How to Make a Punchy Synth Lead

Powerful Punchy Synth

Nobody can deny that synth leads play a massive role in today's electronic music. From Dubstep and Psytranceular EDM, bass synth leads are the main focus of almost every track. Consequently, music production techniques used to achieve such a sound vary from one producer to another. For instance, one way is to compress the hell out of it. In the following tutorial, I will try to show you a different, let's say a more natural way, to get that punchy synth lead. The basic idea is to layer a click, or a sound or sample, with a very short attack time to the main synth lead sound. Let's move to the practical examples.  

Use Layers

Firstly, let's add a new MIDI track in SoundBridge and drag and drop an instance of Serum into it. I have chosen Serum since it possesses a really good noise oscillator with a big palette of different noise types and other short decay samples and impulses. Furthermore, I already made a somewhat simple synth lead sound in Serum. Let us hear how it sounds, firstly solo and then accompanied by rhythm and bass.

~ Clean synth lead solo

~ Clean synth lead with bass & rhythm  

Experiment With Noise Oscillators

Next, I will open the Serum and turn the noise oscillator on. As I said before, you can choose many noise samples and impulses, so feel free to experiment. In this case, I have selected a kind of white noise sample. As you can see in the picture below, I have pointed out a few options, which are:  

1. One shot mode for the noise oscillator. This is useful if you load a sound that you would like to play in a non-looping way.
2. You are tracking for a noise oscillator. This is usually not needed because noise in a traditional sense is not pitched to follow notes.

Next, I'll modulate the second envelope section in Serum by dragging and dropping the cursor icon to the level of the noise generator. This is because I need to control the decay of the noise generator, which, in this case, is very short. This means that it will be heard only at the very beginning of the sound when I play it, accompanied by the sound from other oscillators. So, let us first hear how the noise generator sounds. Then, let's check out how the noise generator sounds with other oscillators. In the end, let's hear the final result together with bass and rhythm in the whole mix. In addition, I have added a bit of reverb as an effect inside of Serum to get some more space for the synth lead and a compressor to glue everything together.

~ Noise generator solo

~ Noise generator with other two oscillators

~ Full mix