How to become a Synth Runner - Synthesizer Sound Design Class [with Arturia Pigments]

1. Overview Video: Hey runner, I am void or a professional sense sound designer based in Germany. I've created a few bestseller sounds as with my futuristic style. The most recent one is called analog save up time for pigments. And that's the one you see here right now. I have created a sound design courses specifically for beginners and intermediate levels. While I will explain everything from scratch, I'm going to maintain a slightly steep learning curve and dive into some advanced techniques as well with you. So here's what you get. Let's take a brief look at the chapters and start with chapter one. In the first chapter, we will create four different patches of the most important patch types. I will show you how to take a patch from here to here. In chapter two, we will dive deeper into things like play mode. Lfos, randomizes, and how to apply all of this. In the first chapter, we will explore the most important and common effects, and we will finish with how to organize them in your plugin chain. In the fourth and final chapter, we will have a look into arpeggiator sequences and as well into FM synthesis and wave tables. Before we finished with some nice tips on how to make progress from here. When you are ready for his big adventure, grab a drink, enroll to this course and load up your sin. We have got some sounds to create. 2. Chapter 1 - Welcome Video: Hello and welcome to our first video. So I'm glad to have you around intercourse. And I just want to give you a brief introduction in how I approach this and how you should approach the course and just a few tips. So first of all, like I told on the product page and in the video, I'm doing this course for a beginner and intermediate. So the challenge for me is because you guys have two different levels of knowledge to bring you together on one level without being too fast for the beginners and not bore out the intermediate people. So what I do, what I've seen several times when people create tutorials or guides or courses, is that they would explain every little knob all the time talking about envelopes for 10 min without you hearing anything at all in the first place. And I think that's boring because the cool thing is to see the magic of sound design happening in front of you. So I follow a different approach. We will create four patches in the first four episode as you probably already know. And each time I do something new, I'm going to explain this. So if we introduced modulation in our chapter, I will explain what it does. If I use the fine tube, fine tune up in a lesson the first time, I will explain what it does and why I do it, of course. And the same goes for everything else. But I will only explain as much as we need in this particular moment to create the patch. However, in chapter two, I am actually then going to die for view into envelopes, LFOs functions, randomizes and all of the stuff. And then I will explain every little button and every little setting. The only XX acceptation is that I won't go over these here. Can I turn this thing down? Because this is usually not on synthesizers, but I mean, this will explain by yourself. If you, if you understand envelopes later, these will be self-explaining. So it doesn't matter. Yeah. Because like maybe in the first or second episode, it can be a little bit challenging for you if this is the first time that you have to deal with new things that I explained here. So don't feel discouraged if you can't follow up completely and really beginning because we will repeat this. So we will be creating patches again and again and again like four times in the first chapter. If you don't understand envelopes or oscillators, are filters really well in the first episode than maybe in a second or third or fourth. So we'll go over and over again. And I think this process of doing this while we create something is way more interesting than explaining it one-by-one. So just keep that in mind that it can be a little bit challenging in this way, but it will, you will get it over time the more we proceed and then more you do. Because what I want from you is that you don't only watch these episodes, but pause after each episode and try to recreate or use what you've just learned. So let's say you stop after episode 1.1 to recreate the pad that I built. Then load up your synthesizer and start to build at one-by-one, step-by-step. And don't only copy values, so don't don't go through here and read these numbers and try to bring an ops to the same amount until you have done the patch, and then you have a nice patch. Then you have effectively copied the patch, but you haven't learned a lot about the processes. I mean, you have done it then for one time, But what is better than doing? Only dad? Don't be afraid to experiment. Before you set up the envelope. For instance, two settings that I have, play a little bit around with it. Play with the settings. Play some notes, look what they do, and try to figure out their relationships to each other. And experiment a little bit. Don't be afraid to do that. And then when you've done, maybe after 10 min or so, you can then apply the exact values that I had in the video if you want to recreate the exact same patch and move on, because this way you will, you will have more benefit from, from creating, from doing this. You should always keep this approach in mind even in the further chapters, if you go through the effects or the LFOs, really take your time to play around with each of these elements. So that's the advice I would give you two, how I approach this course and that you keep in mind that you don't feel discouraged in the beginning, if something is maybe a little bit steep learning curve, I think you will get there over time the more we proceed. And the second thing is that pigments, like I told you in the beginning, that you don't need pigments to take this course, which is true. You can do it as with most synthesizers that are subtractive, like this one. However, you maybe don't have all the functions are the same features because every synthesizer is different and pigments is really, really fully fledged in that regard. So maybe some, some things you won't be able to recreate and it will be generating a bit more challenging for you to follow up. Because sometimes buttons are a little bit different, labeled, most of them will have the same names, but sometimes it's labeled different, are laid out differently. So I hope this won't be too much of a problem. However, if anyone of you is now not owning pigments, are not having access to pigments. What you can do, I just wanted you to know about this opportunity, is you can move over to spliced.com. It's what I did. And you can rent it there. You see it says here free to use ten days left. So I've paid €10 and I could use it for a whole month. And you don't need to subscribe further as you can really just subscribe for one month, pay only ten bucks and use it for a month. If you want to have another month, you pay another ten. And this rent to own concept means that you are not only renting it, it saves your balance. That means that if you pay in, let's say five months for 50 bucks, and then you say, I want to own pigments now I want to buy it. You only pay the remaining balance, the difference. So what you paid already is being subtracted from the final price. So just that you know about this opportunity in case that you rather want to use pigments to have it easier to follow up or to have access to the synthesizer. But enough of the talk. So I'm glad to have you here. I hope you enjoyed us. We will have a good time and we will see us in the next lesson. 3. Chapter 1 - Creating a Pad patch: Welcome to our first patch. So let's start with creating a pad. And in pigments, you just click here and click on New Preset and you're given a completely blank patch, which sounds like this. So you click here and then bring it back to analog. So we have our basic waveforms which are sought to this one here. This is an inverted saw tooth is just the same inverted. This is the pulse wave and the triangle and assign, and you will later here how they all sound or even I can show you just buy now. But like I said, I don't want to bore you with all the little things like so. I will try to keep a certain tempo. But first and foremost, because maybe some of you are not using pigments in this course. Maybe you use your own synthesiser. So somewhere either you will have a menu where you can create a new preset, or sometimes it's hidden in the factory presets. It's called init. In it, like initialize, somewhere has to work in it, or initialize which will give you a blank new preset. So that's what you're looking for. This is how the song waveform sounds like. This is the pulse. Sounds more hollow. A little bit like ritual games. So this is more edgy. Says more low end, a little bit more powerful than we have to triangle. It's more subtilis, you can hear, more rounded, not that edgy, and assign this even more smoothed out. And this is something you can even tell from the waveform a little bit because this has more edges here. And this is more rounded. And that's actually how it sounds. So the first thing when we create a new patch is we have our oscillator here, which is or sound source. So what we hear is this, this waveform being played if I hit a key and we have three oscillators, they are turned off now because the volumes is not dialed in. And the first, like the absolute basic of every patch you create is your oscillator and what wave form you choose and how you set them up. So let's just proceed from now on. So we have a filter on every single patch. And the filter is basically like what you hear is the full spectrum of sound. So if I bring in my equalizer just to show you, Whoops. No, come on. So let me actually remove this. So if I hit our key now, you can see the frequency. So we hear the whole spectrum from all the way down here, Up to hear sound. And this is why it sounds so harsh and so strong because we just hear everything in the same time and this is not what you want. Usually, if you go to a filter, in this case it's a low-pass filter, just by default. It, it cuts off higher frequency. So if I play and just look at this graphic here. Okay, Maybe I should move the windows so you can see what the drought does. It cuts off the higher frequencies and the less of them are given, the quieter and more subtle sound comes. So while we do, when we do create patches, we first of all removed some harmonic content. We remove some frequencies. And this is called low-pass filter because it Let's pass through the low frequencies. So a high-pass filter is the opposite. It, Let's pass through the high frequencies and cuts off the low frequencies. This is the, exactly, the exact opposite here. So you can see it. So it takes off the lows, even until you can't hear anything anymore. Then there's bandpass, which is the same from both sides. So it cuts off a little bit from the top and a bit from the bottom, so it's a bit more well-rounded. And you can shift the emphasis. You can say red, I want more of the highest or red I want more of the lows. But personally for me, low-pass filter is the best thing for almost every patch. So personally, I believe that high-pass filter and band-pass you can work with them, but they are more specific for specific purposes. Just because they are more harsh and less powerful, because you have less low frequencies and more high frequencies. So after we have set up a filter to level that you'd like, for now a baseline. What we do is we work with envelopes and envelopes. We have three of them here, so you can see, but we have only one by default now activated and this is linked to the volume. So what we set up here is what we hear. So if I hold down a key, you see this little dot going through. But let me actually change the settings so you can see it better. So what it does represent is all volume. So the bottom of course is not not audible. This is no volume or just to initialize position. And then this is the maximum amount of volume that we can have in our patch. It's just determined by the maximum volume you just set up on yourself. Or you could of course, may use after sustained button, but I'll explain this in a second. And with the attack button, you can determine how long it will take for the sound when you hit, hit a key to get to the full volume. So 3 s, if I hold down, it will take 3 s to get there. On the other hand, the opposite fingers to release button. If I release it, it will now take 3 s and 77 s to fade out. If I bring this down to one, if I release the key, we're instantly here nothing anymore. Because to release time to fade out of the whole volume is one millisecond. So this way we can determine how our instruments should behave. So if I bring it like this, this is what it sounds like now. And even if I bring it down to zero, which means that we instantly start at a maximum volume. The tail is determined by their release. So if I just hit a key ones now and you can see it here, I'm not touching it anymore. This is to release fade out now because we put it here on 4 s. If I bring this down and played the same key, it's shorter. Envelope is basically like the control unit that shapes the volume progression. And since we want to make a pad, which is a huge texts or texture of sound, soundscape. We want to have a longer attack and release because this is what is the core of a pad sound. So then we have two other buttons. We have sustain, which is like the name says, when we keep holding down notes, sustain their sustained note. So if this is 100 or one, It's the maximum amount of volume. But if you bring this down, changes and the decay is basically the button that determines how long it takes from the highest position, the highest amount of volume. If if we reach it after these two point five-ninths seconds, how long it will take from there to go to to sustain. Right. So if the case on to, Let's bring it to 3 s, it will now take 3 s from here to here. And here we'll stay as long as I hold down the key because it's sustained. As the same name says. When I released the key, they release one, the release button is triggered. For volume. I usually have sustained just on 100. So that means that indicate button, It's not doing anything, doesn't matter where it is. Because 100-100 is no change in volume, no matter if it takes 20 s or one millisecond. So this is a good base for our lead, for our paths are. And the next thing we might want to do is add a little bit more thickness to the sound. So we have only one oscillator activated. Now, if we activate oscillator two, we just increase the volume here to bring it in to make it audible. And we can change the waveform if you want. So this sounds different from this. So this brings more power into the patch. Or this one would. Add more low end but more subtle, but we go for something more strong than something that is really like common on a lot of patches. Sometimes you don't want it, but what is common is to add our so-called sub oscillator and Dennison oscillated as playing one octave below. Which means if I play this a here, now, it's like here's another one octave below. This is an a, this is an a, and this is an a. And this is an a. And an octave above just means the same node, one octave higher or one octave lower. And by bringing this down 12 semitones, because one semitone is the distance from one key to another. So this is an a, and this is an a flat. This is one semitone. So if we count down 123, 456-789-1011, 12, we end up on the same note, just one octave lower. So if I bring this to 12 -12, it means if I hit this key now for Plato's state, one is playing this and oscillator to which I brought down by -12, is now playing this note. And this is adding low-end. Compare this. If I bring this back to zero, c, This is stronger, it has more low. And by the way, if you ever want to reset anything and pigments, and that is true for a lot of synthesisers. You just double-click it. Dan, whatever you click on double-click, we'll reset it to default. Even for make this double-click, it's back to default. So we have now a sub-oscillator, which gives our patch here more power. Now thicker and stronger. And I want to add something because this is a pad, right? And a pad needs needs more room to expand and we have no room, you have no effects applied. Now. We have two effects that are turned on as you can see, but they are set to zeros so we don't hear them. So this dry wet button wherever you will find it on whatever plaque and you will find it. It says dry is your is your patch without whatever you find this button on and wet is with the maximum amount of this button off this plugin. So this is a reverb module here, right? So this is giving us room. So now a reverb has added some room to a patch, to a pat. And we will be talking about effects later in the chapter three where I will explain reverb delay everything really in detail. So don't worry now, what basically here we can dial in the amount of rework, how long it should. So if I bring this down to here, there's almost no tail when I release the key, but here we have more fit. Here we can change the size of the room to make more huge. Right? So we have now a little bit of reverb on a patch. But it still doesn't really sound massive. And we can do something to change that. So we had the envelope with volume before and had set up and it's fine. But a filter here is not doing anything. It's just set to this value, right? But imagined fertile would be doing something like this. This is something that I didn't know by hand. Well, we actually don't need to do this by hand all the time. We want to program our patch so that it does these things for us when we play. So we can focus on playing. So what we can do is we have two other envelopes here. So I click on envelope too, which is this one. And I can just go up here to the cut-off knob until I get this double arrows. Hold the left mouse button down, and then just move it up in this way, in this situation. So it brings up the value here from zero, which is our default position now, up to whatever value I want. If I bring this to, let's say 0.20, you see there's a little glowing, even more glowing part of the ring on the right outer edge here, which shows us the range, range that I just have set up. And this envelope is now linked to this. So if I now bring this up to, let's say, Well, do we have here 3 s, like yeah, around kind of similar value if I don't, if I hold down a key. You can see it here. It moves up like here. And then jumps back. Because this envelope is not affecting this filter. And the reason why it jumps back is because of the case time is set to true 100 milliseconds. Do you remember? If you keep holding down to note, this sustain is determined whether highest position is, in this case it's zero, it's back to default, right? And the decay tells us how long it takes from the highest position to, to sustain position. So if we want to have a smooth, smooth transition back because we go up here and now we want to go smooth back. We need to increase this as well. To at least something close. It could even make it a little bit more longer. Read bring it close to two attack so we have a better feeling of transition here. And to release button again is if you release the key, so if you play now, and I stopped here, it's instantly gone. The filter cutoff costs are released a set to 100 milliseconds. So I need to take care of this as well. I will bring this up around similar value in this case, because I want the patch to behave the same no matter if I hold down a key or if I released the key, I want to have the same amount of filter paper. So if I release it here now, it was still have some smooth fade out. You can see it up here. So if I released the key, now, see it's still going a little bit back. And this is something that you really need to get into your head, like the difference between release and decays releases when you release the key asset sets and TK is that decay time. Cheers, sustained value. When you hold down the key. He sustaining. So you may notice now that the pad here, it sounds good, but it sounds a little bit metallic. So if you spend attention to the tail, There's some metallic sound. So what can we do about this? If you turn off the reverb for now so we can hear our basic patch. It's metallic but not that much, but we could now take to solve with instead of this Paltz. See if that makes a difference. And I'm really, so we go back to the rework and we have filters here. So like I told you here, I told, I told you that the low-pass filter, Let's pass through the low frequencies. This is why it's called low-pass and high-pass. Let's pass through the high frequencies, which is why it's called high-pass. So the same concept applies here. This is a low-pass filter. This means that if I want to have less of the higher harsh frequencies, which sound metallic, I just cut a little bit off them in the reverb tail. So if we do something like this, just to show you on extreme value so you can really hear the difference. This makes a difference. It smooths out a little bit too harsh part. Again, we can hear filter out lows with this one, but I don't, I mean, it's by default on 200 hz. This is good because it filters out the very low end, which can get muddy in a mix. And we'll just leave it around this. But I wouldn't do anything with this because I don't want to filter out our core or middle. And their dendrites damping, which does the same job like damping the higher frequencies. I'll explain this in the viva video in Chapter Three, more in detail. But for now it's habitats. So far so good. But the patch is still not very interesting. I mean, it sounds lovely, but it's not really interesting. So what can we do next? So you see we have a fine-tune button here. And fine tune is, the fine-tune is between as semitones. So if you remember a semitone was from one node to another node, no matter which one. This is the distance of a semitone. Then fine tune is in-between. So this is zero semitones, which means exactly the key that you hit. And if you bring it to one semi-tone, it's basically the next key. So if I bring this up to one, if I would play now our C, I would get a C-sharp because the pitch has now shifted. So this is something we don't want to do because it messes with our scale. With a music theory, we will be, we will end up and out of qi AFP play around now because we're not hearing the Keystone we pushed. However, if he used his careful in some middle value, even some higher one, it will still leave us on the key replay, but with a shift in the pitch. So I will show you what it does. Separate equal effect. As you've seen. I just did this with my mouse, but again, we want this to be automated maybe, so we can again just focus on playing. So this is something where LFOs come into play. And again, don't feel overwhelmed. We will, we will be working with LFOs and envelopes and all this stuff and every next episode when we create patches. So you will see it again and again, and it will become more clear to you the more often we use this. Lfo stands for low frequency oscillator. And you can just see that it is something that is in motion. It's something that is constantly moving. And we can use this as a modulator to move anything we see here that we can attach it to. So if I click here, you see all, all these knobs. They got a white circle around them. So if I click here, spent attention to all the buttons, they become highlighted, which means I can leak does now to any button off them. So if I link this now to fine tune here, you can see it starts moving. So if I hold down a key now, it does that for me. And it does that in the passion of the, of the waveform you see here. By the way, they are not connected, even if it may look like it's floating, true. They are all this LFO 2.3, they are separate, they are linked to nothing. We just spent attention to LFO one. And this is a little bit strong of course right now. So we maybe, first of all, click here on sync binary because hertz means it's, it's completely free things. So you can pick any little value you want. Well, maybe we want it a little bit more. Sync with our ribbon in Adi HW in our program. Because when we create music, we want to have everything be in kind of correct ribbon time. So it's, it sounds not off but sounds right together. So here we can change the speed, the rate of the sink tempo. So this is a half-note. This is a whole note or acquired a node or an 8-note. So this is simply basically just the tempo and I wanted slower first. I don't want it as extreme, so I click again on LFO one. And I can either just change this number here or just grab it here again visually and bring it a little bit down like this. So if I play it now. All right, so you hear it, there's some motion in the patch now, but it doesn't mess with the pitch so much. I still think that if I release a key, brings up on it, but I think the fade-out is a little bit too quick still. So maybe bring a little bit more decay and release and make this a little bit louder by way of thinking the patch is not that at all. So let's hear it with the other. I think it's too slow in the beginning should come in. Precursor. We can play better to submit a bit better. But knifing the pad is still too smooth. So I would like to add something more to make it even more edgy. But before we do this, look at this beautiful button here, it's called drift. This is really something special to pigments. This is not really given any other synthesisers most of the time. But if we increase this, it will just add some randomness to the pitch of each voice at it says on the bottom. So this means that what we did here, we've defined units. Now, even by the synth itself applied to every node you hit. So basically every node has a little bit different in its fine tune value from beginning. So to make it extreme, so you can hear it. Of course, too strong now. So we will bring this to a septal value. Maybe leave them off to high-end. Sounds pretty cool to me so far. But now let's bring in some distortion for the pet to be more edges. So we actually bring in just sort of starting module here, which just interrupts the waveform a little bit. So what you can see here, it just adds more edginess, right? So by the way, what I did is I decrease the output gain because two numbers here, because if you introduce distortion to your patch, everything is getting really louder. So here you can work against this volume gain and make it again. Bring it back to the volume that you had. Celebrates strong. So I would maybe even reduce this a little bit. So the dry wet button again just determines how much of the distortion is being audible. So if we bring this to 100% all the way up, we hear the fully processed patch. But if you bring it to a value like 60%, that means that 40% of our signal, just how it sounds without this module at all. Plus 60% distort it. A little bit of fine tuning between both values. And to drive button just just determines how strong destruction shouldn't be applied. How hard, how harsh. This is, how much more strong and the sustain. How much of it you want to be audible in your patch at all. Because I can make this super hard but say, Okay, I want only 10% to be present in a patch, right? Or I can say make a super smooth, but I want it all to be mixed into the whole thing, which is quiet or now, because it's so sad that we don't have a 3D volume gain. And I had this button here, reducing it down, but you get the idea. So let's bring it back to something like a mix. Too strong to me. You hear this a fluttering effect happening. We don't want this. Let's see, maybe under the bit less gain. But not sounds pretty good in my opinion. So this is a pretty cool, nice pat. Then there's a resonance bad button next to the future. So if I increase this, you can even see it visually here. It basically just boosts specific part of the frequency. So if you remember, this year, can see if I bring this up. So you have seen this little wave going through because offered a moves of course. But you can see instead of wave that went just through here is this boost in frequencies are resonances, just basically adding more resonance to the filters of boost a little bit of a specific part of the frequency. And all you need to know is that it makes the sound. It adds more character, more saturation. It makes it more edgier, grittier. Well, of course would now interferon more with other parts of your composition because the pad this way is really strong, but it can play in the back of this. Other instruments would have a hard time to fight against this because it's so loud, it's so powerful. But just so you get an idea of what the resonance button does, you can even add, it's something like this. And what you've noticed now that generally like when you apply effects, LFOs, stuff like resonance, I'm personally I do it always up there, but I think the combination of septal things shape the sound. So we have the fine-tuning, it's just a little bit, but it's there. It adds a little bit constant motion to a patch. We have this filter opening by this envelope here. That's again motion and life to your patch. You have a little bit of resonance. And then we have a little bit of distortion. Actually, not just a little bit actually, it's pretty strong, but it's not consuming your whole patch. These little things together, they add up. And we have to drift, right? Each voice that we play, each note that we play as a different shift in its pitch. So I think that's it for the first patch, I think it sounds good. It's good so far. You've learned a lot. So yes, we will, we will just, we will be creating three other patches. We will make a base, a base patch of black patch and a lead. And we will again use envelopes and LFOs and filters. So just hang in, you will get a better understanding of it the more often we do it. And then we will reach Chapter Two where I will explain all of these in detail a little bit more, explain their buttons and show you some practical ways to use them. And then you will really feel more confident with these things. But what I want to emphasize to you is you can just move on and watch the next episode if you want, of course, or your grip, your synthesizer now, no matter if you use pigments or not. And try to reproduce things that you have seen now, you can just rewind the video, click on positions to lag, and then try to apply what I've been showing you experiment a little bit with it, because this is what creates true connection in your mind, which creates memory and understanding of their after techniques. So have fun with this, and if you feel you're ready, start the next episode. We will see us there. 4. Chapter 1 - Creating a Lead patch: Welcome to Episode two. Here we will be creating a lead this time. I've already started applying patch for us. Sounds like this beautiful. And like always, we begin with setting up or oscillators, shaping the behavior of the volume with the envelopes and off the filter. And of course setting up the filter. So these are always the basic, three basic steps you start with when you create a patch, no matter if it's a pad, a base or plucked, or a lead or whatever else, we're going to start with the car off the patch. So let's start with the chair again. So I'm going to adjust this to a minimum level. Like where does sound will end up when we play something around this. So we had a pad in the last lesson and a pad is evolving texture, but now we are creating a lead. And lead is something that you, you know, you play it like. Now this is just, just playing around, but you play it like this, right? Or lead is there. The main, like the name says delete, deleting part deleting instrument. It's the main thing of your song, probably, except you have a singer and in front of something, but it's the main melody. It's, it's, it's the voice of your song, the core. And it needs to be playable quickly. So we don't want to have a text like this. Because as you notice, you can't even hear this if I play it is Craig. You want to have an attack that is nice to play with. And if I release the key, the button as you hear, nothing left. So we want to have a release. And of course I released that is good, but not too long because if you make the release, something like this, I mean, you can if this is a special purpose and your son, but if I put a release on 5 s here, see what happens. So this would function in a song. Not so much going on where the lead can really fall out like this. A busy song with a lot of instruments, elements. And when this, when this patch here has done and it's louder and it's now more present in the mix. And you played and stuff like this. You see it's just all overlapping. This is it's consuming a lot of space. So we'd go for something with a nice tight still. Fades out, fades out nice. I think this is good, is good. And then we are going to bring in the filter for now as we did before. So again, we click here on envelope too and just grab the button. Whoops, not the main button, of course, always the outer edge of the ring. So we can apply this modulation here. And here we increased the attack a little bit. Since almost dreamy. This is true long as you notice, it takes too long until it falls out and are released for the field as well. What do we have here? 1.95. So let's go for something similar. I release the key, I get the same. Maybe a little bit shorter. So it's not open all the time. Ndk button when we hold down the key and unit, remember the release is when we released the key, If I just quick, but if I hold down, the decay is the main parameter. So in this case, when you do something like this, you have two choices. Either you said released indicating the same time. This means that when I just play now, no matter if I play quick like this, I've released all the keys or if I hold them. I mean, okay, this is still a little bit longer. But let me just show you one key. So if I hold this down, just playing a short, it's pretty similar now. Or Bring the K just up and uses performance-wise. That means that now if I play quick sequence sequences like this, it sounds different than when I play it and hold the keys longer. Soup of these settings, I have the choice as player to play the instrument differently. This can be cool. If you want to play it this way, then it's great. But if you just want to program in your notes, maybe in your DAW and you always use the same nodes. So you only use eight nodes for the sequence, for instance, then you don't need it. But then if you want to play stuff, life in and choose, sometimes hold notes longer than you want, just, just because you do when play and you get a longer decay, then it's good to bring this to the same amount so it doesn't affect your playing if you get what I mean. So, but this sounds really good. And let's see, we have just one, right? So we could bring in second oscillator. So maybe with a triangle, the triangle is less edgy. I show you how it sounds again. This is only the oscillator to now when it's turned off. Right? This is a whole different sounds, so it adds a little bit off, a little bit of thickness. And if you play with the fine-tune stuff like this here, you had started. It was stopped to sweet. Faster and faster. You can even get us better with the same waveform. Here. This, it sounds like this looks like this. I just stood up for leisure. Idea of autosomes. It's not actuated, right? So this is what you hear and emailing pieces. It's getting faster happening because oscillator one is of course tuned perfectly. And if you use oscillator tuned, you, you tune it a little bit different than the two waveforms. Stay, swing a little bit different. And the difference is what you're here to. This can be a cooling effect. You could even what we usually do on other senses, we have two oscillators with this knob and then just do the same on the other one to the upper side, opposite. Something like like this. Now, this of course, already extreme value could bring this back to around 112. Maybe. Sounds like this. It's a pretty cool effect as well. So if you want to make use of this effect really strong unique to us as one Austinite and a second oscillator that has the same button so you can detune them against each other like I did here. But having first year and just doing this does the job as well. It sounds different because only one of both states, you know. But just remember, this here sounds a little bit thicker because no one is in tune and only choose adding a little bit of movement. Here. It's not that audit name. We will stick with this one. Or we go for a pulse. But we could do here at ports with module and see if that sounds good. Not really convinced right now, but when I talked with something like this, but it gets an artefact. So I will be talking about ports with modulation, maybe. Other in another lesson. So let's stick with this for now. Detuning. It gets fine. And we could leave it like this. So not turn this into a sub ostinato because we want this effect with the de-tune. Be present. Bring this down. It's still there, but it's not as present as here. Because in the lower end, it's just down there and being masked by oscillator one. So if we want to have a sub-oscillator, we can now turn on oscillator tree, de-tune it. And we have more low end. And we can make this extremely short triangle waveform, which is most often and just add some more sap the low-end, not as gritty as this one, is way more smooth. And of course this is even more smooth. But the sine wave has really a lot of harmonic content and it starts to rumble a bit in the low side would be careful with this one. But this is good compromise. And about the volumes I have just oscillator one at the maximum volume than oscillator to adding a little bit less. So it's, it's just not as super present and oscillate a tree, even a little bit more quieter, just as low end, so that our main oscillator, which is the most stable one because it's not detuned and it's not shifted down in pitch, is the strongest, loudest. Give a good base. So far so good. So let's actually work with modulation. Modulation is a pretty cool thing. As you see here. The more I increase this to more away from here changes. And if I hit Aquino, sounds different. Donor can then move this. So of course we need to figure out if this fits into the patch. If we don't have practical use for this, we will ditch it. But let's see. So what is modulation in general, right? So modulations basic Kelly, in this case feeding oscillator tree into oscillator 2.1. Or actually you can decide that with this FN button, which stands for frequency modulation. So if you turn this off, it won't do anything. So you can say, Okay, I just want only oscillator to be affected by the modulation if you just activate it on oscillator two only. This means we can keep the stable sound of oscillator one and have this effect only on to signal. Isn't as strong distorted like this. Right? Then we can make this more sap to in this case because oscillator tree is modulating oscillator to the way this looks like and the way it's set up. It makes a difference. If I change this to semitones, for instance, you will see that it changes the shape of oscillator too. Because this one is being fed into this. And of course, the shape of this one will then affect this. So you can't make changes here without affecting what it modulates. Sounds different than this. It's by the way, not important. Like if you asked yourself now, maybe like, how is a pulse waveform effecting this different like this. So you don't really need to know the technical details behind it because it's, it's just it's just what it is. You just need to figure out what you like. The sound brings us back to suppose. But now it sounds hollow, right? So if I turn this off, so normal sound, frequency modulation has metallic sound to it a little bit hollow. Don't quite line. By the way to source, you can change to noise. Then this here becomes the modulator, which does nothing because of course, because the amount button is turned off, this is really smart. So now nicest demodulator, even if it's turned off and we will be talking about noise later. So you know about this option. But I wouldn't actually use noise as source. So by default is just set to oscillate it. This way, we just add a little bit of grittiness. Maybe we could take our envelope to further filter and add it here. So it does this job for us just for the same time in the filter opening happens. So if I hit a key, now, you see this. The Fed or obese demodulation happens and then both goes back. Thanks to our annual up to It's not that super present as if I just bring it here all the time. Because it's somehow sounds like it's bringing down the quality of the patch because it's not that clear and strong anymore. But this way we can edit a little bit more sap though we can even make this less. See if you liked it. So far, so good, but are patches pretty dry? There's no effect on it yet. So let's start by let me think. Do we want to have delay? Let's see. Let's see if he wants to have delay on this patch. So of course, we turn it on first. So delay as you here, if I play a key, just bound, bounces, just duplicate off to signal a visual representation. It doesn't really show the times it balances because if I bring the feet back up and I hit a key now, so basically forever. It's not showing the maximum amount of visual representation. So first of all, you set to feed back to a level that you like so that your delays not going endless into your mix. So if I hit a key now, still too long for my taste. Still, that's maybe good. But first of all, it sounds even more metallic because we have this metallic sound because of our modulation. So what we can do here is apply a low-pass filter. And it's actually doing what we do here or what I showed you on my, on the equalizer before, like here. You remember, here's the signal. And the low-pass filter is cutting off these heights, again from the delay and from the DA Only this is something that you need to keep in mind. If you find buttons like this on an FX plugin, it only affects what the plug-in creates. So if I bring this all the way down, It's not that. I mean, of course now you don't hear the low end anymore in the delay, but you still hear it in the patch. So it's there. It's still there. The patch sounds the same. This is really only affecting the day. We can make it a little bit darker. So that delay is not increasing this metallic sound that we have too much patch. But actually I think that sounds less metallic than before. Yeah, definitely. This is, this is more where rounded, It's not so metallic. So let's make a better ribbon first. So we have these ribbons for the, for the delay. This is acquire a note ribbon, so it will give us four bounces in the time of a whole note step. And when I say this, I mean like in context to a tempo in DDH W. Right? So this is, this is four beats for a bow, right? It's, whoops, it's 1234. So if I play just one note here at the beginning, we should get four bounces for bounces in the first bar. And this is because we set this to one quarter note, which means four bonds is a bar if I bring it up to one-eighth. So we have 81. We maybe not here all of them because the feedback is turned down, but this would equal than eight bounces. Or if you make it a half, half, note, it means to bounces beat. So for planar. Difficult because when I record I have a little bit of delay. I mean, in my DH W, If I hit a key, it takes a few more milliseconds then usually until I hear the sound. So it's hard to play live performances sometimes, but just so you know. And anyway, what we can do about the timing, which is pretty cool. What I like is we can either go for triplets or dotted. So triplets means the value we have, but a little bit shorter. So speaker, you could say. So compared to a quarter note, quarter note triplets quicker, while dotted means a little bit longer. It sounds terrible now to be honest, but we will, we will make the sound good. So let's, let's make the delay really, just, just really subtle. And then let's add a little bit of room for rehab module. So this is pretty good in terms of the room after delay and reverb together. And we will be talking later, of course, about a plugin chain like in what, in what order should you use your plugins and stuff like this? I will cover this in the effects section. I would like to give a little bit more power to lead because it reacts a little bit sloppy. So let's make the attack a little bit shorter. Let's see if that's better. So now the delay mess a little bit with my ribbon because it's distorted sound that's loose. Fingers delay has a better value because I can play whatever I want to know. I don't get ribbon that messes with my ribbon. The time I am playing. Would like to have it a little bit smoother. Let's look if you turn off the modulation because I am, I'm showing you things like modulation. But maybe sometimes it's not, it's not fitting into the patch and it's totally fine if you remove things. Like if I'm playing this, I don't like this, this distortion at the beginning of each year. So for smooth now, let's look if you can. More interesting. So let's talk about randomized. I think we could use a randomizer. Well here, let me actually turn this away from our modulation because we don't use it anymore. So thinking even sounds good with this trying to form because it's even more smoother. Now go for smooth sound. Bring it back up again a little bit. That's pretty good. So randomizes. So randomizes are pretty cool because you can just apply them to anything and they will add random values. And they are like two main ways you can use ten. So this is the cheering mode. So you see it's creating values all the time. So if I take this randomizer now again by just clicking on it, and let's say I would bring this here onto our filter. I choose to arrange the area where the randomness should happen right from a default position up to in this case, like around 03:00, right, around 0.30. And as you can see already here, these random values are moving or filter knob. So this position here is not true anymore. It's actually there with a blue highlighted colors jumping all the ways. If I hold down on note now, of course, a little bit edgy because we have chosen such a huge range. So if I bring this down, we will get more balanced changes. But this is something you would use on a pad or something, or something that is longer evolving because if I hold down, we can barely hear this. I mean, it's there, but it's not in the sense of our lead. You want to play on it like this. And here it comes in a way as to see sometimes I get random values that are closing my filter too much. And this is not what we want, but just so you know what Turing does, we can see in the next lessons. If we can bring this into a pad, actually in the randomizer lesson, I will do this. But for now let's bring it to a sample and hold. And sample and holds means if I hit a key, I will get a random value. If I hold it down, nothing happens. And if I play, ever get random values all the time for every note that I get. But again, we don't want to mess with the filter because sometimes it's super open, sometimes it's, it's close like this and it just doesn't sound good. It gives inconsistency into our sound. So let's think about where could we use this randomizer too At benefits. So what we could do, we could bring the resonance a little bit down and say, we want to have some random values here in this area. So if I play now, you can see it's not really altering our sound so much that we get completely different hits. It's even almost inaudible, but it's there, it's modulating the resonance level. So each key has a little bit of a difference back to it. You can't really hear it on each, on each hit, but it makes the patch my interesting when you play it. But of course it's the septa. We don't really notice this. And by the way, let me see how to trigger modes. So actually I would now choose poorly. I will later, we will have a lesson later about, about mono legato poorly, well, we'll explain this. So don't worry. If you're interested like Leganto actually just means, I can show you this here. Just, just short. Legato means if I play a note and then another upload the note, what I still holding down the first one. Not re-trigger or envelopes. Not a fit or nothing because it just takes the value from the first note. Hold down on one of these upper ear and placement females. They will take it from there. So basic Kelly When I, when I happily gather when I hold down unknown, and then we end up getting, you know, new random values. So, but if I bring this to poorly, she hits, gets a new value instead of just one. So this poly mode in this case is better for a purpose to get each notes on some specialness, some individual things. So we can now take this randomizer and bring it onto the fine tuning knob a little bit. If you noticed from the first lesson. Basically doing the same thing as if we would use the drift button to add some randomness to the pitch, often nodes. So this drift button is something special on pigments. So here we could actually just use this much. Usually just this button is not on since. So if you want to have this effect, you could use the randomizer I suggested and bring it a little bit to the fine-tune, just subtle like 0.6 because you don't want to have something like this. Maybe you want for particular sound, but it messes with your scale, right? You're not in key anymore when I play now. Sounds terrible like in a horror movie or like if you're playing on really, really untuned instrument. So if you bring this to a septal value, already pretty present. So I could hear the changes in pitch. So I bring this back to 0.06 and its receptor. But now we have random resonance values and random fine-tune radios. And this makes a sound already way more interesting. And he could even now this is crazy. Let's take the randomizer and bring it just a little bit to the attack. So this means that sometimes the attack will be shorter, so we will get a quicker attack and sometimes it will be longer. Be cool if it wouldn't go up in the same time because I don't want it to go up because then we can run into such a way as to take long and we want or lead to be playable quick still. So usually it's not in here. But on LFOs it is if I take an LFO and let's say I bring it here, onto here you see it's going into both directions, but I could click on unipolar and it will only go up now. So not down, it will just start a default, go up and bounce back. Our randomizer sadly, doesn't have the function here. We can do this. It's actually nowhere. So it's not good for the purpose of routing. These two are envelope. However, let me think for a second. This is function one and I guess we have side chain. Yeah, So let me actually explain you what side-chain do. So we can do this with the function. This is now really getting complex. So don't worry if you can't, if you feel a little bit lost. I just wanted to show you this opportunity, but as I said, we were going to repeat the staff and you will grow into it. But functions like this is an envelope like or envelope here, right? So it's not doing anything now. But I could now, let's say link it to filter and dot floating. I drew here all the time because it's unmute. I can bring it to one shot and we'll just do this one. So while we could try to do is to take this function, this is basically buried by the way, this is special because you can create your own wave form, your own envelope, sorry, not waveforms envelopes, because here we only have four dots in a special relationship to each other. But here you can really do whatever you want. You could now linked this to year-end, Something like this. Right? So this is special about functions. Let me erase this quickly and bring this back to what it does, right? So that's dealing from the cutoff and let's take this and route it to the attack. So if we now, because remember I didn't want it to go up to not get longer value. So if you bring this out a little bit down, however, by -11, and then side-chain it to the randomizer one. It means. By 100%, it means that the randomizer now picks random values for us from our default position up to down there. So if I now play but still going up sometimes, did you notice this? I don't know. I think the text should become actually, let me try something. I have the feeling that it's still going up. Sometimes. It's actually look at this little that it just see this. Sometimes it brings it up. It sets the starting position higher than it is now. I don't know why. Because it shouldn't this like I have picked my range only down. But it did, so we were just not used as nouns. Maybe it's a buck, but it shouldn't. Do this. On the positive is unipolar, yeah, and we headed to Unipolar. If I click here, it would start to work into both directions. You see this, this is why we didn't want and where we didn't have. And if I set this to bipolar, which it was it shouldn't actually you wanted the other direction. I don't know why. Maybe like maybe it's a box. Sometimes this can happen. I mean, usually this synthesizers bug-free. But anyway, you've got the idea, I hope so. Um, what, uh, what our lead sounds now like, I think it sounds pretty good. So we have to randomize on the resonance, sorry this the LFO, but it's still affecting the resonance. You a little bit arrange D. When did I linked the LFO to the resonance? I can remember doing this. I didn't know when this happened. So the randomizer is giving us random values under resonance and making sound even a little bit more interesting. We could even see this is the width button for the triangle. Changes. The sound. Actually sounds pretty cool as well. Let's bring it a little bit to the middle. And around here, take the randomizer and give some random values. It's better at some more clear sound. But now we have the randomizer. I'm just adding a little bit of variation here. It's like a told you this approach that we had in the first lesson and that I did here too is that we use little modulations here and here. Little randomizes, stuff like this, but we keep it softer. But if you apply it on the right things and just a little bit, you will have the, you will have a patch that there's more coming alive. It's not a static, it's not at every single key it sounds the same, but now they have some third dimension to it, right? Some deaf. You can really hear that they are different, that you can go down into the sound. This is how I feel about this. So I would say, because this was a quite long lesson, but I hope you learned a lot about the new things that we covered here. Sounds pretty good. I mean, it's not super bright. I mean, if you could say this is not bright enough, you could just bring us a little bit up and do stuff like this, but it acts like a lead now it sounds beautiful I think, and I would love to keep it at this point. So we will be creating a black patch and a base and the next two lessons and go over again through all these settings. And I will show you some new things, why we get the old things deeper into your mind. So I hope you stay tuned. I hope you're good and don't hesitate to grip your synthesized and try some of this stuff out before you start the next lesson. See you there. 5. Chapter 1 - Creating a Lead patch 1.2: Here a little after video to our lead patch because after the lesson I was playing around with this function here to figure out why it didn't work. Actually it wasn't a buck, but I found out now, why does weird behavior happened? So if we take our function again and route it to the attack and you remember, we just wanted to have it go down. So let's say by -12. So if I just do this now, it will always start at minus term, right? So I wanted to apply to randomize or for us to pick random values in this range. So on the side chain button, I picked the randomizer one as source to affect this. And then you remember we had something like this. And if I play now, look at the position of this orange starting point is two times now started above or threshold below. No way up. And this was what was confusing because I've set this up and you can see it's just -120.12 and it only covers this range. So I was wondering why is it going up? And I figured out so 50. Why they decided to do so, 0.50 Is your whole range. If you go above that, it means that it will duplicate your range in the positive direction, in this case upwards. So if I, if I would make this 75, it, we're probably at a range of 0.6 upwards. So I never bring us up to 100. It will duplicate this range up. And if I bring this down to 50, it will again just cover the range that we have set up. But if I bring this below 50, it will duplicate into the negative direction, so this time downwards. So if I play now, span attention to the starting position. You see it started at the bottom, way down there. It's out of a range, but this setting here is duplicating it. So if you want to stay in your range, you just got to pick 50, positive or negative. As far as I found out so far, it doesn't make a difference. It's -50 plus 50 doesn't matter. It only matters if you go above that. So that starts to create a duplicate into that direction beyond your threshold. But so you get the idea. This is how it worked and how we can make this function work on our attack knob. And by the way, I did watch the part of the episode after episode where I was wondering why there's an LFO on my resonance. And I completely forgot that I explained this to seconds before to you and forgot to turn it off. That was pretty fun. But yes, so I hope you understand now the thing with the functions and the randomizer. And we will see us then actually in the next lesson. 6. Chapter 1 - Creating a Plucked patch: So welcome to our next episode here we'll be creating a plaque patch. And the first question that you might ask yourself now is, what is the difference between a black patch and delete? So you remember the lead was, like I said, something that you need to be able to play in quick sequences. It needs to be powerful present at carries the melody of your song. So a black patch kinda falls into the same direction, into the same, the same kind of patch. And it's just, it just sounds different. So if you plug an instrument, you usually pluck on own string instruments, something like a guitar, like a cello and the orchestra, or viola, double bass, or a Japanese kowtow. Things like this are plucked instruments. So the first thing you want to do is to set up or envelopes to pluck characters. So first of all, we bring the filter down, make this louder, and apply, adjust our envelopes. So we went to have a really short attack and are released and they have a little bit of tail. And then we want to apply our filter envelope to the cutoff envelope two, like we did with the last patches so that we have this effect. So before we delete, we add more tags so that we could do something like this. Or he will go for really short attack. And you already here. This is way more. Click here. It sounds like something being plucked. So this is the basic concept for a black patch. Now we need of course, to adjust the release as well for the filter. How long it should and fade out. Maybe a little bit less than the volume envelope. And then the decay, of course it matters because if I play now this filter is different. If I do this. So the decay, I would just bring it to the same amount of volume value. Because on a plucked instruments you can't really hold the string when you plug it, right? You pluck it with your fingers like this. And then you can hold it and make it sustains not possible. I mean, this is a synthesizer and you could go for it, right? So you could, you could go for it, could say, Hey, wider, I'm creating my own instrument. I want to be able to play something like this. It's totally fine if this is something you want, go for it, you can create this. So there are no hard wired routes when you create your own patches. But for the sake of presentation, of creating a real black patch, where we will be doing here is we will get rid of the sustain for the first time. That means that even if I hold down now Accord, it will disappear. This is a new behavior that we didn't have before. For black patch, I like it because sometimes when you play you tend to hold down notes longer than you need. And if it's, if there's any amount of sustained, you will hear this and it will take away the character of the plus-minus. So we will get rid of this. And this in the same time means that the decay button here becomes relevant for the first time. Because if I hold down, you remember the decay is active when you hold nodes. Why they're released only is active when you release nodes. So if the sustain is up, it doesn't matter, right? Because we always have the sound no matter if I hold it or play short, we have always maximum volume. But you remember the decay is determined how long the volume travels from a maximum volume to a sustained value. So if this is ten value is zero, it would travel to that point as long as we holding the keys. Since this is a plaque instrument. And like I said, we don't want this to happen, to have sustained sound. We will bring the decay to something short as well, even if I hold down. So make sure that your decays not sure then you release, which is now 7,600.600. So we need a similar value. Because it could then happen that you hold down a note and it fades out too quickly. Now if I hold down, sounds like this, and if I played just quick, sounds like this. Pretty similar, there's almost no difference. So this is fine. Sounds plucky already. So let's now look what we can do to make this patch more interesting. So again, we can bring in oscillator to maybe should turn up the volume on it. Of course, I did. Sorry, I was just confused. I was looking at the volume button here next to it not being being up but real audible. Okay. But it's there. Okay. Maybe because or envelope is so short that we don't hear a lot of stuff. Maybe we can make this a little bit more audible. Let's go to 5 s here. This tear down awesome. Facing issues. If course, because I have, this is something interesting. It didn't, didn't mean to happen, but something's really interesting for you. Maybe waveforms they can, they can kill each other, so sound disappears. This is happening when they have a special relation, relationship to each other, which is called phasing, it will then make your sound disappear because they any late each other. If we have a saw wave here and a saw wave reversed here, it seems that they sometimes emulate each other. It's not happening So strongest time, but we just added in the last one when I played a case and now everything is fine. Then let's actually add modulation and not to our first oscillator on each was seconds. Because as you hear, What do we hear this, this is a little bit more sounds more realistic, right? It sounds like plucking on an actual instrument. But I don't want this all the time. I wanted only only in this attack time of the filter together. So what we can do, we could now take envelope to which we have on a photo and just let it do this for us. But as you can hear, it's already getting distorted a little bit desk, this is because even this little attack time 0.3 and the decay time here, especially to the k, which determines on the release how long we hear it gives us too much of its content. So what I would do is I would take envelope tree so we can set it up individually and make it way shorter. And now you notice that we get less of this distortion in the sound are still there. But it's now adding more clicking once to a sound. And let's make this an order. So we will find a way to make this parents actually, let's bring this a little bit up and way down. It's not that strong. So the goal is not to get rid of this, this distorted sound because we want our crystal crisp, clear plucked instruments. So let me change the shape of oscillator tree because as you know, oscillator tree is modulating two. So it is a difference. This waveform resistors. You cannot really hear it now because it's a short, but it makes a difference definitely. And then I will show you this actually so you can hear the difference. So this one versus all sound different. It's by the way, a good way if you're creating a sound and you can't really hear what it's doing. Just bring it up to work with an extreme level and then you can still bring it down, But then you know what's in there, right? So I think this one's good. This one's and ended super edgy, a little bit more well-rounded. And if we bring up the semitones, this is not actually shifting or pitch. It just changes oscillator tree, which affects the wave from oscillator two. So this, now this sounds really plucky to me, like a real plucked instrument, maybe for juristic CO2 or something. So this is cool. With this. Let's stick with this. And then again, now we bring it down. So it's more subdued. Yeah, Still the secretion is in the beginning, but that's fine for now, I guess. Yeah, I think the tail is too short. There could be more of a release time, even a little bit more. Let me bring this a little bit. This is better. But less for the filter. The filter should close earlier than the volume. So does the storage and only happens in the lower register. For play up here. We don't have so much of this problem. I mean, we could even look if we bring this up. Sounds to synthetic, not a good idea. So now let's actually take a randomized again because it sounds pretty static. So let's take the randomizer again. It's on touring as bring it back to sample and hold. So we get only new value each time we hit a key. Bring it back to poorly. You remember from the last lesson what it does. So we have not shared values, but each key gets its own value. And now let's just add little things. So actually I would first of all, bring resonance in a little bit because plucked instruments definitely have some, some resonance in their body. It resonates when you play them. And then let's bring our randomizer into play and add some random values. Just, just slight stuff. Let's do the same. Let's, let's work with the filter later. I think I will go for the functional thing again. Let's effect a little bit of the modulation and maybe a little bit off to fine tune. So you see I'm just working with real small amounts of numbers because you need to be careful with stuff like this. If I did this, you remember, you get this out of tune stuff so I use real tiny numbers. Sounds good so far. Let's see if we can. Actually. Now this is too strong that you hear this, so we get too much inconsistency with a sound. But this so far is good. I'm still a little bit bothered by this started somebody will get rid of this later. And of course, here you could again use the drift button for what I did with the randomizer on the fine tune up. But for the sake of this tutorial and using the randomizer, we would just apply it to fine tune. And now sometimes I would like to cut off filter to be a little bit more open. But you'll remember the problem of the randomizer is that I only get into both directions which I don't want. So we will go to function to our envelope and bring it in here. And you see it's now pulsating because it's set to loop being a 21 shot. So it does what it does only one time. And you can hear the speed. That's too long. I think we should bring it to one eighth. See the difference, right? Makes a huge difference. It's not really audible now because the sound disappears. So Craig, you want to snap your text here. And then function one. We will, we have brought it now here. So that is sometimes opens the filter but not by, not by this huge amount. We go for something subtle again, like like 0.8, right? We just wanted to have this little human factor coming in because you're not plucking the string each time of the same strength and at the same position. So we want to simulate this. And again, we will side-chain it with the randomizer. Which means again that the randomizer will pick random values for us between default position and this area that we just increased here each time we hit a key and remember by 0.5. As 0.50 really only cover the section that we have picked. Now even think this is sometimes too bright because there's a little bit more of distortion going on. So I bring this to 0.5. So of course, playing chord sounds a little bit odd. We've plucked instruments, it's possible, but let's take care of this distortion thing because how can we make this? This would be an option. So we would have less modulation in it at all. But by the way, before we proceed, let's add delay, because delay is really, really beautiful on, on plucked patches. And this is because, because they have such a snappy, snappy attack and the delay just, just mimics this beautiful. So. So show you what I mean. Actually, let's bring in a little sequence because then I can adjust it better. Because just sounds not really good. Now. Just some random melody. Let's just see how this change to really delay. But I'll turn this off for now because I'm not quite happy. Thing it doesn't sound really good now. Sounds realistic, but it's super, super thin. So definitely know. This sounds like a little flyer. This is just not good enough. Let's bring up the volume a little bit. Still. Release is too short. Let's bring this down. So if broke down this heavy semitones, so we're back to normal patch for the modulation. Normally pitch maybe. So let's take a good delay. Beautiful. This is way too long. And deliberate. Reruns. Usually reverb on a plaque. This a little bit odd, but it creates a beautiful Taylor's. You can hear. Nsa odd because a string instrument is something that sounds realistic and tin and tiny. And then you have this huge room on it. It's a little bit. Working against intention. But again, we are in, we are in the futuristic instrument, actually a synthesisers, the most modern instrument we can play. And it's completely okay if we do things that are not common. If you make a real Marina, not as crap. Let's see if I can quickly improvise something for even way too slow. This is just a sequence like different and a little bit lighter. Can you hear this all to stay okay. So we can make it a little bit smoother if we increase. This is like move because it doesn't sound plucked anymore, but it's still a difference from here to this. It sounds too black. Kids, pretty much static detail. So we can get rid of this year. In this audience. It's pretty cool that we have this bouncing delay now. We have to rework with a little bit of room. Can get a little bit rid of this super edgy attack. But you hear this beautiful, I love how it fades out now. You play it. And then the right side is like mimicking this in the, in the, in the far, in the distance. Sounds lovely. But this is like this is a black patch, right? So it's pretty smooth. We could now of course be working on it, getting it more smoother or more edgier, adding more correct or grittiness, whatever you want. You could even bring distortion in. Just show you. So if you just take distortion little bit, not really audible. Audible. But what we could be doing is taking or envelope tree to really support short one and just add this to a tech transient in the beginning. So now with this, it's still. It sounds a little bit more aggressive. So if we bring this, if it turns off, the sounds more clean. And this is a little bit. Hope you can hear differences receptor again, but it's there. And notice what it does a little bit louder. It's adding a little bit of this when the click illness could of course goes up to again, must not be a lot of ways. I can always preach these little things here and there, then they add up. Now let's not beautiful or patch has become. And then there's one last thing I want to introduce with you, and this is, I don't know if you have a midi keyboard in front of you, but usually it looks without these, of course, it looks like this with the keys and these little two wheels on the left. And we have this pitch bend wheel, which will bend the pitch as it says. So if I play a note and move this with my hand on my physical keyboard here in front of me. Change this to pitch, but you can move it while you play. Of course, you can move it with the mouse as well here and in pigments, but it's more of a performance tool, something that you use for your play. And then we have this mod wheel here, which does nothing currently. It is here. So you can click here on MV for mod wheel and route it to something. So if I bring this to the fridge and make a negative range like this, and I let it play now this spec that we had. And if I move them, it will move the cutoff, not for me. Right? So instead of clicking with the mouse, because I think this now here to this area -31, I can shift the default position for me. And you can see this by this new area that it travels. So this is not, I mean, it doesn't move now, right? Because they didn't any main it. But usually this little, this little line here would be now here because we closed the future. It's nothing different from taking this now with the mouse and bring it. It's just not animated, but that is what this minor things. You can make cool foods as we can even you go for something like this. Because the delay and reverb, they mimic it so well. So yeah, I hope you enjoyed this episode, this lesson, and I hope you enjoyed this patch and learned something about black patches. And I will see you in the next one for the basis. 7. Chapter 1 - Creating a Bass patch: So welcome to our new episode number four, where we'll be creating our base patch. And before we do so, I just want to talk with you about what is important when you create a base, what to spend attention on, what to consider like before. Every patch type that you create has a specific purpose and you should make sure that it's really good at what it should be good at, and it must not be able to do everything else well. So for instance, let's, let's pick our base from my analog Cyberpunk sound set just to show you what I mean. So let's take, for instance, does crush our base, which is pretty strong. So it's supposed to sound good down here, right? So base place on the lower register to accompany your song, to add low-end to, to support it. So it's really important that it sounds good here. Rather than here. In this case, it does sound good app here because if I play something like this, so you could actually play a lead with this, but it's not really a great sound, like it's possible, but it doesn't really sound grade. It would need some delays, some other filter settings maybe to really, to really carve this out as a lead sound. But down here, just a random sequence, not supposed to sound good, but just from the sound itself, it sounds some way thicker and powerful down here. So this is the purpose of the base. It's not made to play up here. Maybe look at another one that I have, like this lower district bass. Sounds like this down here. But up here. So way better in the low end because that's the purpose. So don't worry if your base is not going to sound good app here, you don't need to make it sound good here because that's not the purpose is most of the time it won't never play there. So just keep this in mind and then let's just jump straight into the base. And by the way, there are two ways of basis. So I mean there are more than two but two most common. Let me first bring the cutoff down. So you can get either all. Let me introduce SAP oscillator quickly. So we have no end. So you can either have a base like this, which is for sustained notes. So I could play something like this. Of course this doesn't really sound good now. It's just like just to give you the core idea. Or you could have a base with a quick attack. So we again take or envelope too, as you know, as we did in other lessons and bring it to the cutoff filter to add more power. And if I play this now, it's more made for short notes. If I hold it down, you can still play a sequence like this with it, but it will have the stronger attack transient. It's important for you to decide what kind of base do you want. The one mode is rolling SAP database in the back without the clicky attack, or do you want to have this one here which is better for sequences? So let's just play back a sequence here. So this one handles the sequence way better than without this envelope, right? Because this doesn't really put so much emphasis on each little note. So if I hold it down now, or even lower. So just keep this in mind when you create basis as you have these two main opportunities, of course there's even more, but that goes into the advanced range. Like if you want to create stuff like wobble base, as you know it from dubstep are some, some experimental stuff with the filter. We will go for a clicky base year now. Are piercing base. I think this is actually already a good base for, for obeys this, but this was really not intended to make this joke. Well, it sounds good so far. So we can add some resonance on base. It really adds character, but would be subtle with it because as I say, the base is more made for the lower register. And if you increase this as well so much you can see like we have a boost of frequencies here and from the spectrum just from the picture, you can tell that this is not the low end and low end is around here. So this would now really go too much into your mix. So just use WhatsApp to maybe if you want, you don't need to put resonance on, but I think it's not bad. And then we could actually, so usually I create a patch first in its core and then add effects in the end so that the core sound is done. And I know how it sounds with artifacts. But just before we start moving on, you usually don't want to put reverb on your base because the base is more in the middle and strong in the mix and it's not there to fill the whole mix with its tail. Of course, down nor hard-wired roots. As I always say, if you have a song and you're like, Oh, we were perfectly fits in here, then you can go for it. There's no rule that forbids it to you. But if I play this now, so this is way less powerful than this. And it might, it might sound good in isolation, but if you use it in your composition, it can easily bringing problems into your mix because it has a lot, a lot of low end that is now being made longer by where you obtain. So just a heads up. I wouldn't put reverb on it unless you have a specific purpose for that and your song. And with delay, It's kind of similar. Sometimes a little bit of delay can make a base a bit more interesting by really depends on what you're doing. If you play, if you play short sequence like this, you won't have a lot of effect from the base because denotes plays a quick that you don't hear the delay anyway. But if I play this solo now, like something like this, well, let me actually find a good rhythm. So let's go for dotted. Then. If I played this doesn't really sound really good now just so you get the idea right? If I would be playing something like this, and it would maybe benefit a little bit from the delay because it creates a room with the base. Right? So I can play with this ribbon just as an idea. So really, just sloppy playing, not really a good sounding, but just wanted to show you the concept of this idea. But usually I wouldn't use delay as well on the base. Things that are common on base is stuff like distortion overdrive, because you just make it sound more powerful. But this again like the way folders to really harsh version of the distortion. So I think this doesn't sound really good, but it doesn't really sound good as well, in my opinion. Try without resonance. A little bit better now. But this is still pretty strong, right? So what we could be doing again is bringing this down and just let our envelope duties for us and Oakman only for a short amount of time, so we don't have to strong effect all the time. Or we going to tag a separate envelope number three. So we can mess a little bit with the timings and maybe start a little bit in already. So we have a little bit of basic distortion and don't start at zero and bring this a little bit. Back in compensation. Yeah, that sounds right. So without hope you can hear the difference, it's not much, It's not really important at this point, but as always, it adds a little bit. So now we can maybe use our envelope to for resonance. But I wouldn't do it in this case because it all starts to get too harsh on the higher frequencies. In my opinion. Of course, this is something we can take care of. So we could click in here and bring in an equalizer, which I will be explaining later, but just filter out a little bit off the higher frequencies so it sounds a little bit more smooth. And we will be talking later as well about the pluck and chain. So the order that you put effects in, So don't want me to be covering all of this. So what we could do now to make this base thicker and stronger as we could try to bring in, I thought austenite and see, maybe this is all it's giving. Now. Let's see if we can bring in some modulation. If it sounds good. Here at this really small value it gets, it becomes a little bit more edgy and gritty. If you bring this mom and with some metallic and high. Here's the basic sound like me. If you just bring in a little bit of a mount, it just already has impact. Maybe some drift from the drift button as you know, it gives each note a little shift in the fine tuned amount. So while we didn't have this button. So let's see, can we do something with an LFO? Deb would sound good here. Bring a little bit more breath into this patch. The thing is that with the base, since we playing all these short notes, you won't really hear, hear a lot from the LFO. I guess, because it's just all happening to create. But if I hold down because you may feel play, well this is too strong because we can control it if you play, you never you never can really good time when this happens and when not. So I wouldn't be doing this. I mean, the base itself is pretty solid right now. It's really basic as far So unison is something we could put on it. But it will bring the space more into the stereo field. Thicker now. It's more present now. And the left and right speaker, regarding units, and what it does is you see the wisest button here. It creates basically duplicates of a patch. So the default is one. So this means just a patch. If you bring this up to two, it will mean that we have a patch and duplicate it once. So we have two instances of a patch. And the more you go up, the more we have. So this is eight times or patch. Then we have to detune button which determines how they're fine tune and pitch is being detuned from each other. So if I increase this, you will hear all of the advisors have different fine-tune settings. So this is the really extreme amounts, so you can hear what it does. But if you bring it in a little bit, it will just add small whiteness to the sound. And my emotion as you can hear it. It swings like this, right? It has some movement. The higher you go, the quicker it will become. Or even. Or. The problem, however, with this is, like I said, it goes more into your mix. It, the base becomes more prominent in the front and can bring travel into your mix with your other instruments that should be in the front because it's steel stair there and show you could work against this hysteria about mono again, like this. Still thicker than, like this. Well thicker in dimension. So you have the feeling that this is deeper, right? It's wider, but this one strong. So unison might not be the best way on a base. You can do it. I have it on some patches. But for this one I wouldn't go for it. But just so you know what unison does, because the purpose, I mean, we are creating patches now, but sometimes I just want to show you something and tell you how to use it and why not to use it. So it's not that much about making this patch now the best base that we've ever heard. It's more about, I'm playing through all the options and opportunities and explaining some of these functions. So actually, I would say that I liked the base the way it is, no, I wouldn't really start to mess more with it. Like the base usually is something in the back that is SAP. They'll sometimes people create as my main types of music or tracks where the base is more important thing in the middle. So these are songs than where the base is in the same time the lead instrument. And then you have just some effects being here and there, some pads and percussion mainly. So if you go on to do electronic or experimental music, a base patch could of course, sounds way more interesting than this one. But this one here is a good base for every other song wet, it just sits in the back, right? It just supports the base is something that is not so super prominent. And this is why it shouldn't overload your base because then it could make your mix, could really bring travel into your mix. So you have a hard time taming the base and bringing it in and playing well if the order instruments together. So this is a pretty nice real basic example. So without LFOs because denote, denotes are too short to really have a benefit from it. And what you could do is, of course now add some stuff to the mod wheel. So let's, for instance, bring down the filter here. And then if you play the sequence, you could just have nice filter sweeps like this. So this is pretty, I think that I use pretty commonly on my bass patches. Because I think this is something you always want to have easy access to on your monitory. I like this, which you could be doing of course as well. Like it's making fewer. But then decreasing the decay in the release time. So we will get this effect. Clicking has been reduced, right? This is something that could be usable on a face patches and is telling me what you can do stuff like this. Yeah, and and effect wise, there's not so much stuff that you can use on this, otherwise maybe compression and stuff like this, but we will be talking about this later and in other lessons. So I would leave it at this point. Sometimes it's just better to keep things simple and keep them the way they are. So you don't need to always go full hand just because you can. Sometimes patch are just better when they are simple. We will see us in the next chapter two, where we will be talking about this middle section and dive deeper into LFOs and functions and randomize this. I will give you some practical examples. It will be really interesting. I would do it on my, my sound set patches. And I will give you way more insights into this. So stay tuned and see you in the next chapter. 8. Chapter 2 - Playmodes: Mono, Poly, Legato, Glide: Welcome to chapter two, where we will be going through all of these things. So you will learn more about envelopes, about LFOs, about functions, about randomizes, about mod wheel. Yeah, about the material that we can apply to things. But I, first of all, one to start with this one here, because this mode button here gives us mono legato poorly and all of this stuff. And when we will be talking about LFOs for instance later, and we will be talking about research sources. It's better that you understand what mono legato poorly and after stuff is. So you understand what all of these settings do and why we pick them. So let's actually start right away. So I've picked a patch from my sound set. It sounds like this beautiful pattern. And you see it's set on Pali eight. And what this means is, let me actually start with mono. So I show you what monitor. So if I play a key and then play another key. So what you notice, each time I play a new note, denote that I was playing before it's getting replaced. So if I hold down this and no matter where it is, her play another note incidentally gets killed. Because on mono, the whole synthesizer has only one voice, which means you can only play one note at a time. And we will be talking, we will talk later in this lesson here about why you would pick mono or poly to over 40 trail for something like this, but just hanging for now. So the difference is then, if you look at poorly to, as you may think by herself now, probably two means. We have polyphonic, which means more than one voice. A mono actually stands for monophonic and Pauly stands for polyphonic. And two means that we can play two notes at a time. So I can play a firstNode and a second notes. But as soon as I play another node and another node, it will always start to replace the first note that the oldest nodes. So if I played this one, does aid that you see it bound down there. And this a one octave above on a play another note, the first one is getting erased. So you can see it now because I was calling down to note, but the synthesizer that kill these voices, so they disappear at this point. So this basically means the higher you go with poorly, the more notes you can play at a time. If I play eight nodes, it means I'm safe. As long as I play eight nodes or less. So I can do something like this. What you need to be aware because SUSE these envelopes are still running. They're all running and it's something, it's part of the sound off the pad, how it sounds. So if I play eight nodes and I played the ninth note, the first one is getting killed. And maybe the first one is still in the process of this. Because if I play quick, Like, like this, where if I'm not wrong, nine nodes. So the first one was probably not finished and got killed. In this case, it doesn't matter because we have enough voice is going on eight at the same time always. And they have a lot of reverb and they have a lot of a tail so you don't hear it, you don't notice that the first one is getting erased. So in this case, pulley eight is no problem. But just be aware that when you go for something like poorly for which makes it more audible when you when you play a day where getting erased, it's still not as strong as onto our mono, but you still hear it. Suggest. Just keep that in mind when you make these decisions. And we will, like I told you, talk in a second about when to use what. And then we have League Gatto, um, which is something special and legato, especially because if I hold down a note and then I play another note while I'm still holding the first node. The next node will not read trigger anything. It will not re-trigger. Or envelopes or LFOs are filters. It for just half the exact values that are firstNode is currently causing, which sounds like this. So I play and now I add notes. The first nodes started this whole process of this envelopes and our filter and everything. And when I play another note, it just takes the value that is currently given. So does this leak out? Oh, this is a special way to play things. So you may not ask yourself when to use what. So usually, I mean, in the hardware world, a lot of synthesizers in the lower budget range only have monophonic, just one voice. Some of them have two or three or four, but often not more and more expensive synthesisers go up here. In a digital world, you could, you could argue that it's not important, like we have no limitations here. Why not set it to 32? While it could be that you have a sound that is so huge that it's not made to play chords. So with this pad, I can play chords. Maybe another pair that I've created is so strong, so powerful, so brooder. That's only made for single solo performances. So that if you want only to play one node at a time, and you don't want to play more than one node at a time. So this way you can even remind yourself or if you give patches away to others to tell them that this patch is not made to play several notes. Or maybe their tails are adding up and you don't like how it sounds. So something like this. So this is a way where you could go for mono or you could go mono with base because you don't want the base to overlap when you play quick notes, right? You want them to embrace each other. And maybe you have a base where it sounds good, where it doesn't matter. It's just a little fine tuning. It's not really necessary because you could create a base in a way that you can even play it with poly aid and the tails will never come into each other's way. But you get the idea. This is when you could set something to mono. And the same applies to things like 456 and so on, so forth. So maybe sometimes you have a patch that is so strong that you can play a few notes about maybe not more than four. I would play you an awesome. Now hit that reset because it wasn't fully eight. Let me bring this up. It's still not bad. Actually sounds good, but only sounds good If you hear it alone, no. Now, but if this would happen in a whole composition, it will consume the mix. It will overshadow all of your other instruments. However, then it's still not really super helpful if you are bringing us to pull the four because then you play and you're just disappointed when the voices disappear, right? When you do something like this. But this effect of cutting voices, It's not always bad. I mean, listen to this, except the first low note that disappeared, which was not good. But if you play it in the same range like I did here up here, just Dan, you can still play it a little bit more free without worrying about too much of the tail getting into each other's way. However, personally, I always put it up to at least eight or 12 or as high as possible because I don't like this limitations. And I just spent a tension in my composition 2, kt overload instruments with too much notes. If they're not, if they can grant that. 99designs sounds in a way that they won't come in a way, even if I play 12th leg, you're just here on this patch here. You notice I can play this with really a lot of notes and it still sounds good because I have designed it this way. So this is just so you know how this works, but I think they are really rare, rare moments where you want to go mono or limit yourself to fewer voices. I just wanted to give you some ideas we had maybe could be a good decision. But generally you can go with a high number and you don't need to worry about anything. It should work. It should just work out. And then we have glides, which sometimes also has the name port our mental and other synthesizers. And glide is something that just introduce another glide from one node to another. So if I bring this to, bring it first up to a higher value so you can really hear it. So if I play a low note and then a high note. So what it does, it just said some time that a note pitch needs to travel from your first note to the next node. So from here to here, It's a pretty cool effect. It's not really good for Craig melodic lines because as you notice, it takes too long. At least at this setting. I mean, you could bring it down to something like this and then it doesn't really prevent you from playing quicker sequences. Can't even really here to see, I will show it to you on another patch. Before I do what you've maybe noticed. If you play close notes, even on this huge setting of 2.8, It was good. It was better with no notes together. And then the glide time between two nodes is still two points, 7 s, but it's not such a huge distance, so it's not that extreme. But yeah, that's, let's take a patch where you can see to the slower glides. I think this one is good for it. So if I bring this up to something like this, maybe a little bit less so you hear it. So this is basically it. Glide with a lower setting. You can even go lower and make it more subdued. Even fear, because it's still some extreme. Just want to show you that you can even work with low. But without it sounds like this. But if you go high with short instrument, like we're short notes when you play melodic lines like this, this happens. So this one workout because you will never hold a note for 2.7 s and you won't even hear the correct pitch because you don't have the time to let the nodes glides. So this problematic with instrumented you play like this. And even if you release a key, they're synthesized, remembers your last node. So I just played a high note. If I play a low note now, it will glide to the position. So as you see for instruments like this, one, blow values. So that's actually everything about this. There's the earlier, the other thing that we can do is we can change the mode that the voice steering mode works like voice dealings like a torture. You hold down like a note and you play another note. And it's, it's why stealing what happens when the firstNode is getting replaced by the second? And you can just switch to mode. Actually, I don't know the difference between reassign and rotate. But I think you could just just play around and figure out easily. You could just pick the other one and this one paid the same three or four nodes. We follow Pauli to amount and then just see what happens and you would easily find out what it does. So it's not super important because usually the most sense just had, have reassign at all by default, usually you can't. Change modes. Holds probably that I may know about. This is cool when you use sequences like we will be talking about sequences later, but imagine you have something like this. I'm going to place this for me. So I don't need to no matter what I had now, hold that for me. So this is just the hold button. Like it's really not necessary in today's times because we have for sequence and can just just put notes in and loop them here and something else. This is something that was taken from hardware synthesizers, but maybe you'd like to work more on your synthesizer or yeah, or I don't know, maybe do some stuff that should not be triggered by new nodes and you just want to hold OneNote, then it makes sense, of course. So it's not completely useless or not just a gimmick. You can really use this when you have use for it. I on this button, it says When sets are always all nodes were glide. Otherwise only nodes played legato will glide. And you remember legato means that you play a new note while still holding down another ones. If I hold down this one should actually introduce glycine. So with lines down, but what we're not happen anymore if you, if you deactivate always, is that the next note is always following the picture. You remember I told you, if I play this note, if I know play a high note, it will go there. But if you turn this off, it won't do this anymore. Now it will only glide if you play legato. And you remember from just that leg out who was playing mode where you hold down a note while you play the next one. This wasn't bad playing, but you just get the idea right. So this is everything about these modes, everything that you need to know. And we will see us then in the next lesson where we will be talking about envelopes and how we can incorporate them more and some practical examples. See you there. 9. Chapter 2 - Envelopes: So welcome to our next episodes. Let's talk about envelopes. But before we do so, I just want to compare it shortly, briefly with these other two because I want you to understand the whole concept of this better. Because envelopes, LFOs, and functions they all have in common. They add motion or movement, two things. The question for you is when to use which of those when you make decisions? And of course it's somehow limited to their capabilities. You can do things with LFO, so you can do with envelopes and vice versa. But the concept of envelopes is that everything has starting point, our peak position. So the highest position it can reach, and then it travels back to default. So it's a journey from a starting point to the highest point and then back to default. Lfos, however, they are in constant motion. Of course they will at some point in time be at their first position again, but then they keep moving. They don't have this progression and they always repeat the same shape. Then functions. The special thing about functions is as I told you earlier, that you can do something like this. So you're not limited to either have the same progression and not only just once because you can set it on loop. And you're not limited to have the looping same stuff all the time. I mean, if you hit loop here, of course, it will always repeat what you see here. But you can't make this shape in an LFO or an envelope because this is completely free drawn right now. So just that you get the idea about these concepts of these three, we will cover this in the next lessons, the other ones. But just that you have it already in mind. Now when we apply envelopes, we want to look for things that we can, that we can manipulate in a way that they have a peak position and then go back to default. So where does that make sense? We could, for instance, now just take our envelope to listen to the patch for us that's from the sunset. So it sounds like what it sounds like. So quiet, a little bit of resonance. So you could, for instance, bring this down. So it sounds like this. It's more powerful in the course on, because these high frequencies, they are not of making the sound so thin. But then we could take our envelope and let it do it as far as a little bit. So there'll be only half this resonance at a reverie attack. I mean, look how short it is at its peak position, right? And we instantly back after a defaults. If I hold down notes, That's quite a difference to if we bring this up to this position already and don't mind this Greek gray line. I deactivated the filtrate. So this is our default position now, like when we had this activated, it would jump for us to this point and go back. But now it's always on this level. Now listen to compare. It sounds way harsh on we have way more distortion and it's fine if you want this on your patched and this would be the perfect setting. But this is just a good example of how you can make use of envelopes. So if you bring this down and say, Hey, I only want this resonance at the very beginning for the blink of an eye for 1 s or half second. And this is perfect. Of course. States cleaner. And then you could of course, at this to something like fine tune so that each node starts with a little bit of instability and goes back. Of course, you can bring this to the maximum or something around. Stronger effects. This already other the two strong because if necessary. For scale, you can really hear the melody anymore. But you get the idea right? So this is, this is some familiar quit apply. It's okay. I just want a little pitch shift in the beginning. The difference here to the drift partners to drift pattern adds this instability constantly to each note you play. Each note will be different in their fine tune as long as you hold it down. But if the envelope, it would just be for this tiny second before it goes back to default. This is the concept that I told you about. Like if you did this with an LFO as we did in previous lessons, the fine-tune would move all the time back and forth. But with the envelope, we only have it for the attack time. And another thing that you could add this of course, is something like the shape of an envelope. You can say, oh, I want to whoops, this envelope tree. I want just to have this shape for each in the initial node. So this apparently makes no difference now, at least, not really audible. But sometimes it does. Depends on the patch, how much impact our waveform hairs. So you just have the idea, you could do the same with the modulation. You could say, I just want to have modulation at the very beginning. This case, I don't really think it sounds good because it somehow cracks up the sound at the attack. There's this. And then, you know, like if it kills the EdTech transient a little bit. But this is something you could get rid of rats, you could then mess with the attack time, make it shorter so it instantly starts higher. And has not this time where it goes up and you hear this diving in. But therefore you would then let's actually do it is to show you, it's actually take envelope tree for this purpose and then make this super short. It should be a little bit better. Let's see. Yeah, so now the tech is more stable because we don't, we don't here this part, this part of going in at least edit settings we had before, did a little bit mess with the sound. If you have a strong, it's again good. If you want that, of course. Whoops. Oh, which one does? Um, but yeah, or you go to Chris can bring this up a little bit. So we start with a little bit of this already and then have just a little impacts. Or just printing doughnut if twice it's going so I think this is still it's still modulating. Yeah, I was wondering because it went way higher than I clicked. So I have no close just to fill that with my mod wheel here, more here. So if the filter close, this effects are stronger audible than here. Because this is a really bright patch and you are adding brightness. So it's not, it's like holding your lamp into the sunlight, right? It's maybe a little bit visible in, but not that much, but if you make it all dark and then bring in some light, in this case some higher frequencies. You will hear this effect stronger. So yeah, this is one way to use envelopes and just wanted to show you another thing. Let's just for fun a bit Garcia at the end of a chain here. And bring envelope to tree into this. And let's, let's make it some progress in here. And then if a pretty nice effect now because if this is an extreme setting now, right? It's long, it's set to 3 s, almost four so you can hear it, but this is pretty cool. Of course you could set this to lower settings, but then it's not that cool anymore. There's just like, like water. Sounds a little bit like water. But you get the idea right? So, so we set our end positions where it should start and then it takes all the way back. Of course, we can increase the attack as well. So we have going all the way there and then back. I just went with this four 0s. But this is the concept of an envelope. You have a journey, you have a start and an ending and a peak position. Just keep that in mind when you use them. And then you will find a lot of opportunities to apply them. And I will see you in the next lessons when we will be talking about other folks. 10. Chapter 2 - LFOs: Welcome to our next episode. So I've picked already a patch for us like always this time my mega city pad from the analog Cyberpunk sound set. This is what it sounds like. Don't know if you can already hear this, but the LFO, what is dying doing here is changing the waveform off oscillator tree is just a little bit audible, little bit of movement. But like I told you in the last lesson, that LFOs are something that gives constant motion to whatever you want to route it to. And this has two main purposes. So the first one is to just change the color of the sound. So let's take LFO and for instance, added to fine tune just to give it more instability. Here it's adding, it's adding some motion Trudeau sound itself. There's more stuff going on. This is one way to apply a force to you either way is to create Ruden, actually, and you can do this really well with the cut-off. But let me actually take on a patch because this one has a huge, huge tail. Let's go for all dystopian future patch because it's a little bit cleaner for this purpose. So by the way, let's see this modulation here on engine to sue. You can see what it does. Here. It's really slow, really subtle, but it creates a part of the motion. But I wanted to tell you about. So let's, let's take out of O2 and routed to our filter. You see it's pretty quick now. So first of all, we're going to bring this down to a shorter value. And we click on this button. This is unipolar. You can see it better if I click here, you see usually it goes into both directions from the default position. But if you make it unipolar, it goes only in one direction and bounces back a little bit like an envelope has a starting point, goes up and comes back. But on repetition this time, what envelopes want to usually, I mean, probably you could now could actually not. Yes, no repetition button. Yeah. So what we have here, the benefit is we have to repetition and of course, we can do more with a wave form. So this is a sine wave. Sounds like this. If you really want to, sounds a little bit metallic, tried other direction. What you could do is you could change the shape of the wave, but we won't do this, but rather above the waveform button. But if you, because if you bring this to square, it will mean that your modulator here. Let me try something. Okay, I'm just wondering that this little, this little dot here is just flying on random positions. I hope it doesn't do what we see. But the waveform, the square wave, usually means that the sound will start here. And then this is the highest value or default position. And when we reach the middle, it will instantly be at a lower position. But now it's creating random values. I don't know why. Let me try something. Alright, this is okay, I can explain to you why. You see the values here. When I'm here, I'm on square, which means it will only bump between the highest and lowest position as you see here. If I bring this further, we will get a little bit of sample and hold and sample and hold, which you will learn later in the random chapter about the randomizer. It's a sample and hold always gives you random values when you hold down and out something like this. This is not control, controllable and we don't want to have randomizer here, so we just bring us to square. Where is it here? And then you can really hear this effect. This is what creates For instance, let's make this a little bit more subtle. So this is strong example font LFO set to zero where wave. Because with this you can really, really, really, really play crazy with ribbons and you can apply this to many, many things. And now let's first of all talk about this little thing here. And because I told you earlier that it's better that you know what mono leak out and all of this stuff is. So this is where we are now. So mono as you remember, means that y is stealing is happening. That means that let me make the slow so you can really see this. So if I play a note, I play another note. I'm going to reset the envelope. So what this does mean, let me show you this in our better example. One sound really good, but you get the idea better. Let's take this away from our cutoff. And its brings us to pitch because then you can really hear it. Sounds terrible. I say not to dispatched to the whole pitch of the synthesizer. We have two engines on charitable, no budget to read it. I really can't hear what it does. So on mono, if I play another note, I will re-trigger this LFO and we will again start at the default position each time I hit up note. Right? So this will steal like each new. Oh, no, don't don't think in stealing. Just, I mean, mono and this way and legato poly, it won't affect the amount of voices you have. If you have set here eight voices you can play advice is even if this is mono, it just means that every new node that you play, I'm starts to cycle for every other node. So even if I play four notes, I play on getting reset for all of them. Legato, however, is, as you would suspect, if you hold down a note and you play other nodes, they would just take whatever value that is currently there. And poorly starts a new cycle for each node that you play. So I have played four nodes now in every note. When I hit them, starts here and it has its own cycle independent from the other nodes. Maybe another node is already here when I played a second node, the second note was to start from here and not re-trigger the first one, which is still in the process of going through. This is This is poorly, so poorly means each new node starts at the default position and then gets its own cycle without affecting all the others. Mono is really triggering the cycle for every other node that's being played. As soon as you play a new node, Leganto keeps the settings for each other node. If you hold down one node when you play the next one. And the last important reset sources you need to know is free running. Free-running means that this here is just doing its thing. It doesn't matter when we play, what we play, how we play it. It will just do what you see here already all the time and we will just jump in whenever we want like here. Notice I started up here. We have a higher value. If I hit a node when it's down there, we will start low. So this is what free running is. It just lets the LFO mind its own business. So this was a really terrible black sample for your ears. But a good way to hear this, because I will show you this now on the cutoff filter. But just so you have an understanding because sometimes it's really hard to hear. I mean, if I make this on Paul II, can you really tell after us? And if those get triggered? I mean, but you can hear one thing. You can hear that every node that I start playing starts at a low position. They all start at like at the default position, at the beginning of the envelope. So the LFO, so if I, you can see, know which notes I'm playing just spent attention when I hit a new key that they all start it, start at a dock stance. You compare this Mono. Mono will reset it for each node so you can see it. You could even hear this interruption of the cycle. If I do legato, just join wherever we are at. But it was not that audible again this time maybe because sometimes when I'm like what I played the first nodes, we went here. But when I played the fourth node, we were back here. So you could, it's just sounded like you would start at this position. So this is why I showed you the thing with the pitch before, because it was my Audible there. What's really happening? Free-running, as I told you, is it starts where it is. So if I start now when this is up here, we will have a brightest sound. What you see here, this, this resetting of this curves. It's just happening because of our envelopes. Because if I turn this off, so this is our default position and when I play something, they move in a play on new kid and your kid. And you note it shows us again the default position where it starts at surf had two days and I plan on a note, these jump back. But it doesn't mean they get re-trigger. It is just a visual presentation of me playing some notes. So this is the different modes from the LFO. Like I said, you can either use them to add a little bit of sound difference like modulating the fine tuner, as you can see here, modulating the amount of frequency modulation. Or you can use them to create ribbon like a torture here with doing this and doing something like this. Creating revenue. What else do we have here? We have to symmetry button, which will shift or WAV format as a bit. So maybe you say it's not a good example of this waveform but with this year. So this is the common sinewave. But let's say, you know, like you remember, if I play a key will always start here at this position. So maybe you say, Hey, I want to, sorry, this is the wrong button. Actually. I wanted to talk about faith. Sorry. You could say, Hey, I want to start up here. Oh, hey, I want to stop down here. If I play here, you see it's actually verify this. So if we start here, we have this downward movement so you can hear the foot are closing when I play a note. However I start here. We were rather get an opening. So this is just to adjust your starting point in some way. For the NFO. Then symmetry, what I've been talking about before, it's simply just a button for you to shape the waveform a little bit more from the LFO. Just so you can do different things like this. Which is pretty cool as well. Then we have to fade button. So if you see this is getting darker here. This is our fate in which means if I make this two and level of 11 s, it won't actually take 11 s until this audible because you can see this dark line is progressively going higher. And the time from the dots starting on the left side until it hits the black areas just a few seconds. But its fate in it means just that the LFO takes a little bit of time before it gets activated. So if I where is it? What is that? This is real, we don't need this. Okay. So I love O2, so let's bring it to the pitch and then maybe hit that. When I started, we had done all my pitch of our node and it took a few milliseconds until it started to detune procedures this fate in its subducts, but it just gives a little bit pre-delay. This is cool if you want an effect to come in a little bit later. So maybe you want the first seconds of the filter be normal before it starts to do stuff like this. So if we, if we did this again, Let's see, not this one, this 12 square and we have a maximum amount of fade-in time. Let's see. Okay, I was wondering why nothing is happening. That's because I've picked LFO one. Let's take this away again. I don't know why I wasn't no wrong one. So again, let's take this. Now you really start to hear it, right? It's getting stronger because of fate in its 20 s. So it takes really 20 s to complete the unfolds. If I start, you won't hear this bumping. Know it slowly comes in. I always get it. Hello. This is what the fate is for. Of course, you can make this more subtle. So say, Oh, I just want a few seconds to be on the fact that this can have a lot of purposes depending on the patch that you're creating. But that's basically it about LFOs. So you can add motion, you can add ribbon. Of course, you can apply them to everything. You can again, go to your effects like here's a tape echo in this and you could be modulating the time of it, which we sound a little bit funny, but just so you see another opportunity, so you see this moving now. Of course, an extreme example. But just so you get an idea that basically no limits can we just apply them to whatever you want and find the kind of modulation, the kind of motion, the ribbon that you want. And then you just pick your, your part of the synthesizer, your knob, and then you just start modulating it and then you can mess with the shape of the starting position with the reset type. And of course he had at times I think this is self-explanatory. It's just the quickness. And like I told you before, you can have triplets which are a little bit quicker. So like a quieter note, triplets is a little bit quicker than a quarter note, does the opposite. It's a little bit slower than quieter. And this is true for every other value that you pick. And this is simply just a time or you bring it to hurts to freezing. And can just pick whatever value you want. But I always recommend to use the sink versions because they are linked to the tempo in your DAW. So you don't have issues when you put this into your composition because it will all be within the beats of your composition. So far about LFOs, and we will see us in the next lesson about functions. 11. Chapter 2 - Functions: Welcome to this episode. I have already picked a patch files from my sound set that has huge function applied to it. This is how it sounds. So span attention to this thing here and this moving line. Maybe you'd better on a high note because it actually down here, yeah, He gets better. It is. This will grow. By the way. Did the reason why we don't hear this up here is, like I told you earlier, what this is doing. It's bringing up a modulation. And as you know, modulation increases in this kind of frequency, the higher Harsha notes frequencies. And if you played his high, it's still there, but it's kind of sad. But if we play a really dark nodes, then we can heal way more of this harmonic content added on top. This is why a dark note here is useful. So what you see is what I've done here is I've created basically a sine wave. So basically something like this. But as you can see, I had already tree LFOs in use for this patch and they all have different speeds and purposes. And this one, the only sinewave is really slow. And I wanted to have it a little bit faster. So just picked a function and both myself, a sine wave. So this is, this is one way to apply functions. Actually, if you run out of LFOs and envelopes at could it, could do the same job. You could take your function and do it. But yet the special thing about functions is as I told you earlier, you could even do something like this. You can just create your own envelope and shade. This is pretty cool. Let's do something like this. It's kinda funny. But you get the idea, right? So this is, you can just go crazy and can do whatever you want with this. Could even apply this a little bit to the cut off. And here's this bipolar button. It does the same that the uniporter button here does. So if you click on bipolar, it becomes bipolar like the LFO by default. So it goes into groups, into two directions as you see here, left and right. And if you click unclick this, it gets unipolar. And now has only one direction. Of course, this is not in sync now because you can see here this little brighter lines. So I could actually bring this up here. So this is, this is our quarter note, I guess. Then this here. And then this year and this year. And it should now be a little bit more room, Let's see. Yeah. So here you can have a little bit of orientation. So you see this line here, it's a little bit brighter than the dark lines. So these are markers for your beat parts of this, the first part, the second part, the third part and the four-part. You can see it here on this big on white lines. And you can have functions which are extracellular here or just click there. Like I said, you can change the polarity. If you rather want to have it go into both directions or only one here can change the speed as always, if I bring this up a creek or speeds. Then down here we can pick between loop. Which is looping this envelope. Or we can click on one, which means it's a one shot, so it will be only played once. And then stays at the end. And because we have they got home and I'm holding down to node, we would stay at as well. You can see it says legato keyboard on the bottom middle. But if I release the key downplay another key, trigger. Remember legato only triggers when we hold down on when we play another note. So it's just dives into that current value and run like on the LFO means the function envelope just minding its own business. So it's running all the time and we just get the value, whatever it is on when we play our key. If a plane, the middle straight jump into this values. This is true for every are the nodes. And then of course you have the different gates sources again, some mono re-trigger for every nodes. Which sounds pretty **** on this one. I have to admit. And then we have poorly, which means every node gets its own cycle independent from the others. But it's a C. It doesn't sound quite good with this because this, he is creating kind of a ribbon. And if you create a room, you want everything to play in this ribbon. Because there's no point in me playing three notes with different rhythms. They just get into each other's way. So for things like this, you want to have half either free running, which in this case is just clicking on Run. So what am I place in the sequence? You just want to have the legato option. Exactly. This is, this is what makes most sense. And as you see, there are lots of other sources to start, but I won't cover them right now because this is all of this is going into the advanced sound design stuff. It's really getting complicated from there on. So this is why we don't need now, and this is what you won't find on most synthesizers. Like I told you in the beginning, I want this course for you to be really about learning sound design and understanding it. Not in particular, learning pigments inside out just with this course. So most of the time, if you have an envelope like this, you don't even have the choice to make this start function to our randomized a tree or something like this. So I really teach you the things that are common that you will hopefully find on most of the synthesisers. Some even don't have these settings here. But these are the most important. This is how you can apply functions. So the principle of envelopes, we had explained a few of times, like I said in the last episode, LFOs create motion or written, but on a constant repetition and wafer with a fixed waveform. And here we can create our own envelope. So wave form, an envelope in this case means the same. You could even call this here waveform or envelope. So here we can create our own envelope and we can make it one shot or loop, whatever you want. And this is simply how to apply these. Which just gives you one more example. Let's see what we can pick for this. So what is this a texture. Actually nice example because it always already has three of them. So we have functional one, moving the filter like this. So I set this up like in square wave in the LFO. This is actually something I could have done with TAF role, but I decided to make it with the functions. We have function two, which goes, Oh yeah, okay, this is getting complicated because this is granular synthesis super-complicated at when stuff. But basically messes with the start position of the sample here. Just in this shape. Again, something I could have done with an LFO probably. But as you see, I only had one left. So probably this is why I started to use functions and then just stick with them so that I would run out of space with LFOs anyway. And when I was working with functions, I just stick to this function tree. Is just moving this further here. This first effect by two things, not only by this function, so this function here changes the starting position, as you can see here, it goes up and down and something else, Dennis, even messing from there on off this movement. Probability function one or something else. I don't know. Maybe an LFO, LFO one, I guess. It doesn't matter if something is modulating this, but you get the idea. So in this case, I've just used the functions. Sometimes. You just want to draw in your own stuff and then work with this. And by the way, the other things here, they don't really matter like here's just presets that you can use are safe. Dan, this is just another way to, to draw, as you can see these numbers here, these values, they change when I make this. So you can get type in precisely values if you're not sure if you're perfectly online, but they are magnetized as it says here. So if you want to bring this really, really into position, it falls into place so you don't need to worry, it will always have the right value. Of course, if this is off and you make something like this and it looks, it looks like it's straight, but you can see here it's not, right, this is straight. But this is just what the magnetize button for us. With scale, you can just shift a little bit of the shape. And the Draw mode is just when you want to create stuff, you can go with something like this as well. So now we have different values. So this is good to create a ribbon actually. So let me draw that bit difficult because you need to click in the proper second. But you know, like you could build ribbons easier with this. Come on up. Yeah, you can hear this, I guess. Also now we have this revenue. And then you can just change the draw mode and do stuff like this. This just helps you if you want to really create ribbons with particular forms that you can just draw them in easier and generate. This is just a free draw tool and you can do whatever you want if this is just shortcuts, if you already know you're just wanted to create something like like this ribbons, then you can do this perfectly with this tool. So that's about functions. So I hope it's clear for you the difference between these three concepts now. So it should make it easier for you to decide when to pick which of these opportunities that you have, depending on what you want, right? So you have these different choices and you now know how to apply it. So in the next section, in the next video, we will be talking about the randomizes. See you there. 12. Chapter 2 - Randomizers: So let's talk about randomizes. We have been working with them in the past already. You remember that we added them to some values to give each note that we play a little slightly different starting position of something like fine tune or cut off or resonance. Just to add a little bit more life to a patches, but randomizes can do way more. And this is what I wanted to show you here. We have actually three modes, which is a special for pigments. Sometimes you just have randomizes at all that you always the same and you can just apply them to something and set the amount. But here we have three types, so we have binary. And as you see, I've already rooted this randomizer for us to the cut-off knob. So I've picked a value around 0.20. 20. If I can hit the number. And what you see is it's jumping between the lowest and the highest value. Nothing in-between. The binary mode just jumps between your maximum range and the default position. And everything you can do here is to change the, the sync speed. You can change the probability that a higher or lower values being hit. So this is 100% high-value, 100% loan. Everything between will just shift this relationships so that you get more of one of the other. But what you can do here is you cannot get a ribbon or something. This is always randomized. So no matter what you do, it's always randomized and only between the lowest and the highest value. So Turing, turing is something different. If you bring this flip mode down to zero, it will always create the same sequence. And by length, you can determine how long the sequence should go. So if it should be eight nodes long, you do the setting and if I hold down a note now, you always get the same secrets. Let me actually bring us into the other side. Maybe we can hear it better. So as you notice, we have the same ribbon hold the time. It was one screen randomly, but then it repeats. Stay in this room. If you want to create a random room. This is the way to go. Here can decide how many steps does ribbon should have. So 20 steps means 20 different values until it starts again from the beginning. And something like, let's say four means only four different steps. It's up to you how you set this up. And then move the flip button and it says on the bottom. So it sets the probability for a sequence to evolve at 50. 50% is fully random. At 100 flips each time the loop repeats. By flipping. Let's actually see. If you bring this to two. It looks like a plane repetition home. Yeah, I don't know what they mean by this. But at 50% at here is random generated, randomly generated. So here you want Current written like before. If you grow something between, you can make the changes more subtle that happens happened to the ribbon. So if you say, Hey, I want to have an eight-bar written that is mainly the same, but a little bit different each time you can go for a value like this and then alveolar difference. This is weird that it did stop now for so long. I guess this was just an accident by the algorithm which just created so many steps that we're all the same. Yeah, You see, it's you can't really count on that. Sometimes it will give you some, some trashy ribbons or evolve into a direction that you don't like. But if you want your sequence to evolve all the time, you can, if you are, if you want to be happy, random. Then you can just do something like this and see your cigarettes evolving all the time over and over. So it repeats each time itself. If little alterations and belong on your player will be changed from the beginning of course, because each new cycles and human evolution in your, in your, in your values. So this is a turing mode. And by the way, this is always asked, you know it, right? So, um, so if I hit legato, notes will have to current value. If I play poorly, each node will start to sequence that's currently running from the beginning. And moonlight, guess what? Then restart each sequence. You already here, it is cut off corrected at Mono often asked when it replaces something. So these are the settings as you know them. And then we have to sample and hold section. So if you hold down a note here, when all the time get randomly generated values. Completely. There's no there's no, there's no shape that you can recognize. A ribbon like before. And then with this button so you can just determine how the values should be generated to each other. So it says here, when the new value is higher than the previous sets, the time it takes to fade to the new one. So instead of getting this rapid strong changes like a square shape, we will get more curves. And you can do this into the opposite direction. So this of course, changes to weigh everything sounds because this shape here, if it goes from down here to up here, it means it's instant jump in, in value y. This here now is our transition. So what we could do to make this pulley first, or even free running, is free running an option? No, I can't. And we stick with holy. Holy means that each note that I will get another value. Basically what we did earlier than, let's say with mono, maybe. Just wondering that it stops. It did stop to create values for us now, right? Because it just stays there. I don't know why it does this. Let me reset this. I don't know. Let's see if this is going back to what it does. Because this is sample and hold as well as you can see, it generates force all the time and this one is just stopped. I don't know why. Let's just for now take random either to Dan. I don't know why they stopped. Maybe this is a buck. Let's bring us to pitch so you can hear what I really mean. The curve. So this is a rapid change, right? We get instantly all the other values. But if you are okay, was set to clock because I changed. If I bring it back to clock, it will probably start again with this. Clock means send that it's generated by this rate button in the time that you set up. And if you take any of these keyboard settings, it will only be triggered when you hit a key and then behave to where you wouldn't, you would expect from it. So as you know, poly sequence for each node, legato, all join the current node that you hold and mono resets the cycle for every other node being played. If you play on new node. Okay, alright, so good that we have to sort it out as well. But yeah, remember how this sounds? The rapid changes. And if you make something like this, we will have more of a pitch shift effect. A little bit like applied function that I showed you earlier in the video with the poorly modes. Because now we have this transition instead of this rapid changes. So this is again the same principle like with the LFO. You remember when I applied this, we had this constant jump, this bump here in the middle. Instead of working with this, which is more smooth right here we have a transition because from here to here it takes some time. This dot here needs to travel. And if this is pitch, it goes down and then goes up. And in this case it's just bumping down. So this is remembered. Ignore this dot because it's randomized and everything is back to square. So you can see now it comes and faults and we have rapid change. And this use the same behavior on pitch. You can hear me well. This is what the settings for. And with this little button, you can sync them to each other so they have the same value all the time if you don't want to have differences between them. And here you can pick the source for the generation of the random values. So it's not linked white noise, which we'll be covering later. And it does, it's the source no matter if it's activated or not. But we could link it to something else. But actually, I must be honest. I think it's pretty like yeah, okay, Now you can see it's sort of so I linked it to the LFO one. You can see it moving here up and down. And this is still values that it generates now. Right? It goes up and down like this. So this is a little bit, yeah, like white noise is probably a bit more core and this is why we don't have this movement. But we will be talking about white noise later. So this is how, you know, now you know about these three different types. So you can make decisions based on your on your plan, on your goal with your sound, which one to pick. And for this, for this mode that is now running true with random values, there are really no roots. You can really put it on everything you want as you just heard on, on this course button with the pitch. This is something that you can only use in an intro or if you want to play only with this one patch, of course, and I'm musical composition. You can use this because it will mess with your scale again with your music theory, it would sound out of qi. But like I showed you, you can, you could link this to 2D, cut off random values. You could put a module here in the middle and at the randomizer. So you could give us some random values all the time. Charitable. Maybe not aquatic sample. Maybe we will run out. Yeah, look at Temple. Didn't lay the speech sound funny, but it's way too strong. Well, maybe this is cool if you would use the touring and bring it to a fixed sequence of 8 bar. So we'd get the same amount. It's always maybe bringing it back from this button. Turn this off. Just so you get an idea. It really didn't sound super well. It's not like this is not the best presentation ever. But just to show you some ways, like fine-tuning something like this to make it sound good, can really take long, sometimes an hour or even longer to figure out where to route things too and make cool stuff of them. Just so you have an idea. So we could even when you're bringing us to this one here. Let's get something like a sequence starting to combine this with other governments. So of stuff like this, you could be creating then sequences and, and figure out what you want to do with the randomizes. But most of the time I used them as I showed you. So I think it was on sample and hold. And then we change this to poorly. And that means we get a new value every time we hit a node, which is of course on Dispatch, not really audible because it's a pad and we would need to hold it longer to hear it. But then an issue which evolving scale you want, she had a difference. But just to show the concept, again, take this one. So here's our randomizer on the cutoff filters to see it gives all the time little different values. So I put it here on touring a little bit further, which you want here because this is a black patch, so you read a plate like this. And then it's not a problem that this is all the time moving. But let me, let me change this to sample and hold and then we bring it to Pauli. And the way we did it before. And then we could take this randomizer and say a little bit of fine-tune changes. Just a little bit of resonance. Go to the fx is nothing we should modulate right now. She is not much on this patch and we can modulate. But just so you remember the concept, so we have now the cutoff to resonance and the fine-tune being a randomly generated at each key and just a little bit. And then always make sure that it's not working against you. So if I would say I would do this into the negative position. Remember coast into bulk both directions as you can see. If I bring it into a negative position, um, and then play. Just to see all the time now I got high values, but sometimes I get these low values. So this would take a lot of control away from a patch if I would be playing now it will come into my way because sometimes I've really bright and really dark nodes. Sounds weird, right? Because some nodes are really inaudible and some are super loud. And so you want to be careful with stuff like this. If your player in him as an actress, I really only use little super literal values like this to just add more organic to the salt. So yeah, this is so much everything about randomizes that you need to know so far. And I will see you in the next lesson. 13. Chapter 2 - Noise: Let's talk about noise. So I've started a new blank patch for us. Sounds beautiful like this. And I just wanted to show what, what noise is. So if we, if we bring down the volume from oscillator one, we have no sound. Bring in the noise now. You hear it. This is how it sounds, no matter what note I play. It has no pitch. It is what it is. This lets you play it a little bit more, but don't mind. This is just I'm just playing around. So this is noise and you can either he had changed to a darker tone. Red noise. Are brighter tone, blue noise on a balance middle, the white noise. Usually you don't, you only have white noise in your synth if at all. At least from my experience. Now you may ask yourself, what the **** is this far, right? Because it sounds like a TV on snow picture. So it adds some it sounds like like wind sometimes. And it mainly has two purposes on to kind of patched. So either you pick up pads, so let's make it look into a pad. We could actually make quickly or on Pat. I mean, this is really set up. So you can just show you the the principal should bring a lawsuit. Give us some delay. So now just a quick patch, that's a creek pad. So what you hear is that this noise is just adding a little bit to the patch. It's just adding some kind of yes, some wind in S, If you can say so. But actually to some not so good because the patch, this is so bare bones that we hear too much of the wind off the noise. So let's actually really pick a pad. Just go off the dystopian future pad again. So this is what it sounds like. If we bring in noise. So you hear it here. More subtle. Span attention. Swift has, it adds, it adds air, venus air to your patch, right? So it makes it a bit more airy, is what you could say. You can even then make it less area if you go into the darker range here in there, but you can read it here and that's when it adds some arenas to the past. So does this one way to apply this on? The next most common way is, let's take our base is find a bank that is good. So pancreas, now you hear this. It's like there's this new. It sounds like if you have a blank sheet of paper and hitting our table with a Sufi, right? So it adds some air attack. Transient. Hey, this is not how to play a base, but this is pretty strong. So again, if you say, Oh, this is too much, you can just year ago Dr. volume or make it less bright. Dial it in gently but it adds more clicking as to their tech opposite to this. Yes, just clicking this minded heck. This is already the two main purposes of noise. You either bring it into our pad from arenas or you bring it into a base or a black patch, anything with a quick attack envelope on the furniture so you can hear the sound snappier heck, because the volume is more audible when the failure asthma opened. This means that when it's opening happens, you hear it because if you turn this off without this, you still hear a little bit. I guess. Just that, but it's really you can't really hear it here. But with this envelope because the envelope opens or let me actually bring us off again. So if I hold down, now, you start to hear it down here so quiet you can hear the noise anymore. However, or envelope takes care of this and then we get this snappy sound. So this is the two ways that noise is mainly used for. And everything else is probably just specialty effect sound design. So if you're creating some crazy as f x patches, then maybe noise can add up some fee. We can actually open one of these patches and look into this. I don't know if this will work now, but I have this time modulation patch here. I say not even audit, but because the filters to close, it can't hear anything. Yeah. Do I have another SFA eggs? Too quiet. Be audible in this range here, here, here. This costs if I bring this down. You can here. This is a weird kind of sound design stuff that I mean, where volume, volume, when noise could actually add something to your sound. Personally, I think there are not that many opportunities for your users. But you know, like you need to figure this out for yourself when you create patches. If you have used for this. Sometimes when you build ribbons like this with photo filter and then you have to noise like let's actually do this. Let's take this LFO off and instead linked this to here. Let's see. Here. It sounds terrible. But once you get the idea, so on other patches where this would actually play a snappy sequence with almost a percussive character, then volume would really add onto that. So, yeah, if you create a percussion with your synthesizer, because you can absolutely create cakes and snares and high hats with a synthesizer, which is another whole topic. But you could, if you then take your eardrum patch and add add noise to it. Let's see if there's like, I mean, here we have the Where the **** is the Victoria Here. Victoria. And then this is what I was looking for. So let's let's look for do they have percussive as I've never, never ever looked into this. I was just creating sounds. I don't think that they have a section that is percussive. Maybe. Maybe on a sequence is, let's see here. But it's wave table and we don't have noise on this wave table we will cover in the next chapter. You can heal wave table again. Let's look for something that has no wave tables and a loop year. Here you can really hear the, so this is the basic zones. Bring this in. So you can hear changes like it adds more percussive elements because the noise is giving us clicking. What do you notice? Maybe it changes to solve over all. This is because as you maybe noticed, sometimes you have the noise as a source for some modulation. So I guess somewhere here, yeah, here this randomizer sample and hold to as white noise as source. So if I make changes up here, it changes the way it is randomizer works and probably be here. Morphing is connected to having the noise as a source. But you get the idea right? You, you hear the clicking SDA was coming on top to it. Of course, you need them to shape this and plan this from the very beginning for it to release on good and Apache. But this is the next way. So you have, you can apply it to pads, to add arenas. You can use it on basis to make to attack transient, transient harder. Or you can just add it on percussive pet patches with sequences where they're clicking has often noise can make it just sound more percussive. So that's it. See you in the next episode. 14. Chapter 2 - Modwheel, Velocity, Aftertouch: So let's talk about velocity after touch and mod wheels. So I think they, they pretty well grew up together to explain them. But I wanted to start with the mod wheel here because it's the most interesting one. We can start right away. On your heart, if you have a hardware midi keyboard in front of you, which I strongly emphasized you to buy one if you don't have one already because it's really fun when you create music. Has these weird attached to it. And I have, I've been talking a little bit about them earlier, but again, let me play and I took a patch from episode one of pattern we created. So if I bring up the left wheel, I do it manually in the real world on a keyboard, but you must see it moving here in the graphic. Receive messages. This is what it's for. If I release it, it jumps back into default position is just how I how I pitch. We are set up. So you always get back to the initial position and don't, you're not stuck on e to figure out where it was, the middle, right? It jumps back to the perfect pitch. And then you have this mod wheel attached, attached next to it, and it will stay wherever you live it. So I'm moving this with my hand now in real time. You could ofcourse click this with your mouse here as well. If you don't have a midi keyboard, you can make use of it like this. But it doesn't really make sense because it's more of a live performance towards so that you can play and move this in the same time if your left hand. So here's the mod wheel field. And you can just apply to anywhere and it's simply does nothing else than just scroll through the range that you set up. So if I bring this value here down by -30, 40, point -34, I bring this up now because this is the default position. If I bring this up, I'm closing the filter, as you can see here in this window. If I do this via Play, I can just affect the Santa Maria Times. I could actually bring the moderate all the way up and starting point and then play and then slowly increase it when I play, bring it back soon. So as you can see, I can use it as a creative performance tool while I play. I can all the time work with the filter. Why, Why did I play with my hands on my keyboard? And this is something that is cool because it gives you some real-time control over yourself. Because if you would be working on a hardware synth and the rearward, of course, you would have all these knobs in front of you. Probably not as complex as the synthesizer, unless you spend a few thousand bucks for a modular synth. But in real time, in real life, you would just be messing with all the knobs and faders all the time while you play. The mod wheel is like an excuse for that. So we can link things to this and you don't, you're not limited to link only one thing you could say, okay, if I increase this, I wanted to fine tune to go all the way down. I want this waveform to shape the pulse-width. I want to add a little bit of resonance, and let's see here, I want to increase the distortion to go really crazy now with this and even add some modulation. Let's see something like this. If I move this mode, we now have a huge impact on our salt. Suceed. This is pretty, pretty, pretty cool. I mean, if you like this, if you say, Wow, this is pretty cool. I like how it sounds, but I don't want to move it with the hand all the time. I wanted to synthesize or to do this for me. You could now go to the LFO and just, just try to add the same value stream, everything. And then you have 0 would be doing what I just did for you. But yeah, this is about them what we are. So this is like when I move it now you can see I can even sweep through their positions. I could just leave it halfway and say this is finite, just stay here. And LFO can do this. Lfo will always move and the functions and the envelopes as well. But if the mod wheel, I can just Let it stay here in the middle and then splayed a pattern does value. And then adjust if I want by just moving this element. And basically do macros here are the same. I just want to show it as at this opportunity. So if you click here on M1, you can just, I don't know, do something like this. Do something like this, and like this. And as soon as you move this macro enough, it will move all these knobs for you. So you can see them moving up there if I move this, so this one I can control my keyword because my keyboard only has these two. But some keyboards have an obsolete cater to them. And then you can connect them and move them by hand on your keyboard. And this way you can make wrap some functions on a single button to have this effect controllable the same way I do with my mod wheel here. Pretty, pretty cool if you asked me, so this is just some opportunity how we could make use of this mod wheel. And then we have velocity. And velocity is something that I read. I show you on a different patch. But let me actually save this before. So we have this and let me just take something from my bank. Maybe stuck neon. So this is how it sounds. Velocity is the amount of pressure you put when you hit a key. So you see here's the velocity curve. And if I hit a key now, you see how strong I hit it. So faded, really gentle. It's probably not all the way down there. But Suseela, different values. And velocity by default is linked to nothing. But I could link it to the cutoff filter. And the strong I hit, the more open to fetter as so. Cea. It's really hard not to, not to push the keys too strong because different keyboards are different, velocity sensitive. So to get to real low values, it's hard not to get too strong, but you get the idea. So like I have performance options, I can play stronger. Would even be better audible if I bring this cutoff even more down. And then increase range so we have more range to play with. So just to see, just by pressing harder, I can now control this. Usually I don't work with this because I like to type into, to draw in sequences are played them in, but I don't want the velocity to affect the sound. But for people who play a lot of life with the keyboard and maybe they like pianos and they want to have a similar feeling. Or even if you're just like life performance on your synth. Then you can play with this velocity values. And they will become relevant later when we will be working with the sequencer. Because here you can add changes to the steps of the velocity, but we will cover this later. Don't get confused by this just now. But just so you know, there's some, some reason on our reason for it. And this curve here, this curve, Let's set you up how it should respond. So this means if I bring this down, it means that the low notes that I hit, I mean, everything like this is 0-127. Don't ask me why does a certain range, but as the range for velocity. And let's say that this year is around 50. If I bring it to this point, it means that every note that I hit that has a velocity pressure below 50 will be. At the minimum position. So you see all these down there. No matter where the Linda dot lands, they sound the same. Really hard to play this little differences, but you get it. And when I play stronger, I have my normal progression. So what you actually could say, I wonder what most of the sound to be a little bit darker. So you set up something like this. I can only make two dots as it seems. Okay? It says something like this. Can even here and move the curve a little bit. Let's actually make it like this. And this means that we will be presented with less of these really high notes, right? Because I limited how loud, how strong discipline as velocity notes should have an impact because they are routed to the filter. And if I bring it all the way up like this, and then all notes and pass this threshold will be having a real huge effect on the future. So I am by right-click, you can just reset this, just right-click on a dot and it will disappear. This is by the way, true for, for this year as well. So if I hold right-click, I can just have this rubber symbol and get rid of everything. Here. It's not true for these. Here doesn't work with the reset, but just so you know, yeah, This is basically what velocity is about. And same is for after touch. Let me actually remove this velocity after touch. I can't show you in real time simply because aftertouch, not every keyboard hazard, and especially the cheaper ones, don't have really good aftertouch. So I don't have it because I purchased just one for my performances, but I don't mind. But after touch, you usually is if you hold down a key, how strong do you all that? Because I could now start to holding it still, but not as strong as I do. So if I would like pushing this key down, let's say, let's say 0%, 100%. I could bring the key a little bit up and you still hear a note. And if your, if your keyboard has aftertouch, you could link something like this to it. And it would mean that if you hit a key and then slowly release it, that this range that we just set up would move regarding to how hard you push. So basically you can say velocity is two initial pressure you put on a key and aftertouch is the pressure that you put on a key when you release it. So it basically does the same, but from the other side after you've played a note. Then let me actually look at keyword tracking. So keyboard tracking, aldose, this goes into both directions. Okay, Interesting. Yeah, So what you can do with it. So let's say I'm usually keep on tracking as well as your keyboard, the keyboard you see down here. And pretty similar to what I did with velocity. I can now say, I can pick this range here on the cutoff filter. I could say that I want to lower keys to have fewer impact on this than the hierarchy. So actually it's the opposite now. But if I, if I play now, really soft, I get a huge effect. In effect, strong, sorry, not strong. This is not velocity. Sorry, I don't get confused. I actually went confused because I talked about something that I'm going to tell you. Just forget what I just said. So if I play higher high icon, the more close to filter is, the low I play, the more open is. Because this velocity curve here, it works together with my with my keyboard. Let me grab, Thank you. Wes, together with my keyword and move this little dot. You can see how Hi, I'm playing. So if I play a low note, we are here, the Fairplay high. We are up here. And you can change the relationships. So I could say I want the lower notes to have less impact on the future. So I would make something like this. And Dan. Now come on and then do something like this. This is an extreme example of cross. Now, don't set it up like this unless you have a special, special purpose. But now if I play low notes, everything in the lower range. So this is about nodes. Now this is not about pressure, not about how strong you hit a key. This is why I just was confused because I wanted to tell you this and I accidentally spoke out what I just talked. So what I wanted to tell you as velocity is about pushing somebody I can push as strong as they want. It doesn't matter because this is representing just the pitch, the node on my keyboard. So this here reacts to your, to your range on your keyboard. And if I pass this threshold here, to finish, I will be more open. Down here, doesn't it? So I could have. So now my my lower notes acted like a base. A base accompany their pledges of my hands and my right hand can write notes. But this is an extreme example, like I said, what you could do more in practice. So you could do something like this and could say, okay, it's, it's, it's flipped right now is because it's minus. Let's bring it up to two plus because it was just inverted because of the negative value. So you see, this goes into both directions, but I have had a negative value and this is why this was upside down in the way it reacts. Now it's, it's an, a positive value. Now it actually does what you see. So if I play something here, down here, let me actually bring us even more. So if I play a low note now, the closer furthermore, because it's lower, this year, will be in the upper range of values. So we have a value here, right from default position two plus 19. So this basic area, especially in combination with the filter, usually you have this button here. In this case, it says it adds frequency modulation to the filter. Let me reset this one or let me actually just reset the whole patch. So what this does for you is basically the same, but you can't control fine tune the curve. So this means that now the lower notes here, this, they are darker. The higher notes sound like this. So basically this here puts more emphasis on the power off your, off your nodes. So the lower nodes can darker, the higher nodes can write this more for difference between them. So this is basically doing the same like this. But here you have more fine tune. Because you could say, I wanted the opposite, right? I want to have the dark, the lower notes to be a bit more stronger present and the higher notes, they should be. Have a curve like this. This is now not super beautiful setup. But this way. This way. If we link it to something whereas it keyboard here, the lower notes will be darker and brighter. If you went the opposite effect, just bring this into a negative value like we had before. Now it's flipped. The darker notes. Now here, open the filter more in the higher notes. Don't. This is a way for you to do a little bit more fine tune with the keyboard. And yeah, you can just apply this the way you want. So this is basically everything you need to know. So I hope you enjoyed this and I see you in the next lesson. 15. Chapter 3 - Reverb: Welcome to chapter three. In this section we'll be talking about effects. So I won't cover all the away blur effects here because some of them are really special specific, and I will only cover the most common and most important ones that you will find on almost any synthesized that it comes with facts and stuff that you will most likely actually use. And except, except equalizer and the compressor which is here, except these two, I will explain all of them completely. These two I will explain to you as well and as good as I can. But they are really topics for itself because they are a lot involved in mixing and mastering. And there's so much to know about them. One could really, I could just create a whole courses just for these two. But I will, I will give you a brief intro, introduction and a good fundamental, basic understanding of what they do and of course that you are able to use them. So don't worry, just as a little introduction speech. And I would actually like, I've picked a patch already for us from my set. This is how it sounds of artifacts. And with a little bit off the filter closed. So let's actually start with rework in this session as the title says, reverb is your number one tool when it comes to creating room. So without this patch is pretty dry. The only thing that you hear is the tail from the patch itself, from the envelopes. And it's just a short tail. So if we dial in and let me reset all of the stuff to where it was by default. So let's dive in some rework issue here. The more we dial in, the more far away the sound seems to be, right. If I increase it even more, That's pretty far away. So the amount of reverb is one of the factors that come into play to determine the distance. So if you want your instrument to be stronger, to be more present, to be audible better, especially in the attack. You want to pick values here around this level because we still have the power and the tail. If you go up here, it starts to become weaker. So let me first of all explain all these buttons and knobs to you. So size apparently is the size of the room. Let me increase this a little bit so you can hear it better. Justice. So this sounds almost like via analytical base med room. While this huge soundscape listened to the tail. Some beautiful tail. So to decay button tells you how long it takes for the reverb to fade out. And I don't know why they picked these weird numbers because like this here, it doesn't mean 8 s. I guess. Now 8 s are gone and still going. But this is pretty long, by the way, if you do it on the maximum, I think it will be endless. The same goes for delaying. You control with the feedback, how long it fades out. If you make this to 100, you will hear it forever. Maybe this is not the case here, but it's true for delay. But the edist distance fade out slowly. But yet the decay is like the tail. And the size is how huge room sounds. So this is, sounds tighter, right? Not a huge space like this. This is a cool effect, but unfortunately we can't modulate this pattern as you see, it has no A circle around it so we can do this with any modulation. But still good to know. Dan, we have pre-delay. And pre-delay is pretty easy to explain. Maybe you can hear it. Maybe you notice something. Basically tells you how long it takes until the reverb kicks in with the setting, 200 milliseconds will pass before we hear the delay. Compare this. Here we are already in the delay from the very beginning. Here. Take some time. Except from personal taste. When you want to use this or not. If a sound source is far away from you, Dan, you will most likely, if the signal finally reaches your ears, hear everything at the same time, the instrument and it's reverb tail already. So this is the setting for us as far or further away. And pre-delay is actually when you have a player sitting in front of you, for instance, I mean, if the sound, it doesn't quiet sound like this because this is a really futuristic synthetic instrument right here. And the room size is on deck. But generally, if a player is sitting in front of you and place our node, let's say a cello player on our channel. And imagine, let's say this is the middle and these are the awards. Then he placed a node and the sound of him playing the note completely without re-wrap from the surroundings. We're reached your ear before the sound has traveled to the wall and then bounce back to your ears, which is the re-wrap than that you're here. I hope you get that. There's always the dry signal from the player itself and then the rework, the whole that comes back from the wards. And if someone is close to you, when a sound source is close to you, you will hear the original sound before you hear the reverb from the surroundings coming back to you. And this is what pre-delay can simulate. If you want to have a realistic sound. If not, then you can still use this in a creative way because maybe you like it that there's some initial delay. Then we have stereo width. I think this is pretty sad explaining. It does affect the stereo width. So if you have good speakers now or you are on headphones, you should hear that this is now in the middle, not on your left and right ear? Well, technically it is, but it feels like it's in the middle. And this is really wide. If you ask yourself, when would you use this? Apart from special effects, where you want something to sound like this. Maybe you, you have the left and right speaker already occupied by instruments that you have panned left and right. And you have another instrument that you want to have some steel roof from the real-world, but you don't want it to fight against the other instruments on the very edges. So maybe you do something like this and it's a little bit more well-balanced in your mix. But this is really up to you and there are no hard wired real roots. I mean, you could even drench everything and reverb on the sites a few fields. So and then we have damping. And damping you can imagine is, first of all, I'll let you hear it. Without the default position. And damping is basically imagine a whole and are empty hall without everything inside it. Just an empty hall would sound like this. Sound would just traveled through. But in reality, in a hall or whatever room you are in, there are obstacles. So there are humans or chairs or instruments, walls, stairs, furniture and stuff like this. But depending on the room you are in and all of these objects in a room. If the re-wrap is passing them by, a little bit of it is getting catched, especially in the high frequencies. And this is what damping simulates. So it simulates to sound. But for you as a sound designer, you can just keep in mind that damping is simply another way to reduce the harshness to higher frequencies and the higher range. Just this has a really bright tail. And this hasn't. If you go too far, of course you will cut off your tail. Because it has almost nothing left. So it's not only working on the frequencies is I think it's kind of algorithm based. And then you have classical filters like you know, from a footer here, we have this low-pass filter, which lets pass through the low frequencies, which means it cuts off the highest. And we have the high-pass filter, which lets through the high-pass frequencies, as the name always say. And let's end, cuts off the low end. So it's basically the same here. Your input low-pass filter is filtering the higher frequencies. This is why it starts at the top at 2000, 20,000 hz. And you can just adjust this to taste so full sounds like this. If you go down, you have a way darker tail. And this filter is only affecting your reverb. It's not working on your patch itself. Your patch is the way you set it up. This only counts for the reverb module. Only for the tail, even for making to this, you still have to low-end from the patch here. Still there. It's just not in the reverb. You see the patch itself is really unaffected by this. So yeah, this is if you have a reverb and you say this is too bright or some time, sometimes it sounds to metallic, too harsh, then you can just go down here and find a setting that you lack more. And on the other hand, and just reset this. The high-pass filter is doing the opposite. So it cuts off your low end. So if you, sometimes, if you do something like this, you notice there's a lot of low end and the river, but if you do this to re-represent way thinner. So compare this again. Right? So this is a way to take some Martinez out of your mix. If you have reverb on an instrument and it's playing in the lower register and creating a lot of dark reverb tail that is too much. But of course, you can also use this in a sound design fashion just to taste without a specific purpose. Maybe you just want your tail to sound like this, then you can just apply this. As always, you don't have to use these two. If you apply reverb and you like the sound, you're not forced to play around with this. I'm just saying you can and then this is what they do. But Indiana, It's up to you. Just, just do what sounds right to you and fits into your composition. And this is basically how a reward works. What I would like to try with you now is to simulate a room like I told them, I will just take a sample for this. Louder. Because this patch actually, I created a hybrid between an analog synthesizer and the sample here. So let's take this off so it sounds. And do you hear this clicking? Sometimes it clicks. Let me just find out quickly why. Now probably be then it's the attack, like I told you once, if you get clicking here, so you can just increase the attack a little bit and then shouldn't happen. I hope I'm right here. Yeah, it's gone. So it doesn't matter on a full patch because this year is so loud that you don't hear the clicking, right. And it's even not bad if it adds some trickiness because this is a black patch. So this was not a mistake. If we play with the sample alone. Just smooths it a little bit out. So let's add reverb. And what I told you if the pre-delay, so let's add a little bit of pre-delay and let's make the room smaller. This sounds more like a smart room we're in now. Maybe less damping because tiny room can't have that much obstacles. So this sounds like we're pretty close to the source. Doesn't sound super realistic. But you get the idea. And opposite to this, if you create a huge room. So just to show you these two ways of doing this, and most of the time they rewrote that come with since our good, however, you can buy separate reverb plugins and apply them to your synthesizer from some companies you will find the exact same back buttons there. Most of the time you will have a damping and these filters, you will have pre-delay, you have fully k times size. All of this. There are two types of reverbs, algorithm based reverbs like this. One It's simulates a room in real time. And then there's something that's called convolution reverbs a day simulate real rooms and actually they have recorded we're rooms and capture their space inflammation and the convolution reverb is ten, simulating this. So convolutions a little bit more realistic when you want to make realistic compositions with real instruments. For synthesizers, it's not necessary unless you dislike it more by taste and find it a cool hybrid to use synthesizers on realistic reverb so you can experiment if you'd like that. But every, any reverb should do the job. Indiana, It's just something that you need to like. But so much about reworks now, and I would say we will move on to the next lesson and talk about delay. There. 16. Chapter 3 - Delay: So welcome to delay episode. So I just kept the patched or we just used and because delays already on it, Let's deactivate the reverb so you hear it alone. So delay creates a room as well, but in a different fashion. So you see these little things here. They symbolize the bouncing effect. So you play a note and jumps like this. And this is not the actual amount that you see. Even if I bring this up, you can see it will bounce way longer than you see here. I think this is endless, like a tortilla maximum amount. But this kind of shows the delay, how it would look like if it was visible. And yeah, like the buttons, you have the stereo spread button here, which again is just making this balanced more between your left and right speakers, which I had around here. Then the feedback, as you just noticed, it, determines how long the Taylors or how many bounces there are, if you want to say so. Be careful with some of my patients actually have a really long delay time. But if you make it too long, something like this. This can be cool if this is really part of your song. If you do this on purpose, if you know why you're doing this. But if you just throw out too long feedback on your delays, and you have three instruments playing with a delay like this. They will get, get into each other's way in your composition because all these tails will fight for space. Then we're fine tune as you know what fine-tune does in the synthesizer. We have used it so many times. It just shifts the pitch. But just a pinch off the delay again, like I told you hear everything you made two changes you make here. They only count for everything that comes after the delay plug-in or better said, everything that is another delay plug-in soon, case only the patch right now. We will be talking later about the chain, the order in which you organize your plugins, your modules. But first of all, I want you to know and understand all the plugins before we talk about how and when to stack them. So yeah, just to fine tune where you can detune your delay a little bit. And then you have the two filters, just like here. So you can cut off the heights again. Have a way darker delay. And of course the opposite here. And we have the ping-pong button which makes the delay bounds between both sides. If you remember, this did kind of the same, but there's one big difference this year. Has kind of a I mean, they bounce a little bit between left and right, but they are kind of in-sync. They're not super out-of-sync. If you activate ping-pong, will notice this way my really jumps between left and right. On headphones. You should really hear this pretty well. I don't know how it's on speakers now, but it should be audible as well, pretty good. And then times the time setting that you always know from other from all the other sections that we had before. So let's run a look into analog delayed, which is the tape echo first of all. So tape, as you remember from the '90s and earlier, is these ancient technology with the bands where music was recorded on. And these bands, this tape could get old over time, could get used. And if it was overused at a certain point, it started to be a little bit in stable, which introduced a little shift in the pitch some times. And had some analog feeling what people like. So tobacco kind of simulates this. And I'm bringing this up. The intensity button here is what the Feedback button was before. So it determines how many bonds does you have, how long the Taylor's, you notice when there's delay disappears. It's a little bit low in quality. Has some fine-tune instabilities. So a little bit pitch shift and has a warm character, as people say, is this a subject? If maybe you could say a sound card too cold to you, that's fine. Just saying what people usually connect with tape echoes, they say as vom. So this is what it sounds like. Just has a different algorithm. The settings are all the same. You can again go ping-pong. It is a bit dreamy hypnotizing how I would describe this as a tape, a coup. And the other last delay we have here is two P S delay. And the cool thing about this is this pitch shift buttons. So as you see if I move this, it changes the balances to bounces now go upwards. This is what actually is happening here, is kinda really experimental delay. And then of course you can do cool things like this. If I move this. So this is an opportunity for you to modulators with LFOs are with your mod wheel or anything to get cool effect out of it. Then we have to spray. This is just how much they, I mean, just listening without and with a little bit how they how they spread into the room. Then we have the photos as you know. Again, descending thing here. Pretty dark coffee filter off all the high frequencies. And the feedback is how long the tailors, as you have seen earlier, previously, how many bounces we have. So it could start on a really no load here. Would jump all the way up. And you have stereo offset is just how much the left and right channel are different from each other. Basically gives a little bit more of a wide stereo sound. And then we have stereo detune, which is basically a fine tune button that changes to fine-tune between left and right side. So yeah, this is basically how this one works. It's a crazy today. It's really more for special things. I could imagine as well. If you scored some horror music, you could probably do crazy stuff with this. Especially if you load in some channel samples here. I'll make a cool patch with Shelley and some creepy synth and then do something like, like this stuff here and well, yeah, so far about delay. This is the tree times we find here usually only have one delay on a synthesizer. Sometimes you will find tape delay or tape ICO, however they call it, sometimes just as a preset here and other sins, but that's about delay your second best opportunity next to the reverb to create room. 17. Chapter 3 - Distortion: So welcome to our distortion lesson. I've picked our dystopian future patch that we've been using a few times here in this course. Because this one is a soft pad. At least software from my terms for the things I do. And that means that we can apply distortion for it. So let me actually show you distortion on this pad, Sophie. Well, this is came from the tape echo. Now, if we bring in distortion, make this up as quieter. You should instantly here that it's more aggresive. So distortion basically brings in more of this two-year waveform. So you can imagine like this modulation here. It just interrupts more of the waveform and makes it more Diddy, dirty, more gritty, more Cracking depending on how you adjusted. So you could either set your rework, your distortion to a fixed amount or you take your envelope, maybe the same one that goes into the filter and open the drive of it in the same time. And then you won't get an interesting effect. So you have to distortion getting wider over time as well, which makes the whole progress of this patch opening more special and more powerful. You don't have to. You can actually, if you want, just work with the fixed value. And this output gain buttons here to work against a volume game. Because if you introduce distortion like this, your patch will become louder. And with this output gain button, you can work against that and make it quieter again. So it's not, oh, we're driving actually in your the H w. Let me look something up. I guess this is routed to the cutoff. Does it close it? Know it opens it. So let's just change this to negative. Well you, so we can close the filters with the mod wheel. Because distortion, as always, like I say, if you apply something with high frequencies as something that is harsh, it even sounds stronger if your base patch is darker because of course you have more, more for Canvas to paint with this effect. So Here's you stronger. Then it's almost sounds like a storm. By the way, on this patch here I have noise, as you can see. This is just as a reminder to annoys episode, practical example for it. And I've as well the modulation source here set a little bit to noise. This noise is affecting this year more than oscillator tree. So it's a mixed between both a blend, but you get the idea. Then S, you notice like the distortion is adding some, some chaos to the sound. It makes it sound like we're in the middle of a storm, something huge, epic. And the drive button is just telling you, or you tell them module how much distortion, how distorted the wave should be. And here you can apply how much of this should be applied to your whole patch. So even if you put this on 100 per cent, in this case, 36 decibel, you can turn this down to 20 to just have this heart amount of distortion only dialed in by 20% into your patch. All you could say, I just want to have a little bit of distortion, but I wanted affecting almost everything. In then we have four other distortion modules here. And actually I will show you all of them because they are common. At least two. I know. So we have Overdrive. It's almost the same like the one we had before, but it sounds different. First of all, the level buttons, same night two output gain to control the volume, to work against a volume gain. Notice what Dr. more aggressive, it's Harsha and the frequency. Therefore, you have this tone button to work with this so you can change to two. So this is like it's almost the same night to just tossing. It just sounds a little bit different. You can even find tune the tune, but it's really different things. So it's not just about a tone button. Then we have the wave folder. This is pretty harsh as it looks like. It looks harsh and it sounds harsh often, what you see is really what you get. This is really a strong, strong, strong kind of distortions that we could turn this down and have more of our real estate with patch playing, with just a little bit of this wave falling, being dialed in a lot so can even go down. But now it's red. I just cracking noise. So I would incent incentives. Instead, just maybe make this a little bit more balance and then dial in more. Real difference really comes up here to the ones we had before. So if you pick wave folder, you may be actually want to use what makes it special. And here you can just switch between triangle and sine. So trying to just a little bit sharper as you can see here, you get this sharp spikes instead of this smooth waves. Like, like I told you earlier, what you see is what you get. So this will even sound harsher. Justice, just a harsher type of waveform, the output gain, as always, it's just your volume control to work against the volume gain. Usually, you want to turn this down instead of up. And the last module we have is the bit crush on one of my favorites. It's on my main synthesized and June 2 and 2.3 as well, which are usually used to do sound design. Next two pigments. And the really cool thing is, let me play something. So maybe here already. This maybe noticed that it crashes or quality of the sound is what you can see. This crushes is usually something that is evil, more cool and motion. So if he would just bring our NFO into this, let's see. If that's cool. Air. Definitely. Submit cash-out, really mess us with. You have your sound and it will show you this on a blank page so that you can It's already here on FXB. Then I swap them modules because I'm wondering why FXB is before f XA didn't even know this is possible. I don't know how of course here I switched the routing. Okay, Cool. Yeah. So if you, if you have your chain setup like this and instead of shifting one by one all of them, you can just switch them or you can make them parallel. But this is something we will cover later in the chain in the effect chain lesson. So here's the big crowd. Just as an extreme example. You can hear it stronger. Das, really a cool effect. But often I really make, just use this together with my envelope because you don't want to have it all the time. One extreme, so something like this. But just a sample mean. Maybe this is the envelope for our footer now, but just for the presentation saying, like we did earlier on, of course, the fewer envelopes lumbar you have walked from the effects. Okay, but yeah, so far about the distortion plugins. See you in the next lesson. 18. Chapter 3 - Chorus, Flanger, Phaser: So welcome to this episode. We will be looking into phaser flanger on chorus because they, they tree, I think they fit into the same category, something somehow. And let's first of all make space in our plugin chain here. And I would add it here at this position. So let's actually start off chorus. I've picked a lead for us because these effects are strong on things that you can hear longer. So they won't make so much effect on black patch or a base, which doesn't mean you can't use them there. But only if a specific purpose most of the time. But for leads and pads you will have most effect. So the core rows here makes the sound. You could say wider without the chorus, as the name suggests, you can imagine these two waves here as two separate instances of a patch or two singers if you wanted to, if you can remember it better, but if you think of acquire. So these two are singing next to each other. This is why we get this white-space because they are slightly delayed from each other. And we can change the amount of voices. This graphic is not adjusting to what to do here, but basically three singers. And this is again, just the shape of the LFO. And what is meant by LFO? This thing here, its wings, it has motion but we can't really hear it. So span attention to the movement in the sound. So this LFO is doing a little bit. So let me actually turn this off so you can really hear it better. This is not just a knob. You can really determine how your sound sounds. If you bring it up, your notes will sound like this. Like a spawn off insects or something like really quick Roberto, or even something slow, more evolving. And then there's this button here. Now what it means by LFO is how and this thing swings. Does it swing in sine waves or does it swing in square wave? Which Run button, which is this, right, which you had before as if AT a square. With more extreme. This is smooth here and the sine wave has more humming like between and this is more like if you spent attention, this is the best thing, the best way I can describe it. So here's more humming. And if we had square. So if you can imagine what I mean, like it's exactly like I told you, what you see is what you get. This is the humming, the smooth ER thing. And this is more like this thing here happening with the sound. This ofcourse are extreme levels here which you wouldn't work with, but just so you hear what it does. So you have to re, do half the amount of voices you have to feed back. In this case, it's just a little bit how much the signal is fed into itself, I guess, if I remember correctly, you can just come, you could say this is the intensity. And then we have the deaf button which determines how much of delays they're a little bit like. How much tail you want to have in this fashion. Usually I'll use there too. Let me pick a preset because I've met so much with the settings. Now, let's just start to widen your sound a little bit. In stereo. Off course. If you turn it off, it gets more and more. No, it's still I mean, we have to we have to delay and reverb. And this is why you hear it in stereo, but it's completely mono. And if you put it on stereo, smarter sides of your speaker, just because we had delay and reverb activated, you couldn't really hear the difference because the delay and reverb as to creating pretty nice rooms. But you still hear the difference. Just wanted to show you. This is what color is this about? Something that adds thickness and tree dimensional sound. I would describe. Then we have to flanger, which does this here. Let me play a note. So it adds some kind of some motion all the time. I think it plays a little bit with the filter and the frequency, stuff like this and creates again a little duplicate off or sound and D2 one's just a little bit. So here we can even shift them more foot away and you can even hear this. This is more wider between them. Here we can kind of dial in more stronger effect. This is why it's not pretty savvy about, you know what I mean compared to this. Then here's the speed it's set to rate to free sync by default. So by freezing, I mean, you just can't pick the heart's numbers. Well, of course you can sync this to binary, to your DAW tempo. You don't need to on your, I mean, in this case it's not super important because this year won't mess with the ribbon. Because I can still play I can still play an arithmetic. Wanted to change the ribbon. It just changed the written off the danger in itself, but it's not so super important here as you go for binary. So you can mess with little amounts or even modulators, put an LFO that does this year. You stuff like this. The feedback is then again the, the amount. So at 100 person it's being fed into itself and it starts to self oscillate. So it swings. So quick intro itself that creates a new sound. And then you have your occasional high-pass and low-pass filter to change the detail. But the flanges producing phasors basicallly, pretty, pretty similar, but it has more of a YoY effect like we say, sometimes it's even called ligase is called wah-wah. Don't know if you can hear this. Like this. I think it does work a little bit more of a resonance. It's not affecting or extra resonance button just saying it, it works somehow with more resonance is what I would say by ear. This is maybe why you can pick your frequency where it should do its magic. Chesterfield. Move the resonance here we are. Well, we are actually just increasing the same amount, the same spot all the time, but it shifts the wave. You get the idea. Then we have the LFO wave again because this has some sort of emotion again, like it's here. So it has some movement. And by LFO wave, I don't know why they go for the, for the all fought his button here and we only other pluck and we just had this little knob to switch between sine and pools, sine and triangle, but Yeah, if you have to sign here. Trying a little bit more edgy, the saw. Actually they all sound the same right now. He has better. Let me start from the beginning. So sine should be smooth. Then we have the triangle. Should give a little bit more like this. If the salt and the salt looks like this or actually like this, I saw wave, so it goes up and then instantly jumps down and this is what you hear if you spend attention. I can try to make this the same speed just that you see at the function is not activated but just span attention to the dot. So what it basically does is something like this here, right? It goes up and down and up. And at this point it jumps instantly back to the default position at the bottom. So just to get a better understanding of what did they mean by saltwater, if you can't hear it. What is the split of balance at the end? Sinus mover? Small like this. Then we have a ramp. It's actually I think it's the inverted. Let me just show you here. Like we had to solve wave before, like up and down like here. And I think the ramp is just the same thing in water because can't think of anything else. When I think of a ramp right now. And then we have to square, which is this here. In the shape swipe. She had strong switch up and down. And sample and hold from the randomizer is you hold down and you get random values. So this is the different settings for the, for the LFO wave which affects how your phasor was swing. Then he can fly how strong the LFO should be, or just less. Then here we have the N poles, as I say, determines the steepness of the filter frequency response. So basicallly, the steepness of the curve, as you see here, if I click something else, the steepness changes here. And I guess this is what they mean by poles because pods are in photos as well and determine the steepness of the curve. So by ear, this to here is more cutting off, more like this. And this high thing here on 12, it sounds more like this because you hear him off the higher frequencies. So the lower you go, the more steepness is Dan to craft, the more it's cutting off. Stereo button, of course again. Oh no, actually not I wanted to say it makes the whole sound wider but it doesn't, um, it said Quit gradually changes the phasor from mono to stereo. But I don't really hear. I don't know maybe its receptor, but I can't hear anything. So but what it should do is make the whole thing wider. But doesn't matter. This is basically what these tree plugins are. The phaser, flanger and the chorus. Um, so the phase of things, and they sound quite different. Quite similar, the same time. But if you mess with them, they were brand-new different effects. I would say that the phase that just has more of this wire, wire effects, it is hidden. It has more resonance here, which is probably why you can mess with the photo steepness curfew. So yeah, so far, so good. About these three plugins. Then we will cover the equalizer and the compressor and the next two videos. And then in the last one, the plugin chain on the left side. And of course I will be explaining to you as well the auxiliary channel. So stay tuned. 19. Chapter 3 - Equalizer: Welcome to this episode about equalizers. I have already set up the patch for us and edit an equalizer to a plugin chain. However, I think this is not the best visual representation of it in pigments because you can see the bands here, but you can't see anything behind it. So if I play a note, there's no visual spectrum that tells us how the frequencies look. So let's actually, before we work with this, use this one here. Because it has the spectrum analyzer, which you can see here. I like, I can just turn it on. So if I play, can actually see what's happening. Can even see when I played as patch, how the fertile opens up more and the frequencies travel higher. So first of all, what is an equalizer for? So once you see here is our frequency spectrum from a sound, this is what it looks like visually, all the frequencies. So this here is the base down here. In the lower area. This are the mids and the highs. And they stare split into different parts of the sound. So if I bring this up just so you can hear how these different segments sound doesn't stay low and area it sounds like this more for travel, true? So this is just basically highlighting how these sounds, how this frequency sound like. So if I boost them extremely, you can hear them stronger than even equalizer plugins way you can isolate the band that you've picked so that you hear only the sound from what you've chosen. On financially. This one can't, but it's not super important. So the most easiest answer about what an equalizer does is that you can, you can edit frequencies with it. You can either add frequencies, boost them here, or you can cut them out if you don't like them. And let's actually give us a reason to do so. So let's go back to a patch here and let's introduce elements that will make it sound harsher. So I will add resonance a lot on purpose now. I will open up the filter a little bit and maybe, maybe we can add some way folder here, which were as well introduce more high-end. I believe this was sound terrible now, but not even that super terrible, but it's pretty harsh, right? There's a lot of noise in the higher segment. So if I e.g. have a patch like this, and I find that this is too harsh on top. What I can do is first of all, I just grabbed a band and make it super small surgical. And then while I play, I sweep through the frequencies just by dragging and moving it. So trying to find really nasty sound frequencies. So they all saw nasty, of course, if you boost them the strong, but you need to learn how to distinguish between the ones that are just nasty because you boosted them and dose that really sound bad. So DOS who really isn't bad. It's like this. She had just a lot of resonance going on. This is really uncomfortable, not just, not just harsh like the other things, but this year it really introduces some rumble and stuff you don't want to have. So even if you don't hear, there's really no basic patch. It's Dara, you're just, we have just detected with this technique. And we now, we now can see like I figured, no, not this one. This is the band. I'll write here as I can. I can now grab it here and just bring it down to the opposite. Well, I could probably hear just used to invert button. But yeah, you can just bring it down and make it as small as possible so that you only trying to cut this one frequency out. And by the way, you don't always need to cut like this. Usually if you make cuts, it shouldn't pass. Minus six decibel is like a thump rule. So you don't always need to listen to this if you feel like six is not enough. If you have to deal with a really harsh frequency, you can even go further. But if you face something like this, I would either say, try to fix it in your sound design if it's so brutal that you need to filter it out so hard. But just that, you know, as a, as a rule of thumb is around minus six. Ditsy boats. So this freq frequency, it's not tamed a little bit, but we have still this harshness over here. And what we can do here is just a hard cut. Just take a band and showed extreme here what it does. So now we hear less of the harshness. This is an extreme example. Now of course you wouldn't never go this brooder, right? I just want to show you the effect that you really can hear it. Usually you would be doing something maybe like this. So this is less harsh than before. Compare this with bout for bypass the plug-in and with a turned on. So it only affects this area that is highlighted here. And you could even go more chapter. We must not always be on the peak of minus six. That's even true or free decibel, like we have a gain of minus two here now can make things better. This is of course now an extreme example. Usually you don't want to filter like half of the frequency like this. But this is just an example because this is our pad. And if I'm playing this only in the low range, and I want just a little bit off this harshness here. I can go for something like this. Then I could say, Hey, I want to boost a little bit here when it happens, more base, so I can bring it up here a little bit. Now it has more power in the low end because I boost the slower. And of course this patch sounds terrible now because I really wanted to show you this harshness and would even sound terrible without the filter here. But just to bring you the concept of an equalizer closer to you, this is how you would work with this. Usually if you do this on your music itself, you will work more subtle and don't do extreme things like this. But regarding sound design, when you create a patch, you can actually do anything you want as long as it sounds good, right? Because you're creating a sound and whatever gets the job done, gets it done. However, like I said, I would always try to make your patch sound good in the synth itself. And that you need, that you don't really need to apply equalizers at all. So they can sometimes be a tool to push something or to smooth something out. But they shouldn't really be your main source of shaping your sound. So let's take something else, like the space, for instance. And let us bring in the equalizer. I think I will put it in after distortion. Like I said, we will be taking we will be talking later about the chain and why you make specific decisions about the order. So of course we can see again the spectrum here, which I don't like about this, a paramedic or q. Let me actually turn this off, bypass it, even if it's not in usage now and just feel better if it doesn't affect anything at all, Just in case it does somehow do something. So what you can still do, I mean, it's about your ear, right? It's not about your eyes. So even if you can't see it, you can hear it. So if I so here we'll notice this is a lot of more base. Of course, this is opposed by 11 decibel, way too strong, so you can bring it down to maybe, maybe two. And you will have a little bit more base. Competitors. Bring it a little bit more up, right? So you want to be subdued with this. And then you could say, hey, this is a base. It's supposed to play in the lower range. Anyway, I'm not playing it up here. So decent notes don't need so much harmonic content up there. Then you can just, you know, like can change the sound. So in this case, what you can do is again, use this sweeping technique. So you bring up band up. Then you go for the Q button, which determines how, how broad use your slope is, make it really, really, really surgically. And then we can seep through and identified dose nasty frequencies. Here's a little bit of big resonance, but it's not really terrible. And here as well. So you could now say, okay, I want to bring this down so you just Just go a little bit down here. And it's a bit filtered out. But this is more about mixing in whole contents. So if you have a full song with a lot of instruments, you may be want to try to identify things like this. Usually you don't do it on single instruments. I mean, you can, but usually you do it on groups of instruments because if you have, let's say, five different cello plugins playing, or five different synthesizers in our group. And all their frequencies come together. They might be clashing and creating some nasty resonances. And then if you filter on the group with you equalize that you will find these spots where clashes. So like I said, on, on patches itself, I would be really careful with this and you don't really need to use this allowed, however you can if you want to really fine tune stuff like this. Personally, I don't use equalizes on patches because depending on their composition, I will equalize them differently. So it makes no sense to me to equalize them before. But this is how you would use equalizes in a way to improve your quality of sound. For sound design, however, when you create patches, it's not really about making this surgical tiny differences, but it's rather about doing major changes to shape your sound because we are sound designing now, we are not trying to make a clean mix. So if we say, like I told you earlier, I'm playing down off the base, we can actually just try to cut some highest because we don't need them. Right? Compare this. So this is darker, it's not so harsh. And we, I mean, a part of the middle, MID area frequencies and high frequencies. They are still part of the space. They are. What is, what makes this bass sound the way it sounds compared to other bases. But it doesn't mean that I need to be super presents like this so I can even bring them a little bit down if I wanted to. That's fine. So this is a tool to shape my sound. In this case, of course, what you could do or you remember I told you this keyboard thing here. You could of course bring this curve down and then route this keyboard thing to the fridge and say, Hi, I play. The more close the fruit I should be. It does the same. Well, no, it doesn't really it doesn't do the same job. That was a wrong thought, but I will explain you why because if we, let say, I will show you why. If we bring this to the filter and say, Okay, everything I play, let me reset this. Let me make a.in a minute so the lower end is unaffected and let's say we're doing this and like I need to make another. So let's say even we go for extreme values like this. So it's true now that the higher notes quiet now, but it doesn't affect the lower nodes. This node here has exact the same amount of high-end frequencies than without this curve. He had sounds exactly the same. There's no change. So this was a this thought from my side was not accurate, but I think it's better to explain you why. So you get the concept behind it more. So this is more of the equalizer. It's more about if you hit a node, no matter what notes, you are going to produce frequencies. These. And if I make this equalizer on top, you can see here now, it's here, more time to induce higher region and the basis in a bit more boosted. So if I turn these off, a little bit more, high-end, little bit less base, but it's more audible with your ears instead that you can really super strong see it here. But yeah, this is the principle behind this. So only use equalizers if they really add something to your sound. Actually, I don't know what this is basically our veteran up. So if you bring this to zero, this thing won't do anything. I guess let's try this. This brings to equalize the way why, the reason why they did this is because what you could do now, you could take an LFO and modulators and then we have this effect, would even hear it stronger if the failure is. Let's actually do something more audible. But I'm not impressed by that. I mean, it's an option, but there's so much better things to, to modulate on the synthesized at sound way better have way more impact and don't mess with your frequency spectrum. Because if you do this here, I show you the Equalizer. It's probably too quick to see. Usually all these things would go up and down. Let's make this slower maybe then we can see it better. So this makes your sound uncontrollable because you usually want to have full control over your frequencies. You want to make sure that all your instruments are well laid out and the frequency spectrum, you don't want them to class, you don't want them to fight for space. And if you do something like this, in the moment where this goes up and all of this gets activated. Your balance of your frequencies in your mix is getting interrupted because this will crash and clash into all your other instruments. That would actually not make use of this modulation wise, except you really find a really good sounding setting when you open and close this here and you're using only one single patch in this moment. Like you're just make an intro or a solo part, then you maybe can justify to do this, but I really wouldn't. And yet this is basically what equalizers R4. So unless you really can't do something with them to shape your sound, that you can do with anything else on the sound, on the synth. I wouldn't use them. And as well, I wouldn't try to fix problems with our patch. With the acronyms are rather fixed them in your patch itself because the patch itself is the main source of the sound and should really sound well executed. So what you really can do is like I told you, the basis too bright, we really could just search it out a little bit here. Just a slight change. This is okay, right, Because you have less harshness now. That's pretty fine. Of course what you could do here. So you could say, hey, I'm making the curve steeper. But you're here. Still still pretty bright because yeah, the curve is now steeper, but the photo opens up when we hit a key. So we will get the full spectrum for a second here, right? Because this is opened and this still sounds harsh. So this is something that just equalizer contain for us. So this is really one of the few moments when you design patches. Well, you could justify to put the equalizer on. But on the other hand, notice that this kills a little bit after character of the patch because this is usually the character of the patch. It's made the way that it sounds a little bit harsh. And it's okay if you make a composition and say, Hey, I don't want it that harsh, I wanted more like this. I'm just saying be aware that when you cut away frequencies, you are actually taking a part of the curve of the instrument away. And the more you cut, the more the instrument becomes more and more LDL and HDL and even less characteristic. And again, if you boost as well, you need to be careful because if you boost too much, then you can even again introduce frequencies that you didn't want to have in your patch. And then they may interfere RAB of other instruments. So just keep that in mind when you use equalizers at all. I would, like I said, just use them gentle to cut off sometimes things if you really know that a patch has this purpose because this is a base now and you really know you will always play it in the lower register. So it's not that bad if the higher frequencies are cut off. But if you play black patch like this, and you know, it's something that you might want to play here. Then this beautiful brightens up there is what makes this patch sound good. However, in this case, if the low-end is too strong. So let's bring this in here. Right now we have really a lot of low end. And let's say you're playing with this instrument now, low notes because that's how your musical pieces set up. Then you could say, okay, I'm, let's just take this one for this purpose. Just take an equalizer and tame a little bit after. No answer. It doesn't rumble so much and doesn't crash with the base. Right? Just a little Locard here. It's only taking 4 db away at 50 hz, and here already only 1.6. So this is even pretty much honor inaudible. So it really just cuts on this big chunk here, but makes it less rumbling. But this again is more in the, we're talking already about mixing your music here and not really about sound design in your synth in the patch. So like I said, I would not put it on because it really it matters how you play our instruments and where you play it. So even if this patch had this much low end, I wouldn't go on with an equalizer. Us sound designer, you will make this choice from the right beginning. So if you say this is, this has too much low end for me than simply take it off, right? There is no point in bringing this in and then filter it out. I just wanted to show you that if you play maybe with patches from someone else or you are in your composition and instrument is, has too much low end and you maybe can't just tweak it easily like this, then you can go in with the equalizer and take care of this. Just so you know the, the general purpose of an equalizer, because equalizes are way more important for stuff like this rather than for sound design. So this lesson here is a little bit about musical composition and your whole mix and less about creating patches on a synthesizer. But no, I hope you get the concept clear now and you know the differences in the ways you can use them. So I hope you enjoyed this episode and we will see us in the next one and we will be talking about compression. 20. Chapter 3 - Compressor: Welcome to our compressor episode. So explaining a compressor will be really tough because like the equalizer, the compressor is usually more of a tool that you use when you mix and master your songs. And it has so many purposes as well as the equalizer that you could make a, I could make a whole course about this unknown. But I tried to bring you further to understand the basic concepts of a compressor and how you could benefit from that in sound design. So let's actually bring in a compressor and we will do this before the reverb and actually before the delay. So here's the compressor. And what it does. I want to show it as a visually first and I will just for this purpose, make our funny, funny paint paint sketch for you so you see it. So this is, trust me, this will get the job done pretty well. So imagine this is the amount of volume we can have, right? So you know that every patch that is passing zero decibel is going to introduce distortion. So if I waste my filter, my mixer here. So you see this is my master channel. And if I play we as seeing the volume here, if this would go all the way up and then pass zero decibel, we will get distortions that we did. The sound will start to crackle and to sound ****. So we want to avoid this, but it always in the same time means that we only have limited amount of volume we can put into this. We can only fill up so many instruments in here until we reach zero decibel, and then we run out of space. The same as true for signal sounds as well for your whole composition. So imagine, I'm trying to draw our waveform. So let's say this is no signal. And then here we start to hit a key, we play a note and it starts to make a sound wave for us. And then let's say there is sometimes this peak and volume like this is volume, right? So it's mirrored into both directions Usually you could, you could imagine that this here is, sorry, it's not zero. Let's say this is minus -20. He has zero dB. We don't want to get over this, right? We want to stop here. And then we have like, let's say -15 and then minus ten and then minus five as arrange. And the higher this comes closer to zero decibel, the closer we are to the limit of maximum sound that we can have. So we play a note and this volume here is being generated. Okay enough. Let's just, just ignore that here. Down there. The problem is now, well, it's not problem, but it could be a problem depending on your, on your needs. So we have content, right? So let's say this is a patch and let's say dispatch has a quieter, a lower part of sounds which is represented in the middle and it has some harsh clicks. Let's say just something like a percussive element as now high at something, right? And this is causing this huge, huge peak and volume. So it means because we already almost here at the top, we can't really bring this patch louder. It were, we can't increase the volume because this, these peaks here, they will scratch at the surface here at zero dB and go beyond. And it was sound ****. What a compressor does, it compresses for us this content. So it will push down some of these a day, all of them that pass at certain threshold. What this means is in the seventh I will show you. So this is the, this is the scale that I just painted, right? So we are here in the middle or at -20. And if we place our faith, bring this up or down so we can see it here, see it now. Usually a song would come from the bottom, which is, isn't displayed here, but you'll see it like here. Sun's coming from the bottom up filling our volume bar. And this is what it represents this way, I don't know why they don't show it here, but this is how it usually is. You could say now, okay, everything that goes higher than -10 db should be reduced in volume. So what we just did here, right? So let me reword this. Now peaking, let's say around minus eight here. And we say everything that is above minus ten should get reduced. So we cut it away with the with the compressor. So actually we don't cut it away, we just make it quieter. There's nothing getting cut out, it's just getting quieter. And it would of course happen, whoops, happened from the other side too. But just in his visual representation, when we talk about volume, there's only one direction and that's towards zero decibel. But if your display, our waveform or a WAV file, you can see it like this. And I will show you what I mean later in the lesson. But the compressor is now compressing, taking away these peaks. And what that means is that now what we can do is we can increase the volume of everything, right? We can bring this into both directions and make it bigger. Because now we're still not we're not reaching the ceiling here. We have now increased. Like you remember, if I rewrote this, look how tiny these middle parts are? Or even, let's go even further back. So this is what it looked like before. Now, look how tiny these middle parts are. And if we make these changes, we cut or not. Let's not say cut this, this around what word we compress from the, from the peaks, make them less loud. And this gives us more space. So we can, we can now make the whole thing bigger because we have more space to fill with volume. So this is basically what a compressor does. So the dead CBA, the real true loudness, is not bigger, but we humans, we will hear it louder because we can hear more of the content that is now more audible because it became bigger. And this is what a compressor does. So if you have the sound here, if you spend attention now to the sound, we have this loud clicking noise. Each time in this photo. We have to really quite low end here. So let me actually look which LFO is affecting a filter, this one. So not only this one, okay, So there's even more stuff going on. What is affecting this envelope and the mod wheel. Okay, So let's actually take envelope to off for now and this one as well. So this is the low-end only that you're here. This would represent the middle, these quiet our pods. And then we have where's the LFO that I turned off. And then we have this loud noise clicks. This would represent those higher peaks that were up here. And the same principle that I explained here too, you would apply here if you say no, I want this whole thing to be louder. I could do now is to tell the compressor that everything that passes, let's say minus four strong effect. So you really can hear it. I'm making this now excessive as always. So if we say everything that passes through 20 db -20 db should be compressed. So it's now quieter, but mainly only further apart. Louder part. Everything is a little bit quieter now, but you get the idea what's happening now. These edges are compressed. And to compensate, we can now bring this back in. We get here a compression of around minus eight decibel, so we can bring in a debts evermore around, maybe even more. So this now represents this part here. So we have cut, we have not cut, we have compressed the edges, and now we increase everything because we have more space available. This is what we did here. And if you listen to the sound, we hear less of this clicking this and more of this inner part, the low-end. Compare this without stickiness now is strong. When everything inside or it'd be low, the dark sound a bit quieter. But with the compressor, it comes more closer to us. And with the right shoe button we can determine how strong the compression compressing the sorry, the compression should be. It's a little bit difficult because in Joanne vf, just like a compressor is in German, is actually compressor. And Compression is complex, shown in German, so we don't have this difference between compressor and compression with this different. But what I wanted to say is the rate you, what it does is it does determine how strong you can see it here on this curve, how strong the sound is getting reduced in volume. So 0.2 to one means that it is, it's getting two times quieter than it was before. And three means it's getting three times quieter and so forth and so on. The more you increase it. So we can make our hada compression or lower compression. This is really up to you and down no roots. So I can say something to you like you should always go with the 2.5 for something. It's really up to the patch. But usually you want to be around 0.2, up to maybe five. In extreme cases, stuff like this is really uncommon. You can do it, but it's not really common. And again, this is a really, really deep topic when to use this. But you get the idea. This is what this thing here is about. Then we have these attack button which tells us how long it takes for the compressor to work. This means that if I bring this up to 100 milliseconds, I think that's, I think that's equal to 1 s. Now it's equal to 10 s apparently. So 100 milliseconds or 1 s. Or am I wrong? Okay, let me not talk **** actually, in the last time I've checked how many milliseconds or 1 s is long time ago. But I guess towels and it's just, this is just 1 s, right? And 100 milliseconds or probably, well, 0.1 second. So what this is about is if you bring this up to here 1 s, it means that if a sound, Ara Pacis, your threshold that you set in this case -20 decibel. It will check 1 s until the compressor starts working. And the release is basically the same as the other direction. It says like from the moment on when nothing is anymore passing through 20 decibel -20 deaths. But in this case, how long it takes from that on until the compressor stops working. Because if you have really short times, it was sound a little bit. Depending on the sound source. This is why I can show you this, but it will, it will sound interrupted. You know, like like maybe yeah, you can see it here. Because every time anything past this -20 decibel, it attacks instantly, but it instantly stops working. And this is why it starts to do this. This is an extreme example now of course, but on other moments, if you use this on slower patches that have more time between the peaks and the moments where the compressor's not being triggered. You will hear the strong bumps and going up and down if you have this. So this is basically making a smoother transition. You can imagine this. You remember the randomizer. We had this. Let me show on which one we have this option. So you remember these hard bumps here, right? If you, if you remember back to our randomizer lesson, we had this on, on-page. And you remember that every time this drops, we had a strong, really huge effect. And I told you that with this here, you can smooth the transitions a little bit out, so it's not happening, That's super strong, but there's a little bit of transition between what this thing does. And you can imagine the same thing on the compressor with the attack and release button. It's moves a little bit odd when this starts to work and stops to work. So you get a smooth transition so it doesn't sound like the compressors working or the compressor stopped working, you know, like it's more smoothed out. This is what these are for. Mainly, you can use them for a specific sound design techniques. But this is again something foreign advanced course because this goes really deep. But just so you understand this, and of course you need to make sure. That's your tech is not too slow. Because if it's too slow, it won't take too long until the compressor reacts and it will let pass through loud noises that you want to compress. And of course you don't want to release too long because then it will still compress. When usually there is nothing you would want to compress right now. Because the last thing that past your threshold is, again, 2 s ago like here. So be careful with this. Again, it's hard to tell you specific values here because it's really up to your sound and when you use it. The last thing that you might want to understand on this compressor is the makeup button that is basically making up the amount of compression for you automatically. So this button that I used here, you remember, I played. And let me bring this back to what we had. So I noticed, oh, this is, this is compressing or soundbite -10 db. So I will bring it up by ten deaths so as to compensate, right? This was a process to make this part here bigger again. But if you don't want to do this by hand and you want the algorithm to somehow look up the values and real time and make up for that. You can just hit this button and it will Augusta for you. So this, this can be a little bit better sometimes because it reacts in real time and tries to maintain a well-balanced compensation of volume. But sometimes I feel it can be a little bit sloppy and not boost of volume at parts where you want to boost them so that your signal is not getting as loud as you want. So we need to always try and figure out if you'd like to make a pattern more if you want to do it manually. I usually go for the manual thing. And because this here and doesn't move, it just, it just boosts. When I click here, I'm not actually sure if this compressor here is actually doing it in real time or if it just bumps this up and that's it. Here at the bottom says automatic control of the output level. But I don't know if it puts us in real time or if it's just us. Some automatic value regarding to your threshold. Because if I move the threshold now, you can see that it tries to compensate whatever I do. If I remove the band, make up be only half or steepness that we control. But if this is turned on, it will, here on this other curve, adjust the levels for us. This is what a compressor does and you mainly use it to make things louder. And this is really the main reason you could even limit just hard limit sounds. But this is again, I'm mixing thing and not really a sound design thing. So you want to use compression. And when you want to make signal's louder, or even four different things like if you have a little bit more of a tech time, you can let the attack transient go through and then the compression will start to work. This has the benefit that let me show you this on a black patch. So if I play, we have this initial powerful attack, right? This is what gives our sound power. If I compress this, it will sound way weaker. So if I bring in, let's actually do this even if it's homework. Now, I want to show you this because this is, think this is important. Let's keep this at 100. If you notice, if I make this, let me actually compensate much justice on 12. And let's make the attack law. So what do you notice? I hope you notice. This is a little bit more powerful than this. It's not a good example because we can't really hear us now so strong. But if the attack is so low, it will most likely start to compress. Four, we hear the full power of stickiness. So if you bring this attack a little bit up, there, there you hear it. Now you hear the difference how powerful this kicks in. Because the compressor, it now takes these 60 milliseconds until it starts working. So it leaves are powerful attack pass true. And then it starts working and compresses everything else which we again then boost. So while we effectively doing with this now is we are making the whole thing louder. We are making the tail louder without affecting or attack transient. This is the full power. Of course, you need to be careful because we have a serious volume gain, because only this attack transient is getting boosted by 12 db without being compressed, which means it becomes a way louder. Need to be careful with this and spend attention. But you don't need to use this in such a hard way. You can just, you know, like we can just make this That's brutal. Let me actually around minus five and then be boosted by five. And we still have the benefit of this more powerful attack now. But the whole patch became louder competitors. This is way weaker. This is a little bit stronger now I hope you can hear their friends, but it's mainly really no audible on Ditech. And yeah. You hit it before when we had the double twice the amount from now it was even more audible. But this is a way to deal with the attack button just so you understand that principle, what you can do with it. But this is a so far for the basic fundamental understanding of our compressor really, really, really well. So you should come away along with this. You will have enough to experiment, to try out. Again like with equalizer, I think compressors are not super neccessary on patches. Not everything needs to be louder. There's a thing going on. You can Google that up. It's called loudness Wars, which is a debate about that from the '60s or '70s until today, music are always louder and louder and more compressed and compressed. And while it's true that people seem to perceive louder music better, you're losing dynamic range, which means you're losing. You're losing this beautiful differences between the highest and the lowest parts are the loudest and the quietest parts. You're losing the flavor, the correct characteristic that it's creating. So when you apply this on your patches, be careful again that you don't kill the character of your sound because if you design a patch, you had reasons to make decisions that something is quiet and some things louder. And you don't always need to compensate this with our compressor. You can just leave it the way it is. Or you can say, okay, I'm making a little compromise. I will just use a little bit of compression. Just something even less than, just something like a slightly mini compression of two decimals just to add a little bit more clicking as to their tech and make the whole tailor a little bit louder. So you could do this, so you can be gentle with this. You don't need to go all in full force. And again, you don't need a compressor on most of your patches really like with the equalizer, like I told you, only use it if you have really a specific purpose for it. If you're creating a sound and you're like, oh, okay, dispute now, fit perfectly, then go for it. But don't feel that you need to use a compressor on every patch you create because that's just not the case. The same if the equalizer. There are way more important towards like the reverb and a delay that should be used more often if you like, to create rooms and stuff like this. But I hope that the concept of a compressor is now more clear to you and that you've enjoyed this episode. I think that's already everything with chapter three, I will see maybe I will add another video if there's something that I feel that I missed. But otherwise, we will see us in chapter four. 21. Chapter 3 - When it all comes together: Organizing the plugin chain: In the last episode, I said that that's it and we will continue in Chapter four. But actually I forgot about the plugin chain video, which is really important. So this is of course to official and lesson of our chapter Tree. So let's talk about plug-in chain because I told you we would be we would go over this. So before we talk about the plugin chain, let me first of all tell you the difference between an auxiliary channel, as you see here and the insert channels. So we have a reverb here on our Insert. I've created a simple patch for us. Doesn't really sound good, but it's easier to hear. The difference is here, and I will adjust this patch when it matters. So if we use this insert reverb here, because we are on ethics a here, as you can see, this is fx. If I bring this to 100 persons, you will notice sound is really far away. So if we do the same on the auxiliary channel with this reverb here, we hear nothing right now because we need to turn this on. So this is turned off by default. So no matter if you have plugins in here and they are all wet, you won't hear them until you actually increase the volume. So listen, this is now the full range 100 person like we just did there. Listen to this. You'll notice there's a strong difference even if I make the same settings, like longer decay, bigger room. So what is happening on the auxiliary channel is this is a duplicate of our patch, you could say. So. Even if you have nothing active on it. So this is louder than this. So this is creating a duplicate. So a whole patch is sent into this auxiliary channel and they work independently from each other. This means that one signal is being processed by these plugins in fxy and FXB. And the duplicate is being, being processed by the auxiliary channel. This is why if we do this on 100% wet, we still hear or normal patch because we have one time or main patch which has no effects. Delay is activated but it's not, it's on zero so we can turn it off. Actually, I remove this just for the better visual understanding. So we have our blank patch. So without auxiliary, this is a patch. And if you bring this reverb in, we now hear onetime a whole patch dry as it is, plus this auxiliary channel with the reverb on it. This is why even on 100%, we still adhere or normal patch. But duplicate this now, 100% wet, it's completely processed. This means that this second auxiliary channel here, let me actually see if we can still hear it. Even when we use this, the same button. Yeah, this is the same Send button that we have here. They are connected. Let's see, even if I bring down the volume from our output, now k We can't hear. But basically, if I turn this off now, and let's go to FX and put a reverb in. If I bring this to 100%. I was confused why we hear so much of a patch because to send us now duplicating. So this is the whole reverb sound. So this is, this is the only sound we get from here. When this is on 100% mixed together with a dry signal from a and B. I hope you get the concept clear. Let me think of something that could even show this better. We could do this with an equalizer as well. So if I bring in an equalizer here and do some crazy stuff like this. So this is a real sound. And now we have a mixed between our radio sound and this duplicate, which sounds way higher. Because of this. This is a really ugly example, but I hope this makes it a little bit more clear by fingers, should be clear with the web already. So what is the benefit of this? The benefit is that if you bring in the reverb here and 100% and of course need to bring down the auxiliary as well. Because if he has no effect on it actuated, it means again, this does is creating a duplicate of a patch. So this of course, is too far away to play around with. And of course you can go for something like this. Right? So now we have 40% of our signal is wet with rework and 60% range that we didn't cover is our main signal or dry signal. So now this is a mixed, but you notice this still sounds different. So if you say, Hey, I still want our main patch to sound stronger to sound dryer. You can only go further down, but this results in a really quiet rework. Can almost hear it anymore. So what you can do about this is you could just use the auxiliary rework, bring it to 100%, and then you have a mix between a 100-percent dry signal and a 100-percent wet signal here and the railroad. So this makes our main sound stay strong and powerful because it's not drenched in reverb while we get the full tail. And the same is of course true for, let's say delay. So this is a full vet delay here. And make this dotted. Just to compare how the sounds, Let's bring this over two or f x a and turn down descent. So you didn't even hear my notes here played and down there. But you can't see it. And because this isn't 100%. So we would need again to mess with the button and it would sound like this. On delay. It doesn't make a huge difference. But it does make a bigger difference on I mean, it's different, right? Or main patch is way stronger now because there's no there's no mix. Maybe it just was because two button was still here, which made a duplicate of a dry signal by 56 65%. Which of course makes the signal louder because this basically is just a duplicate of a patch, right? And if I just diet in the delay a little bit, it still means that the other untouched process part is to duplicate it dry. I hope you get the concept clear. I hope this is really clear. I hope in the feedback form you're going to write things that you would have loved to explain more and of course tell me what you liked and what you want to know more about it as soon as it still fits into our beginner and intermediate range. So some things I really don't explain on purpose because it would just be too much for this course. And I don't want to discourage you and overwhelm you with too much information. Because if you really want to master all of this, what you need to do is after in-between the course is of course to take your synthesizer and doing work, right? It's not just about watching, but about trying things out. And you will be busy a lot with all these things and all the knowledge. But this is the different difference between the arcs and they insert so that you first of all know about this. And now let's only work with our inserts for now. So you see, you see here is you have three slots and F. And then F x goes into FXB with tree sloths again. And then this is sent down into our output. This simply represents the output. And the auxiliary is separate. It's a new block here with three slots and it just goes into the same line, into the output then down there. Yeah, here you can change the volume of these of these FX blocks if you want, and you can change the routing so you either, instead of a going into B, you can make B go into a. This is really, it doesn't matter, but maybe you have a plugin chain set up here. And once this plugin go into them. Instead of moving them all hand by hand, you can just swap them. This is why the function is therefore, but it makes no difference at all. The only difference is parallel routing here, a and B, which means, as you can see it on the picture now that a is being fed into the output separately, B is being fed separately and the auxiliary is being fed separately. This doesn't mean that we get tree the duplicates. Now, that's not the case. A and B are still, are main thing and the auxiliary is still the duplicate. But it does mean that everything you do in a is not sent into B. It sends parallel away from it. So they work independently from each other. That means that if you put a rework on FXB and you put a distortion on ethics. We want here the distortion in the reverb tail, because if I now play, so I hope you hear the reverb. Let's actually turn it higher. So so here the reverb is untouched. It's super crystal clear. There's nothing from this distortion. So again, see the revolt was super clear. If you have a bring the reverb after the distortion, you can clearly hear that the rework, the tail is actually a tear it off or patch with the distortion. So this is a and B are parallel, like we say this is parallel, parallel FX buses. So it this way you can separate them if you say, Hey, I want to have distortion on my main sound, but I wanted to revert to be unaffected by it. So this is but usually gets none. Let's start from the beginning. You have just a going to be into the output. Your plugin chain matters as well because now I see noticed. Reverb is now containing the distorted signal. But if you swap them, this happens. And that is because now the reverb is working first. So we have our patch. The reverb is creating a tail and then we put distortion on top of it, distorting the rework as well. This is y of t and now sounds are distorted because the distortion is processing the rework. If we swap this again or patch goes into distortion, which then goes into rework. Rework is a little bit cleaner because it's not being distorted. It still contains a distorted information. And you can hear this in the tail. Because the main sound is distorted, but we are not adding another Processing Unit on top of the reverb that is distorted, distorting it. This is why your plugin chain matters. So genera as a, as a rule of thumb, I would say the reverb should always be on the last place because you don't want to process it in any way no matter if you put distortion after it or any stuff, it will just change the room. It will just make it sound not good. However, well, what you can bring up that of course, is an equalizer. For instance, if you say, Hey, I have so many plugins in and the reverb tail is getting really harsh. You can then in the end, at an equalizer for instance, a little bit of that out. I mean, you have these filters here as well, but these are knobs. They act more like a filter like this. They do hire a strong cuts. So if you, if you actually bring this down, What's happening is that you're doing something like this. And if you bring this here up, what you're doing is something like this because you make strong cuts. But with the equalizer, you have the opportunity to just make things like this. So if you say hey, to tell us, Let's see. Let's just imagine you wouldn't like to start here. You could say, okay, I will bring this a little bit down. And now, and now this equalizer is processing the reverb. So in this case, of course, you want to have this behind. However, if you would swap them over, the equalizer would work before and wouldn't affect the tail of the reward. So this means for you that, for instance, if you use a compressor to compress your whole signal, right? You don't want to have like I'm compression. I mean, this is no hardwired roots. If you find a good reason to do so, go for it. But if you, for instance, make this to compress your signal, but then distortion columns, then the equalizer crumbs than the reverb qualms. This means that your compression will be not as useful as it wasn't a beginning because the distortion, the acuity reverb again will make the waveform go big again and mess with your loudness, which is not what you want. So in this case, you would bring the compressor at the very last position and reverb just in the end. Because as I said, reverb is something that you most of the time don't want to touch. It should create its room that it creates. If you put a compressor on the rework, you would actually hear how the Taylor's getting. I can show you what I mean. If you bring this compressor here, right, you can hit us instantly. It will sound odd. I can hear how the tail it's not flickering. Can you hear this? It's like flickering all the time because to compress us now, working on the tail of your reverb. So you want to have white as you would swap them. And just see, whoops, your Tiana is clean again. Compressor messing with it, flickering. So this is wider. The plaque and chain really, really matters. So let's say you would have a delay in this. Where would you place the delay at this point? I would say you don't want to compress the delay as well. Everything that creates room should come after your processing. Things that shaped the core sound and delay should come before reverb. Because if you put the delay after the reverb, you are bounds the reverb tail as well. So you put the re-wet first and the delay first and the reverb will create a natural tail, even including these bounces. So let's see how this sounds. So let's do something or no pain continents to something like this. Here the delayed it bounces. They are in there, but they are in the core and the reverb is creating a nice table out of it. If you however, swap them, you hear that your VBA, your delay now contains a tail off to rework the delay, these bounces that you get day now sound more ambiance because they contain the tail of the reverb. You can go for this if you like that. If you have a specific purpose. As I always say, go for it because there are no rules. Just because they say, do it the other way. Maybe one day want to be experimental, wants to create a new kind of sound. And if you want to create a new kind of sound, you need to mess with things. But before you do so it's important to understand the rules and why to do what at what time. To make creative decisions when it comes to printing. And S2 here now, this reverb is way more smooth. And this cross here, the delay contains detail. And he had a rebirth. Again, creates its beautiful soft smooth tail. So this is about the order of your instruments. When it comes to the equalizer. Remember the reason for the equalizer is that you don't like some frequencies that are in the patch. Distortion can add frequencies and compression can as well at frequencies. So in this case, what you would want to do is put to equalize or maybe behind, because let's say you forgot our frequency out that you disliked here. But your distortion is adding new frequencies, your compressors even making them louder. And then you have again two d over frequencies you don't like. So E or you can leave it like this and put another equalizer than here to deal with them with the new frequencies that happened. Or you can of course, make sure to remove this. Or you can just of course swap them and then work with the equalizer just at the end. It depends in this case, if you feel that your basic sound already needs an equalizer before it even goes into the compressor and the distortion, because you don't want a compressor and distortion to make this even worse. Or if you want to just routed through and then process it in the end, this is really up to you and really individually about your sound. And then other things like roads and stuff like this. Everything that gifts to sound some room or changes the shape I would put before the before the compressor. Compressor. But it's really, really hard to say. So if you, let's say you own chorus. Because the reason why you put a compressor is you want to make the amplitude, the volume from the edges. You want to crush them on in a bit and then bring everything a little bit up to make it louder. And you remember it's about reducing the peaks on top and on the bottom, or just at top. And if you do it here in the beginning, but your chorus and distortion and acute are adding so much new stuff content, then you will lose this effect. So it's better to bring this somewhere after the main things that change your sound. So in really compressed. By the way, what I wanted to show you in the, in the episode about compressors just shortly. We've talked about this now because I always say this thing like the bottom and the top. So our waveform is being displayed like this. It has the top peaks. This is what I painted for you earlier, are drawn from your earlier and paint. It shows this into both directions, of course, because this is what a sound wave looks like. But if we talk about volume, it's just that you can forget about the downside. Volume buys is just from zero up here, zero decibel, he has some value. And this here is then the thing that is peaking close to zero decibel. Just, just as a little help for your visual imagination. So this is the general rule I would say for, for setting up your FX chain, it really matters. So we rub always in the end, if you can, for your tail to be smooth and beautiful. Except you want to do something if it on purpose, to get creative than by all way. By all means, just play something behind it if you want and delay. Second part behind reverb, I would say because often you want to delay your whole signal, you hold sounds, you don't want to have delay and then distortion afterward because then your delay gets distorted. So I mean, if you if you would swap this, let me bring the car was I don't know if you can hear this, but the distortion make it stroma for you to hear. The delays distorted bounds that you're here. They are more like. And if you swap this again, I mean, well, it's really strong no S because the delay, delays, of course, mimicking the sound and the sound has distortion in it. But it's not that the delay itself as being processed by the distortion module. Of course, widest sounds so strong. Now, you may notice that if I play these notes here, this sounds stronger than this. Or even this we had before. That's because if the things are missing up, give me a second to reorganize this. Yeah. This is how it was. If the if the distortion comes before the compressor, the compressor will compress the distortion as well. If we do it this way, then the compressor will first of all. 22. Chapter 4 - Sequencers & Arpeggiators: So welcome to our episode about sequences and arpeggiator. So I've just picked a patch for it already. Sounds like this beautiful dark Neon Parc patch. And you can just go here on sequence or button in pigments and just initialize it here. And then you will start on the sequence of page here, which is C. The only difference between these two is the notes here. We will be talking about this later. So start with the arpeggiator. What it does is if I hold down a note now, it placed this node for us. And I just use my mod wheel too close to filter and it's not coming from the Apache Ada. I'm just holding down the slow ray here. Nothing else and a place to sequence from here. And if I play no two new nodes, it will play them for me. You just noticed you need to be really good with the timing if you miss the timing up your willingness to secrets. But this is how you can play around with an a pedometer. So it does cycle through the notes that you hold down. So if I only hold down two nodes, my sequence will be shorter than if I hold down five nodes. Then as you see, we have plenty of things here. So let's start one by one. So first of all, this year is, or we could say the step sequencer. So each bar, a bar is the whole thing here. 1-16 is containing 16 steps, or if you want to say 60 nodes. So all of these are nodes. If I hold down a note being played, all these nodes for us. And we have plenty of options here of parameters. So let's look into what they do. So let's start with the octave button. If you remember, let me turn this off for a second. And Octave is the same node. One range higher or lower, you could say. So. This is an a, this is an, a one octave higher. And this is what? A EV-1 octave higher or Alloway here. It's all the same node, always transpose by one octave. And this means that it will never mess with your musical scale, so you will never get out of qi. So this is a C and a C and another, and another C. They all sound the same, just different pitches, but it's the same note. So if we play around with this octave thing here, we could say the first node should always be one octave lower. Then what we play, the second one should be one octave higher, and then the next one should to lower, and the next one should be to hire. And it would do as far as if I hold down now a note. Each time we come across these four steps, it will do it as far as if I hold down two nodes. Now, it will do the same for the note that is actually being played at this time. Then we have to trick our probability, which means the probability that the note is being played at all. So at 100 person denote all the notes are being played. But if you bring this down to this amount, maybe for instance, then it means that the chance that this note is being played is only 66%. So it could be that you want here as noted are. So this can kill some random nodes in between and can make everything a little bit less predictable. So if I just hold on OneNote now, we will only always get different values. So, so each time it passes one of these, it rolls the dice and determines if that node as being played or not. And then we have the gate length. This is determine how long a note will be. Yeah. Audible. You could say it's a little bit like the sustained. If I make this a little bit of difference but not strong. So let me bring the release down so you can actually hear us better. My God, why do we have three envelopes? Okay, so let's bring this down and this down, and this down. So now I can really hear it as print. Let's bring all of these down. So here the difference now, because the lowest, the lowest values, of course still on default position here. So if you bring all of these app, the lowest position is just not sure. So in short settings, of course you can hear this better. But then on the other hand, if we make this shot again and then bring some app of those, that's something you will notice. Never released a queue after one of these. You will hear it way longer. Opposed to that. If I release it here, instantly getting killed. So this way we can add some, can create some Ruben with it. You could say this is what this option is good for. Let me bring this back for a second. I don't know the original values. Fingers was around this value than the cell and the choroid as well, something like this. So the next thing we have is to slide. So the slide does what the glide does. Remember the glide if I turn this off, light at something like this. And basically when you're setting up here is Glide as well. So if I make something like this, it will glide between these nodes. Only of course, if you play different notes, if I, if I play only one node now at where glide back to that node because the sin from MSU last note, but then it will stay the same. Because I'm just holding down the a. It's playing all the time. A and from a teenager can't glide because it's the same note, but if I play two notes, so this already sounds extreme on this value. So you should, maybe not, you should do whatever sounds good to you. Maybe you want to have a crazy patch, but you could bring this a little bit down if you hold down Control on your keyboard. And this is true for all the other buttons. You get these little fine-tune values so you can work with them. So here we have minus ten. Let's make this minus ten. Minus ten, but bringing it to us and you know what I mean? So we get only a little bit of this glide and then let's shorten this so we can grab it here and make it shorter. Just Sui here only this part. Mhc place something better. So you see the slide is adding a lot, especially if I make this mode we movements to dive into our dark filter. So pretty cool. So these are the options here. So we have still the velocity open that we didn't talk about yet. Let me reset this. K Zorba, the velocity, you remember the velocity is how hard I push the key. And basicaly this arpeggiator here can program the velocity for these nodes. So insert like if I play a, all these ASU could have different velocities. You could push this one really hard and this one really soft. And do something like this. Because it simulates how you would play, right? This is what we do here. And it of course does nothing now because velocity is not linked to anything. So we need to bring it to something. So let's, let's link it to this modulation here. It's an extreme example, but let's do it. So you can really hear better. And you need to spend attention to this year. So by a 25%, it means that if I push the key really hard now, so let me, let's, let's say we bring all of these. Let's just bring the first four downs. I don't need to reprogram everything. So this says velocity is basically at 01 is likes us the minimum value. So usually if I hit a key now, we should not have any modulation at all, right, because default position is at zero. But if I play strong now, we start here. And that is because 25% of what we play will be taken first. So default position and then this applies. So if you want this only to apply, your will, bring this to zero. And if I play really hard now, we still start at zero. If you really completely program your patch with this, you need to bring this down to zero. Otherwise you could mess something up with playing. Or you say, Hey, I want to have a little bit of control. I bring this to 50% or 25%. So you have a little bit of control and the rest is done by. Now what you program in here, this is of course, an opportunity as well, but this is how it sounds at zeros. So these nodes now have this velocity. I missed one step. You could bring this to something else. So let's let's take this here just to a little amount and then open the food are a little bit more resonance and maybe mess with the pool's worth. Yeah, sounds absolutely terrible. But you get the idea. Gets completely messing with our with our notes. So let's get rid of all of this. But you get the idea, this is how your program then velocity in and then you could just link it to something. If you really want to have a cool effect, like bring it on the cutoff, e.g. and then of course, don't make it so super strong. Dan. Still too strong. So you could eat. I bring it down here, of course, reduce the value here from a velocity that we linked to the cut-off, but you can go into negative positions. I was going to close the folder each time. The velocity is higher than one. If you bring it down by the multiplier. Now the filter, you will have a cooler effect. Because the filters now pretty close. And these velocities, I'm opening it a little bit for us on each second note. But enough playing for now. Let's cover all the other elements because they are still quite a few. So let's finish with this window here. So we have the app mode, so it's up. Now, if I play a chord, Let's say I play a C major chord, which is C, E, and G. Place this for me. Now it's going up because the mode is set to app. If you said it two down and I play the same chord, it will play from the last node down to the first one. Then we have S played. This means it will do, what am I do is if I play the C first, and then let's say the B, and then the E and then the G. It will do it in this. Fashion in this order. So for us to see the E and the G. So you can see that it follows the ribbon that I played while they order. Then we have up and down, including, which means if I play a C major chord, C a place the other nodes twice, they may actually play a minor. I just think that sounds better. So you see if I play this sequence, a place where a place this. And then it starts again from the top. This is why it's placed your notes twice, twice because of place now, same sequence bag. And now it starts here again. This is why we have these double altered notes. If you don't like this, you can set this to excluding here. And it will do it, play it smooth without this. And of course you have random, which will just pick random nodes from whatever you play. So if I hold down or something with four nodes, like this year, we'll pick everything completely random. So can happen that sometimes I notice being played three times in a row and another one, not at all for ten steps. So, well, the fun that you get with random. So talking about random, we have this randomized option here and we have two dices here. So the diocese, they actually, if you roll the dice, it will create new values for us. So let's click at the octave, for instance and increase this. And you'll see there's a gray area appearing behind. And we get these new dark horizontal lines. Which means that instead of the one that we picked here, the highlighted one, it will play the dark one because we have added this randomizer here. And as randomizer gives us, well random values in the range that we set. So if I play this now, we will have all these random octaves being played at are now in here. And they stay always the same unless you go here and you can say how often they should change. So you run by 1 bar is the whole thing here. So if I bring this to one buyer for player note now, so after one cycle is completed, we get new values. If this is too slow for you, you could, or too quick, you can change it to bias means it needs to pass two cycles until this happens. However, if I bring it to a quieter bar, it will change every four steps because this is a quarter. So basically, you could say that this is the speed that you set up for dicing out new values for the randomizes that you've applied. So if I bring here some randomizes, and here's some randomizes and a little bit on the slide, but just tiny values. Because it's so extreme, then. You see this is now a few randomizes. Let's get a little bit creative with this. Maybe let's see what we can do. So just a little performance to show you. Did it just play a few chords and a few notes? And see, the arpeggiator is adding a lot of tears through all of these randomizes, right? Um, I could even go more crazy with this stuff like I showed you before, so that it follows my sequence as played or stuff like this, by the way. So we have the regeneration button here. If you click this, you'll see that we just get new values. Because if you bring this to zero, it will never refresh, as you remember, stay the same. If you don't like these values, but you don't want to always get new values because you want some kind of consistent rhythm or sequence, then you can just roll the dice this new until you find something that you're happy with. And you can even then click on Apply. And if I click now apply, you will see that are highlighted bars. We'll move to the position often new values and will become the new default positions. If I click here, this is now a sequence. Then we have this rate button, which is simply just speed. So we can speed this up a bit too fast, but of course you could make it really slow. Then we have to swing button. So if I hold this down, well, let me actually reset this so you can better here what it does. Let's get rid of these randomizes. Because he has so much stuff going on right now and it's hard to hear. So without That's a sequence. And if I introduced swing, well then it gets to swing rhythms. So you could say it's a bit funky. Yeah, that's, that's what it does is just to mess with your written. And the last thing that we have here is just poorly written things. So if I click here, what happens is that I can now change the length of these individually. So I could say, whoops, oh come on. I could say that these are shorter than the restaurant could make them actually have half the length. And then let's say something like this. So you see it in motion. What did I do here? Let's just do it like this. So basically you could say that. You could say like you have a sequence that is 16 step lungs and you always want the octets to jump lectures, but you want something here to have a longer sequence. Maybe you want to have something like this here, but then at this part you want to go with values like this, while the octaves still jump here. So you don't need to program this all the way. You can just make it like this. And then you will have the same effect so as to still leave. No, Let's see. Just so you get the idea. Sounds terrible. I think it's because because of this, this is simply something to set up your ribbons. So I think it's just think making things easier. And as well, there is something that's called realigns of this off. It will just like if I do something like this here, you may notice that things are getting out of sync from each other even if there's no settings now, but you will see Israeli. So now they have all different positions. And you could want, you could actually want that because maybe add some randomness that you would like that you invite to your piece of music. But just if you don't like, you could say, after half a bar. I actually after 1 bar, so after one cycle on off, these showed real line. So now out of sync, but at the end, they all start again sheets together. This is what this is far. And if you bring this to half about, they will actually reset from here on, which means it won't play for half a bond. This case would only make sense if you had something like this, something that is even shorter. So it will realign after that. This is what this does. And let's reset all of this and we have one last setting that we didn't talk about, he and his sister. This division, division pitch rate divider. Yeah. So let's say we increase the octave here by two and this one by minus two. So usually if I play now, let me turn this off. It will only happen when these notes are being played once. But this octave rate divider thing tells to sequence how many steps he should stick to those values. If I bring this to four, it will mean that it takes this value here. And the next four notes that you hear will have the setting. And then it goes to the next value, which is minus two octaves. And the next four nodes will have the setting as well. So if I play now, you notice like instead of this, it did it for longer. I can even make a double so lung eight times. So this is another way if you play with this and different settings to, to make your make your ribbon smaller and maybe more interesting, or give them some variations in the length and how they behave. So you can really mess with the settings and get really wild with this. That's basically everything that you need to know about this because that's all the settings. And we have the sequence and here on the last button, and I told you in the beginning that you see that what changes here is, instead of this arpeggiator, we become, we get this pitch thing. And it says, see everywhere here. But no matter what note I play, I get that note that I played with her, play an a here and a fair player B here, B NFL player C here, C. So this is actually not showing the true nodes, but it shows, and let me make this shorter for ease of presentation, it shows the distance between a node. So if I, if I make this CEG, CBGB, which is a huge, a major, C major chord. So this is, let me turn this off. So if I play a C G chord, sounds like this. That's the court. And if I have this programmed in here and I hold down only see now a starting node. You will play it out for me. And that's cool. But if I play now the B below, I'm out of qi. I'm not in C major anymore, so it messes with my scale. So I can't play with this everywhere I want because I will always be in another scan. So when could you do it is you could actually do this. If you say, I just want to play this patch this way, we just wanted to have some fun with programming ambient music. And that's cool. And I just want to play through all of these defensive major quotes, Nazi Major, major quotes. And actually did you hear this clicking this, I think There's sometimes sometimes to as just clicking, let me check something. Still the I don't know where it's coming from. Friendly but it's not from my patch. Sometimes if you get clicking this, you can check your tech times. If the attack is set to zero or 0.1, that's really can cause trickiness. I don't know why it does this now. Maybe it has something to do with yeah, with the smokiness. It seems to come from the sequence and I don't know why it's doing, but it doesn't matter anymore anyway. Just so what I wanted to say is that it is hard to play with this in a real musical composition because you will run out of scale pretty quick. But if you just want to play with a patch and just have some ambient or musical performance fun on an evening. You can just program a quote in here and then, and then play sequence. Of course, you could even make longer courts and you couldn't make a minor chord and whatever if you're good at music theory and then just cycle through and play. And here you have even more options to deal with how pigments works with the things that you do. But in the end, it's a really specific tool. In my opinion. This is why I usually only work with the arpeggiator. I must admit that. It could be. I don't know. It could be that there's some way to program this that you would only get notes in your scale. Um, so I know if I click on major bug, I can't even pick our scares. I can say that everything I want to play is in C major, so I actually don't know how this works. By Doesn't matter if our course, because we are here for sound design and for sound design, music theory is now really not important and I don't want to bore you with this, especially because everyone has a different, different skill level in music theory, but just so you know about the option and that maybe if you're good with music theory and you want to make use of this, just take a look at the manual from pigments. Maybe we'll find something that makes it more playable, um, but yet the arpeggiator is generally more versatile in your productions. I find that's how these two work. And I hope you enjoyed this lesson. I hope you find some inspiration in this towards and we will see us then in the next lesson. 23. Chapter 4 - FM Synthesis & Wavetables: So welcome to this episode. Let's talk about FM sentences and wave tables because you haven't really heard about them right now. So actually FM synthesis is really complicated. It's a different kind of synthesis. So what we do here on the synthesizer is called subtractive synthesis. So we subtract, we take away stuff with the filter, shape or sound the way we want. And we take away volume of these envelopes basically because if we set an attack to a value like this, we are basically saying, let's take away volume from the beginning, or let's take a walk away volume from here. So this is what we call subtractive synthesis. Fm, however, is called frequency modulation, or FM, is a different kind of synthesis. And the third number, the third sentences that is out there as a type is additive synthesis, which is really rare. It's on sale. Maybe if you notice from you here, from this company. It's a German company. And the last and forth really known synthesis or type as granularity, which is pretty new and pigments is capable of this as well. I'm actually here in the granola top, but this is something really advanced. So we won't be covering in this basic to intermediate course here because we want to talk about what you will find on almost any synthesizer. Wave table is a pretty modern technique that is given on most synthesizers today. So this is really important to cover. What is special about wave table is let me actually, I think we can just work with this patch here. I hope. So. What is special about wave table is that if you click here on 3D, it has more than one waveform. So if we usually work with a saw wave like this, where we have Paltz with our, with our triangle wave. Wave table has a lot of them stacked behind each other. You could say so. They are all a little bit different from each other. So as you see, the last one here is pretty linear. Why this first one is really distorted. Even if I showed this in 2D. And yeah, and I bring this position up now, we would suspect it to smooth out like the last one that we see. The first one is pretty interrupted like you can see here. And this has effect on the sound. Of course, if I play a note, maybe this is not the best patch. Two shoulders. Let's take a lead patch. So we have more open further away all my leads, find a floor. Think we can work with this. So let's see what they have here. So for instance, we have this waveform here. My true can see a sound changes because we changed the waveform. Basically what you can think of as a wave tables offer you instruments that are more organic, they have more movement. So what we always try to create with LFOs. And so what we did on the earlier lessons, it's already given here by default in the wave table. If you want to. To change the position, you don't need to make use of this. You can just say, hey, I want a crazy waveform like this for my son, I just using this because every waveform sounds different. So you don't need to make use of this just because it's there. But it's an opportunity for you to make your sounds and add some life to it. So let's find something. I like this one. Even if it's quiet can increase the volume. Yeah, I guess. Then you see there's a lot of new stuff down here. So first of all, we have a modulator. This is basically the same that you know from, from a modulation tap down here. We have used this quite a few times. This is a modulator, which we can hear now, but we can increase the volume. And. The waveform to let sawtooth. By the way here to prove that I was right when I told you that ramp is probably to inverted sawtooth. It's actually what I told you earlier. If you remember this, just a little side note. So this modulator is basically an oscillator dialing. This is nothing different from dialing in a saw wave from here. So this in it's very quiet, just oscillator, but it's a modulator as well, which means that this oscillate as being fed into these different modules here. The same way that this modulation here feeds the third oscillator into our oscillator 1.2, like we did in the past. So this is the same principle that you already know. And the same way that this is being always fit into 1.2, even if the volume is turned down and we can hear it, is the same principle here as well. Even if I turn this down, It's not affecting this u now let's actually try their fingers not affecting it, but it will affect these things here if you start to do this. And then you can see that messing with these knobs will change this year because it's being fed. And even if you can hear it, because the way it's fed in means just that this waveform here is being mixed into whatever module we have here to change its shape. So it's not about the audible part, not about what you can hear. It's more about the things that happened in the, in the background. So let's, first of all cupboard is modules and then we will talking about a modulators. So we have this frequency modulation here, which is fn. We covered this after this. Now we talk about wave tables. Fm is what we did here. If this modulation button, I will explain this later to you. But this is basically doing the same thing. It fits this here into the frequency modulation. So this is, this is actually modulating the frequency of this wave form by frequency from our equalizer video. You know what is meant by frequency, right? The spectrum that we have. So here we can change the mode. Exponential if you know from mathematics, is just like it each time duplicates. So two becomes 44, becomes 88, becomes 16. So basically you can say it just applies to is way harder, duplicate itself. Which you can even here. Getting really pretty. Then we have the phase modulation, which just messes with the face of the waveform. So if you turn this to the opposite, it simply inverts. The waveform changes the way it sounds like, of course, because the waveform changes. And here we can probably just change to source. So if our key should affect this, or if we have modulator oscillator effecting this. But this is not really important right now. And then we have to face distortion, which is first of all the amount. And then we can start modulating. It suggests a little bit of distortion and changes the phase by phase is just mean, meant the position of the waveform. It's like when we move this face and up here. And then the wave falling. You remember the wave folder for moire effect video. It's a really harsh module. So what is really cool? And let me pick another waveform for this. We can take or LFOs to do stuff of this, we can modulate us so we can use this sparingly. Maybe this one isn't good. So see now we have created a lot of movement on these parameters. If you combine this with the glide time, maybe now, just to experiment. I think that's pretty, pretty cool. Just to show you one way to use this. Again, if I play this on high notes, really not impressive because as I told you, if you play the high notes, if all the high frequencies and all these cool modulation. So we do that at high-end is not really audible. It's like my analogy with the lamp in the sun. If there's all sunshine on the beach and you pull out your land and try to make light on the floor, you would barely notice it, but do you do it in the dark down here? Or even lower? It's way more harder. Of course, it's still changes to correct or main instrument up here. Doesn't mean that it's useless. I'm just saying that it's more strong given down here. And this now is being modulated. This means that if you notice when I play, sometimes when I play, when this is all bent back to default, sometimes the notes sound way softer. So this is of course just an example. Now you wouldn't set it up like this maybe, except you're really going for the sound. Again. It's too much. You lose too much of control. So either you would bring these out a little bit up so you don't have to strong difference between no modulation at all. So if I play now, still too strong, so still when it's, when it goes back to default, It's sounding like the nodes get really weaker. But you get the idea. So you don't need to do this with an LFO. Of course you can remove this. We can take our envelope tree and do this with envelope tree. Bringing us in a little bit here and there everywhere. Just as an idea, right? So you can see it's not the best sounding patch here, but, but you get the idea. And then we can of course, dial in as modulator here louder. If you want. Or simply mess with the semitones. Are bringing this up. Okay, Just some sloppy playing. But this Basie kelly, like this is the pitch of oscillator, which we can here because it's down. But as I told you earlier here, when we have modulation applied and we changed the pitch here as well, it has an effect on the waveform. And this is of course true this year as well. This is really, really low. And the lower pitch is the slower it swings, which means this here is starting to get slower. The higher notes replay, the quicker this is going. So if I play a low note, this is really, really slow because we have a slow movement of a waveform. And then the slow -36 semitones from unmodulated play. A higher note has a pretty cool effect. This almost reminds me of the blade club team from the blatantly. But here it is. I can't give you like a sketch and say do this and this to make wave table sun god, you really need to experiment each time because every wave, for every wave forms different. They also different. So even if I change this now to this one, we will have a completely different sound of the same settings. This makes it a bit like a pat. So yeah, this is basically Kelly, what wave tables are and how you can use them. And you can as always, modulators and your tree common options are envelopes and LFOs and functions and randomizes. Of course. We could take our randomizer and you know, like add random values all the time. Which was sound really weird now because the envelope Buster, he wrote it's there. So plenty of ways to bring life to this and played us with some energy. And regarding FM synthesis. So let's go back to an analog module. And let's get away from this. So about FM, There's not a lot of stuff to say because we have used this in the past and you know how it works. You have just this little amount button here, which feeds oscillator tree into 211. You can turn it off here if you want. You can take the source of modulation. So if you don't want oscillate a tree to be the source, you can take the white noise here, which doesn't do a lot. It's just what it is. But, and therefore, I show you something in tune to about FM synthesis because I told you FM usually is a little bit more complex. So this is my June to synthesizer now. And if we bring this to FM, which you see here is that this is how FM usually looks like. It's a little bit more complex than what they show here. You have way more options. So in this case, if m has by default a little metallic and bell-like sound, this is the correct off FM usually. And as you can see here on this algorithm, oscillator a is going out being fed back into itself, but it's also being fed into B and then it's being fed into C. And basically, you know, like we go here from tree into 2.1. By tastes, you can deactivate one of both. But you get the idea right? This is being fed into the others. Here you can change the algorithm. You can say, I ran, I want this one, I run, I want this one. In this case, a goes into C and B goes into CS1 and gets fed into itself as well by a, B and C. They just, they have laid it out here already, a, B, and C. So we don't have, we don't need three oscillators, we just need this section here. And with the amount we can say how much of this, let's say oscillator we want to have. And by Rachel, we can determine the speed and the frequency. Bring in some delay. Not the most beautiful sound like if usually we need it takes time to shape. Well, just to give you the idea of what it sounds like, usually, it's really more like a bell. So you can hear better now because I turned down the wetness of these room creating a fixed clearance. This way you can make it smoother. Notice this has a lot of resonance. Can bring it all the way down to reach you. And then, and then of course you can mix it with normal oscillators to get the same way you do it here. Here it is getting modulated by everything. But if you turn this off, then you have one fm oscillator if you want to say so and one normal. But this is the concept behind fm, just so you have seen a little bit more what it looks like. And usually if you purchase a synthesizer that is completely focused on FM, or true FM synthesizer, you will actually have way more of these buttons and way more algorithms and stuff to deal with. So this is a really, really dumbed down version, version of it. So you can use a little bit to get some of this frequency modulation effect, but it's really a bare bones here. So see you in the next episode. 24. Chapter 4 - What to consider when creating patches: So let's talk about a few things. So we have reached the informative part of our fourth chapter because I don't want just to end the course here and let you, let you run into the world and do sound design. I want to give you some useful information and some thoughts and perspectives onto your way for now. So let's talk about what to consider when creating patches and how to approach this. So you can either start with a blank patch and just fiddle around and play around and improvise and just go with whatever sounds good. That is. One way to create patches and you can do this. And maybe even in the very beginning, it is maybe more enjoyable for you to actually do something. But what I will always strongly emphasizes, try to build a sound in your head first. So just close your eyes, go somewhere you like, or go outside, go for a walk and try to think of unsound. So you can really, really pictured in your mind and then think of how you could built it. How could you try to recreate that sound? And then try to build this? Because first of all, your imagination is less limited than your skills to improvise because you don't know where you would end up when you're just randomly fiddling around. But in your head you can build whatever you want and then try to figure out how to come there. Because this is the most important skill as a sound designer to be able to imagine something and then build it. Because planning a patch sound is really important as well. So I will just tell you to practice this sometimes. And you don't need to overwhelm yourself so you don't need to, um, think of the biggest and hardest sound that you could ever imagine and then start to become depressed if you can't build it in the first place because we can easily overwhelm ourselves. So even baby steps will add up over time. So don't be afraid to just imagine are easy patch, maybe really a simple thing to effect plugins or a specific envelope, or think of a movement that an LFO could make and then try to produce that patch actually. But so generally when you create patches, like I showed you, the four main types. So what we have in front of us here is the plucked type. This is just a summary so far. So, you know, for, for plaque pet, this initial attack transient is really important. This transient is what makes this patch plucked. Because a black patch. Answer. Remember, like if you play on a string instrument and you pluck on the string, on a guitar or a cello. Of course, this sounds futuristic here because synthesizer are pretty futuristic, but you get the idea. Then you know about, about pads, that they have evolving textures, so they have these longer envelopes. Then of course a big one, huge pads like this you can't use in our composition to play chords. You can do something like this. Because first of all, it doesn't sound good. I mean, this was a beautiful quote, but it just didn't sound beautiful because this pad is harsh and epic. And the second thing is that consumes too much space in your composition. So if you play this, your base, your lead, everything else will disappear because this is way too strong. So when you create an pads and they are IDA specific to play only Singer notes like this one. You create a pair that is way too narrow, way softer, so that you can actually play chords with it. So of course, then you put less distortion on it. Don't make them that loud and open the filter so much. Just so you have some, some ideas how you could work around this with pads. But generally, generally for courts and stuff like this, if you want long evolving things or something that has sustained notes, I would I don't know what maybe go for. For strings or something like this for other plug-ins. But let me actually open my megacities Six Sound Bank for June to one of my sons is that I've created because I have here dispatch. And as you can here, this is beautiful to play chords because it's really quiet. As a closed furniture. It's soft. And it doesn't come in the way of something. Of course, this is super quiet, so it's not super easy to make this work and composition. But you get the idea. And he, I even included the opportunity to bring this up with the material. So you can play this with some expression like acquire. This would be a way to make a pad of texture. Being able to play chords in your composition. So this is something you need to keep in mind before I create a patch. What is the purpose? How do I want to use this? With basis? Let me change the synth because it's still there with bases, like I told you, you want to make sure that they mainly sound good in the lower register because you won't play them up there. So sounds good here, but doesn't need to sound good up here because it's a base. So this is something, again, when you create a base, don't, don't try to make it sound good everywhere. Do it more on the lower edge. And for base, like I told you, usually you don't want to use delay or rework. It's here, but it's it's turned off, so don't get confused by this basis. Usually they want to be dry and want to be as strong in the low end and support your track. So you don't need to put room onto them except you want there's no rule that forbids does three actually, I have a base here with delay. Let me find it. Infinity, this one. But this is a really special. It's more like a smile I got like a club based or something. And even with a specific technique that is called side-chain, which is a completely different topic, but maybe, you know, a side chain with side-chain together, I can make this square. We're cool, futuristic club team. This is why I have created a space and this is how it's being played in my demo video for the sound set. So just as an example where you could actually use delay if you really have an idea for it, if you know why you are doing this. But of course, this base here. One support a song that strong with so much low end, like this one. Right? This is completely different. So just be aware of this when you create a patch. And then for leads, as I told you earlier, you want to be able to play quick sequences so you can really carry the voice of the song. There should not be too short. Not too long, of course. And they should sound well across the whole range keyboard because that's the main thing. Of course not really No Nick here. And of course not really highlight here. That doesn't matter, but the, the main range that you have in front of you when you play. And then things that I told you earlier, like spend attention to the release time, so stuff like this. So if I bring this up to here, this will come in the way when I play. So unless I don't want a specific effect, expand attention because too long, too many too long tears from different instruments they can overlap with your base is the same. Your base sometimes sounds cool if, if, if it has a little bit of a tail, like this, has a little bit of a teaser. I could go down, make it like this. But this is to interrupt us. And this just too long. So I've taken a nice word, your photos for his base. But sometimes you want to go really short, something like this. Because if you play quick sequences, maybe, let's say this base would play something like this. There maybe such a short time could sound better than this because this becomes already Rumi. In such cases, you can just set up a sequence for you. I don't know if this is a good one. Yeah. And then you can just fine-tune via place. So it can look what's the perfect release. So even this becomes a little bit clicky. Can you hear us? This is clicking this because it interrupts him. So he's no clicking as special art. But I can bring it out. But you notice from here on it's dots there create more roomy Martinez in detail because they overlap. So a good way to always check things like put the sequence in that you want to play and then play a little bit around, or just do it with the keyboard no matter which way. But just as an idea how you could approach this. I think that so far about patches, just a little heads up, what to spend attention on when you create. And yet we will see us in the next lesson. 25. Chapter 4 - Afterword, What now: So welcome to our last video. I just want to tell you how to proceed from here on because I think it's cool for you to have some, some ideas for the future. So first of all, what you can do from now on to get better is reverse engineering. And that means that I could, you could just create a second copy of pigments are synthesized, are opened up simply. And then you load in a patch that you like. And then you try to rebuild it on a blank new patch so you create new preset, start at zero. And then you just look what is, what is done here. And then you just replicate it. You take these values one-by-one over part four part and of course play it in the meanwhile, you can really see what it is doing, what it is contributing to the patch. And therefore you recreated from the very beginning. So this is really, really helpful because rebuilding it by yourself, just following this, like this plan that someone else has created into a patch will give you a better understanding on the different parameters because you building this step-by-step together. So if I play this now, it's a pretty huge pads with a lot of stuff going on. But if you build it from the ground up and you build it one by one in the parts here, you will hear every little step between and you will hear what every part contributes and what they do. And I think that's really helpful. So you could just go up here and take any of the factorial content patches. The problem of them could be sometimes, of course, that they are pretty, pretty advanced often. So if you click to something like this, you see his granola or notice this granular synthesis and the sample is in. Maybe you would skip that one because you don't know yet how this works. Just assuming here maybe you know, but just as an idea. So maybe you come across this patch can say, Hey, okay, this is analog, this is wave table. I understand both from the course. And then you see okay, different filter types, but you will figure out what it does and everything else so far looks not too complicated. Even here naught. And then you can just try to recreate this, I mean, this patch, this now, maybe not the most amazing one. But you get the idea. So if you see something that overwhelms you, you don't need to rebuild that. You can, of course, if you want to grow, if you want to get better. But for the beginning I would say really just start with things that you feel comfortable with. So don't overwhelm yourself because this can lead to frustration and sound design is all about fun, right? So enjoy the process of going somewhere and be kind to yourself and your creations. So don't, don't be frustrated if something doesn't work out the way you want in the very first try. So yeah, the next thing is the patches don't always need to be complex, but just because you can, just because you are able to do sometimes simple patches are better. Because either, I mean, maybe you're just creating patches for fund and then make them as complex as you want. But maybe you create a patch for a specific production that you have in mind. Maybe you want to create a song and you're like, Oh, this song could now need a pad like this and that. And then you create the pattern specifically made for this song. And often we realized and that the things that we created don't need to be super complex because they are just one little part of the whole thing. And it sometimes doesn't matter until a certain amount. Just keep that in mind as well when you create patches. But I think the really the best thing that you can do now is create your first ten patches, your little 1st own sound said, Take your time for that. Do some reverse engineering of patches that you like. If you want to do that. If you don't enjoy this, by the way, if you don't enjoy reverse engineering, you don't need to do is of course, really go with what is fun too. You just want to give you some ideas. And you will, over time, naturally get better just by doing this, just by repeatedly creating patches. And you can re-watch episodes. That's no problem. Maybe take a piece of paper and write down some things for the beginning until you have it all in your head. So what is really good is if you remember the concepts rather than how a patch set up. So let's say dispatch here. Instead of remembering how all of this is set up to get the sound. Remember the concepts so that you, just for instance, now you say, I want to have this patch more metallic, more digital, more harsher than you know, that modulation will give you that. You know that you want. To have more low end and you know that you can bring in sub-oscillator or even two sub oscillators, right? Or, you know, you need more space, my width, then you know that reverb and a tape echo and corals are your friends and unison as well. Right? So it's about the concepts is, it's about that you know, that you understand. If you need something, where do you find it? It's not about mesmerizing the particular patches, how they are set up. So you know that LFOs, they give constant motion to your patch itself. You know that randomizes can add some variety over time. Stuff like this so that you rather think in this concepts and then you could maybe just like I said, take a pen and a paper and write down like words like motion and motion and grittiness, edginess, and softness. And then write down which waveforms do give you that, which functions can help you to achieve that. So that you may be for yourself, create a little mind map, and then create some patches of that. And until a certain point it will just be in your head that you naturally know where to look and what to do to get the sound that you want. So, yeah, that's the advice I can give you to maybe approach this other bit different when you create sounds in the future. But I think you're on a good way with this. And everything we have learned so far is really a lot. So this will take you really, really far. Sound design is still so much more to explore. Like we're just on the tip of the iceberg, as we say. But still, this is a lot to learn and it will take some time to master this. So I can't, I can't tell you a specific time, but I think it will take quite long. And you could produce whole albums with only this knowledge and come pretty far. Plenty of stuff to learn for you. So enjoy the journey. Don't fit this courageous. Be kind to yourself when you create stuff. So don't, don't compare yourself to either know the biggest sound designers out there that you like and then compare your patches with that. Just enjoy what you can create right now because that's absolutely fine. And you will make progress over time. And only do stuff that really, that really makes you feel good. So don't force yourself to techniques or learning methods that you don't enjoy just because you think that they will carry you through. Just really find your own way. And regarding on how well this course will sell and how good the feedback will be. Maybe I will in the future create an advanced course and take all of this to the real next level and a really complicated stuff and really special techniques, but it's really up to how all of this works out. So this is my first course and I can't, can't really estimate right now how this is going to turn out. But I hope that this course alone here was a huge help for you. A good starting point. I hope you enjoyed that. I really did my best and I actually re-recorded this whole course a second time because I wasn't happy with the quality in the first time. And then I even rerecorded some I episodes because I do really care about quality and that I deliver good content. So I hope you felt that on your side. And I wish you all the best for the future and for your cool sounds that you are going to create. And I'm sure we will hear from each other somewhere in the future. So see you there.