OTT Madness

Intro

In this post, we’ll explore a quick and easy approach to generating a solid basis for sound design for those badly timed creative blocks.

OTT Madness

In cases where design requests come with no visual or descriptive references or definitions at all, it can be tricky to come up with designs out of nowhere, on the spot.

One of the quickest ways to generate massive and crazy-sounding designs is by using multiple instances of Xfer’s OTT.

But just loading these instances into your favorite DAW won’t be enough. Adding a different kind of plugin is necessary to serve as sound generation, typically some sort of analog modeling plugin will do the trick.

These plugins tend to induce noise into tracks that aren’t audible in a common case, but with the multiple OTT instances, this noise will come through in an extremely compressed and over-processed manner (changing the amount of OTT instances will reduce this over-compression. Experimentation is key here!).

At this point, the noise will become audible when running the track, but it might sound fairly uninteresting, or boring even. This is where the addition of automation and LFOs can bring this sound into life. There are usually some parameters in your selected “noise” plugin that will alter the noise altogether. Automating these parameters will generate different types of movement and sounds.

Taking Soundtoys’ Little AlterBoy as an example, automating the “Drive” parameter will generate some more interesting-sounding results than just its default noise. Adding further processing effects at the end of the chain can help clean up or further boost the sounds.

At this point, the effects chain will generate sounds that could easily be used as a basis for some assets or design direction.

From here on out, it’s all about experimenting with parameter movements, additional processing at the end of the chain, and different noise sources!

Conclusion

Stacking multiple instances of OTT after some noise-inducing Analog Modelling plugins allows for a fast resulting, yet flexible and highly experimental way of generating sounds out of seemingly nothing.

This approach can also be used with other sources of noise, and can be heavily customized by changing automation options, or even the settings on each OTT instance.

Here’s an example of what we came up with, using this process (done in less than 10 minutes!):

Enjoy!

Referenced plugins:

• Xfer’s OTT

• Soundtoys’ Little AlterBoy

• Kjaerhus’ Classic Compressor