Making That ‘THX’ Sound Effect
I’m sure you’ve been to cinemas to watch your favorite movies. If you have managed to get in the cinema early before, you should have seen advertisements and also the THX advert, where it promotes the surround sound if the cinema. Wondered how they made or got that sound?
If you’re thinking sound design, yes it is. But if you’re thinking it’s hard to achieve that THX sound, you’re wrong.
But why learn how to make the ‘THX’ Sound? Having this tip at your perusal will enable you to design many other sounds, such as the whooshing jetplane take off sound in Chris Brown’s Yeah x3 and more. Lets’ dig in.
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Step 1
1 - Basic Piano Loop
In Logic, you’ll want to start with a basic sound. In this tutorial i’ve used a random piano loop. I’ve chose this sound just very randomly and also to let you know you can use many many other types of sounds like a snare drum or a bass. Get creative! You’ll be able to achieve many types of sounds.
Here’s the loop:
Step 2
We only need the first chord or note of the loop, so slice the loop and delete the rest.
The first chord should sound something like this:
Under view, click on Flex View enabling the flex time. Change the flex mode on the inspector to ‘Polyphonic’ or ‘Monophonic’. That would do fine for the sound we’re trying to achieve.
Stretch the audio file at the end with flex time enabled. For my case here, I’ve stretched it to about 6 bars length from its original length of a quarter bar. The sound clip shows how it sounds:
Loop Cut & Stretched
Step 3
Copy and paste the loop into a few tracks. Here’s where it gets interesting. Hit ‘Esc’ on your keyboard and select ‘Fade Tool’. Draw a fade at the beginning of the track and pull it across to the end. You should have a nice ascending slope that fades in the volume of your loop.
Bend the fade in a little and make it curved fade.
Step 4
Now here’s the trick everyone seem to miss out. Right click at the corner of the loop where the fade in starts. The ‘fade in’, ‘speed up’ or ‘remove fade’ window should appear, and you change that to SPEED UP.
Having done so, here’s how your loop should sound:
We’re almost there to that THX sound, but there’s more to be added.
Step 5
Do a few more fades with speed up and speed down for the each subsequent tracks. Play around with the fades and do a few variations. Yes, you’ll be able to select speed down if you click the bottom right of the loop track. Once you get up to this stage, it should be easy to know where you’re heading.
Add reverb to the tracks. In this case, i’ve simply added the the platinum reverb in logic and have also panned the tracks in different directions to create a bigger and atmospheric sound.
I’ve also added two extra tracks without any time speed changes to it, with some volume fading automations on all the tracks so that the sped up loops will seam smoothly into the two extra tracks creating a nice warm ending. Below is how the completed project looks:
The THX Sound Effect:
That’s it. That’s your THX Sound Effect. Of course you may use different loops and sounds to create something different. Experiment and you’ll find this skill useful in your music production.
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Download the Play Tutorial here (and open it up in your software!)
