Adding Oomph To Your Whoosh Sounds – With Tilman Hahn

 

What’s the story behind meltedsounds?

When doing sound design I really enjoy the process of bending organic field recordings with creative samplers and effects, but what always bugged me is that most of the really cool manipulation tools are mainly music orientated.

Our goal was it to create something that is aimed at sound designers. Something that measures in seconds or milliseconds rather than in bpm or bars. Creating our first instrument was a very long process as there are hardly any preexisting instruments to learn from.
 

When did you start working on Whoosh? Can you tell a bit about the development history?

The inspiration to Whoosh comes from my daily work in film and sound effects editing / designing and through reading posts and tutorials that can be found on exceptional resources like Designingsound.org.

It all began with an amazing article by Charles Deenen: 100 Whooshes in 2 Minutes which was posted at Designing Sound in 2010.

In this article Charles explains a technique on how to design whoosh effects in Pro Tools. After reading this highly inspirational article I experimented with syncing mixer and effect automations to a Doppler path. I wanted to align the events precisely, but with optional randomness and editing possibilities.

Soon I discovered that the sort of thing I was looking for was only possible with an instrument solely built for the purpose to design whoosh & pass-by sound effects.

In November 2011 Dietrich Pank and I started the development of the Whoosh. Dietrich is the one who really built the whole instrument. He contributed a lot of ideas and from the beginning he was very picky about the sound of Doppler engine.

The Doppler Engine:

He spent a lot of time on testing and rebuilding it to make it sound as natural and powerful as possible. Later we came up with the idea of the Wave Mixer and the Grain Players.

The idea was to make all the modulations and the grain sample playback syncable to the Doppler Path.

In 2012 Jean-Eduard Milcot posted his Kyma patch: 100 Whooshes in 2 minutes, which is amazing and a must for every Kyma user out there! J-eds patch really gave us a lot of further inspiration.

Besides the engine the included field recordings are an important factor for the sound and character of Whoosh. So be sure to check out the amazing sound effect companies that have contributed to the versatile and extensive onboard library of Whoosh.

And finally a lot of detail was spent on the GUI Design. Benni Diez did an awesome job and created a clear looking GUI that feels smooth and is fun to tweak.
 

What’s a typical usage scenario / work situation with Whoosh?

At the moment Whoosh works like a loop player. Best is if you just open it in Pro Tools and hit the Run button.

For the start you could pick a preset that comes close to what you are looking for. If you need a windy whoosh for example, you could set the categories of the four samplers to wind and choose a different wind sound for each sampler.

But you could also pick a fire sound effect in one of the samplers and you’ll get an interesting blend between fire and wind. All the Volume, Effects and Grain Playhead modulations are synced to the duration of the doppler path. So when you change the Master Duration all the modulations follow.

This enables you to get different tempo variations of complex setups.
 

Is Reaktor required to run Whoosh?

Yes. At the moment, the Reaktor Player format is not available to 3rd party developers. We hope that this changes at some point in the future.
 

Whoosh comes with a large SFX library – how are these sounds used in the plugin?

The sounds are integrated into two styles of samplers:

1. The Source 4 Samplers:

The Source Samplers provide the raw sounds which are blended into each other by the source mixer and they are responsible for the whoosh component of the sound effect. The source players each provide 13 SFX categories containing 128 samples in total and they can operate in Granular or Loop mode. In granular playback mode it is possible to sync the playback duration of the loop to the master instrument duration.

2. The Impact Sampler:

The impact sampler is divided into four individual impact players each sharing the same functionality. The players offer ten different categories of impact samples. The three big encoders at the top of the impact panel allow to adjust the Position, Pitch, and Amplitude of all 4 impact players at once. If the Position parameter is modulated by an amount of randomness the playback position of the four impacts is randomized after each pass.

 

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Do you have an approach for making really full, beefy whooshes in Whoosh?

I think this actually is the strength of Whoosh. Besides the atmospheric sounds in the trailer, all the sound effects were made with Whoosh.

The following tips come to my mind: Find a combination of sounds that work well together. It is good to combine sounds that feature different frequency bands. (Low, Mid, High). Be sure to have some fire and animal sound included. :-)

If you have created a setting that you like, you can conveniently step through the different sounds to find the combination that works best. Also, when adding further insert effects in your DAW, you should be able to create all styles of whooshes. Here are some examples of sounds created with Whoosh:

 

Any other tips and tricks for new Whoosh owners?

Open Whoosh in your DAW. At the beginning you could just pick a preset you like and change the sounds of all the samplers in the Overview mode. This can be a lot of fun!

If you want to create futuristic Sci-Fi whoosh sound effects you should experiment with some granular or spectral manipulation effects on top of Whoosh.

To dive deeper into all the functions be sure to check the manual and the online walk-through tutorial. Importing your own samples is a bit tricky but we also have a tutorial on that.

We are currently working on the next free update which will feature a better workflow for sample import and more midi functionality.

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Thanks a lot to Tilman for taking the time for this interview. And, as a special treat to A Sound Effect visitors, meltedsounds offers 15% off Whoosh: Just use the code ASE-WHOOSH15 here to enjoy a nice discount!
 

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