What this course covers
Sound design sits at the intersection of physics, music, and experimentation. You do not need a background in audio engineering to start here, but you will leave with a working understanding of oscillators, filters, envelopes, and effects chains. The course uses Ableton Live and a free version of Serum so everyone can follow along without extra purchases.
Who tends to do well here
People who already make music but feel like they are relying too much on presets get a lot out of this. So do beginners who just want to understand what all those knobs actually do. The group usually includes producers, film students, game audio folks, and people who are just genuinely curious about how sound behaves.
How the sessions are structured
Each week combines a recorded lesson with a live group session on Thursdays at 7 PM EST. The recorded content runs about 40 minutes per week. The live sessions are where most of the learning happens, because you can bring your own attempts and get feedback in the moment. There are no grades, but there are weekly sound-building exercises that you are expected to share with the group.
What you will be working with
The curriculum moves through subtractive synthesis first, then FM and wavetable, then sampling and granular techniques. You will spend two weeks on effects processing, including reverb design, distortion types, and sidechain behavior. By week eight you will have a personal sound library of roughly 30 patches you built yourself.
Community and feedback
There is a shared Discord where students post works-in-progress. The instructor, Tadashi Okafor, responds to posts daily and runs a listening thread every Friday. Past participants have found this ongoing feedback more useful than the formal lessons.
Program Outline
Course outline
- Week 1 - How sound works: frequency, amplitude, waveform shapes, and why sine waves are a useful starting point
- Week 2 - Subtractive synthesis basics: oscillators, filters, cutoff, and resonance in practice
- Week 3 - Envelopes and LFOs: shaping sound over time, modulation routing fundamentals
- Week 4 - FM synthesis: operator relationships, feedback paths, and building metallic and bell tones
- Week 5 - Wavetable design: creating and importing custom wavetables, morphing between timbres
- Week 6 - Sampling techniques: chopping, pitch-shifting, granular processing with a free plugin
- Week 7 - Effects in depth: reverb tail design, parallel saturation, delay as rhythm
- Week 8 - Sidechain and dynamics: compression as a creative tool, not just a corrective one
- Week 9 - Building a patch from a reference: how to analyze and reconstruct a sound you hear
- Week 10 - Final project: a complete sound library submitted and reviewed by the group