I've always been more of the orchestral composer, but I feel the need to start dabbling with some more electronic based stuff into my orchestral works. I was curious what samples are considered to be the 'industry standard' in this genre?

The most common samples are going to be sine waves, saw waves, triangle waves, square waves, etc.

Basically, any sound that is generated by simple or fairly simple math is going to sound electronic.

Industry standard demands that these wave forms be your main components for constructing a more complex and stylized sound palette.

Cheers,

If you're talking about popular electronic music, much of it is done with your typical synthesiser, modulating 2 or more waveforms together and then applying effects such as overdrive, filter sweeps, or multi-tap delay to it. My copy of Sonar came with about 5 or 6 different VSTis that are all pretty much different interfaces onto this same sort of thing. A package like FLStudio is arguably even more suited to this kind of work and comes with synths and many presets which will work well straight away.

Percussion however, is often done using the well-known 808, 909, or perhaps SR-16 drum samples. Obviously many people mix loops in or process the sounds the way they want them, but many tracks have the signature tones of these classic percussion samples.

It's really hard to say what is standard, since the "genre" of electronic music is so vast. I started about 7 years ago dabbling in electronic music, and I almost never made it out alive! Listening to 808 State led to Meat Beat Manifesto, which led to Aphex Twin, which led to Squarepusher, which led to me listening to my washing machine on the rinse cycle. Yep, it got THAT nuts!

Thankfully, I snapped out of it after a long hard fight (as well as some intervention by friends) and got back into composing classical/orchestral pieces...but every now and then, I want to glitch out my string section. Shh, don't tell my friends.

You have been warned!

-David "Avi" Scott
www.myspace.com/kayfabesound

Great. I'll have to play around with some plugins and see what I can come up with. Thanks.

Hi Steve,

You might want to check out spectrasonics Stylus RMX and Atmosphere and also from Native Instruments Absynth 4 and Reaktor 5. This only if you plan to spend some budget on it of course.

Enjoy :)

Also, Propellerhead's Reason 4 probably deserves a mention here..