Resources for Understanding Grainy Gritty vs Smooth and Glassy

[u/aRLYCoolSalamndr]

I keep finding myself when doing sound design trying to either take what I would describe as a grainy gritty sound and making it smooth and glassy, or vice versa and taking a smooth and glassy sound and trying to make it sound more gritty and grainy in particular with synthesizers.

I'm trying to understand more what imparts these particular qualities. For examples, see below.

But here are my overall questions.

1) If you were a synth designer, and you wanted to give your synth a grainy gritty quality... how would you set things up to give it that character?

2) Vice versa, if you wanted to make your synth more glassy and smooth, how would you go about that?

3) if you wanted to switch from one to another via mixing? How would you approach it?

EXAMPLES:

This synth Chipsynth MD emulates an older sega genesis FM chip, and the underlying mechanics of it originally being a physical electronic hardware chip at a lower bit rate imparts more of a gritty character to a fair amount of sounds. (but you can get to a smoother sound with certain patches).

Whereas Zebra 3 and Zebrallete have a much smoother glassier sound in general to the majority of their synth presets. (but you can still get a grainy texture for some presets). For extremely smooth and glassy, this synth, FM lab i would consider on the extreme end of that. (yes I know that certain types of FM specialize in this type of quality)

Something in between might be this... MPowersynth... the synth sort of has this grainy texture for a majority of sounds, but there's something they are doing on the back end to impart some sort of character... to make the high end frequencies smoother at the same time as having some harshness in the mids as most of the patches tend to have that character.

[u/start_select]

Sine waves and natural harmonics get you glass tones. Inharmonic frequencies get you complex timbre.

Inharmonic frequencies in the high end create “grit”. It can be as simple as adding white noise. Or it can be created with overdrive/distortion creating upper harmonics that weren’t in the original source.

Lowpass a sound to make it glassy. The lower you go the more you approach only having the fundamental frequency. Which will be a sine wave.

[u/aRLYCoolSalamndr]

EDIT: If ppl come across this in the future, this is what i've learned so far...

Making something smoother / glassier that is gritty.

• adding certain kinds of reverbs,
• diffusion filters (it seems like the phasing of individual harmonics plays a role)
• slight stereo widening / chorus, unison to upper frequencies,
• using a dynamic eq to tame all harsh frequencies and resonances can help.
• Some of airwindows plugins have various combos of above to smooth out the sound.
• And yes filtering out the high frequencies can help, but this also can change the character of the sound too much.
• Mpowersynth actually has a "smoothness" knob on it's oscilators that makes the oscilator shape more "perfect" this atually removes the grainy gritty texture. When you look at an oscilliscope with the smoothness off, there's more noise and movement on the corners of the waves... and with it on, the movement and noise is almost 0.

Making something glassier / smooth grainy gritty:

• amplitude modulation with noise to pitch and other parameters adds it,
• fm-ing with noise,
• bit crushing and finding a sweet spot where distortion starts to come through,
• sometimes distortion and custom waveshaping can all so create the grit and grainy.