Sound Design: Synthesis for Beginners

1. Intro: Synthesis isn't just important for sound designers, it's important for all musicians, composers, and producers. The reason is, is because when you create your own sound, when you synthesize, you create something that no one's ever made before, you are making a distinct sound. Something that you can put into music and into your tracks. Something completely unique. And no one will ever be able to replicate it again. Now we'll never know the exact parameters with which you made it. So there will never again be a song that completely captures the unique sound that you've made. This is incredibly important. This is the way that you get noticed. This is the way that people figure out how you sound. So many people are using existing samples, or they're creating their own music from existing packs, music packs and plug-ins, which is all good. Of course it's fine to make music from sounds that already exist. But if you want to sound truly unique, truly special, and unlike anybody else, you're going to need to make your own sounds, it's important for musicians, composers, producers to make their own sounds, to get their own voice. But it's important for sound designers because you're responsible for all of the sounds and you're on your project. And there are certain sounds that you're going to just have to make because it's going to be unique to your project and no existing sound is going to sit it. Hi, I'm Jordan. I am a composer and a producer of music. And today we are going to look at one of the most important components of sound design, which has synthesising your own sound. So let's get started. Jump along, beat up your door. Let's, let's make some sounds. 2. Synthesizing with Serum: Today we are going to be using the serum plug-in in, Ableton. I love it. You can use any synthesizer you want, really. I'm just going to be using Sarah. And because I find that it's just, it's so visual. And you can see the graphs really easily and move them. You can move the graphs themselves and not have to worry about the little dials. I hate saying a graph and being forced to move the dial when I could just grab a corner of the graft and drag it. You don't have to use Sara. If you do want to use serum, you can get it through splice. They have a rent to own programs so that you pay I think it's $10 a month and it costs a couple $100 in total. So that at the end of having paid $10 a month, once you've paid what the product is valued at, the payments stop and it becomes yours, but you can stop anytime. I'm not endorsed by splice at all. It's just the synthesized that I love to use because it's very easy and it has a lot of functionality to it that other synthesisers don't have, that you need other plug-ins to supplement. And you'll see what I mean when I'm in splice. If you've used a synthesized it before, you'll see that there are some components that are not super typical of synthesisers to have built-in. If you've never used a synthesized before, That's cool. What is important when it comes to synthesising sounds is that you never stop experimenting with the parameters. We are not going to get into literally every single dial in serum or every single effect or thing that you could change or alter. And there's no need for me to, because all you need is the building blocks of basic sound creation. And from there, you are going to create all of your own sounds by just experimenting, by just turning dials and moving knobs and seeing what the effects is. What difference did it make on the sound? And most importantly, digital like it did when you made that change, was that a change that you wanted to make? If not, you move it back. If Sagar, Great, Keep going. We're going to just make some unique sounds. I'm going to teach you the basic parameters of serum, and then we're going to apply it to some midi samples and hopefully create a result That sounds great. Okay, So boot up your door. I'm using Ableton bit up a synthesizer. I'm missing serum, but use your own if you want to, if you want to use serum purely for this class. The three-day trial, totally free. Jump on splices website, get their app, get into their rent to earn and grab serum, download it. It's yours for three days at no cost. Just cancel it, use it for their class. Have a little bit of fun. Cancel it because nothing. So if that's what you wanna do, then do it. All right, let's get going. 3. Building a New Sound: So what I've done is I have started, I have put a single middle C note in Ableton and put it in repaid so that we can play with sound as much as we want and never have to worry about it. Okay, so I've added the serum plug-in. We can get started. I know that this looks really intimidating. So I will go through the, the three most basic things that if you can do it, It's most of music, it's most of synthesis. So let's start over here on the first oscillator. Now, what we have here by default is this ramp sound wave, wave form. This is what we have automatically and it sounds like this charming sound. We have this, we have this re-form automatically, but we can just switch it by pressing the cross arrows. Oh, some weird ones immediately. Goodness, Let's some basic ones. Who, nice, nice. Very nice. Now, what we have here is just a nice traditional sinewave. Back to original. Now, each of these is going to sound different, right? Based on how high and how low it is and how it moves. So it sounds like this. I'll change it. Serum has a lot, a lot of weirdly named waves that you can play with anyway. So you can really go crazy with that. Here we're nice and traditional. So we have this sine wave here and sounds like this. Sounds pretty good. But not quite what I want. I want to go back to that nice, harsh one from earlier. Now, the more you play with it, the better you'll look at this. You just have so many. You're, you're in the business of coming up with really unique sounds. No one else has thought of before. That's what you want. You're not going to find out unless you play with all of these variously shaped sound waves, waveforms, and figure out the sound that sounds best for you. So we're back where we started. The first thing we're gonna look at is a unison. So right here, one unison, one sound. The more of these we add, the more sounds we add together. Now, people may automatically want to add quite a lot because it does sound really cool. But you want to find the right amount that works for you, and the right amount that doesn't literally crash your computer. Okay, so we're going to detune it and we're going to hear a nice change to the sound as we do that, you want to try to find where the detuning sets, where it's sounds great. And then doesn't get pushed over the edge. Starts to sound terrible. It sounds nice. Okay, so with the sounds, we've made a nice little sound here. Once we've done that, the most important thing we can do to that sound is filter it. So I automatically have it on a low-pass filter, which is just cutting off the top end and making it sound like this. Then all I need to do is just play with the law, play with the cut-off. So this is how it started. So I love cutting off the top end when I work with sounds, but there are a lot more options and just doing that all the way down to silence. We can get a high pass filter and Gary, completely the opposite to that. Now we're cutting off the low end. I'm a big fan of a line. As you play with this, you can completely change the quality of the sound. The other way is quite interesting. I often put this one, I'm sorry, between picking your waveform, your unison, detuning it. That's a pretty great start. And then putting on a filter, you've got a sound that you can work with. So that's a great start. 4. Adding Parametres: Alright, so we have S and we made this, we achieved it. It's our own. It's no one else's. We made it by choosing our waveform, changing the unison. So how many sounds there are working together? And we added a filter, and in this case a low-pass filter. Notice that this waveform, you can just change that and it would immediately change the sound completely. So you're never, ever locked in the box. When you're creating these play around with all the dials, It would take a long time to explain the technicality about what they all are and what they all do. But, but play around with them and get different sounds out of them. What you might want to do is add the second oscillator and have the sounds work in conjunction with each other. Notice how, even though it was weird, it added a lot of texts, Jain and deepness when we added a second oscillator on top of the first. So we would want a sound that's a little bit more complimentary. So I would probably change the way. Just teaching lessons, quadrants. We go. We have a richer sound, just formatting a second estimator. Okay, so what we're going to work on now is down here, we're going to work how the sound, as it's being played. As you may know, may or may not know the attack. So how long does it take the sound to get started? Basically, how, how long does it until it ramps up to its full level, to its full volume, to its full gain. The great thing about working with Sarah is look, you can just manually play with this. You could use the dials down here. But if I don't want to, I didn't have to. So I can change the attack and then it will affect the note and how long it takes to get to full game. Pretty good. And then the decay basically, the decay is how long it's going to hold it before it starts to release. Now look, look at this. Sorry, how long do I want it to hold at the velocity that I sat? How fast do I want it to go down? You can change the shape manually. You can move around. Now what you might want to do is just have a really quick sound so you can just like rain at Olin. Yep. There we go. That could be useful. That could be beneficial, especially if you're doing like a potty bait. Doing a lot of those, it's going to be nice, fun to dance, to making some shapes that mean. Okay, so now we come over here. Here we have the LFO. So basically, how do we want how do we want different things to act? So what I like to do is I like to put the LFO on the filter, sawdust, drag it over here. I'm causing the filter to act differently based on the shape that I've created here. So this triangle is how it, how it sits automatically. But check this out. This is a control panel for how I want anything. I want to act. Pretty darn fun. So that's the most important part. Applying, creating your way for deciding what kind of oscillation you want. Adding a filter to it, then messing with the attack, decay, sustain, and creating any parameters that you want is the most important parts of making sounds for your music. 5. Turning Sound into Song: Hi guys. So here we have a car, some midi samples. What kind of melody here? Looks quite nice. Then we here we have a harmony sample which reflects the melody pretty nicely. And then we've got some drums up here. So we're going to synthesize our own sounds to go with each of those. Let's whip up serum. So we have our, OH, that's an insanely fast tempo. I don't know about you, but that feels like it should be slower. So let's create a sound that sounds like a melody using what we've just saw we've done so far. I'm going to change the waveform into something that feels nicer to me. Let's put this thing on a loop. It's gotta be on offensive, but it needs to stand out from the harmony so it can't be too soft and wishy-washy. We also kinda too much in unison because a melody, a melody is a leader, right? It's a leader of a song. It's telling me rest of the cell what to do. Sorry, the copy too many voices. Calling the shots. These voices should be pretty in line. We deepen our voice. My favorite filter on there can't really filter off too much. It's the melody needs to cut there. Have, you can have a slight buildup to the filter. I mean, I kinda like a it's like it's almost like a jump in there. No, I don't think I want to mess with that. Let's say that we want to add any effects to it. Alright, let's see how we can do the harmony to match with that. Goodness. Alright, so the melody has to take charge. So the harmony has the luxury of being more in the background and easier to filter out. Wholesale more voices. This one might work for a slow ramp up. Oh, look, we can change the rate down here. So I go down two bars. Takes longer to get there. Maybe we want some attack this time. Alright, That's not too bad. Alright, so how do they sound together with the drum? Let's say we didn't need that attack after all. Oh, right before they had a gas. Let's hear what the drum coming in. 6. Keep Experimenting: We did it, we synthesized sound. So this is just the beginning. What we did was we didn't, we didn't do everything that we could have done. We didn't play with every dial, we didn't push every metric. We didn't use every waveform. We just played with a few and we made sounds as Santa cool off the cuff. The most important thing to remember is the sounds that you make within an hour. Like we just did. We just spent half an hour doing it. The sounds that you make within half an hour, just the absolute fraction of the possibility of the sounds that you're gonna be able to make after several hours. And then over days, over weeks or months. If you don't have a synthesized, I recommend not canceling your serum trial and just keep going with it unless the $10 a month is too much of a commitment. Totally understand if it is, there are plenty of free ones. The only difference between serum and something that's free is how easy to use It is. How, how much is included in this one plugin versus several plugins. You could get the same functionality in serum in a free one, I'm sure, or several free ones put together. You may find that it's not as easy to change something or that something's just not so user-friendly like you can't change the shape. You need to move the dial. That's a very small complaint. If it means having a little bit less efficient, but it's free, the preferred that total eco. Otherwise, I'm going to keep using Sarah. I find it really fun. So keep making sounds. And most of all, never feel completely satisfied with the sound that you've made. Keep trying more, keep making new sounds and keep just going and trying. The only regrets I've ever had is stopping too early. It's happened several times, our finished track and be completely satisfied, then be sleepless that night because oh my God, there's a parameter I could have tried and it would possibly made a huge difference. It would have possibly been amazing. I've never be too quick to export the track. Isn't that the most timeless advice you've ever heard? Don't export to quickly. Don't experiment with like dirt. Stop experimenting to quickly. Keep trying. You're gonna make some incredible sounds. And then the next challenge is going to be adding effects. So those sounds, so that they're even more unique. Adding very crazy noises and sounds to make your unique sounds that you've created. Even more unique, even more special. So keep experiments and keep playing. If you want to know how to apply the sounds that you've made musically. Check out my other classes. I've got a music theory class. If you're confused about notes and chords and keys, all of that crazy music stuff. And you want to know more, I have a class on that. And then if it comes down to just literally putting together a melody putting together how many? I've got several on that. Check it out right here on Skillshare. Thank you. I'll see you at the next one.