing the modulation settings a bit on the right channel, then combining them together. 

This creates a super wide and thick sound since both whooshes are doing slightly different things. 

Don’t deviate the two channels too much from each other though, or it loses its continuity.

MySpace link: www.myspace.com/djwolfganggartner

Paul Maddox

On the Spektre stuff we use quite a lot of found sounds for stuff like this - my favourite was on ‘A Glimpse Outside’ where the crackly buildup noise was the sound of a sunglasses case being unzipped.

It’s just close-mic’ed with loads of reverb and delay to thicken it up.

Other than that though, white noise with various filtering is best for the swooshy stuff.

If you have any old analogue synths with a white noise generator it can be fun to record all the whooshes live over the track rather than automating it, that way they’re all a bit different and give the track a bit more life.

MySpace link: www.myspace.com/paulmaddoxdj

Tyler Michaud

The whoosh might be the most simple and effective thing for build-ups in dance music.

And if you are interested in exploring it further, you can try literally almost any effect on the sound - but the simplest way to start is two words: White noise.

Open up your favorite softsynth, and choose the white noise patch or function.

Next thing to most commonly do for a build-up effect would be to apply a filter of some sort.

Now start playing with the cutoff, and voila, you have your Whoosh buildup.

Automate the cutoff as needed.

There’s an infinite amount of things you can do from here.

Apply any of your favorite effects to the audio channel - flanger, reverb, compressor/sidechain – or layer new synths/sounds with it.

The options are absolutely endless.

MySpace link: www.myspace.com/tylermichaud

Mike Monday

I try not to have a “favourite method” of doing anything in the studio because that way lies boring, inevitably predictable tunes which go against the whole point of electronic music for me.

Dance music is at its best when its innovative, and this applies everywhere in the studio, even the lowly “whoosh”.

For instance on my recent club remix of one of my album tracks ‘I Am Plankton’, I used a sample of some waves crashing on a beach to create a whoosh as I felt it would fit with my watery theme.

I tried reversing the sample to get the “sucking” effect, but it stopped sounding like water, so I ended up using some volume automation on an exponential curve to create an enormous whoosh into the big bleeps which form the basis of the whole tune.

I also added some serious chorus (using the Spreader plug-in in Logic) and subtly brought down down the chorus amount so not only did the waves feel like they where getting closer, but also, erm, “narrower” if you get my meaning.

Even though the chorus thing is very subtle, it sounds amazing on a big system in a club and definitely adds to the whole shebang.

Another really cool thing you can do if you’ve got some vocals is to bring them in with some reversed reverb.

I’m sure there’s an easier way of doing it now, but what I have sometimes done is to record a large reverb (a hall reverb works best with a nice long tail) from the first line or word of the vocal, then reverse it and then place it as you would place a whoosh into the where the vocal comes in.

It creates a quite bizarre and unsettling effect, but works a treat.

I haven’t used vocals for quite some time, so I can’t remember when I last did this but I remember doing it a lot a few years ago when I was using samplers and outboard effects machines which took a lot longer than doing it all within the computer (although to be fair it probably won’t sound as good as it did when it was done on outboard gear).

One thing I would be careful of though is to make sure you don’t use these whooshes (no matter how spectacular the sound) too many times in a track.

The woosh follows the law of diminishing returns whereby the more you use something the less its impact.

I think I only use my Plankton whoosh twice in the whole track.

MySpace link: www.myspace.com/magicmikemonday

Tritonal

One of our favorite and unique methods for creating a whoosh, or white noise sweep is by utilizing a tape delay’s feedback and wet parameters.

Your basic whoosh is nothing more than white noise with a high pass filter sweeping it over time with a very high Q. 

We like to take one element of the track, something that is creating the melodic groove of a piece, and automate the feedback of a tape delay plugin with Logic Pro’s Tape Delay.

We also do some nifty things with iZotope’s Trash, but we’ll keep it simple here. 

At a certain feedback amount, Logic’s tape delay begins to distort because it is feeding back on itself - I believe this is right around 52.

We love to automate the feedback to around 56, hold it there, and then gradually automate the low cut and wet/dry over time.

As the sound begins to distort, it also begins to build and create white noise much like you amateur swoosh.

If harnessed correctly, you can sweep out the low end while keeping the high in check with the high cut and wet parameters.

An even cooler thing to do is to get automation just about perfect, and then bounce the entire thing.

Once you have your little section of gold, you can use a basic EQ and sweep the low again with a high Q to enhance the resonant peak.

Again, this is all done with automation.

Try sidechaining the entire thing, and then adding reverb for an absolute gorgeous pumping distorted white noise swooosh!

With iZotope Trash, you can do all the above with the extra bonus of having an LFO modulate your cutoff point, and choosing different distortion modules.

Absolutely wicked!

MySpace link: www.myspace.com/tritonalmusic

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