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Malva Luma is a versatile sound designer fascinated by enhancing the ordinary with unexpected elements, crafting alluring sounds through field recording and other stunning techniques that mix contrasting materials. It’s time to shine a spotlight on Malva Luma!

What device or feature of Reason do you like the most?

Overall, I really appreciate how Reason emulates real-world hardware, along with the inherent limitations that come with it. The platform feels intuitive, playful, and creatively inspiring—qualities I sometimes find lacking in many other DAWs.

Mimic and Grain stand out as my favorites, as they allow me to integrate my own recorded audio and explore it from multiple perspectives, often uncovering intriguing nuances in the sound. Additionally, Synchronous and Alligator are both dynamic and engaging tools that consistently spark my creativity. However, I typically avoid including these in my sound packs, as I prefer to offer users more straightforward and neutral macro controls, such as ADSR, Reverb, and Delay.

What do you find most rewarding about creating sound packs?

It’s incredibly rewarding to know that users will engage with my sounds and integrate them into their productions in diverse and unique ways.

How do you typically get into the creative flow?

I start with a large coffee, immerse myself in music that aligns with the theme I intend to create, and most importantly, I turn off my phone to minimize distractions.

Malva Luma, sound designer

Do you have any unique or unconventional aspects of your work style that you would like to share?

I have been living, traveling, and working full-time from my homemade van for the past few months. As a result, my home studio setup is now highly portable and constantly immersed in ever-changing landscapes. I draw significant inspiration from my surroundings, and much of my creative process begins with a field recording session, where I collect extensive material that serves as the foundation for each project I work on.

Which of your sound packs was the most satisfying to produce?

I thoroughly enjoyed producing Evolving Vocals Vol 1 & 2, as I’m particularly passionate about sound design using vocals as the primary sound source. The human voice offers a distinct and inspiring element that quickly stands out when incorporated into a musical context and enhanced with various production techniques. This project was especially rewarding, knowing there was a significant gap in Reason’s catalog for vocal-based sound packs, which made the process even more fulfilling.

What are you currently working on aside from sound pack production?

My primary occupation involves sound design and composition for various companies in the industry. Additionally, I occasionally work shifts as a caretaker in a group home.

Three of our favorite Malva Luma sound packs:

Mystical Orchestra

Soundtrack Tools

Evolving Vocals

Follow Malva Luma on Instagram

 

Transcript

Intro: A philosophy of owning less

I realized that the less things that I own, and that I have to look after, the better I’m feeling. And the more space there is for me to be inspired and be creative, and just follow impulses that might grab me in a moment — where I want to create music, or go outside, or go explore this area, or see this particular friend — it just offers me so much freedom.

Who is Malva Luma

My name is Malva Luma. I’m a sound designer, composer, music producer, singer, recording artist.

Life on the road in her van

I recently moved back to Sweden. In the summer times, I live in my van that I built myself. And right now, it’s a little bit too cold to stay in it, but for the warmer months, I live full-time in my van, and travel in that quite a lot.

How van life shapes her workflow

Van life has impacted my music production quite a bit. I minimized my setup a lot, which offers me more freedom, I would say, to go crazy with just inspiration whenever I feel it. I don’t have to go to a specific place and set up this complex thing — I can just open up my laptop and make the sounds that I want. And it’s much easier to be creative nowadays, when I have less things to worry about.

The field recording process

I decide on the microphones that I will be bringing, and then I head out. Usually then I just kind of start somewhere and end up, like, three hours later in a completely different place — where I’m just, how did I end up here? Because one thing leads to another, and, oh, and then I see something and I better go and record this, and then I break that, and this starts the idea to go over there and put this broken thing into this other one, and take the stone that I find there and throw it in the water.

And then I might pick up this underwater microphone, and I want to capture the sound of the stone hitting the water, but from below. And then I find a piece of ice, and then I might break this — and this sounds quite cool. And what if I take up the ice and place it in a bucket of water and I record it from underneath? How does ice actually sound when it breaks, but not above, but below? And this is something I found sounds extremely cool — it sounds kind of like an alien orchestra, just singing and playing their weird violins. So, ice breaking, melting, and crackling underneath sounds just so squeaky and scrumbly and strange.

From ice recordings to a sound pack preset

This is something I used in one preset specifically that I made for a recent sound pack. I took this texture and I blended it with Polytone — so you have the synthetic elements plus the organic. And with the knobs on the Combinator, I sort of let the users blend back and forth and explore how these two elements play together in different ways. And the user can actually create their own take on the sound — they can make it their own, with the knobs that I programmed.

Building the patch: Grain and Polytone

Yeah, so I load the sample — in this case, I used Grain, I think it’s great for textures — so it instantly sounds quite cool. I might go ahead and change the speed a little bit, and then it kind of freezes in certain locations of the sample, which could be really cool. But for this case, I want it to be moving around quite freely.

And now I wanted to introduce a more tonal element, so in this case I used Polytone — it’s one of my favorite synths in Reason, actually, I think it just sounds so charming instantly. I go ahead and change Polytone a little bit to my liking — I want the tail to be a little longer, and maybe not so much of an attack there. I think those play along quite nicely.

So I think it sounds a little bit dry though — I usually use a mixer where I patch in my effects, and now I want some reverb, and a little larger. There we go — there’s a patch.

Closing thoughts

Dream scenario would be that the person dares to open up every single patch, play around with it, you know, see what sparks that inspiration, and then just go kind of wild — repatching, throwing in a bunch of different new effects, maybe just throwing the sample that I placed in there in the trash, and just record their own stuff, and go wild with adding it in, exploring how does this patch change when I change the sound source. That would be…