Transcripts
1. Orientation: All right. Welcome, Teoh. Intro to electronic music In this first video, we're just going to do an overview of what we're gonna cover in this class and talk about the format and all the good stuff. This class, it is presented by Slam Academy. Um, and it is taught by me. I am Dr J. Anthony Allen and I will be your instructor throughout this whole course. Okay, so first things first. Uh, who is this Class? Four classes for anyone interested in diving into electronic music. I think that's self explanatory. Ah, those who have worked on tracks before but want a general understanding of some key audio concepts. What I mean by that is anyone who is maybe fooled around with, Ah, some audio software, maybe has even fooled around more seriously. Um, maybe even someone who has produced music and is actively producing music but wants a a deeper understanding of maybe some of the effects they're using. Um, maybe they don't know exactly what that effect is doing, but they like the result of it. And hopefully, in this class, you'll learn kind of exactly what that's doing, which will lead to a little more predictable results when you're working. So yes, anyone that's that's done some work before but just wants a review or some deeper understanding of what's going on. Ah, lastly, anyone that digs electronic music and wants to know more about it. So maybe you don't want to produce electronica music. Maybe you just want maybe just dig it. And you just wanna learn some more about what's going on under the hood when people make it . There's going to be a lot of fun stuff in this class like, Ah, the history of audio of digital audio We're gonna talk about when I spend a ton of time on it. But it's fun stuff. So I think there's, ah, a lot to get out of the class for some from someone who just really likes music and wants toe enjoy it. Okay, uh, materials you're gonna need for this class to be successful in it. First things first, a computer and Internet connection. Ah, if you've got this far on, you're watching this video. You figured that part out. So, congratulations. The hard part is done. The second thing, if you want to do the assignments in the projects Um a dog D a w a dog. Any doll will do if you don't know what a dog is. Don't worry about it. We're gonna talk about that a lot in our Ah, I think in our second chunk of stuff, a dog dog stands for digital audio workstation. It's basically the software we used to create music. There are a ton of different ones. There's anything you've used to make music before is probably a dog. Um, GarageBand is a dog. Um, pro tools, able tin, fruity loops. Any of those are Dawes Digital Audio Workstation. If you don't have one, don't worry about it. We're gonna talk about him. We're gonna talk about what to look for the advantages of different daws over others. And if you don't want to buy an expensive piece of software because they are kind of expensive, I'm also gonna point out some open source alternatives. Those are free or very inexpensive options to create music with, um, there are some good stuff, um, coming out all the time for, ah, inexpensive or free applications. So we'll have a look at some of those. So don't worry about it yet. Don't go out and buy anything until we get to that section and you get my advice on it, Okay? Overview of what we're gonna talk about in this class. Topics covered eso This class is gonna be divided into three big chunks. So in the first part, we're going to talk about a brief history of digital audio. One of my favorite things talk about an overview of the hardware and software options. That's what I was just talking about with the dog. The dog is the software and of things were also going to talk about the hardware. End of things. And there's not a lot of hardware. We need any more. Um, most of what we do when we're producing electronic music can be done just on a laptop. So the laptop is obviously a number one piece of hardware or a desktop Doesn't really matter. There are some hardware things we like toe have depending on what you're doing. Maybe some different controllers, maybe a keyboard. Audio interfaces are a big thing. We'll talk about all those in that section. And the last part of part one is just working with audio. Just how to get it sounding nice and clean, if that's what we want or getting it to sound nice and dirty, if that's what we want and keeping it clean throughout the compositional process. So we'll be talking about working with audio. OK, Part two. Ah, brief history of Midi. If you don't know what media is, don't worry, you've probably used it before, but we're gonna be talking about what that is. Um, in fact, that's the next thing. What Midi is and is not. Ah, that's really important when understanding midi. A lot of people think they understand what made he is, but they don't understand that it's actually not doing one of the main things I think it's doing. So we'll talk about that when we get there. Don't worry about it. Ah, many instruments and effects and then working with the piano roll editor. That's kind of like how we organize Midi over time. It's basically are sequencer. Ah, lot of really important stuff there for producing electronic music and in our third part will be kind of focusing on putting it all together. So working with loops, if we're if you're into creating loop based music, ah, synthesis basics. That's how to get sounds out of a synthesizer. And in our case, it will be a software synthesizer. So we're not gonna go out and by a big synthesizers to be a software synthesizer. Rewire is a is a way for, um, different audio programs to talk to each other. So you could be working in multiple pieces of software at same time and have it all worked together. Hopefully, ah, And then exporting tracks, finishing them up, getting the final finishing touches on everything. And that is basically everything. So join me inside and our first chunk of stuff. Ah, for the intro to electronic music class.
2. Lesson 1: All right. Welcome to intro to electronic music presented by Slam Academy. And I am Dr J. Anthony Ellen. Ah, part one. In this first part, we are going to be talking about a brief history of digital audio overview of our hardware and software options and General ah, stuff about working with audio. So let's dive in with a brief history of digital audio. Okay, A brief history of digital audio. So normally, when I give this lecture, um, you know, it lasts two hours, So we're gonna do this a little bit condensed, but hopefully had all the main points. I'm going to try to use some fun images to throw at you, Teoh. So, progressives, right along. So before we had to gel audio, Let's take one quick step back and talk about analog audio. So what is analog mean? Analog, Uh, literally comes from the word analogous. Well, it comes from the same place that analogous comes Ah, which is the Greek word, Anna. Ah. Which means according to and the Greek word logo, which means relationship. So with analog, it meant it was the same. It had a direct relationship with the sound. So the the physical way we recorded, it was related to the thing. So if we look at a record, which is our like a vinyl record, this is our You know, the best example of analog. Because if we took a magnifying glass on that record and we zoomed way, we will weigh in, we would see grooves, and those grooves would correspond directly to the actual waves of pressure that moved through the air and hit our ear drum. So those grooves are hit by the needle of the record player, which then amplifies them in either the amplifier or if we're going really old school like the horn and transfers those little grooves into little pressure. Ah, waves in the air and those had our ear drum. And though and then you know, neurons, fire and all the stuff, and we hear that sound so those grooves are analogous. They are really kind of a snapshot of the sound, the actual waves in the air of the sound. So analog recording goes back a long way. Um, take guests. Just think about it for a second. Think when was our first analog recording? This will be a fun cocktail trick for you someday. Ah, when you're at a cocktail party and someone says How What's the oldest record we have of someone? Speaking of the human voice, this would be our first recording, right? Um, the oldest record we have. Okay, so think about it. Tick tock, tick tock. Okay. Gotta guess, um, 19 twenties or so. A lot of people guess around 19 twenties, um, goes back a little bit farther. In fact, there are two answers. Um, we can go back to 18. 57. That's our first recording. Now, the there's a different answer and the commonly accepted answer is 18 78 and I'll get to 18 . 70 in just a second. But let me talk about 18. 57 because it's really interesting. It's only recently been discovered. It was I came in when it was maybe it was, like, 2000 eight or so that this recording was discovered and it was made in 18. 57 by this guy. I'm not gonna attempt to pronounce his name, but there he is. Um, he invented something that he called a phone autograph. Not a photograph, a phone autograph. And what his goal was Basically, he was a visual artist. He was not trying to do, uh, audio recording. He was trying to make a graphic representation of sound on a canvas. And the way he did that was basically with a backwards record player. He had, ah, bighorn that worked like a microphone, and it went down into a needle. And as you shouted into it or played music into it or whatever you wanted to do, the needle moved up something like a pencil. It was graphite Ah, on paper or the canvas, and it drew pictures of the wave form. And that was the end of it for this guy, Eduard. Let's call him. That was the end of it. He was like, cool. I represented sound on ah, on a canvas And and that was it. That was his work of art. So that was in 18 57. And it wasn't until very recently that through the use of computers, we were able to backwards synthesize his drawings into what he was actually saying into them. So those drawings made by this contraption of his the phone autograph was re synthesized into back into sound. Now you can imagine This was basically a record made out of paper and pencil. Quite literally. So. They don't sound real great. Um, I have a recording of one of them here, so let's take a quick Listen, this is from 18 57. This is the oldest recording to exist in the history of mankind. Okay, so we have That's a little noisy. It's not terribly interesting. Um, but that is the re synthesized paper drawings of our friend Edward Leone Scott de Martinville or something like that. Okay, so that's that's kind of the party trick. If someone tries to stump you thinking they know, you could always say, Well, you know, 18 57 we have a recording from 18. 57 sword off. Ah, the real answer is 18 78 um, 18. 78 is where we get Edison and the photograph. So Thomas Edison invented the phonograph. Um, and he makes a record. He makes a recording of himself narrating Some people say singing. But he isn't really singing. He's narrating. Mary had a little lamb. This is the oldest record we have, where we can actually hear the person's voice. This is essentially the second record it's really the first. This is really the first recording. Um, aside from that one we just heard, which is, you know, not really recording, but it was 20 years earlier. Um, and it does make sound, but this is the oldest human voice. Well, we can hear or will ever hear this goes back to This is a recording made in 18 78. Um, and you will never hear anything older than this because the very first recording ever. So let's hear it. It's very short. First sports. I spoke in the original corner, a little pizza practical portrait. Mary had a little damage, quite a slow. And everywhere that Mary went, the lamb was shorter. So it's scratchy. It's old, but we can put it clearly here. You know, he's he's narrating. Mary had a little lamb. Um, that is also, by the way, let's just enjoy the profundity that we just heard Thomas Edison's voice that is actually Thomas Edison talking. Cool, right? Um, OK, so let's talk about these early records. Um, they were not these kind of records that we know they were not vinyl discs. Um, they were initially cylinders. Ah, and it's It's weird. They look kind of like a toilet paper roll. They were not made out of vinyl initially, and I can't remember what they were made out of. Um, but eventually he started making him out of vinyl, I believe. And, um, the stories. I mean, you can read a lot about this and various articles, but the the research that I've read it talks about, he was mainly developing the photograph to preserve dying languages and in particular in you it languages. That's what I've heard. So hey, wasn't trying Teoh turn the music industry on its edge, if you Because if you think about it music the only way these soul on leeway to enjoy music for anybody at this time was to go to a concert or to play it themselves. Eso you didn't get a record player in your house? You got a piano. You didn't have any other way of getting music. If you want to hear a symphony, you had to go to the symphony. That was just what you did. So the invention of the record really turned everything on its edge. Now we didn't need performers as much. We could just enjoy, um, a previous performance of someone. So that's a whole other can of worms. And if you're interested in that, there's a really fascinating book on this topic by Dr Mark Katz called Capturing Sound. Subtitled How Technology Has Changed Music. Um, that talks about this whole book length thing. Anyway, let's get back to the cylinder. So the cylinder comes about from Edison 18 78 and, um, the main goal supposedly was to preserve these languages that were dying. These tribes, these native tribes, were dying and their languages. We're going with them. So, um, some people were taking these record players out to preserve these languages. Um, eventually, musicians found it and said, Hey, I can record things with it, but it had a big problem. The problem with the cylinder was that it couldn't be easily mass produced. It was a cylinder, which was weird. You couldn't just print these things, you know, just, like crank him out in a factory. They were unique, so it was very expensive to reproduce them accurately anyway. So that's when ah Edison came up with this idea of the flat disc. Ah, and and we get what we now know as a record. Another drawback of the cylinder is that it was fairly fragile. I mean, this thing was a toilet paper roll made out of vinyl. Um, so if you dropped it, it broke. And if you are preserving ancient languages that were now gone and the Onley existence of them was one of these cylinders and you drop it, it's gone. That language is gone forever and ever. It's not coming back. You can't glue the thing together. Um, there's a really interesting thing that happened on ah Tech TV show several years ago where they brought an expert on curator of a museum on these things. Teoh talk about them. And, um well, I'll just I'll just play this little video clip in and you can see what happens. A one of a kind piece. There's no other one like this particular one in the world. And you can see the tracks go this way. And, um, it's really cool because it records much more accurately. Oh, shit. Oh, my God. That doesn't happen every once in a while. That can't be good now is are you done with that? I'm done with. Okay, so another trivia question. If you're ever at a cocktail party and anyone ever asks you this is probably you'll be at a very, very nerdy cocktail party if these ah conversations are happening. But, you know, um, welcome to my world. Ah, what was the first recording are? Sorry. What was the first record label? The first record label ever to exist was, of course, Edison Studios. Um, records put out, um, in the early part of the 19th century were, um Edison, Edison Labs, Addison studio. I think it's called as in studio, and you can still get these records. Um, they had a different couple different formats. He was experimenting with the thickness and thinness in the speed. We know all these things. Probably, um, all the way until well, still, you know, there's different kinds of record, different speeds of records. Anyway, Um, okay, So after the record came about and we sort of got used to having records around, not much changed with analog audio. Eventually, we got two cassettes still analog audio until the end of cassettes. We got some digital audio cassettes, but, um, cassette tape was an analog representation of audio on do Ah, a piece of magnetic tape. Um, that technology I don't know as much about but, um, I do know that the story goes and I can't validate theocracy of this story, but, um, I've heard this story on a number of occasions, and I've read a little bit about it. Story goes, that magnetic tape was invented by the Nazis. Um, so like it or not, that's where that comes from. Um, and I believe it was Frank Sinatra Who there was a soldier. The story goes that there was a soldier fighting Ah, for the U. S. Who was over in Germany and seized. Ah, tape recorder and some of this tape, um, and was like, Wow, this is kind of fascinating. And he brought it back with him and showed his friend a budding radio deejay named Frank Sinatra. Um, in this this tape, that was it was the advantage of the tape is that it was a way cheaper to record on it. Um, where is a vinyl record? It was You had to go to a studio that was very expensive to record on. Ah, blank vinyl discs. So, um, he showed it to Sinatra And so Sinatra having this radio show started, um, recording his show s So we had, like, a document documentation of his his radio show. Um, and then he started telling some of these musicians like, hands, tape stuff. It's totally sweet. You should check it out. And then, ah, cassette tapes came along and built off the popularity from that Otherwise not much really changed with with analog audio. It's it worked. It was analog. It sounded good. Um, digital audio comes about and let's let's play another party trick. Here, take a guess. Think about it. Digital audio. Um, take a guess at the year. Tic tac, tic tac. Give up. Ah, we get our first instances of digital audio of what becomes digital audio in 1957. Typically, that's much earlier than most people think. Um, it didn't really become ah available to the public until the early eighties. But in 1957 the seeds are planted and, ah, digital audio is happening. And it was kind of confined to research labs, um, and the people that had access to computers and in 1957 access to computer meant ah, university or a big big company. Um, that had one of these computers that was the size of a building that they could use. Um, and the person we have to thank for digital audio is a guy named Max Mathews. Um, Max was back just recently passed away. Actually, I think he passed away. Probably 2010. Um, he was with us. He was very old when he passed away. Is a really sweet guy. I had a a chance to meet him. Ah, couple times at some of the electronic music conferences. And he was, you know, he still came to him sometimes. Ah, really, really fascinating guy. So Max was working for Bell Labs, the the big big telephone company at the time. That kind of ran the whole country and the goal of the telephone company. They had this kind of R and D wing, and they said, Max, you're in charge. We want you to figure out we want you to figure out how to get more voices down a wire. 1957. Everyone wants a phone. Everyone wants a phone in their house. Um, which requires a wire in 1957 and there's wires going everywhere, and the phone company was saying, How can we get more voices down that wire so we don't have to hang as much wire? So Max's job is to figure out a way to do this. So he experimented with using a computer to pull apart the voices, pack them into tiny little bits as data essentially, and then send them down to the wire down the wire and have some a special kind of handset on the other end. The phone receiver. Um, no. How Teoh put all these little pieces back together so that we would hear in his voice that was what he was trying to figure out how to deal. Didn't really work. Ah, it worked, but it didn't sound like a voice. It sounded Ah, you know, very strange and weird. And that's actually kind of the dawning of the vocoder was kind of the accidental invention sort of that came out of that. So I didn't really sound like the human voice in the way that you want when you're talking to your grandma. Eso didn't really work, but that concept of breaking audio apart into little tiny bits and then putting them back together is digital audio. That's what digital audio is its tiny, tiny, tiny little bits that we that we can move around and deal with and then put them back together in order to hear them. Max was also and, ah, I don't know if I call him an aspiring musician. Let's call him an amateur musician and I think that's a fair way to describe him. I think he would agree with that. He was a violin player, Um, in addition to being a computer scientist and the story goes that he would at when he was working on this, he would bring his violin into the lab into the money where he had access to the you know, this giant computer system, and he would play his violin along with the computer so he would spend some time programming the computer. And by time I mean, like, days or maybe even weeks programming the computer to go like a pro and make some bleeps. And then he would play a little duet with his violin. And that was the first time that computers interacted with musicians, um, and kind of the dawn of computer music. So we have Max Mathews to thank for that. He's kind of the father of digital audio, godfather of digital audio, if you will. Ah, and he comes up a couple different places. There's a a popular audios synthesis sort of program called Max that's named after Max Mathews. He didn't have anything to do with the program. To my knowledge, it's just kind of named after him in honor of him. Ah, he has nothing to do with Mac computers. That's m a C. He's m a X. Um, Mac computers are made by Apple. Interesting fun Fact about Max Mathews. Ah, he taught for a long time at Stanford, um, in their audio program, which is called the Karma program, and he Ah, So he lived in in Palo Alto, California. And when the early animators for the first Shrek movie were thinking, OK, we need a donkey that's gonna be voiced by Eddie Murphy. Ah, who's got a donkey that we can, you know, do some modeling of it? We can, you know, take some measurements, bunch of pictures and and figure out how we're gonna animate and design this donkey for the Shrek movie. Ah, it was Max Mathews, who had the donkey that they used to model Shrek after. So I don't know if it just happened to be that they were walking down the street and said, That guy's got a donkey Oh, it's Max Mathews. Or if the animators were like, Let's call up Max because we know he's got a donkey. And this would be a beautiful homage to the person who invented digital audio to make this animated representation of one of his pets, I guess, um, because he had a donkey. So there you go, Max Mathews. Anyway, So, um, after Max kind of figures out how this is gonna work this idea of digital audio in 1957 Not much changes, actually from their different file formats Come and go all the time. Compression types, different ways of doing Ah, digital audio and sending it Ah, and doing stuff like that. But the basic principles of digital audio have not changed. Hardly at all. Ah, since then. Ah, it's still taking an analog signal, breaking it up into tiny little bits, letting a computer do what it wants to do with it, um, and then putting it back together formatting it as an analog signal again so we can hear it . And then And that's what Max figured out. And that's how it still works today, which is kind of wild. If you think about it, think about a technology you use that hasn't changed in 60 years. That's a millennia for technology, Right? Um, in the computer that I'm using today is two years old, and it's getting old already. Kind of, um, but that's the way it works. So that about brings us up to date with, Ah, the history of Of digital audio. An analog audio. Um, next, we're gonna move on to talking about our hardware and software needs for creating electronic music. We will see you in the next lesson.
3. Lesson 2: okay. Our next thing to talk about is hardware. What we need when we're making electronic music now, Like I said in the first part, there's not a lot of hardware we need anymore. Um, we don't need a mixer. You don't need a bunch of synthesizers. Um, you need a computer. I mean, that's kind of essential, and you could have other things. And those other things really just kind of augment what we do. We don't need them like you don't need tohave five different analog synthesizers because we can model them in software and you can get software that does it. However, ah, sometimes it's just cool to have the real thing. So, um, if you get really into producing electronic music, you might want some of these old analog synthesizers that everyone loves, Um, because they are pretty cool. And, you know, it's debatable how well this software emulate some of these analog things. Um, it's not perfect. I don't think anyone would argue with that. Um, sometimes just the old analog stuff just sounds cool. That's the only reason to have it. But you don't necessarily need it. Um, you might want some kind of controller. There's a whole study on this called physical computing. Physical computing basically means how you interact with your computer, what you touch and turn and things like that. And one more making music. We can use the mouse. We can use our keyboard like the one with letters on it. Um, but sometimes it just feels better to get our hands on stuff when we're making things. So we like to have some dials and some knobs and things like that that we can move around ah, and interact with. So, um, we'll talk about that more in a minute. First, we're gonna talk about this thing called the DAC. Um, no. In order to explain what the DAC is, let me jump back up to here. So the difference is an analog audio and digital audio. We sort of talked about these in the previous session, but let's be a little more specific about it. So analog audio is analogous. We talked about that. It captures waves like vinyl. Digital is ones and zeros. It's data. Um, this is the most important thing right here. Analog audio. Humans here analog. Our ears as humans are designed for analog sound computers here digital. Another way to say that would be if you play digital sound, we can't hear it. Human beings cannot hear digital sound. It has to be converted back toe analog in order for us to hear it. Um, similarly, if we have an analog sound in a lot of computer to be able to deal with it, it has to be converted to digital. So this conversion of going back and forth between analog and digital is often. It's one of the trickier parts about dealing with sound, and it's often where we ruin our sound is when we convert it from analog to digital or back . Most of the time it's going forward. It's going from analog to digital, Um, and that's kind of the recording process, right? The recording process is taking a microphone that knows how to take an analog signal and converting it to a digital signal, running it into a computer right? That's the conversion is taking the analog and going into digital. We work with it in the digital sphere. In our computer, it's all digital, and then, ah, we play it back through speakers, which are analog. So somewhere in your computer, there is a conversion happening to get it back to analog. So let me take one step backwards. The Dak Dak stands for digital analog converter. This is what converts the digital sound to analog. So this basically means if you have a device that makes sound that you can hear, then it's got a DAC in it Dack is ah, hardware thing. Um, your phone has won. Your phone is a digital device that makes some sound that you can hear. It's got one in it. Um, your iPod is one. Um, your iPad is one. Your computer is one. Um, Adam. Lots of other things make sound. Um, their digital devices that make sound There is a DAC in them. There has to be. Now the quality of the dac is what eyes kind of in question here. So my laptop I'm using a Mac book pro here. It has a headphone output. I can plug headphones into an anus speakers built in. So that means that it's got a DAC in it. However, the dac that's built into your computer may or may not be that great. Um, the kind of factory generic ones built into most computers are fine for plugging in your headphones. But for serious pro audio work, they're not quite enough. So what we do often is will buy a piece of hardware that is a dedicated DAC, um, which we sort of call. Is it more general term and a ah, audio interface? An audio interface is ADAC plus some other stuff that we'll talk about in a minute. So I have one right here. Hopefully you can see this. Um, this is an M audio FireWire 6 10 Um, I am using it at the moment so you might see some green lights going off. If you see this red one going off its means, I'm clipping. Which means the signal is getting too loud, and it's going off a little bit. So we're gonna push my mic back a little bit. We'll talk about clipping in a minute. You still got it? So that is a dac, um, more about this in a minute. So, as you can see, my microphone is plugged into it right here. You can see that microphones plugged in here and I could plug headphones into it. I'm not wearing headphones right now, so I'm not plugged into it. Um, but and then there's a FireWire cable going to my laptop. So the conversion is happening here. Data, FireWire, cable data coming out, Um, analog signal going in. So this is doing the conversion, and this one will work a little bit better than the converters built into my Mac pro laptop . Um, there are different kinds and qualities of dax, and the converters are what get kind of expensive and the so these could be really expensive. Um, and they could be chief. This m audio one is pretty cheap. Um, let me scroll down here. Ah, here we go. Popular audio interface manufacturers. Low end m audio. That's what I'm using here. They're fine. Um, I don't love him. They kind of They're not great. Um, the main problem with the M audio stuff seems to be the drivers. The driver is like, um, if you plug a piece of hardware in your computer and need the driver, the driver is just a piece of software that tells the computer what to do with that thing. You just plugged into it. Um So the drivers from AM audio seemed to be a little. I know they just don't work all that great. So if a driver isn't working great, what that means is that it might lose track of the piece of hardware. It's just gone for a little bit and then comes back. It's kind of annoying. I think they've gotten better. But, um, it's not my favorite piece of gear, this m audio. I use it, Ah, to record things like this video that I'm doing now, but it's not my main workhorse. Ah, the main workhorse I use is a motew, which is a company. It's accurate for Mark of the Unicorn. I don't know how they came up with that name. It's intriguing, though. Um, I like motew. I'm kind of a motew Fanboy. Their stuff is really reliable drivers. A great it's reasonably affordable for what it is, Um, and, ah, they have a great repair policy. So I've been really happy with motive, and I tend to stick with them if you want to get into the really high end stuff. This company, Metro Metric Halo, um, people rave about their converters. Um, I have never really used one for my own work, so I don't know. I'm not. It seems too much money to me to spend on a converter. Um, for what I do. Ah, the interesting thing. And there's a whole bunch of other companies in here to that that make this stuff these air just three that I kind of randomly picked. Um, the interesting thing about these audio interfaces is that they tend to be pretty spot on with the you get what you're paying for philosophy, so anything that's around 200 bucks to 800 bucks, it's not gonna be that great. But it will be fine if it's 200 bucks. My kind of socks. Um, if you're paying 5000 for something, it's probably pretty good. Um, in my experience, anyway, you get what you pay for with these things, so we're gonna be doing some really serious work. You want to, um, invest in a decent audio interface that has a really good converter in it? Um, other things in the audio interface, it's not just a dac. It's also in 80. See if we look right here in a d. C. We don't have a fancy way to say, but it's a backwards Dac right dack is digital to analog converter. 80 c is analog to digital converter, so the D a. C we pronounce as dak because it's cool. 80. See, we don't say add. We just say 80 c so analog to digital converter. That's the one that converts it from an analog signal back. So right now my microphone is taking the analog signal, which is my voice. My voice is analog and it's going through the wire and then into this M audio box, the audio interface, which is converting it to a digital signal, pushing it out? No. So that's the 80. See, the DAC is also in this box. This is both, and the DAC means that when my computer plays back something, it's going to not now. It's going to not send it to my headphone jack on my computer now because I have a better dak plugged in. So it's instead going to send the sound to this FireWire cable and out the M audio audio interface. So, to this interface, I would plug in speakers or headphones. Um, and this is gonna do the conversion for me instead of the one built into my Mac laptop. So, um, it's doing both this m audio one. And any audio interface is gonna do both in and out, Doc and 80 c. Um, you don't need to shop separately for ADAC. And in 80 c, you just want a good audio interface that will handle the conversion for you, That's all. Um now, whether or not you need one of these are not is a question need is a tricky word here. Um, I would say if you're going to be doing recording if you are going to record stuff, if you've got an acoustic guitar and you want to record it if you've got a drummer that you want to record If you're a vocalist and you want to record it, then I would say yes, you need one. You don't need a super fancy one. You don't need a metric halo. You need something decent that will convert the sound of the microphone into the and get it into your software. Um, if you're not gonna be doing any recording, you might not need one. If you're gonna be doing all synthesis stuff or working with samples pre made or something like that, Um then you could just plug headphones into your computer and work that way. Let's find, um maybe you would get a better sound if you had a DAC and plug headphones directly into that and let it do the conversion to the digital to analog conversion for you. But not necessarily, to be honest in my home studio, which is where we are now, Um, so over here is a home studio. That's why I'm looking that way. Um, I use a motew audio interface. It's good. I use it for all my in and out all my inputs on my output. So I plug into it and my speakers are plugged into it. I don't use the built in one on the computer at all. Um, but sometimes, you know, I just want to kind of go hang out somewhere and get some work done. And I'm, like, do that on my laptop. But if I'm working on my laptop most of the time, um, I just plug headphones in and work on it, so Ah, and that's just fine for what I do. Um, yeah. I don't know how to explain that. So headphones are okay. Um, now, there's 1/3 situation, and that's to say, maybe you are doing some deejay work and you're going to like a club. And you're gonna walk on stage with your computer and you're gonna set it on desk and you're gonna plug in your headphone jack and send that to the house. P A. This is tricky. Um, I wouldn't recommend doing that. I used to tell people, Don't ever do that. Um, you need an audio fate interface if you're gonna be playing a show like that. Um, some my friends lately have said, now they do that, um, they'll they'll just plug in to there. Headphone jack especially, um Well, I don't know. They'll do it. Um, I don't think it's great idea. I would say if you're gonna be playing shows like that, you need professional gear. So you need some kind of audio interface. Um, rather than the headphone jack. I just think that the sound person at the venue would be like, What do you want to plug in your headphone jack? Okay. Crazy. Um, but maybe it's OK. I don't know I to me. I wouldn't do it. I would have an interface for that kind of situation. Um, but if you're playing gigs like that and it's a big club, you can afford $500 interface. So they go, Uh, okay. Other things in audio interface to look for if you're shopping for one, uh, connectivity, how it connects. Ah, let's scroll down here just a little bit, uh, connectivity right here. Get my little underline er here, connectivity, how it's gonna connect to your computer and what kind of computer inputs you have. What I mean by that is is it a USB? Is that firewire I showed you? The one I'm using here is FireWire, its FireWire 400 which is a little out of date. Um, I really should replace it with something that's either FireWire Ah, 800 or faster, Um, for sending audio across the wire. Um, pretty much anything works. Um, if you're recording, like, 10 tracks at a time, you might need the fastest thing. But if you're doing, like, one microphone in all that data can pretty much get through any kind of cable in plenty of time. The exception of USB old US view one. Um, it's a little too slow. Um, it might be OK, but it's just kind of crummy. I wouldn't I would avoid that. But a U. S B two, which is hard to know sometimes because it looks exactly like us. Be one. But make sure it says U S B two if you're looking at a USB interface. Ah, USB two is fine and I think we're down to USB three now has recently come out and, ah, they just get faster and faster as they go. So, um, you don't even need all that speed of USB three for this kind of work, but it's not gonna hurt, so just be two or faster. 34 Whatever's out, Um, Firewire 400 is fine. That's what I'm using now Fire where 800 is fine. And whatever the next rounds of firewire are, thunderbolt is the newer thing. Um, this is kind of the new adoration of FireWire. It's got a bunch extra stuff in it. Um, it's super fast, so that will be great to you. I put a question mark in there because it's new, so there aren't a lot of hardware interfaces that are incorporating it yet. Um, but I'm sure we'll see them very soon. Um, some will have. Ah, Thunderbolt connector. And I think vulnerable is unique to Mack. Um, I think that's a Mac only thing for now. Um, but for PC USB two, uh, well, do you Great. So that's it. Depends on what your computer has If your computer has ah, USB two. Ah, slot, then use us. We two, if it has a firewire use FireWire. Ah, whatever. It's got you that, um, number of outputs. Other things that we need that means basically how many speakers we can plug in at a time. Um, you need at least two because you want to plug in to speakers. If you're doing some other work, you might want more than two outputs. Um, for example, let's a You know, a lot of the work that that I do sometimes is when I'm doing live performance. I might have a drummer with me or a full band. And in that case, I need at least three outputs. Um, because I need to send two channels, a stereo signal to the house. That's gonna be what gets put through the p a. And then I'm gonna send one channel. I'm gonna have to be a click track. And I'm going to send that back to the drummer. The drummer gets a click track of what I'm doing. So I would use another output on my interface for that so I can separate out what goes to the house and what goes to the drummer. Um, you might need more. You might want to send multiple click tracks or multiple mixes. Um, you might want a Q mix. You might want other outputs. You might want to set up four speakers in your studio so that you can hear things on different sets of speakers or in ah ah, circular pattern around you. Um, it's common. Uh, most interface. All interfaces have two outputs. Um, some of them have up to eight is pretty normal to find eight outputs. The one that I use the main when I use has eight outputs. This mo to one has eight outputs. So even this kind of cheap moat m audio one has eight outputs. So, uh, eight outputs is not that uncommon. Um, and it's fine. I never used more than two outputs on this M audio box, but it's fine. It's got eight if I want. Um, okay. Number of outputs. Number of inputs. Number of inputs is how many things you can plug into it at the same time. Ah, this M audio. FireWire 6 10 has four inputs and they are different. So on the front here, I have to microphone inputs right here. Um, these two microphones have pre amps in them. That's what I've written here. Which means they're ideal for microphones, pre amps to a little bit of sweetening of the microphone sound. Um, there's more to preempt, but let's just leave it at that for now. On the back, I also have two more inputs back here that are just line level. So they would be good for something like a guitar or something like that. Um, so I have four inputs, but to with preempts on, and that's plenty enough for what I'm doing. Let's say I was building a studio and I was gonna record ah, whole band. Um, so I've got, like, five mikes on the drums, and then I've got a singer, guitar player, bass player and keyboard player. This interface would not do that's I don't have enough inputs to do that I only have four here. Um, so I couldn't even get the drums down with this interface. But for what I do here, where I'm recording a microphone and I only need one. Um, so I don't need a lot typically for the work that I do. Because when I'm going to do recording, I go to a bigger recording studio. Ah, and don't do it in my home project studio. My home projects, which goes mostly for editing. I might record a guitar track, maybe a vocal track, miscellaneous stuff here and there. But I'm not recording whole bands, so I don't need that. Okay, so that's number of inputs. Ah, Midi interface. Ah, Midi interface means if you're gonna plug in many devices and we're gonna talk about many devices soon, um and what that all means, But that means basically keyboards and things like that. Um, you need a separate interface for that. Um, lately, in the last, like, 56 years or so, the people making the audio interfaces have built midi interfaces into them. And this one has a MIDI interface. It's these two right here. Um, that could be handy. It's one less piece of gear you need to carry around. And with the MIDI interface that more or less the question is, does it have one or not? There's not a huge like quality to the interfaces, like there is the audio conversion. Um, it's you've got MIDI capability or it doesn't. So, um, I would look for one with MIDI capability because most of them have it now, I think, and there's really no need to go without it. I guess it's not really gonna cost you anything extra. So more on that later when we talk about many interfaces driver support. I already mentioned the M audio drivers kind of suck. Um, and just some, uh, interfaces might have problems with supporting ah PC or a Mac. You know, they might be tailored to different things. That's pretty rare. Now, I think anyone's going to make a good interface for a good driver for both platforms. Maybe if you were like a Lennox user, you might have problems. Um, but if you're Lennox User, you have other problems. So, uh, I guess audio interface might not be your biggest one. Yeah. So just making sure the drivers don't suck. That's all The only thing I care about their Ah, OK, let's talk about software. Um, I'm not gonna go into how to use every piece of software here. I'm going to sort of talk about the main ah, daw workstation that I mentioned in the very first video for this class. Um, what is a dog? And we're gonna talk about different features of a couple of the main ones and then in a future video will look at a Bolton as one example, but, um, there are plenty of other examples. Okay, so first of all, doll, we talked about this word in the first day. It's It's digital audio workstation. It's a piece of software that lets us work with audio. Um, there there are a lot of different ones. GarageBand is a diet. Lets us deal with time and sound. That's the main requirement. If you've ever worked with I movie. Um, I movie isn't necessarily a dog, although it kind of is it's more a digital video workstation. It's Ah Devoir. I don't know how you'd say that word, but the D V w digital video workstation would be like I movie or final cut pro or any of those, but we're looking at digital audio workstations. Same kind of thing, though. Um okay, let's scroll down here. Here's just some vocabulary words. This, by the way, um ah, screen that you're looking at up here is just kind of a big handout that I used for when I teach this class in person. Um, so I'm gonna put this as a pdf up for download. Um, somewhere around this box, probably underneath me, um, in the text. So you can download this if you want to look at it. It's got a couple of these, like vocabulary words. Um, which Let's look at these really quick. Um, an ADA. We'll see. We'll have these buttons. Newt Button for any track means don't play this track. Muted panning is the word we use for the left and right spread other work, so of the sound. So we always have to speakers connected because we have two years. That's why we use to speakers. Um, when you have headphones on your using two speakers. Um, so that's called stereo. We hear in stereo. Humans are built in stereo. We have two years the opposite of Syria. Will be mono. That means you have one here. I guess, um, if we're using one speaker or mano So, um because we have to we can move the sound right and left in what's called the stereo field. So we can kind of go around, Um, and we call that panning. So if something is panned left, that means we put all the sound in the left year. Fits pan right. We've put all the sound in the right year, which will make it sound like it's over there. If it's Pan left, it's gonna sound like it's over there or I'm not sure how the video is flipping it. But my left is there, um, we panicked center. That means we've put an exact copy of both in both the left and right channel. And that will make our brain think that the sound is right there, right in the center. Um and then we can We've got a whole range in between there that we can play around with. So that's called panting plug ins are effects available as add ons to any Daw there. Basically, you know, your reverb delay stuff like that effects sequencer is a slightly more general term. For most Dawes, sequencer means weaken sequence sound over times we can put a sound here and then a sound here and then a sound here in a sequence and hit play. And here, all of them in a row. That's a sequencer. It's pretty much synonymous with Daw. Soft sent is what I sort of talked about a minute ago. A software synthesizer instead of a big analog synthesizer. We might get a soft synth, um, which is a software synthesizer, since that exists only in software, and solo is the opposite of mute solo means play only this track mute all the other tracks What solo means. Okay, here we are with the main Dawes, my highly opinionated list of Dawes. So let's look at what I've put here, okay? Able to live. Um, I am unable to live. Nerd. That's my main thing. Um, the strength I put performance in production. Um, interesting to note here is that a DA prerequisite of a dog is not performance. We don't usually use a dog and performance Able 10 has this weird little side to it that lets you do performance with it. But it's unique to able to him. So we're not really looking at a doll for a performance platform, but able to it happens to be one in addition to being a really solid production platform. So I like able to. It's become kind of the standard one of the standards, I should say for, ah, lot of different production. Uh, people, um, the cost is anywhere between 107 100 bucks, depending on the different flavors of it. They haven't introversion, and they have the full suite. They also have student discounts and all that stuff. Um, yeah, okay. Pro Tools is probably the most widely known, at least in the United States. Um, it's also the most expensive, um, its strength. A studio recording. Not necessarily production, I would say. And again, this is a highly opinionated list. So studio recording is the strength of pro tools. The cost anywhere between $702,000. It's a very expensive program. Um, and the note I put here is that it needs its own hardware usually, so you can't just get any audio interface for pro tools. Pro tools requires its own hardware interface. They did come out with a kind of lower end version of pro tools that would use other audio interface manufacturers. Well, but only one. Only this M audio stuff, which I've already told you, kind of sucks. So that's not really great. And there, hardware that they requires the pro tools hardware. That's pretty good. I mean, it's solid. It works well, but, um, it's expensive. So that's kind of the biggest hang up with pro tools is that it requires its own hardware. But, um, I think one of the main reasons they do that is so many people pirate software and just download and steal software you can download and steel in ah, audio interface. You could steal it like physically, but, um, you need to have their hardware or the software won't work. Okay, uh, logic, um, logic is an apple product, so it doesn't exist for PC. It's Apple. Only strength of logic is, I think the software instruments they are, uh, logic can run a lot of soft since ah, without slowing down all that much and create some really good sounds within it. You can also do studio recording and all that other stuff with logic. But, um, it can do this, I think better than most others. Um, it's cost us for 99 but it's Apple, so it changes a lot. It's hard to really say, um, what it costs now. Last time I looked it up, it was for 99. Um, another strength of logic is that I end up using logic a lot for film, work, film and television work when I'm doing film scores or advertisements or whatever, because because it's Apple, it plays well with Final Cut Pro, which is kind of a standard for video editing, so you can kind of swap files between it easier. So when I've worked for, like, a film company that's editing a film in, ah, Final Cut Pro, they might require that I work in logic. Um, it's happened. So logic is good to know whether or not you're using it has remained more course or not. Um, digital performer is one that's kind of always been around. It's kind of the odd dog out because not as popular as the other ones. I used to use digital performer exclusively, and it's a good program. It's really solid, many sequencing. I don't know. I just put something there. It's It's kind of good at everything that able turns good at except for the performance stuff. But I didnt performers a good program. It's 4 99 Ah, that's a lot of stuff. Okay, now we get to some of the interesting ones. Ardor is really interesting. So Order is an open source. Daw. It's free. Um, it's basically a clone of pro tools, so it's kind of like open office. You might know open offices, like some computer nerds, went after Microsoft office and said, This is too expensive. Let's make our own version and they basically reverse engineered Microsoft Office. These guys have done that with pro tools. So ardor is a reverse engineered pro tools. I've used it a bit. Um, it works well. Ah, it still needs work. The problem with open source stuff as that No one's really getting paid to work on it. It's all a labor of love, so it tends to progress lower. Um, but there's some There's some good stuff in it. And if you're if you're tight on money Ah, give order a try. You might like it. Um, I have some friends that work exclusively in order, and they like it. So there's that que base, uh, made by a company called Steinberg Que Bases another one kind of like digital performer. It's been around for a long time. Um, it seems to be, even though it exists for Mac and PC, it seems to be a favorite amongst PC users. From what I can tell, um, I don't use it a ton, so it's hard to really tell what its strength is. But I know it's handy for teaching medics. I've used it as like a many instruction tool before. Um, reason is a separate program, and we're gonna look at reason in this class a little bit. Um, it does many sequencing and synthesis. It's about 4 49 and it's Midi only sorta. Um, the thing about reason is that you can't do audio sequencing like you can't put like, ah, kick drum audio sample and then a snare audio sample and a high hat audio sample and then have it play a beat. Um, in a timeline, you can load them into samplers, but basically it's a whole bunch of synthesizers. Um, you can do some audio stuff now, but it's mostly designed for Midi synth work. Um, re noise. I thought I'd throw on here because it's new. Um, it's different, um, than all the other ones. It's kind of quirky and weird. I like it for making beats sometimes, Um, it's a European Ah program. So it's about 58 euros, which, when I made this handout was about 76 bucks. Um, it's new, and he's a little time to mature, but I like what they've got going with it. I think it's got some potential. So keep your eyes out for re noise. Okay? Lastly for this lecture, let's talk a little bit about general audio things and working with audio clipping. Um, well, before I do that, So here's some basic terms we're gonna encounter, and then we're gonna talk about some file formats. Um, and then that's it. So we'll do more with with audio stuff soon. Um, but I want to get these basic things down. So clipping is important. You saw when I held up my interface that every now and then it was turning red. Um, that meant I was clipping. And what happens when you're clipping? Basically clippings bad. Um, you don't want to do it. Here's what happens when you clip. See if I can draw it like this. So let's pretend this is our wave form. We OK, so that's our way for him going in. And this is amplitude going this way. So that's volume. So let's pretend this is zero. And this is Max. So put an M for Max. So this is our max. So Max, in this case is going to mean the most that our computer can handle the biggest audio signal our computer can handle. So as I get louder and louder with my voice, it's going to come closer and closer to hitting that. So right there, it's fine right here. Oops. It's really hard to draw straight with a mouse pad. Okay, so here the audio signal meant above the max that the audio, um, converter can handle. This is clipping. This is not This is fine. This is clipping. What happens is this wave form this is going to get chopped off, and the way form is gonna go up and then flat and then around. So this top part of the way form got clipped off that's called clipping. That's bad because it means it distorts. So let me since I'm already like riding this mike really hot, let me just do it. Okay, so now I'm clipping. My red light is going off, and it's probably to started. Cool. Okay, so that was clipping that was just pushing the way form way over, um, what it could handle. So that's clipping. You don't want to do it now when I say it distorts one thing to point out, it's not cool. Analog distortion. Analog distortion is like the distortion you put on your guitar, and it sounds cool. This is digital distortion. Um, and if you're, um, signal has clipped and it's digitally distorted, it's done for you. You have to re record that that bit. Um, it's not gonna sound good. There's no amount of fixing that you can really do to it. It's clipped, it's clipped. It's gone because this data, this piece of information that got clipped off, is gone. It didn't get recorded, so there's really no fixing that unless your computer could predict what that waas So it's gone, so we don't want a clip in the way we clip is, um we hav
4. Lesson 3 : All right. Welcome to introduction to electronic music presented by Slam Academy. I am still J Anthony Allen. Um, it's a day to So here we go. Today we're gonna talk about a brief history of Midi. Ah, what Midi is? Ah, many instruments and effects And lastly, working on the great and incorporating MIDI into your tracks. So we're gonna actually get down and dirty a little bit and makes a music Maybe, Uh, okay. A brief history of midi. So I like these little brief history. Things this one won't be is elaborated to brief history of audio because midi is much newer than that. Ah, Midi comes around and let's get that picture of the synth on their just cause it's pretty. There we go. Um, many come to us, Comes to us in 1981 I believe. Um and what happened was in the eighties, we had personal computers were just coming on the market, and, uh, people were starting to incorporate electronica music into their computer. So there were using synthesizers like this one that we're seeing on the screen. This is a Moog synthesizer they were using since similar to that. And there were other products on the market by the eighties, and they want to do incorporate them and other computer they want under computer to be able to control the synthesizer and the synthesizer to control the computer to some extent. So, um, there was a lot of different attempts to build a standard way for that to work. Um, things like proprietary stuff. There was just all kinds of different ways that it was working. So at some point, there was a lot of options for computers to talk to synthesizers, and but they were all unique to the computer. So the ah one synthesizer company might make something that worked with a certain kind of computer. But if you wanted them to work together, you need that computer in that synthesizer. You couldn't switch out computers or switch out synthesizers. They were really paired together in these really tight way so they wouldn't You couldn't swap him out. Um, so ah, bunch of manufacturers got together and said, Let's come up with a standard way to make this work. So they invented Midi. Midi stands for a musical instrument digital interface, and all it really is is a protocol for computers to talk to synthesizers. So all MIDI devices have the same kind of output. It's got five pins on it. Have a picture of one down here, and that's just super to that. There it is. So this is a midi jack. This is a MIDI cable, I should say. So it's got five pens and it's a circle. All many devices at the time had those, and computers will be able to recognize different kinds of many devices so you could swap things out. So all the companies came together and agreed on this protocol. Ah, which would never happen. Now, right? You never get like Sony to agree to the same type of device input that another a competing company was trying to use. But at the time, it was totally cool. And so everyone was happy. All the synthesizers could play with all the computers, and it was great. So let's look at who I have here for the major players. Thes air, kind of the main people in the story of how this came to be and they're not chronological. I think I put him here alphabetical by last name. The oldest. We go back to Leon Thurman. Um, Thurman didn't really have much to do with Midi, but he did have a lot to do with electronic instruments. Um, Leon, Chairman invented the Thurman. Ah, you've probably seen a Thurman. It's like that spooky controller that, um it actually makes sound. And it's used a lot in horror movies. It makes sounds. You don't actually touch it. You wave your hands in front of it and knows the distance away from you using like magnetism and all that stuff. Let's watch a quick little video of a pheromone in action. Way, way, way, way. Okay, So Thurman came along, was born in 18 96 and he lived to be very old. He died in 1993. Thurman is a really fascinating guy. He was an inventor who came to United States from Russia. And, uh, the story goes that he was coming here as an inventor to build I I believe it was home security systems for the time. Uhm he develop this technology. Basically, when you got closer to it, it got louder. So this could be your home security system, and you had to get pretty close to it. for to get loud, and it didn't get all that loud, so it was kind of a crappy home security system. But, um, he found out that it would make a really cool musical instrument, and you could actually study this thing and become really good at it. So the Thurman was supposed to replace the piano. That was the idea. Um, everyone was gonna have a Thurman in their home, and for a while he came pretty close to achieving it. Um, it was very popular instrument for a while. You can find one. Ah, the beach boys used one. The Beatles used one just a little bit. I mean, they didn't It wasn't like they don't have a dedicated German player. But if you listen to probably one of the most famous songs, including a Thurman is good vibrations. Um, by the beach boys. Um, that has a chairman solo in it, and it's pretty creepy. We now use them in horror movies a lot. It's like the ghosts sound. Um, but they're still fun. They're still kind of novel toe. Have, um uh, and at least one person, actually, probably many. But the most famous Thurman player actually was a virtuoso of it. Her name is Clara Rock more and you can find videos of her playing all over the web. She became a Thurman virtuoso. She played. She was well known for playing like violin Sonatas and Violin Concerto. Um, and she and it's amazing to watch her play. She has this technique of used moving your fingers like this toe, like, get closer to it. It's really weird. Um, but look her up. She became a virtuoso, Interestingly, about Thurman. Um, after he got a certain amount of celebrity from having built this thing and people starting to use it, he disappeared. He disappeared from the world, was gone. Ah, for I think, about 30 years. He was just gone. No anywhere. Iwas um he was discovered later when it turns out and I'm not making this up, he was kidnapped, um, by the Russians because it was Cold War, and actually, this is probably before the Cold War, But it was wartime, one of the wars, and Russia wanted their inventors back, so they kidnapped him. They brought him back to Russia and they put him in a lab building, something we still don't really know what he was working on after he was discovered. Um, he was brought back to America to New York. Um, and when asked what he was working on, he gives these really vague answers part of it. And the vagary of his answers might have something to do with at this point. He's like in his nineties, you know, when he is very, very old. Um so that could be part of why he's being vague. And the other part could be that he just can't talk about what he was building. But they they asked him, like, What were you working on for all that time? And he was like, Yeah, sometimes you work, done stuff, you know, it's really back. Um, but, ah, if you want to know more about this story, there's a really cool documentary about Thurman. I think it's called Leon Thurman An electric odyssey or electronic odyssey or something like that. Um, so watch that movie in that movie, um, they bring him back, they bring That's the movie where they follow him around and bring him back to the United States. Um, and reintroduce him to Clara Rock more who he knew he was very close with, Ah, in his life in the United States. Um and then he gets, like, some honorary doctorates and stuff like that, but it's really fascinating. Um, I believe he died shortly after the making of that movie so that we was probably around 1991 or so that it came out and really? Sure, But watch that movie if you're interested in Thurman. So Thurman kind of paved the way for Elektronik. Instruments. Um, later, we get Bob Moog, a sort of the next significant player in this move. Got his start by building Thurman's Thurman's air? Not very complicated. You can actually still by, like, a little kit to build yourself a Thurman uhm for like, 100 bucks. You get all the components, saw her a couple things, um, put it in a box and you've got a Thurman. They're actually fairly simple to build. Um, So Moog, when he was a kid, ah started building Thurman's as a hobby and eventually got more and more into it and started building bigger, elaborate synthesizers. This is one of Moog synthesizers here. You can see it's super gnarly. Um, these things are you can, as you can tell by the velvet rope, these air kind of museum pieces. Now, um, they're crazy and very expensive if you find one Ah, at a garage sale or something by it and ship it to me, and I will pay you for it. Um, they're pretty awesome. Ah, so move started building these really elaborate synthesizers. Big, huge synthesizers that keyboards which Thurman's didn't have, obviously, um, and some other kinds of controllers here to and they were all packable. You could plug cables to connect like this to that and all this stuff. But they were not computers. They were just synthesizers. They were all analog, right? So each one of these is a little sound making module on their some filters down here, and we'll talk about how this works when we talk about synthesis. But, um, the main thing about this is that there was no saving a sound like if you built a cool sound by patching a whole bunch of stuff with all these cables. Like the way this one is? Um, it was cool, but then it was gone. Like once you unplug these cables, it's gone. There. You can't save a preset or anything. So these were pretty crazy. Um, at some point, historically, these were still considered for a long time kind of toys. The music world didn't really can take them seriously. Ah, synthesizer was neat, but it wasn't, You know, you couldn't be a virtuoso of it. Clear a rock more on the Thurman. That was some kind of a different but the Moog synthesizer and similar synthesizers. Um, there was no really legitimacy to those things as musical instruments. Until we get Wendy Carlos coming along, Wendy legitimizes synthesizer singlehandedly. Ah, What she did is she put out a album called Switched On Bach and I believe that's a series of albums. There's multiple switched on Bach albums and all she did on these is play Bach on the Moog synthesizer. Um, no, the the thing about the synthesizers that you could get a lot of different sounds by patching this in different ways. So she played kind of all the parts of the synthesizer. But if you look at this thing and remember what I just said about how it was patched, what she had to do was create the sound of like the flute section for the Bach piece and then record it in one take and then go back and do it again and alive them shoot at the same time. Um, so it was completely virtuosic. And after it came out, um, the whole music world kind of said, maybe there's something to this synthesizer thing. Um, So they quickly became not toys. And ah, serious, serious instrument. So after Wendy, Carlos Carlos is still alive? Um, Wendy Carlos went on to do more stuff. She had a very brief career in film music. She wrote the music to, um, to kind of significant movies. One is ah, Clockwork Orange. She was a composer behind Clockwork Orange. Use a lot of classical music combined with some very modern kind of synthesizer music for its time. So that fits perfectly with what she does. And fitting even more perfectly was the original Tron movie. She scored the, uh, the whole film, which Tron being the first movie, I believe that incorporated um significant amounts of computer animation with live action people. Ah, fit perfectly again with what Wendy Carlos did by incorporating classical music with the modern synthesizer. So it was a really cool blend of stuff when he was not involved in the, um try and remake. Um, yeah, I'll leave that at that. Ah, OK, so after, um, Wendy Carlos. So when he's still around, she doesn't do much anymore. She's kind of a private person. Um, see, keeps up a blawg, and I think she does a lot of visual art now, but she's not very active in the music world anymore. So, um, then we get Dave Smith, Um, who invented this thing called a prophet? Five Cent. He's commonly considered the father of MIDI. This is the Prophet Five. And it was the first, um, synthesizer to fully incorporate what we would then what we would come later to call MIDI. Um, it would talk to a computer just great, and a computer could talk to it. And ah, human could talk to it so you could play it. You could turn knobs or the computer could play it and turn knobs in its own way. Um, so this is our first instance of midi, and it was Dave Smith along with, ah, these other manufacturers and kind of this consortium deal that did it, um OK, so with this problem five. Okay, so let me just point out what I were here. This is a move, since it's pretty awesome and had a hard time playing with other sense. So other. That's the other part of this thing is that when something is Midi capable, other sense can play it, too. So a human complaint. Ah, computer complaint and other since complaint. So in something like this Prophet five, you could plug in another synthesizer to it and have it play this synthesizer, and you can still do that with Midi. Um, OK, so let's talk about what actually is inside Midi. Um, Midi is a protocol. That's the main thing to remember. MIDI is a protocol. Let's look here. Midi is an acronym for Musical Instrument Digital Interface. That's what it means, So let's parse that out a little bit. Musical instrument, right? So it's a musical instrument and it's a digital interface. So it so it's an interface just like your malice is an interface. Ah, for your computer in a way. But it's also a musical instrument. It's a musical instrument digital interface. It is a protocol. That's the keyword remember, right here a protocol for musical devices to talk to each other. Okay. The reason the word protocol is so important is because Midi does not make any sound. Um, it just doesn't. There is So Midi does not send audio information generate any sound by itself is not audio . It is not audio. Very important. So many does not make sound. All Midi does is tell something that makes sound What sounds to play. So the second example here. So let's say, um I have ah, computer. This is my computer. See computer And this is my mini keyboard. So this is a keyboard? Yeah, it's pretty junky keyboard, but that's OK. Okay, So what I can do is if my computer here has a sent some samples loaded up, let's say I'm running garage band and I have a track cute up. That's God's, um, a piano on it. So there's a piano on this track in Garage Man unplugged my MIDI keyboard in to my computer , and now when I play the keyboard, the keyboard is going to control those sounds. The sounds live in the computer that don't live in the keyboard. Now there are some keyboards that do make sound right? Those technically are midi keyboards. This is the keyboard part with sound generating stuff in it as well. That's kind of the definition of a synthesizer. It's a midi keyboard that also has sounds in it. Um, but in most cases, when we use stuff, now we're using Ah, controller. A controller is like a synthesizer, but it has no ability to make sounds on its own. You you can touch it, play with it, hit it. It will not make any sound unless you like, smash it on the table. That's the only sound it'll make, Um, but we plug it into a computer and it controls all the sounds inside the computer, right? So that sounds all exists here. All many does is say, when I play this note, I put my finger there. That sends a message across the cable that says, Hey, computer, the dude played that note. He put his finger there. It also gives some more information. It says how hard I played that note. It says how long I've held that note. Um, sort of. It says, Ah, some more detailed information. Ah, specific to the sound. So it could send a lot of information, but it's basically Onley sending information on what I did. It's not sending any sound. There's no audio output to a keyboard. There's no way to plug your to a controller. I should say there's no way to plug your headphones in or anything like that. If you have a keyboard that makes sounds a synthesizer, then you can plug in headphones to it because it will have some sounds built in. But most of our controllers don't. They don't make sound okay, so many does not make any sound by itself. It on Lee sends information on how to control it. Now that makes some interesting things. For example, um, Midi has found other uses outside of music, even though it is musical instrument digital interface. We use it for some other stuff. It's become pretty popular and robotics because this idea of I'm going to do this and this is going to send information based on what I did here in this case, I put my finger on this key, and this is going to say, Hey, the guy put his finger on that key. That protocol tends to work well in the robotics field. I don't know anything about robotics, so I'm not gonna go into detail on that. But I just know that they use many. Sometimes another thing it works really well for is lighting. If you go to like a big theater, you'll find, um if you go up to like the the control room, you'll find a big light board where they have a whole bunch of failures. And if you look on the back of it, you will see ah, one of these cables coming out of it. They most lighting boards work by midi now they, um And it's kind of cool because you can actually plug in a midi keyboard just like a piano keyboard into elect controller and just sit there and play and watch all the lights flicker in different ways. Um, and it works really well because if I say I'm gonna play this note and oops, if I play this note, I want you know, a certain light to turn on, and I can say how hard I hit it. And that means, um, how bright the lights should be and stuff like that. Now, that doesn't mean that most ah, people that are doing lighting design for theaters are sitting up there playing a keyboard . They have their own interface. It doesn't look like a keyboard. Um, it's got favors and things, but it functions inning in the exact same way and using the MIDI Protocol so the instrument itself doesn't look like a keyboard. It looks totally different. So let's talk about that for a minute because that's important. The reason that most midi controllers look like a keyboard, you know they have the white key Blackie layout. Uh, is on Lee because keyboards are the most popular thing. People tend to know what to do when they see one they know to hit notes, whether you know how to play keyboards or not, whether you know how to play the piano or not. But there's no reason it needs to look that way. I'm gonna show you on the screen here some other ah types of controllers and talk about them for a minute. Okay, so here's an example of the lighting controller that I talked about. Um, this is a keyboard. Um, this is someone using a keyboard to control the lights and a theater so you can see they've marked on the on the keyboard. Ah, this note triggers a blackout. Um, this one triggers a splash. Um, different blackout. Strobe like it's triggered from this key. Um, cool. Warm eyes is probably right wide, full, wide, cool, warm. So these are just different lighting cues that they've marked going up. So 50 52 51 to 53 55 to 7. Um, so they just mark this and again, it's kind of weird to use a controller for, like, a keyboard for lights, but you could, um and this person did. Here's a more traditional lighting controller, so this has a bunch of failures and a bunch of buttons, but it still works by MIDI instead of a keyboard. It's got failures and buttons, and that's just fine. The protocol still works. It can handle failures, um, and buttons, and we use failures and buttons a lot. So this is a typical lighting controller. It's kind of a small one. Normally they're bigger than this. Okay, so getting back to musical instruments, Um, like I said, the only real reason that the Midi keyboards are shaped like keyboards is because the piano layout is pretty familiar. You can get different instruments, um, that are that send MIDI information and there are tons of him. Every instrument you can possibly imagine has a MIDI version of it has been made. This is a midi guitar. Ah, so this particular model, I believe, still outputs audio out down here so you can play it like a normal guitar. But out down here, there's a MIDI output. So it's figuring out what notes you played an out putting midi. There's a bunch of companies that make money. Guitarist. Now this one is called a wind controller. It's essentially ah, clarinet or it works. The same is like a saxophone. Um, so it's for a wind player that wants to play Midi. Now imagine what you could do with this if you were a saxophone player and you said I want to be able to play the piano. All you really have to do is plug this into your computer and queue up a piano sound. And then, as you play, the sound that we hear will be a piano. You will essentially be playing a piano with a saxophone, sort of. You'll be playing a piano with a wind controller. The way this one works is it's got keys just like a saxophone does. Or a clarinet. Um, so what keys? You press correspond to the notes. Um, just like the normal instrument does. The one major difference here is that inside this piece up here, there's a little like hair thing, and ah, that's the volume of the note. So how hard you blow will bend that hair thing so you have to blow into this and that regulates the volume of the note that you're playing. So that's why it's called a wind controller. You have to blow wind into it, but otherwise it works just like a saxophone or clarinet. And I've been told from saxophone and clarinet players that they hate playing these things because you don't need any amber. Sure, that's like how you position your mouth. You just blow into it. Eso it's kind of strange, And like I said, any instrument you can imagine has been made into a midi version of it. Here we have a MIDI accordion. Ah, someone that some manufacturer took an accordion and said, Let's have this thing output midi. So you can play it like a normal accordion or, ah, you can pump it into your computer and have it control an orchestra If you wanted to. I don't know why you'd want to use an accordion, but some people will do so. There it is. Many accordion moving even farther down The weird scale. This is a tap shoe. So a tap dancer that out wants to output midi. The reason you might do this is let's say you are a tap dancer and a really good tap dancer , and you want while you tap dance to play the drums. So you where this taps you and you pump it into a computer and ah, you are now playing the drums as you tap dance here we've got the unfortunate thing about here is we got a wire coming out of the shu which won't work really great. You can send MIDI wirelessly now, and it's actually fairly easy. There's a lot of devices that do it. Um, for example, your phone. If you have like an iPhone or an android, it can be a MIDI device and send many information wirelessly. Okay. Last one on the spectrum of super weird things, but, um, this guy invents all kinds of weird, weird stuff, and this is a horrible picture, but it's the best one I could find for you. Look over here, what he's doing as he's playing a thing that he calls a digital do, which is a didgeridoo. Ah, wired up with some extra controllers and things so that it will send midi information. So it is a midi didgeridoo. Like I said, anything you can imagine someone's made it. I played a gig, ones with a, um, midi bagpipe played by a robot where the robot was being controlled over Mitty and it had these little fingers that played bagpipes. It was the loudest thing I've ever heard because it had to have this, like air compressor that was controlling all the air, and that was insanely loud. So anything you could imagine Okay, back to what is midi? Let's look at my little vocabulary words here. Um, let's start with at the bottom here and talk about velocity for a minute. Velocity is volume. Um, it's kind of the fancy word for volume. All it really means is volume. Um, it's how hard you hit the key. Think of if we're working with a keyboard Midi controller, Think of it just like a hammer going down. And the velocity is how hard you hit the key. Why we call it velocity. You're not volume. I don't know. Probably because it was midi was put together by computer programmers. Um, but you will see when you're working in a dog and working on midi ah sequences, you'll see the word velocity a lot. So it's important to know what it is. It basically just means volume. Um, Mitty. We know what that is Now. Bus power is an interesting thing. So bus power basically means we have a controller that it doesn't need to be plugged into a wall. It gets all of the power that it needs from, um, being plugged into your computer. Now, let's talk about this cable as it relates to that. So if you look at your computer and look at all of the possible things you can plug into your computer, you will not see any sort of inlet for this kind of cable, right? You can't plug this cable into your computer. Um, so that's kind of a problem. What we need to do is we need to get all are many devices down to a USB thing. And what we used to have to dio was by a separate piece of hardware that would let us have , ah, plug in a whole bunch of many things and it would convert it to USB and send it out so we could plug in, like, eight many devices to it, and it would send one MIDI cable, so it converted it basically to I'm sorry it would send one USB cable so it would convert it. Essentially, do a USB cable. Um, increasingly, we don't need to do that anymore. More and more MIDI devices, especially controllers that don't have a synthesizer or anything in them, are doing the USB conversion for us, so they will. Most of them will still have a MIDI output. So ah, cable that looks like this or a jack that looks like this. But they also have a USB outlets. You can plug it right into your computer. So for the ones that have a USB output, typically they could be bus powered, which means all you have to do is plug the thing into your computer with a USB cable, and it can get all the power it needs out of USB If you're shopping around for a MIDI controller, Um, you want to look for something that's USB that sends out a USB cable and is bus powered? Just makes your life easier. Bus power isn't that important, but make sure that it's USB, um, output. Because if it's not USB, if it only has midi output, that means two things. One, it means it's old, Um, and maybe you should be skeptical of that. And to, um, it means you're gonna have to buy a separate piece of hardware to convert it the MIDI information to us be so you can plug it into your computer unless you have some crazy computer that has USB inputs, which I don't You do? Okay, last thing I listened here is an A P C 40. If you are in a Bolton person or interested in deejaying. Ah, this is just kind of become a very popular MIDI controller for able to in live. Um, let's have a look at one and talk about it for a second. Okay, this is an A P C. 40. It doesn't look like a keyboard, right? Doesn't look like a piano at all, but it's still midi. What? This has a whole bunch of buttons that we can push, tow, launch different stuff in a Bolton. Um, it's got Fader is so we can control the volume of different tracks. Um, and it's got some knobs that weaken turn to adjust different parameters of effects and things like that. This is really designed to work with the able to live platform, So if you're not using able to live, it's probably not a great choice for you. Um, it's really designed for people doing like D J type work like performance so you can launch a bunch of stuff with these You can do beat matching really kind of typical deejay stuff. You gotta cross Fader down here, and some transport controls play stop record down there. But I wanted to show it to you because it doesn't look like a keyboard, but it's very musical in the way that it set up. It's actually really versatile thing, so it's called a PC 40. It's been by Akai Okay, um, moving on last couple bits that we need to know before we get into some of the deeper details that I just mentioned, these many cables air really kind of funny. Um, because when Midi was developed in the eighties, the idea they had was we're gonna make it really expandable. We're gonna make it so that later people will improve upon the MIDI Protocol and make it better. So of these five pins Onley, three of them actually do anything. This one and this one don't do anything. Ah, this one is where all the data comes. One of these on the ends is a ground, and I can't remember what the other one is. But really, it's the center. One is the only one that really matters all that much. Um, so there's these other pans. Just don't do anything. They're just there. Um, in case someone wanted to improve on the protocol which no one has ever done. People have tried, but no one's ever done it. Um, So there's these. It's this five pen thing, even though we really sort of only need one of those pins kind of goofy. Um, another reason, though, that we use this five pin thing is at the time. These cables with this five pin connector were super cheap. They were everywhere. So it just made good sense for these guys that we're putting together this protocol, that we would use this five pin connector because they're just tons of them everywhere and we get a really cheap. So that's why we have that. Okay, let's talk about many instruments really quick, and then we'll break. Um, we'll take a little break and we'll cut to a new video. Ah, where we go into effects and working in a dog. Um, we talked about many instruments a little bit. General Midi is, ah, midi. That's kind of already built into your computer. If you can play a MIDI file, which, if you have a Web browser, you probably can, and it will make some sounds automatically those air midi instruments that are built into your computer already, they sound really horrible. They're like the cheesiest sounds you can possibly get, but they're built into your computer. Ah, velocity. We just talked about soft since we talked about in our previous video, but it's a software synthesizer now. It's relevant here because again, because the soft synth is controlled by a MIDI controller. So if I've got a MIDI keyboard set up, I might plug it into my computer, queue up a soft sense on a track and then play that sense with my keyboard or my mini guitar or my MIDI accordion or my taps you or whatever I want to do. Um, so that's what self since do we play them with a MIDI controller? Um, okay, a browser can play MIDI files using its built in Midi sound, and they really suck. That's what I was talking about with General Mitty. They're comically, hilariously bad. Just search for, um, like whatever the current pop hit is and put like dot m i d. After it. That's a MIDI file. Um, you'll find people that spent all day making midi files of these of, like the newest Justin Bieber tune or whatever. And it's there just hilarious to listen to and kind of painful. Actually, they're horrible. Um, okay, let's talk about me. The effects quick, and then we'll take a break. So I lied before. Sorry. Um, many effects are data effects. There is no sound in midi, right? We've established that, um midi only trigger sounds elsewhere. So a mini effect, um are things that affect them the midi data coming in. So, like how hard you hit the note, you could put in effect on that. And instead of having ah, the velocity which we know is how hard we hit the note, the velocity just be a constant We could put in effect that haven't makes it jag, you know, go up and down really crazy or something like that. Common many effects are things like arpeggio. Arpeggio is a way to say it comes from the word AARP, which is similar to harp like when we roll our finger across the harp. Um arpeggio means if we play a whole bunch of notes at the same time Ah, an arpeggio is going to separate them out into playing them one at a time so we can play like five notes, but instead of hearing bomb in terms of five notes, all same time and arpeggio effect would play them Doo doo doo doo doo doo doo doo doo doo doo doo doo doo doo doo doo doo doo doo doo doo doo doo doo doo doo doo doo like that. That's an arpeggio transposed means we just shift the pitch. Um, so if we transposed something by two, it's going toe. Raise every note that we played up to notes. Or we can transpose things by an active or randomly transposed things if you want to get it all. Super dissonant and weird. Harmonize would be Teoh. Add another note to the note you're playing, so it's not going to shift the note. The way transposed is it's gonna play the note that you played. Plus another note, a note that sounds good that you like, um, velocity shift randomized. That's what I was talking about in the beginning. Um, velocity is air volume, so if we play a note, might we might say randomized the velocity, especially if you were like playing drums on one of these little pads and you're queuing drum sounds. You might randomize the velocity to make it sound a little bit more human because humans are random. That's how we work. Ah, you can Onley add audio effects to the instrument after as it has created the audio from many data.
5. Lesson 4: All right. Welcome back When we're talking about working on the grid with midi and what I mean by that what I mean, by working on the grid, let's talk about that first attack. Um, is working in the Daw. So in a few minutes, we're gonna flip over to a bilton, and we're gonna look at, um uh, generating some some musical content with, ah midi information. Ah, Before we do that, though, I want to go over a couple quick little things. Key concepts, piano roll notation, editor and tempo. So let's talk about let's do him in order this time, something different. The piano roll. Okay, so this is the typical way that you edit midi in a dog. Um, the piano roll. It's called a piano roll editor because it comes from those old school. Ah! Ah, player pianos, Right? I always call him Scooby Doo pianos because there are pianos that, like in Scooby Doo, would, like, play themselves to show like there was a ghost there. Some like that. Anyway, um, so in those old player pianos, there was this big role, and it had holes, punches and punched in it, and you would pump it with your feet and that would move the role. And And when the role came over this certain, like line, it would tell the keys on the piano what to play. So this is like a really modern adaptation of that. So we still call it the piano roll editor. And that's why so we're gonna look at that. That's the main way we're gonna work. Um, other ways you can deal with MIDI information in a Daw is with the notation editor notation editor is pretty rare to use, and I just want to tell you about the existence of it, and then I want to tell you to never use it. Um, the notation editor pretty much means you're gonna be writing, um, using traditional notation, you know, like dots and rhythms and flags and all that stuff and notes. Um, I am a fan of traditional notation, obviously, but, um, he's actually don't work that great. I don't think any of the dog manufacturers people that make you know, pro tools logic. All those things really put a lot of emphasis in building a really good notation editor. So they all kind of sock. Um they're really hard to work with, and they're just ugly. If you want to publish musical scores of your information, you can do that. But the way you should do it is create all your your creator track basically, And then you can export the MIDI file into a professional notation editing program that's completely separate. Ah, and then you could make it look good and make a really professional looking score. That way, those programs would be there are basically two on the market right now that are kind of the standard Ah, professional notation editors. And one of them is called Finale. The other one's called Ah, Sebelius. Um so those two programs are designed to make to do notation editing, and that's all they do. They're very good at that. Um so the notation on orders in a dog just don't use them because they're not. They're just not very good. So, uh, I'll leave it at that tempo. Now, a special mention of tempo can needs to be made here. So the reason I'm separating out tempo So let me just read my little blurb here. Temple can be easily modified and midi the dog just has to send. The message is to the instrument faster. It's not stretching audio. What that means is that if you remember, MIDI is a protocol. So when we if we hit record on our dog and then we play our keyboard, what is actually recording is not audio, right? What's recording is when I hit what note and then the computer knows it's gonna make basically a timeline of when you played what note? But that's it. No audio, so you can speed things up and slow them down, and you don't need to do it. Any fancy time stretching of the audio all speeding it up and slowing it down does is tell the computer to send those messages faster. So let's say you wanted to record like a really thumping awesome beat, using like, ah, pad controller, right that had, like, drum hits on it. What you could Dio is take the tempo of your track, pull it way down, pull it down to like super slow and then just play in the B like snare, kick, snare Hi hat snare, you know, and just play it through really slow. And that's totally fine. And then, after you recorded it. Crank up the tempo to where you want it, and it's gonna play the It's just gonna be like you physically are playing it except much, much faster, because it's just going to send. The message is to turn those notes on and off at a much faster rate, that's all. So Ah, you can really play around a lot with tempo if you record. If you're like me and you're like, you kind of know how to play piano but not all that great and you want to record a piano part for something, slow it way down, play that piano part really slow and then speed it back up so that it's at a normal speed. So tempo is really flexible when you're working with Midi. And it's one of the best features about working with Many, in my opinion, is that you can really just adjust time without degrading the audio at all. Um, because there's no audio happening in Midi Audio comes later. So with that, let's pop on over to a Bolton and actually make some noise. Okay, so here I am unable to live. Um, now a couple things about this Able tin works in this way. Able to know works the same as almost all dot So if you're not using able to in Don't worry , what I'm about to explain is going to apply in all Daws. So all the Dawes, the digital audio workstation, have a couple of the same things. They have a timeline, which is what we're looking at here. So time is progressing this way you can see 0 15 30 45 seconds. So time is going this way and then we have tracks going this way. So these air different tracks so we can put some sound here. And it's, um, sound here and some sound here, and we can say Play it. And this is We call this the play head. That's what's playing right there. Um, we have a transport up here that just deals with our place. Stop commands are tempo is over here. It's all pretty much the same stuff. Okay, so let's put some midi information in this thing. So here's our piano rule editor. I am going to zoom in over here. Auction's gonna move this back on this back. Okay, so let's zoom in a little bit. Okay, so this is just a close up view of what's up here. So if I put zoom in a little bit, Okay, so I'm gonna put a note right there. I'm gonna stretch it out. So here's one note that's like on our old school piano roll editor. It's like, Look that tick in the paper role that I was talking about a minute ago. Um, so that's going to say play this note for this long At this velocity, there's a tiny little thing here. If I make another note out here, you'll see it better. There it is. So this just says how allowed to play it. Okay, so I'm gonna say, that's cool. Let's make another note. Was gonna duplicate that one and put it up here. And another note up their cool. I have three notes played all at once. I'm gonna highlight them all and stretch him out so they last. So I have my notes. I have my velocity. I should be good to go. Let's hear it. And we hear nothing, right? The reason we are here, nothing is are. The reason we are hearing nothing is because I haven't given intern instrument. I have to give it a sauce. Soft sent our routes. It's not gonna do anything. Um, all I'm telling it to do is play notes. I'm not telling it what to play, so we need a soft sent. So I'm gonna go to some of these just built in. Ah, sounds that are enabled in here. So here is a soft sent This is a synthesizer. And now if I play it now, we have sound So, um that's so what's happening here is the Midi notes thes three notes are going into this synthesizer, and it's saying, play these three notes on this synthesizer and then output audio. So if I wanted to put any audio effects, I could put him here That have to be after the, um, synth. Right. Um, if I want to put Mediafax, I put him before Let's do it. Let's put a little, um, our pesci ator on here. If I try to put this are Pesci ater over here? It's not gonna let me do it. I let go. It forces it over here because it's a midi effect. It has to come where we're still dealing with Midi this essentially is converting our MIDI signal toe audio sort of. That's not a very good way to think about it, but that's kind of what's happening. So goes in Midi here. After that, it's audio on its way out of this synthesizer. So here we have in our Pesci ater. So I explain what an AARP educator does. It's gonna take these three notes and instead of playing him, just bomb all at once. It's gonna play in one of the time. Let's hear that, E o E. Okay, so now it's our Pesci. Ator is playing them one at a time and I have options in appreciator. I could make it go really fast. Cool, right? And I have a lot of choices for my sound. I could craft this sound in a lot of different ways and make it do a lot of you know, different things, and we'll talk about that in the next class when we talk about synthesizer basics, which I think is our last topic in the last class. So, um, now that I have that I have some sound happening, I could go back over to my Midi notes, pull us up so we can see more and I could make more happen. Let's do see what else we should do. Let's do some drums. I'm going to go to some just pre built drum sounds. I'm gonna throw them on a track. It's got to think for a second. There we go. Okay. So here are my drum sounds. Um, I gotta set my output. Okay. You should be able to hear that. All right, so let's record some drums. I'm just gonna use my mouse because of the way I'm set up to record this video. So this is not gonna be very interesting. I didn't go real well, but if I now go to my piano roll editor, let's take this back here. Focus in. I don't really get anything, so let's just draw it in. That's okay. Um, I need to go back over here. Okay, So let's draw in. There's a kick. Here's a snare. This is gonna be kind of chaotic, so boom, boom, snare, boom, snare. We're gonna loop this. So we've just got this kick snare. Let's maybe take a closed high hat, put it on the off beats. It's gonna be pretty fast. and chaotic, but I kind of don't care. All right. Before I hit play on this, I'm gonna look at where I left my lot. Appreciate er because it's kind of going crazy. Um, let's just put it there. All right? Let's hear what we did here. Okay, That's kind of chaos. Let's pull that down to about half the speed. Okay? Now we're at half the speed. That that just was not because I just pulled the the tempo down. I'm not degrading the audio at all, right? I'm just telling it to send those message half the speed that they were before. Let's hear now. Okay, Maybe I want that high hat to be not just on the off beats, but on everyone's. I'm just double clicking to make that to double up the high. Okay, not a great example. Um, but it works. So you see that the sounds I'm doing are being controlled, But here's where all the sounds are for the drums. These air, my different samples and they're just being controlled. Told when to play by the MIDI information. Here's another cool thing about Mitty. Let's say that first synthesizer I'm kind of bored with it, right? Let's say I want to do something completely different. Let's set up. Um, I don't know, a pat on it. A pad is a word we use for, like, a a sound that has not a really sharp attack, A very kind of slow type sound that kind of fills in a lot of space. Um, what's throw a pad on that? So I'm just gonna put that instrument on their All I'm doing here is replacing the instrument. I don't have to change the notes. So now we've got a whole new instrument playing sounds here. I'm going to get rid of the AARP educator. That's not gonna work very well for a pad. So I didn't change the notes. I just changed the instrument. Let's hear it. Okay, Cool. Whatever. So this is a cool trick, because what that means is that once you've got your notes down, you've got the material down that you want. And you can mess around with changing the sounds all day long, right? You just have to change the instrument and the midi notes are always there. It is really handy while I'm working What I do a lot of the time is, ah, create a core progression or a melody or baselines. Happens a lot, Um, where I just queue up like a piano and I get the notes the way I want them. And then I keep going through the whole track with just a whole bunch of pianos. Um, and then when I get done, I say, OK, I'm done with the compositional process of I'm done creating all the notes. I've got all the notes in the right place. Okay, so step one is done. Now let's go through and start messing around with instruments and getting the instruments to be what I want them to be. So then I start swapping them out, programming in the synth sounds that I want and getting rid of all those pianos. But in the first step, it's just a matter of getting the notes in the right spot. Now I don't think that's typical, and that's not how a lot of people work. Um, but I feel like it's efficient for me to do it that way, because I can spend all day dialing in a synthesizer to get it exactly the way I want it to sound. So just by setting it up as a piano, it lets me just skip that process and get the notes down. And then I can go back and devote days or weeks or months to figuring out exactly how I want that sense to go. So it kind of separates the compositional process for me or the producing process and the creation of the actual sound process. Not how most people work, but it's efficient for me. Um, and that only works when we're doing midi. Okay, so the next thing we need to do is talk about audio and getting audio into this session to , um Well, look at that in the next chunk of stuff. So I'm gonna leave you there for this one. And next time we'll talk about putting it all together, getting audio into our sequence, making tracks and bouncing amount. Now that you know how many works? Hopefully, um Oh, and we're also gonna talk about programming synthesizer. So lots to do next time. So we'll see you there.
6. Lesson 5: All right. Welcome to introduction to Electronic music. Slam. Got him. Day three, Um, coming to you in a little bit different setting this time. My studio is under construction right now, so I don't have a microphone, so I'm sorry. It's a little bit noisier. Um, but we'll make do so today we have three things on the agenda. First, we're gonna talk about working with loops, different formats, file types and things like that that you'll need to know. And second, these kind of four things all group together reason rewire, flattening and exporting. These will be things that you'll use a lot when actually producing tracks. So my thought here is that who spent some time with audio? We spent some time with committee. These are all things that are focused on, um, finishing, like actually making stuff. So reason you might need rewire. You might need depending on what you're doing. Flattening. You will probably need an exporting. You will certainly need when not if, but when you finish something so we'll look at what you should be exporting as and then our third chunk will probably cut to a second video. Is introduction to synthesis uh, this gets really complicated really fast. It's kind of out of the scope of this class to get really deep into it. But my goal here is that you'll be able to look at a synthesizer. Um, any synthesizer, whether it's software, hardware, analog, digital, whatever you will, you will be able to look at any of those devices and just immediately know the basics of how to get this sound that you want out of it. They all work different, but there are a couple of core things that they all have in common. So we're gonna look at how do I identify those core things and making some sounds of them Okay, working with Lutes. Um, so first, let's talk about a couple different of file formats and then we'll talk about, uh, warping and with different kinds of warping getting some samples and things like that. So, um, anything can be a loop. You've probably seen sample libraries. We'll talk more about those in a minute, but sample or ah, any audiophile or midi file actually can be a loop. Um, some are designed to be loops like this Rex file. Those air really designed to kind of be looped very often. Um, MP threes could be loops. But remember what I said about using MP threes in a production? Like while you're working on a track, you don't want to do it. Audio can be our ai f wave. Those can all be loop. So audiophiles totally fair game. Um, there are some companies that make really specific files that work only with their loop player. Um, so you kind of have to watch out for those, um, because you need their software to play those loop files. It's becoming less and less common to see that, um, this rex file is one of them thes play in the program Reason which we're gonna look at in a minute. Um, a rex file is really just an audio file with these slices in it. Very similar to very similar to warping. So we'll look at that in a second when we talk about slices. Um, but what the slices do is it allows it the luke in an audio file to kind of work like a midi file. It takes like a drum beat, and it's and it's a complete loop of a drum. Lee of a drumbeat, But then it's got these little markers on the kick, the snare of the high hat, and you can basically say I want to play the kick Snare high. You can program it to play whatever you want, or you can leave it alone. Just let it play through. And it will be a complete loop that will play over and over and over, if that's what you want. Little Rex files are. They only work in reason, but we're going to show you in a minute how to make reason. Work with other programs. Reasons kind of a special, uh, program when we're working with loops and warping transients are important. So this word transient means the heart sound and easy way to remember Transient is that in the word transient, the tea right here is the transient. It's all the hard continents. When you talk, Um, you think about like, um, a kick drum like a jungle don't And the initial attack is the transient. And then there's a little bit of boom after it, and that's got a a subtler, like be sound for like, boom. That's why we say boom. Um, but we call that heart attack. The the beater, right? Like that's like the mallet hitting the kick drum. And that makes the thump like was forward. So that's kind of a transient that is transient. Other transients are the easy way to think about transience is it's the attack. It's the attack of the A sound, the initial of any sound. So when we talk, it's the hard continents like the tease. The th is, um, sees K's things like that, things that making next sharp sound. And we use those when we're creating, uh, loops and when we're adjusting sound to basically br markers of significant events. We'll look at that when we talk about working. But that's what transients are metadata. We talked for a second about. I think the previous video metadata is all this extra stuff that could be hidden inside a file. So, um, when I talked about those DRM heavy file types when I was talking about audio, um, that means that there's all this extra digital rights management DRM hidden in the audio file. It's not like hidden like it's a secret or anything like that, Um, but it's it's tucked in there. It doesn't change the sound at all, but it makes the file bigger, the file size bigger, and that's all metadata. That's extra info in in the file. Like, for example, a good example of metadata is, um, if you were looking like on Facebook and someone posted a picture and if you could download the picture and its original storm at which I think you can on Facebook metric, um, download the original picture and then look at the metadata you can see, like the date it was taken, what kind of camera they used. If they use like a smartphone, you can sometimes see the user name and sometimes a number. I think of the phone that used to take the picture, which is really interesting for policing reasons. They do this all the time. For us. It's relevant because things like in these wrecks files all this slice information. All those little markers inside the audio file are tucked away in the metadata extra info in the file so it doesn't affect these sound quality at all. It's just extra information and warping more. Ping is what we're gonna talk about next. What brings is able to lives term for adding marketer markings markers to an audio file so it can figure out loops and beats and other information. We'll look at that in a minute. Warping is really similar to what Rex does with these slices. The kind of two different companies kind of thing and warping. Um, I think we looked at warping earlier lesson really quick. Um, warping is what able to called it most d a W's conduce this kind of thing now, um other d a W's Call it different stuff. Like I think pro tools calls it elastic audio. Um, logic calls it something. I came in what logic calls it, but they all have their different names for it. Okay, let's talk about warping. And the easiest way to talk about warping is to show you what it is. So let's jump over to able to. Okay, so here now I'm in a Bolton. I have a ah, a little sample loop that I grab when we do warping. What we're doing is we're looking at down years. Make this nice and big for us, and what we're looking at is changing this. So see these little light brown markers here those air suggested war points. So what I can do is I can double click to make it a war point, and that kind of anchors it down. So let's put one here, too. And now let's say I want this transient right? That's the transient. You can see that it's a transient because it's got a very sharp attack and then some decay . So that attack is the transient. That's what we really care about right now. Um, let's say I want that transient to be back here, so I just drag it back. This is called warping, so I can really adjust where it goes. Um, yeah, Let's put it here. Let's take this one. Put it out here a little bit. Now you'll notice that when I moved this one, everything in front kind of readjusted because it's stretching this space in between these two anchor points. So if I don't want this to adjust, I need to just, like anchor something down there, and now it's only gonna just within those two between those two anchors. But that was there, so I can put there. I don't need to only use these little suggested points. I can put whatever I want by double clicking, and this makes it so we can do some really interesting stuff. This has a lot of really wild sound design possibilities you can really stretch. Something is like we're way out. Be like, Well, this is now really long this decay off this transient. So, um, it's handy when you're doing, like, film work and you want, like, a boom like a really big boom. You take the boom like the gunshot or whatever, and you stretch it way out and you could make a really powerful sound. But that's a warping that's moving it around. And almost all W's will let you do this. Now it's it was able to in was kind of the 1st 1 to really incorporate it really well, um, and very smooth. The other ones were a little late coming, but they can all handle it now. I think Mableton does it the best. The interface here is is really good for it. No keys, toe warping When you do this, no matter what dog you're working in, is that the more war points you put, the more you're stretching the audio, you stretch the audio, even if you compress it or stretch it. Whichever way you go, you're messing with it. And the more you mess with audio, the craftier it's gonna sound. So, um, I can double click to get rid of these points, and it will go back to where they originally were. Um, don't go crazy with your warping. Only work with what you need to, um, because the more you do it, the more you degrade this out. That's the thing to remember. Now we do have some down here could see this. I have some different options. The warping used to be basically warping his math. It's taking the sound and like chopping it up into bits and dealing with it in very small ways, many thousands of times so requires a ton of math. Um, so what these are down here is basically different algorithms to use. I know that sounds scary, but don't worry about it. Beats means that it's going to favor the transients, right? It's going, which is what of deep is is it's a whole bunch of transients in order, Um, so if you're warping of beat, put it on this setting, this transience But if you're warping like tones, let's say you've got like, a synthesizer melody Right then the transients aren't the most important thing. You might want it to hold on to. More of the sustained of the tones and this tone setting will preserve those much better. Texture is if it's, you know, maybe an ambient thing. Re pitch is your old school record player. Re pitch means that when you warp it and you stretch it out, it's gonna play it. It's going to slow it down on the pitch is gonna go down. So if you want it to be or record if you wanted to be a record where you put a finger on your record and it slows it down and the pitch goes down, set it to re pitch and that's what'll happen. Um, complex and complex pro are the two newer ones. They only come with a built in sweet, I believe are complex pro Does I should say, um, these are good if you're doing like a whole track and you want it to be like all the power of able to tow, do the warping. Um, and you would think, Why wouldn't you always wanted to be on that so that you're using as much of juices you can to do all this crazy math really fast. The reason is it slows your computer down a little bit. So if you've got a whole bunch of tracks and they're all set to complex, then your computer's gonna be bogged down a little bit. Um, and if you're performing a whole set live, you don't want your computer to be bogged out any extra weight. So the lettering about using those, um, and don't go crazy with them. Here's what it sounds like. You can already see my juices upto 91%. This is my whole computer. And most of this isn't because of this little file being set too complex. Pro. If I take it off, it's still gonna be really high. This is mostly because of my screen capture software that it's running that high. Um, it's got to do a lot of extra stuff. Okay, so that's the really basics of warping. The key to remember is use it minimalistic Lee and wise. Don't go crazy with it. Unless you want to degrade the sound and make these crazy sounds, which can be really fun. Um, but aside from that, keep it simple and you'll get good sounding stuff, okay, Back to my hand out, um, warping tips. And it's gonna reiterate these don't be totally o c d. About how maney markers you use less is more markers. Are those things that I was calling anchors a minute ago? Marker is a better term for him. Um, less is more with those. Check the warp mode to be sure you are using the best algorithm. That's the drop down menu that I just showed you with the re pitch complex beats texture settings was called work modes and use your ears. Listen to the file against the Metrodome to make sure it's lining up well. So what I mean by that is, if you're warping of beat, let's say you've got a recording of a drummer just like your friend planning the drones. Not a computer, but like a human playing the drums that make this place and you want to make a loop out of this, you want to be sure? Well, maybe you don't. You might want to be sure to put it that way. That your drummer is dead on exactly. To beat, which humans typically aren't. That's the joy of being that we are not robots. But if you want your friend who recorded this little drum file for you to sound like a robot, then you can put it into able to enter whatever doll you're using. Go into the warp settings and put every transient exactly on the grid and listen to it against the Metrodome. Turn on the Metrodome. And so you're hearing a constant click and be sure that it's lining up perfectly. You might not need to warp every single transient, right? Maybe only every fourth transient. You just nudge him over onto the beat and it'll be just right. And then when you loop that it will be dead up. So, um, that's what I mean by user years. If it sounds good, don't warp it just so that it looks good on the screen. Um, trust your gut. Follow your heart, as they say. Okay, um, more on sample libraries. So let's look at a typical sample ivory. Really quick. Okay, so now I'm just in the finder window of my computer. I have the sample library here called Twin Cities Breaks. This was a simple library put out by a guy in town here in Minneapolis ST Paul area who just kind of went around to all of his favorite drummers and put out a sample library of his drummers play of his favorite drummers. So it's pretty cool. The library. I like it. It's fun. Um, so once we get inside the library, this is what we see. He's got him separated out into categories and in his categories. He's got just the name of the government. So let's look at Joey Ben Phillips. Oh, he's one of my favorite, Um, inside I have two folders, loops and Rex files. So here those wrecks files that we talked about, what one looks like, Um, this is a rex file with all that extra information. So I can't play it. Um, it needs reason to play. So we'll look at that more when we look at reason. But, um, these are pre built with all the warping information is in them. That's the trick to the Rex files is that they are pre warped, pretty much you not to do anything with them. We just go into loops and look at these audio files. What we have here is, and this is pretty typical. We have some kind of name for it. We have a BPM written in a tempo, which won't really matter to us if we're going to warp it right, we can change the tempo around in our dog. But this tells us what the tempo was when they recorded it and says, This is a four bar version, so it's four bars, long of a loop. This next one is 16 bars long. It's one is four bars long, and here we get two different versions of the loop. So this is Luke for 90 BPM, four bars, a dry in a wet. So since these are just acoustic drums, what that probably means, and it does mean because I know the sample I very well. But typically, what that means is that the the dry version is he played a beat, some kind of beat that was cool, and the wet version played the same kind of beat, but used a little bit more symbols, little more ringing stuff. That's what we mean by wet. That's this one. Um, so maybe he left his high hats a little bit open, so they sizzle a little bit more. Let the Cymbals ring stuff like that. So it'll mostly be the same beat, but with a little more reverb on it. A little more, uh, sound resonating with more residents. Call it residents. So all of these, there's a wet in a driver. That's that. And some of these other ones we have samples. So here in this one, we've got looks, Rex files of pre warped versions and then samples. So we have. What he's done here is he's taken the loop and chopped out his individual high hats, snares kick, reid rim click on a bunch of different snare sounds. So what that means is that these aren't loops. These are just individual hits, one shots you call him. So with these, we've got ah, high hat sound that, uh, we can build a loop with and do our own. So if you like this person's playing you can are the sound of their playing, you could maybe build ah, loop of them playing or even more interesting, combine a bunch of different people in the different samples say I like this guy's high hat , but the other guys kick in whatever, and you could make your own stuff. So once you do this a lot, you'll eventually build a probably huge library of samples of different stuff. And then you've got a big problem of categorizing them and keeping track of it because you'll have hundreds of thousands of audio files, um, on several hard drives worth of stuff, and you got to categorize them and keep track of them both loops and individual audio samples. How I do it is I've just kind of created a naming scheme for stuff on, and then I tried to keep him sorted as much as I can. Um, that's not a very good way to do it. And I just used the finder kind of like this. Um, another way to do it will be There's this program called Audio Finder, which is really designed to do it. I used that program a little bit and it was OK. It didn't blow my mind, Um, but it was pretty cool. There's another program by audiophile engineering called Sample Manager, which is really designed to be kind of like a batch converter, so you could select like 50 samples and say, Convert liest 44 1 or whatever, but it does do a pretty good job of being a librarian of your samples. It gets not to be not such a great tool. Once you load it up with a ton of samples, it starts to just take forever to load, and it's really slow. But, um, if you're using a smaller amount of stuff, it can be OK. But that's called sample manager by audiophile engineering. My hope is that someday a piece of software will come along. That's just like a really awesome sample librarian that knows how to, like search your hard drive for samples, categorize them at metadata so that it's searchable. You could just type in like high hats, and it'll pull up like all your high hats that you've got. Um, that's my dream. Okay, so that's Twin Cities breaks and a sample library. Let's go back to, uh, my hand out and talk about some other example. Library business. Okay, so I made a little list here of where some some good places to find samples would be, um, these companies like gold. Maybe there's tons of these that produce samples. There's tons of companies gold, baby and pure magnetic. Both produce and sell sample libraries and packs. Um, if you get into buying sample libraries impacts, you could go broke really fast. Um, and and they're good. I mean, you can get good stuff that way. I wouldn't I don't buy them. I should say that I have. I have bought sample libraries before, but it's very rare. Um, unless there's something really wild that I like, but and like, I've bought him for, like, theater. Like when I was doing, like, sound design for some theatre shows, and I needed, like, birds chirping and stuff like that. Um, I've bought, you know, sample packs of like birds tripping things that I don't have because most of stuff I have is like drums. Or since it's, um, but you don't need to invest a ton of money and buying these things. There are other places. If you read Computer Music magazine every month, this comes with a whole bunch of free samples. Um, some of them are royalty. Frieze art. Royalty free means you can use them in your tracks without having to pay someone and they can't see you later. These air all non suitable samples that were using Speaking of let's talk about free sound dot or this is the coolest place to be If you're hunting for samples, Um, let's pop over and look at it really quick. Okay, this is pretty sound. Um, free sound dot org's is the or Else this is a community driven website of sound designers. Pretty much, um, you can download and upload as much stuff as you want. Um, it's all free, and it's all sort of public domain. It's under Creative Commons license, and I won't go into that. Google it. But Creative Commons basically means that, um, the creator of it has given you permission to use so you don't have to pay them for the rights to use it. Um, you need in order to download sample packs on this site, you need to create an account which is free. I'm already logged into me. Um, so there's losing and for here, but let's just look for something. Let's say it's a crazy sound we could look up for. I'm going to say shoes. What sounds happened. Okay, Footsteps putting on shoes squeaky shoes, pointe shoes, high heeled shoes, basketball shoes. And it came up with 396 sounds related to shoes. So there's tons of all, um, let's see high heeled shoes. Okay, cool. Whatever. Um, there's gonna be tons of these if you click on one plays. But if you click on the name of it you get, there's the sample, your comments. There's tags years. You can look for other stuff you can. Also, if this is part of a sample pack, you can download the whole sample pack, which will give you tons of them. Like someone made this sample pack of like, 100 samples of different kinds of shoes or something like that. You could download all of them at once, and it would be really efficient music. So I could just download this and there goes. And now I've got the sample of shoes, right. That's free sound. It's a really cool website. I love it a lot. Um, it works by community, so if you download a lot of stuff, you should be uploading stuff. Well, when you create sounds, which is the next thing we're gonna talk about, let's talk about making your own samples. Okay. Last thing about samples making your own, uh, get a handheld audio recorder, an m audio, micro track or similar and, uh, walk around. That's what the next page says. Walk around town and record stuff. Use audacity free to chop them up and make interesting sound out of them. Or if you have an iPhone used fire by audiophile engineering, it sounds amazing. Okay, so let me talk about that little bit. Um, the handheld micro track that I mentioned. That's like a handheld audio recorder. There's a bunch of different ones of these on the market that got good microphones in them . And they're basically ah, hard driving a microphone on their handheld so they'll record digitally. You can record with them, and then you take them back to your computer, plug him in and, uh, upload them to your desktop or your project, just like, ah, hard drive. It's a hard drive with the microphone, essentially what they are, and there's a bunch of women. They're fairly there. I wouldn't say they're too expensive between 204 100 bucks, depending on how fancy you want to get with them. you could get much more elaborate versions of them. However, I want to point you to this, um, this program fire with a capital F in our by audiophile engineering is an iPhone thing. It's awesome. It turns your iPhone into a hand held audio recorder. And it sounds Justus Good. I used to carry around an M audio micro track. I've totally ditched it on. I just use, uh, this with fire. No, and it sounds great. It sounds so good. I can It's really kind of stupid. Um, the microphones in your iPhone are surprisingly good. So, um, and it's always on you, and you can upload and download with it so you can record something and then set it up so that it goes directly to like your soundcloud page when you get home was downloaded from sound. Or you can download it right from your phone. Or you can do like a fancier Web thing so that they're just like on your desktop when you get home. Um, it's really slipped. I like it a lot. So that's a kind of protest on using that stuff Now. I mentioned audiophile engineering twice in the last few minutes. I also much in them when we were talking about sample manager. And they make that and I don't work for audio final engineering. I do like him because they're local. They're in Minneapolis. They do good stuff. They're good company. So keep your eye out for them. Making stuff? Um, yeah. So make stuff. Just walk around if you've got one of these handheld things or an iPhone. I don't know if this app exists for Android. I don't know if they have done that or they're gonna do Androids stuff, but im sure theres something similar for Android to be a handheld recorder. Um, you know, walk around with it and let's carry it on you when you hear a cool sounds stop hit record, grab it. Um, use it later. You will entirely and completely annoy your friends and your significant other. If there's one with you there. Um, but, you know, they're the ones that decided to date a musician, so it's kind of their fault. Um duh. Get over it. Uh, the other thing I mentioned here is audacity is a free program. It's not a Daw where it's designed to work with a whole bunch of, uh, audio files and let you arrange them into a song. If it works best working on individual sounds. So you open up like one audiophile in audacity, and you, you know, you can craft it really well. You chop the beginning off, chopped the tail off, add some effects. What if you want. But, um, it's really good at working with just one single audiophile, um, and building like loops out of it. Audacity is free. It's a good program. It exists for Mac and PC. You can use audacity as a dog you can like, do multi track stuff, but you will regret doing it. I've seen some of my students tried to use it as a dog because they didn't want to buy a dog, and it was painful. It's not very good at that at working at individual audiophiles, it's great. So check out audacity is free program
7. Lesson 6 : Okay, Part two. In this section, we're gonna talk about reason rewire, flattening and exporting. So what Stark was talking about reason Reason is a completely separate program. I mentioned it on and I think the first or maybe second think first lectured no second, Um, when I was talking about different daws and one of the things I said about reasons that doesn't handle audio um, it doesn't handled much audio. It works a little bit different. What reason is is it's like its own set of synthesizers. So it does synthesis really, really well, and it makes a lot of really cool sounds, but you don't really use it as a full sledge dogs. So in a program like able to, you can do synthesis, and so you can create sounds using midi, um, as the control. Remember? And you can work with audio and move everything around and build your track the way you want it to sound, but you, but in reason you have access to more synthesizer. So it's just the synthesis portion that it gives you more of so and I think this is the way it happened. But my hunch is that early in the days of reason, the company propeller heads said, This is cool, but no one can really are well. People typically don't build entire track and reason because they want to use samples and want more flexibility than reason could give them some people. A lot of people do build their entire tracts in reason, and you can. There's a lot of ways you can use it, Um, but they inventive this protocol called rewire. That's what I have here. Rewire is a protocol for different Daws to share a transport and exchange audio. What that means is that you could be working in two different Daws and kind of piped the information from one into the other. Um, this was developed first for use in reason, so reason could work as basically like a synthesis engine toe other dogs. But, um, now it's a protocol. It's built into most computer, so it'll work for if you want pro tools to talk to able to or you want digital performer to talk to pro tools, you can get those things to happen with rewire. So let's look at reason quick, and then we'll look at rewire and how it works. So this is reason. Reason has a lot of the similar things that we've looked at in a Bolton. It has a timeline. It's down here. So this is our timeline. We have different tracks here, and we have piano roll editor kind of built into the timeline, so we can kind of expand it to see inside of it more. Um, so timeline, we have transport down here. We also have some of our transport controls up here. It's kind of split, and we have our sound making stuff up here. So if you imagine a Bolton has the synthesis stuff in the bottom and the timeline of the top, this is just a plate out. Um, what reason has is it has this kind of rack looking interface. So you've got, like, real fake screws here. Some of them you can actually click in unscrew I can't remember which ones. Kind of an old Oh, here we go. This is like a joke built into the program that you can actually unscrew these. Nothing happens when you do. They just go away. Um, but anyway, amaze your friends, so in reason, all of these are synthesizers. Sound making things. With some exceptions, here's a delay that we could hook in. And if you hit the tab key and reason, you basically flip it over and you can re patch all this stuff so I could say, Okay, I want this to go here or whatever. Um, so it's really versatile. You could make a lot of different stuff happening here. Eso I've got down here. I've got a subtract er synthesizer cute up. And what I want to do is pipe this over to able to. Okay, so what I've got here is I made a little bit of MIDI information here. Now, the way I'm set up here, you're not gonna be able to hear this, but doesn't matter. You're gonna be able to see it. So if I play this, we can see a sound is happening by this little green thing. Our little audio indicator. So it's making sound. This is midi information. It's playing it into the subtract er synthesizer. And it's coming out audio here and sending it to the mixer. Now what I want to do is I want a pipe that over to able to. So rewire is the protocol we used to do that and it's already set up. The reason I know it's set up is if I go to the top of reason and look at what it's using as my hardware interface, where that's the same as the DAC or the 80 C that we looked at before the audio interface. This is what it would say it was using as the audio interface, and it's not listing anything I've got connected to the computer. It says rewire slave mode. That means there it's a slave to another piece of software. So I'm gonna go over to able to, and Hamilton is gonna work just fine and I've got some MIDI here, but that's irrelevant for right now. We'll look at that minute. Here's an audio track and I'm going Teoh getting I'm gonna play this. We've got nothing coming into this audio tracks. I'm gonna set this track up toe. Listen for a reason. All I have to do is go to my input section se reason It sees reason here because it knows reasons active because we wires active. It's a reason now I'm going to say Listen to Channel three and four because That's where my audio is coming in. And now for the input monitoring on a ship that end so I can see it. So now I see I've got a channel of audio coming in to this track. I can record boots have to enable that track I can record and get that audio in there. We should see some audio coming in like it's right there and there it is. So now I'm taking that audio in from reason as audio. Now, the way I set this up, let me walk through that one more time. There was one thing I didn't show you. I think I didn't show you because it takes too long for this video. Is that the way to set? The first thing you have to do to get rewire set up correctly is something just called the launch order, which is a fancy way to say have to launch the programs in certain, That's all. So the master program, which in this case is a Bolton, has to be launched first. So you launch whatever is going to be the master that after that's launched an up and running you launch whatever is gonna be the slaves. So not all programs will be the slate. That's the key here. Any dog that I'm aware of will be the master that will work with reason. But not all of them will be the slave. Some programs will be both, um, in different situations. Down same time. Obviously. That would be weird. Um, so when I launched reason in its launch sequence, it looked around to see if there was a master and it found one that said, Go able turns open. So I'm gonna be in rewire slave mode. That's all I had to do. You have to do anything fancy. Just found it. So this is automatically pumping all its audio and in public committee as well into ableto so then unable to all I had to do was go to my inputs and say in this import, listen for a reason. And Channel three and I knew it was channel three only because before I started recording, I set this up to send on Channel three, which was here. So that was That's how you set it up. So the launch order is really important. No. Let me go back to my hand. out really quick here. Okay, So here's the launch order. The next thing I want to talk about is freezing, freezing and flattening. So in my title up here, I called it flattening. But freeze and flatten are two sides of the same coin. So the reason you would want to do this is if you are recording. Let's say you were doing a session. You had reason open. And it was sending Midi into able to him as the master or any other dog, and you were using reason as your synthesis ends it. So you're synthesizer living living over there or another reason that you might want to do this would be that you've got some sounds on your computer that you're using. You've got some fancy synthesizer happening, Um, a soft since happening and you have a collaborator somewhere else, and you want to send this session to them. But they don't have that fancy software since, so when they play it, their computers gonna say, Where's that soft center? And it's gonna mute that track when it doesn't find it. So what you might want to do is convert that track to an audio file before you send it over . So that is called flattening is to convert it. So let's go back over to able to that I can show you how to do that. Okay, here we are, back over and able to know I have a MIDI track here. And let's say this mini track is using ah, synthesizer that my collaborator doesn't have, so I'm gonna send it over to them. Um, actually do this a lot when I teach, because I might make a track in the studio where I've got a lot more tools than I do on my laptop. So if I'm going to show that track in a class, I move it over to the session over to my laptop and then I have to see Oh, crap, What don't I have on my laptop that I do in the studio? So then I have to go back to the studio version, freeze the tracks, and then flatten the tracks. That's key, that you have to do both things and then I can send it over to my laptop and everything will play. So let's take these and I'm gonna freeze these tracks. I'm gonna control click on it and go to freeze track. Now what? This does no audio trees out. Yeah, I need to put an instrument on it. So let's just put any old instrument, Okay? No, it's got some audio that it could make now, in a safe restrict what it does when it freezes. The track is it's going to create a temporary audio track. So the this mini data, it still looks like midi. But it's playing as though it was an audio track here, but now it's playing it looking like an audio track because it's frozen. Now if I want to make that permanent selected again control click and now I have the option to flat. What this is going to do is it's gonna write it as an audio track. Now it's audio deleted my MIDI instrument. It converted this track into an audio track. It is known audio track. It's not a mini track anymore, and that is permanently in there. So that's what slackening is. It's getting rid of all the extra stuff. We could also do this if let's put some effects on this, let's say we put you know, like a whole bunch of effects here. You know, I've got all these effects on this doing this crazy thing. And now I'm saying, Okay, I want to get this down to a single audiophile. No effects on it. I want to write those audio effects, even to the file. I want to permanently be in there and not have to deal with the audio effects any more. Same deal. Let's go to freeze track. Wait for that to do its magic. Now it's in there as a temporary audio file with all these things. So these are all great out because they're not gonna do anything anymore. It's temporarily in there. I want to make it permanent, gonna flatten, and then it's gonna do eat all my audio effects because they're written into it. And you can see it put this big long tail on my audio file because that's what one of those effects was doing. So now I've rewritten this audio file and made it into one audio file that has all those effects built into it. You know, I could export it and make it a zit zone loop for its own effect, or just added to my sample library as a cool sound that I made. So let's talk about exporting next. Okay? So let's say I want to export this as its own thing. First thing I'm gonna do is set up a loop brace. Now, I don't really need to do a loop brace, but what I want to do is I want to select everything that I'm going to export. So if I set up a loop brace, I can click here and select everything in it. So it's just kind of a good habit to get into to say, Okay, this is my track. So I don't want this extra stuff. In the beginning and the end, I wanted stop right there. That's what my track is gonna be. You don't have to do that. You could just do select all at it, select all, which I just did it. It's gonna be great out. But, um, that works too. I like to just get in the habit of setting a loop race than clicking on it and say, That's what. So in this case, when I export it, there's gonna be empty space here, but I might want that if you want that. That's how you do it. Maybe I want empty space and beginning, but I could just do this now it's gonna put some dead space there. It's gonna go Add this. It's also gonna grab all these tracks. Sort of. I can specify that in a different spot in a minute. So once I have selected what I want to go, I go to file and export audio video. Different applications will call this something different. Mableton calls it export audio. Other programs call it bounce. Some programs call it, rendered it all basically does the same thing. I think like a garage band called it share same thing. Let's go to export and look at these settings so and rendered track. What do we want to export? We want to export the master most of the time. That's what you want to do. If I wanted toe Onley export this track, I would find the name of that track, which is operator because it says it here. So that's that track. Um, I'm gonna pretend I've got a full session here. I'm gonna say the master track, that's this one that everything is going through. That's what I want about normalising do I want to normalize when it bounces or not. Here's what normalizing is normalizing means that after the track is bounced, it's gonna go through, and it's going to find the loudest point in the track. And remember when we talked about clipping that there is that maximum threshold? We don't want to go over that threshold, but we do want to come as close as we can to that special. So what normalizing does is it will find the loudest point in your whole track, and it will boost the whole track appropriately so that if your whole track is like this that after it's normalized, it'll just boost the volume of all of it so that the loudest point hits the top threshold but does not go over it. But hits it actually will, usually depending on the program, come underneath that threshold with a little bit of room in between just to be safe. But most of the time, or while all the time normalizing means find the loudest point boost that loudest point so that it's right at the maximum amplitude that's allowed even boost the arrest of the track proportionately the same so it doesn't boost it all. You still keep your dynamics something quieter about it, but it boosts it as needed. That's what normalizing does, so it's good to turn on. If you want your track to be consistent all the way through. It's, uh, some people say that if you're not really confident about your mix, you should turn it on. Uh, I turned on sometimes, and sometimes I don't usually I don't. But sometimes you might want to renders loop. If this is gonna be a loop, you should turn that on. It's gonna be a finished track. Don't turn on converts. Amano don't really know why you'd want to do that, so don't do that, Okay? The output file type, We only have two offense here, a wave or a I s They're both just about as good as the other. One. Wave is kind of becoming more standard sample rate number. Their standard is 44,100 is standard seat equality to make it higher lower, but you probably don't want to do it. I would recommend leaving here, leaving it here until unless you have a really good reason to do it. Same thing with death you could make it higher. 16 is our standard, so just leave it there. Um, dinner options. Let's not get into dithering right now. We have time. We'll talk about it later. Great analysis file. That's gonna be if you're gonna re import it into able to You want that? Gonna leave that off and then video settings if you want to. If there's a video involved in this section So if it's like a film and you want to export the video also with the new audio track in it, you would do video. If you're not doing any video, this will give you no options. You can upload it straight to Soundcloud here. That's a new future. Um, yeah, that's all. Eso once all your settings were good, you hit okay. And then it's gonna think for a minute, and then it will make an audio file. Oh, it's gonna ask us where to put it. So let's call this, um, intro on class Janney. I see rendering audio disc. This won't take very long. The link how long it takes depends on how long the track is. How many tracks are stuff. It doesn't do it in real time, so it's usually faster than the actual length of the track that is done now. I could go find that file if I want to. But those of your export settings, all those settings will be different depending on where What program are you using? Um, but they all pretty much work the same. So normalize. If you want to, you can also normalize later. So if you're not sure if you want to or not, don't normalize, and then you can go through a track and normalize it later. Normalising is also something that you might want to do in mastering. So speaking of mastering, let's talk about that next. Okay, back to my hand out. I've talked about freeze, flattening, normalizing, mastering. Uh, you probably heard of mastering. Mastering is what we do. I would I write here tweaking your final mix so it sounds great and everything. The main goal of mastering is to make it so that the track you just bounced sounds good on in your home studio. Sounds good in the professional recording studio. Sounds good in your friend's car. Sounds good on your neighbors, uh, backyard crappy stereo and sounds good on your friends. Uh, so So we want to sound good in many places is possible. So when you send something to mastering, you don't send him the whole session. Come in, Miss Donor. Um, mastering is not mixing. Next thing happens in a stage That's your last stage before you bounce it usually and then you send the bounced track just a single audio file. That's what goes to mastering. So they work on a single audio file, and they do all kinds of e que tricks and panning and all kinds of stuff to make it so that it's going to sound good on as many systems as possible. Um, what actually go? I'm not a mastering engineer, so I don't really know the intricacies of going into master going into mastering a session . I've done some mastering before. It's complicated process. And, um, it's difficult. It's tricky. So these guys get paid some money toe to make it sound as good as it can. That's a measuring is Okay. I think I talked about everything in my four part section here. Exporting. Uh, test your exports when you bounce. Ah, track. You export it tested in your car, other speakers etcetera. And then it could send off to mastering. If you want to master it of a lot of people, just assume things have to go to mastering and then go. If it sounds good everywhere, don't send it to mastering. Save yourself some money, but mastering will make it sound better. Um, okay, let's stop there. And next we will jump to our introduction to synthesis. Synthesis works. So you there.
8. Lesson 7 : Okay. Welcome, Teoh. Part three of the last, uh, chunk. I guess they didn't say last day. But the last chunk of introduction to electronic music, that slime academy, this one, we're gonna be talking about synthesis. So what I mean by synthesis is creating our own sounds in a synthesizer. Basically another way to put that would be generating sound. So we're not using audio, We're using raw synthesizers. So, um, synthesizers are all different, but at the same time, all the same, they have a couple of the same things and there's a couple of core functions that make us synthesizer isn't decided. That's what we're gonna look at here. Um, like I said in the previous video, my goal is that you will be able to look at any synthesizer and makes him sound with it. There's always extra stuff. People are always adding extra knobs for this and that that do cool stuff. Um, so there's always a learning curve with any new synthesizer, but you should be able to look at one and basically understand what's going on and how to make it make some sounds. Um, OK, so I have here my vocab list um, let's come back to that in a minute. Once we've done a little bit of work, and then we'll, um, go over some of these terms. This is what I want to start with here. Four elements to a simple send decider. All synthesizers contain these four things at its core. Um, an oscillator, an envelope of filter and an amplifier. So let's go through each one of these and look at how to identify them on a synthesizer. Now, in a minute, we're gonna go over to reason, and we're going to use that same subtract er synthesizer that we used in the previous lesson to dial in a sound that we like. Um, we'll get to that in a minute. First, let's talk about these basic elements in oscillator. An oscillator is the thing. Making sound. Um, everything else. All these other things are shaping that sound. The oscillator with the only thing that makes sound now. But also later you would think about that word. And, you know, it means toe oscillate back and forth. Right? Um, that's true, because that's what waves do. They go back and forth or up and down. Um, let's look at this one right here, The bottom here. So this is a sine wave, and you can see how the word oscillator would apply. Here it's going up and down and up and down and up and down. It's not going back and forwards backwards or this way, like we think an oscillator that were normally me that's going up and down. But still it's oscillating, right? It's going up and down and up and down, up and down. So the pattern that it Ossa Leight's is what generates the different quality of the sound? Um, this gets really tricky to explain. Um, because fun fact for you, Um, the English language is really inept at talking about sound. We don't have very many good words to describe. Yeah, what sounds sound like? We tend to use words borrowed from the visual aspect of things, and sometimes the textural. Like we say, that sound is sharp or we say that sounded bright. Things like that way just don't have really good words for it in English. Some languages do. Some languages have really good words to describe the quality of the sound, but we sort of don't in fact, the word we use kind of university of universally in English to talk about the quality of the sound. Like what it sounds like. The word we use is Tambor. Whenever you see that word, Tambor means the quality of the sound. It's got a bright tambor. It's got a dark timber. It's got a sharp timber. Something like that took Tambor means what it sounds like. And Tambor literally is Italian for color, timber means color. But since we don't have a good word for in English, we use the Italian word for color. Teoh make up for our lack of a good work. Someday, maybe someone will invent some words that'll stick on. But for now, Tambor is what we got. So, um so this is a sine wave. It's nice and smooth that goes up and down. So one cycle of the sine wave is from here up, down and back to here. This is called a cycle. Now, how many of those happened per second determines the pit. So if this is oscillating, faster pitch goes up oscillating slower, which goes down. Um, you can see up here. Another word for that is hurts. How many cycles of away form happened per 2nd 1 hurts. Hurt, I should say, is equal to one cycle per second. So if it takes one whole second for this to go up and down, that is one hurt. That's a very, very low sound that's too low for humans to hear. Whales can hear it, I think, Um, but that's too low. We can hear down to about 20 hertz or less. 2022 hurts around there. Um, but eso if that was traveling at the speed of sound at one cycle per second, that's going to generate away form. That's really long. Um, I can't remember the math to figure that out, but it's it's really long. It's probably like, you know, uh ah, football field, long or so somewhere in that range, Um, and that's a very, very low. So as we speed them up, the pitch goes up. Like I said, Um, and as we change the shape of this of this art, the timber changes right. So the quality of the sound changes, so sine waves are very smooth sound, and one way this isn't a hard and fast rule, but it's a general good rule to follow. And that's that when you look at a wave form, how many straight lines it has determines how buzzy it is. So let me explain that by looking at the next one here Sawtooth Wave. See, this goes up and then a straight line down, up straight line down like a like a saw. You know, like a blade of a soft. That's what it kind of looks like. Um, this is a bit fuzzier than this, right? This is nice and smooth. No hard angle, no right angles, no straight lines. This one is gonna be buzzy. Er has got this big straight line in it, right? If you look at another common one square wave, this one's got right angles all over the place, which means it's gonna be fuzzier, even more buzz. Another common one is a triangle wave. This one's gonna be buzzy, but not it's going to closer to a sine wave because it generally resembles the shape of a sine wave. But, um, as these straight lines in it, so it's not a smooth, it'll be a little bit but here. So these are four of the basic waves that we use there are more, Um, the wave forms is what we call this are, uh, different in every synthesizer. Sometimes they'll always have these four pretty much and often 1/5 which is just noise, which is random, random way forms that makes noise. Um, and then some manufacturers will create some of their own wave forms to that are more complex way forms. Um, those make unique sounds, but these are like kind of the four basic ones that you'll find in everything. So let's have a listen to these, shall we? All the That's good. Let's go, um, over to audacity, which is the program we talked about in the previous lesson. And have a look at these wave forms in that. Okay, so here I am an audacity. Um, this is the free program I just told you about. It's good at working out individual audiophiles not so good at building whole tracks, but it's a free program. It's got some handy tools in it, and and it's it's good for explaining stuff, so I like to use it. So what we're looking at here is a bunch of sine waves played, Ah, a couple different pitches playing him. So it's gonna go from low to high and the low ones probably gonna be electric you here. But let's I'm just gonna play this first, Okay? So there was a couple different things played, uh, using just sign ways and you'll notice that it was kind of clicky over here. You could hear that that clique iness was because there was no envelope on the sine wave. So hold on to that word envelope for a minute, because we're gonna get to that next. Um, but let's have a look. So right here we just see a block of stuff, right? Um, way Don't really see the oscillating because it's going too fast for us to see, But let's zoom in. I've got a little magnifying glass here, zooming in, zooming in, zooming in, looks a little bit more familiar, swimming in a living way in. Now we see what looks more familiar to us like a sine wave, so it's going even farther. There we go. So now I'm looking at the tiniest fractions of a second because these things are going very , very fast up at this range. This is like right in the middle of our range. I don't know what pitch this was, but it was probably around 4 40 Um, that would be 440 of these per second. Um, that means they're very fast, um, on your zoom back out. So when those air played, they sound like that's not for 40. That's quite a bit lower, but, um, still, they're still going quite fast. Okay, so let's look at and that's a sine wave. It's a very pure sound. Um, if you think about, uh, naturally occurring sine waves, something like a bell is close to sine waves, sort of, but not the initial attack. Attack of the bell, not the transient. Remember, we've talked about that word, but what comes after the ringing of it's very pure sound. Um, in terms of normal instruments, a flute is close to a sine wave. It's not as pure as a sign away, but it's really close. So, um, that's the same way. Let's look at another one. Here's that sawtooth wave eso. Let's zoom all the way in so I can prove to you that it's Saudis. There it is. Zoom out. Let's hear what a Saudi sounds like. Okay, so it's a lot busier, right? Um and that has its uses, As you heard in this little synth riff that he played at the end Sawtooth waves And that bussiness can be valuable. Sometimes you want that sound? You don't want that really clean sound of a sine wave all the time. Saturday's chemical Um, when synthesis really gets interesting is when you start combining these, which is what we're gonna do in a minute. But I want us to understand the basic ones first. Okay, here's a square wave. Same kind of deal was way, way, way, way in. There's our square wave. It's not quite a perfect square way, which is interesting. I don't know how these audio samples were recorded, but it'll sound like a square waves. Let's hear a square wave. Okay, So square wave buzzer than a sine wave. Not as buzzy as the Sawtooth. Right. Um, do one more quick. What? Haven't we don't We haven't done a triangle, right? Trying a wave there. It is aptly named because it's a whole bunch triangles. And here is what the triangle way Sounds like Ah, uh, okay, go. Um, it has a little bit of Ah Melo sound like the sine waves, but it's got a little bit more grit on it. Eso Those are our main wave forms and there are a 1,000,000 more. But those are like, kind of the standard ones. In the early days of synthesis, that's all we had. And the reason we have these is because, mathematically, these were really easy to represent. I shouldn't say easy but relatively easy to represent so you could make a circuit that could do a sine wave, you know? And then you had a thing that made a sine wave all day long and slim, who all day long and then you had a dial on it to change how fast that sine wave went, which would adjust our pitch. And then he would run that sine wave into the other parts of the synthesizer that we're gonna talk about next. And that would generate your interesting sounds. So that's what when we talked about the early days of digital audio and we talked about Wendy Carlos, that's what Wendy Carlos was using. Just sign ways, square wave oscillators and then filters, which is next thing we're gonna talk about. Um to just craft all these sounds. So a very limited amount of materials to start with. But some really interesting things can come out of it once you start to combine them and do some stuff with them. Okay, so next thing on my list is an envelope. I think I just said we're gonna talk about filters, nets, but I like, uh, an envelope is a function of volume. So an envelope now, when we looked at the sine wave, I said, You know how it's all cliquey because they don't have an envelope on it. The envelope basically, um will open and close like that. Um, and we can define the speed of the envelope and that will let us define an attack. Right? So we can say I want the envelope to look some something like this. This is a very typical envelope. That's five, the most typical and below what that means is when I first press the key down on my mini keyboard to tell the synthesizer to play that note. What that key that initial pressing down says is start playing that note here very quickly . Ramped up the volume to here. That's the attack. That's the transient. We've basically made a transient by doing this so quickly, ramp up to here and then pull down to here. And then as long as my finger is held down, sustain at this volume. So this is zero down here volume to go up and back down to make a attack and then sustain here while my fingers down. And as soon as I lift my finger up, that's right here, slowly fade out that sound. Let's ignore that little bump. Slowly fade out that something. So what that means is I've got an envelope on it. It's like, uh, think about hitting a symbol, right? You hit a symbol. You have this immediate like That's this. That's what this is. It's that immediate stick hitting the symbol on a big thing. After that, the symbol rings for a while. That's what this is. This is a symbol ringing. And then I guess my analogy kind of falls here. But, um, as soon, let's say okay, let's not say it symbol. Um, well, no, we can still say simple. So, uh, at some point the sound dies away and on a symbol. This sustain is fairly quick and then it's going to start going away. Um, so that's how we draw an envelope for volume. So this will be an implicit envelope. However, the cool thing is that if once we have an envelope in the synthesizer, if we have already we can apply enveloped all over the place So you can say I want the pitch to go up and then down and sustain here and then die. Um, you could say I want ah, filter to go up and down. Um, we'll talk about filters Next. Um what if you said you wanted your amplitude envelope to go like this? If you could Dio So you wanted to go up and down and up and down and up and down and we like wherever What you would be making dub step sort of, um, because this is zero. And you could say I only wanted to go halfway down, right? That would work, too. Eso this shape this is called an a D. S are curved and in a lot of synthesizers you'll just see it label just say a DSR. And what that stands for is attack. That's this. That's our A our attack. Decay. That's our initial Decay s is sustained and are is release. So attack, decay sustained release. That's the basic function of an envelope. And in this case, and what we're gonna look at here, it's gonna be an amplitude envelope, meaning it's affecting the amplitude, the volume of the sound. Okay, so that's what envelopes do. We'll look at one in practice in a minute, and I think I think I have my vocab list right there. A DSR, our basic envelope shaped, attack decay sustaining release also have oscillator that we just talked about takes away form and repeats it at a desired speed, thereby producing a frequency. So oscillator you choose the way for him that you want for an oscillator, sine wave, square wave, whatever. And then it repeats that oscillates it at a speed that you have determined, and that is what creates the pitches how fast that goes. So when you play a note on your mini keyboard and that goes into your synthesizer, your synthesizer knows Okay, that note means play this oscillator at this heat. Eso it? No, it does that conversion of speed to pitch for you so you don't have to like do that map, but that's essentially. What it's doing is it's just saying how fast to play that wave forms we've looked at. Wait. Forms are general term for the different kinds of oscillators saw two square triangle and sign or the main wave forms below. We just did that and hurts. We talked about two. How many cycles of away form happened per second? One. Hertz is equal to one cycle per second. Um, Okay, well, we haven't talked about yet. Is this term here some proactive synthesis? But let's talk about it now because it relates to the next of our four elements of a simplistic synthesizer. A filter filter is how we shape the timber of the sound. What that means is what we're gonna do in this first overviews and desist, we're going to create a complex sound. It's going a lot, have a lot of bussiness in it, and then we're gonna use a filter toe. Take away some of those sounds. Right. Um so think of a filter just like a filter you might use in, like, photo shop or a color filter. Um, where you say, OK, I want to take all the blues out of that, um, picture right where I want to take all the read out of that picture. Or I would just want to pull the red down a little bit, so it's not as bright or something like that. Um, Holder works the same. We say I want to take, uh, these frequencies down or I want to boost these frequencies or things like that. That's what a filter does and that ultimately shapes the timber of our sound. Um, so when we do that, when we start with a complicated way for him or several wave forms, which is what we're gonna do and we start to pull out things, then with filters that is called subtracted synthesis, there's a whole bunch of different kinds of synthesis. We're gonna look at subtracted synthesis. What I have here is a Taiko synthesis, starting with a complex way form ricin overtones. That means bussiness. Ricin wave overtones is a fancy way to say it's really buzzy and pulling things away to craft your sound. So we're going to start with something with a lot of sound, and we're gonna pull out things and what's gonna be left is this sound we want. So crafting the sound is a matter of pulling things out. Actually, is a very common form of synthesis. Okay, so, filter, see a sort of talked about it. Filter. Um, we'll see one in action in just a minute. Um, well, let's do it now. Let's go over to reason. And let's look at what a filter looks like. And then we'll dial in the whole oscillator and we'll hit the amplifier at the end because that's the super easy one. Um, amplifier pretty much just means it's gotta volumes about it. Um, okay, let's go over the reason. Okay, so here I am in reason. Um and I'm looking at this. Subtract Ersin. Now, now that we've talked about, what's a proactive synthesis is the name of this sin makes a little more sense, right? It's this attractive synthesizers. It's going to generate rich overtones, and we are going to peel them away with filters. Let's start by looking at what a filter is. Okay, so here's a filter, and we've got to filters here. Filter one and filter, too. What we're gonna do here is we're gonna set this to a frequency. So this is the lowest frequency, this zero, and this is Ah, very high frequency. Um, Now, the type of filter that's happening is listed over here, and this is super tiny, and I'm sure you can't read it, but what it set to is L. P 24 So that means it's in a low pass filter. Low pass means that it's gonna let low frequencies go through and high frequencies is going to stop. So what that looks like if we were gonna draw it in a grass would be something like this where this is frequency. So this is the lowest frequencies, and this is high frequencies, right? And somewhere around here it starts to dip down. So and this is the cut off for the different frequencies. So down here, it's gonna not affect the frequencies. But right here, it's going to start to pull down the volume of those frequencies and let less unless, unless of them through. So kind of soften the sound. Now, where this is this is called are cut off point, and it's where it starts to slow down. That's what this nod here is doing that's making the frequency cut off. So if I pull this way low, that's gonna make it here, and it's gonna make it go like that, right? Without that extra thank you thing in there. Okay, so we have another thing in this filter, this thing it says R E s right there are e s and then go back to Okay, here's my filter. Rez is called residence, and what residents means is this is our cut off frequencies. So that's where this first knob is. The residents means boost the cut off frequency. So instead of going like this kind of a curve where it's going to take our high frequencies and chop them off, it's going to still do that. But it's gonna go and give us a little boost right at the residence point or right at the cut off frequency. That's what resident starts. It boosts the cut off frequency if you wanna. I know what that sounds like. Ah, fancy or not fancy. A very non fancy way to say that, um, is that it adds a bit of shimmer to your sound very non technical word, but it gets a little summary. So I have just a major scale plugged in here. It's okay, so I'm moving the filter you can hear down here. It's not as bright because I'm pulling back all those low frequencies. I opened it up more e get more low frequency. Let's put it right there. Let's boost the residents to get that Schumer s now here. It's got a little so that's a filter. Um, I have different filter types, so I have this one that we looked at, which would be a low pass. It's letting low frequencies past and cutting off the higher frequencies. I also might have a high pass, which lets high frequencies pass and cuts off low frequencies. I could also have a band pass, which lets certain bands through, uh, and cuts off lows and highs. And there are other filter types, too. But those are the main, the main three. And that's what are my options. Here are low past band passing high paths. Okay, so that's a filter. I could add another filter if I want in there as well. Okay, so let's look at dialing something in will hit amplitude on her on her way out. So first thing I'm gonna do is I'm gonna make a new synthesizer. So I'm gonna go to Initialize Patch, So kind of set everything back to zero. This is what that sounds like. Okay, so I'm sorry. This is so small. I bet you can't read this. Normally, I would like zoom in big time so you can see this, but the screen capture software doesn't let me zoom in. It's really bizarre. Um, I'm working on fixing that, but, um so here is this says osc one. So this is my first oscillator, and it's this chunk of stuff right here. So what I have here is the wave form that it's doing. And right now it's set to a saw tooth in scroll through here. So that's a square wave triangle sine wave opted. So it's like an active shift semi tone and sent. So this is a transposition. So semi tone is one step on your keyboard. So if I ah, shifted by one semi tone, then whatever note I play on my midi keyboard or midi instrument, it's gonna play one note higher. There's a good reason why you'd want to do that. And I'll show you that in a minute. sent is basically de tune. There are 100 cents for no. Um so we could just, like, crank this up and it's gonna pull it out of tune. And you might think, Why? Why do I want to go out of tune? Very good reasons and I'll show you that in just a second. So here's a pure sine wave. So we got right Really simple. Now let's make this interesting. Um, let's add a second oscillator. Here's also later to of Actually, before I do that, Let's make this a little more interesting. Let's take it, Teoh. A square wave. Okay, go now Let's add another oscillator. Let's make our second oscillator. That's it was sawtooth. I was kind of into the Sawtooth before, so here they are, both together. Okay, doesn't sound all that different, but let's do this. Let's make this second oscillator an octave lower. So this says AKA for this is occupy. Three. Let's hear that it's another separated by an octave. What if I made this 2nd 1? What if I made this second oscillator off by a couple semi tones like, let's say like, seven. Okay, that's kind of a weird sound I'm not gonna do that. But check this out. I'm gonna pull this one down and active my first oscillator and my second outsider Down and up. So now this is that three. This is at two. They're still separated by inactive, but the whole thing is lower. Okay, now this D tuning thing, I'm gonna de tune this 2nd 1 Actually, no. I'm gonna detain the 1st 1 by, I don't know. 16. Now, listen, my change just wanted triangle to. So the point of the story here is that when you d tune these oscillators from each other, you've got to oscillators you d tune one of them, typically the higher one. But, um, the sound gets really fat really fast because they're out of tune. Just a touch. And it makes this really rich sounds. That's why you would want to detain him. Okay, so from there, they're going into these filters. I'm gonna open up this filter a bit more, and I'll better get more grit out of this sound way. Residents way. So that's cool. I've got a decent sound there. I've got the filter where I like. It's dirty kind of bass sound. Now Let's shape that sound a little more with an envelope, right? Because the envelope right now we've got is that sound turns out, and it goes. It's got a little bit of a shape to it. It's got the 80 s are happening because when I defaulted it, it's still it didn't flatten this out completely. So it does have a shape, but let's crafted a little more. If I wanted this to be a bass sound, I might not want, um, it is sustained so much. So let's pull back the sustain. Do this. Well, it's playing. Okay, let's see that. So now with the amplitude, I pulled the amplitude up. So now it takes a long time for it to get from its initial sound up to it. It's not necessarily what I want here. I want a quick attack on the amplitude if this is gonna be a base, so I want to really pop right on. Okay. So, no, it's a good, punchy sound because I basically took the sustain and the release out. It's just it's really just the a sharp attack and this much of decay. Now crank this out. Okay, Well, okay, so Now I've got a short, punchy sound that is nice and thick. Next fat based sound. Um, the envelope is shaping it so it doesn't have much sustained at all. It just kind of hits, sustains a tiny bit, but really dropped right back down. And in this case, that's what I want. Just because that's what I'm feeling right now. Um, so those are the main points of are subtracted synthesizer. Here's our oscillators. We turn on my little marker here. Here's an oscillator. We actually have two of them. They go into the filter, it's here they go into and envelope amplitude envelope. And then everything goes into the amplifier, which is actually in this case right here is just our level. It's just a volume. That's why I said this one's easy so I can turn it up or I can turn it down. Right. Um, those were basic things. Now let me go back, Mice. Quigley's here. So what are all the rest of these things? These are all the bells and whistles. We've got more envelopes. So you see the way this envelope works, envelope works. That's a D s. Are is what these letters air saying underneath here. So we've got more a DSR stuff right all over the place. So these air different kinds of envelopes that we can apply to different stuff. Here's a filter and below, so we can apply an envelope to the filter, which is interesting. Got some velocity stuff lfo stuff. Um, he's get a little deeper than I that I want to get in this initial class. Um, but if you want to get deeper into this, we've got some really cool synthesis classes coming up at slam Academy that get really deep into, like, really crafting the sounds that you want. So check those out. Um, but I think it's about it for synthesis. Okay, that's it. You finished the introduction to electronic music class from Slam Academy. The online version. I hope you enjoyed it. Um, if he did, and you want to take more classes with us strongly recommended, um, other classes that now that you've you've taken this class, um, jumping into are able to in one class. That's how to use able to for production and D J techniques. That would be a good place to start. That's our most common place where people jump in other than this class, um, also, we have a new newer class called D J and performance with able to mind that really focuses not so much on production, but just focuses on being a deejay plan parties. Um, that's really good class to, um any other class would be a good place to start. Um, And if you're not local, are other online classes right now are always good. We're always building up the repertoire of what we have in the online classes. So, um, check those out. Go back to the website. If you have any questions about anything email info at slam academy dot com and some of someone will answer your question very quickly. Hope you enjoyed it by
9. SkillshareFinalLectureV2 (2): Hey, everyone want to learn more about what I'm up to? You can sign up for my email list here, and if you do that, I'll let you know about when new courses are released and when I make additions or changes to courses you're already enrolled in. Also check out on this site. I post a lot of stuff there and I check into it every day. So please come hang out with me and one of those two places or both, and we'll see you there.
Jason Allen, PhD, Ableton Certified Trainer
