Ultimate Ableton Live 9: Part 4 - Synths & Samplers

1. Intro: Hey, everyone, welcome to a Bilton live part for This is the fourth class in my six heart mega class that I'm calling ultimate able to live where we're going to be covering able to live in excruciating detail, giving you every tool that you need to be a master of able to live. If you've gone through the 1st 3 classes, you are awesome. If you haven't, it's not too late to be awesome. But you can start right here if you want. It's totally okay. Um, you'll pick up a lot just from this class, and if you want to later go back, that's fine, too. So if you just want to jump right in on this class, you're totally welcome to do that. And you'll be just fine. And this class, we're gonna focus on the since and samplers in able to live. That is to say, all of the instruments in able to live. We look up here, that's all of these things were gonna go through Ah, bunch of detail for every single one of these. I'm gonna walk you through how to program these different scents were gonna separate samplers out. We're gonna look at those separately and how we use samplers. We're gonna walk through some of the pre built patches that you already have. Menelik. It's of small ones, some big ones. We're going to design some of our own, and we're gonna make a ton of cool sounds. Now, in addition to that, like always, I'm gonna be talking a lot about the workflow of able to live some tips for working with able to live in terms of key command. How I make tracks organizing your clips on. Also, we're going to spend a good amount of time on the basics of synthesis here so that you really understand not only how to use these instruments that are in able to lie about how to use any synthesizer you come across. I love teaching synthesis and I do it almost every day. Uh, in my i r l classes. I don't know if that was a super dated term or not, but in my real world classes, I teach synthesis all the time. So I'm really excited. Teoh talk about synthesis in this class with the able to live instruments. So we're gonna jump in with some workflow tips that we're gonna talk about how synthesizers work, Then we're gonna focus on able to analog synths. That's this one up here and we're gonna focus on that one first and use it is kind of the model for learning synthesis. And then from there, we're gonna go down the whole list and do all of them. So I hope you choose to join us. It's going to be a great class. Um, to be honest, I know it's a great class because I just finished filming it. I always film these first ones after I filmed the whole class, so I just finished making the whole class taking me about a month. It's a long one. So there's a ton of content in here. Um, more so. I think that any of my other classes I think this is the longest class I've ever done. But I stand by all the content. I'm really proud of it. I think that you're going to really get a lot out of it. So if you've ever wanted to know how these instruments works, this is the class for you. If you want to know how to make sounds, using all of the fantastic. Able to live instruments. Jump in, start this class right now and you're gonna have a great time. So with that, let's dive in. And let's start talking about, uh, lives, instruments, how they work and how to make some awesome music with them. 2. Lives Instruments: All right, let's get started. Right on finding our instruments. Now, I know we've We've maybe looked at this before, but I want to point out three different areas in the browser for you before we get down deep into, um, all the different instruments that we're gonna be talking about. So let me rewind just a second here. So in this chunk, we're gonna be talking about, um, kind of the overview of working with instruments. After that, we're going to start going through ah, bunch of different instruments in able to life. So this first part, just a getting us up to speed on working with instruments and basic stuff we need to know that will apply to all instruments in able to live. So, um, first thing right off the gate, I want to show you three areas in your browser appear so we're gonna be in the browser a lot in this class because that's where we find our instruments. So let's look at instruments, plug ins and packs three different areas. Right? We're gonna be here in instruments now. I want to tell you with the difference between these three areas, because it can be a little confusing, especially between instruments and plug ins. So the way I think about this is instruments are things that you can get enable to live on . Lee. They're the things that a Bolton has made, and they include with live there, basically separate programs that run within live in a way that's not exactly true. But that's kind of true. Um, and that's an okay way to think about it. So analog is an instrument. It's a MIDI instrument that plays Midi. Um, it is its own thing. If you had logic installed on your computer or pro tools installed on your computer in addition to live, um, which you can dio, you wouldn't be able to load up analog in pro tools or, in logic, these this list of stuff. These instruments exist Onley in able to life. You cannot get them in other programs. They're made by a bilton for able to period. Right contrast to that plug ins are separate. Plug ins are not made by a bilton, Um, while the plug ins in this list, um, things that show up here are going to be things that can be made by anyone any third party person can make plug ins, and when you install a plug in on your computer, it can be accessed by any Daw that knows how to handle that plug in. For example, I could install a plug in that is an instrument plug ins can be instruments. They can be other stuff, too. But one of the things that plug ins can be is an instrument. So let's take a popular one like, um, Omni Sphere on the sphere is a big plug in, Um, it's a synthesizer. It's a sampler. It's a lot of different things. Um, there's some really great sounds, an ominous fear, and you can go on the website and not able to the Web site. But if you Google on the sphere, you can find it. You can buy it. I will give you a whole bunch of files and you'll install it and it will show up here in one of these lists, or both, depending on the format of the plug in. So these are plug ins that I've installed, and whether I'm in a Bolton or pro tools or logic, I'm going to be able to access these things. I can load up one of these. So here's a D clicker plug in and I get this window right. If I was in pro tools, I could load up this, this plug in and I would get this exact window. It's a separate program that runs within a doc, so that's what plug ins are. So we're not going to spend time looking at plug ins in this class. We're gonna focus on instruments. The able 10 made stuff, the stuff you can Onley do in live now. 1/3 area is packs, and a way to think about Pax is that packs are essentially content. Not necessarily those separate programs that run right, So packs is kind of a unique to able to live term. I don't think any of the other dogs used this term. I'm pretty sure they don't. So I have here, for example, orchestra strings. If I load orchestra strings, let's load a string ensemble. There's a Lo Gatto string ensemble that says llegado there llegado. So if I load this, this is a midi instrument, sort of. I'm gonna qualify that in just a second, but I can load this on. Let's load this onto this muddy track. I could just drag it there or I could double click on it. Now I've loaded it, but we look down here and what did I actually load? Is I loaded a sampler or a simpler and into an instrument rack? So I've loaded able to instruments. So that's one of these. And one of these is what I loaded when I did that. So this packs area is just really giving me content for the instruments that already have another way You could think of it sort of as presets. But it's more than just a preset, Um, so you can go unable to his website and get tons and tons and tons and tons and tons of packs. You confined them around online, people make packs to give away for free. Um, it's a good way to think about packs, I think. Is that its content Organized, organized content. It's put together in these things called packs, which can be instrument settings. It can be samples. It can be ah, whole live sets, actually, So, um, we're not gonna spend a lot of time on packs. Ah, in this class, we're really gonna be focusing on instruments, but I wanted you didn't know the difference between packs, plug ins and instruments before we get started. Um, so that you don't go looking. If I say load me up a collision, you know, collision is unable to an instrument, so it's gonna be here and here. It's not gonna be in plug ins, because this is not able to stuff. This is everything else, right? So instruments ables and stuff. So these are the instruments that we're gonna look at in this class. So with that, um, let's jump into a quick little midi refresher eso that we're all in same page on how we're gonna be working with MIDI in this class. 3. Quick MIDI Refresher: Okay, Quick refresher on MIDI. So, um, remember that in order to make a midi clip, I can do ah few different things. But the quickest way is if I'm in session view here is I can just double click on a clip slot and I get the piano roll Editor could make a little bigger if I want. And I could just double click on notes to start making notes. So let's move some stuff around. Let's just make four notes here. Make sure that they're gonna sound reasonably good together. So I congrats on the edge on the right and stretch it out. Let's go there and let's go there. Stretch it out. Now I can also move notes up and down by clicking and dragging left and right by clicking and dragging, Or I can click on it, wants to highlight it, and then I can use arrow keys to go up and down. Um, and left and right. I can use Shift writer left to make the note longer or shorter. Um, and I can shift up and down to jump up or down by an active right. So those are some quick key commands. We'll talk more about key commands in a few minutes. Um, okay, if I didn't want to do that, I could also go to create insert midi clip here. Or if I was working an arrangement view, I could highlight a chunk and then do you create Midi clip? Right? And that would create me an empty midi clip if I wanted to do it that way. So now remember, we've got many notes. And when I hit play on this clip, we're going to hear Say it to yourself. I hope you said nothing. Um because ah, why do we hear nothing? We hear nothing because we don't have an instrument on this thing. Ah, we're just playing raw midi data, which Ah, I'm sure sounds wonderful to our computer. But to us, as humans, we can't hear data. We hear audio. So here we see that data coming. There's those notes. Ah, it looks great. But that's data and we dont hear data. We need an instrument to hear it. So here are my instruments. So in order to hear this, I got a slapping instrument on it. So let's grab an analog. I can click on the triangle here and open up a bunch presets. Or I can just put the empty one on there if I want actually, really kind of like the sound lately of the out of the box analog without any presets. But let's throw a preset on their say, piano and keys. Accordion. Who doesn't like a good accordion sound? Um, or cli p. Even better note that once when you're in the browser here, I can actually scroll up and down with the arrow keys on audition. These really fast on If you if you're clicking on these and you can't hear them and you're scrolling through here and you don't hear anything Ah, when you're auditioning these, be sure this little headphone guys on here that's our law edition light. So turn that on so that we can hear that sound. Okay, so I have one I liked. I can either just drag it over onto here to load it, or if I'm using the arrow keys. I'm trying to be fast and quick. I could just hit return and load that right onto my mini track. Now here's my notes, and it's played through my instrument. I remember thes two tabs down here in the bottom, right. This one is showing my midi notes when I'm looking at a midi track, I was looking at an audio track Would be showing my way for him if I go to the other tab. I see my instrument and any audio effects that I have on the instrument. I want to get between those two. Really quick shift tab, Right shift tab goes between these two tabs. Regular tab goes between session viewing arranged with shift tab between instruments and audio effects and midi data. Or are the piano roll editor or the audio waveform? Now, here I have all my settings for my, um, instrument. So theme. Next thing to do is start tweaking those settings, which is what we're gonna look at shortly. Okay, let's move on through our quick media refresher and talk a little bit about, um, mid eclipse and how many clips operate so that we can get all of speed 4. MIDI Clips: Okay, A couple more things about mid eclipse that I just want to point out. Remember that we can option click and drag to duplicate if we like. Ah, we can click and hit the delete key to get rid of them. And this is all the same as audio clips. There's nothing special about mid eclipse here. If I double click on the clip, I jumped to the piano roll editor. Now, I just walked you through some of the key commands and the moving around of notes here. Um, one important little thing to do is this. Ah, little audition light up here. It's the same one that we just saw over here. Make sure this is on if you want to be able to hear notes as you're moving them around. Meaning, if I move this note here, if I, like, move it up right, I wouldn't hear that if this was off. So now if I move notes around, I can't hear it. So let's, um, be sure that's on because it's handy. It's handy to be able to hear things when you're moving, however, it can sometimes be kind of annoying. So if you don't want to hear him. You want to turn the audition light off up here. This fold lighter, not light. But this fold button Ah, what this does is it hides all notes that you're not using eso It kind of minimizes our piano roll editor. So I'm using four different notes here. So it's good if I hit fold were only going to see those four keys. Now, this is not terribly useful. If you're trying to make chords or harmonies or anything like that because we only see the four notes that were using We don't see the whole ah, piano, but where it But it can be useful sometimes for doing that, depending on how you like to work. I suppose there's no harm in doing it, but where it's really useful is when we're programming drums like, let's say this is our kick. This is our snares are high hat, and this is, ah, crash symbol or something. Um, we might not want to see all possible notes because most of them are gonna be empty, right? Ah, they're not gonna have a sample on them. So we hit this fold button, and then we just cr four main drum hits or more. You know, we might have 10 or 20 drum sounds, but hitting that fold still is better than dealing with the whole piano roll. So that's where that fold comes in handy. Um, okay. Remember, Ah, that when you're working with many, you can do multiple notes at a time, so we want to make harmony weaken stack notes. Right. So, um, don't forget about that. Ah, I talked about moving around. Also. One last thing I want to point out here is that Ah, I think we looked at this in a previous class When, um, I did this halftime double time thing when we were talking about warping. Yeah, we definitely did this when we're talking about warping. So what I did was we warped something, and then we we could double the speed or have the speed of an audio file. By using these two buttons down here, we can actually use those in MIDI files as well. So check it out. So let's halftime. You have time again, right? Like super slow. Or we can go double time, double time, double time, even faster. Cool. So you get the point we could have time. Double time now. One interesting thing, and I'll use this as a um Oh, it's that word. Foreshadowing into programming sense is how come the faster I made that clip, the quieter it got. Right now we're going really fast, and it's really, really quiet, right? If I double it gets a little louder, double it again. It gets a little water. Why is that? The reason is I'm gonna tell you now what? I'm gonna explain it later. The reason is because of the amplitude envelope in the instrument. Um, when we go faster, we have a slow amplitude envelope in this particular instrument. And so it doesn't have time to open up now that, um, I'm gonna kind of leave that dangling for now, and we'll talk more about that when we start talking about instruments. That concept of amplitude envelope applies to all instruments. Um, that we have, I think, Yeah, I don't know why it wouldn't, um, so keep that in mind as we move on to talking about more of the instruments. Okay? In the next ah segment of the of the class, what I'm going to do here is I'm just going to spit out, um, in text, a bunch of key commands related to what we're gonna cover here. So, um, write things down, keep these handy. Um, there'll be some good key commands to know, and then we'll be onto talking about synthesis basics. So enjoy some key commands in the next little chunk, and then I'll see you in sentences Basics. 5. Synth Basics Overview: okay. In this next chunk, I'm gonna give you kind of an overview of how I like to teach synthesis. Now, if you, um, watched any of my synthesis classes, I have two classes. One of them is on Ah, synthesis. And one of them is on sampling. Um, I'm gonna cover ah, lot of that same stuff here in a much more abbreviated way. Um, so just remember that this is a big topic. And, um, I have a whole other class devoted to this. Two of them, actually. So what we're gonna be talking about is two things in these next two videos. One is the different types of synthesis. So remember, synthesis is basically math. Um, it's it's ah algorithms designed to produce sound. So algorithms applied to sound. Let's put it that way. So there's a number of different ways we can do that, and the results are slightly different. You know, they're different kinds of sounds. Um, so don't get that confused with sampling. Sampling is when we import ah, sound already made and do some stuff to it to use for, um, making music. So we manipulate it. In some ways, synthesis means we're not starting with any audio. We're starting with basically just math. And we don't have to worry about math like we're not gonna go into the math in this class. Don't worry. Um but I'm gonna tell you how it works and what's happening so that we know how to produce the kinds of sounds we want to produce and what kind of synthesis we want to use. So part one of the next chunk is, ah, the different kinds of synthesis. Uh, part two is my goofy little method of teaching synthesis. Kind of in a nutshell. What that means is, Well, it's not in a nutshell, because I'm gonna introduce this style of teaching synthesis or this method, I should say, And then we'll be using it for the entire rest of the class. And what it is is basically, um ah, trick for looking at any synthesizer, whether it's in able to live another dog or even an analog synthesizer. You know, a keyboard, anything, any kind of synthesizer. What you do is you look for these four key elements. Once you find those four key elements, you know how to make sound with that synthesizer. So you've got to learn these four key elements. They look different on all synthesizers. They're gonna look different. They're gonna act slightly different, but more or less will be the same. So once we find those things, we can plug him in. Ah, dial up some sounds and we'll know exactly what we're doing. Um, different synthesizers have more than just these four things. These air just kind of the basics to get you making sound with any synthesizer quickly. So, um, with that ah, let's dive in and first talk about the different kinds of synthesis. 6. Synthesis Types: Okay, so let's talk about some of the different kinds of synthesis. So and in able to live, it's not as simple as saying this synthesizer does. This kind of sense is, er this instrument does this kind of synthesis. This instrument does that kind of synthesis, etcetera. They're not so clearly defined as they kind of maybe used to be in the old days. Um, because a lot of the different synthesizers or the different instruments in a Bolton serve multiple purposes and handle multiple kinds of synthesis. So, um, one of the kinds of Cindy says that's one of the most popular kinds, and one of most well known kinds is called FM synthesis. Um, FM synthesis is a way of essentially multiplying sounds to generate. Ah, unique kinds of Tambor. Tambor is a word that we used to talk about the quality of a sound. Um, it means like, what does it sound like? You know, Does it sound? Buzzy does it? Let's let's do an example here. Okay. So what does that sound like? Does it sound buzzy? Does it sound smooth, right? Like this sound, it's pretty smooth. Pretty clean sound. Right. So, um, what Let's let's make it buzzy, a little buzzy and to make it even more buzzy Theo. Different quality of sound. We're not talking about the pitch when we talk about this word. Tambor. We're talking about the, um, different characteristics of the sound. It's one of those things that's just really hard to describe. Um, we don't have really great words for it. So we use this word Tambor Tambor actually means literally. It means color. So we're talking about the color of the sound, you know, and we use words like bright, buzzy, soft and things like that. So, um, we have FM synthesis. Ah, we re essentially multiply different tones together to make different kinds of sounds a different Tambor's of sounds. We have additive synthesis where we layer different kinds of sounds and then add them together, not multiplying them. And that generates certain kinds of sounds we have sampling, which we could say is a kind of synthesis because a sampler is not. Let's look at a sample really quick. A sampler is not so simple as just dragging a sample in, and then that's the end of it, right? We have ah lot of controls down here and there are things we can change. We have oscillators. We have, ah, filters. We have modulations and we have these crazy things called zones, which we'll talk about Ah, shortly. And then there's a lot of other kinds of synthesis. So I'm just kind of doing a quick overview of the main kinds we're gonna be working with. Um, but one of the kinds it's really popular and that able to in live has a lot of is this physical modelling synthesis. Physical modelling is like, um, when you take, it's basically replicating the physical world in math and then making a sound for that. So when a good example of physical modeling would be, um like, ah, I want to do a physical model of a violin. So I've got some parameter for like, the stiffness of the bow the ah, tension on the string like just basically like everything you can think about the humidity in the air. All kinds of stuff is factored into this algorithm, and that generates the sound. So here we have essentially that here's the tension instrument. So we look at, um, the exciter. What are we hitting the string with. Is it a bow? Is that a hammer? Is it a bouncing hammers at a Plec trim or a pick? Right. So let's say we're gonna hit it with a pick. Well, let's say we're gonna have the boat. That's actually kind of more fun. So we're gonna blow this thing. How hard? What is the friction? What is the velocity? Was the position of the bow? Is there any dampening down? Let's turn on the damper. The mass stiffness velocity. Position off the damper. What's our vibrato amount? How does it end? Ah, fling. Ah, fret stiffness. Is there a pick up? Where is the pick up? What is the body of it? Is the body a the size of a piano, guitar or violin? Or just a generic one? And even at that we can say, Let's say, a guitar. But let's say, and extra large guitar, right. We just have tons of parameters for the different kinds of, um, the different factors that can go into a physical instrument, right? Like the position basically all the physics of making sound. So we've got a extra large guitar body bowed with a pick up on Let's hear what that sounds like. Theo, that's pretty weird. Let's turn the Stamper off. Oh, alright. It's still pretty gnarly. So there's a lot of different things we could do with this physical modelling said. This is something we see in a lot of, um, the able 10 synthesizer. So when you see things like force friction ah, position dampening, ah, body size, things like that. Those are, ah, physical modelling characteristics. In addition to that, we can put a filter on it and still do some more things with it, but lots and lots of options. So those are the main kinds of things we're gonna be working with, um, kinds of synthesis, more on the different kinds later, Um, as we approach them in the different instruments. Okay, So with that, let's talk about them key elements that where we find in all synthesizers 7. 4 Key Elements To Synthesis: Okay, So here's the secret toe. All synthesis. Um, you walk up to any synthesizer brand new, whether it's a big analog synthesizer that you see at your local music store or a new piece of software, whether it's able to live pro tools, anything. And you already know how to work that thing because you know how to find the four key elements that are in that synthesizer. Um, and you can dial them in and you could make sound right away. Now, after you do that, there will be more things that make that synthesizer unique. Um, and that's what you want to spend your time experimenting around with when you're exploring a new synthesizer. But once you find these four key elements on that new synthesizer, you know how to get some sound out of it and get your basically. You're kind of baseline set. So let's look at what those are saying. The load in here and analog analog is a good one to look at. So what we've got here in analog is essentially to, ah, instances of the same thing. So let's focus on the top, right, cause a lot of this stuff is duplicated was the oscillator one oscillator to filter one filter to AMP. One amp to write LFO one, lfo two. So let's find our four basic things first basic thing that we always need to find. First thing you I should go to when you're looking at a new synthesizer is find something called the oscillator. You got to find the oscillator section, right? So here it is for us oscillator. One case, we've got an oscillator inside that oscillator section. You're always gonna have ah, shape of some kind. It might be listed as text and it might say sine wave sawtooth wave square wave or noise or random or something like that, Um, or it might show you these pictures which correlate to what I just said. This is a sine wave sawtooth wave square wave, and this is, ah, noise or random. So we're gonna have a wave type of our oscillator, and then we're gonna have some tuning parameters. Usually these three, sometimes they might be a little bit different. So what octave is it in what semi tone and ah, fine tuning knob. So in this case, I'm gonna turn off everything else. I've gotta have amplifier around or else it's not gonna work. We'll get to that guy in a minute. Um, OK, so let's load up a sine wave sine wave is very pure, clean sound. They will hire one. Okay. Nice, clean sound. Um, I can switch it's octaves so I could go up by an active. So I'm playing the same key now, right? So I'm always playing the same key when I did that. So my tone is gonna just it by basically each semi tone is one step on a keyboard. So let's look at a clip. So if I put in this note, but adjusted by, I tell the ah synthesizer to play it one semi tone higher, it's gonna play this note vital to play two semi tones higher. It's gonna play that note, right? Let me just actually put in some notes here for us. Let's do this. This I'm just gonna make us a little G major scale. Oops. There we go. Nice and pretty right thing and hit shift tab. Let's go back and look. Let's just keep that going when we walk through here so we can change our the shape of our oscillator, right? This is also sometimes called our wave form. So let's change it to a saw tooth waveform, which looks like this right? Different Tambor. Different sounds for different Tambor. It's slightly different. It's not as dramatically different as a sine wave. Whoa, but it's different. Let's try that right? It's noise. Talk more about noise later. Okay, so let's leave that sawtooth wave on Can change the tuning. Fine tuning. Fine tuning is, uh there's eyes basically pulling its very slightly out of tune and go up and down. One thing always remember when you're adjusting these settings is that if you're clicking on a setting and adjusting it and you want to go back to the default, which for he's tuning parameters zero discipline really good. Just hit the delete key while you've got it selected on you go back to zero. So our first thing is oscillators. We always gotta find that oscillator section Lodin away form. Set your tuning if you want. Um, and you're often running. Second thing we can always find is our filter section. Now I've got it turned off here, so let's turn on our filter. So filters have a couple different settings. But our main to to look for is frequency. Um, and resonance. You might not find a residence knob and all filters, but most of them, you will. Frequency is gonna be the cut off frequency. It might also be called cut off frequency. It's where we're going to start pulling out frequencies. This is how we start to shape. Sounds really well, I'm going back to a, um, saw tooth waveform here so that we can hear a little. We need a little bit more bussiness in order to really hear the filter working Well, so here I have the filter set at 4.4 K Remember, that's the cut off frequency. So what a filter is going to do is it's gonna pull out frequencies. So if I pull this down, it's going to start pulling out the higher frequencies. Which is that bussiness, right? Put down a little bit more less unless bussiness because those higher frequencies air going away. Now residence is going to boost the signal. It's gonna boost the frequency right at the point where we're cutting it off. What that's going to do is give it kind of one last push before we pull it out. Which another way to say that will, would be that it's going to emphasize the highest frequencies that we're letting through because it's gonna push up right there and boost that frequency. And then everything above it gets cut out. And what that does is actually generates a sound. That's kind of like a little like a laser gun. Theorize. Call it the laser guns found. So now when we move our frequency, that's kind of frequency sweep sound that we all know and love Theo Frequency and residents cut off frequency residents. Third thing you need to find is an amplifier. An amplifier is always there. Sometimes the amplifiers just the volume knob, that's all. But you're not going to get very far without it. So, uh, let me pull this filter closed with a little bit so I can keep you going here. So in our amplifier here we have a volume, crank it up and get really Cliffy where I confront it down. I also have panning in my amplifier section here so I can pay and left and right. It's cool. Now let's move on to the fourth thing because We've already been looking at the fourth thing because the fourth thing is not its own. Well, sometimes it's its own section. Sometimes it's built into the other sections, particularly the am flick fire and the filter, but sometimes even the oscillator. So this four thing is called the envelope section. No envelopes in this particular synthesizer. The envelopes are built into both the filter and the amplifier. So let's look at the amplifier envelope. Sometimes it would call the amplitude envelope, Um, because it's easiest to explain. So when I click on this area in this particular synthesizer, the analog, this is my amplitude envelope comes up here. When I click on the filter, I get an amplitude envelope here. They're separate. So let me adjust it this second. See? So now that's my amplitude envelope. My filter envelope still looks like that right there. Separate. And all of this stuff in this dark area depends on what you've last clicked on. So it changes depending on what I've cooked. Right? So that's ah, changeable area. A contextual area depends on the context is what we're showing there. We call that a contextual area fancy. So what? These envelopes do is they change the sound over time, right? So what I'm doing here is I'm saying, make that sound, have a quick attack and then pull it down very quietly. So this is the amplitude you can imagine. This shape is now driving this the volume of the sound. So it's hitting very suddenly and instantly right here and then pulling it down very quickly. I can make it very long, right? Let's slow this down. So now we can hear it a little more clearly. So now that sound is on for a long time, and then it goes down, right? Let's actually let's simplify this a little bit. Oh, let's do this. Oh, I want to make some nice long notes so we can really hear what this is doing. Okay, so now we hear that sound turns on, stays on for a long time and then pulls out. If I do this, that the sound comes out quicker, right? Make that really short. Right now the sound is hits and it's instantly gone. Give it a little bit more. A little bit more. Right now, we get a little bit more sound on it. What if we did this, that now it's fading in, right. The sound is fading in. We're telling the amplifier. Slowly open that envelope so we don't get his heart of an attack right now. Remember what I said in one of the earlier, um, videos in this class? Just a couple videos ago. I said when we sped up Ah, sound. We were getting less and less volume, right? Because the amplitude envelope was not getting a chance to open. We were switching to another sound when it was still on its way up. Right. So, um, that's gonna make it sound like it's quieter. So the envelopes play a big role. And so imagine that what the envelope is doing its slowly opening and then closing, depending on the parameters that we set. And in this case, we apply that envelope to the volume. We can also apply an envelope to a filter if we want. We comply envelopes to a lot of different stuff, actually, but that's how we're going to shape our sound. So those four key elements again are the oscillators. First thing we're gonna do is find the oscillators. Next thing we're gonna do is find a filter. Um, tune that to where we want it. Third thing we're gonna do is find an amplifier. Might just be a volume knob. It might be more complicated before thing we're gonna do, it's find some envelopes. Those four things are going to be in pretty much any synthesizer you come across. Even a lot of most samplers actually are gonna have those same things in it. Look for those things and you'll be often running. Now when I explain how to use three different able to instruments thistles where I'm going to start on every single one I'm gonna be, I'm going to say, OK, where's our oscillator section? Where's our filter section? Where's our amplifier section? Where? Envelopes. After that, then I say, OK, now that I've got those four things figured out, Um, let's look at some of the extra stuff that's in here. Let's look at our LF owes right. Let's look at how our second oscillator is interacting with our first to generate sound. Let's look at anything extra that might be here that's unique to this synthesizer, right? But I basically knocked out this whole row of stuff, and this whole row of stuff because this is a duplicate. This is another oscillator. This is another filter. This is another amplifier. So that's essentially half of the synthesizer I've knocked out on by knocked out. I mean, we understand how to use it now, right? What we need still need to look at with this synthesizer is how does this noise filter in our factory? And I should say, just by turning it on, we can hear quite a bit of change there. How do the oscillators interact with each other? How do the filters interact with each other and the amplifier interact with each other? That's something that we want to look at. How do we tune in the LFL? And then what are these things over here? So that's basically just a couple extra things that we have to look at, and we understand the basics of the synthesizer, for those are my four key elements. That's how I like to teach synthesis. That's how I teach synthesis every day. When I teach it, it's never proved me wrong. Okay, let's turn off this crazy little siren happening. So with that, let's dive in and start working our way through the different able to instruments. Now, we're gonna start with analog here, which we've already understood the basics of, But let's start from scratch and really understand it. So I'm gonna give you another pass it at locating the oscillators, filters, amplifiers and envelopes of that synthesizer as we work our way through it. So we will see you in the next chunk. 8. Analog Intro: So we're gonna dive into analog first. Um, is there going to be the 1st 1 of all the instruments? We're gonna go through everything in this list in this class, you know, tons of different instruments, everything that comes with a built in sweet. Um, I'm gonna try to do him mostly in order. Um, but I have to kick a few things out of order, particularly drum rack. We're gonna wait on external instrument I'm going to tell you about We're gonna work with a little bit, but I want to say that till the end. Ah, instrument racks will come near the end and then both simpler and sampler because those are sampling devices. I want to say it till the end. So we'll go through all the other instruments one by one. At first, I'm gonna try to keep this relatively uniform so that we find our four things. We find the things that are not the four things. And then we play around and make some sounds with it may be dissected sound, um, in the preset and see if we can figure out how it works. So with that, let's dive into analog and start with finding are four things which we've already done and the previous one. But let me just walk through it one more time. Ah, in a slightly different way just so that we're really sure that we really understand that we really understand this concept. 9. Analog Basic Outline: Okay, So first thing I'm going to do with Analog isn't gonna load up an analog, and I gotta put it on a midi track so I could just double click here to load up on analog. Or I could open up this triangle and get some presets. And if I want to do a preset like, um, let's say a bass sound I can open that up here. All these based sounds, you know, I can scrub through find when I like. I can either click on it or hit return. And that replaces what I just had on the selected track with that sound. So now that's, um um, So let's leave that sound open. That's that Sounds like a nice sound. So now on my track one, I've got this sound. So this is the name of the preset. I can change that by just doing the command are. And let's call it base since go. Uh, OK, Now let's look through our synthesizer. So this is the analog synthesizer, because all these presets are filed under analog, so that means that's what we're going to get. So this is called analog. Um, Now, as we saw before. We basically have two banks of stuff, right? We have oscillators, filters, amplifier up there, and we have another one. Oscillator filter an amplifier down there and in the center here we have this contextual menu. Now, contextual menu just means that, um, everything in this darker box here changes depending on which area I've last clicked. So if I click on this amplifier one, we see a whole bunch of different settings here, filter one different settings filter to different settings. So even LFO out here, we have different settings. So, um, those menus change and that happens on almost all live instruments or live devices. Well, live instruments devices are a little bit different, but because devices is a general term, that could include effects. And I don't see this all the time on effects, but in the instruments you're going to see these kind of contextual menus happen all over the place where they keep changing. It's a fancy way to, you know, put a ton of settings into a relatively small space, right, because that area just keeps changing, depending on what we clicked on. So ah, just a quick overview. So we have our two main roads of stuff. Up and below are oscillators, filters and amplifiers. We have two of them. That's great. Now, over here, we have a noise. Generator Noise is a very common thing. To have in a synthesizer can add a little bit of grit and it can also have some synthesis Um, uses, um, beyond just going making noise. Eso We'll look at that more shortly. And then if we zip all the way over here, we have our LFO and some settings for our LFO. Now we're gonna talk about an l A full later, So just file that away if you don't know what an LFO is. What we're going to do here is in this video, we're looking at the basic outline of the synthesizer and the next one, we're gonna dial it in. Ah, using are oscillators, filters and amplifiers. And then in the one after that, we're gonna look at the extra stuff and in that we'll start talking about LFO so l a foe's air really handy. Really important. Almost every synthesizer you'll come across is gonna have an LFO. Um so file that away for a minute. We'll come back to its very important thing. Over here we have our volume. We can add some vibrato Could do little d tuning Ah, at a little glide in between notes Ah, and llegado mode which will talk about shortly also. So our general overview We have oscillators filters and amplifiers on the top and bottom noise on the left, LFO on the right and our volume on the right as well. So with that, let's jump into programming a sound from scratch with this. 10. Programming Analog: So let's make a sound here. So, um, I have my key board, huh? So I can play something. This is that pure bass sound I loaded in a second ago. I'm gonna get rid of that. I'm just gonna load the default setting. That's what it sounds like. Now, One cool thing to keep in mind with all of these instruments is that if you get to a sound that you really like and you you can change the default. Actually, if you just control click Ah, on the instrument and get this menu. You could go down here and say, save as default preset, So you can kind of create that if you want to. You. Um so this is the default. So let's hear what the default has. Right now. Let's just walk through this. We've got in oscillator. Ah, filter is on and turned up pretty high. Um, which will walk through what that means Just second and amplifiers on and our oscillator to is on. So let's scale this back. Let's turn off everything except our first oscillator and our amplifier. Okay, that's what it sounds like. So I'm just gonna play a single note Okay, so we have a volume for our oscillator, and then we have filter one filter to down here, so we're sending to filter one, so we're sending a percentage to filter one or two filter to so all the way down this is going all the to filter to and this is going all to filter one or weaken do like a 50 50 split. So that's sending it to hear filter one or filter, too. So for me right now, I'm gonna send this all to filter one, which is going to send it over here. Um, we're bypassing that right now because it's turned off and we're going straight to the amplifier. If I sent it to Filter, too, we're not gonna hear anything. Let's do that. So I pull it all the way down to send it all to filter to. And if I play a sound, we don't hear anything, right? The reason is it's getting all the signals getting sent to filter to, which is then getting passed to the amplifier, which is off. If I turn that on, we hear it again. Right? So the signal flow kind of goes left to right here. So I'm gonna turn this off and go back to filter one. So we're sending that signal here to the filter, but it's getting because that's off. In this case, it's getting passed to the amplifier in this case, down here, too. It's getting passed to the amplifier, but the amplifiers off and without an amplifier, we don't have any sound. Right, So we're going to filter one. We've got some volume we've got. Our oscillator is on. If I turn oscillator one off an oscillator to off. What are we gonna here? Nothing, Right? There's no oscillator. We need an oscillator to make sound. The oscillator is the thing that makes the sound. Everything else in this synthesizer is shaping that sound. So here is the way, form, shape. So this is our first place where we're going to start to craft our sound so we could do a sine wave that's going to be a really pure sound. Do a higher note, right? Very pure, very clean. It's like a flute. Then we can do a sawtooth wave. It is gonna be pretty buzzy into a square wave. That's what this one is called. It's a little bit brighter and then we could do noise. Now it's No, it's important to note that noise is all frequencies all the time. It's kind of the definition of noise. So no matter what key I play here like I'm playing really low notes, really high notes, it all sounds the same. And that can be useful. Um, that has a lot of good uses, but I'm gonna not do that right now. I'm gonna stick to a sawtooth wave because I'm just in that kind of mood. So now I could do a little tuning here, So let's say I can go up an octave the same notes I'm playing here. I can do semi tones and Aiken de tune it a little bit will come back to D tuning in a second. I'm gonna go back to my original active by just clicking on Octave, impressing the delete key. It takes me back and I'm gonna leave this not be tune. I'll show you why we would want to do that in just a second. Okay, let's start on a filter. Now, remember that the frequency of the filter here this is our cut off frequency. So if we have it all the way up hoops. If we turn it all the way up, it should sound about same, right? Because that filters all the way open When the filters all the way open, it's not doing anything. It's not filtering anything out, right? That's what filters do. They filter things out, they throw things away. So when it's all the way open, it's not filtering anything. What we need to do is pull the cut off frequency down in order to start to hear it. So I'm actually gonna play a note. Okay, Now, I'm gonna pull this frequents this filter down. Right? So now you can hear it pulling out the higher frequencies. That's what the cut off frequency does. It sets a point. Ah, frequency. Where it says, Okay, everything above this frequency, we're gonna start Throw out everything below that frequency we're gonna let through. That's what are cut off frequency does here. Now it works that way when you have this set to a low pass setting, right, we also have high pass, which is the opposite where the cut off frequency is gonna be the low point. Everything below that frequency is going to get thrown out and everything above is going to get sent through. Um, the way you can remember these differences between low pass and high pass and even Band Pass is use the word let like L E t. So let low pass like let low frequencies passed through. In other words, throw out high frequencies and high passes, let high frequencies through, throw out low frequencies and band passes. Let certain bands through, um, and throw out other certain bands. So this is kind of used as like a mid range filter. But that's but doesn't have to be that, um, I don't want to spend a ton of time on the different filter types here, Um, so you can look these up. Maybe I'll try to throw in a good resource to go through these different filter types. But, um, let's stick to low pass filters for now because they're the most common in this kind of synthesis on. Let's just set it right there. Remember that residence is, ah, boost of that cut off frequency, so it's giving it a boost right where, right at the top of what we're letting through, right? That makes that little laser gun effects, right? That's pretty cool. Okay, let's go in. There are amplifier. So with our amplifier, we consent are panning. That's how much left and right it is. If we just go there, it's at center that c stands for and level. We could make it louder required, Right? So now one of the key things with the amplifier is the envelope, right? As a super important on the amplifier, it could be really important on some of the other elements to, But when the amplifier we really start Teoh use the envelope in the really obvious way. So here's how the envelope works. Um, we have four points on the envelope. We only really see three here, and I'm gonna tell you why. Um are four points are attack, decay, sustain and release. Who sort of have this sustained time? One in here also, um, which we're not using right now. Because the sustained time, how long it sustains is dependent on how long I hold my finger down on the key. You know, as soon as I let go, is when the release is triggered. So the attack is this first point here? How long does it take for it to get to its full volume, which is this right? So right here, it's straight up. That means it instantly goes there. It instantly goes to its full value. Right? If I do this, it's gonna take some time to get to its full volume, right? It's going to ramp up to its full volume now, right? So it fades in this, make even slower, right? So that's a slow attack on the amplitude. Envelopes were on an amplifier envelope. Amplitude envelope. The second thing is decay. That's the this for point here. How long does it take to get down to It's kind of arresting position. So imagine, like a Cymbal crash. There's the initial crash, and then there's the ringing of the symbol. So what we're talking about is, how long does it take to go down to this ringing of the symbol? If we wanted just to stay at its full volume, we can just do that right now. It goes up to that full volume. It just stays there, but more musically we'd have it come down a little bit. Let's do it really kind of extreme here, so it's gonna go to its full volume, and then it's gonna come down toe arresting position going down. And now we're there, Right? Let's make it faster right now. You hear it? Go look like really harsh right away and then come back down. Let's do somewhere in between. Right, So now we hear kind of percussive hit, and then it comes down. So that's the decay. So attack, decay sustain Is this part here? And this graphic is just what we used to kind of represent these four things all the time. Sustain is just where it's gonna sit all the time. So in actuality, this decay point is how long it takes to get from the attack to the sustained right. So when I go left and right with this point, I'm affecting the decay. When I go up and down, I'm affecting this sustain. Right, because of decay is how long it takes to get to that sustain. All right, so here's the sustain at zero right, we get a sharp attack, but then immediately goes down to zero. So now we said this sustain about half it very quickly, goes down to it and then sits at this halfway point. The last thing is release release is what happens when I lift my finger off the key. When I stopped playing the note does it immediately go down to zero? Or does it take some time to get down to zero? So let's say it takes some time to get down to zero. Okay, so I'm still holding my finger down. This is the sustained. Now I'm gonna let go. Laughing is not on the key. And this is the release. Very slow release. Let's make it slightly faster. Okay, Now I'm playing the note, and I'm letting go right now. Right? So it was a quick fade out to somewhere between letting go right now, right? So nice slow, fade out. So if I wanted to do a really soft like pad kind of sound, I would make a slow attack and a slow release, right? So that everything just kind of keeps ringing. Slow attack, slow release. That's kind of how you get that pad sound. Okay, so now that we've got are three things in appear, let's look at them down here. So let's add a second oscillator. So we can do is different way form or the same one. Let's do a square wave. Now let's actually let's do a sawtooth wave, and then I'm gonna de tune it just slightly. So this is where this D tuning comes in handy. Let me turn off this filter and turn on this amplifier. So now we can just hear these two oscillators, right? I'm gonna pull him back in tune. So here they are in tune right now. If I de tuned the 2nd 1 a little bit, you hear how that just fattened up sound? Ah, especially to low sound, Right? Right. It makes its really gritty sound. That's that out of tune stuff that's really helping. Okay, let's put our filter back on. Let's put a second filter on to pull that down a little bit. It's gonna eyeball. It may be a little bit of residence amplifier. Look at my amplitude envelope here as compared to the other one. The other one is nice and slow. That's match it. We don't have to, but let's do it. Okay, so now I've got a similar amplitude envelope on both of them. We've got okay. Pretty interesting, but those are our main elements of the synthesizer. Now in the next chunk, let's look at some of the extra stuff that analog has that we haven't seen yet. 11. Noise And LFO in Analog: Okay, So here's where we left off with our sins. So just for the sake of because we don't have all day, I'm gonna, um, pull in the end of our amplitude envelope a little bit. Shorten that release. Okay, that's a little bit better. Um, that was just said Toby really long. Um, okay, so now in this video, what we're gonna do is we're gonna look at two extra elements that are in here. Ah, that we can play with. They're not part of the main oscillator filter amplifier, envelope system. Um, but they are fairly common. I wouldn't say these air like mind blowingly unique to analog. There's more. Let me clarify something here. There's more to the synthesizer, then. Just the knobs that we have in front of us. So the analog synthesizer has all of these parameters. You know, the typical ones that we've talked about and it has a noise, oscillator and LFO and some a couple other things. Your vibrato, Glisan, does things like that? There's more to the to the synthesizer than that. If you had another piece of software or hardware that had all those exact same parameters, it might result in a different sound. Um, there's some laugh. There's some stuff under the hood that makes it unique. Ah, to its different thing. And there's a lot more parameters in here that we haven't looked at in a great amount of detail yet. So some of these things down here, So, um, there's more to it, but I want to point out and go through the main elements that we have access to, um, for programming. So ah, let's turn on this noise filter here so you'll notice that the noise filter does not have a contextual menu. If I click here, here's my filter. Here's my other filter. I click on noise. I don't get anything extra here. There's not a lot to noise. Um, we have noise. We have volume of the noise and we have what filter we're sending it to or what percentage of what filter all the way to filter one all the way to filter to or a percentage of each do like a 50 50 thing on Senate to both filters and then the color so we could talk about white noise, pink noise, these different kinds of noises so they have a different tone to them I don't want to go into. I'll tell you what. Google White noise and pink noise and different colors of noise. The color is just a word we used to associate with it, but they have their slightly different in the way that they're constructed in noise. So here it is, with a whole bunch of noise in it. So let's see if we can make that kind of useful here. Turned it down a bit way here, all that noise. We're sending it to both filters now. Let's actually just send it to the top filter. No, I take that back. Let's actually descended to the bottom filter filter, too. And then let's see if we can pull it down. We've got that kind of its noise, but it's more of a rumble in there now that it's getting actually kind of useful to us. Good. Open it. Open a little bit more. Now it's adding a certain layer to that sound that I kind of like right, So it's getting us. Ah, it's changing the tambor of that sound slightly and it's kind of cool. So noise is technically noises. An oscillator, just like how these are oscillators. This is announced later that plays either a sine wave a triangle wave or sorry, a sine wave, a sawtooth wave, a square wave or noise. This is an oscillator that just plays noise. So technically, in this analog synthesizer we have three oscillators capable of making sound and two more oscillators that we're gonna talk about right now. Those other two oscillators are over here The two LF owes now when an LFO is LFO stands for low frequency oscillator. What this does is it's another oscillator but it goes really slow really slow too slow for us to hear usually. Um So first thing we need to dio is set it to be at a certain speed. Now we care about speed with LFO is more than we care about pitch because we're not gonna use these to make pitches were going to use them to control something else, right? So I consent my speed as hurts or as divisions of the beat. I like divisions of the beat. So when I select divisions of the beat here with a little 16th note icon, I get down here 1/4 note or oops. Eighth note. Half note. You know, I want things to be reasonably slow, so I'm gonna go with 1/2 note. Okay, so now I've got this LFO going at, ah, half note. So that means for every two beats, if you were gonna hear one cycle of this, I can change the shape of it in the contextual menu sine wave triangle wave rectangle wave are other words square wave or noise, which is kind of random. A different kind of noise. Let's do a sine wave so that this oscillator always going smoothly up and down and up and down. Okay, Let's see what I just did. We're not gonna hear much weight. We don't really hear anything yet because we need to apply at somewhere. We're gonna put this We're gonna have this al fo control something. Let's go to our amplifier. So we go to our amplifier and we looked through our settings on here Looking for is lfo one and I see it here and I also see it here. So those are things that l f 01 can control the panning and the level. So let's pull this up. Let's pull it all the way up. So one is the max, so that means this LFO is going to control the volume. And so, at that duration of ah, half note, which is 21 cycle for every two beats, um, we're gonna hear the volume come up and down. It's so this oscillator is now controlling our volume. So it's here theory that that's the If I speed that up, here's 1/4 note. I could also change this wave form two triangle. So now it's either on or off. The way this is going to be applied when we do it as an LFO is to the volume is that the volume is gonna be all the way up to wherever it set or completely off. That's how this one works. It's just gonna be on off on off, right? So interesting to note there. When it was off, we didn't hear silence, right, because were only applying this LFO two the first bank of oscillator filter amplifier not do the noise or two the second oscillator. If we wanted to apply it to the second oscillator, we could I'm gonna click the amplifier down here and oh, I need to use LFO two so I could turn on LFO two set it to the same settings. I'm gonna set the note value here. Set it to 1/4 note, set it to rectangle. Now I'm gonna go to the amplifier and say LFO two modulation of level Turn that all the way up. Now we should have just hear the noise in between. Actually, we don't even hear the noise because the noises being all sent to filter to which is being sent to amplify or two. So the noise is getting killed out there also by the l foe. Cool. So that's what an LFO does Weaken Set our l a photo control, whole bunch of stuff. Let's go back to a sine wave. It's to a sine wave on both of these. Um, let's send it to a different duration. Let's make one of them half now, and one of them 1/4 or even weirder, go to odd numbers. You start to generate different kinds of rhythms in there. By doing that, I'm gonna go back to just lfo one for a minute and look at our filter. So there's a couple places we can use this in the filter Ah, frequency modulator or residents modulator. So let's set our frequency to be controlled by Al Fo one also. Okay, so let's let's crank it all the way up. In this case, we could go all the way up to four and let's just see what happens. Let's slow that down, and let's also make it a little less extreme. You hear that filter opening and closing way can also have a control. Our residence, Theo, actually tones down the residents quite a bit from where it waas. So that's what the LFO does. If we said it toe hurts here, it's just on hurts. And it's more difficult to use in the hurts setting. If you're doing like music with a beat and with a pulse, because you have to basically find the beat. Or you could just do a really quick type thing, right? That's just I'm just have it randomly cranked up pretty high. But if I wanted that pulse to be in sync, I'm gonna click on the beat, look at a division of the bead and then set it to where I want. So that is noise and the LFO of the analog synthesizer. So great. So that's pretty much everything you need to know in order to use the analog synthesizer. Okay, Last thing I want to show you here is, um, saving presets. I'm going to save this preset for us. Ah, and then I'll throw it up so you can download it. So easiest way to do this is I'm just gonna hit this little save icon over here. And now it comes up here in a folder under my presets, and I got to give it a name, so I'm gonna call this. Oops. Lesson 12. Analog. Okay, Now, I can actually find this if I go show and Finder. Here's that setting. And you can import this into your session and use it. So I'm gonna put that in this class and, ah, so you can download it 12. Collission Intro: Okay, The next thing we're gonna look at is the collision. So this is the second sent in the list under instruments. Something load one up. Slow default. Let's hear it. OK, so a couple notes about collision before we dive into it. Collision is more of a physical modeling synthesizer, so our oscillator filter and amplifier an envelope are all gonna be a little obscure here. Um, they're not gonna be labeled exactly that way. Um, because this is a sense that is trying to model the physical world. And in this case, um, as percussion instruments, eso drums, bells, um, mallet, percussion, things like that. Basically things you can hit. Um, that's what this is designed to be an emulator of. So, um, instead of something like the oscillator section, we're gonna have this mallet section and this noise section, you know, and, ah, instead of filters, we're gonna have resonator sections, right? And they work a little different. But if we apply that same concept of oscillators and filters and envelopes Ah, amplifiers to this synth will end up in pretty much the same place. We just have to look a little harder to find those things some other stuff will be really familiar, right? Like we know what volume is color we've seen before. Noise we've seen before. Ah, LF owes we've seen before. Ah, tuning. Ah, here's pitch envelope. So we know what that is. Um, we also have more volume panning and things like that. So there are some familiar ah, controls here, but we'll look at making some some cool percussive instruments with this, um, with collision. 13. Programming Collission: So let's first look at this mallet and noise section. So look at the three tabs appear the tab wearing here is called the Exciter. Right. So this is the thing that if you imagine, it's it's a physical modeling synthesizer, So ah, designed for percussion. So this is what we're gonna This is This is what we're going to hit something with and also how we're going to hit it. Eso we have parameters like stiffness, right? Ah, you might think of that. As are we going to hit it with a ball of yarn or we gonna hit it with a metal rod? You know, that's gonna change the sound rather drastically. Right? So we have volume, some noise elements, color that will affect, um again that the what we're hitting it with then we also have noise here, so Ah, we can apply a filter to the noise and we comply an envelope to the noise. They have all of these K's and V's all over the place. Those air worse looking at Let's jump over to the resonator and look at that K and V. What? Those stand for our key as we see here and velocity. So that which is to say what percentage of the key is going to change that parameter. Right? So, um, let's say tuning right. So let's let's make a clip. So I'm gonna make a little clip and I'm gonna go. Um, I was gonna make a bunch of 16th notes. Uh uh uh. Pretty, Um, okay, let's hear that on our collision shift tab. So that's affecting the tuning of it, right? Because the key is in control 100% of the tuning of it. If I turn this all the way down, let's turn it to zero. Now, the key is not affecting the doing of it, right? It's always playing the same note. We're still playing the same clip, right? But now the key is not affecting the what? What pitch comes out? This, you might think. Why would you want to do that? This actually has some really cool implications because now I can use the key for something else. What if I used the key for the volume of the mallet? So how hard we hit it right now? The higher pitch that we're telling it to play is interpreted as higher volume right. Let's set that back down to zero. What if we did the volume of the noise? So I'm gonna turn the volume of the noise way up, right? That gets it a little. You know, that's not strict noise because it's been filtered and Scott an envelope on it. So it doesn't sound like, you know, big gush of noise like we're used to, but I'm gonna ply the key, setting all the way to it. Now listen. Right. So now the different pitch is controlling the different key. Let's try to do some other stuff here. Let's just keep it going. Let's look at our resonator on what happens in the resonator here. Actually, I take that back to stop it because it's time having a hard time talking over it cause it's actually gonna vocal group. Um, so inside our resonator, there's a couple. There's a whole bunch of stuff here, and I want to look at a couple different things. Um, one is this setting here? This is kind of our big setting. This is like think about this being What are we hitting? Are we hitting? Ah, Bheema marimba string A membrane memory in would be like a head like a drumhead. Ah, plate a pipe or a tube. So let's say, um, let's say a plate. Let's see what we get, right? That's a little ringing. Try to. Okay, that's kind of fun. Okay, let's adjust. Now, we have this parameter here for decay and radius, right? And these parameters are really hard to like. Say exactly what they're there, uh, doing in, like, a very clean analogy, but you can imagine we're hitting a two radius. Could be like, Where are we hitting it on the tube on decay is like, How long is it going to take a right and all of these things? We can apply our key to it as well or the velocity. We haven't done anything with velocity, but let's apply the key to the radius, right? That's kind of cool. Let's tune this down a little bit. So now I'm just manually controlling the pitch. Let's turn that noise down a little bit. I'm actually on a pretty cool, um, kind of a subtle kick sound now, right? With some accents in it from the ah, um, pitch. So let's try changing this to be let's actually turn it into a kick. Let's maybe just go on the eighth knows Oops. That the So I'm just gonna make it. Give it. Ah, straight eighth note. Feel by getting rid of the extra 16th notes. Oops. Okay, so now I've created this cool percussion sound right. And now I've basically got a nice kick out of this by going to the tube, setting my resonator, tuning it down all the way almost all the way, using the key to do some random elements. Um, I could even do more with random elements like, Let's do, let's just get weird with it. Let's go to, um, are many effects and go to velocity and throw velocity on there. And then let's turn random all the way up. So now all the velocities coming in are gonna be randomized. Push it a little harder. And now let's use velocity for no some subtle effects like this Stiffness. Maybe not so much volume. Right. So now we're getting some nice velocity parameters. Pitch envelope, right. That's kind of cool. What if we treated this not so much as a kick butt as a, uh, drum sound? Tune it back up a little bit. Okay, so we're getting a pretty cool sound here. Let's see if we could make it even a little hipper. Let's go with, um let's double this up again. So I'm just gonna select almost everything here right now. I've got a pretty cool groove going, and all I'm really doing is, like, slight adjusting of these tabs and setting this key and velocity to control a lot of different stuff. Got random velocity. Um, the key is essentially random at this point, and all I've really adjusted here is the tuning of it. The key of it, the velocities and the keys on a very on several places down here, And this tube setting can change it to its unit to string. Right? You hear all that subtle variation remembering plates? I like that. So that's our basic overview of, uh, collision. Remember, we have the mallet section, which is like our oscillator section, and it's got to sound making things in it a mallet and a noise generator. So those were kind of like our oscillators, the resonator, which is the thing that we're hitting, which is, in this case of functioning, both, like a filter and like an amplifier. Um, we've got a second resonator that we're not using here, but we can add to resonate er's if we wanted. And we also have our LFO is that we could use we could apply an LFO so if I turn it on and then we set the destination of what we wanted to control in here. There's a lot of stuff in collision toe work with the best way to really learn collision because, uh, it's weirder. It uses the physical modeling parameters. The best way to really get your head around collision is Teoh. Dive in and just start making some noise and experimenting with the different settings. E think you'll find a lot easier by just turning stuff. Then what? I can just kind of explain over this, but things like stiffness is if it is a very kind of abstract concept here. But if I turn it, I can hear what it's doing right, and it's a bit more clear, so check that out. Um, I can upload and save this patch for you so you can screw around with this one that I made as a starting point and then go from there 14. Electric Intro: okay in the next chunk here, we're gonna look at the electric instrument like collision Electric is another physical modelling, um, instrument. This one is designed to be a physical model of an electric keyboard. So, like a Rhodes organ or something like that. So that means that it's got parameters for the let the strings because electric keyboards will really have strings. They have these things called Tynes, which I'll talk about in a minute. But it does have a hammer or a mallet that hits that the tien or the fork, and then it's got a damper, and it's gotta pick up. So there are a lot of parameters for these things in here, so you can do a lot with these sounds. Um, now, applying our oscillator filter envelope amplifier system to these physical models gets a little tricky. Um, most of the time, most of the synthesizers you look at that are not physical models. It works Great Physical modelling is where that system kind of starts to fall apart a little bit. Well, it doesn't fall apart. It just gets more abstract. Let's put it that way so we have to kind of pick through here and find out what and what is our oscillator and what is our filter. And in some of these physical models, that can be elusive because something that is acting like a filter could also be acting like an oscillator. So different parameters could have multiple rules. You know what I'm saying? It's very actually metaphysical sounding the way I just said it. So let's dive into electric and look at a few patches. 15. Electric Basic Outline: Okay, let's go over the basic outline of electric, and then we'll, um, look at some of the presets that are built in and see if we kind of dissect them, which I think will be a good way to get us into understanding electrical deeper. So we have these five sections here. Mallet, Fork, damper, pick up and global. So just kind of think that everything moves from left to right here, which it sort of does. But that's a handy way to think about designing your sound. Right? So the mallet section, remember, this is a physical model, so kind of like collision. We kind of have two parts to this. We have this part over here, and then we have the noise part, so we could think of this as the mallet part in the noise. But, um, it's not quite like that. So why do we have noise in a mallet? Imagine you're bowing something. There's quite a bit of noise involved in Boeing. Um, something like if you were to bow a string, You here, you hear a lot of that. So it could be representing that, Um, that's not in the mallet. So when we just think about a mallet. We just we think about, like, basically a hammer, and we're gonna hit something. But we could add some noise in there to change the sound of it a little bit. Remember, one of the best things about physical models is that you can break them. You can make them do things that the physical world can't do. Um, like adding Bowe hair to a mallet. You know, that doesn't make any sense when you're thinking about the physical world. But if you're working with physical model, you could do whatever you want. I knew a guy who will Actually, I did a project once where I built a physical model of one of the big bridges here in Minneapolis. And I made a physical model of one of the cables of this giant bridge. Um, and then I boat it using, um, a similar process to this and I was beautiful. Sound was like Boeing this giant, you know, like foot in diameter cable eso. Obviously I couldn't do that in real life, but I can in a physical model. So, um Okay, so let's look at some parameters here, Uh, can turn the volume up a little bit so I can hear a little bit better through this is a C. I'm always gonna play the same note here just so that we're clear. Just gonna play that one note. So let's listen to our stiffness in turn all the way down. Nothing. It's like we're hitting it with a feather turn all the way up. Now we're hitting it with a brass ball. Right? So somewhere between that's really changing the tone quite a bit. And the volume, right? So the stiffness is acting as kind of an amplifier and and also later, in a way, because it's affecting the tone in the volume and quite radical ways force. Uh, so obviously, if I go all the way down, I'm not even hitting it. So this is how hard I'm hitting it. And obviously, this would be a really good one to make velocity dependent, right? So if I crank all of that up on the velocity, uh, now, if I play really quiet on my keyboard, that force is gonna be really low. If I played really hard, that force is gonna be through the roof. I started around their Ah, give me a little more control over E s. So I can really clip it pretty fast, mostly because I have this volume cranked up, but that's got all right, We can add some noise in. Let's turn up this levels. We can hear this. Mm. Oh, I'm gonna turn this off so I don't clip this too much, right? So we're adding kind of a beater in here, we call it. Sometimes it's like the sound of, like, hitting the head, so it's not really a bow hair noise. Although if we adjusted this decay, we could turn it into that. Um, it's more of ah, impact noise. So then the fork section, Um, so in these electric keyboards, like a Rhodes organ, which is one of my favorite instruments of all time, Um, what we have on the inside of it, it's not strings like a piano. These things called time, which are basically tuning forks. You can think of them very similar to, um, they're usually made of metal. Um, and they're actually very similar to a tuning fork. So it's a I think a time is like a as a piece of metal. I think actually, um, but there's a lot of different variations that could happen with that way can change essentially the size of it. So this tone section is really out acting as the filter. Whenever you see tone on something, um, the odds are that it's it's, um, doing some kind of filtering process. So the damper is, um, just like on a piano, the damper. Like, what is stopping the sound? You could think of this as acting a lot like our envelope, right? Because it's going to be affecting how long the sound sustains. So it affects how I let how I release the known and pretty interesting ways on the pick up . Um, basically, ah, microphone. So this could be part amplifier and part filter. It could also be a part also later, actually, because where the you put the pick up where you Mike, the time is going. Teoh have a lot of influence over the sound of it, actually, So that's who some interesting stuff in the pick up, and then over here we have volume. And don't forget that we also have a couple of these settings where, like we looked at the one for um, force here and mapping forced to velocity. But also, we could map the key to a lot of different parameters to, um, all of these ones that have this down here. Um, and we don't have as many as we had in collision. You in collision. There were tons of these. But remember, you can always do this. So if we wanted, for instance, um, the distance of the pickup to be mapped to the key, we could crank that up. Now, the higher pitch I play, the higher the, um, pick up is going to be, you know? So it's gonna be moving based on what pitch I I'm playing. So you create some interesting sounds that way. Okay, so that's a basic overview. Very basic will review of the electric instrument. Now, let's look at some preset patch. Is that we've got 16. Electric Preset Study: I'm gonna open up some of the presets here that come with a built in sweet or live sweet and to see what's in here, Maybe load something up. So I have two different categories here. I have base in piano and keys. Let's look at piano and keys. It's open this a little bit more so we can see what's fully here. And let's audition some of these despite scrolling through the ah, uh uh uh uh uh, Screaming. That's pretty interesting and very different. So let's check that out. Um, let's see what they did to get this right. That's pretty well, okay, so we have stiffness about halfway up, forced quite low. However, velocity is controlling force a little bit. The key is controlling force by quite a bit. And our velocity is also controlling stiffness. So I'm gonna hit it really quiet. Uh, not really loud. What kind of ramps up, you know? So, um, let's see what else? The key is controlling. The key is controlling the level of the noise inversely a little bit, and I say inversely because its a negative number. So it's instead of turning it up as I play. Ah, higher pitch. It's turning it down as I play a higher pitch. Same thing over here. Negative. Almost all of it, right? Negative. 92% on my the volume of my, ah time. So that could be causing that ramp up that we're hearing that I kind of like he is also controlling the output distance. So both the distance and the output, um, volume of the pickup tone is really low. Ah, levels lows. We're not doing very much with the damper here. Our volume is set to pretty low, so it's really interesting. Um, okay, so where is that distortion coming from? All right, it's probably coming from our noise setting right here. Right. So let's turn that down all the way. Right now, we're just back to a somewhat normal, um, if not thin sounding, Ah, electric piano sound. But I turned that level up of that noise. I've got this, like, kind of really dry v pushed sound. I'm kind of into it. It's like another one. Let's look at one of these bell presets. Let's just see what they did here. Okay, So a lot of velocity control, a little bit of pitch control but not much. Here are a key control, I should say so. We're going up here and down here. A lot of volume in the noise, but not a lot of distortion. Right? Interesting. The color of our time is about halfway. The level is all the way up. If I turn that down, we get a more mellow sound. Putting the damper at 100% here is giving us a lot of that ring. All right, if I pulled out all the way out, All right, we don't get that that bright sound. So this damper is ringing a little bit, but also letting us pick up some of the upper overtones from it as well. Cool. Let's do one more. Let's do, um It's to a world, sir. Uh, one of those. Really Nothing wild here. Velocity control, key control, some inverted key control down here. Stiffness, force noises all the way gone, right. No noise there. Let's turn up to see what happens. Well, it's really pushing that attack really hard. I believe that down I would put volumes all the way up on the pick up. I was pretty high. We only have three voices hear voices air. Basically, how many notes you can play at a time. So relatively simple one. Um but I like it. So just remember that with the electric instrument, you know, it's really designed for these electric keyboard sounds, But you could do some other cool stuff, too. I mean, here's Ah, uh, here's ah kind of what base and this is put into an instrument rack to help us get that. What would feel the pulse from the LFO? Because we don't really have an LFO in the electric instrument, right? So this example that we're looking at here, this is our instrument and this is an instrument rack, and it's basically like a rapper for our instrument. Gives us some extra controls, and we've got some more stuff in it over here as well. So we're going to talk more about instrument racks shortly. So hang on to that. Um, and I will show you you'll you will be blown away by what you could do with instrument racks. I think I've already made clear how huge of a fan I am of instrument racks, so hang on to that will come back. We'll talk about these examples when we get to instrument racks, it's gonna blow your mind 17. Impulse Interface: Okay, Next, we're gonna look at impulse. So impulse is, you know, it kind of looks like drum rack. And I think we've seen a little bit of drum rack already. Um, so let's not get this confused with drum rack. The main difference right off the bat is that with drum rack, which will look at more. Ah, shortly. Ah, with drum rank. You can put anything on these pads, right? So I could take an operator and put that on one of the pads. I can't do that. Nothing happened there. Um, I can't do that with with impulse what I can do with impulse to put a bunch sound files on it. So, in a way, it's a very simple sampler where I can trigger different stuff. So let's throw some samples on there. Let's do Here's a conga slap. So I'm just gonna drag that from the browser right on there, and I can hit play right. And with that sample, I can mute, or I can solo it with these little dashes to the right and left. And if I hit mute here, you see down here, that sample is muted and over here so load, right? So they show up down there with the orange and the blue pill. Let's add a couple more things. Here's a high hat. It's dragged that under that pad. Here's a snare kind of a teeny snare on. That's a cool little shaker. Let me get a kick in here. Is gonna use my browser and go kick. That's a cool kick. And you know, this is interesting. Ah, this will be good for us. So this is a kick. But look at this sample, right? There's a whole bunch of kicks. That's okay, Let's throw that on there. So when I trigger this sample, it's got it Looks like it's got a delay on it. Almost right. And that is because of the envelope on this sample, which we'll talk about in a minute. Um, okay, let's just stick with that. So we've got ah, Conga. Ah, hi. Hat a sneer, a shaker and a kick. Let's do another kick. This I I just want a little bit punchier kick there, so let's put through that on there. So now I've got two kicks so I can rename these just like anything, so I'm gonna click on it command are Let's call this conga as this open or closed. Closed. Let's call this. Let's just call it hat. Let's just call this sneer shaker and let's call this kick. Let's call that one kick and let's call this one Ah, kick, too. We don't have a lot of space here, so I want to be efficient with that. Okay, so now I've got that cleaned up a little bit and my different stuff now. Ah, here's what's cool in, um, impulse. So what we're going to be able to do here in impulse, is for each of our samples, we've got a whole bunch of settings. Now let's jump back in our brains to our basic rules of synthesis. Right? We have oscillators, filters, envelopes in an amplifier. So in this case, are oscillators which are the main sound generating thing. Are oscillators are thes the samples, right? What we need next, we need a filter. So we have filters here. There's a filter right here. We see frequency and residents. We know what those are. Gotta turn it on. So let's let's look at our snare. Let's turn on the filter. Let's hear it. Okay, let's close that filter out a little bit, right? We hear that working. So we're chopping off some of those high frequencies and we can set that filter to be controlled by the velocity. Um, and we can set some random ization on it. Let's open it up about halfway. And I'm just gonna crank up the random ization all the way, right? So now if I just keep clicking it, we get some accented notes we get. That's actually kind of nice. Maybe a little extreme. It's pull it down a little bit. I can change the filter mode, low pass, band, pass, high pass and notch. And I could boost the residents if I want it Pretty cool. Now, another thing to keep in mind with impulses that when I click away when I click over to the high hat keep your eye on the filter and I'm gonna click high hat. And now my filter settings are different. Why is that? Remember? Ah, that magic word of contextual all of these settings air contextual everything below the boxes here. So when I go over to the snare, we see it left where I said it. If I go over to the conga. My felt there isn't even on. Right. So all of these settings depend on what we've clicked on, so don't forget about that. Okay? So we've got a filter. Um, let's look at our kick to here. Okay, Um, let's add a little bit of this drive to it, right? Little saturate, er, little drive. Right. And I got a super punchy kick. Let's crank that up right now. I'm no, I don't know what that's for. That's a little intense. So we've got this saturate er on. You're basically a distortion that we can add to that kick if we want to. I could also adjust the volume of this sample over here. So let's look at our envelopes now. So our envelope works a little bit different here. We don't have a ton of settings. Four are envelope. Um, the main things we have our this decay setting here, sort of this time setting. We could file that under envelope if we wanted Teoh and this Ah, start setting. So let's go through those three in that order. The case setting? No, If we remember our envelopes, um, 80 s are the decay is gonna be kind of like the release, but it's gonna be a released time. So it's look at that kick. Remember, that kick was a whole bunch of kicks, right? But I really only want the 1st 1 So when I click on it right now, we only hear the one right, because there's this decay setting on it that's basically fading it out, fading out the sample. So because this impulse is really only designed to create short percussive sounds, if I crank this decay up right now, we're hearing it more. We're hearing more of those other kicks and they're fading away, right? So now they're they're slowly fading away. So for this kick, since I only want to hear that 1st 1 I'm gonna pull this down until I just get a nice, clean 1st 1 and it's all the way out by the time 2nd 1 happens, all right? And I think I got it. So that's our decay setting. So let's look at this start thing. So this start setting is gonna be if there's any time, um, before the sample start. So like basically any silence in the audio file before the sample, we can chop that out here. So let's look at maybe let's look at our shaker. Let's say there was some silence before that shaker. We could pull this up and say, Start that sample. Ah, little forward, like, 28 milliseconds in and in this case, we're gonna chop off some of that initial attack, which actually can be a cool effect to right now, we're not getting that very first sound of the Shaker, which mellows it out quite a bit because we're missing the initial attack, right? So start is just going to kind of move the play had forward on that sample and chop off some of that initial stuff. In addition to that, we've got this stretch setting which we could use to, you know, slow it down or speed it up. Let's crank it all the way up, right? You hear that? It's like it's basically warping it. It's pulling it apart. Ah, I don't really want to do that here. So it's not that back to zero now, All of these settings ca NBI velocity controlled when you see the velocity. So don't forget about those and random. So let's take our, um well we already have a random amount on our snare drum. Let's take our high hat and senator random amount of transposition, right? Just a little. Maybe, like 68. That's kind of a lot, but so now it sounds like a whole bunch of different high hats. But let's tone that way. Down 6.2 now it's just slightly changing, as if you were playing it. And you know you what? You didn't hit it exactly the same with stick every single time. You're gonna get slightly different amounts on that. So that could be cool. Okay, Last couple of things to talk about. Um, we've got panning. We've got volume, panning can be random and it can be controlled by velocity, which can be a cool thing. We say random panning. Let's crank that up and let's go to Maybe let's stick with our high hat, since that's what we're on and let's hear that right. So now are Panning is kind of moving around. That might be cool. Just toe have up a hair, you know, our volume, velocity, sensitivity, honor, volume, which we want. Okay, so now that we've done this, what's I'm gonna try to make something interesting with this. So I've got a couple sounds in here. I've got six sounds and let me just try toe make a beat will jump to a new video and, um, I'll put something together. 18. Impulse Groove: Okay, so first thing I'm gonna do here is I'm gonna gonna work in ah session view this time. I think I've been working an arrangement view a lot. So let's do session to you. Something to make a new mini clip by double clicking here. I'm going to open it up. Give me a little more space to work here. Now I've got remember this fold Command is on. So what that fold button does is it hides all the notes I'm not using. So it's not going to show me the full piano roll editor. If I turned that off, I'd see all the notes of the Midi keyboard, which I don't really don't want, right. I only really care about the notes that I'm using. So I see the different slots in the impulse and they're labeled with what I call them. So kick one kick to, and then I have these two extra slots that are currently empty. So let's make a loop. So I've got see a one bar loop set up here, So let's just do something really basic. Let's take my kick. I'm just double clicking on my quarter notes here, and let's get that moving. Can we go? Let's take my shaker. Cool about way had on the offbeat wait are conga. Maybe try a little bit, get a little better rhythm cut this one down. Duplicate. I think it's kind of cool. Make another clip. Duplicate this clip. Get moving. So now on my new clip that's nearing there. So let's put this there right where you expect it, which is on you, and you're not really into the sound of that snare. So let's go back now that we're cruising. Look at that stare. Well, for one, my mind was going over the top. Okay, so that random filter on my snare isn't doing a ton for me. I want to be its base studying to be much more or less open here. Drive on. Maybe take some of that partners out of it by pulling out the initial attack. That puts it up here. Okay, that's a bit better sound to me. I'm looking that a little bit more way go. So I just pulled back with a k a little bit tighter. Go back many great here, e I haven't used my kick to hear yet. I think that's gonna push us over the top, but let's try it. Okay, so now that I got this prove going, let's see if I can, uh, jazz it up a little bit. I'm gonna go into my groove pool here and open up the group pool. Look at this quickly. In the very first class of the first Mableton class was gonna find cool. Like swing group. It's gonna throw that into my group. Cool. Let's apply to this clip to see what happens. Give us. It's, like, 12. Kind of feel that. Let's try this. Okay, that's kind of cool. So here it is, down here. That's not really doing very much because of 16th based on. And we don't have any 16th notes, really? But I can mess with these all day long, you know, just fine like these. Really Cool. Bruise way. Got something kind of cool. So I like it. I'm gonna hit, commit how you see things fall off the grid down here, but it's just my swing being applied. Cool. So there. That's fun. Um, so don't forget about the groove pool. Could be really handy with these kinds of clips and getting ah something really fun put together that's got a little more life in it. So there you go. Ah, that's impulse. Ah, we could make more dramatic stuff if we wanted to, but it's a great little ah way to organize a group of percussion sounds and make your own drum kits from them. So with that, let's move on to the next thing. 19. Tension Interface: Okay. Next we're gonna talk about tension. Tension is another one of our instruments. And this is a synthesizer. That's another physical modeler. So kind of like collision that we saw earlier Collision was a physical modelling synth that was designed to do percussive sounds. Right. So we had parameters for things like what we were hitting, what we're hitting it with and stuff like that. Tension is about strings. Ah, so it's going to be a stringed instrument emulator. Essentially, Um, so let's have a look at it. We have five big sections and one tiny section. Here's our tiny section right here. That pick up. So, um, remember now, because it's a physical model modeling synthesizer. We're gonna have these different areas that don't that aren't exactly, ah, filter, oscillator and things like that. They're gonna be synonymous with things in the physical world of a stringed instrument. So, for example, our first section here we have the exciter. That's gonna be what are we hitting the string with? Is it a pick? Is it a bow? Is it a hammer or is it a bouncing hammer? Um, the bouncing hammer thing, it's actually makes really cool results I think of it like like on my guitar when I bounce a pencil off of it, you know, you go, like with a pencil. Um, that's kind of what it sounds like. It's all right. It's kind of like that. Um, if we say pick, you know, it's like we're picking a stringed instruments. Bo, This thing, Theo, that's like a super like, aggressively consistent bow. But that's what you can do with physical modeling. You can make it kind of inhuman. So let's go to, um, let's go to pick. So we have a bunch of parameters surrounding the pick, including our friendly velocity and key sensitivity. How much of those do we want to control these different parameters? The protrusion of the pick, the stiffness, velocity, the position and the dampening. So some of these we can make analogies to very easily like I think of protrusion as, um like, if you're playing guitar, how much of the pick is are you holding onto and how much of it? Ah, is hanging off the ends of your fingers in a way, like is it protruding from your ah, finger in a way? So the closer you're holding it the kind of tighter it's gonna be. Stiffness could be like the size of our pick. Anyone that plays guitar knows that you have thick picks and you have thin picks and they have a different sound velocity. How hard we hitting it? So obviously be a very good one to map to velocity. So its velocity here, I'm gonna turn it all the way down and then turn my velocity all the way up so that I'm now controlling velocity with the keyboard. So if I play really quiet, it goes all the way down to zero velocity. Quiet as I can play on my keyboard here. If I played really hard, it goes up to the full velocity allowed. Um, three set that position. Are we picking back near the bridge or up near the strings? The kind of classical word for that would be back by the bridge would be Ponta Tello, if you want it. Really? Ponta cello. We could go up here or Oops. Sorry. Did that backwards. When it really Ponta cello, we go back here, gets a little bit more of a tinny sound. And if we want it Really? Ah, the word would be dull. Che is actually the which I think just means soft, but, um, be up on the frets. Makes a little softer sound. Um, so Ponta Tello is, like, bright and ah, dull. Che is kind of mellow and softer damping, you know, like, are we using, like, palm muting? Whatever. Um okay, great. So let's go down to the termination. Um, so this one can be honor off. Actually, they can all be honor off if we turn off the exciter, though we don't get any sound because there's nothing hitting the string. Right. So we need that to make them sound. Um, the termination. This is, um you can think of this as what's at the other end of the string. Like if we stick with our guitar analogy, Um, what is the thing holding the note down? Let me put another Well, let me just explain, this might be easier thing. Mass thing. Stiff right. Thing is short for finger, right finger, mass, finger stiffness. So what they're saying is, if this was a guitar, how is the finger position? You know? Is it like a very thin, thin finger, like like a toothpick that makes a slightly different sound than if it was, you know, a big, meaty human finger, right? And is it stiff like a like a piece of wood Or like a piece of rubber thes things change the sound of it, right? So let's do Let's take that all the way down, right? And let's take it all the way up. That's by the way, the same pitch I played. So when we go down, this is actually d tuning it slightly. So it's just part of the algorithm that, um if it's a very thin finger, it's going to be a little flat, which is interesting stiffness and fret stiffness. So if there's a fret, is that stiff? Or is it like a rubber front or a soft fret? Think about, um, like putting a towel over your string, you know, does that that kind of mutes it out of it. So here's our tiny one. We might as well address this while we're here. Is there a pickup and where is the pick up? So let's turn to pick up on. Okay, let's crank it up. Let's pull it down a little little tin ear when it's down, not aton of effect. Ah, for the settings we have here. Ah, if we had our damper and maybe we were Boeing, it would probably hear that a little bit more extreme. Let's talk about the damper. Um, is there a damper on it? Um, so I don't actually know. And I'm gonna be completely honest here. The difference between this damping and this damper Ah, that would be something that I could look up. Um, but this is while other than this has a lot more parameters. And this is basically acting as the damper four. Let's say a piano. Right? Left. Let's say we had a piano. We had a foot pedal. Ah, and we were not pressing the foot pedal. That is damper. Right? So now it's being dampened, so we can't hear it. It's like putting a towel over your guitar strings. Like I just said, if I turned that off, right. So how big is it? How stiff is it? Where is it? And it has a damping parameter to So I should really look up to stamping parameter. Um, that's great. Now let's look at the body. Another fun one. So what is the size of this thing. What is the resonator of this thing? Is it close to a piano, a guitar or violin or what? We just call generic? And there's even another setting here. We could say piano, and then we could say an extra large piano. Right? Um, well, look at that in a minute when we design Ah, sound with it. But in addition to that, we also have a little EQ. You hear right? Low cut high, cut, some decay. We crank up our decay. Right now, we're starting to really hear the body of it so great. And then we have a volume. Now there's one other big part of this hero. There's There's the fifth layer that I didn't talk about, which is this stuff in the middle? What is the string doing right? So I have vibrato that I can turn on or off so we can allow for vibrato on that string, and we consent Pramuk hers for how it's moving. We can also set some parameters about this. The string the ratio would be like, Ah, that's hard to explain, but it would ah, in the physical world, the ratio would have a lot to do with the length of the string. And where is our note that we're playing? So if we're playing, I know exactly in the middle of that string so far, string is two feet long and we're playing a note that stops it at one foot. That's gonna be a 50% ratio, like it's set here. Ah, and that does affect the timber of the string. Um, in harmonic notes, also kind of related to the ratio in a lot of ways. So we could change that. Setting the damping setting and this key setting is the same as this key setting. Except here. It's scalable arrow pointing over here to decay. Here. It's pointing to damping, Um, so this is pointing to like the mod wheel of our keyboard, pointing at the amount. So a lot of options here for all the stuff. Now there's one other big element. Ah, here and that is this tab over here We have a whole other Tavis stuff, and here we have really familiar stuff, right? You know what this is? We have a just good old straight up filter, right? We have an envelope, a tactic, a sustained release. Really friendly, familiar stuff. We have an LFO and we know what that does. And then we have some keyboard settings for how we're going to control. Ah, this particular instrument, right? So we can de tune, weaken set voices, semi tone, octave, transposition, pitch bend, etcetera. So some familiar friends over here that should be not too alarming. Okay, so that is the overview of how tension works. Let's cut to a new video and let's make some sounds with it. 20. Tension Presets: So for designing sounds attention, let's do something a little different this time. Let's start with with some of the presets and just see what we've got here. I m let's look at a piano sound. Um, well, piano and keys. Ah, Stevie. Wow, this TV wonder electric piano sound, old school roads, prepared piano repair pianos. A really cool look that up. I don't have time to tell you all about the awesome history of John Cage and prepared piano , but, um, it will blow your mind. Ah, let's look at one. It's basically a piano or a stick stuff in it. Let's look at this, Stevie. Ah Ah, The Stevie Wonder sound. Okay, so a little more complicated here because we have our tension instrument here, but we also have it in what's called an instrument rack. I know I've talked about this whole bunch. It's coming up. Don't worry. We're gonna look at that. But let's just try to look at the actual attention instrument here, so I'm just gonna play some stuff. So it's kind of got that wa sound on it. Um, let's see if I can turn that off. I want to turn off all stuff. It's not attention. So now we're just looking attention. So what's our exciter? Ah, we have a pick you have pick setting. It's controlled by velocity. So as I play quiet and louder, we hear that kind of opening up a little bit, right? Ah, damper is not on body is not on pickup is on and set to kind of low, and the termination is not on either. So that's kind of taking us into more of a keyboard sound on a guitar sound. Which school? Um, look at our filter settings. Over here. We've got this envelope setting to be fairly quick attack. Long decay. Ah, hardly any sustained and a slow release. LFO is often This filter is on and looks like, Oh, it's being controlled by these settings. Out here is what's happening there. Let's go back to the string. Now let's experiment with this. Let's see what we could do with this to change it up a little bit. What if I took this Stevie Wonder style piano and I boat it right? This is the fun stuff about physical modelling, right? That's pretty weird. Um, let's see if we can chill that out a little bit. It's got a lot of like noisy air in its triplets fractionally out. It's wild. Let's turn these off. Just so were we know were Onley hearing our string here. When I turn off this fixed position, I got a little bit better. Sound are more pitchy. Sounds right, so that's pretty interesting. Lots of stuff here. Let's look at another one. Let's maybe look at a guitar kind of sound here. That's what this is really good at. Banjo can't go wrong with a banjo, right? Okay, good. So there's no ah instrument rack here. It's just a banjo. I wish I could play banjo riffs on keyboard, but I can't. So it's Oh, yeah, How would we make a banjo? We would pick it. First of all, we do have a termination on it. A very stiff fret all the way up there. Ah, we have a pickup. We have body a very small guitar, as you could imagine. That's kind of where we're getting the banjo sound from is a very small guitar sound. Okay, let's do the same thing except less than this time. Let's do this hammer bouncing and see what happens, right? So it's got this kind of delayed bounce to it, which is kind of fun. Let's look at this in harmonic parameter set to 34 right now. Let's crank that up to let's just crank it up. I don't know, 82. It sounds good, right? It gets a little more like paper sounding. Let's try putting our ratio back up to 50%. It was our default for our other ones. Not so much effect there. That's kind of I brought a while. Not too much effect there. So very subtle effects here. Um, let's look at one more. And how about this cord balance? One? Okay, so we've got. So it's called cord bounce, so we can imagine it's using the bouncing hammer I hear filter. Probably an LFO happening in there. Let's look at it. Uh, no termination body is set to an extra small piano, which is fun. Ah, damper is stiffness, and damping is pretty far up. Let's look at our filter control here. There's that LFO that I thought was going to be there. This filter is opening and closing, so so you can hear that LFO kind of go warring opening and closing as I'm just holding round one note, by the way. So here's the note that I just played that one. So a lot different stuff here, so cool. There's a lot of different things you can get out of tension. It's complicated instrument. It's It's an unassumingly complicated instrument because it doesn't look like there's a ton of stuff here, but you can really do a lot with it. Ah, and it's a good way to make some of these cool like string sounds. So check it out, play with it and, ah, see what you can discover inside that thing. 21. Operator Interface: okay, it's time to talk about Operator Operator is probably one of the most powerful sense in a Bolton. Um, this synth is going to get us back to our oscillators. Filters on envelopes model um, it's cause it's more of a traditional synthesizer in a way, ah, than the physical modeling stuff that we've been seeing in the last couple. But it's also a bit untraditional in ways. So it's a traditional synth in that we've got oscillators and filters and envelopes. Ah, and those familiar things. But it's untraditional, and then it's a bit on steroids. So let's walk through it. Let's have Ah, let's have a look. So when we first opened up, this is what we see. Now let's just first identify are four areas, right, So here we have an oscillator, Right, So we have tuning. I'll talk about this fixed in a second. We have a level, and we have this big contextual menu in the middle. So when I when I'm here, I can set a couple different things, such as my way form here on my way form options. So let's set us saw. And there we have a saw. Um, I have. Ah, square square. There's a nice square. I can also draw custom wave forms by doing, you know, something just gnarly and crazy if I want. Right. Second draw, custom wave forms. Um, and a couple more settings will come back to these in just a minute. Well, actually, while we're here, look at what we've got right here. An envelope, a tactic, a sustained and release s so we can set our envelope to be how we want. So oscillator settings here. And then we go here, and then we see the actual wave forms, and then we can go into the envelope and set that, um so those are our 1st 2 elements. We have a filter over here and nothing too surprising here with contextual menu updates. So we're seeing Ah, the filter setting. Actually, what we're looking at right now is the envelope. Let's go look at the filter so we can, you know, design the filter just how we want, or we can use the settings down here, and then we can go to the envelope and we have an envelope for the filter, right? Separate from our amplitude envelope that we were looking at before or however we want to apply this particular envelope. So that's our filter. And then here we have frequency in residence, which we can get out right here. We can adjust with the dials over here from a residence. Gives the filter a little boost at the cut off. It's a nice, handy way to see what it's doing right there. That's residence. That's no residence, right? Cool. Um, and down here is our volume. So our main amplifier here now there's some more stuff over here that we're gonna talk about right now. Um, well, it's simple back over here first. So here we have an oscillator, right? It's got it's labeled a right. We can turn it off by clicking on that A. Now, why would they label this oscillator a because and make it yellow? And the reason is we have four oscillators here, right? Therefore oscillators weaken Set him totally different. So here's an oscillator can click on here. I can change that one to be like that. I'm just changing one setting that's like, really visible to us to do that. And let's leave that one there. So we go back, we see are four different settings. So all of the stuff in this contextual window here are dependent on which oscillator we're looking at. Right? So four oscillators, they can have different wave forms. They can have different envelopes. They're gonna have different all kinds of different settings. Right? But these four oscillators go through this area. Imagine the signal flow. It's not exactly this way with this kind of what it's doing. So we're gonna go over here to this LFO and this LFO is going to affect everything depending on how he said it, we could set it to effect some of those oscillators and not all of them if we wanted to, Then down to this filter which is going to affect the output of everything. And then here we have a couple other stuff, we can do a pitch envelope and then again we can set it to which oscillators we wanted to effect. Ah, we can transpose do a spread setting if we want, and then we get down here Ah, where we can adjust the volume and a couple other things. Now here's the important thing. This business up here This is how these oscillators are going to behave together. That's the key point here. So let's do Let's look at this one. This is the easiest, right? So we're all in a line. You see the tiny little ticket, the bottom of each box. That means that each oscillator is going out. It's making it sound. And it's sending to the output, right? So if I say let's turn so all four off Slater's air on now, So let's just a different way for him. So let's look at my oscillator. Let's set this one too. A sign. Let's set this one, Teoh A triangle. This one, Teoh. Ah, Sawtooth. And this one, too is something goofy that I'm just gonna drop. Um, Now what I'm gonna hear when I do this is all four of them. Assuming I have a level, Let's just turn them all all the way up. I got to give them volume. I wanna hear him all equally. Right now, I left my LFO on my filter on and my pitching below Bon. Let's turn all that stuff off on. And that's what we hear now. I could adjust the level of each one to, and that will change the Tambor quite a bit, right? Let's turn these two down. Right now, I'm hearing those a little bit less. Okay, so that's cool. So let's go back to our are the way are oscillators are behaving. So that's all for going out. Let's go to the other extreme now and look it over here. Now. What's happening is the orange one oscillator d is controlling hoops is controlling oscillator. See which is then controlling oscillator B which is then controlling oscillator A which is then going to the output on Lee oscillator A is going to the output, but we have synthesis happening between all four oscillators. They're controlling each other going down the line. This is FM synthesis. Over here. This is additive synthesis. We're just adding them all together. This is FM where they're modulating each other, right? The frequencies air modulating each other frequency motto, modulation. So what? That sounds like I'm getting this kind of big some P attack, and then things changed. Let's turn them all up. Let's do this same experiment again, where all of them are at full volume. We still hear that big attack, right? Um let's try d tuning some of them. Okay, So when I play in this setting, all the volumes are all the way up on Lee. One is coming out even though we have different pitches even set up right way only here one because oscillator A is the only thing coming out. Right? So they're all controlling oscillator A which is influencing the tamper. So let's look at one of the other configurations. Now, let's go to this one. So what we have here is oscillator. See, I'm just looking at the colors here. Oscillator see, is controlling us later. Be and oscillator D is controlling oscillator. A as is oscillator be so oscillator B and D are controlling A and C is controlling be right , So a little bit more complicated configuration. Let's hear that. Oh, right. Let me go back to the 1st 1 right? You can hear how the configuration of oscillators radically changes the timber. That is very different. Ah, a groups much more mellow Here. Here we have much more complex Get another one the right now. We just went totally crazy. The only thing I changed was the configuration of oscillators here. And this one oscillator D is controlling both B and C, which is then controlling a. And it makes this crazy sound. So that's the most powerful thing in operator to me. Um, it's very, very powerful. Actually, there's a ton you can do with it. Let's check out this one just because it's a little bit different in this one. Oscillator B is controlling a and oscillator D is controlling. See, so the output is from a and to cease. We have two outputs now, right? Which means if I have them tuned to different if I have A and C both tuned different, let's do that. We're going to hear, Ah, harmony. Let's make it a little bit better harmony there now we're going here to pitch is, uh, wait. We have that the initial pitch and in the higher pitch that comes later. That's probably helping. Ah, right, Let's make it even closer. Right? So there's those two pitches because there's two outputs here. This one has three on three pitches in there, contributing to the sound right, so that is the basic layout of oscillator Now there's a lot more control in here that we can get into, but the main thing I want you to, uh, understand about operator is thes different configurations of the four oscillators. Oh, I didn't talk about this fixed thing. Ah, this fixes if you want to basically throw out the pitch and manually set it. So let's turn these oscillators off. So we're just hearing us later. A Oops. I should probably make sure all Slater is on output like that. Oh, I haven't set really low. Okay? I was like, Why don't I hear that? The reason is this is really low. Let's turn that pitch will wake up. There we go. So what we're doing here is when I say fixed, I'm saying Ignore the key that I play in terms of the pitch, I could map that key to other things. I went over here and said, The key can control some other elements. But in this case, when I say fixed the key, no matter what key I play on the keyboard, I'm playing all kinds of different keys. Right now, the same pitch comes out and the pitch that comes out is whatever is dialed in here. So here's a really low note. No matter what key I play that low know this makes it great for making percussion sounds right. We could say could make it a pretty low note. We could put a filter on it, put it way down here. So I just my envelope here, get it fairly tight. And I've got a pretty good kick sound right? I could maybe pull it down a little bit lower. I'm not gonna be able to hear it very well on my little speakers. Here, you get the point. That's the basic idea behind the fixed Ah parameter weaken. Use it for percussion. We can use it for a lot of different stuff, and then we can use the key. Actually, what key we play, we can map to other things. Like we've seen in a lot of difference in the scissors. So that's our lightning quick overview of operator. Let's do another video where we explore some of the sounds in operator 22. Operator Preset Exploring: okay again with operator. Let's look at some of the presets and just kind of walk through them to try to get a good understanding of what's happening here. Now I say this with all humility, because operator is as a huge synth, and I know that Look down it slam Academy. We've taught entire classes on Lee on Operator, so this is a very, very, very quick overview. Let's look at um, look at something standard like a like piano keys type thing. I'm not sure they'll have a ah Stevie Wonder style thing, but let's say Ah, plucked piano. OK, it's pretty nice sound. Let's have a look at how it's set up so all four of our oscillators air on. Well, let's just hear it first. E k. Kind of a nice sound kind of electric, very nice. Now remember, this is a plucked sound, so it's a string kind of. It's what it's intended to be. But this is not a physical modeling synthesizer. So a little different. Ah, then that this is using oscillators, not physical modelling. Looks like we've got we've got all four oscillators on. However, C and D have a volume of zero. It doesn't necessarily mean that they're not doing anything, but ah, probably they're not doing anything. B is up just a little bit. So be is being used somehow. Now, the next big thing I want to look at is how I'm configured just cause I'm curious about that, So I'm configured in the FM pattern, right? So everything's controlling everything out. So in this case, Ah, B is controlling A and D is controlling C, which is controlling B. But D and C are not They don't have any volume, so they're not really contributing. So be has a slower attack on the envelope. Right? Um, our oscillator a square wave. Okay, so that's gonna be a little bit of a brighter sound. And then oscillator A is using a sign way, which could be really smooth, and it hasn't even slower attack. So we're gonna hear that square. We're gonna feel that square wave through oscillator a first, right? Because that is a quicker attack than what Ascender a has now. It's not that we're gonna hear a square wave. It's that that square wave is gonna be modulating the oscillator a right, and that's going to contribute to that? Um, kind of buzzy sound that we're hearing. Okay, let's go look at some of our other parameters. Here are LFO is off. Our filter is set. So our filter is giving us a nice bit of residence right up here. Right up around Ah, 2.1 kilohertz. Ah, and the residence is pretty high, right? We've got a nice big boost right there. Um and there's an envelope on it. But the envelope has a sharp attacks. Pretty normal. And then it pulls down pretty quick so we can see that something is happening there. Teoh, give us a nice amount of shape to the sound via the filter, right? So just think about this shape that you're seeing while you're hearing that sound sharp attack comes down. This is not an amplitude envelope, right? This is a filter envelope, so it's a little bit different, but that felt that is contributing to that filter opening and closing. Cool. So that's the basic overview. Ah, we have this tone setting here, which is a kind of a filter. Ah, that's contributing to also let's adjust. That was crank that all the way up. So a little bit brighter, a little bit more muted. Okay, critical. Let's look at, um, that's one of these pads. Pads tend to be much more complicated when it comes to synthesis. All right, what is happening? They're okay now, once again, we've got this in an instrument rack. So, actually, let's see if, um, let's do one without an instrument rack. Um, So here's this one Sounds like Right, so that's something really high. Comes in kind of late, right? That, like, high ring, anything it takes Ah, little while for it comes in. So I expect to find an envelope somewhere. Okay, so here's our four oscillators. Ah, a, B, C and D are all on. They all have volume. A is the loudest. We have some d tuning happening up in D. A little bit of d tuning happening and see right here and here. And no d tuning on B or a Let's look at our configuration. It's the square we can see right here. So that's this one. Now what we're hearing here is oscillator a yellow one and see right, and they are being controlled by the one above them. So be is controlling a and D is controlling. See, So it's a cool we've got. Let's look at DNC. First see is a sine wave, but it is being controlled by D, which is also a sine wave, but a little bit of a weird or sine wave. See, These are both signed waves. This one has an extra partial in it, and it's de tune by kind of a lot. So, um, let's actually just here that I can turn off A and B and there's are really high frequency right and are really slow envelope. So let's look at the envelope of C. And there it is, right, really slow. Let's look at this one oscillator d Also really slow envelope, right? So it's ah, that slow high frequency. Okay, let's do the same thing, but with a and B, let's just hear that. All right, so this one we have lasted d tuning happening be a slow attack sine wave. Let's look at it. Another goofy sine wave. So it's a sine wave with some extra partials in there, and then a is just another sign wave, so that's gonna make a really smooth sound. But with a little bit of grit from those extra partials. And then you hear that pulse that's happening. That 111111 was pretty fast. Okay, so it's turned all four of them back on. Let's go and look at what we've got over here. So we've got an LFO happening. Ah, on B and D only. So the two modulators of that are modulating. See in a right. So they have this LFO happening. Let's also look at this filter. So this filters on Ah, the filter envelope, right kind of similar to the last one. And let's look at the actual filter. It's pretty opened up, not much resonance. And it's kind of all the way open, right? So there's not a lot happening in that and then our tone setting our volumes down pretty low. Now the value is probably down pretty low because we have to oscillators happening. If we turned up too high, it's gonna clip really fast, right like that. So that can be a danger of having multiple oscillators going. Great. So a couple of quick looks Ah, what you should do in your free time is dig through mawr of these. No, look at look at some of these files and experiment around with them and make some cool stuff. There's a lot to find, an oscillator or in operator, so dig around and explore a lot. I don't have time to go through the entire operator class, but I hope to someday make one. 23. All Instruments Overview: Okay, everyone in this next big chunk of stuff, here's what we're going to do. We're gonna go through all the able to instruments. Ah, it's a lot of them. So if you cook over here instruments we know through all of these things. So, um, the few that I'm gonna leave off is I'm going Teoh only talk about the actual synthesizers for this first trunk, and then the second chunk will talk about samplers, and then we'll talk about racks after that. So, um, we're gonna talk about collision, not drum rack. We'll get to that later. Electric, not external instrument. We will also get to that later impulse. We will talk about instrument rack is like drum rack. We're gonna talk about that in the last section. Operator and tension. So those are the actual instruments. Um, so let me do that one time analog collision. Electric impulse operator intention. So I'm going to do kind of a quick overview of all of those, um, just sort of showing how they work their general interface for all of them. Then after that, we'll do a separate section where we address the simpler and the sampler. Um, those are two samplers and then we'll talk about racks. And then finally, I'll talk about the external instrument when we get there. Um, so that's how I'm gonna do it. So not super in depth on all the instruments. Um, just because there's just a ton of stuff. There's a tone of stuff in all of these instruments, So I'm going to kind of walk through how to make some sounds, using them how to program them to some extent and what to look for in each of them. So let's jump in and start working on our able 10 instruments. 24. All Sampler Overview: Okay, so we've gone through all our instruments now and are all our synthesis instruments, I should say, but we still got a couple more to look at from this next chunk. We're gonna look at simpler and sampler. Now, they're kind of two flavors of same thing. They're both samplers, as you could probably guess, and but they don't have a different characteristics and a couple different things we can do with each one. So ah, in the next section we're going to do. Ah, kind of like we were doing with the other instruments with the other synthesizer instruments were going to do kind of a 5000 foot view, uh, overview of these instruments. So we're gonna talk about simpler and sampler. Ah, and there parameters they have and how to make some kind of quick sounds using them. Ah, and then we'll move on and talk about racks, which is gonna be really mind blowing. You're gonna do racks. Okay, so ah, Samplers first then Rex 25. Using Simpler: All right. Okay, so it's time to talk about sampling. Ah, in particular, the simpler is where we're gonna be addressing in this video. So here's our simpler, so simpler and sampler as you could probably guess. Simple. Simpler is a simple er version of sampler. Um, there's one big difference between the two and then a whole bunch of little differences. Um, I'm actually load up. Let's make a new mini track throw a sampler over here. We're gonna talk about sampler shortly, but this is what sampler looks like, and this is what simpler looks like. So on the surface, when you look at him really quick, it kind of looks like simpler is more complicated than sampler, right? We have a lot more knobs and buttons and things we can click on when we look over at sampler. It's bit more smooth, right? But the big difference here is this zone tab here, Um, I'm looking at sampler now, and sampler allows you to have zones. So let me jump over to simpler to explain that basically what that means is that we can accommodate multiple and a whole bunch of samples when we're using sampler. Simpler is designed to let us use a single sample and do a lot of stuff with it. So let's have a look at what we've got here. So let me just load up. Ah, preset quick. What I could do. Well, let's not let a preset I'm gonna go into my samples library, and I'm just gonna grab a sound. Um, I kind of want to pitch sound just so we can hear what's gonna happen here. No, that Here we go. Let's build us a ah synthesizer out of this. So I'm gonna take this sample. I'm going to drag it right into the drop zone here. Drop sample here area. And there we have it. Okay, so now I have a sampler. Right? So now I could just play this right so I could just play that sample. It's gonna transpose it appropriately. Simple, right, Because it's simpler. All I have to do is throw a sample in that area, an audio sample, and then play it on a midi keyboard. And it's all good to go or draw somebody notes for it. So that's the main thing to do with simpler right now. Once we do that there's a lot more we can do with it, right? So in order to look at the what more we can do, let's focus on a single pitch. Okay, so if I do this, you know, I can get some good sound and stuff, But if I repeat a single note, Okay, now we can kind of hear some of the nuance. So let's think about some of those things that we looked at with synthesis because a lot of it works the same when you're working with a sampler. Um, the sample is kind of like our oscillator, right? It's actually a lot like our oscillator. And once we get past that, there's not much difference between the synthesizer and a sampler. We still want envelopes. We still want filters. Um, and all of the rest of that kind of work the same, you know, we still have LFO is down here, you know, there are still there are a lot of familiar stuff here. There is a lot of familiar stuff here. So when I just listen to the single note, we can hear that the first thing that jumps out to me is that the end of this note. The release of this note is a little bland, right? It just kind of stops. So what could we do to help that? Well, um, the first thing we could do is we have these different with these loop points here. Right? So I could get rid of this empty space by nudging this end and at the beginning as well. There's a little bit of empty space there, and then I could set it toe loop. Right? Right here. So now it's gonna repeat over and over as long as I hold the note down. Okay, so I've got this loop going now, and I have this little thud in between. So what I really need to do is kind of find a zero crossing in here. But sometimes the easiest way to do that is to make the loop just like a lot smaller. So let's just try this groups too much. Not necessarily, though, but I'm changing the tone of it by doing this, But you can get some really interesting results, actually, right making is like super small loops. Ah, right. It just kind of turned into an organ because, you know, it's just kind of using it as an oscillator. That's kind of interesting. So we could we could finesse that and try to get that, um, sink to be perfect. But let's call that good for now. In the interest of time, we'll look more of that in a minute. Um, okay, So now, now that we have that we could up our release, right, Because it's gonna be looping. Right? So when I let go, it fades away, just like a normal. So it keeps looping, but the release is gonna pull the the ah, volume out slower in the same way to before. Same thing I could do with the attack. I could make the attack a little bit more subtle by turning it up. Right now, we get, like, a ramp in so pretty go. Um, I've got a filter down here. Um, I could give it a little action. Maybe a little residence, right? It's open that filter back up so we don't hear it too much. These controls up here control the things. I was just manually moving in the sample. So the start point I can adjust the the loop, like where it loops the length of the loop and a cross fade. So let's investigate that cross fade a little bit here, shall we? Because that cross fade is where we can get rid of that, um clicky sound from the ah sound repeating That's a little bit better if we just pull in our sound here our length here so that we get a little bit more of that way We're getting closer. You can see how we could finesse this and get it just right. And that's what we wanted, right? So we could finesse that and probably come pretty close. Now we've got a couple other tabs here we have this 80 s are that we already looked at four volume but here we have an 80 s are for our filter. So an envelope for our filter and an envelope for our pitch could make the pitch go up and down over time if we wanted to Ah, we have to turn it on to use it. So you got from these on to use them? But we have an 80 s are envelope for filter and pitch. Ah, we can add an LFO panning down here we have another lfo Ah, and ah, whole bunch of settings for it. We consent are wave, shape frequency, whether it's in hurts or in our division of the beat. So 16th notes, etcetera, a time offset percentage of the key that's controlling it so we can add LFO and do all that stuff, this spread setting we've seen elsewhere. This kind of is like a kind of a chorus sound kind of, Ah, phasing sound a little bit. It's pretty cool. Um, let's take another stab at this LFO. If I apply it here, let's also apply to the volume. So we've got to turn it on, give it some settings and then apply it to either to one of the settings here. So here we have the filter being controlled by the LFO and the volume being controlled by the LFO cause why not? Right, So now we've got this rockin thing. Let's have it just be filter plus obvious in this example. So it's true. So now we've got a pretty dynamic synthesizer, right? Just from ah, the this single sample which originally sounded like this right? And now we're making you know this quite a bit different sound, but it's It's right. It's got a lot of character, too, and it's quite interesting. So all from a single sample we made a pretty elaborate synthesizer. The key to remember with a lot of this stuff is that the difference between a sampler and a synthesizer after you get past loading in the actual sampler are the actual sample is relatively minimal, right? Um, the sample, the audio file, that is ah, sample replaces the oscillator. Ah, but once you do that, you're pretty much in the same kind of system, right? So, um, in a synthesizer, you have oscillators, filters, envelopes, an amplifier and some other stuff. In this sampler, you have the sample and then filters, envelopes, amplifiers and some other stuff, so it mostly works the same. It's really just the sample that functions as the oscillator, and after that it's a lot of really familiar stuff Now it can get much more complicated once you have multiple samples involved, right? That's where things start to get a little trickier, because you've got to navigate those samples and figure out how to Q different samples and in what situations, the different samples get cute. So that's what we're gonna look at next when we look at the sampler, I just want to point out to other quick little things about simpler just to avoid your future confusion. Um, one thing is that if you go through some of the presets here, like, if I load up, um, let's find a good example. Let's go ambient and evolving. Let's just look at one of these random ones. Now we see that this is in an instrument rack, and that's okay, I promise. Promise? Promise. We're going to talk about the soon, um, but here is our simpler and it is in multi sample mode now. I just said that you can't ah, do multiple samples and simpler, right? Ah, and that is still true. Ah, because the key word in that sentence is you like you can't dio multi samples in simpler. Ah, but a built in Cannes. So some of their presets have this thing called multi sample mode. But as far as I know, you can't actually make a device or a sound or any kind of setting in simpler using multiple samples. Some of our presets do have them, and Mableton has made them. Ah, but we can't just make them ourselves. We would rather use sampler, which lets us do that easy. If you wanted to take a patch like this and pick apart the individual samples, you can't do it in Simpler. But you can in sampler. All you have to do is convert this to ah sampler patch. Right. So we need a way to convert a simpler patch to a sampler patch. Now, this will make more sense after Ah, we look at sampler. But I want to point it out now because it would be weird to point it out later. Um, basically what you can dio if you have the full version of able to If you have a built in sweet you can control click up here on the title bar and you can go to simpler Ah, and then kind of a narrow sampler. Convert this to a sampler patch, which is what I just did. Right. So now I can see the individual samples. That's all of these here, Right? So what I did was, um I loaded up a patch in simpler that had this multi mode thing set. Remember? You can't make one that Ah a simpler That is in multi mode mode, I guess. Um, But what you can do is take one of those and convert it into a sampler and then work with the individual samples. And you might say, Well, why don't Why did they do that? Why don't they just make all of those sampler patches and not simpler patches and not confuse us? And I think the reason is that simpler comes with the small versions of a bilton not the able to sweet, but like able to light in these smaller versions of a Bolton, you'll get simpler, but you won't get sampler. So they wanted to give you some cool sound. So they invented this kind of multi mode thing, Um, but still kind of entice you to get the full version. Ah, in which case you would get sampler. So I think that's why those air in there, um so even converted sampler. And now we're looking at sampler, which leads us to our next video when we're gonna talk about sampler 26. Using Sampler: okay, It's time to talk about sampler. So I'm gonna load me up a sampler here, and it's gonna load up the default. Now, the default is empty, which is perfect, because that gives me a chance to walk through some of the features here. So what we need to do is load a sample in, but it's not as simple this time. Um, there's a reason we called it the simpler. And we call this one the sampler, right? Um, a little more complicated. We can use it on kind of, Ah, relatively simple way where we could drag. Ah, sample in here. Let's some with a pitch here. Great. Let's drag that in. Okay, now we've got a sample that looks great. Ah, let's make a note to play here. Let's say this e sounds great. And let's drag it out to hear it. Oh, kind of long. And let's just start that going. Great. Okay, now, first thing we can see here, right is that were telling this pitch to go long, and it's not playing at nearly as long, right? This is one of the differences between this synthesizer and a sample sample at the sampler is just gonna play that file and it's gonna transpose it so that we can get a higher pitch or a lower pitch right. It can play it faster and slower and do whatever it has. Thio Thio become the right pitch, but in the end, it's still playing the file right now. Um, so the duration that we set here is not really linked directly yet. Teoh sound. So let's go back and look at our sampler here. So we saw this before. Um, we know that we can adjust the endpoint, and that is all the same as simpler when I go down the sustained mode here. This is kind of what we saw in simpler, but it's done slightly different. Let's adjust this sustained mode so that it loops right. But it's looping and stopping because if I go and look at my mini note right now, it's going the duration because it's looping until it's done on the mini note, right? So we could try to make that a little smoother by adjusting the cross fade the loop start loop end point, you know, finding just the right spot in all these settings, and that could be okay. Um, that could get us. They're gonna stop that for a minute. Um, so that could get the the loop a little bit smoother. Another thing we can do here is like a boomerang loop where instead of playing from beginning to end, beginning to end, beginning to end a bunch times boomerang loop will play from beginning to end. And then from the end to the beginning And then from the beginning to the end and to the beginning. So we'll go back and forth and back and forth. Sometimes that can make you a smoother loop, depending on what you're doing. Um, so it's worth experimenting with that. Um OK, so let's just go back to the normal looping mode. And what I really want to get into is some of these extra things up here because we looked at a lot of that in, um, the simpler. So what makes the sampler different? So one thing I want to point out right away that I don't think we talked about in the sampler Is this route key business down here? Now, this is important. Um, because what this means is it a little hard to explain. So, um, bear with me for a minute. So the sampler does not know what pitch Our original audiophile that we drug in there are original Sample What's right, but it's important that it does know it. Ah, because how else would it know to play the right pitch when I play it on the keyboard? Or when I do it up here, for example, Um, when I say when I look over here so I have the note f written in right? That's the note that it's playing when I play it. So how does it know to play an F? I give it an audio file, and it can't just say, Oh, I'll make it enough. All it really knows is relative position. It only knows how to play it faster so that it can play it up to the new pitch or down to the new pitch or whatever it has to do to make that pitch so that so we have to tell it what is the pitch of the original sample? So that's where we tell it. Here, See? Three. The actual original sample was C five. Let's see if we get that back there it is. So what we're hearing when I play C three here, I'm actually hearing at two octaves too high. So when I said this to C five now I play C three. We're hearing the correct pitch. If I play c five Well, here, what is the original sample? Right, So you're the original. That's the original sample. Here's me playing the key C five, right? It's the same thing That means that root key is set correctly, right? So that means that now, if I play a d five right, like a step up, it knows how how to make that pitch correctly. If you don't set your root key, correct, then all the pitches you play either on the keyboard or you ask a built in to play here are not going to be accurate right there. Going to be off because we didn't set the route key correctly. It's going to be off. So watch out for that now. This really Onley matters significantly when it comes to, um, pitched sounds. If you're doing drums and things, it matters less. It still can matter, though, um, because if you're loading in a snare drum Ah, you can still control to some extent the pitch of that snared Romans less pitch and more frequency. But we still want to make sure that Ah, you know, when we go up, it goes up and when we goes down, it goes down, which it almost always will. But, um, you can get a little more flexibility if you adjust the root note the root key. So watch out for root key. It really matters when you're doing pitched stuff, and it only slightly matters when you're doing not pitched stuff. So watch out for that. Okay, here's I want to do. Ah. Next. I want to go through some of these other settings up here, and then this is own thing. We're gonna ah, devote a whole another video to because it's a bit more complicated. So let's go over to pitch oscillator. Okay, So what do we have here? Oscillator here is kind of standing in for sampler. So what we're really doing here is we're we're working with that 80 s are envelope the attack Decay sustained. Release envelope as it relates to our sample. Right. So we can turn that on. We also have a pitch envelope down here so we can adjust the pitch over time. Now you'll notice that this one is kind of set up and the reason it's set up is so that we can go down, right? This is the initial pitch. We could have the pitch go up and then down if we want Teoh. Oh, let's set an amount here. Way right? So now we've got this pitch envelope happening, which is fairly ridiculous. So let's get rid of that. Um, okay, let's go over and look at some of our filters. Really familiar stuff here, Right? Here's our filter. Here's our residence, right? That's what are residents does. Here's our filter envelope so we can have the filter open and close over time. Okay? And let's look at modulation here. We have some auxiliary modulation things. So this is basically a free envelope. It's kind of like Do what you want with it envelope so we can set an envelope, and then we can say what he wanted to Dio. And we consented to these parameters so we can kind of have this envelope control, you know, pitch, sample offset. You can do some really wild stuff here. Right. Um, I believe you can either even. Yeah, like filter envelope amount like you can control the filter envelope this envelope with this envelope, right? It's kind of nuts, but you can do it, Um, and do some really complicated stuff. That way you could get some, like, cool, like, kind of rhythms to emerge with that. So there's a lot you can do with that. Um and then we have three LF owes right so we can turn on LFO. We can set it with the things we want to do, and then we can apply it to different stuff. So, like this one, we see we have the same Abie settings and we can apply it to do a lot of things, including modulate lfo one with LFO two, right? So it's kind of ah, really fun. A lot of stuff you can do. Ah, with this and obviously 1/3 LFO now in the midi tab here we can do some basic midi rerouting and this is all a little bit dependent Your keyboard on what you can do with this ? I actually don't spend a lot of time here, so, um, it's kind of an advanced thing, but you can check it out. Um, see what you think of it. Play around with it. Let's go back to sample here. So those are our main controls. A lot of really familiar stuff down here, right? Ah, sample. We can drag in here. Some pitch settings. Ah, filter filter envelopes, An additional assign herbal, auxiliary envelope and three lfo is that we can use. Cool. Now let's go and talk about this is own button. Let's break to a new video and then we'll talk about zones. And what we're gonna be really talking about was owned is talking about multi samples, so we'll see the next video. 27. Sampler And Zones: Okay, so let's say we wanted to create a sampler that had several different samples in it. Right, Um, for example, a drum kit. You wanted to have a kick A snare. Ah, high hat in it. Right. This should be something that's very easy, easy to do. And yet with simpler and with sample or we haven't really discussed how you could do just that. So that is where zones comes into play when we want to hold the multiple samples in our ah sampler. Now, this has another purpose to, um when you buy a sample library or even make your own sample library. Um, let's say you buy like, ah, like a high end piano. Right. So you're gonna buy like, a high end piano sound. It's not going to be the case that somebody sat with a recording set up. They have a little recording rig and they sat in a really nice piano, and they were record recorded, you know, Middle C. And then they loaded that into a sampler and just let the sampler transpose it all the way up the piano and all the way down the piano. That's not gonna happen because when you get to the top of the piano. If you just pitch up middle C, it doesn't sound like a piano. It sounds really fake and silly. Same thing if you go way down, it sounds fake and silly. So what they'll actually do, um, is they might record middle C. And then there might record AH, couple notes higher and a couple, no tire and a couple of notes higher. Maybe not all the notes, but they'll set up their sampler so that there's every couple notes. We were using a new sample. So that way, as you move up and down, you still have these really accurate samples because each one is Onley being transposed a little bit right. That's the key. Um, you're gonna have a more accurate sound if you're only transposing each sound a little bit now. You could build a sampler that used that sampled every single note of the piano, and you could even go a step farther than that. This is what I'm about to show you. You could build a sampler that used every single note of the piano and then record it again to do every single note of the piano quietly and really loud. So now you've got every single note of the piano three times, right? And how you play on the keyboard. You could set that up to have it choose which sample to play based on not only what pitch you played on the keyboard or in your track, but also how loud you played it, right? So let's look at it now. Earlier, click on zone, and we're gonna get this cool new window up here. Right? So I still have my one sample that I drug in here. This is that acid meltdown. Sample the drug ins that's showing up here. Ah, right. So this is one zone, right? And here it is. So what we're seeing here is I have this key button selected. We're gonna look at these two in a minute, but KIIS selected, and then I have this green line, so I'm looking at the key information. So the key is how ah, able Or how sampler is going to decide what Ah, sample to use. Right. Um, based on what key you played so right here I have this green block going from the highest note to the lowest note. So that means basically went no matter what. No, what I play play this sample right in this whole range. I could shorten it by just hovering over the end of it, pulling it in same thing on the other side. Now, I'm saying, whenever I play a note in this range, use this sample. If I don't play a note in this range, don't use this sample. Right? So right now we're gonna get nothing. So now I'm playing that note That's lighting up red. So now there's that note. Ah, nothing, Right, cause there's no sample there. So what if I want another sample? Let's let's do something really way. Go. That flowed that sample in. Okay, now I just drug that sample over into the zone window here and now we can see here it is down here. So when I click up here, all of this information is now talking about my acid meltdown sample. I click down here now it's all talking about my ambient encounter sample. Right? So have all new parameters and look a whole new zone. So let's go like this. Let's do that Right. So now when I play this? No. Uh uh. I'm on the acid meltdown sample Still on it. Still on it. Now, I just jumped my new sample. Right. And why was there such a big jump in pitch? The reason was my ah, root key for this new sample is not set correctly. So I grabbed a C four. So let's change that to a C four, see if that helps. That's still pretty weird. Um, I'm using, like, very different samples here, and they're off by an active. So, um, what I should probably do is set this to C five and see if that Ah, it's still pretty weird. So I I'm using very wildly different samples. But you know what? Let's do this correctly. I'm going to select one, and I'm gonna hit the delete key. I'm going to use this Ambien encounter because I have six different samples of the same service, either here. Right. So it's going to eat that one, too. And I have no samples. Someone Lodin Ambien encounters See one. Now, I'm fortunate here that the name of the sample has the root note in it. So it says, see one. So I just have to go here and set root key to see one. Okay, so now I've got it all throughout the whole keyboard. Now let's grab the next one and being encounter. C two set my root key to see to. Okay, do another one. Ambien encounter C three, the default of C three. So one right. C four set my route. PTC for there we go. C five set my room key to C five and one more C six screaming high set. Marie Key. Got it. Okay. Now, theoretically, when I play all of these notes, I'm gonna be playing the correct pitch. However, I've haven't done one very important step. I haven't set my zones up correctly because what's gonna happen here is whenever I play any note, all six of these air gonna play. Let's try it. They're transposed correctly because I set my route notes. All right, but I'm playing six audio files right now. Each one of these. They don't sound terrible because they're transposed, all right, But I'm not accurately playing this sense, so let's do this. Let's say I'm just gonna eyeball this and set this one to be here and let's just do that and do that. You know what? There's, um, quick way around this. I could just, ah, control click in this window and say distribute ranges equally and that just kind of spreads everything out equally, which is pretty good for my purposes here. So right now it's sounding pretty good, right? Sounds great. So I'm pretty happy with that. I could go through here and adjust all kinds of parameters for each one of these if I wanted to, Um Oh, but you know what? I realize something that happened when I did distribute ranges equally. I lost my root key. For some reason, I think what I was supposed to do was distribute ranges around root key. What if I could undo? Yeah, I can. Let's do that. Distribute ranges around root key. That should keep my root key. Correct? Yes, it looks like it did. Ah, now we're even better. So watch out for that. So what just happened was I said, distribute ranges equally and it throughout my root note and just spread everything out. I wasn't aware that that would happen, actually, um so be careful. Um, in this distribute ranges around root key. What? It's doing is it's setting the route to be the right spot and then transposing appropriately from there. So Okay, so that's with the key right now. Also, you know, I could solo one. Um I could mute one of the zones if I wanted to. And that's all great. Couple other things before we leave key. Um, I can overlap as you saw a minute ago. So So now if I play one of these notes Ah, I can't reach all the way down there cause I'm set up very strange in my room right now in my studio here. Um, but I can overlap if I want. When I play one of these notes, I'm gonna be playing both of these now, if I want to do something really cool and we're gonna Seymour stuff like this in a minute, you see this little tiny line above there? I could grab just that line and do this, and then I could do the same thing on the next one. Do you see what's happening here? This is really, really cool. What's happening is when I play any of these notes, I'm actually gonna cross fade between the samples, so when I played this note right here. I'm gonna hear mostly the 2nd 1 sample, but a little of the 1st 1 over here. I'm gonna hear mostly the 1st 1 in a little of the 2nd 1 So I'm gonna cross fade between them, right? It's pretty slick, so you can do that all over the place if you want. Now, let's look at velocity. So when I click his velocity tab, we get a similar looking thing and it's all on all the time. And that's okay because, um, what this is saying is that how hard I pressed the note, right? It's saying Always use. Ah, so this is my range of velocity, Right? So velocity is how hard I pressed the note, and this is as quiet as possible and as loud as possible, right? So in this case, it's saying, Always use all of them for velocity, and that's OK, because the key is only gonna let certain ones play at certain times, right, cause they work together key and velocity. But if I had something set up to wear like this sample should only happen when it's quiet, and this one should only happen when it's loud. I could do that. Right. So now I'm only gonna trigger this sample when I play it really loud and in this range. Right? So I can make really dynamic stuff here. I can do a lot of different things. Um, with the zones. Um, let's look at the last one here. 01 more thing. We also have this cross fade business here, so we can do that. We could do the cross fading on the velocity also weaken. Say, let thes happen like that and you can do some really wild sound design with just doing this kind of cross fading of samples based on how you play can build this really awesome. Ah, instruments. Okay, let's look at select. Select is another one. Right? So we have a range of 0 to 1 27 Now what this is looking for where this one looked at our key and decided what sample to play. Based on what Kiwi played This one decided what sample to play based on what Ah, the velocity was or how hard we played The key. This one decides what sample to play based on where this little orange Linus and we can click and drag on that. Now, why would you want to do that? The reason could be that. Well, first of all, you could assign this to be controlled by some kind of physical dial that you have. Right? We're gonna talk about that in the next class. Ah, using physical controllers. But we could assign that to a dial. And I could say I could set up a sampler that when the dial's left Ah, I'm on a piano. And when the dia was right, I'm on an organ, you know? And maybe everywhere in between. On that dial, I'm cross fading between a piano and organ. How wild would that be? You know, you could just do all kinds of fun stuff. So, um, that's what we have here. The selection area. So what samples are happen is dependent on where this is. We could load as many samples we want up in here as long as many as your computer can handle. I've seen a lot, you know, I've seen 228. Ah, is would be not terribly surprising to me. Okay, so there you go. Sampler, right? Like super powerful. A lot of stuff we can do with this his own parameter. So if you want to get rid of this big window appear you just hit his own button again down here. And now we're back to looking at a single sample. We can scrub through our samples. Ah, by the way, if we don't want to open this up, but we still want access to all our samples. Here is a list of all the samples loaded into this particular sampler. Right. And I can queue up the different ones by scrolling through this list. Cool. So have some fun with that. There's tons you can do. Explore that zones area, build some sounds and ah, make some of your own samples. Ah, you can do stuff like this. Fine packs of samples like this in the able to library, you can find a few, but if you want to find some more, go to a free sound dot org's and just look for samples. You can find people that have built, you know, pianos and all kinds of stuff. Um, really cool 28. Sampler Orchestra Library: okay before we leave the sampler, Um, you should really look at a preset so we can see what one looks like when it's all put together. Now, I'm gonna load up a particularly gnarly one here. Just that we can see a really extreme example of a lot of samples being used. So I have here, uh, in my packs, I have downloaded the able 10 orchestral strings, which is a really good orchestra strings pack. So this has in it a bunch of samplers. They're actually simpler is, but I'll get to that in a second. So here's a string on some things is a very good, very realistic string ensemble. If it's very realistic, uh, probably has a lot of samples, so you load this up. Okay, So here's what we see here. We see that were in an instrument rack, which I promise we're gonna talk about soon. I know I've said that like, 100 times, but I promise, promise? Promise. It's going soon. Um, it's gonna be great. And here we have a simpler in multi sample mode. Right. So we've talked about this and we know that we can convert this to a sampler by control, clicking on the header and saying Simpler to sampler, which I need to dio if I want to see the individual samples the individual zones. Right. So let's do that. Okay, we have 300 samples in this thing, so let's look at our zones. Let's see if I can make this nice and big for us. There we go. Okay, So now if I scroll down, look at my samples here. Oh, so many samples. So I'm looking at the key parameters now, So let's look at just these first couple here. Let's look at just these ones for a minute. These all have the same pitch selected. Right? So we have 123456 different samples that are being triggered by the same pitch. So what does that tell us? That tells us there's probably, ah, velocity parameter for those same six. So let's look at velocity for those 1st 6 and there we have it right. This one is the quiet one. This is the louder one. A little bit louder, A little bit louder, A little bit louder and as loud as we could go. So those six have his velocity parameter. Now, if we scroll down are probably going to see this pattern, you know, all the way through it, you know, or a really similar pattern. So there's a lot of those patterns right now. If we look at our selection, our selector, knob, what we think we're going to see, I think I actually haven't looked at this, but I don't think we're going to see anything. Yeah, and we don't because all of these are exactly the same going all the way down. There's nothing in the selector now. That's okay. You don't have to use all three. You don't even have to used to, you know, just using the key is plenty good. But each of these samples is designed to play on Onley. One note, right. Only one note and we have six of them. Burn note. So that's a lot of samples. Um, so these samplers can get really robust. There can be a lot of stuff in them, You know. I have six notes, perky plus velocity settings for every key. This is a very, ah, dense sampler, right? A lot of stuff happening here, but that's why it sounds really good Yeah, right. It's a good sounding orchestra library because there's all of those samples to choose from . Eso the higher quality samplers tend to have more samples in them, but let me just qualify that really quick. Say the higher quality samplers is what I just said. But I should have said sample libraries. The sampler is just the software that plays all of them. The sample libraries that have a lot of samples tend to be the higher quality ones. Um, okay, that's great. So let's leave sampler now. Um, I hope you understand it. I hope you understand the zones area and everything you can do with that and let's move on . 29. Instrument Racks Overview: so at long last, at long, long last I've been promising we would be looking at racks and here we are. We're going to start talking about racks of that wasn't too tedious to get here. Um and I hope it lives up to the expectation because I've been making these sound like quite an amazing thing. And, um, I think they are. So when you describe able to live to people when I describe able to live to people one of the things that you know when I say, like, what makes able to in unique, what makes it different than you know? Ah, pro tools logic, fl studio, any of the other ones There are a couple things that I say, Um, I say I say session view makes it unique to those programs. Um, Max for live makes it really unique to those programs. That's something we haven't looked at yet. But we will, in the last class in this whole Syria's is totally devoted. Um, extra life, um, and racks, racks is something that makes it really unique. Ah, and it's really powerful. There are a couple other things, obviously that make it really unique. But Those are the three things that really filter to the top, um, as the most unique things. So what is a rack? Let's just dive in and look at an instrument rack because we're talking about instruments right now. So there are three different kinds of racks. There are instrument racks, there are drum racks, and there are affect racks. No effect racks, or I knew one of my favorites, but we're talking about instruments right now, so let's talk about an instrument rack. Now I'm gonna drag, or I'm just gonna create an empty instrument rack. And that's what it looks like. Not a lot. Right. Um, racks are in a way. Ah, group there, there. Really, like a group of instruments in this case, Um, because we're talking about instrument rack, so I'm gonna focus on instant racks. I'm not gonna talk about drum racks or audio effects racks right now, Um, just to you, not to confuse it. So this is an instrument rack, right? Like it looks pretty simple. There's not a lot happening. So when I group things together like, let's let's look at tracks here, right? Like Aiken groupies together, I can select multiple tracks by, like, shift clicking, and I can hit command G right. And I can put them in a group. Right. So now I can hide this whole group of stuff, and I can apply effects to the whole group if I wanted to. I can do a lot of stuff because their group that gives me a lot of advantages, right? Going to get rid of that and go back here. Now, I could do the same thing with instruments, and this is what is, like, totally crazy. So let's get rid of this for a minute, okay? So if I want a loden instrument, I'm gonna load up this analog onto this track. Okay? So I've got a track, No rack, no instrument rack, nothing. Just a normal old analog. Okay, so everything's working normal. Now, what if I wanted to have two instruments on this? A Bilton doesn't want me to have two instruments. Um, because it's going to say what's making sound? How do I choose which instrument makes sound All that stuff. There's choices to be made if we have two instruments on track. Right. So the way we do that is we use a rack and instrument rack so I can actually turn this into it. Instrument rack by literally grouping it. Command G. If I press command G, this is now Iraq. The only thing that changed is we see this out here and this out here. It's basically just a container for that instrument, right? Like a little container popped up around it. So let's open it up now. We've got these buttons over here. Let's look at what's here. Let's do. I could close this, and that's all I'd see. So this bottom one shows us the device, right? The device that we're looking at in this case, it's analog. That's cool. Let's look at this button here. This is the macro button. Now this is wild. OK, so, um, we can do a lot with this macro button, and I'm gonna walk you through programming this macro button in just a minute. But I just want to look at the main interface for an instrument rack first. So let's look at here. Now. We're starting to see what we call chains. Okay? So chains are where that choice comes in. Now. We saw something really similar to chains. Just a minute ago and we're looking at the sampler. Right. Um, this stuff up here might look familiar. Key velocity chain. Remember this little orange thing? We didn't call it chain before, but we called it selector before, but it looked pretty similar, right? And this stuff, all of these things, they look really similar to our sampler. Right? And remember in our sampler, what were we choosing? We were choosing when the sampler should decide what sample to use. And now we can use it to say, What instrument should it use? Right. So I can say, based on what key I play, what instrument it should use by having multiple instruments in there. So check it out. Let's do this. Um, so here's my analog. So I click on that and out here, I see my analog. Let's add another thing, let's throw an operator in there. It's gonna drag it down here. Now I have an operator. So each of these air called chains. So in this chain, I have an operator, and in this chain, I haven't analog. Let's do one more. Let's add a sampler. Hi, Here. I have a sampler here. I have an operator here. I have an analog. Now that sampler is empty. Let's get rid of that sample or and let's load in a preset Let's do I don't know pad. There's my old friend Galactic pad. Okay, To now have three different synthesizers. Cute up. Now, the key is all set to be the same, right? So when I hit a note, any note, I'm gonna hear all threes in theme. Right. So there it is. That's all three. All at once. Now, here's what I can do just really kind of on the surface level. The first thing I can dio is I can go through an adjusted volumes for each. I can say maybe I want this analog to be a little quieter operator, even quieter yet, and we'll let that galactic pad kind of shine through. Let's pull it back. Just a hair. Now, I've already designed a pretty dense sound, right. I've got three different instruments contributing to the sound thing. There's a lot happening in that sound. Um, what if I wanted to make it even more dynamic? I can choose. My range is just like before, so I could say when we're in the low range. I only want to hear operator or the analog in the middle range. I only want to hear operator. And in the high range. I want to hear this galactic pad. So when I'm down here, I'm hearing Operator. And now I'm hearing Ah, galactic pad. Um, so that's cool, right? I could do for something like that. I might wanna adjust these volumes so that they're a little more even. Um, so I could make an instrument that does that, but let's get even weirder with it. Let's go like this. Can you guess what I'm gonna dio on a cross fade between instruments? I'm just grabbing this little bar at the top. So what's happening now is I'm cross fading between instruments, right? So they're gonna come in and out. So when I play the one, he's really low notes, I'm just gonna here the, um, analog. Right. Then as I go up, I'm gonna here less and less of the analog and more and more of the operator. And then as I keep going up, I'm gonna here less and less of the operator and more and more of the galactic pad, right? That's like crazy now, I don't have a keyboard set up that has the full range. So really, to demo this, let me create a MIDI clip that's got some really low notes in it. And let's do get I was gonna try to go through, like, an entire scale as fast as I can, So I'm gonna take this duplicated shifting up in octave, and I'll jump between octaves me societies. I can go. Okay, let's set my loop length to include everything I just made there. Okay, so it looks pretty good. So now we're going to hear the whole range of this instrument by launching this clip. Right? So I have a pretty expressive instrument. Now, I can also control the panning. I can say I want my analog to be all the way right and my galactic pad to be all the way left, and then maybe I'll leave the operator in the middle. That could be a cool sound. Let's hear it. Okay. Pretty interesting. I commute. I can solo each instrument if I want, and I commute over there. Um, now, keep in mind that whenever I click on any of these, I still have all the parameters of my instrument that I can adjust, right? Everything still works. So I've got multiple instruments and I'm fading between them and controlling. Ah, when they ah launch right When? When they're in use. Basically, lets reset my panning so I don't get confused by lattes. Um, one last thing in the chain area here in this first chain area is we can always rename just like we can rename everything so we could call this. Ah, you just hit it in the new command are Let's call this bright. Let's call this, um this is also bright. Um, let's call this mid range and let's call this high. Go up. So now we have that all set up so we can keep track of things a little bit. Ah, easier. And you'll notice that this kind of a new thing if I go up to my track that has my instrument rack on it can actually open this up. And look at that. There's my, ah devices for each chain. I have my own devices, so I can't put content on it, right, because the content has to go here cause we're controlling all of them at once. but I can still have some level control. I can still get, you know, some some kind of minutia control in this in this window here. Okay, let's look at velocity control. So this works the same as before, right? So I can just determine where the velocities happen. So if I play loud, we could switch to a whole different synth, right? Like that's totally wild. Um, so you've got a synthesizer that's a piano when you're playing quiet and an organ when you're playing loud or an orchestra when you're playing quiet and a percussion ensemble when you're playing loud, you can easily make that right. OK, now let's look at this chain. This is where things get really interesting. Um, now we looked at this before in that selector and up. So what we can do here is we can say, uh, it's hard to see here, but there are a zone just like the other zones for each one here. But they only have one there only on zero right now. So if I get my mouth just right, I can drag that out and let's do it for all three of them, just to see it a little bit better case and I have all three. So I could do this and this and this. So now when this selector knob is called the chain selector So when we're in this range were Onley gonna hear instrument one? We're not gonna hear instrument two or three, regardless of what key or velocity we play. And here on Lee, this mid range instrument and here on Lee, the high one. Now, why would you want to do that? Well, we haven't talked about key mapping yet. Um, we'll be talking about key mapping mawr later, but it's time to introduce that because here's what we want to dio. We want to basically make this be a switch that we can just quickly control with a knob what it does. So what we can do here is we can assign this to a physical controller, and then we can basically make it a switch that a lot of toggle between different instruments. So let's talk about that in the next video and then after that, we'll get to this macro section 30. Chain Selector & MIDI Mapping: Okay, So what we need to accomplish in this video is we need to figure out how to map this chain selector to a physical controller. And I don't think we've talked about this in this class yet. Um, so first thing we need to do is so I have a MIDI keyboard hooked up My midi keyboard has a bunch of knobs on it, not just keys, but knobs and failures and sliders and stuff and all of those air map herbal. So we're gonna deal with this more in more detail later in a later class. But I do want to talk about it now, because, um, this chain selector is wildly more useful if you know how to map it. So the first thing I need to do in order to be able to map something, so I need to visit my preference is real quick. So this is the keyboard I'm using Is this oxygen 49 looking at the input and track is on, and I need to make sure remote is on also, because if remote is not on, we're not gonna be able to control able to. So if you're not so If this mapping thing doesn't work, be sure that's on. Okay, Next thing I need to do is go into mapping mode. Now there are two mapping modes. There's key mapping mode and many mapping mode. We can get them both up here a compress key or MIDI. Here's the difference. Key mapping mode means you're gonna map a key like a letter or a number on your keyboard. Your physical like typing keyboard, Not your music keyboard. But like, if I wanted to launch this clip when I pressed the letter af um that would be a key bap, and it would be very easy to do. In fact, let's just do it. I would press key, anything that just turned orange I can map. The way I would do it is I would click on what I wanted to map just once. Okay, I just clicked on it. Then I'd press what I want a map it to sewing, press the letter F and it shows up here Key f is mapped to slot three and then I would turn off key mapping. Okay, now we're back Now. I pressed the letter f Oh, and oh, this is very good. Ah, thing that just happened. I have a problem here. See, when I press the letter f look up in this top right corner here, see all that orange stuff That means Whoa, something's going wrong. What that means is that I have this midi keyboard keep had input turned on, which means I can play my key pad like a midi instrument. And I can't have both those on because that means my f key is assigned to different things and a Bolton is confused. So I'm gonna turn that off now. When I pressed F, I launched that clip, right, and it works. So if you get that blinking orange stuff when you're doing key mapping, turn that guy off. But we want to go to many mapping because when we're looking at our instrument rack in our selector here, key mapping isn't gonna do us a ton of good for this because all your keys or buttons there , on and off What we want is something that we can turn to say go from here to here, right? We need something we could turn and a dial and a midi keyboard has some dials on it. Mine does anyway, So I'm gonna go into this midi mapping mode by pressing this midi button here. You can also quickly get to these with command M. We'll get you in the MIDI mapping mode, and command K will get you in the key mapping mode. So I'm gonna I'm just gonna click at this time. So now everything's blue. Anything that's blue I can assign to something on my midi keyboard. So I'm gonna go down to my chain selector area here. I'm gonna click on it just once. You can see I've already assigned it to something, so I'm gonna un assign it. So I'm gonna click up here was compressed the delete key. Now it's unassigned, right? It's like, super easy. Okay, so check us out. Now, I'm gonna sign it again. I'm gonna click in this area now. I'm just gonna turn the knob that I want to assign it to. This is all my media keyboard, So I'm gonna find a dial that's not doing anything. Just one of my assigned herbal dials on my mini keyboard. It's gonna wiggle it, but I just wiggle it. That's all I did. Um, now it's assigned In order to use it, it got to get out of mini mapping mode. So command em or you compress this blue button Appear Okay. Now, when I turn that dial now I have a physical die. Elikann control. That's that chain selector, right? So now I've got a dial on my keyboard so I could be playing my keyboard and be like, Yeah, I'm on my bright since that I can go boom now I'm on my mid range since that I can go Boom now I'm on my pad since, right? Oh, now there's a little bit of guesswork here. Um, So I could make this even better by doing this? Let's do this. I could just do that. Distribute ranges evenly thing. But this works too. So let's do this. Because this way I can pay a slightly less attention. And let's do a little cross fade in there. Kate. Now, when my dials all the way down, I'm on the bright Since when it's all the way up I'm on the high sent and when it's going when it's in the middle, which on my keyboard is when it's pointed straight up. I'm in the middle synth, right? I got a little bit of cross fade between them, right? That's pretty cool. Um, great. So, um, that is our physical. Ah, mapping our chain selector to a physical controller. Let me walk you through how to do that one more time. Let's assign, let's una sign it and then sign it again. So I'm gonna press command em to go in a midi mapping mode now, anything that's blue Aiken map to something on my MIDI keyboard. So if I want unmapped this, you see, it's got a little symbol here. I'm gonna click it once. And then I'm just gonna press the delete key. Now it's unmapped. Right now. Let's cook it again and let's map it to I'm gonna map. It's something different this time. Still another slider on my keyboard. So I just move it around a little bit, and now it's mapped. Now what I can do is go out of many mapping mode. And then when I move that slider, I see the slider on the screen move. Now we can get a little bit more advanced with this. If we wanted to, we could go back to the way we originally were, which is where everything was at zero. All right, this is how our default loaded up, right? Our chain selector was that was had one knob, and they were all at zero. What I could do here is I'm just gonna click on this, and I'm gonna hit the arrow key and move it over. So now this is 01 and two, right? And those are my only possible values. Now, why would I want to do that? This is kind of nuts, right? Because I've got all this range appear that I'm not using, but watch this. Let's go back into our midi mapping mode and let's look at this up here. Excuse me. Details. This is what it's map to. So minimum zero Maxim was 1 27 What if I said the maximum is too? Now, check this out. I'm gonna go out of many mapping mode now, as I use this fader, it's basically the same as it was before, because when it's all the way down, it's at zero. When I push that fader all the way up, it's at to and when it's right in the middle, it's at one So now I've got basically a switch between all three settings. Right now, let me tell you about a practical use for this. I've seen people do shows where they're like a keyboard player in a rock band or something like that. And they need a different synthesizer for every tune that they play in their show. So what they could do is they can set up one of these racks an instrument rack with 12 15 different synthesizers programmed right and then make this switch. So they know on track one, they're here when they get to the next song. Bump that up. Now we're on the second song. Got a whole new since the next song Up to three are up to two in this case, and we've got a whole new scent and they just go through their whole set that way they never have to touch their computer right there. Just cycling through all their different synth patches and they've got everything they want . So that is the chain selector and mapping it to midi controllers. Next, let's talk about ah, this macro area because this is Superfund to and very related. So in the next video 31. Macros: okay. Time talk about macro. So, what are all these buttons doing out here? We've got this little group of eight buttons, and right now they're not doing anything. They're great out. I can turn them, but they stay gray and nothing happens. Here's why they're there. The reason is when you set up an instrument rack, we've got a lot of stuff happening out here. And we might even I have more stuff happening in our instrument rack. Right? What? The macro section is four. Is it? So that you can put your eight most important things you can assign to those knobs and then you can hide everything else and you could just simplify it, right? So for example, let's say we want to be able to move the filter of Well, let's do this. What we could dio as we can hide everything right? Let's say I don't want to see my instruments. I don't want to see my chains. I don't want to see anything. There's still all there, but this is all I want to see in my performance, right? Is this So here's what we're gonna do. I'm gonna open everything back up. Okay? Let's say I want to be able to get to my first filter cut off frequency in my analog. Okay, um, now, if I want to get to this in a performance, I'm gonna have to open up the chain scroll all the way over here and then hit it right. That's gonna be a little dangerous and tricky. So what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna control Click on this. And this only works because I'm in Iraq and instrument rack. Okay, so this won't always work. If you're just in the instrument I'm after macro one boom. Now we get a little green dot There. Now, let's go outside to go all the way back over here, Filter one frequency. Okay. And now, when I move that, I move this this knob in the macro, you can see all the way over here that we're actually controlling that. Right? So now we can hide everything and say, there we got like, that's my filter. One frequency on my bright synth here of the ana lock. Okay, that's cool, but it gets cooler, so let's make it even cooler. Go to our next month, go to our filter here Okay, we can map this to macro to So now we've got the filter frequency for the mid range since the operator we have and a separate one for our analog synth. Right, So we've got two knobs we've got to now is basically doing the same thing, so why not combine them? So let's go to our mid range unassigned. This I'm gonna control click unmapped from filter frequency. Now I'm gonna control Click it again. And this is where your mind should be Blown map to filter one frequency Boom. Here's what's happening This macro one, it renamed itself to macro one because it's got two things assigned to it. Now, this is now controlling both those two filters and let's even get weirder. Let's see if we can put it on our sampler filter. Here's a filter. Here's my cut off frequency. Let's put that on a macro. 12 Okay. Now, just to make life simple, let's rename this so command are filter cut off. Okay, now I'm controlling all my filter got offs with his one knob. Right for all three cents. Isn't that crazy? Okay, so I got the chain selector set, so I could only hear one at a time. Let's make it so we hear all of them and I'm hearing two of them, right? So I could do that all over the place. What about in a case like operator? What if I wanted to control the level of these different, um, oscillators here. Right. This would kind of be a crazy thing to do, but I'm gonna demonstrate it. So I'm gonna map this to the level of our D oscillator. I'm gonna map to macro to. Okay, now, I'm gonna map the next one RC oscillator, RB oscillator, and are a oscillator to macro to now. This macro to is the volume of all four of those. That's when I move macro to I'm controlling all that stuff. So here's what's awesome about these macros. You can map tons of stuff to a single macro, and if you want to get even weirder with it, you can go into the map setting here and kind of fine Tune it right. Like this are four oscillators here. What if I want them to kind of work? Ah, proportionately to each other? Right. What I could do here is I could set this one to have a smaller range, this one to have a bigger range. But I'm going to set the minimum to be higher, the minimum to be higher Maxim to be lower. That's when the minimum to be higher and go all the way to the top. Right? Do you see what's happening here? Now they're all going to be proportional to each other. Let's go out of mapping mode here. And now when I turn this mackerel, keep your eye over here at what's happening, right? Like they're changing at different rates. So they're all staying kind of in a similar range. Ah, to each other, as I just this. So I could get really weird with it. Um, you can invert stuff for some settings. You can invert the setting so that when one goes up, the other one goes down. Um, you can do a lot of fancy stuff to make, like a single knob that controls everything. You know, People do this. I'll show you one in the next section. When we look at some of the presets, we'll try to find some that just have, like, an awesome knob, and you turn up one knob and there's so much stuff map to it. It just sounds sweet. Okay, The last thing about macros, now that we've done all this, we can, of course, map the is to a physical thing. Right? So let's go into our midi mapping mode with command em. Let's say my filter cut off. I'm gonna click on it once I'm gonna turn a knob. My MIDI controller. There it is. I'm gonna turn off midi mapping And now my filter cut off is for all my synthesizers In live is on one handy little knob right in the corner of my keyboard. Right, So I can control all my filters just from That's great, right? So that's pretty sweet. There's a lot of stuff we can do with this. So this is why I have been telling you all along like, Oh, man, can't wait till we get to racks because we can do so much awesome stuff with this. It's a whole other instrument, you know. It's almost a whole other program. Ah, inside of live. To be able to use all of this stuff in conjunction with each other, have this kind of choice element happened where, like you hear the different sounds dependent on you know what key you play. What velocity? Where the chain selector is, where your macro zehr set. Call that good stuff. So it's really fun. The last thing I'll say about this is this group of eight buttons in this four by two kind of grid. Here, you'll see this a lot in a lot of physical controllers that are designed to work well with a Bolton, you'll see a grid of for two rows of four buttons like this. And sometimes they even auto map meaning, like without doing any of this midi mapping business, they'll just show up and start mapping to whatever instrument rack you have set up. Um, so when you see physical, like midi keyboards, you might see this like four by two great of buttons every now and then. That doesn't mean that they auto map. They don't know automat, but, um ah, there they're designed very quickly to integrate with a bilton. So keep an eye out for that when you're looking at keyboards. Okay, one more section on, um, racks. I want to walk through a couple presets and just show you some of the cool things you can do 32. Rack Presets: Okay, just quickly. Now, I want to walk you through a couple of presets here, so I'm gonna delete my instrument rack. I'm gonna click on the top bar here and just press the delete key. So let's go into instrument rack and open it up. So we've got that's like a ambient and evolving. And, you know, one thing to notice here is that when you're looking through your presets here, you could see that when you're looking at an individual instrument, check out the icon. When you look close, see this icon? That's an instrument. See this icon? That's an instrument in Iraq, right? That kind. The icon kind of makes sense right now that you understand racks, why, it's kind of split like that. So let's go back to instrument racks. So I got this stutter pad loaded up. Let's hear it think it's kind of fun. I think we've got okay. It's the first thing we will look at is chains. Do we have multiple chains? I don't think we do in this one. No, we don't. And that's okay. This it's got one chain. It's called beast. Great. So we don't need to have multiple chains in Iraq. That's fine. If we don't, there's still a good reason to use Iraq. Um, so we've got attention here. We got attention set up, and then we've got a bunch of audio effects in this rack. Also, who've got a limiter, an auto filter, a ping pong delay and a reverb. Right now, let's see what's mapped to our Mac Rose. Right? So anything with a little tiny green dot like there's one. There's one. There's one, and there's 10 and there's a whole bunch down here that little green dot means it's mapped to a macro. So let's move my filter frequency here on the macro. And now we see our volume is going up and down. And if we tab over to our filter here, we're probably seeing that move as well. Yes. All right. So that's interesting, because they've got the volume also influencing the filter frequency and the residence. All right, check that out. The residence is moving at a proportion to the filter frequency as well. Okay, what about these Up here. Now, this is interesting, because this is the on off right? This turns this ping pong delay is on her off. So when we go down Teoh, what do we think is mapped to that delay? The space amount is mapped to the dry, wet mix. When I turn this all the way down to zero, we have it maps to turn off, and as soon as I move it up, it turns on right. So at zero, it's off at one. It turns on right. Same thing with this river. It looks like when I'm at zero, it's off. But as soon as I push it up at all, it's on the one. And the way we would do that, as we would just go into our we would been app this to our space amount so we would map it the on off button, and then we can look at our map settings and so see, we have a whole bunch of more complicated map ings here. It's really fun stuff. So let's look for this So ping pong delay on off so name device on reverb device on Ping pong delay. There it is. So it's set to one and 1 27 So basically ah, when it's above zero, it's going to be on right Ah, pretty cool. So there's a tonic stuff you can do. Let's look at one more. Uh, let me get rid of this whole rack. Let's look at Let's look at an orchestral one cello section about that floated up. OK, now Oh, this is good. This is this is inception time because what we've got now is remember how I said you could put anything inside of Iraq? Here's where it gets weird. You can put Iraq in Iraq, so and then you could put Iraq in that rack and then you have racked conception. So that's what we've got going on here. So here's our word. Most rack. And so I look at my llegado chain right inside that I have Iraq that's gotta sustain in a release chain. And I've got samplers and all of these if I go to staccato one, I have another rack here and it's just got one, and it's got a sampler in it. And Pizzicato has another act, which just has one, and it has another sampler in it, right? So let's look at our mapping here, so key velocity chain is set so that we can control that with one of these out here, right? So llegado attack llegado release. That's probably where are llegado attack and releases coming from from out here, right? Sustain and release that's probably being controlled by these two. So there's a lot o articulation. That's probably yeah, see, that's controlling our, um, llegado staccato or pizzicato because that's what we would call those is an articulation so we can set which kind of sound we want by doing this. So that is just the chance Elector mapped to macro one here. Okay, so racks within rocks can happen. You can put Iraq within Iraq. Um, and you can put Iraq in that rack in Iraq in that rack, and it could go on for a very long time. And you could go down a scary wormhole where you never see your friends again and you lose your job and, ah, it's a rough life. Um, but that's what you can do with racks. That's why I get so excited about it. And, um, why, I think I just think it's so brilliant to put in this program that you can just design these sounds. Okay, so we looked at a whole bunch of stuff here, I think Ah, I've impressed upon you how cool racks are Wattana stuff you can do with racks. Please spend some time exploring them. Build some of your own racks, look through the presets and do some, like just quick dissection of the rack. Find some cool properties in them and have some fun with it. Do some of these key map ing's. Ah, it's just a ton of fun. 33. Drum Rack Review: okay, It's time to revisit drum racks. Know what we're going to do Here is, um, in this video, we're gonna do a kind of review of drum Rex. We've looked at drum racks before. We're gonna look at him again, and they should be a little more familiar to you now, now that we know what instrument racks are and we know a bunch of the instruments, right? We know. Simpler. Which plays, Ah, an important role in drum racks. And then we're gonna look at kind of two key features of drum racks. Eso that that helped kind of allow you to make really dynamic drum kits, you know? So, um so let's start with this. A little review. So I'm gonna get a drum rack up here, So I'm just gonna click on drums, and I'm gonna look at some of my built in stuff so that you have it too. Ah, and let's go with this kit. Core ate away. Now, I'm hearing this little preview because I have, by the law edition lineouts. Someone double click on it and load up that guy. Okay, here we go. So this is Iraq. You know, it's essentially an instrument rack with ah couple changes to it. Um, so let's just kind of step through some of it, and then we'll look at some other things inside of it that are a little hidden. So the first thing we see that's different is this, you know, four by four, lay out. Now, this is These are essentially our keys, right? So these correspond to a key on the keyboard, and we could play him just like a piano, but with Trump sounds. Right. Um, now, one thing to keep in mind here is we have the whole range of the MIDI keyboard available to us, even though we only see these 16 pads, and that's what this is over here. So where they're white or like, lighter colored, I should say, um, they're showing us that there's a sample there where they're not. There's no sample there. So I could click and drag and scroll up to another bank, and I'm empty on all these. But I could fill all of these sounds with drums if I wanted to. So I have a lot of drums available to me. Not just these 16. There's a lot more up here. And if I put those in there, I can get access to them. Ah, in the middle grade, right? Like when I make a MIDI clip like this, that's open this up a little bit more, so I can see it. So here's all my drum sounds right. And these labels correspond to these labels, right? So I can see all of them. So if I add more stuff up here, I'm going to see it in here in this list of stuff, right? That's pretty slick. Okay, lets go back. Okay, let's keep moving to the right here. So here we have a little bit of inception happening here because we have another one of these racks within Iraq's. And I know that because I have a macro section on the inside. Here's my macros section for my outside, Right. So, Mac Rose keys and then Mac rose again. And we can kind of see this little rounded corners here telling us that we've got another rack inside there. So this pad has Iraq on it. That's what we're looking at. Now, if we look at this one, this one and this one, you to these pads of Iraq. So let's look at this. Kick it away so I can play it by clicking here. I can solo it and I can mute it by hitting here. That's not gonna do us any good at the moment because we don't have a sequence going. We had a sequence going and we wanted a mute it. We could do it. Okay, so let's look at it. We've got some controls in our macro is set to control some parameters and we see the little green dot meaning that the macro is controlling those things. We've also got some more things inside here. We've got a compressor and any que we have that pretty much everywhere. So let's see if there's anything else inside this rack that is our kick. So we're looking at Macron's. Now let's look at the chain's nothing in the chain except the volume of the chain is being controlled by something out here. Let's take a guess at what that is. Probably this one right, There we go. So I turned that and I see that move. So this volume knob is mapped to the volume of the chain, which is a cool way to do it. We also have e que the glue compressor, which we'll talk about the glue compressor later. But the glue compressors out here. Let's open it up and look at it. So I just double clicked on that by toe. Open it up. But here's the glue compressor. It's a kind of compressor that's unique to ableto and again, we're gonna be talking about effects soon. So here we have a knob for that glue compressor. We have some e que settings all set up in the macro, so all of that contributes to this one kick sound, right? If we go to this rim, you know, we've got a lot of the same stuff but mapped a little bit different. Well, it's probably actually matched the same. Each of these is a simpler right. We've seen simpler before. It's a simpler inside Iraq. We could hide this stuff if we wanted to and just work with the sounds as they are if we didn't want to have some of that control of all of this stuff to mess with, but it's good to have it, you know, Let's look at here's the rim click. We could adjust the sound of it. I'm gonna make a little bumpier, right. Give it a little more low end. Change the pitch, right? The opposite of more low end. Here we go. It sounds like we're getting a big wood box. What's that called? A coat code. Could job cone, I think C o G j o N. Cone Sounds like a cone. Now it's like a big wood box that you play like a drum. Anyway, um okay, so that's the essentials of our drum rack, right? Like it works. Ah, just like an instrument rack. Except for this part and a couple more things. Okay, so in order to look at these couple more things I need to expose a couple things that are hidden related to this section. Because what I want to look at is, let's say, um this conga, Uh, how do I know what pitch it's gonna play? Because this is a simpler so it can still play any pitch, right? And how do I know what pitch is going to trigger this sound? I can figure it out because of where it is on the grid, but I could also change it. So in order change it. We got to go and look at our chains. So here's all our different chains, right? Each of these pads is on a different chain, and that's intentional because it gives us all this control. So a couple of these things we've seen before in chains we've seen volume. We've seen panic, right? We've seen the mute and solo, and that correlates to out here, right? I hit mute. It shows up back there court. So we know those things. Now this audio to is disabled, which we're gonna talk about in a minute. And now we have these three elements here, and there's one more big element that I'm not showing you quite yet. Ah, we have received play and choke. So let's talk about that element that we're not seeing yet, cause let's just expose everything. So down here we have. Oh, well, first of all, if you're not seeing some of this, be sure this little Io light is up. That's where that's coming from because we want to see our ins and outs. And that's these three things right here. Now, these three buttons you're only going to get when you're looking at the chain right when I move out of the chain and I hide the chain thes go away. So be sure you're on the chain and you have io ah, lit up so that you're seeing the Iot, cause we're gonna work with that now. And also, I want to look at my sends in returns. So when I hit return, I get this extra affects box down here. Now, that gets pretty interesting, right? So this is what we're gonna do in the next two videos. We're gonna talk about this return Ah, function. And then we're also gonna talk and and the send function. And then we're going to talk about this choke box, right? And the receive and play we'll talk about while we talk about the choke. So basically these three things and then this stuff in the next two videos. So let's jump in and let's do the choke and receive and play in the next video 34. Choke: Okay, so I'm gonna hide this little return down here so that we're just seeing are received. Play and choke. So the receiving player are fairly simple. Let's go down to our kick. So let's find that there it is at the top, right? I can play it from here. So receive What note? Can I play on a midi keyboard that's going to trigger that sample. Right. So this is just assigning it a note, right? And it shows me up here what's already assigned. I can scroll up more and I can assign it to any free note, right? Anything that doesn't have a pitch assigned to it. So I could say e zero e zero is now what triggers this? So if I play E zero on my midi keyboard, I'm now going to trigger that note, and that's fine. Um, if you don't have a great reason to get in here, um, I wouldn't worry about it. I wouldn't mess with these too much because you mess with the grid over here and you can, and it's well, let's just say if you don't have a good reason to change those, I wouldn't change him so this is when we play this pitch, it's going to launch the sample. And if you remember, remember back to when we were looking at the simpler and the sampler we had that thing called the route No, right. The root note was the untranslated posed, Ah, key that we would hit that would play back the audio file without transposing it. Let me say that one more time it would be the The root key is the key that we can play that plays back the audio file that is the sample without speeding it up or slowing it down or changing the pitch at all. Right? It's just the natural sound. So if remember, the root note defaults to see three. So that's what we have here we have C three. So what that means is that when I play this C one, what it's gonna dio is it's going to effectively play a C three through that sampler, right? Which means we're going to hear our kick without any transposition on. But what if we wanted to Ah, we could say I'm just clicking and dragging here. Play a higher note now. Right now, we're playing a sampler. So if we tell this kick our sorry, we're playing a simpler If we tell this kick to play a simpler and then play but play a higher note We're still gonna hear the same sample because it's going to the same simpler device. But we're gonna hear a slightly higher note now. We're not in this case actually going to hear this pitch change and go up because it's actually going into another rack, right, which has another process in there, and we're stopping it from allowing it to transpose, actually. But if we were doing something like, um, we were triggering a synthesizer or something like that, this could be something that where we would basically set what note? We want the drum hit to play, right. So we could say, When I play this note, I want you to play a G on the synthesizer. That would be a little cumbersome to do, because you you could just bypass this whole process and just use an instrument rack. Um, but there are good reasons when you would want to do that. So now let's get to the meat and potatoes and talk about this choke because This is really fun. Um, what choke means And this is like kind of an older drum machine thing that's been around for a while, and this is kind of able tones lives, implementation of it. What it means is basically, um, it's kind of like let's say you had a couple different hits you could do on the same drum like a high hat is a really good example. So, high hat, we could hit it with a stick or we could, um, well, actually, let's do it. Let's let's simplify it. We could hit. We could leave it open, right? So our foot up and then hit it with a stick or we could push it down and hit it with a stick, right, But in a sampler, that's gonna be two different samples, right? So we might want to set it so that those can't be happening at the same time or if I hit it open and then I hit it close the though whatever is ringing from having it be open stops, right, because in reality, we couldn't hit it open and closed at the same time, unless we had to. High hats, which we typically don't unless you're like Rush. So what we can do is let's say hi hat open, Okay? There's are high, had open and high had closed, right, weaken set these to choke each other of which basically means when one plays, the other one stops. Whichever one started or is playing, it stops when the other one's starts playing. So the way we do that is we have 16 settings here and the settings. These 16 do not line up with these 16 pads. It's a common mistake, so they don't mean ah, let these ones go. What these are is basically 16 groups, right? So what? This one we're going to say we're going to sign this to group one kind of arbitrarily, and we're gonna sign this one two, Group one also. Now those are grouped together and they will choke each other. So if I do this right, they stop each other. If I unde group them, that's all I really have to dio right now they can keep going. So now they're not. You can hear. This one continues to ring after I hit that one. Right? But if I put this toe one were killed, um, in a lot of e g m types stuff. We have multiple snare sounds that's getting to be pretty common, even in, like, trap music and things like that. Um, and you might want to choke all your snare drums together so you could do that just by saying, Okay, we'll set a snare drum to two. And let's say all of these are snare drums. Set them all to to, especially if you had a particularly ringing snare drum. Now, on Lee, one of those could be ringing at a time. Any new attack shuts the old one off, right? So that's what the choke does. It basically ah kills a previous sound on the same group from happening. So this is where you can start to set up really dynamic sounds that sound pretty realistic . Um, let's set this up by going into are great. And let's just make a little loop here. I had closed and I had opens, right. So let's do this. Um, let's go make a really short Well, it's not really gonna matter. Um, with just do this pattern a couple times and see how it goes. Right? So you hear this one is cutting off that one that slows down a little bit, like even pull it back right now. You really hear it right here, heading the same time. So this one's winning. But if I did this so that's choking. Ah, that's the choke setting in the drum rack, Of course. Okay, let's move on and talk about sends and returns inside of Iraq. 35. Send Return Drum Rack: Okay, so sends and returns inside the rack. This is pretty cool. So you'll note this audio to Doesn't do anything right, because it's not supposed to. And the send button isn't showing me anything new because there's nowhere to send it. So let's grab this return. And now I have this drop audio effects here. Let's grab an audio effect. Now. We haven't talked a lot about audio effects yet. Um, and we will soon. I promise. Um, but let's just grab something that's gonna be really obvious. Ah, a simple delay. Right. So we're gonna have a whole bunch of delays. I'm gonna drag that right down in here. Now, I've got a delaying. You'll notice there's a tiny little a set up there. Right, Because this is now what we're calling send a right. So in my send A, I have volume panning, mute solo, same as everything else. Now, I also have this audio too, so I can send this to the rack output, which is going to be basically here, right? And it's gonna forward it on to the track to the Channel strip. Right? Which is gonna go into this main mix or I can send it directly to my send over here or my return over here or over here. I have to return set up in A and A B. And I could send it directly to those if I wanted to. But let's just leave it to the rack output. So it's go. It's passing through and going here. You see? Here, this is my simple delay effect. This is just the effect I happen to put on it. And this shows up kind of like another chain, right? And it kind of is another chain, actually. Um so let's give it some juice, crank it up. Ah, And now I've got this. Send a over here, and that shows up because of this. So this send option is now showing up because I have somewhere to send it. I can send it within the rack so I can give it some send and send it to this simple delay and that is going to run it through this effect and then out, right, so audio to is going to the rack output, but it can go also to my returns. Over here, my main track returns and send is being sent to it. So what I want to send to it. I don't really want to send my kick to that delay. Let's since we've already got something going with their high hats. Let's send just the closed high hat to this delay and let's send kind of some kind of a bit of it to it. Let's see what we got waken See it coming in here a little more kind of hear it, you should put that went all the way up so we can hear a little bit better turn it off to an off beat so that we hear it a little more. Obviously way right, that's pretty. Getting pretty fun is what I want to do now, just for pure aesthetics. I'm gonna take my open hi hats. Take all the velocities for it down a bit. So now I've got this send is sending to my main track and if I click on it, I see my settings for that effect. And so it's basically an affects chain within my drum rack, and I have to send something to it. And that goes out to the output. Makes sense that Sundin returns within a drum rack. Pretty fun. You could do a lot of fun stuff with it on. Don't forget about choking and all our settings in the drum rack. 36. External Instrument: all right. Last but not least, um, the one instrument that we haven't talked about yet in our list is this external instrument device. So when I go here and look at it, um, if I open up and look at the priests for it, nothing pops up, right? There's not really presets for this and you'll see why in a minute. So I'm gonna loaded here onto a midi track. Now, what this is for is, let's say you have a piece of gear in your studio that you want to control with a Bolton and basically as a sound source, that's the best way to think of it. Use it as a sound source. Do you have a keyboard? You have like a cool keyboard that you really like the internal sense of it. What we're going to use this external instrument for is a quick and easy way relative. You control that keyboard with many information and get audio out of it, right? So I really wanted to set this up for you, but I don't have anything that's midi controllable that produces sounds in my studio. Right now I have some some analog gear, but it doesn't execute this out of the first stuff. There is a way to control some analyzers that need control Voltage using this external instrument, but in other ways, using some max for live tricks that maybe we'll have when we deal with Max. But I actually don't have any devices that, um, except Midi and make sounds like I have some a bunch of controllers in here. But what we will be looking for is some kind of synthesizer you might have in your studio. So what we would dio, Because we would set up that synthesizer like any of the instruments. So we might need to take a visit two references and make sure that it's on in here. And then once we do that, we haven't plugged in. We would see it in this list, So it's a midi do. And then we'd say that synthesizer. And then we'd plug in a midi cable from our MIDI interface, which may be the same as your audio interface if it has a midi output, which most of them do. So from the MIDI out of our audio interface unity in of that synthesizer. Right? So now we could make a clip here, and we could put notes in it and that would get sent to that synthesizer, right? That external synthesizer would would be basically controlled by able to. Now, that isn't anything monumental, because we can do that. Ah, here is well, weaken. Send the midi to other places. What's handy about this is that we can then also at the same time, recorded the audio in from it. Right. So what that means is, um So I walked you through half the set up. So the first part of the set up is taking the Mickey out from our audio interface plugging into the midi in of our keyboard. Okay, the second part is taking the audio out of our keyboard and plugging it into one of our input channels on our audio interface. Basically was making a loop, right? Like I'm sending midi information to the keyboard and I'm getting audio information back. So So what? I could set up I would select the odd the midi controller here. And then once I did that, I would say audio in a list of my available outputs would come in here. Ah, if I had them set up. And then I will get an audio signal So you would see here Midi would go out and it would come back in. So you can see it's like a feedback loop. We send ah midi clip from the track and that goes into the device which sends it out to our piece of external hardware. And then we bring back the audio signal. And then we put that back into the track so that after we get the audio signal, you know, we can add any kind of effects we want, right? So and then we would dial in the actual sound on our physical synthesizer. Thats where the actual synthesis is gonna happen. So he would use this if you had something external that you wanted to control. A piece of hardware. Basically, Um, after that, we can't do much more. We can boost the gain. We can fiddle with laysan Layton. See, that's like a delay. Um, an unwanted delay. Let's call it a tiny one. Ah, and then we're going to go. So there are no presets here. Right? Because all of the presets are gonna be in your external instrument. Really? All the settings so that's the external instrument. It's pretty simple, but it's pretty important. You know, there's kind of got to be a way for us to do this for us to communicate with our external hardware s so that we can use some of those sounds in some of those other devices that you have laying around. Great. So that's in the external instrument. It didn't really fit nicely into any group of videos like the synthesizers and samplers did . So I just kind of tacked it on the end so that you know what it is, because you're always probably going to see that thing, to sit in there and the list of instruments and wonder what it is. And now you know, and knowing is half the battle. Okay, let's continue on 37. Thanks Bye: All right, everyone. We have reached the end of part four of my gigantic Mableton class. You haven't taken the other able 10 classes. You're not too late. There's able to 123 and now able to four, there's gonna be two more. They're gonna be able to five and able to six enabled. In five, we're gonna talk about audio effects and some mixing techniques on a bit more on just overall production. Mostly audio effects. Me effects things like that and working with plug ins in audit and able to in six, we're gonna be focusing on Max for live. That's this guy right here. Max for live lets you do all kinds of completely unbelievable things. I'm so excited to work on this class. Um, it's kind of like my, uh, sprint to the finish line to be working on this, Max, because I love Macs were alive, so I can't wait till we get there, but we gotta do able to five first. So if you're, uh, if you're just jumping in able to four here, don't be afraid to go back to able to. In 12 or three, you will get lots of good information. My goal is to have this be the most comprehensive online class you've ever taken. I didn't want to just make another able to in class, focusing on little things here and there. I wanted to make a class that really got you comfortable with the entire program. Which is why, in this class we looked at all the instruments available to you. So with that, I will say good bye, And thanks for watching. And I hope you learned a lot. And I hope you had a great time. I hope you're gonna make a lot of beautiful music, So I will see you in the next class. Yeah. No. 38. SkillshareFinalLectureV2: 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.