I wonder which system people here use to describe the sounds that their synths produce or whether they categorize their sound library at all, that is beyond categorizing them solely by their function (e.g pad, bass, lead, etc.).
The system I use to further describe my sound library is by cataloguing some of their characteristics as follows:
timbre/harmonics: pure, thin, hollow, rich
filter/brightness: dark, mellow, still mellow, bright, crispy, brittle
These characteristics are then completed by a “temperature” assessment: warm, lush, fat, grainy, thin, metallic.
All the assessments are ideally made without any effects because the latter can impact any of those characteristics.
The reason I use such a system is for purposes of songwriting. I often know which one of the characteristics I need in a sound for a certain song passage but, without any descriptive system, I would walk through each relevant preset to see whether it would work, at the risk of ending up with my usual favorite or of losing both time and inspiration while browsing for the good one.
I’ll name drum sample chains. And have them all in one big folder called imaginatively, “drums”.
Some other samples, usually ‘chords’ or something related.
Other than that, I dont have any need to catalogue anything.
I make a synth patch record it, done. I rarely save patches, if I do I name them after the song I’m working on.
Yep. This is me. I’ll name samples to say what record they’re from. But if it’s a sample that I recorded from my synths then it’s going to just be named after whatever I called the session on my Digitone.
And on my Digitone, I’ve got a handful of presets but pretty much all of the sounds I made just live on the patterns that I made them on.
I find that the more granularity I introduced into my sorting/ categorization system, the less likely I am to be able to find what I want in the future. So I tend to stick to fairly broad categories. If I got a bunch of samples from one place (a record, video game, splice) I will usually make a sub folder to note that, but that’s as far as I go.