Are ""how-do-I-make-this-sound" questions on-topic here?

Question

I frequently find myself wondering how a particular sound is produced. Frequently, these are synthesized or sampled sounds that I hear in some recording and enjoy, but sometimes it's a particular production technique ("how did they that great reverb sound on those drums?"). I want to be able to create similar sounds for my own purposes and it seems fairly logical to ask such questions on an audio production Q&A site.

However, this kind of sound design is kind of in the middle between composition and production. It isn't really music performance or theory, per se, but it's not entirely something that studios necessarily spend their day doing, which has always been more the bend of this site.

But after seeing this question about imitating basslines show up, and receive several upvotes (including mine), I started wondering if there was more interest in it than I'd realized. I thought I'd ask and see if this kind of question seemed appropriate to the community here. I'd certainly have several of them to ask myself.

What do you think? Would you be interested in more questions like this?

Answer 1

I think it should be allowed.

If anything we want to broaden the scope of this site to help it grow (remember the video merge, which may happen this coming week), and the general guidance for determining proper scope of our sites is:

Would an audio expert or pro enthusiast be offended if a question like this came up?

(a bit of a simplification, but you get the idea)

And I can't imagine any pro audio person really objecting to these questions.

Answer 2

The SocialSoundDesign.com community could probably provide better answers than this one but I don't have a problem with these questions being asked here.