How do you manage to stay in key while designing

[ARNK]

Without being bogged down in theory. I find it difficult to mangle sounds together and experiment and still know what the key is. I find that extremely tough.

[Unaspected]

It's not something that I am considering as I do everything by ear and if I need to be absolutely certain about the pitch of something then I'll employ a tuner. Same with EQ - all by ear.

I think that "Golden Ears" training did help me a little so I might recommend that you try applying yourself to such a course as it will help you with identifying frequencies. Though, simply working with audio every day should help to develop more intuitive working practices.

For which genre of music are your sounds intended?

[BertKoor]

A bit of theory is unavoidable me thinks. Just some simple things like names of the notes, basic scales and recognising basic intervals. I mean, there's just 12 notes and that's all. The alphabet is more complicated with 26 different choices and you do manage that.

NB: you really postponed this 7 whole years?

[Effectsworks]

Definitely the ear, but a guitar tuner for samples can work quite well. That said, mangling sounds can vary the pitch over time - so it may nearly be impossible to get it right all the time, so-to-speak. As long as it does'nt jar you're probably alright.

[Unaspected]

A bit of theory is unavoidable me thinks. Just some simple things like names of the notes, basic scales and recognising basic intervals. I mean, there's just 12 notes and that's all. The alphabet is more complicated with 26 different choices and you do manage that.

NB: you really postponed this 7 whole years?

Something I can't appreciate is approaching audio production without having previously learned how to play musical instruments - as that was not my experience. I've noticed that those who study without that prior experience struggle quite a bit - and sometimes ask questions that might seem odd. I doubt I would have learned how to produce music at all if I wasn't interested in recording what I was creating. It's a lot less daunting when you have some focus; opposed to feeling that anything and everything might be a viable option.

So yeah. Learning an instrument as its own thing might be wise.

[lijuan19]

I personally just use a guitar tuner or soft tuner. Maybe if the sound is getting a little crazy try to filter parts of the sound so you get a less distorted sound when you use the tuner.

[BertKoor]

I'd suggest playing simple music games to train yer skills, there must be plenty if you search.

> Determine which note is lower / higher
> Replay short sequences
> Determine the interval

Developing an ear does not happen overnight I guess...

[peejunk]

Something I can't appreciate is approaching audio production without having previously learned how to play musical instruments - as that was not my experience. I've noticed that those who study without that prior experience struggle quite a bit - and sometimes ask questions that might seem odd. I doubt I would have learned how to produce music at all if I wasn't interested in recording what I was creating. It's a lot less daunting when you have some focus; opposed to feeling that anything and everything might be a viable option.

So yeah. Learning an instrument as its own thing might be wise.

I have gotten into electronic music making after I developed my ear to the point where I could easily figure out any melody I hear and most chord progressions if I have access to a keyboard. I was never a great player but this skill I mastered early.

This, however, still didn't mean a lot when it came to getting more complex samples of phrases in tune with rest of my music (or each other). This was a separate skill that needed developing and learning decent amount of music theory helped massively.

[soundmodel]

By trained ear. There's no meter that will tell "what fits" and it's culturally variable a bit. Perfect harmonicity is often very boring and "enough, but not too much inharmonicity" takes a trained ear.

Maybe this could be summarized:

"if it sounds good to you, then it's good"
"if it sounds good to you but someone complains, then consider whether you need to train your ears more"

A good way to practice is to listen to your favorite artists and their sounds and then attempt to recreate them.

[Eine Alte Oma]

mabye it would make more sense to actually stop caring about key or pitch values. i mean sounddesigning is just about the texture of a sound, so it makes sense to only focus on that. if you slap a huge ringmod on your signal and it screws with all of the pitch relationships then so be it. if it sounds cool, it's cool. then later, when you've found a sound that you like you can still run it through melodyne or something and try to find its root note, so you can use it in a sampler. just beware, that if you thrived away too much from the normal series of harmonics, so that they are not multiples of the fundamental frequency anymore, it might be hard to use the sound in a melodic or harmonic way at all. but on the other hand, if you enjoyed the sound before then there must be a way to use it musically

[gearwatcher]

I have more than decent pitch ear, but I've found that when in doubt -- your DAW's tuner (if provided) helps. If your DAW hasn't got one there's GVST GTune which is free.

For polyphonic material I've had decent (not always correct, mind you, but it gets the notes right -- you simply ignore the key interpretation and figure it out yourself) results with Hornet's SongKey and looking at peaks around notes (or actually using a narrow Q sweep) in EQ. I use FF ProQ3, but any EQ and looking at Voxengo SPAN or another EQ with a spectrum analyzer would likely work equally well. The big advantage of ProQ is the keyboard with notes which helps tune EQ band to notes really well.