MIDI Mapping For Intuitive Sound Design

Getting tactile with your MIDI controls can breathe new life into stale music.

A lot of sound‑design tutorials focus on the technical aspects of the tools at our disposal — how they work and what they do. Whilst it’s always an advantage to have a theoretical understanding, this article will take a less analytical approach. Instead of designing a sound from scratch by working through the basics, we’ll discuss a way to design sound by working with an existing phrase or loop directly. The advantage of this technique is that it ignores the screen and relies on your ears and brain to feel the right settings.

We’ll be mapping hardware knobs, faders and buttons to various sound control parameters in order to manipulate them in real time. Which sounds pretty straightforward and basically what analogue synths have always done... but there are some subtleties that bring this to life and (I’ve found) make the whole sound‑design process far more fun — and productive.

This technique also solves the age‑old issue of stale loops. We’ve all been there; a burst of creativity generates a great‑sounding loop, but after a ‘mere’ two or three hours of repeating the same eight bars, it gets boring for some inexplicable reason! Mapping controllers to multiple parameters and recording a jam session with them can solve this, creating new and surprising sounds and ideas for arrangements and key moments in a piece of music. And the beauty is that once the principles are understood, this can work with any recorded audio, MIDI part or musical element in a mix by adapting it as needed.

The Setup

The best way to get a feel for this technique is to try it. What you’ll need:

• A musical phrase in your DAW or equivalent. This could be a MIDI part triggering a soft synth or a piece of pre‑recorded audio. MIDI is best as you can get into the real parameters of the synth, but an audio phrase can be used by inserting effects plug‑ins and manipulating those instead.
• A control surface with any combination of knobs, faders or buttons that can send MIDI control data to your DAW.

The key thing with this simple setup is to make sure you can control various parameters of the sound in question from the control knobs and faders, and to make sure that there’s one knob per parameter and no menu‑diving. So for example, knob one could control filter cutoff, knob two controls resonance, knob three controls the decay time of the volume envelope, and a fader is controlling an effects return level.

If you’re working with pre‑existing audio, then you can apply modulation to plug‑ins placed after that audio, such as filters, EQ, delay or something more exotic.

Take some time to map a decent number of parameters to controllers. There are obvious ones like filter, resonance, LFOs and envelopes, but it’s definitely worth trying some less obvious parameters, just to see what happens. If you don’t have a lot of handy control knobs, mapping mod and pitch wheels from a synth to two parameters at a time is still going to give some results and is worth trying. Just overdub a few passes using different parameters.

A Novation Launch Control XL is perfect for hands‑on MIDI manipulation. Note the annotations on tape — it’s easy to forget what’s controlling what when you come back in the next day...

Jamming With The Knobs

So far so good, you might say. Sounds like you’ve recreated a basic synthesizer, what’s the big deal? Well, the magic is in seeing what the setup can do. Instead of just playing the keyboard and giving a knob a quick tweak every so often, what we want to do here is to loop a part and find out what that phrase is really capable of, from a sonic perspective.

Because there are (hopefully!) going to be at least three different parameters interacting, by experimenting with them as the loop plays, one can cover a lot of ground quickly to find a sound that sympathises with the musical part really naturally. And it might be from surprising settings that you wouldn’t have thought to ‘mathematically’ design. Remember, you’re twiddling knobs and listening to the results rather than drawing visual automation on a screen. This is very definitely a mouse‑free activity!

Arrangement‑driven Experiments

Not only this; don’t be content once you’ve found something that works. Especially in loop‑based music such as techno, continually tweaking these parameters over the duration is what keeps such music (when it works) alive and interesting. The trick is to record a good few minutes of these tweaks and then select the best bits. The recording might comprise the controller data itself or simply the resulting audio on a new audio track. They both have their advantages: MIDI can be tweaked if something was nearly perfect, but audio forces the decision to be made and you to move swiftly and decisively on.

And don’t be afraid to go extremes — high resonance, fastest LFOs, lowest filter with highest envelope — it doesn’t matter if it doesn’t all sound great all the time, you are almost guaranteed to stumble across something unexpected and wonderful in the process.

By the way, I’m quite convinced that all those articles about ‘how artist X made sound Y’ are misguided, in the sense that it’s better to just create new sounds using techniques like this, and finding the unexpected, than trying to reverse‑engineer someone else’s happy accident that they themselves are very unlikely to be able to recreate!

We’re back to ‘feeling’ the effect we have on the music and we can be guided by our taste as to what sounds good and what doesn’t.

Feel The Music

The reason this works so well, I believe, is because one’s hands are directly connected to the sound in real time. We’re back to ‘feeling’ the effect we have on the music and we can be guided by our taste as to what sounds good and what doesn’t. We’re freed from the tyranny of looking at the screen and thinking, for example, that the EQ graph looks a bit ‘non‑standard’, worrying about it and — worst of all — changing it back to something that ‘looks right’. And the mere fact of not letting that happen is half the battle. Using these techniques one can:

• Fine‑tune the best settings for a part in a song or track.
• Create an arrangement and discover unexpected ‘key moments’.
• Refine a whole groove. Why limit yourself to one sound’s parameters when a kick, bass line, lead and drums can all be adjusted alongside each other? (I’ve found this one to be the most fun in terms of discovering the groove.)

Do Try This At Home

A great exercise to prove why this is so powerful: create a random one‑bar 16th note pattern. And I do mean totally random — atonal, multi‑octave, the works! Then choose a starting sound of a classic analogue waveform — something rich like a sawtooth. With a good collection of knobs mapped to parameters challenge yourself to manipulate the sound until it sounds good. There will generally always be a setting that makes it work, or at the very least suggests a usable musical fragment, with built‑in excellent sound design. And I’ll bet it won’t be a sound‑design setting that you would have deliberately created first and which then would have inspired you to compose that random pattern... Food for thought!

And let me finish by reminding you that looping a random bar is the exact method Phuture used for their ground‑breaking and genre‑defining ‘Acid Tracks’ back in 1987. What is that track but a 12‑minute exploration of that eight‑note loop and all the sonic variation that could be extracted from just cutoff, resonance and envelope? And inadvertently kick‑starting decades of acid house and techno. The power of the intuitive live tweak! So, free your eyes and mouse and get back to feeling the groove!