Transcripts
1. Welcome and Introduction!: Hey, I'm CK, your instructor. Together, we're going to use Logic Pro's awesome
retrosynth to recreate the now
iconic synth sound from Charlie XCX's hit 360. Along the way, we'll cover a ton about
subtractive synthesis, envelopes, filters, and more. I love this topic because
I'm a huge Charlie fan. I also have a master's
degree in music. I've made a ton of
electronic music for use on TV and I've taught music technology at universities for
more than 15 years. But you don't need any
of that experience. You're going to have
fun regardless because I'm going to walk you
through each step. If you don't have logic, you can just grab the
freeware subtractive synth surge and follow along. Here's how the class
is structured. We'll start by setting
up our project and discussing what
makes a plug a plug. You'll get a basic
understanding of the tools we'll use in any synth to
shape sound over time. Next, we'll put those tools to use exploring how the
amplitude envelope can impact the character and dynamics of your synth sound
over the course of one node. Then we'll use Logic's
built in echo plug in to mimic the echo that
we hear in the 360 sound. Then we'll experiment with
different waveforms and settle on the combination that comes closest
to our target sound. We'll finalize the
sound by matching the original's stereo
image and positioning. We'll wrap up then by
making sure you know how to save your synthsund as a
preset right inside retro. And how to save it as a
patch in the logic library. For the class project, you'll design and save your
own retro preset. It can be the same
one we build in class or something
completely original. If it's useful to you, it's perfect to me. Alright,
let's get going. We're going to have you
sounding like an icon faster than you can
say spring breakers.
2. Project Explainer: In my opinion,
projects are what set skill share apart from
other learning platforms. Projects give you access to direct specific feedback
from every instructor here. That's a lot of expertise
at your fingertips, but it's up to you to
take advantage of that. Completing your project is the best way to check
your understanding, so be sure to do it and get the most from your skill
share experience. For your project in this class, you can just follow
along and create your own version of
the 360 plug sound. You can also make an original
sound, if you'd rather. As long as it's useful to
you, I'm good with it. You've completed your design, take a screenshot of your
settings in Retro'snterface. If you're feeling extra, make a brief recording
of your sound and upload it to
any Cloud platform, whether that's YouTube, I Cloud, Google Drive, et cetera,
and then copy a link to it. Go to Skill Share
Projects and Resources, and then click the
Submit Project button. Use the controls and fields on that page to include everything
you'd like me to see. I'm looking forward
to seeing your work, your questions, and
your accomplishments.
3. First Listen and Project Setup: All right. Let's
start off by having a good listen to
the target sound. This is an excerpt
from the song, 360 by Charlie XCX, and it was produced by her longtime collaborator, AG Cook. Let's give it a listen. Okay, so that's a great sound. It's nice and rich,
not overly complex, but tons of character, clear and strong
but interesting. Here is what I came up with using stock instruments
and effects in logic. Not exact, but I'm happy to call that a pretty
good similarity. Pretty satisfied with that. Now what we're
going to do is add a new track and we'll
put retrosynth on that, and that will be our working
track for the class. I go up here to add tracks. I make sure that software
instrument is chosen, and then retrosynth is already chosen because it's the
last thing I added. But if you need to choose it, you just go into
this menu and find it retrosynth and boom, you don't need any of these other options, that's all fine. Click Create, and it
gets created right below whatever track you had selected
when you chose it. Great. Now a best practice
for when you're trying to emulate somebody
else's synth sound is to look in your synth for any preset that might be
close because you can maybe get a long
way there just with something already existing
in your synth presets. Because this is what we
would call a plug sound, I might look down here and see if there's a pluck category. There's not, but
there is something called sequence
elements and that makes sense because plugs
are great for things like sequenced
arpeggios and so forth. Sure enough, I see sounds that are called plug all over here. But I went through
every one of these, and the one I found
that came closest to what we're after is this one called
simple square wave. So I'm going to choose that,
and it gets loaded up, and I can play it. And then better yet, I can actually load
in this MIDI phrase. I've included the MIDI
file in your resources. So in the class, go to the resources tab and
you'll see this MIDI file. So you get this out of the way. Go over to the finder, and here it is, drag
it and drop it. And there's our file. Okay, so it seems like
it's nowhere near, but have a bit closer listen. It's actually got some
nice similarities in terms of the timber,
the tonal quality. That's a really important
place to start. It's also already set up
like a classic pluck. What do we mean
when we say plug? Well, if you think
of instruments like real physical
instruments that you pluck in order to play
like say a guitar, The sound comes up to full volume pretty much
immediately once you strike it, tapers off, sustains
a little bit, but then dies out even when
I'm still holding the note. That's a classic pluck sound. Another great example
is violin pizzicato, which is when the violinist
plucks it with her finger. Again, rapid attack attack, meaning the amount of
time it takes for it to reach its full volume
once the note is struck. It's very fast, very responsive. By contrast, here's what's
called a pad sound. It fades in slowly and it exits slowly when
I release the keys. That's the opposite. Let's take a look
at what we mean. This is a retrosynthe sound and the one we're going to be working with
is a retrosynthe sound. I've arranged the two synth. This one is the pluck
that we're going to work with and this one is
an example of a pad. You can now see both of their amplitude
envelopes here and here, as well as the
diagram so that you can refer to that as
we talk this through. You'll notice there's an A, a D, an S, and an R. Those are the four
stages of this envelope. Attack, decay,
sustain, and release. Those are these four life stages of a note you can
think of it as. We already know that if
I play the pad sound, it takes a long time to fade in. To be precise, it takes 1.5
seconds, 1,500 milliseconds. Once it hits full volume, it starts its decay stage. That refers to the
time it takes to fall down to its
sustained level. Right now, it's
about 4.7 seconds. I'll shorten that so that we can hear it more quickly,
almost abruptly. This whoosh and then it fades very quickly
to the background. That's what decay
time does for us, and the sustain is
the only one of these settings that is
not time. It's level. This says 0.04, that's basically 4% of full strength
or full volume. It takes a second and a half
to rise after I hit the key, it falls down to
its sustain level in a little over half a second. Its sustained level is 4% of
full strength, very quiet. Then releasing the key. See this little change
in the line right here that represents
when I release the key. Once I release the key, it's
going to take 2.1 seconds, 2,100 milliseconds for it
to fade away to silence. So in this compact
little illustration that also is a graphical
user interface, you have a complete
description of this sounds amplitude profile. Here it goes. So if I wanted to turn this into a plug, what
would I need to do? The first thing would
be shorten its attack. Boom. The next would be to pull that down
because it doesn't sustain. It just dies out over time. There's also the envelope. I'll just disengage that for
now the filter envelope, let's not worry
about the filter. Now it's acting a whole lot
more like a pluck sound. Just by changing this funny
little diagram, right? So I'll put it back to
roughly where it was. So this one section
of the synth is incredibly powerful in terms of adjusting the character
of our sound. So we're going to start from this one and work
our way to sound more and more like Charlie
XCX song, 360 like so. We've got a long
way to go, but it's going to be fun. See
you in the next lesson.
4. Dialing in the Echo: Okay, we're back and ready
to rock our new Syth. Now, I'm taking
what you might call an unorthodox approach
in that each lesson, I just want to tackle the
next most obvious thing that will get us a step
closer to our target sound. I think there are
probably as many ways to design synth sounds as there
are people on the planet. I don't think there's a
right way or wrong way, but a little bit
of careful listing and some background knowledge
really do help a lot. Let's give a listen
to our sound. Pay attention to that last note. Now check this out. There's a pretty
glaring difference, and it's the echoes at the end. They're actually all
the way throughout. I feel like that's something
that we can tackle, quick, easy, and we'll be that much closer
to our target sound. First, let's get this guy out of the way so it's not
distracting to us. I can hide a track
by selecting it and typing Control H.
Boom, it's gone. Then this H up here
lights up to remind me that there are some hidden tracks
in this project, so I don't forget all about. We need an echo that's called a delay in audio engineering. Let's go over here to
the channel strip. If that's not displayed in your copy of logic
right now, just press I. That toggles the inspector, which is this part and the
channel strip off and on. Make sure you've got that shown. Then in the first
audio effect slot, click and look through the
different categories here, and echo is a delay. We find that here and
this is just the simplest built in logic echo
unit. I'll choose that. Now we have several
different settings here and we'll walk
through each one of them. It's really pretty
straightforward. The first one is the
note value of the echoes themselves relative to the current tempo
and time signature. Let's see what we've
got in the original. Da da da da da. That's the sound
we want to mimic. I'm thinking it's either
going to be an eighth or a 16th based on the
time signature. I think that's the
ticket right there. I think that that's
the right note value, but we are having a lot more echos and much
louder echos than we want. Let's take that one at a time. This setting right here called feedback literally means how much of the echos should be fed right back into
this echo unit. In practical terms, it helps you control how
many times it echoes. And we just want
like three, I think. Let's listen to this.
Three, da da, da, da, da. So we want that to
happen. Let's see. I think, yeah, dialing
this down to zero and then bringing it up gradually as we listen is an easy way to do it. Okay, that gives us our three. They're really kind
of fading out. That last one is pretty quiet. Okay, yeah. I'll take
that. All right. Great. Now, the other thing you're probably noticing
and annoyed by, I know I am, is
that the echos are stomping all over the synth. So the echos are practically
as loud as the dry signal, the original Syth sound. So that's what these two
sliders will help us deal with. Dry refers to the
original synth sound, and wet refers to the echos. And so you can see their
kind of neck and neck here. In terms of their loudness. Once again, let's turn this
down and we'll just turn it up until we get a balance that we like a little better. We can listen to this
one for some clues, listen to different
individual notes, and see if you can hear how they behave in terms
of their echos. I'm noticing the note
that goes, da, da, da, da, da, da, da. And it kind of holds over the one note bleeds
into the next one, and I think largely
because of the echo. So let's see if we
can achieve that. So that's a little bit higher
than I had in my notes, which said 18, but I like it. I feel like it gives us that same strength
in the lower pitch. Now finally, this
color setting deals with actually equalization or filtering of the
echoes themselves. Should they be bright? Which it means that they're having some low frequencies
cut out of them, or should they be dark so that they're having some high
frequencies removed from them, keep in mind that
because we're feeding echos back into the echo unit, this is going to get
applied every time. So it's not going to
just get brighter once. It's going to get brighter
with each repetition. That can be cool. L see what a really dark
one sounds like. Okay, you get the idea. Let's
listen to the original. I feel like they
lose a little bit of weight with each repetition, so I'm going to vote on the side of brightening. Let's see. Okay, I'm going to go with that. Again, I've surprised myself
by being a little more heavy handed than I was in the notes that I took, but I like it. I think the danger of going
that high might be that I lose that low quality that I was liking
about the original. If I'm filtering the
low frequencies out, I might lose some of that. So you can really hear
that kind of bleed done in the lower notes, the smear. I don't want to lose that. We have other settings that
we're going to work on in later lessons that maybe will help us make
up some of that. That's fine. I'm going to put
it back where I liked it. I liked it at like 40, right? Yeah. Okay. Yeah. I like
it. All right. Onward.
5. The Envelope, Please: Now we're going to tackle
the next most obvious thing. Let's have a listen
to our sound so far. Now let's listen
to the original. To my ear, the most
obvious difference is that our notes sound
short and pointy, whereas AG Cook's sound has
a little bit more sustained. None of the notes
sustained for very long, but they definitely
have more of a tail to them than ours do. There are two main settings that are going to affect this. There's the amplitude envelope and we've talked about
that a little bit. And then right next door is also the filter envelope that
controls the filter cutoff, animates it over the
course of a note. Now, we talked about
how an envelope controls some aspect of the
sound over the course of one note and how amplitude or loudness is the
most common thing to use an envelope
for in a synth. If a sound is going
to do anything much more interesting than just turn on when you
play the key and turn off immediately when
you release the key, we're going to need an amplitude envelope to make that happen. Let's take a look
at a simple example here is simple on
off amp envelope. This is exactly what I
was just talking about where the attack is
virtually instantaneous, might as well just
make it instant and the release is as close to
instantaneous as we can get. As soon as I play the key, it'll hit full
strength right away, and as soon as I release
the key, it'll stop. Here we go. That's it. Just on off. We can tweak that really easily to make it do
more interesting things. Let's make it fade in a
little bit, right here. And we can make it drop
down really quickly. That's this right here, 20 millisecond to c down to a level of only
5% of full volume, and then we can make
it take longer to let go once I release the key. We've also mentioned
that envelopes can be used to
control other things, for example, filters, and retro is set up
that way for you. You have an envelope
here that's been hard wired to control the
cutoff frequency. Just like in the
case of amplitude, we mainly need to
use this if we want the cutoff to evolve and change over the
course of one note. We can listen to what
that sounds like. I'm going to switch to
this copy of retro. We can listen to what changing the filter
envelope sounds like, but first we have to make sure that the amp envelope will keep the volume up long enough for us to even hear what's
happening with the filter. Let's listen to what a
moving filter sounds like. I'll turn the filter on. I'll play a note. I'm moving the cutoff frequency, which defines where we
start cutting off sound. Remember that
subtractive synthesis is about generating
waveforms and then using filters to cut out of the resulting sound to sculpt something
exactly like we want. The filter envelope
would automate this evolution and movement over the course of a note for us if we decide that's
something we want to do. How about if we copy our
phrase from the song 360 down to this synth and we start tweaking the filter and the filter
envelope and see how close we can get to the attack and decay that
we're hearing in the original. The first thing I'll
need to do is make it so that the filter envelope
actually has an influence. You'll notice this dial
right here labeled envelope, this says how much control does the filter envelope
have over the filter? Right now it's at zero, so
there's no effect whatsoever, no matter what I would do here, it wouldn't make any difference. If I put this all
the way up to one, that's equivalent to 100%, and now the filter envelope has 100% control over the cutoff.
Let's give it a shot. Hyper plucky. Doesn't really have a sustain. Something to always
keep in mind regarding sustain is if the instrument you're trying to emulate or create can't sustain
indefinitely, its sustain level
should be zero, period end of story. So a snare drum sound,
this would be zero. An organ sound, this would
have a value, probably 100%. But if it's not something
that you can say, hold down a key and
make it go forever, then this value
needs to be zero. That includes, say, piano. Piano dies out eventually, so this has to be zero and
you need to use dec to get where you need to be
in terms of how it behaves over the course
of its dying out. Alright, let's
keep working here. You notice we're starting to get that little bit of
bleed over in notes. You know what else
we want to do? Let's put our echo on so
it really sounds the same. I'm just going to type
X to show the mixer. And because we dial this in
exactly the way we want it, I'm just going to
option drag it over. And so now we've got that
same echo on our new synth. I'm going to type X to hide the mixer again.
And here we go. We're getting closer to having the right loudness behavior thanks to the filter envelope. But the overall tone is very harsh and edgy compared
to the original. Check out the original. It's mild mannered
compared to ours. That's going to be a
function of our cutoff. Where we pull the cutoff down is going to be
its lowest point, no matter what the filter
envelope is doing, the cutoff frequency that we set manually here is going
to be the lowest point, and then the filter envelope
is going to push it upward to the right to
let higher sounds in, higher partials
in, and then bring it back down as part
of the decay, right? And, He. If you aware that if
you're holding down the option key and you
click either of these, it's going to reset
it to its default, so it just jumped
way up. No problem. Here we go. I'm
taking it way down. Uh huh. Wow. We are suddenly a lot
closer. Let's keep tweaking. Let's see. Let's listen to what
resonance can do so that we know we
don't need any. Yeah. There is absolutely none of that inner quality to the
original sound at all. So let's keep the
resonance at zero. C. Wow. Okay, so with just the filter envelope
really affecting things, we've gotten way, way closer
to our desired sound. All right, cool. Thanks for hanging out with me and
tweaking our way through this, and I'll see you
in the next lesson where we will get even closer.
6. Waves of Every Shape: All right. We did
manage to get a lot closer in the last lesson
using the filter envelope, but there's still quite
a bit of work to do. Check out the
original and hours. Now, the most obvious difference that you're probably
hearing as well as I am is that there's a thinness
and reds edginess to ours that's not in the more mellow sound
of the 360 synth. To change that, we're
going to need to go to the foundation
of the sound, which are the waveforms
or wave shapes. Over here on this
left side of retro, you see the oscillator section. Oscillators generate waveforms
which the synth then amplifies and then usually
they get run through at least one filter exactly
as we've been doing. Different wave forms
or wave shapes, sound different from each
other because they have different combinations
of overtones above the fundamental pitch. If I move the mixed slider
down, to oscillator two. That means we're now only
hearing Oscillator two, and you'll notice it has a little bit different
shape options than Oscillator one has. Oscillator one has square
rectangle, sawtooth, and noise, where shape two has square rectangle,
sawtooth and triangle. Let's hear what
those sound like. Now we'll move the mixed slider back to oscillator
one or shape one, and now we're listening to the
output of this oscillator. The main difference is this one called
noise. Check it out. Obviously, that's
not what we want. That's really cool though to
add a little bit of fuzz to the background of
another wave shape or to create synth drum sounds. But let's get back to our goal. If I switch back to the square wave up here
on Oscillator one, you're going to hear
that that seems to get us a little bit closer
to where we want to be. It's a warmer, richer,
rounder sound. A lot closer to that than
we were with the sawtooth. Now, notice that there's this continuum when we're on the square wave or
rectangle wave. Just for the sake
of illustration, I'm going to bring up a
completely separate part of the sinth to show
us a square wave. You notice that it spends
half of its time in this high position
or peak and half of its time in this low
position or trough. When it's exactly 50, 50 like that, it's cool
to call it a square wave. If it starts to deviate
from that 50 50 split, say it's only 20%
here and 80% here, then it's better to just
call it a rectangle wave because we're acknowledging
that it's not a 50 50 split. The shape dial
allows us to adjust that ratio and you'll hear that it sounds different as
we do. Check it out. So to my ear, as I move this just a
little bit to the right, it does get even closer
to our target sound. Let's listen to that
target sound again. Okay. So there's a little bit sort of clarity that we get there. Next, let's go ahead and add in a little bit of shape two. I'll bring this
down to say, 25%, so it's three
quarters oscillator one and one quarter oscillator
two that we're hearing. This might start to
get a little bit loud, so I'm going to just pull this
down before we go further. I'll try to bring it in
line with our reference. Okay, great. Now I'm
going to go ahead and put Shape two on
a rectangle wave, and I'm going to continue to tweak a little bit
and see what I think. It's a very small amount,
so it's pretty subtle, but I do think it's
getting us that combination of
warmth and clarity. Now, there's one last
detail we haven't discussed that is going
to have a big impact. The filter envelope
has a velocity slider. It lets us determine how
much the velocity of each note and velocity just means how hard
we hit the note. Is going to influence
the filter envelope. If this is all the way up, it means the velocity completely controls the filter envelope. How intense an impact
filter envelope actually has on the
cutoff frequency. I'm going to step
to the side briefly here and show you how this
can be really, really cool. This is a common
thing in dance music. Check this out. These
different colors map to velocity. That's one of the
different ways we can use colors in a piano rule in logic. I've got it set to velocity. You can see very easily that these are all
different velocities. We could also show it
this way by pressing A. You can see my velocities
are pretty scattered around. And when I look at the synth that's outputting
this difference, we see that velocity
is all the way up, meaning the velocity is saying, does this even have an effect
on the cutoff frequency? Not. Every time the
velocity is super high, we get the bright sound and when it's really low like this, we get a pretty dull sound. Building stuff like that into your synth patches,
well, it rocks. Instead of, say
having to automate a filter opening and closing
on your track itself, you can just build it
right into your synth. It's basically automation
inside the synth. Let's close that and then let's
return to our little guy. I'm going to open
up this retrosynth that we've been working
in toward our target, and this time, I'm going to pull the velocity influence
all the way down. The velocity has
absolutely no impact on the filter
envelopes operation, it really now has 100% control
over the cutoff frequency. Going to drag this downward and just listen to what happens. Big, big change in tone, where as if I put it all the
way up, it's more muted. I'm going to open
up our piano roll and I'll start messing
with the velocity and you can hear
what's going on. Ah, each time click
on a note over here, it's going to output that to
the synth and make a sound. I'm going to turn that off just so that's not distracting
us. Let's try again. You can see now we have even
another level of control. In fact, if we pull this all the way down so that
velocity has no impact, we find that this is brighter
than we want it to be, we're going to need to use
velocity to our advantage. Let's bring the velocity
slider all the way back up and then refine the sound
by adjusting the velocity. When I bring that down
as far as I like it, we start losing the
sustain on the low note. Check out the low
note, if you can, focus on the lowest note
in this pattern from 360. It sustains through pretty nicely and even bleeds a little bit onto
each succeeding note. And we don't have that, I think, anymore. Not as much. S. I also think I went a little too far with
the velocity adjustments. Let's bring this back
up a little bit. Okay. So what I can do to adjust for that a little bit is maybe increase
the decay time. Ever so slightly. I think that's gotten us closer. If there's something
I want you to take away from this
chunk of the class, it's that this is an
iterative process. Every time we change one thing, it's bound to affect something else and so it can
become a tweak fest. It really depends how much of a perfectionist
you are, honestly. But you can see we
have a lot of tools. If we try to look at
it the positive way, this is a much more
than half full glass in terms of the tools that
we have at our disposal. This is actually really
different than the approach I used to get to this same sound before I started
shooting the class. It just goes to prove
there's definitely more than one way to get to
a particular sent sound. Just to complete our look at the oscillator section
of retrosynth, let's talk about what these
remaining controls do. Shape modulation,
lets us effectively automate control of the
shape dial by assigning either the LFO or the filter envelope to modulate it so that the sound
morphs as we play. Let's give that a listen. But first, notice that the LFO, like the filter envelope
and amp envelope, also has this slider that indicates some other control
has influence on it. In this case, it's
the modulation wheel, which is a common feature
on Mi keyboard controllers. I'm going to pull this down
so that it's not a factor. Now let's play our phrase. You can hear it's warbling.
Let me slow that down. Now you can hear it's
having an on off effect, and that's precisely
because we have this on off shape of a square
wave set as our LFO. Now let's hear what the
filter envelope does to it. You get a choruse or
modulating sound to it. I'll just option click that to set it back to zero
because I don't really hear that modulation
in our target sound. The vibrato, as you'd expect, adds vibrato, and the deeper controls for
that are down here. Again, it has a mod
wheel assignment, so we can pull that all the way down and let us just hear
the vibrato in action. Again, I don't hear anything like that in our target sound, so I just brought it
back down to zero. Then finally, the
semitones and sense dials. Let us detune shape
two specifically, tune it differently
than shape one. If we do that a little, it creates a richness. If we do it a lot,
we can actually create a diad like a
chord, but just two notes. We could do, for example, seven semitones, which
correlates to a perfect fifth. But clearly, that's not something that's
happening in our sound, so I'll put it back to zero. Okay, so we're really close now. We have just a couple
more refinements and some bonus tips. See
you in the next lesson.
7. A Little to the Right: Okay, let's listen again
to the original 360 clip. And this time, I want you
to pay special attention to where the sound is
positioned from left to right, and how wide it sounds to you. Now hours. The 360
sound is actually mono. It's focused in just one spot in the stereopeld just slightly
to the right of center, and it seems to be mono because
it's really quite narrow. We can address that
right inside retrosynth. If you look in the
lower right corner, you'll see a button
labeled settings. When I click that, it reveals
a bunch more controls that affect the overall sound as well as midi
controller assignments. Notice over on the
left under Global, there is a stereo
spread control, and it's currently set at one, which is the highest setting. But our sound doesn't
seem all that wide. Why might that be?
Well, it works hand in hand with this setting just above
it, voice D tune. I'll leave the stereo spread
at one and then start increasing the voice D tune value and you'll
hear what I mean. I think you get the
point. Especially if you're wearing
headphones right now, you're going to hear the
sound get further and further to the sides
until finally we hit that max value and the sounds are hard
panned out to the sides. Okay, so I will
just quickly tell you that this
column of settings, they all can combine in some
pretty wild sounding ways. And I don't really
want to derail us with that detail in this class. But I would encourage
you to experiment with these controls and definitely refer to the
logic help for explanations. It's really good. Alright, so
let's get back to our goal. I'm going to put the stereo
spread down to zero. So now you hear that
it's in the center, and, of course, our
detune is way up high. We definitely don't
want it that high. I'll bring it back down to
about where it was at 0.22. And then let's experiment. So as I increase it, I get this fuzzy, kind of distorted sound in
addition to the detuning. And as I lower it, I am getting these sort of tonal differences that
I'm not wild about. If I put it all the way down, I think that's actually a little closer to
where we want to be. The thing is, I
do hear a sort of chorusing or even detuning
effect in the original sound. Let's listen. The notes
don't just stay static. They do tend to
move a little bit. Detuning didn't seem like it was going to get us to
that kind of sound, but we have other options. I'm going to shut settings
by clicking down here. And then let's go up to the upper right where
it says effect. The drop down up here lets us choose between
flanger and chorus. They're related, but they
sound distinctly different. I'm going to choose chorus. It's a little more subtle
compared to flanger. And let's see how
close we can get to that 360 sound when
I turn this on. Oh, way too much, right? So you can hear
how the rate makes it really wobble.
We don't need that. Okay. I think that's
getting us really close, but the chorus
reintroduces a bit of width to our
sound. That's okay. We can take the brute
force approach. We'll go over here to our
audio plug in section, and I'm going to
hover just above echo to where I get
this white line, and that lets me insert
above the first plug in. I'm going to go down to
utility and then choose gain. And what you'll find is that
there is a mono switch. So you can throw this on any
track to force it to mono. All right. Cool. Okay. So we're really close now to
where we want to be. Let's also pan our sound slightly to the right to
get that much closer. Let's see what we've got here. You see that slight difference. Yeah, I think plus
five is plenty. That much closer. I'll see
you in the next lesson.
8. Packing More Punch In Our Pluck: Alright, we're super,
super close now. Let's listen to the original
again, and then ours. What I'm hearing is a little more punch in the 360 synth than
we have in ours. We already know that
we could try tweaking the amplitude envelope or the filter envelope and we
can revisit that in a minute. But first, I want to show you
another way to approach it. The principle comes from a classic way to create
a synth drum sound by enforcing a really
fast downward pitch bend. Check this out. I've got this other retrosynth set up here in a
different track. Retrosynth over here
in the lower left, you'll see this
control labeled Glide. If I click directly on Glide, you can see that there's
another choice called Autobund. But first, let's hear
what glide does. I'll turn it on and then I'll turn up the time and you'll see that every note I
play will glide into the next note for the amount
of time that I specify here. This is about a half second. Okay, so that's pretty fun. Now let's take a look at
auto bend. I choose it here. And in addition to
our time control, which still controls the amount of time that the effect
is going to take, we also now have a depth dial. On the right, it goes positive all the way up to 36
semitones and on the left, it goes down three octaves. So what's going to happen is
that no matter what I play, the note is either
going to start this many semitones above the note I actually
play and then bend down to it over that
amount of time. Hey. Or it's going to start this
many semitones below the note I play and bend up to it in
the specified amount of time. Mm. All right. What
does that have to do with adding more
punch to our sent sound? Seems a little odd unless you know a little bit about the
eight oh eight kick sound. If I set this depth
all the way up, so we're going to bend
down three whole octaves, and then I play here, let's see, a low note I'll
start lowering the time lower and lower and eventually you'll
start to hear what sounds like an eight
oh eight kick. To to to to In short, that rapid descent
creates a knocking sound. We can use this same
principle to add a little more punch and energy to the onset of each
note in our synth sound too. I'll close this
retrosynth and I'll go to our sound and then
open the retrosynth. We'll go over here, turn
this on and choose autobnd. Once again, I'm going to throw this all the way up
to three octaves. And in this case, I'm going to play
our little phrase so we can hear it in context. But once again, I'll just
lower this little by little, and eventually we'll start to hear a knock on each attack. Hear that? It's
like a little bam, bam, bam, dam, dam. It's got this little knock, this little to it that we like So we want to lower it enough that
we're getting that knock and we're not audibly
affecting the pitch anymore. I hear a little bit of, like, uh, uh, uh, in the final notes
of the phrase, so I have to be aware of that. Okay. That's a little better. Let's compare to
what it was before. Maybe a little more. All right. So I think
that's working pretty well right around five
milliseconds. Okay, cool. Now, let's just see
if we can tweak the filter envelope
or the amp envelope and get just a little
bit more punch. Let's compare again. Mm hmm. I think also I'm hearing just a little more chorus
in the original than in, so let's give that a
little tweak as well. Alright. I kind of feel
like we have a winner. I maybe notice a few little
distinctions here and there, but nothing too bad. I think we've got it good here. All right. Let's wrap this up.
9. Saving Our Awesome Sound: Hey, in this super brief lesson, I'm just going to make sure you know how to do two things. One, save your retrosynth
preset and two, save your patch to the library. They're a little bit different. Saving your retrosynth
preset is exactly that. It's only going to cover what you've done
here in retrosynth. This menu right here
is the preset menu. Any existing presets
are listed down here. These are the ones
that come with logic, and these are the ones
that I've made myself. Up here is a Save As command, and that's our ticket. Click that and then you'll be
prompted to provide a name, give it something
appropriate like my incredibly cool plug. And then you could maybe
make a subfolder like pluck and save it
there. All right. Now, every time you use
retrosynth in any project, not just this one,
you'll be able to choose this patch right here. Cool. Now the second part is you can actually save
this entire track setup. Retrosynth gain and
echo with all of their current settings
and be able to recall it in any project
with a single click. Here's how we do that.
I'm going to type Y to open Logic's Library. And then I'm going
to make sure that this little triangle is
not here by retrosynth. That would just allow us to
choose retrosynth presets. What we want is to have it
appear next to setting. You notice that this updates. This is going to save all of the plug ins and settings
in this channel strip. So now that we've
got that chosen, the arrow next to setting, we can come down here and
click the Save button. And now we can again, give it an appropriate name like my killer Pluck xx patch. So what that lets us do is in any project going
forward, you could add, make sure it's a software
instrument track, click Create, and here it is, head over to the library and say what was it? Killer Oh, there it is.
My killer plug XCX. I click that and I get that whole channel strip setup loaded right in and that's it.
10. Thanks for Hanging With Me!: Hey, I'm so glad
you stuck with it. You've learned how to
make a really cool sent sound and how to use powerful synth controls like envelopes, filters, and more. Again, I strongly encourage
you to upload your project. I'll definitely check it out and get back
to you personally. Finally, I hope you'll take time to leave a
review of the class. I take every review seriously. This is an important tool for me to make my classes
as good as they can be. So thanks for your time, and I look forward to
seeing you again soon. In the meantime,
keep making noise.
CK Barlow, Composer for Film/TV, Tech Instructor
