Make Better Sound Design, Faster | The HMLS Technique
634Today, you're going to learn about making better sound design, faster for your game audio projects.
Pretty much every sound designer wants to create better sound in less time, and wants to avoid that "I have no idea what I'm doing" feeling as much as possible. Well, you're in luck, because we're going to be sharing a technique that will get rid of that feeling nice and quick.
Here, we go into how to make better sound design, faster using the HMLS technique. Once you start employing this, you'll never suffer from "Blank DAW Syndrome" ever again.
The HMLS technique is based off of a common sound design technique known as "layering". Layering is when a sound designer stacks multiple sounds on top of one another to create a more unique final creation.
While that's a simple enough technique, it's often daunting to know what to layer to make sure our sounds are thick, satisfying, and suit the project we're working on.
To prevent our sounds from becoming lifeless, all we need to do is use at least one each of the following layers: High frequency, Middle frequency, Low frequency, and a Style layer - H M L S.
While the High, Middle, and Low layers may be self-explanatory (we need to make sure we're covering a generally broad frequency spectrum for sounds that need to sound thick and satisfying), the Style layer may be a bit confusing.
Simply put, the style layer is something that we add as a cherry on top to the rest of the layers. The style layers don't have to have anything to do with the actual sound itself - they're used more as an enhancement for the rest of the sound. If you want to put a tiger growl underneath your sword sound effects, go right ahead. So long as it sounds good, it is good.
And yes, you definitely can add more than one of each type of these layers.
I hope this video helps you make a lot more sound design!
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💀 The DAW I'm using in these (and many) of my videos is Reaper: https://www.reaper.fm/
🌈 The Reaper theme I'm using here is Smooth 6: https://forum.cockos.com/showthread.php?t=228983
🔊 Download the free Sonniss GDC Sound Packs that I used here: https://sonniss.com/gameaudiogdc
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