Sound Design in 90 Minutes: Fast-Track Guide to Synthesizers

1. Introduction: Hey, everyone. Welcome to Sound Design in 90 minutes. My name is Jay. Thanks for being here. I'm really excited that you decided to join this class. In this class, we're going to power through the principles of sound design. If you're on this site regularly, you know that I have tons and tons of classes and also tons and tons of sound design classes. This one, we're going to boil it down to really the main principles, the big picture stuff, and how when I'm working on a track, how I think about the sound I want and then how I make it. That's really what we're going to zero in on. Going to use a little bit of Ableton. We're going to use a little bit of logic. We're going to use a little bit of analog synthesis. It's like a fun little analog synthesizer that we're going to be looking at a little bit. But none of what we do is going to be specific to any synthesizer or any software. This is a class that's going to teach you how to walk up to any synthesizer and identify uh, how to make the sounds you want on it. You're going to be able to say, I know what that button does. I know what that button does. I know what that button does on every synthesizer. So this is not an Ableton class. This is not a logic class. This is not an analog class. This is a class for anyone who wants to learn how to make their own sounds with synthesis and skip the theory and math stuff and jump right to the music stuff. So, yeah, that's what this class is about. Clock's ticking, so let's dive in. 2. My approach to sound design: Alright, so let's talk about sound design. We have a lot to get through in a short amount of time. So, um, how I approach sound design is with a little bit of experimentation, you know, I mean, I wish sound design, to me, was so specific that I could just imagine a sound and then just make it exactly how I envision it. And that is sometimes true. But sometimes I don't have a problem making the sound I'm envisioning. The problem is more that I find better results experimenting with the tools than I do imagining the sounds. You know, there's new sounds all the time in some of these new synthesizers that are more interesting than what I can imagine. So, a healthy amount of experimentation is really awesome. So that's a long way of saying. My approach to this involves a lot of experimentation and happy accidents, and don't be afraid of that. That's okay. Um, so we're going to explore, we're going to create, but we're going to know a whole bunch of fundamental principles, and that's going to get us in the ballpark of what we want to make all the time very quickly. There are really just a couple main principles, and we're going to learn those, and then from there, we'll be able to design any sound you want broadly. And then we'll work on crafting that down into exactly what you want. In the end, I'll talk about how to study sound design more and point you to some of the kind of best sound designers working today and how to study their stuff and also how to find these sound design recipe books that I really love. So, before we dive into meat and potatoes, let's talk a little bit about the software I'm going to use here, what software you should have, and what's the best way to follow along with this class? 3. What is sound design?: Alright, so let's talk about sound design. What actually is sound design? I find a lot of time that sound design is a bit like music theory in that a lot of people have the assumption that it's something that they need to learn and they know that they need to get good at sound design, but they don't exactly know what it is. So, let's first just kind of talk about what it is and what it does. Sound design is like crafting our own sounds. Not necessarily. You can think about let's look at it this way. John Cage, famous composer, said that music is organized sound. Okay? That's a very famous quote of his. So sound organized in time, right? I'm like, kind of paraphrasing his thing. So if music is sound organized in time, what sound design is is it's crafting those sounds, so we're going to make those sounds. We're going to make them really cool. And then separately from that, we're going to make music out of those sounds, right? Now, in reality, often those things come together, where we're making music and sound design at the same time. I don't work that way, where I'm making I make all my sounds, and then I make music with them. I don't know anyone that works that way, but maybe some people do. But that's really what it is, it's making the sounds. So most of the time when we talk about sound design, we're talking about synthesis. So how do handle synthesizers and things like that. But we're also talking about just making cool sounds in all kinds of different ways. Let me show you. I've got a track pulled up here. This is a track of mine. It's a work in progress, and it's got a whole bunch of audio things happening here. This is this is an interesting track in terms of Synth because it's got all this midi stuff here, but this is a track where I'm not using really any synthesizers. I'm using samplers, and we're doing a bunch of string stuff. So it's supposed to sound like there's an orchestra within this kind of techno landscape. So, but you can get a sense of the sound design here. Everything you're hearing here is sound design from the drums to the pads to the atmospheric stuff. Everything is sound. So that kick? That was craft. Now, even that violin, there's a certain way I wanted that violin to send, right? I wanted it to have a certain attack, a certain sustain. And when a note was let go, I wanted it to end a certain way. All of this is sound design. So for every note, we think about how it works, how we wanted to enter, how we wanted to exit, all of that stuff. If you come from a traditional music background, like a classical music background like I do, you can think about sound design really as almost synonymous with orchestration. It's a lot of the same stuff. In orchestration, we're really trying to make orchestral instruments sound unique by layering them by doing different techniques, but doing all the stuff. We just have a much smaller palette. In sound design, we have a way bigger palette. We can do virtually anything. But the goal is the same. We're trying to make unique sounds. Okay, so now when I think about sound design, my kind of starting point is I think about three main things I can do with sound, and that is, I can mess with timbre, shape, and motion. So let's go to a new video and talk about those three things. 4. Timbre, shape, and motion: Okay, when I'm thinking about sound design, I'm thinking, I have a sound. We can always start with a sound, and usually we do. In all types of synthesis, we don't. We'll talk about that later. But in most types of synthesis, we start with a sound. And we'll talk about that soon. And then when it comes to how do we shape that sound? How do we design that sound? There are three things that I think about that you can do to that sound. We can play with the timbre. We can play with the shape, and we can play with motion. Okay? All three of those things are going to make that sound whole lot more interesting. Let me demonstrate. So, here is a very plain, basic boring sound. Oops. Okay, this is the default analog Synth patch in Ableton, okay? Oops, let me loop that. And I just have two notes looping. Okay? Nothing too wild. This is basically just a square wave, I think. Okay, so let's make this more interesting timbre. Now, we're going to talk about timbre more in just the next section, actually, the next video. So if you don't understand this word, just don't worry. We're gonna talk about it more in just a second. But basically, timbre is kind of a confusing term. It literally means color, okay? So timbre is the color of the sound, very nebulous, right? Color of the sound. Here's a cool kind of an easy way to think about it. Let's say I asked a flute and a violin to play the exact same note, same octave, okay? Now, you don't even know you don't need to know anything about, like, classical music or anything to understand this analogy. Just imagine this in your head. If I asked a flute and a violin to play the exact same note, could you tell the difference? Probably. Yes, you could probably tell the difference. You could hear it and say, Well, that one's a flute because it sounds like a flute, right? And that one's a violin because it sounds like a violin. Why? They're playing the exact same note. The answer is timbre. They have a different timbre. They sound different. They have a different color to their sound. So that's kind of what timbre is. There's a lot of things we can do with timbre. So more on that in a minute. We'll come back to that. Shape. Okay, shape is a little bit easier one to describe. So let's put a little shape on this one. Shape would be like, how does the sound start? How does it end? What happens while it's sustaining? So we'll go over the details of how this works shortly. I just want to give you a quick overview so you don't have to understand everything that's happening here. But let's hear it. So I can go here and I can say, What if this had a slower entry? So right now it goes on, right? Let's make it slowly turn on. Okay? Different shape. Let's make it slowly turn off. Let's make it stay sustaining all the way. Let's make it come way down right away. Maybe not that much? Maybe a little more relaxed. There we go. Okay, now we've got a very different shaped sound. Right? Um, What if we make it shaped like really sharp? Like a buzz. What if we just did this? There. Just a op. Okay, I'm gonna put it back similar more reasonable. So we can demonstrate motion. Okay, so that's shape. Now let's talk about motion. What's happening while it's sustaining? Right now, it's just going right, it's just sitting there. So let's add a little motion to it. Give it a little something to make it more interesting. There's a few different ways we could do that. Here's the easiest. And let's go Oh, I don't know. In fact, let's go this way. Let's do that. I'm just gonna pull a duplicate of that oscillator. Ota tune just a little bit. Now you feel this, like outta tune thing, and that gives it a little bit of emotion. I could also use an LFO if I wanted. Let's use an LFO on the volume. Okay, now it's a little more obvious. Now there's a lot of motion there, right? Let's speed that up. Right? So now I've got kind of a silly sound, but I've got a much more dynamic sound than just our initial Bing sound, right? So timbre shape, motion. I. 5. What is timbre?: Okay, back to tamber. So the best way to play around and affect timbre is with our oscillator, okay? So let's dive in and talk about an oscillator. So just a minute ago, when I said that usually in synthesis, we start with a sound, okay? That is always going to be the oscillator. In a synthesizer, the oscillator is the only thing that makes sound. Everything else chips away at the sound. Okay? So if we go down here and look at this synthesizer, we can see over here oscillator one and oscillator two. So these are two oscillators. They're the only thing in this whole thing that makes sound, other than noise, this is sort of a third oscillator, and it's just kind of a noisemaker. But we have two oscillators. So let's turn this one off and just listen to this one, okay? And let's turn off this LFO. Let's get this back to normal. What else did I do? Okay. Should pretty much back to normal. A little more volume. Okay. Now, the oscillator, we'll go into more details about about everything that's in the oscillator section in just a minute. Here, I want to focus on the timbre we can get by changing the waveform. Okay? Here it calls the waveform shape. But in your synthesizer, it might call it wave, I might call it waveform, I might call it shape, it might call it something else. But basically, here's what we're looking for. These kinds of symbols, okay? Sine wave, it might call this sine might call this one sawtooth, triangle or sorry, square wave. You might also have one called triangle. Each of these waveforms, and this is noise or random. Each of these waveforms are going to generate different timbre, okay? So we are on sawtooth wave. You can imagine this little shape, if repeated over and over and over, looks like a sawtooth. Okay? So it sounds like this. But let's switch to sign. See, very different timbre. Same note, same shape, same motion, same everything. Here's a square. Right, so you might think, Wow, that sounds awfully similar to the sawtooth. Let's compare the two. Close, right? One thing to keep in mind is that all of these shapes of waveforms, the way I think about it is the more like right angles the waveform has, the more like, buzzy it is. So this square wave has a bunch of right angles. It's gonna be pretty buzzy. Sawtooth wave, no right angles, but some sharp angles. So it's going to be pretty buzzy. The sine wave, no angles at all. Very smooth, right? So that's the very smooth one. Okay, now, but why why do these sound buzzy or smooth or whatever? The reason is partials and harmonics, okay? So if we select a sine wave, it generates a single tone. Let's look at this actually. Let's look at this through Let's use a little tool here called a Spectrum. Let's throw that up there. Okay. Okay, so let's change our note here so that we are hearing one note all the way through and make it a little more consistent. Okay. So here's what we're seeing here. This is the note that we're making, okay? This is the note that I'm playing. All of these things above it are like the signature of that note. Okay. Every note that you hear anywhere, if a clarinet plays a note, what you're actually hearing is a whole bunch of notes that make up the note that you're hearing. So there's one note that's called the fundamental. That's the note that we intend to play. Like, if I have a clarinet, I don't know why I'm picking on clarinets these days. This is true of all instruments. If I have a clarinet and I say, I want to play a G, and I finger a G, I blow a G and say, This is a G. I'm going to play a G, but there's all these other notes that happen. That you don't really hear consciously, but they're there, and all of them contribute not to the pitch, but to the timbre of the sound. And that's what these are. These are a bunch of different notes that are contributing to the timbre. Now, watch what happens when I shift this to something like a sawtooth wave. Right? The pattern changes, right? We get a lot more present in these upper partials or these upper harmonics, right? Those two words, I think, are slightly different, but for our purposes right now, let's use them as the same thing. So a lot louder in our upper partials. So it's gonna be buzzier. Let's look at a square wave. Right? So now we're getting big, quiet, big, big, quiet, little bit louder, big, big, quiet. So different shapes on them, right? And again, back to our really smooth sine wave. Now, in theory, a sine wave shouldn't really have very many up here at all, but that's a story for another day. So all of these upper things contribute to the timbre of our sound. All these upper frequencies contribute to the timbre. So what does that mean? That means that we can do a lot of messing around with the timbre of our sound by playing with these frequencies up here, okay? So if we had a way to mess around with these, we could really play with the timbre. Which is a long way to say, there are two main ways we can mess with the timbre. We can change the waveform, or we can mess around with these, which is to use a filter. Cool? Cool. Okay. All right. Let's move on. 6. How to read a waveform: Okay, let's do one more thing here, and let me just show you what these waveforms look like on their own. So I'm going to switch over to another program here called audacity. If you're not familiar with audacity, it's a great little program. It's free. It's for Mac and PC and Linux, I think. It's just a great little utility. So I'm going to go to Generate and Tone. And then I can go to waveform, and here are some options. I go to sign, frequency 440 amplitude 0.5, duration, 30 seconds. Sure. Generate. Okay. So now we can zoom in Zoom, Zoom, Zoom. Well, first of all, here's what it sounds like. You might want to plug your ears. Nat. If I zoom way, way, way in down to the individual sample level, I see these beautiful sine waves, okay? And to show you how zoomed in I am, now, see these little dots. These are the individual samples. So we are way mega zoomed in, like, to the millisecond. Okay, so let's look at another one. If we go to generate tone square Same thing. It looks like that. Sounds like this. Much buzzier. We go in in a square wave. It's going to look like that, right? So squares. Now, we can see that it's not actually a perfect square. If it was perfect, this line would be just straight up. But there's, like, weird math going on. Like, it's hard to make a perfect, perfect square, as far as I understand it. So you can just generate these tones if you want. Audacity is a great tool for that. Um There's a bunch more. You can do. You can do a lot of other things with audacity. Triangle. They're neat. Oh, look how it connects. That's fun. So check out audacity. Free program, fun to use, fun to demonstrate stuff on. 7. Synthesis types: Okay, in the next section, we're going to go into the main guts of how synthesis works. And we're going to start with a type of synthesis called subtractive synthesis. Now, I want to point out that there's a number of different kinds of synthesis, okay? Subtractive synthesis is one. It is probably the most common, I think. But it's also kind of stylistic. It depends on what sound you're looking for. Subtractive synthesis is the best to start because it's easy to explain. It's easy to understand. And at the end of this class, we'll look at more types of synthesis, how some of the other ones work. But some of the other ones are additive synthesis, physical modeling synthesis, wave table synthesis, FM synthesis. FM synthesis being probably one of my favorites. If you've listened to anything that came out of the 80s, then you're familiar with FM synthesis. So there's a lot of different types, but a lot of the things we're going to talk about in subtractive synthesis, all the elements are in all these other types of synthesis, okay? So once you learn subtractive synthesis, then you can learn all the other types really easy because, like, an oscillator is still an oscillator. A filter is still a filter. You know, an envelope is still an envelope. They just work different in the different synthesis types. So be aware that there are different types of synthesis that work differently. So when you're looking for, if you're not using Ableton, you're looking for a type of synthesizer to use. Search around, make sure you're using a subtractive synthesizer or an additive synthesizer. That would even work to follow along with this next section. Anything that's just kind of a very basic synthesizer that has a simple layout of an oscillator or two, a filter or two envelopes all over it and an amplifier. That's what we're really looking for. So don't try to use a physical model to follow this next part. That will be very confusing. So make sure that you're using some kind of subtractive synthesis. Cool. Alright, let's get into the meat and potatoes and talk about how to design synthesis sounds. Here we go. 8. The 4 Sections to any synthesizer: Okay. Actually have my most complicated setup I've ever done to film the class now. So what I've got going here is I have Ableton with analog and keyboard hooked up to that. I also have a second camera shooting down at my desk to show you this fun little analog synthesizer. This is a Corg monotribe. This is just a cute little analog Synth. I love this little thing for teaching because it's got everything we need on it. So, you know, we can do some really cool stuff. I'll show you how it works in some detail as we learn this stuff. But that's there, because what I want to do is I want to show you how these principles work on multiple things. So I'm going to show you how it works on analog and then also how it works on the monotribe for most things. So hopefully, you can find it on whatever device you're using. So in this video, I want to talk about the four main sections of any synthesizer, okay? So, no matter what synthesizer you're looking at, hardware, software, analog, digital, whatever. As long as it's some sort of additive, subtractive synthesizer, it's going to have four sections, four main sections. And you can kind of see them here if we look at analog. You can kind of see this box here, and you can kind of see this box here, and this box here, and then this box here. Now, there's going to be extra stuff, right? Like, every synthesizers different. So there's four main things, and then there's going to be like extra bells and whistles that makes everything unique. So what we want to do is learn how to use those four main things. And if you learn how to use those, then every synthesizer that you find you can just walk up to it. You know these four main things. You can dial them in and make some cool sounds right away just by knowing these four things, okay? So here's what they are. The four things are the oscillator section, the filter section, the envelopes, and the amplifier. Okay? Those are the four things you need to figure out, okay? So in the next several videos, we're going to learn what those four things are, how they work, and how to use them and how to dial them in. Okay. So we see them here in the analog. Here's our oscillator section. And like a lot of synthesizers, we have two oscillator sections, kind of three. We've already talked about that. Here's a filter section. We have two filter sections here. That's cool. Here's an amplifier section. We have two amplifier sections. And then envelopes, this is an envelope. Envelopes are kind of all over. This is another envelope. Click here. This is another type of envelope, and there's sort of an envelope buried in here, I think. There's an envelope. There's an envelope. Envelopes are all over the place. We'll talk more about that. And over here, if we look at the monotribe, VCO means voltage controlled oscillator. Well, voltage controlled is a way to talk about really analog gear, and we're not going to spend too much time on the voltage controlled stuff, but that's a way for analog gear to control other analog gear. Maybe sometime I'll do a big analog gear class, but that's kind of outside of the scope of this class. So we're going to not deal with the voltage controlled part of that too much, but the O in VCO is oscillator. A, VCA is amplifier. LFO is something different that we'll talk about soon. So we have oscillators, amplifiers, filters are here VCF for filter. These two are for filters. And then envelopes are here and kind of here and kind of here. Actually, all these are sort of different elements of envelopes. So all the same stuff just laid out differently. Cool. All right, so let's dive into the oscillator section. 9. The oscillator section: Okay, let's look at the oscillator section. Now, we're going to have two main things in the oscillator section. We're going to have the waveform to choose, and we're going to have some tuning options. Okay? So let's look at the waveform first. So down here, here is our waveform selection. So here we have sine wave, sawtooth wave, triangle wave. If we look over at our monotribe, we have three options. We have a sawtooth wave, triangle wave, and a square wave right there. Some synthesizers have hundreds of waveforms to choose from. Some have two, some have, you know, anywhere in between. So some let you draw your own waveforms. These are the standard ones. So there's no kind of way to know how many different sins have, but they will have some. Each one of these, you know, they contribute to the timbre it's also worth noting that different synthesizers have different amounts of number of oscillators. This Synth has 2.5, right? It's got this one, this one, they work the same and this noise. The monotribe has 21.5, let's say, it's got this one VCO, and it's got this noise right here. So let's turn off the rhythm. Okay. That's pretty sad, sounding. Let's just play record a new note here. Okay. So I can add in some noise with this dial. Just to give it a little more character changes the tang a little bit. Whole bunch. T, I'm gonna turn that off. So that's something I can do. So different waveforms. Now, the tuning is here in my case. So I have octave semitones and then what they call detune here. So octave is if you're not familiar with the term octave, it basically is 12 semitones, but it also you can think of it as just like the range. Like, if you move it up one octave, you're shifting from, like, mid range to upper range to higher to higher to higher. So for example, well, let's play something here. Here's a note if I go up an octave. Let's turn off our second oscillator. And let's go down. Okay? Semitones is like one step on the keyboard, right? So, like every I shouldn't say one step. One key on the keyboard, right? So if you one note right next to each other, okay? So two notes. So if I keep playing the same note like this but move this up, Okay, so I can play so I can change what pitch it's playing. Why would you want to do that? Well, watch this. If I turn on my second oscillator. Okay, now I have two oscillators doing the same thing. Let's say I set this one be fifth higher. Now I'm, you know, making some interesting stuff. So that's one use for that. Now, detune is going to work in cents. So there's 100 cents for a semitone, or is there $0.50 to a semitone? Let's find out. Well, in this case, well, let's go up 50. Okay, hold on to that note. Nope, it's 100. 100 semitones or one, in this case, is one or sorry 100 cents is one semitone. This will let us go up to three. Now, why would you want to take something out of tune like this, right? This basically is gonna let you take something out of tune. Well, you saw me do it earlier, right? If I take two oscillators, This is do that. Alright, two oscillators, but I take one out of tune. I get this kind of sound. This is really effective on basses. You get that real flangy sound. Awesome sound. So being out of tune is a cool thing. So that's our oscillator section. Over here, we have a little bit of routing stuff that's unique to this. You find that in some synthesizers. With this one, I can route this to filter one, which goes to here. Or if I drag this, I can route it to filter two, which is going to send it down here. Or I can do any combination of 80% of it to filter one, 20% of it to filter two. If we look over here, our oscillator section, we have the octave right here. Let's just play a single note. Let's play a C. I don't know why it's alternating notes like that. It faster. Yo. There we go. Okay, there's a single note. So here's my octave. All right. So I have an octave. I don't think I have any other tuning here in this particular simp. I just have octave tuning. So I can't really pull it out of tune, although I can kind of do some stuff that I'll kind of simulate that it's out of tune. But more on that later. Alright, so that's our oscillator section. 10. Waveforms: Alright, we've already talked about waveforms, and, you know, choosing what waveform comes here. But I want to just emphasize how important this step is because in subtractive synthesis, what we're doing is we're starting with a very rich waveform, and then we're going to carve out the sounds we don't want, and that's how we shape our sound. We're going to subtract the frequencies and shape the sound we want. It's a bit like I always screw this up. Is it DaVinci or who made the statue of David? Was that Davinci? No. Yeah, I don't know. Whoever that was, they said someone asked them, like, how did you make the statue of David? And they said, I had this giant rock, and I just carved away everything that wasn't David. It's kind of like that. So we're going to carve away. Even in most types of synthesis, where you start is a very, very important thing. So if you start with something like a sine wave, you don't have very many partials, right? Like, it's not buzzy like that, so there's not very much to carve away. So if you want a really smooth sound, then you need to then that's a great one to start with. But if you want to do something more exciting, you need to start with something more buzzy so that you can chip away at stuff. So like a square wave or a triangle wave. Now, let's look at that over here. Let me just play for you the waves that we have here. So we can hear how they're different. Okay? So here we have sawtooth wave, triangle wave. So not all that much different. And square wave. Here's all three. You know, and they didn't even really give you a sine wave here because the filtering is so important because the sound of an analog synth, it's really like this kind of a sound. This is, like, where the money is, right? Like, that's like the coolest thing. And what that kind of sound is is that is a rich waveform and a filter over top of it going quick. And if it's just a sine wave, there's really nothing for that filter to grab onto. There's no partials up there, so it's not as cool on a sine wave. So that's why this one doesn't have a sine wave. So, where you start is very important. The different waveforms. Okay, let's move on and talk about those filters. 11. The filter section: All right. Onto the filter section. So what we're gonna do with the filter. Now, if you've used an EQ before or anything like that, that's the same thing. That's a filter, right? So what we're gonna do here is we're going to use a very specific kind of filter. We usually, in most sense, have access to many filters, but the most common to use here is a low pass filter. So let's get a nice sound cue up here. So let's get a square wave. Nice. Okay, so here's my filter. Now, my main filter controls are frequency and resonance. Okay? And then we have our filter types here, okay? Let's come back to those. Put a pin in that for just a second. We're going to do a separate video on the different types of filters in just a second. For now, let's focus on the frequency in resonance. Okay, so the frequency is where the filter cuts off. Okay? So let's look at that in just a little bit different graphic. Let's go to an EQ eight. Now, this is not what we're using. I just want to use this to show you what's happening here. Okay, so, do, do, do. Okay. So this is a low pass filter. Again, we'll talk more about that later. So this frequency knob, okay? This frequency is the cut off frequency. And in fact, in some synthesizers, this will just be labeled cut off. Okay? This will say cut off. And what that means is roughly where this number four is. It's where this starts to slope down, really. Okay? So it really should be right about here. Okay? So what that means is what we're looking at here is on the left is low stuff, on the right is high stuff, okay? So it's low stuff, high stuff. And down here on the bottom is quiet stuff. Up here is loudstff. So as our sound goes through here, what's happening is everything that's high, high frequency stuff, the volume is getting turned down on high frequency stuff, okay? So we're left with low frequency stuff. Unless we move this up high, now we've got more higher frequency stuff. We've got some mid to high range stuff, right? If we go down here, we've got just low stuff, okay? So that's the cutoff frequency. Now, when we just look at a synthesizer, a lot of the time, you don't get a cool visual like this. So this is why I've pulled this up. Down here, you don't get that visual. You just kind of have to imagine what's happening. But you can see that if I set this for 3.4 K as our cut off, what's happening is that's right about here. Okay? That's about 3.4 K. So that's what that's doing. Okay? So that's what the cutoff means or frequency in this case. Resonance. Resonance is really fun. Well, actually, before resonance, let's hear what that does. Let's hear what the cutoff does. Okay? So I'm going to turn this EQ off so this isn't doing anything. We're just hearing. Okay? So what we're hearing here is right now the filter is all the way open, right? It's like, all the way out here. So it's basically not doing anything. But as I pull it in, you can kind of see what it's doing, right? The filter here is closing in here. Like right now I have it set to 1.2, which is right about there. Okay? If I turn this off, you can hear it stopping those upper overtones, right? It's stopping those so that we're getting a smoother sound and we're only getting low frequencies. Now, it doesn't have to be just low frequencies. We can flip it and do a high pass filter if we wanted. Now it's going to do the opposite. It's going to let high frequencies through. Right? And shut off low frequencies. Which isn't going to do a whole lot because I'm playing a fairly low sound. So let's go back to low pass. Okay, so that's what that sounds like. It's not extremely interesting. So let's add some resonance. What resonance does, let's go back here. Resonance gives us a little push right at the cutoff frequency. Here's what that means. Boop. See that? This little hook is resonance. It means that just before we start to cut off or push down, we give it a little nudge up. So there's a lip up and then it goes down. What that means is that we're always emphasizing the highest frequencies that we're letting through. Okay? Why? The reason is, it gives us this sound. Let me turn that off. Turn my resonance up. Sun. It gives that laser gun kind of effect. W w w w. Right? If I turn the resonance down and do that, I don't get that. I need that little push. Wow. Till you get that kind of sound? So, now I got kind of an interesting sound. That's the resin. Okay? Let's look at that over here on the monotribe. We have Oh, say note. By Luck. So here's our note. And we have the cut off here. So here, it says peak, and here it says cut off. So the cut off is our turn that up. So the cut off is our cut off frequency, right? And the peak is our resonance. Who Arlie. So if I turn the resonance all the way down. It's not super interesting. I give it a little bit. That's where I start to get that really fun Filter sound. This is the stuff that, like, Mg is famous for. It's filters. Among other things. Cool. Let's move on. 12. Filter Types: Okay, let's talk a little bit about the filter types or filter shapes. There are tons of them, and there are even some proprietary ones where different Synth makers will kind of invent their own. But there are also a whole bunch of standard ones. So here's just a graphic I found online really quick, Low Pass. Low pass is what we've been looking at where basically, remember, in this kind of a graph, we're looking at low stuff on the left side, high stuff on the right side, high volume on the top, low volume at the bottom. So what this is going to do is it's going to let low frequencies through, and it's going to cut off high frequencies. You think about these names, what I always do is use the word let, so let low pass, let low frequencies pass. So low frequencies can pass through, and high frequencies get cut off. The opposite looks like this. A high pass filter, lets high frequencies pass through and low frequencies get cut off. So the low stuff volume goes down to zero, and it kind of ramps up from there. There's a band pass where just a certain band, so to speak, is allowed through and above it and below it is filtered out. And then there's a notch filter, which is kind of the opposite of a band pass where everything is blocked except for a certain band is allowed to come through. And there are other ones, too. There's one other thing I want to point out about filters is that sometimes you see a number on them like this one, we see low past 12 and low pass 24, band pass 12 or bandpass six, band past 12. What that means is decibels per octave. And basically what that translates to is, let's go over here so we can visualize it with this is how steep this line is, what that means. So can I simulate it here? Yeah. So here is we don't have the same numbers here, but we can kind of simulate it. Here is, let's call that 12, and here would be like, 24. So much steeper because it's more decibels per octave, that's getting cut off. So it's a much steeper filter. We might call it a more aggressive filter. So it's cutting off more faster, less gradual, more less so to speak. Okay, so you'll see all kinds of filters in the different synthesizers that you're using. You can usually figure them out by the name of them and just kind of thinking low pass, bandpass, notch. But some of them are weird and you just have to look them up. Alright, let's talk about envelopes. 13. The envelopes (ADSR): Okay, let's go back to the beginning of this class when we talked about what we can do with a sound. And remember, we talked about timbre, shape, and motion, okay? Timbre has everything to do almost everything to do with the waveform and the filter, okay? We're on to shape now. When we talk about the envelopes, we're talking about shape. How can we shape that sound? Okay? So the envelopes work a little bit different because there's not really an envelope section. I in a synthesizer. They're kind of thrown all over the place. An envelope is just a convention that we use to control sound. Okay? So let's go to our filter, and let's use an envelope on the filter. Okay? Let's turn our resonance up a little bit. Okay, so here's what we have. Ooh, let's turn this EQ off. Okay. Cool. So, not much shape to that. I turn it on, and it goes bang, right? That's cool. It's a good sound, but let's give it some shape. So what we're gonna do is we're going to put an envelope on it, and what this envelope is going to do is it's going to sort of apply like a mini automation. It's an automation that gets triggered as I play the note. So if I go to now, how you apply these is going to be all over the place. But the envelope typically looks like this. You're going to see the letters ADS and R, okay? Look around your synthesizer. Find the letters ADSR, okay? They're probably there somewhere, or it might just say envelope. Okay? So I'm going to go down and you're looking for this kind of a drawing if you don't see ADSR, or it might look more like this. Okay? And in fact, I do see both. So here's the drawing, the shape that I'm looking for. It's this shape, or up here, I have ADS in R. Those letters stand for attack, decay, sustain, and release. And they correspond to these points, attack, decay, sustain, which works differently than the rest and then release. So here's how they work. Here's the attack, right? The attack, you can think of this as sort of like a momentary thing that happens over time. So when I play the note, that's this box right here. What happens when I put my finger down on the note? That's this. Does it happen right away, full blast? That's what we're telling it to do here? Or does it fade in? That's what we're telling it to do here. Um, so let's tell it to fade in just a little bit, like that. Let's give it a little bit more. Oh, actually, I'm affecting the filter. Let's go to the volume and make this a little more obvious, okay? So let's do this to the volume. Let's have the volume fade in. Okay. Now it's fading in. So that's the attack. Now there's the decay. So in most sounds, there's an initial attack and then a quick decay, and then it goes down and sustains at a particular spot. So if I go bum there's the but there's the initial, like, bum and then it comes back and then it sustains at a spot. So that's this. The decay is where we come down to where we get to our sustaining volume, okay? So attack decay, and then the sustain is just the volume at which we sustain. So sustain works different because it is a volume, not an amount of time. So we could say, we're going to sustain full blast up here or ramp up and just stay there. Or we could say we're gonna ramp all the way up and then shoot back down to a very quiet volume. Right? Or somewhere in between. Here. And then we could say, we want what happens when I let go of the note? When I let go, we could say we want the note to just completely stop right away. So letting go of the note, right. Yep. Right? Completely just stops instantly. Or we could let it fade out. Let it go, right? Yes. All right, so if I wanted to make something really ambient, I want, like, a big pad. I want a slow attack, slow release. Nice ambient textures because we got very slow everything. That's an envelope. So the envelope gets triggered every time we play a note. So we play a note, that triggers the attack, and then when we let go of the note, that triggers the release. All right. And that is the ADSR envelope. Now, let's talk about how we can use these all over a synthesizer. 14. Applying envelopes: Okay, so what you saw me do here is use an envelope on the amplifier to change the volume over time. And that's a cool thing to do. That's the most common thing to do with an envelope, but it's not the only thing. Let's go back to our filter, and our filter has an envelope, too, right? What if we said, I want my filter to open slowly over time, very slowly over time? Right? I'd say I want my filter to do that. Now, as I play the note, when I attack the note, the filter's gonna open and close, right? That's what that's gonna tell it to do. Listen. Now I'm getting some motion, right? So motion in that sense. So let go, you know? Alright. So what else can we do? What if we put an envelope on our octave? Uh, we can on our octave here, but we can on our pitch. So our pitch starts real high and then goes down real low. Ooh. Wow. Laser guns? Okay. That's not particularly interesting. What if I did a lot more subtle? D What if the picture did. Okay, let's look at our envelopes over here. Now, with envelopes here on the monotribe, what we have is these kind of premade ones. So we don't have the full like ADSR. I'd be a little cumbersome. So we have these. So these just shape the note a little bit. This is like a kind of a saw tooth shape envelope and one with, like, a slower ramp up, so like a slow attack. And then this one has a heart attack, fast attack, but a slow release. And this one is just on and off. So this one gets you a much more percussive sound. So if you wanted to, like, slow it down a little bit. This one would be more interesting. So that's really all we get for envelopes on the Synth here on the oscillator here in the monotrod. But it is an envelope nonetheless. 15. The amplifier: Okay, the last section that we need is our amplifier section. So in the analog here, it's right here. It's really the most simple one. It's really just our volume and panning. But you have to remember that this is also where we get our ADSR envelope. For our volume. So if you want to do a volume envelope to shape your sound, that's where it is. You also have panning controls here. Now, it's important to note that we have in most cases, if you have multiple oscillators, you're going to have multiple amplifier sections. So here we have an amp, which is volume and panning for our first oscillator, and we have another one for our second oscillator, right? And then we have overall global volume control at the end. Okay, that's usually the case. Now, that's not exactly the end. We still have some bells and whistles because there's some kinds of motion we haven't talked about yet. We've gotten a little bit of motion out of tuning. We've gotten a little bit of motion out of the ADSR envelopes. But there's one other big kind of motion that we haven't talked about yet, and that is with our LFO. And this isn't one of, like, the standard four sections, but it would be criminal for me not to talk about it right now. So let's go to one more video on this section and talk about the LFO. 16. The LFO: Okay, so maybe you've seen LFO before on a synthesizer. It's true that most synthesizers have an LFO, not all, but probably most. What an LFO is, is it a way to create some motion on your Synth, for sure. And it does it in a pretty weird way, okay? So an LFO is technically it's another oscillator, okay? It's weird. It's another oscillator. It stands for low frequency oscillator, okay? So it's an oscillator. It's another sound making thing, but it's very low. It's way too low for us to hear. It's under 20 hertz, usually. Um, so you can see this one is 0.9 hertz, right? And it goes up to 17 hertz. Humans can't really hear much under 20 hertz. So you can't hear this. But what we can do is we can use it to control other things. So remember what oscillators do. We give them a shape like a sine wave or a triangle or a square wave or noise. And they oscilate Like a sine wave goes like this forever, right? So instead of listening to that, what we can do is we can assign that and say, instead of hearing you, I want you to control that knob. And now suddenly that knob is going to go Mmmmmm in the same way. That's what a low frequency oscillator does. You're just going to map that oscillation to a knob. That's it. Bees kick, right? So here's how we do it. So let's turn our oscillator on There it is. Now let's go to what we want. Let's let's go to our amplifier and our volume. This will make a really obvious one. Okay? So now we're going to go down to level and LFO. There it is and say all of it. It's going to crank it up to one. That means 100%, basically. So now I can control the speed over here. Now, this is something you'll find a lot of the time. The speed can either be in Hertz or this, which will mean divisions of the beat. So if I say division of the beat, I can see quarter note, eighth note, 16th note. Let's go back to quarter note. Okay? Now we're going to hear this pulse on a quarter note. Right? Nausea. I can speed it up. Neat. And I can apply this to whatever I want, including many things. Like, let's also apply it to panning. If you're wearing headphones, that might be a little nauseating. Let's apply it to our frequency or our filter. So that's what the LFO does. I when you look at an LFO, you really have two controls. You have the rate and the amount. We only see the rate in this particular Synth, and the amount is kind of hidden, and I'll show you where that is in a second. So the rate is the speed, okay? The amount, let's go back here is this. One means all of it. So if I scale this back, I can do it more tastefully, right? You don't have to use all of it all the time. So if I say I want an LFO on the volume, so that the volume goes, wow, wow, wow, wow, w, w, w. But I say I only want a little bit of it. Then it's going to do that speed, but not like all the way. So I was just going to go Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, right? It's not going to be like, Woop, bop, bop. Like, it's going to just be more subtle than that. So there are very subtle ways you can use an LFO. Let's look at it on the monotrod because there is an LFO here. Up here, so here it says rate and INT. That's fun. Is my rate. I have some control here. Go fast, slow. I kind of this one shot mode. So it's just going down. Wow. Yeah. Shepherd tone thing. That's awesome. I kind of dig it. Alright, so that's all. Oh. 17. Question 1: Thick or thin?: Okay, so we know the basics of how sound design tools work now, right? We know our filters, we know our oscillators, we know all that stuff. Now we need to start asking the artistic questions, okay? So this is how I like to start. I like to start by asking four questions, okay? And the four questions are thick or thin, higher, low, shorter, long, and motion or stillness. Okay? So in the next four videos, I'm going to go through those four questions one at a time, okay? So you don't have to write them all down. I know we just he them really fast. So just relax. We're going to go through them one by one. So let's start with thick or thin. So here's what I mean by asking those questions. We're going to say, do we want a sound that's thick or do we want a sound that's thin? Okay? Now, I know that's a gradient, right? There's not we don't just want a sound that's thicker. And we think it's a little thick. It's a little thin. You know, I thick is here and thin is here, we want it somewhere on there. So we know now how to make it thicker or thinner. That's primarily going to be in our waveforms, okay? So the thickness of our sound, the thickness of our sound is primarily going to be in the waveform that we choose. So if we go to a single sine wave, very thin sound. If we go to two square waves, maybe separated by a little detune, we have thicker sound, right? Much thicker sound. So thick or thin really depends on our waveform. Let's see if we can make an even thicker sound. Let's separate it by an octave. Two waveforms separated by an octave. Let's do two different waveforms. Sawtooth and square. I'm going to play one note. That's a relatively thick sound. Now, I'm playing two notes. But I could just do that here by adding, like, a fifth, seven semitones at the interval of a fifth. Now I'm playing one note on the keyboard. So I'm making a nice thick sound, okay? If I want a thin sound, I'm going to peel some of that back. Maybe go down to one waveform. Already, way thinner sound. So as a starting point, ask yourself the question, do we want a thick sound or a thin sound and start that process by choosing waveforms that are going to get you in or using the oscillator section to get you in the ballpark of what you want. Still more we can do in the filters and amplifier section to make it thicker or thinner. But the majority of it, the bulk of it is going to be in our oscillator section. So start in the oscillator section and decide thick or thin. 18. Question 2: High or low?: Okay. Question two, high or low. Now, I'm not talking about pitch here. Pitch is easy. We play a high note. We play a low note. Here's a high note. Here's a low note. All right. That's easy. We're talking about the sound here, the quality of the sound. So let's actually play the same note, and let's make sure we play the same note. So let me stop myself from reaching over. Let's just play a C four. And let's do that and that and then we'll just loop that Lovely. Okay, hopefully, it doesn't drive us too mad. Okay, so let's go back to our kind of thicker sound here. Let's turn it down just a little bit so we don't go totally crazy. I'm going to stop it for a second because I'm going to talk for a minute. Right, filters. So high or low. What we're thinking about really here is the behavior of the sound. Is it high like a high frequency sound or a low frequency sound? We can turn this sound, even though it's only it's a note that's right in the middle. It's actually two notes because we have a second note happening here. But we can adjust it using filters, okay? So this question of high or low sounding note really lives in our filter settings. So let's adjust it a little bit. So right now we've got a pretty it's got some buzz to it. It's a pretty high sounding note. Let's do a little bit to it here. Okay? Now there's not a lot of high frequency, right? So now it's kind of lost that highness, which is the buzzy stuff, right? If we want to get more high stuff, if we want to get a lot of it, let's add some resonance, right? Now, we've got a lot of it. So now there's that high stuff, but it's got a little bite to it. But maybe we don't want that. Maybe we want this to really sit as kind of a lower feeling thing, a little muffled. So it's still the same note. We're not changing the note at all, but now we've got, like, a muffled, kind of not very many high frequencies in there. We're really focusing on the lower frequencies of the note. Right? And that's kind of a nice sound, actually. I rather like. Now I can take it a step further, and I could go down to this oscillator, which is the out of tune one, which is not out of tune, the added note, right? This is the seven semitones up one. Could actually take the volume of that one down. See, now we're getting that fifth, that extra note that's in there. It's actually really quiet. Let me turn it up. So now the fifth is really quiet. And the main note we're hearing that C, it's giving us a little a bell sound, right? It's really nice. So, again, we're getting that by focusing on the lower frequencies of the note, okay? So that's the second question that I like to ask that high or low. And again, we're talking about frequencies of the note, not the note itself. It's a little confusing, but this is just how I like to frame, what I'm doing when I'm starting to design a sound for one of my tracks. Alright, let's move on to the next thing. 19. Question 3: Short or long?: Okay. Third question, short or long. Okay? Now, this is going to be take a guess. What are we going to talk about here? This is one of our things that we learned in the previous section to shape the sound. If you said envelopes, you get a gold star. This is me putting a little gold star on you. Um, so short or long. So particularly here, we're going to go to our amplifier and look for our amplitude envelopes, okay? So amplitude envelope. So do we want a short or a long sound? Let's go back to this thing that we've been working on here. This a bell like sound? So right now we've got a pretty long sound. It's going all the way to the next note. If we really wanted this to sound like a bell, maybe we'd have it decay a little bit more. So here we are in our amplifier, here's our envelope. Let's make it a linear envelope. So right now it's exponential. Most envelopes. If you're in Ableton, it'll look kind of like this, this exponential one. If you're in any other software, most envelopes are going to look like this. So I'm going to switch over to looking like this. I like this. It's just a little bit easier to visualize anyway. Okay. Mm. See, the problem here is I don't really know what I want. So let's think about what we want here. Do we want a Do we want a short song or a short sound or a long sound? I do kind of like it as a long sound that it is now, but let's make a short sound just to do something different. So if I want a short sound, the shortest thing I can do is basically gonna be this, right? I can make it a little bit longer by stretching this out. Okay. That's cool. But we've lost the bell sound of it. So we could pull it out. If we wanted a really long kind of a pad sound, we would do this. We would maybe extend the attack. So it softens in a little bit. On the decay, which we won't really hear because we're itting another note right away. But if we really want like a percussive sound, I o. Let's do that. Let's stick with that. That's kind of fun. But in order to really get the next thing where we're going to add motion to the sound, we really kind of want a longer sound. So let's make it long so that we can put some motion into it. So let's leave it right there for now. So, short or long sound, you're going to craft that with an amplitude envelope. Mm. 20. Question 4: Motion or Stillness?: Okay, the last of my big four questions is motion or stillness. So right now, we have a sound that is very still. And what I mean by that is when it's sustaining, it's just kind of going, Mm, it's not really there's nothing inside of it, and that's fine. It can be a still sound. Sometimes that's all we want. It's just a sound that just hits. So let's actually emphasize this a little bit more by making it a single note. So right now we have two notes per loop. Now we have one. Okay. Okay, so I'm just going to double the length of it to emphasize this. So while it's sustaining here, it's really not doing anything. It's just Okay. So there's no motion inside of it. That can be okay, depending on what you're doing. But let's add some motion inside that sound. If we want motion into it, the main tool we're going to reach for is our LFO. Now, there's a few different tools we could reach for. LFO, we could detune it a little bit. This is going to add some motion. But that might not be the kind that we want. LFO is just generally going to be the easiest. So let's turn on an LFO. Let's set it to set to be pretty slow, like a half note. And then let's put it on the amplitude or the amplifier on the volume. So we're going to go to volume level modulation. LFO one, turn that up just slowly until it gets to a point where we like the way it sounds. So let's listen. It's all we need. Right? Let's speed it up a little bit. So let's go back over to our rate. Here we go. A little quarter note. Just a little bit emotion. You know, it's only, like, what is that, 35% of that LFO in there. It's nice. Subtle. Just give it a little bit of motion. You know, you don't even need that much. Now it's barely in there, you know? We could. Let's take this out. And if you just saw what I did, you can go negative here. It's just going to make it go down when I I go positive, it's going to go up and then down and up and down and up and down. If you go negative, it's going to go down and up and down and up. You're not really going to hear that in this case. Let's do it with our filter, right? We can create a little bit of motion this way, too. Let's go to our frequency. So that's this knob. It's going to move this up and down slightly. Of course, we're not going to see it, move the knob like this, but that's what it's doing. About that, you know, it's just giving us a little more of that high end just to touch. You know, we don't need all that much. Maybe resonance is what we want. That's over here, resonance modulation. It's kind of a fun sound. What if that was going really fast? I kind of like that, but now we've got too much of it. Let's pull it back. So now we've got a very fast moving motion, but a very small amount of it. I rather like that sound. Maybe even a hair less. Right? There's some really nice motion in there. Maybe I'll even come back and add a little bit of motion into the level. Just to give us another layer of motion, too. Okay, there. So now we've crafted just by going through those four questions, which again, are thick or thin, higher, low, short or long motion or stillness. By going through those four questions, we've sort of begun the process of crafting a sound, and we've ended up with something relatively nice that we can use. I'm pretty happy with this sound. So from here, we could save it with this little button here, depending on what software you're in and give it a colorful name. Let's call it bumpy bell thing. Sure. And there you go. 21. The basic layout: Alright. I'm over in Logic now, and I've got pulled up here, Logic's retrosynth. So this is an analog emulation synth and it should be really familiar to us. I've got it set here to its just its default state. I don't know why it still says alien lead. I think I pulled up that one and then went to recall default. So this is what the default is? Look a nice little punchy lead. So, I clicked on the analog tab here, and we can see all of our Syth parameters right here. So, I'm going to give you a little pop quiz, okay? Here's what I want you to do. I'm going to ask you a few questions. I want you to pause the video and try to answer these and then go to the next video, and I'm gonna walk you through all the answers, okay? So, here are my questions. Number one, how many oscillators does this Syth have? Okay? Think about it. How many filters? Question two, how many filters does this Syth have? Question three, how many LFOs does this Syth have? Okay, then question four would probably be the hardest one, okay? Remember when we looked at filters earlier, we made that little like, if this is our filter, we made that little bump like that, made a little laser gun sound. Where would we find that in this synthesizer? Okay, you got to remember what it's called and then how to turn it up or down, how to add it in. See if you can find those four things, and then we'll go to the next video and walk through it, okay? Good luck. But 22. Find the basic elements: Okay, here's the answers. First, how many oscillators does this have? It has two. We can tell because these two big knobs right here are usually a pretty good indication of it. But basically, what we have here is two rows of oscillators. But the best cue is right here, it says mix oscillator one and oscillator two. So this is asking you to balance between the two oscillators. That's a little bit different than the way we did it in the last Synth, but it's still the same basic principle. How much of each oscillator do you want to hear? Turn one up, turn one down. Okay, how many filters do we have? Well, this giant filter here is clearly one. So there's a filter. And here's a filter envelope, but that's not a filter. That's an envelope. So there is just one filter, at least what's on the screen right now. There might be more hidden in these tabs, but right now, there's just one filter. How many LFOs are there? There's really just one. There's vibrato over here, which is different than an LFO. It's really similar, but it's different. So LFO, technically, just one. And then the last thing, where do you find that thing? That's that little bump to give it that little laser gun sound? That is called the resonance, and you're going to find that in your filter, and you're going to find that right next to the cutoff. Remember, cut off and resonance are always right next to each other, not always, usually right next to each other. So here's our cut off of our filter. If we move that around, that's going to change where our filter starts to slope down, and right next to it, Res resonance. There's that little bump given that laser gun sound. So it's right there, right next to our filter. Cool. Alright. So, um, that was just my little way to show you that there's a lot of the same stuff. It's almost all the same stuff. Like I said before, every Synth has its own little bells and whistles and the way that it lays things out. But at the core of it, it's a lot of the same stuff. So, let's walk through this one and just make a sound from scratch. Here we go. 23. Making a quick lead in Logic: Okay, what should we make? Should we make, like an ambient thing, like a lead, bass? Let's make, like, a lead since we're already kind of in that ballpark. So here's gonna play a note on my keyboard. Okay, so this is a little bit different than the way we selected waveforms before. What we have here is sort of an evolving waveform. This is kind of fun. So we have here, we can select noise. Okay. And then this one is still on a pitch. But this one is noise. Let's go all the way up to oscillator one. Okay, noise. And we can switch it to sawtooth, and we can switch it to square. Okay? Now, from here to here, we can go a percentage. And what is that doing? That is giving us something called a pulse width. You can do is see the square graph here and then see this. See that middle line in the square. We can move that middle line right and left to make it asymmetrical, basically. And that will change the sound of it. And that creates what's called a pulse width waveform. Like, the width is different, right? And that slightly changes the sound. Let's hear it. Right? So that's what it's letting you do here. It's just a different waveform, but you can kind of set that pulse width in this particular synthesizer, they're letting you do that. Okay, and we can do that on both synths. So we want, like, kind of a biting lead. So let's use that pulse width. Let's get somewhere around there. And then if we combine that with maybe a saw tooth, go about 50, 50. I'm getting harpsichord. I thought maybe There we go. So negative 12 semitones is gonna add an octave. Okay, that's not bad. So we could do a little more tuning with it, pull it out of tune from each other just a little bit. Oh, it hurts my brain. But just a little bit gives it that kind of phase effect. Shape modulation is gonna let us modulate the shape using LFOs or our filter envelopes, which we haven't set up yet. Come back to that. Vibrato is already cooking under there. That's just gonna give us a little bit of LFO like pulse. Not really hearing it. Don't I need to turn it on. Oh, it's set to the mod wheel. Okay, so I'm not using the mod wheel, so it's not gonna matter right now. Let's leave that alone for now. Okay, let's move over to our filter. So everything's going over to the filter. Um, so let's use that resonance to get a little more bite on this. There. Could change our filter type here. Put an LFO, put our LFO on it. So our LFO is already going here. You can see it cruising right there. So we could just grab it and apply it here. Very small amount. Okay. Now let's use this filter FM. This is a different kind of envelope. Oh so that's a rather nice sound. It's it's still very organ like. We can add they have an effect here. Let's add chorus or flanger. We can turn it on. Mix it in. Okay? It doesn't have as much bite as I wish it had, so I'm going to go back to my waveforms and see if I can just really three. Get in there. That's not bad. I kind of like that. That's a good read. Sorry. Okay, so I've got a sawtooth and a square. I could crank up that pulse wave. Oh, I like that even better. Great. So I've got something pretty decent here. Glide is what's going sometimes this is called portmanteau. This is gonna let us move between notes automatically. I generally don't like this on for Leads. I actually don't like this on for anything, but if you do want to have it on leads is probably a good thing to have it on. Let's crank up the time. Now you'll really hear it. So it's like gliding to each note. I don't like that sound really at all. We could customize our filter envelopes and our amplitude envelopes and make a sound if we wanted and customize our sound right there if we wanted to. But I'm pretty happy with what we have right now. I think it's pretty cool. 24. Sound design "recipie books": Okay, last thing, I just want to point out that I made a series of classes called Sound Design Recipe Books a few years ago, and they're still up. They're probably up on this website that you're on now. These are classes where I asked a bunch of sound designers that I know well to show me some of their favorite tricks and just make stuff and walk me through how they did it. Like, what's the recipe? Like, make me your favorite pad sound from scratch and show me how you did it and film it. Uh, so there's all these recipe books for, like, pads and leads and kicks and snares and all of this stuff. So look for those. They're really cool. I think there's four different classes called sound design recipe books. They turned out really great. And if you're just looking for, like, how do I make a really great bass sound? That's what you want. That just walks you through how to make specific sounds. And they're great for a starting point. You know, make the one that they show you in the class and then, you know, tweak yours from there to make it your own. 25. What comes next?: Alright, we've reached the end. Thank you so much for being here. I hope we covered everything in 90 minutes. I won't really know till I get done editing. And then I might just have to put everything in fast forward. So if I'm talking really fast right now, it's because I'm trying to get us under the 90 minute bar to live up to my promise of covering all this in 90 minutes, which is a big task. So if you want to know more, like I said, check out those people, check out those recipe books. I also have a bunch of sound design classes that are just big sound design classes, one really huge one that goes in way more detail. I would encourage that. Also, the most important thing to learning how to do any of this stuff is just make stuff. Keep making stuff all the time. The more stuff you make, the better it will get, always. So just keep making stuff. Practice makes perfect. Alright, one more thing for you, and then we're out. 26. Bonus Lecture: Hey, everyone. I want to learn more about what I'm up to. You can sign up for my email list here. And if you do that, I'll let you know about when new courses are released and when I make additions or changes to courses you're already enrolled in. Also, check out on this site. I post a lot of stuff there, and I check into it every day. So please come hang out with me in one of those two places or both, and we'll see you there.