Thank you for listening and your insightful comment! I’m flattered that you think I’m a professional. Right now music and sound design is just a hobby, I just have a lot of free time and I’m lucky at tag sales. Though turning this into a profession would be a dream. Hyper Light Drifter is my favorite video game soundtrack so I’m glad that you think that I compare at all to it’s soundtrack, Disasterpeace is a big inspiration for me. The noise in track 5 is probably pink noise, I like to use pink/white noise a lot to create textures. I’m currently away from my computer but I’ll try to describe how I made the sounds in The Seaside Watchers and It Writhes.
The main synth in The Seaside Watchers is a patch I originally made in Vital but moved over to Phase Plant. The synth has 3 oscillators that are slightly detuned from each other by a few cents, a saw wave +7 cents, a pulse width -5 cents, sine wave +5 cents, and some really quiet white noise just for extra texture and grit when the synth is distorted. There is an envelope with a long attack, medium decay/sustain and long release that modulates the PW of the pulse width and two filters, one regular filter, and one ladder/analog filter that is cutting off less high end (it’s important to make sure that both filters are removing some high end at all times). There’s also slow random LFOs modulating the pitch of each individual oscillator very very very slightly. After all that just slap on some light ping pong delay for some extra movement and a big reverb (I used Valhalla Supermassive for the big reverb).
In It Writhes, the drones/background textures are orchestral clusters and sometimes breathing samples that I pitch shifted up and down with the mix knob around 30% so that some of the dry signal still comes through. The clusters are also running through a distortion, sometimes ring mod at a low frequency, and sometimes filters with a high resonance being modulated by a ramp down LFO that’s going at a speed of somewhere between 20-50 hz to make it sound watery. I’m not sure how I made the bass but I think it is a monophonic saw wave and a sine wave with legato and glide with a medium attack. The bass is heavily distorted and is automated to get more distorted at certain points. I also put a reverb on a bus and almost every sound is going through the reverb bus. The reverb bus is then side-chained to a sub boom/kick so that every now and then you get moments where suddenly everything gets quiet as the reverb disappears and then the reverb slowly comes back creating a cool breathing reverb effect.
When it comes to sound design, experimenting and messing around in a synthesizer that you are comfortable with is a great way to learn what works and what doesn’t and gain experience. Having a synth that you know your way around is like having a secret weapon.