Whooooosh!

[Diodes]

Can anyone explain how to make a "whoosh" sound like they do in trance, or point me to a good tutorial on it?

Here is a crappy whoosh sound I put together using white noise, and Fruity Phaser where I automated the min. depth and max. depth to get the frequency to rise. (The whoosh is at the end.) But honestly I don't really understand how the phaser works, so I would have a hard time tweaking with it and getting a specific sound out of it. And anyway, I figure there are probably different ways and different kinds of whoosh, so I'd be interested to hear how others do it.

[Yoozer]

You've already got the basics down properly. The thing is that a phaser keeps on - well, for lack of a better word - "wobbling" so you have little to no control when the part starts so it sounds like it's going up. The solution is to let it run for a long time and cut out the bits you -can- use.

Lots of whooshes are simply continuous noise where the volume's automated. Instead of phasers, you could consider using low-, band- or highpass filters. A quick shortcut: lowpass is like the door of a disco closing (you only hear the whump-whump), highpass is like putting your mp3 player's earbuds on your bed while you're somewhere else in the room - all that's left is chittering. Bandpass is inbetween. A phaser uses an allpass filter, which you don't hear until it moves.

If you want to have more control over the sound you're using, employ a low- or bandpass filter and turn the filter's resonance up. A lot of whoosh effects also employ a combination of delay and reverb to create a "cascading" whoosh.

You can also route an LFO to the filter and modulate the LFO's speed with an envelope - when you have fast LFOs. Listen to the first effect here - http://theheartcore.com/music/arno_windnoise.mp3 (NI Massive was used).

Most effects of the surf crashing on the beach are done with bandpass/bandreject filters and asymmetric LFOs - (rise time takes longer than fall time). Lots of possibilities, especially when you have filter plugins and do most of the things with automation.

[Diodes]

Just wanted to say thanks for your reply, you've given me plenty of things to try out and experiment with

[Zephyr]

I personally recommend the low-pass filter method, just throw a Fruity filter or free-filter on a 3xOsc white noise, set the resonance high and use an automation clip to sweep up.