I make mostly electronica.. Deep house and trance type things. When should I be using white noise to help my productions.. You can be very detailed I read everything on here. I know it's used on the drop as an effect and also with the riser and build up.. Is that the only use for white noise? Can you be very specific with the types of white noise used for each application. I know drop white noise is different than build up white noise for instance.

Question 2 how do you guys craft your white noise? Most of the better producers probably craft their own in a synthesizer I am assuming. Can someone point me in the direction of the how to create these different types of white noises and the reasoning and explanation behind it?

 

I like to generate noise from scratch, and often its genesis is within the "create noise" menu of Audacity, where one can select from white, pink or brown:

The noise can be shaped from then on with various techniques, which I would go into except my brain hurts right now from having had my head stuck in a DAW for two weeks.

 

driving white noise stabs are/were also very common

 

Just by having noise throughout your whole track, you can set a certain vibe. Songs often don't have a complete silence. Most of time there's some sort of ambient/noise.

 

Like you said it can be used in a bunch of different ways, the most common concept people use it for is to fill the whole spectrum with energy to give more impact to a drop. My favourite method of generating it involves using Sylenth with 1 voice on the whitenoise wavetable, then input a bandpass on Cutoff AB and then adjusting the cutoff and resonance to get your typical riser sound. Then you can start sprucing it up with by assigning cuttoffAB and volumeAB to an lfo and try different wavetables in the lfo to get different patterns.

You could also use whitenoise in combination with fm to make drum sounds, but this takes a hell of a lot of messing around with to get a nice result.

Whitenoise in some amounts can also be used as a small gluing element in drums, especially on the rides with a bit of gating at super low volumes.

It can also be used to give more of a clearer impact on sidechaining if you want to overemphasize the pumping effect as it will be easy to discern in the spectrum.

It can be used to give normal purish tone signals a bit more buzz, if you combine your puretone sound like a sine or triangle etc and use a bit of white noise along side it, then assign them both to one channel and distort them it can create a nice tone.

People in the 60's 70's 80's used to make a lot of experimental pattern generated songs using just white noise and an analogue sequencer too but im really not a fan of that sound.

Ive even seen people make their own whitenoise, bounced out then sidechain it to some specific element of their song to add variation to volume, in really small amounts.

You could make tonal noises with a really sharp bandpass filter and resample it into a pad or lead although it will sound a bit weak without a normal wavetable that has cleaner/purer harmonics

 

Have a look here, there you can see the difference: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colors_of_noise

 

Go to You Tube > enter search terms `white noise ableton live 9`.

If you want it the easy way: http://sonicfaction.com/products/ableton/whoosh/