The sounds you use in your music each have their own distinct character. Whether they come from VSTs, sample packs or your audio interface, the quality that makes them unique is called timbre.

Timbre is a basic concept in music that affects everything from sound design to arrangement and mixing.

With such a fundamental topic it can be tough to know where to start.

In this article I’ll explain what timbre is and show how it’s relevant to your workflow.

What is timbre in music?

Timbre (pronounced TAM-ber) is the tone color or texture of a sound. It’s the quality of sound that lets you tell the difference between two instruments playing the same note.

Timbre is hard to explain because it’s influenced by many different mechanisms in music perception and cognition.

Even so, understanding what makes two tones different from one another will help you make decisions about the sounds in your music.

Timbre is hard to explain because it’s influenced by many different mechanisms in music perception and cognition.

What makes up a sound’s timbre?

There are five basic characteristics that contribute to a sound’s timbre.

I’ll go through each and explain how they work.

Noisiness vs. Tonality

It’s easy to tell the difference between a cymbal crash and a synth lead right? One is percussive and noisy, the other is rich and sustained with a clear pitch center.

The biggest difference between the two is the quality of pitch.

When you can clearly a sound’s pitch as a letter of the musical alphabet, it means it’s periodic. That’s when the basic pattern of the waveform repeats over and over again with the same shape.

Think of a basic square wave like the one you might use to build a lead or bass sound in your synth.

Even if you change its frequency or amplitude, the wave’s basic shape will stay the same.

The opposite is an aperiodic sound like the cymbal crash.

Even if you produced a sustained tone with the cymbal, the basic pattern of its waveform would never repeat itself.

Looking on an oscilloscope, the wave would seem random with unpredictable peaks and valleys.

The more aperiodic the sound, the more noisy and discordant it seems.

Even so, aperiodic sounds are essential in music. Struck percussion like snares and hi hats are aperiodic—try to imagine modern music without those!

The balance between noisiness and tunefulness in a sound is one of the easiest timbral qualities to notice.

The balance between noisiness and tunefulness in a sound is one of the easiest timbral qualities to notice.

Harmonic content

Any complex sound—periodic or aperiodic—is made up of a fundamental frequency and overtones that resonate above it.

The combination of a sound’s fundamental with all its overtones makes up how it sounds overall.

The pattern, structure and intensity of the harmonics in a sound determine a lot about their timbre.

If a sound’s overtones appear above its fundamental at regular intervals, it’s harmonic. If the overtones are randomly scattered above the fundamental, it’s inharmonic.

Dense harmonic overtones contribute to the richness and tunefulness of a musical sound.

For example, the sweet, resonant tone of a bowed cello string is a highly harmonic sound rich in harmonic overtones.

The quality of a sound’s overtones and their intensity determine a lot about its timbre.

Onset

The initial moments of a sound are extremely important for how your brain judges musical timbre.

In audio these short bursts of sound at the onset are called transients.

Transients are key for the systems in your brain that help you identify the source of a sound.

Transients are key for the systems in your brain that help you identify the source of a sound.

These systems likely developed to help our ancestors recognize danger quickly and react in time.

A sound’s transients can be aperiodic even if the rest of it has a periodic structure.

This means that the initial moments of a sound can give it a completely different timbre overall.

Envelope

A sound’s amplitude envelope is how its intensity evolves over time.


In synthesis, an envelope can be applied to any parameter in a patch, but it’s most commonly linked to the amplifier to control volume.

For example, the slow attack time of an atmospheric pad sound means that it fades in smoothly before reaching full volume.

Sounds in the real world have an amplitude envelope as well. Some sounds are sharp and decay quickly while others gradually build and sustain as they ring out.

Envelope also helps give your brain clues about the source of a sound, so it’s an important factor in timbre.

Why should you care about timbre?

The sonic qualities that influence timbre show up everywhere in music production.

But they’re especially important to know for some steps in your workflow.

Here are the top three issues for music producers that involve timbre.

1. Sound design

Sound design might seem like a dry technical term, but it comes up often in most producers’ workflows.

If you’ve ever tweaked a synth patch, manipulated your samples or changed a sound with audio effects you’ve done it too!

Check out our intro guide to sound design for a deep dive into techniques for working with timbre in sound design.

2. Arrangement

Arrangement is the structure and organization of the sounds in a musical composition.

What instruments or sounds should play which parts in your song? What ranges should they play in and how should they interact with each other?

The end result has a big effect on the timbre of each element and the overall texture of the track.

For example, some instruments and synth patches have a completely different tone when playing loud, accented passages.

Others sound different whether they play in high or low registers.

Some elements in your mix might even take on new characteristics when they blend together with each other

Pay attention to how timbres shift and evolve as you build your song’s arrangement.

3. Mixing

Mixing is about blending all the different timbres of all the different tracks in your mix together. It’s how you create a balanced sound where every element can be heard clearly.

Tools like compression, EQ and reverb are used in mixing to make adjustments to the timbre of individual tracks in your mix.

Keep the individual components of timbre in mind as you mix to get a more objective view of the sounds you’re working with.

Does a sound’s aggressive transients stick out too much? Does its envelope cause it to disappear too quickly to be heard?

Issues like this can be solved using compression.

What about the balance of its harmonic content? Is it lopsided with too much emphasis in one frequency range? That’s where EQ comes in.

Many processes in mixing match up this way with the qualities that affect timbre.

Check out our intro guide to mixing to see how these techniques come together to build a mix.

Sound color and texture

Understanding timbre is the key to making informed decisions about the sounds you work with in your music.

It may seem academic at first, but the basic characteristics of sound are relevant at every stage in the lifecycle of a song.

If you’ve made it through this article you’ll have a solid headstart on how timbre affects your workflow.