For the lead sound I suggest using a synth with synced oscillators (try syncing a sawtooth oscillator to another one, which is heavily detuned). To give it that "talking movement", automate the tuning of the oscillator.
For the glitchy percussion I recommend taking any drum/percussion loop and sending it through a bitcrusher. Using a transient shaper could give you punchier sound with shorter decay on those hits. I've found that it's a cool thing to bounce it to a new audio file and timestretch the drums. The timestretch artifacts can make the percussions sound a lot like Portal 2.
Mike Morasky also used a lot of chiptune-styled synths, check out Chipsounds by Plogue, it's a VST synth that he used for that.
I used all of these tricks in my P2 styled song "The Escape Pod", feel free to check it out and tell me if there's any sound in it that interests you so I can better describe how I made it.
For the cool synth noise, I'd reccomend using massive, selecting under the oscillators the one that says sync, and automating the middle knob of that osc. I didn't hear much unison, maybe only two slightly detuned voices, however, I picked up on some very slight clipping distortion.
For the drumming, I would never advise loops, as for one, its not your music if you use em, and two, once everyone starts using them everything will sound the same. Instead, load the Reaktor plugin 'newscool'. Its a seed based beat generator, and the OST uses it a lot. For instance, if you load the third preset, you can immediately recognize where that was used. You could use bit crushing and rate reduction, however, the drum sounds are already very nice. If you do go for sequencing your own with your own digital kit, I'd reccomend crushing/reducing an 808.
Do note that komplete is pretty f[REDACTED]ng expensive, but it's the way to get the exact sounds from portal.
Now I'll finally be able to take a stab at Portal 2's style.
splatt wrote:
Thanks for all the help!
No problem! Don't forget to send the results here!
Arachnophob wrote:
I didn't hear much unison, maybe only two slightly detuned voices
I didn't mean detuning as in using a unison. I was just describing the theory behind syncing oscillators in case you can't use Massive, which has loads of different wavetables/oscillator types. AFAIK, Mike Morasky actually used NI Pro 53 to get that lead synth sound. But it's really possible to emulate it with any analog styled synth that allows you to sync oscillators, so it's not like you can only use Massive for it.
However I agree that a lot of Massive's presets are heavily used in Portal 2, and mostly without any change. Speaking of which, what makes using presets with patterns different from using drum loops? I would never advise to just use the plain loop without editing it, but if you use a loop player that supports slicing, then you can totally rearrange the pattern, remove some slices, change their attack/decay, add creative effects, reverse some of them etc. That's what makes the loop completely different from the source sound you started with.