Making a beat with Photoshop + Photosounder

http://photosounder.com

This video shows how to create drums using Adobe Photoshop and Photosounder.

We first start with making a snare sound by drawing a white blob in the upper half of the picture and then black out its first half, then listen to it in Photosounder. We then proceed with the kick drum by drawing a curve in the lower end of the image, then the hi-hat by drawing something similar as the snare drum except shorter in time and higher in the image. All the instruments are converted into "Smart Objects" so that all their copies would be affected when they will be eventually modified.

We then place 8 hi-hats at regular intervals on the image on which we are laying out the beat, and we place the kick drums and snares accordingly to form a drum pattern.

We then tweak many aspects of the beat before exporting the final result to a WAV file which we'll be able to use as a drum loop in any regular audio sequencer.

Category:

Music

Tags:

• drum
• synthesis
• photosounder
• photoshop
• snare
• kick
• hihat
• music
• sound
• processing
• experiment
• spectrogram
• image

[TheSnub]

In the future we'll be drawing music.

[Photosounder]

@TheSnub I'm already in the future then ;). Everyonce in a while I draw short loops in Photosounder in a few minutes with drums and usually some weird kind of instrument. One of these days I'll take some time to demo how I do that in a video.

[MichaelKhanTV]

lol this is pretty neat.. what is the purpose of this though.. sound design?

[Photosounder]

Yep. It's not practical to put the whole beat together this way, but for designing the instruments themselves it's great, because you can create a drum sound from scratch that sounds like nothing else and you can tweak how it sounds.

[CtrlAltEgon]

@Photosounder Hey, that gave me a great idea! :D I'm already decently good at Photoshop now I can make NEW instruments so I won't be bound to the presets so much. Thanks! :D

[Photosounder]

@CtrlAltEgon yeah that's what Photosounder is for basically! Btw you should try learning Photosounder's image editing tools too, Photoshop is good but it lacks the tools that that type of editing really needs.

[takeda64]

As you might realized it's a pain to save a file, and then load in your program. What about adding a (image) clipboard support?

Just a suggestion - I never used the program.

[premium518]

amazing



[Tubeuserthefirst]

this  is amazing!! Great job!

[ALXXMaXX]

Reminds me a bit of NIN's "Closer"

[nikhilesh93]

How do you control harmonics? To get tone instruments (like synths etc.)?

Really fun stuff BTW! Although I'd do beats by the more 'conventional approach (sampling et al), I'd love to do some funky synths like this. :-)

[DEO541]

WOW