Sound Synthesis

1. 00 PromoVideo: Greetings, Film anti own. Here. I've been invited by the pro audio files to put together a series of tutorials on sound synthesis. Videos are geared towards musicians, producers, engineers looking to develop or solidify an understanding of how sound is synthesized by software and hardware instruments. Using some custom applications included with the course, we'll explore the fundamentals of sound and the building blocks of common synthesis methods and techniques. These apps are intended to visualize various waveforms, demonstrate phase and other sound interactions. Will look in depth at 12 popular software since that comes stocked with Logic Pro, Ableton Live in Pro Tools. These range from fairly simple monophonic analog emulators, FM, and subtractive sense, to more complicated component modeling and hybrid instruments. Of course includes 24 tutorial videos with over 4 h of material, 120 custom presets for the instruments covered. Three custom analysis and visualization applications. Currently Mac only, analogic session with original track using the instruments covered. Whether you're a producer, engineer, musician are just starting to work with synthesisers, were just want to fill in some of those annoying gaps in your knowledge. This course will give you the tools necessary to get the sounds out of your head and discover a whole new world of sonic possibilities. Is it the pro audio files.com for details and download or contact me at music at Philip mandy.com. Thanks. 2. 01 Overview: Welcome to sound synthesis with film anti-codon. That's me. I want to talk about a few of the goals I have in mind for this course and give you an idea of what's in store. So firstly, I hope the course will help you to develop and or solidify a deep understanding of basic sound parameters and interaction concepts the way sound works with itself. Develop an understanding of the basic parameters used in both software and hardware synthesis, synthesisers. There's a lot of crossover there. Developed the ability to manipulate and adjust existing presets to suit your own sonic needs. Develop the ability to create sounds from scratch. Develop the ability to get the sounds out of your head. And perhaps more importantly, give you the tools to explore and discover sounds. You've yet to even imagine. We're gonna be using three main does in these tutorials, Logic Pro, Ableton Live, and Pro Tools with an emphasis on Logic Pro, since there's so many great stock plug-ins that come with that particular door. You don't necessarily need to have any of these Dawes to go through the course and get something out of it. But it certainly would help to follow along. Especially having Logic Pro. We'll look at a variety of instruments, from simple monophonic to multi-faceted hybrid sense, including ESM, which is monophonic, ESD, ESP, and the other ones listed here. Ableton Live will look at a couple of instruments called analog and tension. Analog emulation synth and a component or physical modeling synth. And in Pro Tools will have a look at vacuum, which is another analog emulation synth. So the ESM would be the first one we take a look at in logic. And this is a monophonic synth, great for bass sounds. As we go through these different plugs, they'll get more and more complicated with more and more modulation possibilities, more sound sources involved. The ES1 is a tremendous analog emulation since the possibilities of some very juicy sounds with this VS2 subtractive synth and FM and vector techniques are used. Efm one, a great FM synth. That although it looks simpler than some of the other ones, it's actually quite rich. The possibilities are incredible. Retrosynthesis a several of the techniques in many of the other sense. Sculpture is a physical modeling or component modeling sense. Alchemy. We'll have a look at alchemy, although I won't get into adjusting the parameters, we will have a look at browser. Comes with 300 or so incredible presets. It's a very deep plug-in worthy of its own set of tutorials which I will put together in the future. Tension is the component or physical modeling sinth in Ableton Live similar to sculpture in Logic Pro. We'll have a look at that. Analog in Ableton is a analog emulation synth. Here's a look at vacuum in Pro Tools, also another analog emulation synth. We'll talk about in the next couple of videos that major techniques used in synthesis and how they are used to create sound. And some of those include subtractive synthesis, additive and spectral synthesis and resynthesis. Wave table synthesis, FM or frequency modulation, amplitude and ring modulation, AM component or physical modeling synthesis, granular synthesis, phase distortion, synthesis, sample-based synthesis, vocoders, hybrid approaches. We'll talk about digital versus analog versus hybrid approaches. And lastly, modular and semi modular. Since the analog world, the first couple of videos I'll be using some custom applications. I've written in Max MSP as educational devices. I do include these as part of part of the tutorials. So you're free to use them if you like. It's basically freeware. It's more or less for visualization and for analyzing sound. As opposed to generating sound of the instruments will look at do much better job at that. We'll look at also the basics of sound and audio, which these are some things that a lot of people sort of note they are. And many, many people know exactly what they are, but I hope to fill in some gaps in your knowledge, if you have any, or to sort of open up some new ideas if you haven't heard of these concepts before. So frequency, amplitude, wavelength, period, these are all parts of the sound waves and wave forms that you should be aware of if you seriously want to get into synthesis. Some of the common parameters using sound generation and synthesisers are found in all synthesisers. Hardware or software base. You're going to see, start to see the same terms over and over again. Waveforms, oscillators, noise, various noise generators, filter types and parameters, modulation methods, envelopes and LFOs, and global controls. If you feel like the material in the beginning videos is to basic, feel free to skip ahead. But I highly suggest you at least skim through the first few videos to make sure you truly understand the basics and the terminology to be used throughout the course. For the beginner, this course should open up a whole new world of possibilities for the more experienced person. I hope the course fills in some of those annoying gaps in your knowledge once and for all. So let's make some noise. 3. 02 GettingStarted: So let's talk about a few of the prerequisites. Basic understanding of digital audio workstations. I'll be using mainly Logic Pro, but we'll also explore a few instruments enabled to live in Pro Tools. You don't necessarily need to have any of these programs as the concepts discussed, transcend any particular platform or die. But it wouldn't be helpful to follow along, especially with the logic instruments. Need a basic understanding of midi controllers and midi messages. I'll give a brief recap of midi in this video. It's advisable to have some sort of midi controller work with. And lastly, you'll need a set of open ears ready to explore, discover, and create new sounds. Downloads included with this course include a set of 112 custom presets with the instruments will be discussing. There's a preset notes file included in that same folder that'll tell you how to install those presets. I'll include a logic session and a bounce file for track created with custom settings of the sense that were used. Costume utility applications for generating, visualizing and analyzing sound. Refer to the read me file for an installation instructions. The use of these apps is purely optional. You can always just follow along with me in the video and get the same information from it. Getting too many basics, you'll need to connect a midi controller. You can your computer either using USB or midi den, based on your particular interface. It should have at least a pitch bend wheel and a mod wheel and a keyboard, and preferably a few Continuous Controller knobs are sliders. So when you press a key on my midi keyboard, at least three messages are being sent. Midi note number, typically a range of zero to 127, where 60 is middle C, also called S3. Some keyboards have the option of setting it to S4, s3, standard velocity. That is an indication of how hard you've pressed the key. Also range zero to 127. This is not the same as volume. Volume. You can have a velocity of 127, but if he turned down the volume, it'll still sound soft. So volume is it continuous controller? A different message? And then channel number, typically one through 16, you can send messages or receive messages on any particular channel or all channels. The mid ECC message or continuous controller message also typically has a range of zero to 127. So this can be a knob or a slider on a controller. And it can, it can be mapped to pretty much any parameter in a DAW. Some CC numbers are standards such as the mod wheel, which is controller number one and volume, which is controller number seven. But often you can assign continuous controllers to controls on the keyboard. Or if you're working in software, you can map any controller to any other parameter. You will also get channel numbers. So again, three messages, continuous controller number, value and channel number. Midi pitch bend is a dedicated controller that affects pitch. And this is typically used for vibrato or just, you can actually, in some cases, write melodies using the pitch bend. Most instruments have a means to control the range of what the pitch bend does. For instance, bent all the way up, can be an octave, two octaves, or any other interval. And then bent down could be the same interval or a different interval. The center position is usually no effect. Other many messages are dependent on your particular setup or device, and they might include sustain, such as a pedal or aftertouch. Aftertouch has to do with what you do to the key or how hard you press the key after it's already depressed. So certain keyboards have that capability and becomes another controller. You press the key. And then if you press a little harder, you're actually sending more information called aftertouch, which can be used to affect other parameters. Even if you don't have a midi controller at the moment, you can still access and use virtual sense. In most dogs using onscreen keyboards, not preferable, but they're there. Arpeggiator plugins which are really good for just getting a sort of a groove going based on some kind of chord. You can hold down. Maybe loops come with logic. They also come with other dogs. And these are kind of pre-written little loops that can be altered or used as is. So in the next video, we'll discuss the major synthesis techniques being used today. 4. 03 SynthMethods: Let's talk about some of the synthesis methods will be using and some of the most popular ones that are being used today. First of all, let me refer you to Logic Pro instruments Help section on synthesizer basics. You'll find it at the end of the instrument manual. Really good synopsis of all the major concepts as well as even a history of synthesizers. In this video, I'm going to provide you with concise definitions and terminology regarding these methods. For your reference. This will help you understand the approaches used in the instruments we'll be exploring later on. Subtractive synthesis, this is probably the most common technique and is often used in combination with other approaches. So the basic signal flow, and this is from the logic manual, actually looks like this. There's some sort of input midi coming in. Usually there goes through an oscillator section and which generates the sound. That's then put through a filtering process, typically either high-pass or low-pass or both, or other types of filters as well. And then to an amplifier section, which typically has some sort of envelope. And then output. Along the way, you can modulate any of the parameters in the oscillator, filter or amplifier sections. And there are some global controls, such as pitch bend or global tuning of the instrument along the way. Frequency modulation or FM synthesis. This approach uses two main oscillators, a carrier and a modulator, to produce an incredibly wide array of timbers. They are great for tight base and brassy sounds. So when we get to the EFM one in retrosynthesis, those are good examples. Component or physical modeling synthesis. This approach uses algorithms to simulate instrument sounds. And typically a string metaphors used the idea of a vibrating string. The user can specify a material, e.g. glass, metal, wood, and an environment in which the vibration occurs among many other parameters, logic, sculpture, and Ableton Live tension both use this approach. Wave table or vector synthesis. This is technique uses various single cycle waveforms arranged in a collection known as a wave table. Method is good for producing evolving textures, metallic sounds, bell-like timbres and more. The ES and retrosynthesis. This capability granular synthesis. This involves chopping up the sound in a very small pieces called grains, as short as two milliseconds long. These can then be manipulated and reorganize to create completely new sounds. Alchemy uses granular synthesis, among many other methods. Additive synthesis. This method uses the concept that any complex sound can be broken down into an array of sine waves of varying frequency, amplitude, and phase. So once a sound has been analyzed in this way, individual components can be isolated in altered independently of the others. Hence, you can change the pitch without affecting duration and vice versa. Likewise, you can create a sound from scratch by assembling a collection of sine waves. Alchemy uses this method as well. Faux coding. This method combines a synthesized source with an input signal, often a voice, to create a sort of hybrid sound by tracking the amplitude and frequencies in the incoming song, computerized voices. And obvious example, EVOC 20 in Logic uses this method, spectral synthesis. This method allows you to build a sound using sine waves as an additive synthesis plus filtered noise components. Vocoder is like the EVOC 20 share this approach as an underlying method. Alchemy has a spectral synthesis section as well. Phase distortion. This approach uses the reshaping of a wave form, degenerate variations and texture and timber. Many logic sense have this capability. This technique starts with a sample, usually recording of an instrument or a real-world sound. You can then map sounds to a keyboard and alter their playback in terms of pitch, velocity, multiple layering, looping, etc. Samplers like the EXS24 and logic sampler or simpler in Ableton and expand to in Pro Tools use this approach. Hybrid approaches, retro Synth and alchemy and several other sense use some combination of many of the techniques discussed. The bottom line is, can the instrument make the sound you hear in your head? If so, which method is used is really not the issue. Analog, semi modular, and modular synthesis. There's been a huge resurgence in analog synthesis and in particular the IRAC format. So if these things deserve a mention here, first of all, what is analog? While the word analogue in the world of audio refers to an analogous change in voltage in response to air pressure or another voltage. Without a circuit. It is a continuous smooth variation. This is in contrast to a digitized signal that is quantized based on the sample rate, e.g. in 48 K24 bit file, sound is sample 48,000 times per second. And every sample is measured at a resolution of 24 bits, which translates into over 16 million possible values. Digitizing attempts to approximate as closely as possible what the analogous signal would look like and sound like. There has been much debate over whether analog or digital synth sound better. My opinion they simply sound different. Even in the analog world, there are digital components now and the lines are blurring as we speak. The analog sound is definitely attractive and rich and you might find yourself drawn in that direction. Whether you go digital or analog, you'll find much crossover and terminology of sound synthesis, methods, parameters, etc. So if you learn one system well, learning others becomes significantly easier. There are analogs, standalone keyboards available. Dave Smith has been making them for decades. There are semi modular sense available. This is the mode mother 32 of which I own one. So this has some hard wired connections going on underneath the surface and also allows for some physical patching within the synth itself or in connection with other modules. And then there is the modular synth world. And your Iraq has really dominated that whole area quite a bit. This is a standard in terms of size, in terms of voltage that allows you to connect modules from various manufacturers together in the same system. And they can be patched together seamlessly and work with each other. You can have oscillating modules and modules, control type modules. There's basically a module to do every function within a synth that you'd have in a software synth. But they're very manufacturer of being very creative in terms of their approaches. So you can really piece together a unique system this way. The next video we'll have a look at some sound fundamentals and will finally start to hear some examples. 5. 04 SoundFundamentals: So I've written a couple of small applications here in Max MSP for the purpose of demonstrating some basic things about sound. I've included these with the course. It's not essential that you actually use them or install them. You can just follow along with me and get just as much out of it. But they are there if you want to explore their good for visualizing sound, analyzing sound, not so much for, for generating or making sound, because there's lots of instruments that do a much better job that we'll get to. But let's talk about some of the fundamental things in sound. And what's often used is the good old sine wave. Sounds like that kind of thing here to show two cycles at once. Or I can show cycles depending on what the frequency is. What we have here is a sine wave that's got a particular very specific shape to it. It's based on a trigonometry sine function. And it has a couple of things that we can see, has a certain height, that would be the amplitude and that relates to volume. It has a certain number of cycles in a given period of time that relates to pitch. It's called frequency, measured in hertz. Amplitude is measured in decibels. There's three different views here. This is the oscilloscope. This is the spectrogram view which shows frequency on the x-axis, amplitude on the y-axis. This one shows time and amplitude. Then there's sonogram view which shows frequency on the y axis and time again on the x-axis. So we can see how those things look. Pretty different ways to look at the same sound. As I increase the frequency, the number of cycles increases here and you're visually, you can see that, you can see this going up here. Now, there's also something called the period of a sine wave. I have a diagram here that kind of explains more in depth. I'm about the qualities of a sine wave. So here's amplitude and you see on the y-axis, here's time along the top. So this is 1 s of time. And there are two complete shapes of the sine wave here that makes it a 2 hz sine wave, two cycles per second. It also means that the period of that sine wave is 0.5 s. The period refers to how long does it take for one complete cycle to occur. And it's inversely related to the frequency so that if the frequency is two, the period is one-half or 1/2, 0.5 s. There's also something called the wavelength. This is the actual physical length of the wave. If we could see it in space, you can see sine waves in a room. That's how long the sine wave would be. And this is a function of the speed of sound, typically referred to as 11, 32 ft/s, divided by the frequency of whatever it is you're trying to determine. So in this case, a 2 hz sine wave would be 566 ft long. That's a very long wave. And it's also out of the range of human hearing. Are human hearing is goes down to roughly 20 hz on average. Within the range. For instance, a 60 hz wave is still 19 ft. That's quite a long wave. And when, if you ever get into acoustics or trying to treat rooms for acoustical purposes, you'll find out that parallel walls or are kinda the nemesis of an echo station because it creates standing waves where the wave bounces back onto itself. I'm not gonna get into that here. Just wanted to, I want you to be familiar with these terms. As we get into synthesis. What about harmonics? What are harmonics? We hear a lot about them. I have another little patch here in the back and you notice I like to name these little programs after myself. Why not? It's one of the benefits of programming. So this is the phyllosilicate scope. Here we have something I call forms. Notice the spelling. So here we have harmonics, is a fundamental. Second harmonic is zero amplitude, the third is down here, and so on. So in this particular view here, every other harmonic is being played when you do that. And let me just turn this up. One down. Amount of waveform. It's right now we're playing this particular waveform. You'll notice that it looks squarish. And indeed, these are all sine waves. But if you accumulate or add a bunch of sine waves together and you add them in such a way that the fundamental is at a certain amplitude. The second harmonic is zero. The third harmonic is at one-third. The amplitude of the fundamental fourth harmonic is at zero. Fifth harmonic is at one-fifth the amplitude of the fundamental. And if you keep doing that, you end up with this squarish type of wave here. This is the formula for creating a square wave out of sine waves. And it's kind of demonstrates the power of additive synthesis by adding a bunch of sine waves together, you can clearly see that you get a very different shape. Harmonics are simply this integer multiples of the fundamental frequency. Therefore, if the fundamental frequency is 100, the second harmonic would be 200. A third would be 300400500600700 and so on. It's really that simple. There are integer multiples of the fundamental pitch, the fundamental frequency. So let's hear some different formations of harmonics. And we can see here the results of those particular formulaic accumulation of sine waves. There's a square wave. Here's a sawtooth. See that here, every harmonic is present and it goes down in a proportional way in terms of amplitude. A pulse wave, all the harmonics are there and they're all the same amplitude. Here's a triangle wave, looks very different than the others and sounds almost sine, sine like, but with a little edge to it. So that's the way harmonics contribute to a sound. They add into it. They get summed and based on their frequency and relative amplitude and create new sounds. So let's go back for the time being to this other patch. I'm going to turn this one down. And again, let's look at spectrum, spectrum this out. As I said before, the sine wave has one simple frequency. If we go to a different type of wave source though, let's look at it. Sawtooth. And now notice what happened here. We have a different shape. It looks like a saw. We have the, the harmonics going down and we're also seeing that they are related to the fundamental frequency unit in a very predictable way. And we look here what happened also to the sonogram. And now we have very expanded spectrum that we didn't have before with just the sign. So there you can see what happens to the spectrum when we do add different, different waveforms become very much, much more complex. Let's look now at phase. This is one of those things like compression and mixing. It's kinda hard to wrap your head around. But once you get it, you sort of get it. I'm going to select here dual sinewaves. That's these two things are playing right now. And I'm going to turn that on. And let me pick a couple of frequencies here. Let's say 200 hz for the top one. And let's say 201 hz. Okay, so what's going on here? We have two frequencies, 200 hz and 201 hz. We really don't hear two frequencies though. They're too close together for our human minds to grasp. So what we do here is a pulsing or a tremolo type effect. It's called a beat or beating. And we're hearing it at a certain frequency. And in fact, we're hearing it at the difference between this sine wave and this side away, which is 200 minus 201. One hurt. So if you listen, that's a one beat, one time per second. If I wanted to make this, for instance, a 4 hz beat increases the 2 041-234-1234. You can kind of hear that. See it here and you can see it here. So what's causing this phenomenon is that in this case, four times per second, we're getting a complete cancellation when you sum these two waves together. And that's being reflected here. Now if they were the same frequency and they were complete opposite phase, meaning when this one is at its low point in this one is at its high point, we should get a complete cancellation. Let's try that. So I'll put this at 200. And I'll put this one at 200. And I'm going to adjust the phase, reset these starts together just the phase 2.5, which is a normalized way of looking at phase that's equivalent to 180 degree phase shift. So if we look at the way these two things line up, this is at its high point, this one is at its low point when this is at its low point and this is at its high point. So you can imagine if this was minus one and we add it to a plus one, we end up with zero. And that continues along the whole range of both of these frequencies. That in its essence is phase. Phases. It's everywhere in audio. It's, you have to know about in terms of miking. It's used as an effect, phase shifting, it's used as a synthesis technique, phase distortion. So there's a lot of uses for it. You should get a handle of it. Once you do, um, it'll be part of your toolbox. Okay, one more thing I want to talk about before we move on and that is hard sink. Turn these both effect. Let me okay, turn this up. Okay, So here we have two waveforms. They're both sawtooth waves. Right now. We're not hearing any hearts and they're just playing together. What hard Sync does is it uses one master frequency and it controls the phase of the slave frequency. So that every time it gets to the beginning of its cycle, it forces this wave to also jump to the beginning of its cycle even if it's not completed yet. So watch what happens. So you can see that this is just going about its business when it gets to the beginning of its cycle though, it's causing this wave to jump back down to zero, even though it hasn't completed its cycle. At that point. This in its essence is hard sink. And what, what happens when you heard sink one wave to another is you create more harmonics and different content in the harmonic spectrum that adds to the sounds. So it's a way of generating richness from two simple wave forms. Okay, So that's about it for the sound fundamental section. When we come back, I'll be looking at the basic parameters of synthesis so you can kind of understand the terminology before we get into the actual instruments. 6. 05 SynthFundamentals: Okay, so let's talk about the building blocks of synthesis and what's actually used in creating sound. So one of the most fundamental building blocks is of course, the oscillator. And there are only so many waveforms that are typically used, although there's a lot of variation. Here's the sine wave we've seen already. Here's a triangle wave and you can see it looks triangle. Sawtooth wave has kind of look to it. And square wave, which is squarish. Okay, so those are the main wave forms that are used. But what else is there? What else is used to make sound? There's a couple of things. Let's go back to this patch here, and I'm going to turn this up a little bit. During this one down. I'm going to core here and listen to whitening can be quite intense. So notice the three views we're looking at here in white noise. It's kind of a random energy for across the entire spectrum. There's also something called pink noise, which is a more subdued sound. You can see what happens over here in the sonogram when I switch it to pink. So what this means is that there's less energy and the higher frequencies, and in fact, it goes down about three dB per octave as it goes up in frequency or up the spectrum. This is often used to tune rooms because it's more aligned with human hearing. We tend to hear that as well in the upper frequencies. So oscillators and noise to basic science sound sources. Now, what else is there? Well, let's go back to this patch here for the time being. I want to show you some DG waves. So these are our waves that are various shapes. They're not a typical shapes that we just talked about. But they can be really any shape. And when you take one shape and you use that as a cycle or as a wave table, and then repeat it a certain number of times in a second, you will get a pitch and you will get a certain harmonic spectrum of going along with it. Let's listen to some of these I'm going to choose here. Did you waves, That's this little section down here. And let's play some of those. You can see the shape of it here. This length also to keyboard, so you can kind of hear different pitches. Let's just choose one. Okay? These have also including some digit waves along with the application that you can play with. Hit random button here and see how every shape and subsequently completely different. And that's because of the harmonics spectrum that's, that's being generated by that particular shape. Okay, What about filtering? It's a very important part of synthesis. I want to go back to this patch again. I hate to keep jumping back and forth, but some patches do things better than others. Let me put an I'll put this back on white noise. Turned down a little bit. I have a little filter section built into this patch down here. Right now it's being bypassed. Let me turn around. Immediately, hear the difference there. This is a low pass filter, which means it allows lows pass. Nothing fancy about it. The name includes the definition. Likewise, a high-pass filter allows ice to pass and you can see that cutting off everything below certain point here. There's also something called a band pass, which allows frequencies within a certain band between a high and a low point to pass. There's also a band stop. Sometimes called a band reject. The opposite side of the mirror image of a band-pass. There's also a peak or a notch filter, similar to what you'd find in a parametric EQ. There's a shelving filter. Allows you to put low shelf or a high shelf so that you can push frequencies up or down from one point all the way to infinity. So these things are similar to what you'd find in a parametric EQ. There's nothing tricky about them. But what's important to realize is that when you send a very rich sound source through these types of things, you end up getting a new spectrum. In essence, you end up creating new sounds from the source material you wouldn't have if you hadn't done any filtering. Basic parameters are cut-off frequency. This is the point at which the filter begins to do its thing. There's the gain. If there's any meaning. Is it being accentuated or attenuated past or before that cutoff frequency. And then there's the slope that determines how fast frequencies are being accentuated or attenuated. And it's really about it for filters, we'll get more into them when we look at actual instruments. Some instruments have, well, most instruments have filters built into them. So we'll be able to see their effect in a more concrete way. Now what about modulation? Well, these same oscillators that we found over here can all be used to modulate any parameter within ascent. And they're called when you use a wavetable or an oscillator to modulate a parameter. It's typically called an LFO, which simply stands for low frequency oscillator. It's low frequency because it's typically be low, the audio rate, which is 20 hz or less. So that it generates a table of data at a recognizable period of time that you can hear the effects. For instance, you can modulate pitch, modulating cutoff frequency and so on. There's also something called an envelope. And let me just close these for the time being. I have little patch here that talks about that demonstrates what an envelope is. So here we have a keyboard. There's a table that has this sort of diagram in it. It's probably familiar to you. If I hit a note. Let me of course I'll turn it on. So when I hold that note that sustains to a certain point, which is really this point right here. And when I let it go, it goes down. So what we have here is amplitude on the y-axis and time basically on the x-axis. This initial section here is the attack. How long does it take to reach the peak? And then there's a decay time before it reaches some sort of sustain level, which will stay there as long as I hold the key down. And then when I release the key, it goes down to zero. I have a little diagram here that explains that a little further, you can see it Here's level on your y-axis. Here's time. There's attack, which is expressed as time as well. There's decay which is expressed as another time. How long does it take to decay? There's a sustain level, which is how loud is it as I'm holding the key. So that could be as long as I hold the key. So this is not really a measure of time. Don't be confused by that. Then when you release the key, there's a certain period of time that it goes from there back down to zero. Now, when this is often associated with amplitude, but envelopes can be used to change any parameter that they're mapped to. For instance, you can have pitch going up, then down and then sustaining. As long as I hold the key and then go down when I release the key, it doesn't have to be amplitude, although amplitude, it almost always has some sort of envelope attached to it. It also doesn't have to have four stages. Sometimes there's just an attack and decay stage. Sometimes there's just an attack and a release stage. Sometimes you have more stages. There may be a stage after the decay where it rises back up and then sustains and then comes back down. And in reality, most sense only have certain number of stages, but in reality, you can have as many stages as the program will allow for. Since I can do the max and create as many stages as I want. And then when I hit a key here. So you can hear that kinda just doing its thing. I can also map this to pitch. Put this back to the original shape. You can see that envelopes are simply ways to generate data. Once you have data, you can send it to where we want to have it to, whatever you like it to do. Alright, and then lastly, just a quick mention about global controls will see actual use of these instruments. So I won't talk too much about it. But global controls, there are basically things that affect the whole instrument in a sort of global way. One of them is pitch band, where you can adjust the range of the pitch bend wheel up or down. There's the degree of polyphony. Some instruments only allow monophonic playback, which means they'll only playback one note at a time. And other instruments have pretty high degrees of polyphony, meaning you can play several notes at a time. Then there's usually some sort of global tuning which allows you to either de-tune or tuned to another instrument, or tuned down or up by octaves and so on. So those are called global controls because they affect the whole instrument. Alright, that's sort of the fundamentals of what's going on now I think it's time to make some noise and actually start to explore some of these instruments. We'll start with the ESM, which is the monophonic synth and logic. And I'll see you on the other side. 7. 06 ESM: Okay, so let's take a look at this first instrument here. It's called the ESM enlarge. It gets say, monophonic synthesizer, which basically means it can play one note at a time. When you play a second node cuts off the first note. Let's first look at the signal path. It's always a good way to start when you're looking at a new instruments. So here you can see we have an oscillator section that goes from sawtooth, two square wave. And we can mix between the two by holding, holding note here. And you can hear that. Can see the spectrum that's happening. Fab filter EQ I have okay, that generates the sound. It goes through a filtering section. And as an, as is often the case with synthesizers, if you don't see any indication of what type of filter it is, for instance, this doesn't say what kind of filter is a low-pass, high-pass. In general, that's gonna be a low-pass filter. It's kind of the default. And so this is a cutoff frequency and this is the resonance for the filter. Just to make sure, let me play a note and see what this cut-off frequency does. So you can see indeed it is a low-pass filter. This is a filter modulation section which we'll get to in a second. This is the amplitude section, which has a just a single-stage, a sort of envelope here decay only. And then there's a built-in overdrive. And what's nice about having built-in effects in a plug is that if you save a preset with the plug-in, the effect gets saved with it. So you don't have to count on any external plugins that might be in your effects chain to get the same sound in another session. Now on the far left here, there's these three numbers, 816.32. Let's hear the effect of those. So you hear it goes down an octave. And indeed these do change the octaves. Why 81632? This refers, this is kind of a remnant from pipe organ days. And it refers to feet, 8, ft, 16, 32. So if you doubled the length of a pipe, you'll actually get a lower octave and vice versa. You'll see these indications are very typical in hardware and software sense in terms of feet to represent octaves. Then you have something here called glide. This is a portmanteau control that glides from one note to the next. With it off. You just get a little more. With it off. It basically jumps from one node to the next or turn it up a little bit. You hear that gliding between pitches. Exploring the filter a little more. Let me get a little richer sound going here and open, open up the filter a little bit. What does this resonance control do? Well, it puts a little bump, a little boost right at the cutoff frequency. So let's look at that over here and you'll see what I'm saying. See this part right here gets boosted up a little bit and you can actually, in some filters drive that to solve a resonate so it becomes its own pitched sine wave. So this has the effect of accentuating the cutoff frequency, which is nice when you're sweeping it, for instance. As such. Now, what type of modulation can we do in the plug-in itself? Well, there's something here called intensity, the k. Hello. So the intensity is how much modulation is going to occur. And what we're modulating in this case is the cutoff frequency. And the decay time would be how long it takes for modulation to happen. So let's, I'm gonna put it up halfway here and I'll put the intensity all the way up. So it's very obvious. Keep this down for the time being. Let's play a note and see what happens. Okay, so you see how that decay influences a decrease in the cutoff frequency. And although this is not animating, we're not seeing it move. That's what's going on and can clearly hear it and you can see it here. If I turn up the decay, you see it takes longer for it to curse. So this is really a time parameter. We're turning up the decay time. What is the velo do? Develo allows you to affect this situation here in terms of how hard you hit the key or the velocity. So if I turn it all the way up, it's going to have velocity will have the most effect. And let's hear the difference between this with velocity all the way up and then velocity all the way down. So that's hitting it very hard. If I hit it soft. Notice how the harder I hated, the longer the decay time is. So again, this is, the velocity is actually changing the position of this, although you don't see it being animated. Alright, so down here we have a simple amplitude envelope that controls the output and also has a velocity control. So if I turn this all the way down and let me turn down the decay time a little bit and see what that sounds like. Okay, so now we have a very short decay as opposed to Okay, this is still being modulator. I'm going to turn that off with B. So here the decay that's happening there, I can make it velocity sensitive by turning this all the way up. So here the decay time being influenced by velocity there. Then there's this overdrive section. Its saturation to the wave. Which is kind of nice to get some richer harmonics, coy. Alright, there's one little section here that you'll find in a lot of plugins that's typically like not on the front panel, sort of hidden because they're global type controls that you don't usually access unless you're first setting things up. So down here we have two things or three things actually positive vendor range, negative bender range tuning. Vendor refers to the pitch bend control on your midi controller. Right now it's set to 12, which means 12 half-steps or one octave. And the vendor ranges is set to positive vendor range, which means it's the same as whatever you said here will be the same here. So right now let's hear it. I'm going to turn up the decay a little bit. May turn down the overdrive or not blowing things out. So we have an octave up or down. Now you could make the negative vendor range different. Say I make it seven, which would be fifth. So there you can, actually, if you were just to sustain a note, you could with automation, actually record a melody just using the pitch bend, which is an interesting idea. This also has a tuning feature which gives you $0.20 up or $0.20 down. Sense in terms of tuning, refers to the idea that there's 100 cents between half-steps or between two adjacent notes on the piano. So that's 100 cents. So if you go in-between the keys on the piano, for instance, halfway between, you would be at $0.50, which would be a quarter tone. This is somewhere less than a quarter tone. Alright, so that's the ESM. I'm going to play well with a little arpeggiation thing I've set up here and mess around with some of the presets or you can get an idea what this thing is capable. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. 8. 07 ESE: So the next segment we'll look at is the ESC, which is an eight voice polyphonic synth. Put the keyboard window here so it kinda see what I'm doing. This particular center, as I said, it's eight voices. So that means when you get up to the eighth voice, notice that it'll cut out one of the voices as you go beyond eight, which means it's capable of eight different notes at a time. Let's start by looking again at the signal path and how the signal proceeds through the instrument. So first we have the oscillator section here. There's a sawtooth, there's a square wave that is changeable in pulse width so that when it's here, turn down these again are actors 48.16. Again referring to feet from the old pipe organ days. So down here we have a sawtooth wave, and that's a square wave. And then as we slide this, we're actually changing the pulse width of that. And if you remember from an earlier tutorial, that changes the length of time that the wave stays in either positive or negative part of the square wave. So that's where the sound is originally generated. There are some modulation happening down here, which we'll talk about in a second. But from here it goes through the filter sessions as a cutoff filter, I'm sorry. Low pass filter. And this is the cutoff control for it and resonance. And we have an AR indication here that stands for attack release intensity. And what this will do is it will take the same envelope that's controlling amplitude and modulate the cutoff frequency for this low pass filter. We'll demonstrate that in a second. There's also a yellow filter which control, which adjust the intensity of the velocity and how that affects the cutoff modulation. And then there's a very low volume which controls how much influence the velocity has over volume output of the instrument. And a couple of different built-in affects. Coursing and ensemble type effects. So going back to the beginning then, this is, has some built-in modulation capabilities. Now, look at, I'm going to put it on sawtooth here. And when it's on a sawtooth, we have this control acting as a vibrato control. Vibrato is simply a modulation and pitch up and down. And we can adjust the speed of it here and you can hear that. So you see that as we go further up the knob here, the range of the vibrato gets wider. And this is just adjusting the speed. So that's when this top wave control here set to a sawtooth. As I change it to this range of control, this becomes a pulse width modulation control. So that I can change the intensity of this is actually, is with many of these modulations, you don't actually see the knob animating. But you can imagine that this thing is going back and forth like this, based on the control set here and based on the speed. So you can see that it actually chokes off as it gets towards this end of the pulse width, which, which is a very small pulse wave form at that point. So with this modulating, the Wave source here or the sound source. We can then start to filter it and where we get some subtractive synthesis going. So here what the low-pass filter sounds like. Just the resonance a little bit. I'm going to open up a pro to hear from FAB filter will look at the spectrum is we want this filter. So you can see as the cutoff changes, we get a different group of different part of the spectrum being emphasized. And also the resonance is putting a little bumper at that cutoff point. So now let's look at some of the other modulation capabilities here we have first of all, the attack and release, which is hardware to output or amplitude, amplitude. Let's listen to some variation there. So you see we can set the attack and release quite nicely. They're very simple amplitude and that there's no decay or sustained parameter, but still useful. Now we can use this same amp envelope to control a modulation of the cutoff frequency. And the intensity of that is determined by this knob here. So as the center has no effect, but as we go this way, we'll see that the knob actually will. Although again, it's not animating, it will go up and then it will come back down based on the attack and release times. Let's see if we can hear that. Move it up, make it kind of exaggerated so can hear it a little better. So you see there at the end how it sort of made that sweep downwards based on this sort of long release time. We make the attack a little slower. Also. See what that does. So you saw how that works. So now as I go to this side of the novel, let's see how that affects the same idea. Okay, so you see it has the exact opposite effect there. Let's set it to zero. So by using the velo filter control, we can also decide how much influence velocity is going to have over this whole attack. Envelope, influence over the cutoff frequency. And then there's Othello control to decide how much influence velocity you will have over volume. So with its set all the way down, I hit it softly. I get that tiny volume level. If I turn it all the way up and hit it at the same level, you can see it's a much more dynamic or wider dynamic range. So a little more control over volume. Then there's some chorusing built-in to the instrument. And then down below, as many of these instruments are some global controls under the disclosure triangle here at the left, lower left-hand side. And once again, we have positive vendor range and negative vendor range, which right now is set to the same as positive, but it doesn't have to be, for instance, right now that's 12 steps up and down. But I could make this five steps down, let's say eight steps up. So if I go all the way up. And so you can actually play melodies with the pitch bend or if you want it to. And then there's some global tuning controls here. $0.20 to negative $0.20. And again, 100 cents would be a complete half-step. So $0.20 is more or less sort of a detuning feature in many of these controls. If you want it, set it back to default, at least in logic. Option clicking will bring it back to the center. So that's the ESE sort of simple, still more controls and the ESM head, and also polyphonic. But let me play some little apple loop here and I'll play it through some of the presets. We can get an idea what its capabilities are and also mess with some of the controls as those presets are playing. So you can see how you can modify some of these presets for your own needs. We'll try a little more with some pad type sounds. 9. 08 ESP: Alright, so next we have the ESP. This is also an eight voice polyphonic synth that emulates some of the classic sense you'd find the 1880s. First, let's look at signal path we have here where the sound sources originate and this is a subtractive synth. So we have some sound being generated here. In the center. We have some filtering going on. And as I said previous tutorials, if you don't see the type of filter listed, chances are it is a low-pass filter and that's exactly what this is, is the cutoff frequency. This is the resonance control. Some modulation capability here that uses the ADSR envelope, which is also hard wired to the output. Here's a few velo sensitivity controls which allow the influence of velocity, built-in course and overdrive. And also in the far left here we have the octaves as usual. Let's get a little idea of what this thing can do. Let's start with a triangle wave here. There's three different octaves of the trial wave, and I'll put the spectrum display up here so we can take a look and see what's going on. Okay, So next to that we have a sawtooth, which we can either play on its own, blend with the triangle. And let's look at the next one, which is a square wave. And then we have next to that a square wave with a little minus one in it, which identifies it as an octave below the mean pitch. Here, that Octave going on there. And then one next to that. This is minus two, which is two octaves below. If we started out higher with this one, get a nice blended octave, spread sound that way. Then the far right-hand side is a noise generator. She's nice for generating percussive sounds or accentuating the attack on a particular type of sound. In the center. Like I said before, is the filtering sections. So if we put, let's just get a little blend of a wave here. Something like this. Okay, and if we use now the cutoff frequency to manipulate that, maybe add a little resonance to it. So some nice sounds you can see are capable of this center is capable of, right off the bat. Let's look at some of the modulation capabilities. Just to the left of center here we have vibrato and y, which is a modulation of the cut-off frequency here. So when we're on this side of the zero, were, this is operating as a vibrato intensity control, and this is the speed of it. And on this side is the cutoff frequency modulation control and also the speed. So let's just get listened to both of those. Here's my router. It's fairly obvious what's their debts doing? Let's look at the walk control now and I'll start with a slower speed as well. Center this up a little bit and see what that does. So you can see that this is, although it's being modulated, it's not animating, as I've said before in the past. And these plugins, zero those out for the time being, two numbers p, We're back to the original cell. Now, these three-center controls here are key follow commands and what they do. And there are three levels of intensity, 12.3. When you, when you're playing on the keyboard, if you're playing in high range and you have a certain cutoff frequency, certainly get something a little more. So you may want less of a cut-off frequency when you're playing up high in the keyboard to emulate more of a real-world sound, because higher, higher pitch sounds typically have higher frequencies associated with them and vice versa. So you can set that here with these key follow commands. If I turn them all on, we'll get the maximum effect. I turn them all off. Here's all on or off. So you see what the cutoff frequency set lower. It's a lot more obvious what's going on. These are actually allowing more frequencies to pass through the higher-end as you turn them on. So it's good for when you want a more realistic sound that gives you the full range of the spectrum, as opposed to cut off frequency affecting everything. Here's residents that goes along with cut-off, of course, like we just looked at. Here is a ADSR intensity control, which allows the ADSR envelope here that's hardware to amplitude to also affect cutoff. First, we didn't really explore that on its own. So let's do that. I'm going to zero these out. We'll get a sound here. So just to go over winter in a tech ADSR envelope does, let me turn all these things down. And if I now we basically get nothing. I turn it out the attack and I'll turn the sustain all the way up. So what's happening here is it's quickly jumping to the sustain level. And if you remember from earlier tutorial AD and are related to time and S is related to level. So this doesn't really affect anything about how long the envelope is. It's simply the level when you sustain notes out loud. Those notes are, see it right there. So this is the attack time. If I make it a really long attack, see it kind of builds up slowly. Or you can make it more percussive. And this is where the noise comes in. It's nice when you want to get some percussive type sounds. The decay is after it attacks and goes to an official peak level, it will decay and I'll take a certain amount of time to do then and now decayed down to the sustain level over a certain period of time. So let's hear that. So those kind of along to k. Let's look at it a little shorter one and see how that went down a little faster here. The spectrum. Then of course, the last step is the release, which is what happens after you release the key. So with a very long release, it would be something like this release. Okay, versus something with a very short release. And if I hit this keys, like this, release is more of an immediate shut off. So that's the way all the ADSR envelopes are going to work. So once you get the hang of one of them, you'll pretty much understand them all. Now what's going on here is this same envelope and this is a very common for one envelope to be affecting more than one parameter or more than one process in the synth. So this is also affecting the modulation of the cutoff frequency. Now it's on zero, it's not doing anything. If I turn all the way up and let me turn on, turn off the attack a little bit and will sustain up here this too much effect that you can actually see there. I'm gonna put a release, long release, turn this all the way up. This here, and let's try that. Okay, so there you saw that long release on the cutoff frequency actually changing it, moving it downwards with the release of the amplitude envelope one more time. Okay, So that's fairly obvious. So you can change that thing and have it go the opposite direction over here or send around Heather have no effect at all. You can also have velocity effect this whole process. If your velocity sensitive, if you have a line that's more velocity sensitive, also velocity can affect the amplitude envelope in general. For instance, if I had right now it's set to zero, which means it's having no effect when we put a little long attack and a short release. Its right now no matter how hard I hit the key, I'm getting the same level and the same sort of effect. I turn this all the way up and I hit the keyboard at the same speed I did just a minute ago. Now you see velocity will have a much more exaggerated effect. So it just depends on what you want in any particular sounds. Not really right or wrong. In terms of that go the way that goes. Then there's a built-in course and an overdrive, which will really kick things up if you want it to. Once again, the reason you might want to put these type of effects as part of your preset as opposed to having them external and in another process or another insert in the signal chain is because when you then save a preset, these things will save with that preset. So when you're using things and other projects, it'll be ready to go without any additional processing needed. Once again, down at the far left-hand side, we have, as we've seen before, pitch bend range where you can change it positive and negative and also detuning as well. Again, let's hear some sounds that are in the Presets. I'll place them and manipulate the parameters as we go and kind of scroll through some of these ideas and see what we have. 10. 09 ES1 Part1: Alright, so next we have the ES1 and we start to get into some real possibilities in terms of modulation capability. Anyway, let's talk about signal path first. As usual, this is again octaves 2481632. Here we have two oscillators that are generating the source material. One is a sub-oscillator and meaning an octave below the upper, upper one. So here we have, on top I have a blended all the way right now towards the top. So we're just hearing this upper oscillator and let me open up the filter all the way. Turned down the key follow, and kind of reset everything and starts. So we just hear a square wave here. And as we move it this way, modulating or we're altering the pulse width. As you can see, this is a pulse wave down here, so this is something that could be modulated. Down below that we have software triangle wave and back to the top. So that's what's available on the tablets. Listen to the bottom ones. We have a octave below, really deep, a pulse wave there, Here's a square wave. Let me just turn up the octave a little bit. Here we have a hybrid sawtooth square, which looks kinda jagged line almost like a stepped type of sawtooth wave. Here's a little more jagged. Even though that different set of harmonics with this one, you can have it turned off completely. Got some white noise generation there. And another squarish way there. This external refers to external input or side chain input that you can load in from another track. So for instance, I'm going to just move this out of the way for time being. And I'm going to, I have a tracking little drum loop in here. Let me turn it on. Mute the output of that, but I'll turn it down over here. Now when I hold a note down, notice it's actually coming through the center itself. So the synth is now acting as a processor of that live drum sound. So really a lot of creative things you can do. But that's sort of scenario. For instance, I can have the actual drum line playing along with the effected version and so on. And you would enlarge it anyway, there's many of these instruments and other dogs also have that capability, but you can do it in logic here through the side chain input up on top where you can choose some sort of audio track to be routed in. So that's your source material than it'd be in the center here we have a drive control that routes or saturates the input going into the filter. And let me get some sound going here. So you can overdrive and going into the filter and then cutoff frequency for a low pass filter. Again. Resonance control. The two typical controls you'll find on a low-pass filter, of course. Then there's four other controls we haven't seen before. These are slope controls for the filter. Now, what do I mean by that? Well, if I play it, juicy sound on here and we'll set the cutoff somewhere around there. And now notice the slope that we have here in terms of the attenuation past the cutoff frequency. Okay, that's 24 dB classic. What that means is that one octave above the cutoff frequency, we're getting a 24 dB attenuation or decrease in amplitude. Now if I go and make that 12 db, notice that now the slope is a little more gradual and we're getting more high frequencies because of it. There's also 18, which is sort of in-between the two. Then there's a 24 dB fat which attenuates quickly, but it also boosts mostly below the cutoff so that hear what that sounds like. If you're looking for sort of a thicker base on, you might want to use the 24 dB fat. Then we have a key Fall Control here, which is we've seen before, which adjusts for the range of the keyboard. If you want more high frequencies and higher range to come through, set this all the way up to the top. The far right, we have amplifier control and this slider here allows velocity to have an influence over the amplifier section so that if you want it more sensitive, you would open it all the way up. If you didn't care. Um, you would just put this all the way like that and no matter how hard I hit the key, it's the same volume. So this is how far these are spread, determines the intensity of the philosophy control. In other words, the far-left. Something says a gate are ADSR AND gate. A gate our means that it's gating the two middle stages of the ADSR envelope here. So in this case, only the attack and release our functioning. This is particularly good if you want to use it to modulate something. Adsr means all four stages are working AND gate our means. Only the release stage works delicious. Hear some of those things. First, this is with all stages functioning. So you can hear all four of those stages working. This is just with attack and release, working with these are set in the center. Then we get the same sort of effect because they're nonfunctional. Then there's just the release. Which case There's an immediate attack. And we can set the release time only. So before we go on, let's take a little break and I'll come back with more explanation as far as what's going on on the bottom here. This is the kind of the meat of the synthesizer. It's the modulation section. So we'll come back to that part too. 11. 10 ES1 Part2: Okay, Before we get into the modulation section, just a quick note about some of the global controls. So below here we have negative pitch bend range in some midi stuff, a filter boost here. Also positive bender range here. There's a tuning, there's general output level. There's some built-in coursing effects. There's the glide control over here for gliding between nodes. And then a couple of things we haven't seen this as an analog control which sort of shifts the pitch around a certain percentage. That sort of tries, it, tries to emulate an analog synthesizer, which is really what this whole sentence is about. It's about emulating analog. So this kind of helps with that idea. So down below, here on the right-hand side we have the number of voices and we have, for instance, one voice here. All the way up to 64 voices. Don't have that many fingers and then a legato setting. So what's the difference between legato? And, let's say one voice which would be mono. Well, in, in mono mode, if we turn up the attack all the way, and I try to hold one note by another note. What happens is, you can see here when I'm doing it tries to play this phase. In fact, it does play this stage of the envelope every time versus legato mode, which skips this stage entirely so that it's nice for Connected type of sounds when you don't want to have the attack of every sound coming through. Okay, I'm going to set this back to full noun, the attack, a little bit. Sound going here. Okay, so let's explore some of these modulation capabilities. On the left-hand side here we have the low-frequency oscillator. Know it's low-frequency because it's below the audio rate, as we talked about in earlier video. That's usually 20 hz or lower, but really it's much lower than that. Usually. There are two rates here. One on this side is sink, and this one is free. On the sync side, we're actually able to modulate in terms of a division of the beat, whatever the tempo might be, this will line up with it and you go all the way up to 32 bar here if you want some really long sort of modulations. Or it could be as small as in this case, one 64th note triplet. So when we're looking at these things, the D stands for dotted. So this would be dotted 16th note. This would just be regular 16th note, and this would be a 16th note triplet. And that's the same for the eighth and the quarters. And so on. On this side we have a free rate, which means it's by Hertz or cycles per second. So you can have everything from very slow down 0.15 hz. All we up to 24 hz or 24 cycles per second. So let's try modulating something. I'm going to set this control here to pitch. And for the time being, I'm going to turn this all the way up and I'll show you what this is in a second, but we'll set this to pitch. And I'll put a triangle wave is good. And we'll set this up at the free rate for now to see what that sounds like. You can kind of see what's going on here. That's fairly obvious. Now if we go on this side, we'll see it in divisions of beat. So far were to change tempo. Changes also the rate of the modulation. How these shapes, how, how do they affect what's going on? Well, this is a triangle wave. A sawtooth descending or max to min. Here's the same sought to reverse a square wave. So it sort of jumps up and below target pitch. Here's a sample and hold which we haven't seen me for in this. Sort of jumps around randomly, stays there for a second and then moves on something called a sample and hold interpolator it. It's the same as this, only at smoothly goes from one point to the next. Listen to that. Now here's an interesting thing. I can have an external sound file modulating whatever parameter or target parameter I said here. Since we already tried that external file up here as a source, Let's see what it sounds like as a modulator. So I'm going to play that and see what happens. Now, remember whenever you're using a side chain, the session itself has to be playing in order for the sound to be routed in through the plugin. So let's just see what happens here. I'm going to start the session and will loop over the length of this particular sound file. Not too interesting as far as modulating pitch goes. But you can certainly hear that modulation occurring back for the time being. And let me go. And let's look at some of these other target parameters. So the intensity via wheel setting here controls how much of the mod wheel affects the intensity of a particular module modulation you have set. So if I have this, let's say at a triangle wave, 6 hz rate, roughly for vibrato. I have this all the way open. There's no effect at all on the pitch. But if I turn up the mod wheel, that's all the way open. Sort of barely open. So it's a very nice expressive tool if you're playing live and you want to record the mod wheel automation as you're playing or even after you're playing. It's a nice way to get some variety. What else can you modulate here? Well, let's look pulse width. So the pulse width, as we said before, that's this situation here. So if I have this set to 6 hz and it's not a triangle wave, I want to modulate pulse width. It would sound something like this. Again, where it's, where it's set originally, will be the starting point for the modulation. So it'll go up and down above that about with the sample and hold modulator. So that's kind of a nice effect like that. This back on triangle for the time being, you can also affect the mix. And that's this slider right here. So right now we have, we can affect how that gets modulated between the two. And then this is actually being modulated, although you don't see it animating. But that's what's going on. Then there's the cutoff frequency, which is often modulated. Seeing it some cool effects. Obviously with modulating cutoff. And we know it always reminds me of dubstep and that's one of the typical things that's done there. Then there's the cutoff frequency, I'm sorry, the resonance, which can also be marginally more subtle thing going on there. But as we turn off or cut off, That's interesting. Some nice sound design possibilities there. And lastly, for the low-frequency oscillator a modulation targets. We have volume tremolo effects that would sound like with a sample and hold interpolator. Two interesting, what about a square wave? And the triangle gives you the best tremolo effect. And you'll find that some shapes are better for modulating some things than others just depends on what it is. Let's turn off this LFO. Right now we're just back to the straight side. And let's look at the modulation envelope. This is another way to modulate all these other parameters, including two other ones. So I'm going to turn up this is an intensity slider that allows intensity via velocity. Let me just turn that all the way up for the time being, but it works the same way as the wheel only allows velocity to control this intensity. So we can have pitch modulated. And you'll notice that on this side there's an attack setting. On this side there's the decay settings. Let's hear those two and I'll set this to k and center. Shorter, shorter became longer and even longer than that. And then there's the attack which starts short. It's longer as we go this way. All the way up to 5 s. This is milliseconds right here, so that's 5 s. So you can see a lot of possibilities with that. And then we have all these same parameters that we can modulate. So I'll just end here by messing around with a little vintage classic preset. I'll add a drum loop here as we go on. 12. 11 ES2 Part1: Okay, Let's have a look at the CS2. By far, the most complicated thing we've seen so far. What we have here are three oscillators on the left-hand side. So here's your sound sources. There's a filter section in the center, and this is a dual filter which allows you to either route one filter into the other in series. As such, or clicking this button will allow the routing to be parallel, meaning there, the signal goes through both filters together and you can blend the result with this slider here. And then on the far right, there are some effects or some distortion that's built in various colors of distortion, soft and hard. There's a sign sublevel sine wave, which will be just basic sine wave, an octave below the main pitch. Phasor, chorus, flanger. And there's an x, y pair here, which we'll explain later on. So that's the whole top section. Briefly. In the center is a modulation routing section. And there are ten different possible modulation routings here where you can take some source of my modulation and route it to many, many different targets. And have it be influenced by various things such as modulation, mod wheel or velocity and so on. Talk more about this later as well. There's also a vector section which is another way to modulate things based on time. And down below are the various sources of modulation. So we have alpha-1, LFO 2.3 envelopes. All possible modulations sources. At the bottom are some macro controls. And you can change those to midi controls as well. If you have various midi controllers that you want to use, or you can close them all up and use this macro only. And it kind of gives you the basic controls for the whole instrument in a small window. Then down below there's some additional controls here for Midea. And mano pitch bend range of up to 48 semitones, which is huge. So let's start by taking everything, turning everything off. I'm going to turn off all the distortion. And I'm just going to play from one of these oscillators here. Let me start with basic sine wave, a triangular wave. Square wave. So to triangle. Then what looks to be another sine wave. But here's the tricky part. If you right-click on this bottom word here, you'll see hundreds. Did you wait at your fingertips? And did you waves are simply one cycle of the waveform then doesn't have to be your typical waveforms like we've seen before. These can be more irregular. Strange shape waveforms. For instance. Class two, Let's look at heres. Sex to hear kind of has the timbre of a sacs. Here's some, something called Poor. Here's, let's just check out one more here, rope. It's interesting. So a whole slew of possibilities underneath this little menu here. There's also this whole section here which sends frequency modulation possibilities to oscillator two. This can be also much later within this range. Okay, and then on the left of that we have basic tuning up 36 steps, which three octets are all way down 36 steps, three octaves. Substantial manner possible tuning there, and also some fine tuning here in terms of sense. So we can go up $0.50 in either direction, which is quarter tone. You want a zero it out. Just option. Click on that control right there. Okay. So here we have an oscillator too. I'll turn this one off for a second. Just, let's just play too. You'll notice to the right of all these oscillators, there's this mixed triangle. This allows you to mix the quantity or the level of each oscillator in terms of where you placed the puck in the middle of this triangle. So I'll put everything on oscillator to see various things going on here. So here's a square wave saw tooth, as we've seen triangle. Here we have a square and a sawtooth waves. These are linked to oscillator one. So as we've seen earlier tutorial that by forcing this particular wave to start every time this wave starts, they may be slightly detuned, creates its own series of harmonics and a different kind of sound. There's a ring oscillator here, which is fed by oscillator one as well. So if this is not turned on, you won't get any result. These both have to be operational in order for agreeing to work. That can get quite rich. Then also we have this whole set of waves and our fingertips for this one as well. Okay, And then down below, very similar to oscillate or two. In that we will have square wave sought to triangle sinc square wave, a sink sawtooth wave noise, which is It's white noise. And also this whole set of waves as well. And here and also in digital oscillator too, I forgot to mention between the square and the pulse wave, we have pulse-width of variation here which can be modulated. So what's going on here on the side? Let's just talk about that for a second. We have this analog setting, which as we've said in the ES1, this is intended to emulate analog circuitry, which tends to drift or has little variation to it. So that's kinda nice approach. I'm gonna go up here, turn off 31, and just put out a basic. Use the digital wave for sine wave here. I'm going to turn off the analog. So we get a pure sine wave which is happening right there. The reason I wanna do this, because I want to show you what the CBD does. This is constant beat detuning, and I'm going to set it to 100% so we get the full, actually let me start with it off. I'm going to set this second oscillator also to sinewave. And I'll mix equally between the two. So we're getting much in unison there. Now if I were to change one of these, just by a few cents, notice we're starting to get that bleeding that occurs when you have two sine waves that are tuned very closely. But you notice that when I play a high note, the beating is at a certain frequency. But when I play a lower note, it's much slower. So what the constant beat detuning does is it compensates for that. So that now when I play a higher or a lower now, or even a lower note, all the tuning. The beating remains fairly close. Let me turn that up a little bit. So you see it's all about the same words. If I turn this all off, you get very big variations in the beating. So this is kind of an unusual control and it's nice that it's in this particular plugin. Okay, so we've got a little sound going. Have a nice rich sound there. So let's see what's going on in the. Filter section we're going to turn these. Notice that this sets them to parallel or series right now this is a parallel setting. I'm going to blend, set the blend knob all the way down to the bottom so we can take a look at the lowpass filter on the bottom. Turn off this FM. Fm does is allows frequency modulation or the cutoff frequency by oscillator one. Turn that off for the time being. The resonance little bit. Okay, so sound that should be used to by now. Once again, we have some slope settings here. This is a 12 db slope. Can see it there. 18 db. Here we're cutting off a lot more of that slope. 24 dB, running off even more. And then fat, replacing some low end and also cutting off 24 dB. Up on top, we have a multimode filter, meaning it can be switched to different types of filtering based on what you're looking for. Here's a band pass. Here's a band reject, which is sort of the opposite. Kind of see the whole image of a band-pass, really a peak filter. So if we reset one to a high-pass, this one, this one is already set to go pass and then I blend between the two. Gets sort of a band-pass situation. You can find a sweet spot there in this filter. Can also experiment with routing them in series or just bypassing completely by turning this off. There's also some interesting connections here between the knobs, these little chain links here. Or when you grab that, it allows you to change to controls at the same time. Watch this. She's kind of a useful technique come sometimes you just want to play around and see what kind of result you'll get. Next to that we have basic volume output. Here's a sign level here. Is basically sub oscillator, an octave below oscillator one wants you to thicken things up. The distortion here is soft or hard distortion with the intensity level here. Okay? And also different tone from dark to bright. Really, that's just affecting the spectrum there and how would, what frequencies are allowed to come through. That's interesting. Really nice effects you can get with distortion. And when you can build it right into the preset, like I said before, that saves with your preset, which is very nice thing. Down below course flanging, phasing, and you can also change the intensity of those course. In the speed. Get some nice colors going there. So let me just turn all this off. Up on top in the center. Just while I'm in this area, There's polyfit, polyphonic and monophonic settings, which you should be worried by now. There's also a legato setting, which as I said in past, the difference between model and legato is that it doesn't, legato setting will not repeat the attack phase 0, the amplitude envelope. You can set the number of voices here and there's a unison setting. And what unison does is it doubles every voice. We listen to this. We add unison. You notice that the number of voices, it's a little bit louder and also the number of voices gets cut in half because every voice has doubled. So that's sort of the whole sound generation system. Up on top. We'll come back to this random slider, which is pretty cool towards the end of part two. But keeping in mind for now, I think with that, we'll end part one. We'll come back with a cartoon talking about modulation. 13. 12 ES2 Part2: Okay, Before we go on and talk about modulation, I do want to mention the extra stage that we see here in the amplitude envelope. So something that we haven't seen before. I just want to demonstrate to you what's going on. So we have the attack phase, a decay stage, a sustained level, a rise or a fall time, and a release time. This is a velocity sensitivity at the end. Let's watch what happens as I hit a node here in the display here. You'll notice what happens is there's an attack, there is a decay, and then there's a rise, in this case, backup to some level. So that's occurring because of this extra stage here. And we can also have it fall as well, these things. And again, the last envelope in a synth is usually hardware to the amplifier, which it is in this case as well. But these can also be routed to use as modulators for any parameter in this synth as well. So it can be very useful. Let's look at some of the other moduli kept capability. And we have your LFO one, LFO to one says poly, one says Mono. Let's see what exactly that means. Let's get LFO one functioning here. And I'm going to set this, I'm going use this first modulation router. You can use any of them, doesn't matter which order you use. I'll choose this one and I'll set it to modulate the pitch of oscillator one to make it very audible. Set the sources LFO one which is already set. And this is the intensity I'll leave that turned all the way up. Let's hear what it does right off the bat. Okay, so the rate here is set to 1.1 hz. This is a free rate, it's not sink to the beat. And then there's another control next to it, two way or decay. Now watch what happens when I turn up the delay and listened to and see if you can tell what's going on. Let me make it even longer delay. So you see it actually as delaying the onset of the modulation. And in this case up to 10 s, 1,000 milliseconds. And on the other end of this, we can away the modulation as well as check that out or decay rather. In this case. And let me make it longer. It's starting with a very intense modulation and then decays away. So it's kind of an envelope within an LFO, kind of a nice idea. Let me turn that off for the time being. Let's look at all. So there's the case of this Polly, what does that possibly mean? Why is this one mono and y's this one poly. Well, The poly means you can actually have more than one LFO going based on how many notes you attack. So if we have one, well, that's calling if I hit phases or different points in their cycle. So you can actually have different phased LFO is going at the same time. Let's change this same source now. The LFO to, and this one does have, is you notice a free section, free rates on top in terms of hertz and then down below sink rates based on the beat trip with his phone. Okay. Here are the various wave forms that you can use. Here's a reverse or max to min sawtooth. The opposite. Two different types of square waves, a unipolar and bipolar and unipolar starts at the initial value and goes up and then back down to the initial value. The bipolar story goes below it and above it. And you'll hear the difference here as opposed to here. If you remember from the ES1, we have two different types of randomness. This is sample and hold, and this is a sample and hold interpolating or smooth or type of sampling hold, we can hear that as opposed to the interpolated version. Okay, So a couple of nice LFOs there and these of course can be mapped. To any of these parameters within the synth itself, that gives you a huge array of things that you can possibly moduli, including the pitches of all three. You can detune one of the oscillators. You can actually modulate the waves themselves. This one right here. Actually, let's take a look at that. I set this here. And now LFO to set demodulate the waveform. So that's interesting. This is a interpolated sample and hold modulating waveform. Let's try with a triangle wave. Hours of fun and enjoyment right there, my friends. So lots of things that can be modulated, including of course, all the filter parameters, LFO rates themselves. You name it really a lot of lot to be explored there. Let's change now the source of this modulation to envelope one. We'll keep it. Let's put it back to pitch. So let's explore this envelope here. I'm going to use a poly version of the attack decay envelope. And I have it routed to pitch right here and we'll move on to page one. So you see how cool that can be. Let's turn up the attack just to hear the difference there. So you hear it along a rise and then a shorter decay. Now the interesting about this little envelope, two-stage envelope peers. It could also be a release instead of decay. So set to release. If I hit this key here, it'll just stay where it is until I release the key. And if I increase the attack time. So you see the difference there. This envelope is a little more advanced. So if I was to use a little too on pitch, various effects you can get based on the settings of the envelope. And you can also have them look three. So there's a ton of possibilities with modulation here. And you can have several things going on at the same time. For instance, let's keep pitch where it is. And what if I was to take and I'll put this back on envelope one. And let me also use the same one for cutoff frequency to turn that on so we can hear it and I'll give it a little something that we can actually hear the cut-off working. This is blended all the way towards the bottom filter here. And I'm going to have this envelope one also operating on the same parameter. Turn up the intensity. Let me turn this back to decay. So you hear I didn't get a lot of different effects by multiplying multiple parameters with the same modulating source. So let's check out the vector section of this modulation portion in this particular plugin. If you look, I have all the routing turned off for all the modulations ahead, that's happening down here. And I have a basic sound dial, then I'm going to hit the vector switch now. Now when I do that, exposes this thing here. Now I clear it out. You'll look and it's basically a timeline with some nodal points along the way. And if I right-click on that timeline, Let's see, I insert eight by eight loop. Okay, so now it ends in ate different points. Within that timeline. I'll show you what we're gonna do with those in a second. But first, I want to set this. Xy pad up to control certain things. And what I've done here is I've set the x, this x domain here to pitch. One would be the pitch of oscillator one. I've set the y to cut off too. So that would be this cutoff parameter for the lower filter. Downwards as vector mode. I'm going to have the vector affect both the mix and the XY pads. So it's this triangle control and the XY pad. Now I'm going to set some initial state. So with solar point turned on and this first node selected, I'm going to clear that there. Maybe I'll move that one there. I'll go to the next one. The next one. The next one. The next one. Okay, so now I've programmed all of these points into this vector section here. Now, watch what happens when I hold a note. So it's basically playing through all the points and it's jumping to the different settings that I had made. When I set this thing up. There's a loop in a sustain here and here. So for instance, I can have it play through here and then start to loop at this node, and then perhaps sustain at this node and then play forward. So that would sound like, okay, so you can set these things up to bloop and sustain whatever you want. Right now this is set to normal. You can have it set to finish. So when it, after it hits the sustained point and you release, it will actually finish out the whole vector series. This is set to hold this and step right now. But we could, if we hold this down, choose a shape which allows a morphing between nodes, which is quite cool. So listen to this. We'll set a concave six, whatever that means. That's a smoother transition. Can set the rate right here. You can set a loop smoothing factor. A nice effect right there. You can have it loop infinitely, which is what I have it set to right now. Or you can maybe just loop it twice you what that does. And then it would just basically sustain on the last node. You can have it loop forward, like we're doing now, backward or alternating, which is a palindromic loop, goes forward and then backward and then forward again like, like so. Let me set this back to infinite. So there I'm holding multiple pages and you can see you can get quite complex because this is a polyphonic instrument. So one last thing before we go on and that's this slide are at promised to talk about here. Button is random and this slider gives you a certain percentage of randomness that you can decide to employ. This drop-down menu allows you to pick what is going to be actually randomized. So if I set this to 0, and I have a sound for instance, and I set it to 100%, and I click the random button. You'll see almost everything in the plug-in mode. And now what does it sound like? That's much different. If I hit it again. Very strange. One more time. It's pretty noisy. So you see you can have a very drastic effect with this button. But what it is good for other than experimentation is to slightly alter an existing sound just for some variation. So I'll play you out here with just some variations on this particular song. Everlasting preset. And I'm going to set the randomization here to very low, let's say 3%. And I'll randomize everything except router and pitch. And we'll let it play and I'll see you on the other side. 14. 13 EFM1: So let's take a look at D, E, F, M in logic. This is their dedicated FM synthesizer. And it's a very simple looking interface, but an incredibly powerful instrument on many levels. So we just hit a note and I have everything kind of zeroed out here. Notice that basically all we here now is a sine wave. And that's this frequency or this oscillator right here called the carrier. So the basic premise of FM synthesis is this. We have a carrier frequency which is typically mapped to the keyboard. Any modulating frequency also that follows the keyboard. And in the case of the EFM n1, this is, can be tuned to a harmonic of the carrier frequency. So when I hit a note here, I'm hearing right now just the carrier frequency. And this can be tuned in terms of harmonics above the fundamental pitch. So this pitch is the fundamental. There's the second harmonic, third, fourth, fifth, and so on. And if you remember, harmonics are simply integer multiples of the fundamental frequency. So if we were, for instance, playing an a for 40 or whatever, preconceived what one octave above that would be 880 and so on. So where does the FM come in? Well, let's set this back to the first fundamental pitch. Then I'll set the modulating frequency. Let's say to the second harmonic. Then I'm going to use this center dial here to turn up the FM intensity. This is the intensity of the frequency modulation. Let's hear that. Alright, so already we have an incredibly rich Tamar going on just from that little bit of modulation. And nothing else. Notice there's no filter in this particular sense, so you could filter it after the fact. But FM synthesis on its own really doesn't, doesn't need filtering. So what happens if we increase the modulating frequency? Let's hear what happens to the tumor. So very rich, juicy sounds coming just from that little bit of harmonica modulation there. You can also change the waveform that's modulating the carrier frequency. That will significantly change. Even though we can't really see the shape that's going on, we can hear it. Okay. So these, the center and these two side sections are the meat of this plug-in. Everything else is modulation or global controls. So going back to the global controls, we have the unison button here, which basically is doubling every voice. You have any legato setting, which if you remember, legato is the same as mono, but it doesn't repeat the attack phase. So if I had mono here and I play two adjacent nodes here, that attack phase repeating each time. Whereas if I put it on legato, it's a smooth or connection between the two. Anything all we actually up to, uh, 16 voices. Dorsal glide control, which allows portmanteau type of effects between notes, legato, mono mode. Then there's a couple of other global controls here. This is a transposition. And you can go to full octaves below and above. So right now we'll just set it to none. So there's no transposition going on, and there's also some global tuning here as well. Down below we have a sub-oscillator level, so adds a thicken up the sound of sine wave an octave below the detuning feature and get some thickness that way as well. I want to take these off as I demonstrate them. Then here there's an LFO. And this LFO can do one of two things. It can create a vibrato on this side or modulate the frequency. Modulation intensity, this knob here, on this side, and here's your rate. So let's hear both of those. Here's vibrato cool animation going on right here. And then we have the FM. So that's going to be animating this nob, even though remember it's not actually going to animate some really nice things going on there. And let me zero the LFO for the time being. There's a velocity sensitive sensitivity knob down below here for the amplitude envelope. This one is hardware to amplitude. You tack there the decay, sustain and release as should be used to by now. And then up on top we have in modulation envelope which can control one of two things or both at once. You modulator, modulator pitch, this knob and the FM depth, which is the center. So this can be done with the course of this envelope. Let's have a listen. I'm going to turn up the release so that if we do something up here, we can actually hear the modulation. Otherwise, if this is shorter than this, we won't hear the entire modulation occur. So let's look at modulating the modulator pitch. If I turn this up and I'll turn up the attack, that sounds like you hear that kind of thing being modulated shape of this envelope. Turn that off for a second. Let me turn on the hub depth now a little bit. See what that does. Of course, you can have both going on at once for treatment strongly, this and this one. What's that? So you can get a lot of cool effects, lot of sound design type things coming out of this particular instrument. Very nice. And zero these out. There's also something here called fixed on the carrier frequency. I didn't talk about. What this does is it locks pitch here so that the keyboard doesn't have an effect. And this can be useful because this is still tracking the keyboard where the carrier frequency is fixed. So that can create some unusual type of things. Let me, I'm going to turn down this turn everything off. So can hear that in a minute. What would kill push? It's basically staying at the same frequency there. But if I start to change the modulation, the actual modulating frequency flowing or key tracking as opposed to the carrier, which is an interesting kind of effect. In the bottom right-hand corner, there's a button called Randomize. And it's a very powerful little button because it will randomize pretty much every parameter in this plugin. It's a very nice way to generate some variety on an existing sound or just create something completely new. For instance, here I have evolving lead me play this little arpeggiating thing going on. So if I wanted to take that sound and come up with a few ways, few variations on that side, I can take this down and you want to start very small with, let's say, 3% randomization. And I'll just click it a few times and see what happens to the sound. So you can see even at 3%, after you click it a few times, you can get quite a distance away from where you started. Just remember as you, as you do this, there is no undo, There is no going back. So if you did come across a sound that you really like, once you click this button, that sound is now gone unless you can recover it by trying to retrace what happened. So when you do get a sound, make it a habit to go up here, Save As, and then you'll have it. So let me just take a little sound here and play you out with some arpeggiation and manipulate the parameters manually. As we go out. 15. 14 RetroSynth: We're going to have a look now at the retro Synth. This is an awesome foreign one synthesizer. Does a variety of things in a very tight little interface. That's, I think you'll enjoy it quite a bit. This does a lot of things that the other sense do, but it's all in one and you can mix and match things together. So let's just, first of all look at this. The main control for this thing is here up in the upper left as analog sink, table and FM. So what's going on there? If you look the bottom section, as I change these controls, although they change color, they don't really change function because they're really the same. What we have here is an amplitude envelope, the filter envelope. There's an LFO, there's a vibrato, there's a glide control. So these things are always there. In fact, the filter in the center and this sub-oscillator sine wave here and the volume in the effects section here all also stay the same. So really all that's changing when we change these things is the way that the sound itself is generating this, this top, upper left section here. So let's start with analog. So the analog section here we have two shapes that are possible with a blend controller and mixed control minute start with this one. Let's hear. So here we have a square wave that we can modulate the pulse width download elsewhere. Here's a sawtooth. There's noise burst or white-noise, their own below. We have same thing. And sought to a triangle wave in this case. Next to that we have shaped modulation and vibrato. So how did these were? Also, these are some tuning features here that I shouldn't mention. In the filter section. We have a low-pass filter set right now at 24 dB slope. And here also I can just grab it like this and I can increase the resonance controlling. These controls are changing here as I move. It can also change it from the numbers themselves just by dragging, dragging and sliding. There's a key slider here which is related to key follows. So if you want the cut-off frequency to fall, keyboard, the range of keyboard you're playing can use this. So these controls in the bottom here allow you to modulate filter parameters. Typically the, well, the cutoff is what's being modulated and you have two ways to do that. This will set the intensity of the filter cutoff modulation. It's being controlled by the UN, an oscillator, sine wave oscillator from oscillator one. You can also have it controlled from the LFO down here. I'm going to show you how to do that in a second as far as modulating parameters or the envelope here, I can also be modulating the cutoff. Here we have sub-oscillator at psi level, sine wave sub-oscillator. We have coursing feature and a flanger feature that can be offered. Again, it's good to have these things built into a preset if you like the way they sound as opposed to depending on an external plugin. Then there's a glide control down here, which is a typical global parameter. Now let's look at how these modulators work. So if we want to, for instance, modulate the shape of this particular sound here. It turn up the control here to l, up to the LFO side. And I have an LFO set here. And you can kind of hear that thing rocking and rolling. Now this is a square wave, triangle wave, saw tooth and so on. You can set this to sink for free right now it's set to a quarter note triplet. I could set it to a free settings so I can just control it. Means if hurts. There's also a via control here. If I turn this all the way up and I have the mod wheel set here. Now when I hold a note. I'm moving the mod wheel in order to control the intensity of modulation. So that's useful. You can also have aftertouch control that now aftertouch, as we mentioned earlier, is how hard you press the key after it's already depressed if you continue to press it, in other words, after it's been touched, you can actually use that as a another controllers. So right now if I have this set to aftertouch, let me hit it and I'll just push harder and softer and you can hear what's going on. Okay, so that's kinda nice way to control modulation. Let's go to the filter side. And if I do that, I can have this filter here controlling the same parameter. So you heard that kind of go up and then sustain level. And then when I released. So that's kind of nice. Here is a vibrato control. Vibrato is a dedicated LFO in this particular instrument. So these two windows Control the two. If I go to vibrato, vibrato is going to modulate the pitch. Obviously. I turn that up a little bit. Clearly here that doing its thing. Vibrato is one of those things. It's very useful to connect to a mod wheel because you can use it as you're playing to kinda give a vibrato is a real instrument would. And you can also have it set to aftertouch. So if I did that, so I'm just pushing a little harder after I touched the key in order to get that to work. Okay, let me turn that down for the time being. So now we have all the modulation turned off. This filter envelope we already heard. And then there's the good old amplitude envelope at the end. Both of these being velocity sensitive. Let's switch now to sink. And you'll notice that we do that we have all the same controls down here. This, this has changed somewhat. We have some different wave shapes to choose from. So in the sink setting of this upper left-hand section here, we can control the sync between the two wave shapes. Let's hear that. Some nice timbres coming out of that. And we can also modulate the sink. I put this on envelope here, or I'm not envelope with LFO. And I have this set to triangle wave and I have it set to aftertouch. So let's hear what happens when I press a little harder. Okay, So some very nice effects there. And the same with vibrato as it was with analog. You can modulate that or increase it or decrease it along with some sort of after touch or mod wheel or whatever controller. Everything else has remained the same. So I'm not gonna go over it. You can filter things, you can put effects on it. And you can apply modulation for many of these sources at the bottom here. Moving forward to table, table has also two wave shapes and these are wave tables. Can actually change the order and do different things with those. But let's just hear from oscillator one. Very nice single cycle wave shapes there. Once you start to blend it with oscillator to some nice effects there as well. Again, we can modulate the shape. Right now it's set to aftertouch on this triangle down here at the bottom. So that's the first three. Last one is fm. This is similar to the EFM. One instrument. A frequency modulated based synthesized zones here, just off the, off the bat, how it sounds. So some nice sounds coming out of this thing just right off the bat. I think you'll have fun with this. If, once you start to explore the things and what I'm gonna do here is I'm going to just throw in a simple little baseline, little quirky FM synth bass. And I'm going to turn on the heater and just play around with some of the similar controls as it plays. No. No, no. No. No, no. No, no. No. No, no. No, no, no, no. 16. 15 Sculpture Part1: Okay, So this is sculpture, it's a component physical modeling since uses a very different approach than anything else we've looked at so far. It's very complex, so I'm gonna take my time and go through each section with you. What we have here, and let's look at the signal path first, we have the objects that are generating the sound here, 123. Talk about those in a second. There's the material pad and the center which describes the type of string that's being vibrated. Think about component modeling and typically uses the metaphor of a vibrating string, which is animated here in the center. And it tries to create a sound based on a string made of a particular type of material could be nylon, wood, steel, glass, or anywhere in between. And it uses the metaphor of it vibrating within a certain media or environment, which could have a very high media loss, meaning there's not much wring out or very low meaning or is wearing out. From there. This generates the sound, goes over to the amplitude envelope hair, typical ADSR, up to the wave shaper, which is a noise generator or noise saturate or down to the filter section, multimode filter, high-pass, low-pass, and so on. Up to a delay built-in delay section with typical parameters there, down to the body EQ section, which we'll talk about. Up to this built-in limiter, which can be set to Pali or mono or both. Then out. So it's kind of a strange signal path, but nonetheless, once you get used to it, you kind of know what's going on. So going back to the objects, there are basically two types of objects. One of them is a exciter type object, which here are the choices for that. Impulse. Strike gravity, strike, pick bot, bot, wide noise and blow. That's a strike. A blow noise. It's kind of a bot being dragged across a string and so on. So there are different types of effects you can get. It tries to emulate the exciting or the initiation of vibration on a particular string. This object here has all the same excitation methods, but it also has disturbing methods. And what this is is once the string gets to vibrating, you can set one of these things to stop it from vibrating or not to stop it but to interfere with its vibration. For instance, here's something called bouncing. Let's listen to that. So it's almost like a ball has been dropped on the string as it's vibrating. Then this object down here only has disturbing type of functions. So this has, this has both, this has exciting, this has disturbing. Now what do these controls do? Well, that depends on what this is set to. So if we look and you can go here to Logic Pro instruments, I've already pulled it up here. And this gives you a table of the controls or the excitation methods and also a description of what they do and then what those particular three controls will do. Strength, timber, and the variation. So these three controls, it's also this philosophy sensitivity, slider on the bottom. So for instance, Boeing of a string. If you choose bow, the strength would be the speed. The timbre control would be the bow pressure. And the variation controls would be the slip stick characteristics. So each one has its own thing. Now if we go to the disturb or damp table, we're going to get it. Another similar thing where it has the name of the particular function, the description, and what the strength timber, and variation controls will do. So there's no way you can remember all those things. That's why they have those tables. If you get used to using this instrument, you probably want to print those out. Once it goes there. And now we can choose. What is the material of the string being used. You can hear those different steel, glass, wood. Nylon can certainly hear the differences in those things. This media loss can see as I turn it up, I get much less wring out. Whereas if I turn it down and staring longer, There's a tension modulation here, which is emulating what happens when you or pluck a string harder, normal and you get some variation in the pitch. This is a resolution control which changes the number of oscillators that are used to create the sound. This can be low or high, uses more CPU when it's high. But you may want to lower resolution sound that's very subjective there. You can map things differently in the center here based on key scale, where he, where you're playing on the keyboard, or based on release. When you release the, if you have a very long release here and have a different setting here in the center for the release. The wave shaper gives you a couple of different ways to saturate. The filter here gives you highpass, lowpass, peak and so on. As I said before, there's cutoff. These are all typical things we've already seen in velocity sensitivity is nothing new here. There's a built-in delay that has some typical parameters, including a stereo spread and a groove function which will line up with the beat if you choose to synchronize the delay with the beat, you can have it free, or you can have it synchronized with the division of the beat. The body AQ is unusual. This is what a first, a default setting. You'd get the typical low, mid, and high controls here. But if you hold that down, you'll see that there's a whole bunch of other, other settings here. This is a banjo setting. Necessarily going to sound like a banjo. But what it does is it gives you the spectral profile of a banjo that you can then use to sort of sculpt the sound that you already have going. You can make that a fine structure or a looser structure which is more smooth depending on what you want. And there's all these other instruments sounds in there. So that's the whole top end of this thing. There are some basic things we have already seen global controls like poly mono legato, glide control, tuning, bender range and so on. Those are things like I said, you're going to see these things in just about every sense that there is. So it's nothing new. So let's take a break here and come back in part two, we'll talk about this intense modulation section. In the bottom. 17. 16 Sculpture Part2: Okay, looking at the modulation section here at the bottom, you'll see him number of possibilities down the far bottom here we have Alpha-1 and Alpha-2 jitter. Dedicated vibrato, velocity and note on random and then to blank controller functions. So starting with LFO one, Let's turn one on. There are two possible, possible targets with this LFO, and I'll set, set it to pitch so, so we can hear things clearly. In turn that up a little bit. Right now set to a sine wave. Let's see what we get. Here. It is without and with. We can set that to sync, to beat, or we can set it freely. We can set it to a mono phase, which means it's always going to play the same LFO no matter how many notes I play or poly, which means it's going to set off more than one row for each note. There's different waveforms here. You can have a triangle, rectangle, unipolar, and bipolar is a sample and hold a lot of cool features here. You can also have this by using this curve feature down here actually in this only works with certain ones. Yeah, If we look at the sawtooth wave, you see we can change the shape of it with this. Now down below. I'll put that back on sample and hold and get this envelope decay and delay feature. We saw this in another sense before this. This delays the onset of the LFOs influence and this decays the LFO influence over time. So let's hear it with a delay first. Okay, So it's kinda cool this here with the decay. So it'll start out modulating, slowly dying away. So kinda cool. You can have two different targets for this LFO. And there's another LFO right next to it, which gives you two additional targets and to another complete set of controls. Then there's something called jitter. Let me turn this off before we go on. There's jitter. Shooter is like an LFO with a, with a sample and hold in a way, kind of moves around and jitters around randomly and you hear what I mean right here. So it's cool when he wanted to kinda jittery type of sound, which is why it's called jitter. You can have two different target for each one of the jitter functions as well. Let's look at vibrato. This is a dedicated vibrato modulation. And right now it's set to zero. There's something here called via depth, via vibe control. And if I look down below where it says many control assignments, it says vibe, depth control, aftertouch. This means that currently the via control is the aftertouch feature of your keyboard. If you have one, I do have that control on mine. So as I increase the aftertouch or push down more after I initially pushed down the key, you'll hear the vibrato start to kick in more. So let's hear what it is. First of all, with no via control. Here it is with a lot of control. So it's increasing the intensity of the vibrato. With aftertouch. Again, we have this phase, a model to poly spectrum. Here we have all the same waveforms we hid in the LFO's and a curve control it, distorts the wave. Then we have, turn that off. Then we have velocity. And note on random Griswold velocity. Let's look at pitch. I'll turn it all the way up. So this is going to have velocity affect pitch. So if I hit the same key with different velocities, I'll get different pitches. So that's fairly obvious. There's also something called note random. So every time I hit it, hit the same node, I will get a different pitch. So that's an interesting thing as well. Let me turn that off. And then here again we have these two blank controller assignments. Alright, so before I go on, we'll take a break and I'll come back and explain those two envelope here that can be set to different targets each. And this morph pad, which is unusual on its own right. 18. 17 Sculpture Part3: Okay, so let's look at the envelope here and there's two different ones. I'm going to set the first one to pitch. So set that as my main, main target. Their turn up the thing a little bit here. And notice that I've hit this little red button here that says Record, Note plus control. So what's going to happen is I'm going to hold a note and move the mod wheel. And as I do, it will modulate pitch. But not only that, it will record the movements of the mod wheel. So check it out. There, you have it. Now if I play a different pitch, it's going to follow the same contours what I played before. You can also loop these things are as they sustain section here, you can loop it in different segments of the envelope. Do some very unusual things with this. And once again, there's two envelopes. Each one has its own set of two targets. Alright. Now the morph pet is also an unusual thing and very specific to sculpture. What this allows you to do is to set center position here for whatever controls you have. Where this now, when this puck is here, all those controls will be as you see them. Now what I can do is there's some dice like icons on the side here. What this is going to do, that's what the four corners, it's going to randomize. Now, I can set this to, let's say 20, 19%. When I hit this button, it's going to randomize these four locations based on where this is the starting point. So if I do that, now when I move this puck, you'll see all the movement that's going on based on the position of this puck. That happened automatically just by hitting the random button, I could make it more extreme, but I didn't want to be too wild. Now, with this button in the notes, this is next to it, note plus movement. I'm going to click this all the note and then move this around as it's, as it's being sustained. And it's going to record those movements. So let's check it out. There. You have it. So now when I play another note, you'll see a little red marker here that follows the same path. Very, very cool. There's a depth control here on that envelope so you can tighten it up once it's created. You can also move individual things around. You can do a lot of things with this morph envelope that I haven't seen in any other sense. Very powerful sound design tool in general. Sculpture is. So I hope you have fun with it. I encourage you to experiment. I'll just play you out here with a little loop on it. Tight base preset, move around some parameters. So you can see here's some things. 19. 18 Alchemy: Alright, so we're gonna take a look at alchemy. Alchemy is an incredible instrument that come stock with logic and in its own right, it could be its own application. And in fact, in the past it was, we're not gonna go incredibly in-depth into it because it's that will be a future tutorial. It's very deep. But what I am going to show you here is how to XX, access some of the presets that are built into it, how to operate it in general. And I think once you start to explore alchemy, you're going to have a lot of fun with it. So let's first look at the three different views we have. So we have brows, which shows you the entire library here and there's about 300 built-in presets. I believe there's simple, which gives you a performance patterns, some basic controls. And then there's advanced where you can get into the nuts and bolts of how these sounds are being produced. So starting with the brows control, you can choose various categories here, and then subcategories and then genre and then timber. So let's say I choose something rhythmic and maybe something melodic and something in electronica, and something bright. And you'll notice that as we choose things, the list of possibilities gets smaller and smaller here is it kind of narrows things down based on the tags that have been given. So if I choose this, though, this is what I get. So I'm just holding some pitches here. Now, you notice this performance pair at the bottom here is written out sudden pulsing has I'm holding these notes. I could move that. You notice start to get dramatic changes in the sound. When you're set to a certain area here, you can see that these controls are in a certain place. And then when you move them, things start to change an angle in-between the presets, sort of morphing between all the things that are going on here. So it's a really cool kind of performance pad idea that you can play as you're holding nodes, sustaining chords and of course record or automate this kind of movement. Let's check out some other presets. I'm going to reset these to all. And let me go to, let's say sound effects. Sci-fi, house in bright. There's something here called analog bubbles. Me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me. So some cool actual bubbling sounds going on there. You'll notice that there's also comments here. It says here, aftertouch Ben's the pitch downwards. Let's try that and see, as I press harder on the note, the aftertouch, see what it does. It certainly does bend the pitch downwards, so it does what it says. Now, what if I wanted to, let me reset all these sandwiches searching for a sound. I'm not sure what's on, but I know kinda what I want it to be. For instance, let's say evolving drone. I'll just type it down here. See what comes up. Well, we have three different ones. Let's check one out. Cool. Of course there's all these other variations of that sun moving performance pad around. But this one. So you can see some very cool sound design. Each type sounds you might use for film work, post-production or sound design. Now, you can also rate the sounds. So let's say rated this one and I liked the way that we go back here, so I read it right now is three. I can also choose by rating here and find the ones that I've rated, and then choose which ones I like the best that way, Let's try a different category. How about metallic? Caution. Okay, a couple of things show up there. This one, so that one doesn't have a built-in arpeggiator, so I'll turn this one on here. I have a little faster track. You can see how the variety of sounds is incredible. You can be all day here and never really get tired because there's just so much variety even within each preset, just by moving around this morph pad. Tremendous amount of variety. So there's also a built-in arpeggiator here. There's a built-in effects chain which is incredible to have that inside the plug itself. And if we go to the simple, we can have just this amount showing. So that way we can save some real estate on our screen. But when you go to Advanced, you'll see basically for sources that are being used for sound here. Each one, you can look at it independently. You can look at all of them together. A, B, C, and D shows you what they are here. You can load in sound files in this thing. You can do things like spectral pitch, format, granular, and types of effects, as well as loading an entire sampler instrument from, let's say the EXS24 can be in just one of the voices. Pretty astounding really. The degree of control on the degree of a complexity that you can create here. The center section here is modulation section. So you've got various LFOs. I believe you can have up to as many as you want. I believe in terms of LFOs, different shapes going on there. There's an ADD ADHD SR. This is a type of envelope that can be used to modulate any other parameters. Just wanted to give you a brief look at this instrument. Because as you get more comfortable with the parameters of synthesis, you may want to explore some of these more complex plugins and really dive deep into the world of synthesis and create your own world. So that's it for this video. We'll come back with a look at some of the things that come stock with Ableton Live. 20. 19 Tension: Alright, so Ableton Live has its own version of a sculpture or a physical or component modeling synth. It's called tension and have a preset here called big Columba from that particular instrument, you see there's several different categories. When we play, play around with the arpeggiator a little bit, you can hear how it sounds. Okay, so you get an idea there. As sculpture had three different objects for exciting and disturbing. This particular synth only has two sections for those operations. We have an exciter here with four different possible ways to excite bot, hammer, bouncing, hammer bouncing, and plectrum. There's a damper section, which would be the same as in logic, the disturb type of section. There's ways, various parameters for that here. These parameters also have velocity sensitivity along the top and key follow sensitivity along the bottom. With logic. If you have this on the left-hand side here turned on, you get a little help screen here. So as you mouse over certain parameters, you'll get an idea of what they do. And that will help you sculpt out the sound you're looking for. So I'm not going to go over all of these parameters. You will find some that are more sensitive than others. For instance, let me play this again and I'll show you what I mean. So you see that some of those things have very pronounced effect, whereas other ones seemingly no effect. So it just depends on what it is you're moving and what type of sound you have coming in. Down here is sort of an envelope control section for the string decay time. You've got. This slider sets how much the strings to Kate will be modulated by note. You can have the note actually affect the decay time. This is a string decay ratio and so on. So there's various things here, and many of them relate to what's in sculpture. So if you understand sculpture and you get to this center, it'll seem a lot simpler. This termination section down here has to do with going back to the metaphor of this, of the string, any, let's say a finger playing a string. You can set the amount of force applied to the string by a finger. The stiffness of the finger against the string, the stiffness of the thread itself. So these are three other types of controls, different approach to the algorithm here. There's something here called body. And if you remember in sculpture there was the body EQ. This is a similar function, but with a lot less choices. Piano, guitar, violin, and sort of generic. This is the main screen. And then when you go to this section here in this filter, slash global, so this is a, there's a multimode filter here, 12 db low-pass filter, 12 db low-pass filter, or 24 dB, if you remember, this is the decibels relates to the slope of the filter. So the higher the decimal rating, the more pronounced the cut or the slope will be. In other words, it will cut off more frequencies faster. There's an envelope section that can be used to modulate cutoff filter here, and you can choose those parameters here. Built-in LFO that has several wave choices. That can also be used to modify the cutoff filter. And key follow can also adjust cutoff filter. Let's hear a couple of things. So you see this can also be set to free or ST, to the beat. And then there's some global settings here for a polyphony unison, ornamental controls and various things you'd find in many other sense, you, as you've probably understood by now, a lot of these parameters start to repeat and you start to, once you see them once, twice, three times. You don't have to figure out what they mean. You already know. I'll play out here with a little arpeggiator metal sound and see where that takes us. 21. 20 Analog: Okay, let's look at the analog emulation synth called analog in Ableton Live. And it has all the controls we've seen already. Just laid out a little differently. The controls, we manipulate them are a little different, but really all the same processes. So let's look at what we have in terms of source. We have oscillator one. There's a noise white noise source and you can also change the color of that. Listen to the noise. Right now I have this arpeggiator on me. Turn that off. The LFO. There's the oscillator one and there's an oscillator to oscillate or one can have the basic shapes we've seen, sinewave, sawtooth, square, sampling, whole. Likewise oscillator to all the same choices. There's something here says F1, F2, so you can control how much of the sound goes through filter one as opposed to filter too. There's a filter one here. Filter to hear. Filter one of these choices, low pass, various slopes and pass notch and so on. There's also formant filters. And these are filters that have little bumps in resonance, similar to the way our actual sounds like voice may have. And you can hear the effects of those pretty clearly. Put everything through filter one. That's a low pass filter 24. Let's listen to the format. Definitely hear some resonance going on here. So different types of effects you can get with the filter. Cutoff and resonance control. There's an app control here and patrolling the bottom. So these are controls for pan and level. Here's an envelope that will control various things based on where you have it set here. And then two LFOs. Lfos, or you can choose the shape of those here. There's one, there's two. And the rate, and this can be a free LFO or sink to the beat. The way you assign an LFO to particular parameter is you, Let's say we set this LFOs at this beat. So we have a triangle wave. Now let's say I want to set that to cutoff frequency. I click on cutoff here around the frequency panel. And under LFO two or alpha one, I would choose the degree or intensity of this modulation. Let's hear that. Okay, you can do the same thing with the envelope here and key follow here. Also, the resonance can be modulated. So if I put this up a little bit, so I can have an LFO modulating both parameters at the same time here. So two LFOs can each be working independently to modulate various things in the plug-in. So it's, again, not very different from what we've already seen. There's a vibrato, here's a unison control, detuning and so on. Glissando or b glide control. All the things we've already seen. Let me little speciation going on this with some of the parameters. And the next step we'll look at vacuum in Pro Tools, which is again another analog emulation synth. 22. 21 Vacuum: Alright, so what we're hearing right here is vacuum. It's Pro Tools, analog emulation, synthesizer. And let's have a look at the interface, see what's here. And I think you're going to find it's pretty much everything we've seen before, nothing new. Here we have what's called what they call VT0, v1 and v2 CO2. These are oscillators, and you can choose the shape here, sawtooth triangle. There's a pulse width of zero, There's pulse width halfway. So this is sort of like a rectangular way with a modulator able pulse-width. Turn off the arpeggiator here. And actually I'm going to turn down VT0 two. So there's two, there's two control knobs here for volume. There's also a built-in overdrive and there's, there's a ring modulation, which is basically one modulating the other. So let's hear T01. We have again 2 ft, 4 ft, 8 ft, 16, 32. Again, things controlled the same way as we've seen it in the past. There's a fine tuning thing here. There's these little icons showing sort of tubes that will light up inappropriate times. This is V2, V1, V2 CO2. Very similar. Active control here. Waveshape wing includes down here we get a noise control. You can set envelopes to shape. In other words, you can have an envelope over here. Alter the shape of the wave itself. So that's this part. There's a little mixer section here, as I said, with an overdrive during some of these things up here that saturating. There's a high-pass filter and a low pass filter with changeable slope here, cutoff frequency resonance, key tracking also saturation in the filter itself. Envelope control over the filter. And this is the high-pass. Low-pass, same controls, two different types of filters. There is some analog controls here, drift and dust. And this just as a reference to the dirtiness, greediness of an analog signal. And the drift is pitch drift usually in analog circuits it tends to drift and kinda doesn't hold to stay in tune to well, But this, when you're doing things in digital and trying to emulate analog, you have to add some randomness in there if you want it to be authentic sounding. At the end here we have the output and again, some extra distortion there at the end. If we want to saturate the sound. There, there's no load one envelope to ADSR with velocity sensitivity at the end. It looked too hard word to the output. So this is the module modulation section, and you can see there's various sources here. And notice down in this little indicator in the bottom here, it tells you what the control is as you're moving. And so this is mod source envelope. One source envelope to be TODOs can actually be sources of modulation. So we have the source, we have depth, and then we have the destination, what's being modulated. For instance, if I take pitch and I want to modulate using envelope one, here, the tech little up, a little higher. Clearly modulating pitch based on this envelope. So that's modulator one and modulator too long bottom. Then we have little built-in arpeggiator here, which is quite nice. Also mod wheel and pitch bend. Under the little wrench here, you'll get global controls for pitch bend glide. These are things you usually see hidden and you can look at those and change them if you want. Here you can set the mod wheel to do different things based on what this is set right now Let's say set to vibrato. I'm going to turn this modulator off here. And let's just hear what the mod wheel does. So you can hear that putting in vibrato on there, the wall control would be actually changing the cutoff frequency on the filter. And you have the rate here. And also we can do a tremolo as well. So one thing that's not readily apparent, or these two little indicators here now this one, I click it. Nothing happens. This one, you'll notice a lot of things happen. And in fact, this is randomizing the entire instrument. So this might be one way to explore just trial and error wise, since you never know really what you're going to get when you hit this button. So it's a nice little plug-in. I'm going to play a little few things using this generic fat with a little arpeggiation. And I'll take you out with that. 23. 22 PresetCustomization: So how do you take an existing preset and make it your own? Well, that's pretty easy to do. You take an existing preset, you start moving some knobs and dials around till you get a Sony. Like it's really that simple. But now that you have a better understanding of what those knobs and dials do. You can get to where you wanna go a lot faster. So I've taken a preset here in the ES1 call filter bubble. And I'm just going to move around some things as it plays. I've got a little arpeggiator thing going in the background. I'm going to let it play, move around some parameters until they get a sound I like. And then I'll save that as a preset. Okay, Let's say we take that. We want to go up here and say, alright, just for lack of a better name, let's just call it bubble mod one. So it will automatically in logic, track you to the ES1 preset folder. If you're working on your own system, that's cool. You can just start accumulating presets. You can also navigate to an external folder if you want to, if you're not on your home computer or you want to share those with someone else. That's easily done. So that's one way you take a, take an existing parameter. You might want to find something that's close to what you have in mind. For instance, if you want a synth bass, you can audition some of these baselines and see what works for you in that way. I don't know why that one's playing solo. Let's try difficult sub base. Okay, let's try these other ones here, pluck base. So you might want a little more high-end in this one. You want to mess with the attack. Avian want some noise in the attack. Now notice I also have a little bit of reverb on in the background here, just, just for some flavor. You might want to turn that off a bit to see what you have in mind later down the road as far as putting reverb around there. And then again, you can go up here and say, Okay, plot base, I'm going to save that as it's covered 30 days. So now you have that. Then you can recall it. If you're on your own system, those things will always be there. If not, as I said, you can copy it into another folder and take them wherever you want. So another approach to customizing an existing preset is to use the random button. So here I have dark pad to select it as an existing preset and logic and the AS2, like that. This random slider here, and we talked about it briefly in the S2. But it's incredibly, incredibly powerful because you can choose Justice, Certain things to, to randomize. For instance, just the wave shapes. Just to Digi waves, just the filter is just the envelopes and so on. For all, which is everything or all except the router and pitch. So that's this router section here. And pitch or all except the vector envelope, which is as you remember this here. So if we just choose all, remember we start with this. I'm gonna make it a very small percentage here, change, let's say 3%. See what that does. Substantial change are ready. Try it again, no 3%. And I'll just keep going here. So I sort of like what that's doing right there as far as that modulation of the cutoff filter. So what if I make, make a permanent sort of modulation there? So I'm gonna go here and let's see, these are all being used right now, believe it or not, right now we have cutoff one already set here. And it's set to keyboard. Also, there's modulation set to a cutoff in version. Let me, I'm going to bypass this. Now I'm going to change this one too. Hello For one. And turn up the rate. See what happens here. Too fast. And maybe I want that thing to decay over time. If you remember how that works, I'll set this here so that over 2,300 milliseconds it will decay. Let's try that. Kind of a dirty sound there, but you get what I'm, what I'm trying to say here. You start with an existing sound. You then randomize it to some extent and that you can make it very wild or just a very small amount. You get to another place where it's close, then you find the perimeter that's going to really tweak it out to the get that sound you have in your head. Just for fun, let's turn this all the way up to 100%. Randomize the whole ball of wax here and see what happens. That happens sometimes. Let's try it again. That's pretty nasty. Long the lease term here, let's take that down. Let's do it again. So I wonder how that would sound with repair she ate are going. Okay. Pretty weird. Pretty weird. Anyway, you get the idea and I hope you can find your own. Sounds a lot easier than before taking this course. So we have one more video to kind of review and wrap things up. 24. 23 Review: Alright, just a little bit of a review and some final thoughts. So in this course we covered fundamental and commonly used synthesis methods. Talked about a few mini basics. We discussed sound fundamentals, amplitude, frequency, phase, and so on. We talked about synthesis terminology and fundamentals and all the things you'll see in just about every synth, hardware or software based. Talked about several software synthesisers and looked at them in depth. All of them come stuck with either Logic Pro, Ableton Live or Pro Tools. We talked about an approach to analyzing a preset and customizing it for your own needs. If you want to learn more in depth about any of these topics, let me recommend a few classic books on the subject. Curtis roads, computer music tutorials, considered the Bible in this area, it turns out computer music and synthesis in general. There's a great series. I believe they're about to come out with volume three. But the first two volumes were really, really good, called electronic music and sound design. What I'm wanting to buy Alessandra set Briana and married CEO Gary. I've read them both. They're fantastic. They use Max MSP is sort of a learning tool to learn synthesis. And if you read both of those books, you'll have a very, very firm grasp of the subject. There's two other books that are really good in a general way for writing and producing, making music. 74 strategies, strategies for electronic music producers by dentists to scientists, and making sound by Christopher odd twist. Both of these talk about some general ideas in terms of just creating music in the box and finding ways to get creative, unusual approaches. I think you'd enjoy both of those. Then there's a landmark series of articles called synths secrets, Gordon Reed's guide to synthesis. It's an extensive series that began in around 2003, I believe, publishing Sound on Sound magazine. And I think you can find most of those things online. In the future. I have a couple of ideas in mind of four new tutorials, alchemy in depth. I like to take a whole set of tutorials just on alchemy. It's a pretty, as you saw, extensive plug-in and take some time to go through it. Exploring third-party sense, creating custom sampler instruments. There can be a whole series just on how to create an instrument and all the multilayered multi velocity samples and things like that that can be used in a sampler. Creating Max for Live devices. Max is something I've been using for over 20 years now. And just in the last couple of years, been writing custom devices for use in Ableton. So it's nice to be able to manipulate devices that exist and also create your own. Then a general introduction to Maximus P for those people that want to pursue that area. It's a very deep program. There's also jitter, which is a video, video portion of Maximus P. So if there's interest, I would be happy to put together something for Max MSP, iOS synthesis. This is a whole, another area That's exploded in the last few years. There are so many apps out there, really powerful in-depth synthesis apps that mimic plugins or hardware, since that are just really outstanding. And the thing about iOS, apps are so ridiculously cheap. You can pick up some, sometimes $2, $5, $10, and you can get an app that's equivalent to a plug-in for 100 or $200. It's worth looking into and I'd be happy to do a whole set of tutorials on iOS synthesis. Then modular synthesis, sort of the opposite of that. Going into the analog, rural into hardware. And a lot of people want to get into it, but they don't really know where to start. So one idea is to put together a Getting Started type of tutorial that will help you sort of start with the basics and be able to build a system. Love to get your feedback on the course and ideas for future topics. So please send me a line at music and Philip magnesium.com where you can reach me through the pro audio files as well. Check out the logic session included with the course to hear some of the instruments and some custom presets used and musical context. Thanks for watching. 25. 24 LogicSession: So just a quick word about the logic session that's included with the course. I used all the instruments we've discussed, or not all of them, but most of them, at least all the logic instruments. And I took an unusual approach here, which was to use these to drum loops. And one is a variation on the other. You can find them in Apple Logic Pro as source material for every other track. So I would copy this to another instrument and then subtract and possibly randomize and transpose these particular events. A lot of subtracting of events in order to make sense for the instrument and then experiment with some sounds on the instrument itself. What happens when you do that is, you know, things tend to line up nicely because everything is happening when the event takes place in the drums. And so things sound very tight and at the same time you can get some unusual harmonies and things you didn't expect. Also, if you, if you do some randomization and you keep the original events, you end up forcing the instrument to do things that it doesn't normally do or wanna do. And doubling of midi events on a monophonic instrument, for instance, where tries to play one note and is forced to play another really quickly or just slightly off. So it forces it to do things they wouldn't normally do. And that's called the experimentation. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. But it's an approach. I hope you enjoyed the course. Thanks for listening, thanks for watching.