Synthesis and Sound Design for Music Production and Composition: The Complete Beginner's Guide

1. COURSE OVERVIEW: Welcome to the complete beginners guide to synthesis and sound design. This course for musicians have all levels is a comprehensive guide to using any synthesizer to design your own unique sounds and music production. My name is Steve lipid and I'll be your instructor. I've been creating music electronically for over 30 years and during that time, I've gained experience designing sounds and composing and producing music with dozens of physical and virtual analog and digital synthesisers. This course contains over six hours of video lessons taken, right from the basics of synthesis to complex sound design with in-depth and detailed explanations. At every stage, we'll look at synthesizer architecture and how the different elements of a synthesizer work together. Why the various wave shapes generated by oscillators create different sounds, how to choose the one you need, and how to use them in combination. How to use ADSR envelope to control the dynamics and shape the sound of your synth patch. How to use different filters to create the perfect tone by removing or enhancing particular frequencies. How to add movement and depth to your sounds with low-frequency oscillators. And how to use effects such as Chorus distortion, delay, and reverb to make your sounds more interesting. Towards the end of the course, we'll use what we've learned about synthesis and sound design to create some really high-quality professional patches that you can either use directly or tailored to your own sound. You can follow along and create them yourself. I've also made them available as presets for download, along with a glossary containing explanations of all the terms used throughout the course. But we're using the incredible vital software synthesizer for most of the course, which is available as a free download and will run on any reasonably modern Windows, Mac, or Linux computer. I'll then introduce you to three other very different synthesisers to show you how to take what you've learned and apply it to any sense. Whether you are brand new to synthesis or an experienced sound designer, beat maker or producer. This course will really help you to understand how to construct precisely the sound you're looking for, for your music. So join in and learn the art of sound design for music production using synthesis to create any sounds you can imagine. 2. INTRODUCTION: Hi there, my name is Steve lipid and in this course we're gonna take a look at an introduction to synthesis and how we can use synthesisers to, to create sounds for music composition. Throughout the course, we're going to cover a number of topics, but it really is gonna be about the basics of synthesis and how to take synthesizer with his basic scratch patch to really create any sound that you want. So there's a number of topics we're gonna cover. First of all, we're going to look at how a synthesizer actually works on the key elements of a synthesizer. We're going to have a look. The different waveforms that we can use as the basis for our sound. We're going to look at how we can use filters to affect that sound in various different ways. And we're gonna look at envelopes and really how we can begin to really shape how that sound is expressed. We'll take a look at modulation and how we can use. We can use different parts of the synthesizer to affect different the different tones and characteristics of the sounds that would make it as that plate. Then we also have a look at how we can use effects such as reverb, distortion and chorus and things like that to really add some character to the southwest has been created. Finally then, um, we'll have a look at how this knowledge that we've got can be applied across different types and different kinds of synthesisers. We'll look at some patches. So we'll create some patches of various different types of patches and lead patches, atmospherics, pads and some percussion sounds. Some people, it sounds kind of piano like sounds that we can use to construct the kind of music you can hear playing in the background now. And in fact, all of the sounds that are being used in this music you can hear in the background the patches that will create urine. His course. 3. GETTING THE MOST FROM THE COURSE: What are the things that you'll need as prerequisites for this course. Well, actually you won't need anything more than what you're watching on now. But if you want to follow along, then the bare minimum requirement that you'll need will be a computer of some kind. Nothing more than that. It can be Windows, it can be Linux, it can be a Mac computer. I'll be using a Mac, but the same things will apply across all the software that I showed you. You'll be able to use across all of those operating systems. Now, you may use a digital audio workstation. So something like GarageBand or Logic Cubase, ProTools, Ableton Live, any of those tools that will be completely fine, but actually the synthesisers that we're going to use primarily for the course. It will actually runners his own standalone app and we'll cover that in the next section. The other thing I would highly recommend, if you really want to get the most out of the course, I'm really be able to listen to the nuances as you adjust the sounds within the synthesisers are really good quality pair of headphones. I would recommend listening on headphones if you possibly can. Finally, although it's not vital, it'd be really, really beneficial to you if you've got some sort of midi controller, keyboards, piano style keyboard that you can plug in to your computer, usually through USB, that you can play along in the synthesized. And now the synthesized we're going to use does allow you to achieve the same with mouse clicks. But if you really want to stop playing chords or complex melodies than a midi controller, keyboard is really going to help you. Let's move on quickly. I just want to show you the synthesizer that we're going to be using for this course and how you can go and get it. 4. GETTING THE VITAL SYNTH: Okay, so let's have a look at the synthesisers that we're gonna be using for the majority of this course. Now there are hundreds, if not thousands, of software and hardware synthesisers. But really this course is aimed at the basics of synthesis. So anything that you take during this course, you'll be able to apply to any other synthesizer. For this course I've chosen to use vital. You can find vital that HTTP codon for slash forward slash vital, the audio. Why have I chosen vital? Well, the main reason that I've chosen vital, and it is actually quite a complex synthesized and I'll cover that in a second. But the main reason that I've chosen vital is for It's really visual interface and I think it's really helped to get these concepts across to you. It has, like I say, some very, very advanced features which you can build on later. But in this course we're gonna focus on the basics. So what I would do or what I would ask you is to really focus on the basics that I'm showing. You. Don't be too tempted to play around inside vital. Just save that for later. Once you've got a really good understanding of the basics of synthesis, then vital. Ready as a world-class synthesizer. And it's got many, many advanced features that you can continue to learn on your journey. One of the other main reasons that I've chosen vital is it is absolutely free. If we scroll down here on the fights or webpage, you can see that he's got lots of very advanced features. But if we get down to here, we can see that there is a free tier for vital. Now there are paid tiers as well and the development mats Ital has made this available for free, but for slightly more money for twenty-five dollars or $80, or you can subscribe for £5 a month, $5 a month, whichever is best for you. You do get a lot more features, a lot more presets and access to more wave tables and various other features. But more than that, I would, I would say if you can afford to pass money onto the developer max, I'd sell. Having been previously a professional software developer, I can't tell you how many, hundreds, probably thousands of hours have gone into making this synthesizer. If you can, if you can afford it, I would certainly recommend that you try to support the developer. It works across every operating system, as I said before, it doesn't matter whether you're on Windows or Linux or MacOS. And it's relatively easy to install. So you can find the install from this website. There are some slides, constraints device on that is you do need a relatively modern graphics card. Anything in the last 567 years will be absolutely fine. It is reinforced 64-bit operating systems, but other than that, you should have no problem running it. It will run in any door, whether that's pro Tools for AX or Pro Tools, Audio units for something like logic or GarageBand or VST instruments for just about every other digital, digital audio workstation or door. But there is a standalone app as well. So when you download it as a standalone app, and you can run it completely outside the DAW if that's your preference. 5. INITIAL SETUP OF VITAL: So with vital, I'll be running it inside logic throughout this course. This is just the way that I've got the audio routed to be able to record this course. But if you're running a standalone app, Let's just one or two things that you should take a look at. So it'll just run as a standard, standard application. And I can play inside the standalone app. If you've got a midi controller keyboard, you need to go set up inside the settings. If you click on the bottle logo in the top left here, open up this window here. Inside here. You should just make sure you've got this check for updates. The purple button is highlighted there, and this will make sure that you get the latest version of vital at all times. You can sit inside here the screen resolution. You can drag one of the corners of the screen and drag it out to whatever size you'd like inside here. Don't worry about these too much. As I say, I'm slightly strangely, yours will definitely look different, different to this. This is just the way that I've routed the audio for this recording. The important thing down here is usually when it's installed, your, your midi keyboard won't be enabled. So just go down to here, find your midi keyboard here I'm using a, actually a key step 37. So I'm just going to make sure that that box is checked next to your keyboard. And that way you'll be able to get sound out from your keyboard or receive signals from your keyboard into vital, that viceroy can produce the sounds for you. One other thing while we're here is, by default, vital comes with a setting for display units, which is slightly different to most synthesisers that you'll use. For this course. I'd like you to do is just pop onto the advanced tab here. This, this display setting down here. We would just set that from semitones two hertz. This will mean that although semicircular is certainly very interested in way of configuring your sounds. And perhaps a more intuitive way of configuring your sounds by setting it to hurts, you'll find that that translates much better across the vast majority of other synthesisers that you'll go on to use. 6. TYPES OF SYNTHESISER: As I mentioned previously, there are many, many hundreds and thousands of different types of software and hardware synthesiser. And they all work in slightly different ways. They can be grouped into, into different categories of synthesizer. And again, there are many of these, but the most common ones that you'll come across. Other ones that we see on the screen here. This is subtractive synthesis, additive synthesis, frequency modulation, wave table synthesis, and physical modelling synthesisers. And as I said, there are many, many others. But in this course we're going to focus on on subtractive synthesis. Now, the reason for this is this is the most basic and common time at common type of synthesis. Now, subtractive synthesis works by creating some initial sound and then applying filters and various other types of modulation and effects to alter the harmonics most often by, by kind of, you can think of it as starting with an initial sound and chiseling away at that sound. And to get to the one you create much like a sculptor takes a block of marble and chisels away to get the, get the sculpture they desire in the end. Additive synthesis works in slightly different way. This is based on the physical fact that any sound can be replicated by stacking sine waves on top of each other. So additive synthesis works by taking sounds, stacking them on top of each other in order to create the sound that we desire. Frequency Modulation works by having sound waves affect each other in different ways. This is, this became more popular in the late 80s, early 90s, and continues today. And there's some fantastic hardware and software. Fm synthesizers, the most popular of those probably be in the DX7, wait tables synthesis, subtractive and the traditional analogue synthesisers. We didn't really have the processing power to be able to work with complex sound waves. So initial noise generators. So we stick with a set of basic noise generators which we're going to cover in one of the next lessons. Table synthesizes just take the power of modern computers and modern processing, unable to enable us to start with more complex wave shapes. And physical modelling is a very interesting type of synthesis. This really works to take a physical instrument. Often these are kind of woodwind instruments or string-based instruments. Percussion actually really use a really complex often number of parameters to really shape that wave. In various ways. Massively complicated, absolutely fascinating, and certainly something that I would highly recommend you take a look at in the future once you've got the handle on the initial workings of a synthesizer. But really all these types of synthesis off, right, in a really, really similar Bye. They really differ in the way that they generate the initial sound. But everything after that is pretty common and transferable across them all. So everything you learned in this course will apply equally, whether that is subtractive synthesis, FM synthesis, wave table synthesis, or any other kind. 7. SYNTHESISER ARCHITECTURE: Okay, so let's have a look at the basic architecture of a synthesizer. We're going to look at each of these section by section. But as an overview then we can see that we have our initial input from a keyboard or other instrument here, commonly a keyboard that sends a signal to the synthesizer and it starts them oscillator. As I said, we're going to look at each of these sections in much more detail, but I'm just gonna give you a quick overview here, the oscillator them or create the initial sound. And we'll pass on that sound to filter or one or more filters. And the filter will be really doing the subtraction. So really helping to shape that sound by removing some of the, some of the, some of the sounds of the harmonics. These terms all make much more sense in a few minutes of promise. This can be, these filters will then pass on that signal to the amplifier, and the amplifier will then output to your speakers, your headphones, or whatever device you're listening through. We have envelopes as well. So envelopes are used to affect the, the amplitude or the volume of the sound over time. We also have this thing at the bottom here called low-frequency oscillators. We will cover these in much more depth later. But basically these are a way of automatically adjusting some of the characteristics of the sound overtime, adding some movement sounds to make them more interesting. 8. INTRODUCTION TO OSCILLATORS: In this first part, we're going to look at the oscillator. Now the oscillator is used to create the initial sound from which we then go and go and sculpt the final sound that we want to use in our composition. Oscillators, you'll commonly see them referred to as different things on, on synthesisers. Often you'll just see the word oscillator, but sometimes you might see the acronym VCO. Vco stands for voltage controlled oscillator. This is, this is kind of traditional, back to the, back to the good old days when, before we moved into this kind of digital realm where by the oscillators and everything inside a synthesized, it was based very much on analog circuitry. And it was, it was voltages that are applied to these oscillators that created the, created the sound. Let's pop into, into vital and have a look at the oscillators inside vital. 9. THE OSCILLATOR (VCO): Okay, So here I am inside vital. Like I said, there's a lot to vital than one of the main reasons that I chose vital is that it is really a synthesized that you can continue to build on. So once you've finished with this course, vital will. But there's very little that you wouldn't be able to do inside vita was an absolutely enormous and fantastic and fully featured professional grade synthesizer. It's very, very visual. But like I said before, it does so much. Please don't get distracted by drawing this course. I would definitely recommend that Let's get the, get the fundamentals on the about during this course. And then later on, dig into some of the more advanced features. But this course we'll show you absolutely everything you need to know to get the kind of sounds that you want to have a synthesisers. We'll be able to most importantly take the concepts you've learned in the course and go and apply them to any other synthesizer, whether that be software by synthesisers, vital or perhaps a hardware synthesiser, or an uneven onto modular synthesis. A couple of things that we need to do when we open up vital. You'll see at the top here that we have this thing here says a niche Presets. Preset. This is the initial preset. This is a, this is how vital will look when you first open it. I'm running it inside logic. You'll see down the, down the left-hand side here, you can see bits of bits of logic poking through and in the display. It doesn't need to run inside logic. It can run stand-alone. It also doesn't need to be logic. So if the digital audio workstation software that you're using is different, that's completely fine. You can just load it up like any other virtual instruments. So as I say, whether it be pro Tools, logic, GarageBand, Reaper, Cubase, Ableton Live, which have a DAW using the workings of vita will be identical. There are a couple of things I would certainly advise you to do and that will try to remember I didn't always remote. We will try to remember to do whenever we come to this kind of initial preset, Preset screen. So these around the phase and the wave type. So during this course, as I say, vital can work with it, can actually work as a way table synthesizer as well. It can work as an FM synthesizer. We're interested in subtractive synthesis. So the very first thing that we're gonna do is we're just going to hit this right arrow here. If I just pop, pop here, you'll see that in here we have OSC one. Again, it's called something slightly different, but OSC just simply stands for oscillator, oscillator one. And you can see that inside vital we've got three oscillators and we will see how we can use those in combination later. But you'll see this wave shape in here in this screen here, this little panel within the user interface shows us the shape of the wave that we are going to be. There's going to be generated when we press a key on our keyboard. Now, the init patch comes up with this kind of sawtooth wave. What we want to do is just hit this right arrow once. And we'll move this two basic shapes. And we'll scroll through this later. We can also get to basic shapes by clicking down here. And if we go to the factory presets and we'll see that basic shapes is in there in the factory presets. Ignore the rest of now. They're very interested in great fun to play with. But for now let's stick with the basic shapes. The other thing that we want to change when we load up our initial preset is over here. In this phase section over here just to the right of the oscillator. What we want to do is we'll talk about phase later. But by default, what you should do is just bring these both down. So just click on the number and drag down with your mouse and bring them both down to 0. I believe that this is going to change in a future version of or potentially going to change it a future version of vital. So the initial preset, these are set to 0, but for now, just make sure that both set to 0. Everything else is completely fine. The way that an oscillator works in oscillator generates a waveform, so we know that sound is generated by it by a waveform. We've seen soundwaves. You would've seen within your door or in other experiences, you would have seen the shape of a wave. Now, this generates the shape of a wave and we can see that along the, along the x-axis here, this is time from left to right. So this is right over here at the start. On the left-hand side, this is the very beginning of our waveform. Then on the right-hand side, this is the end of our waveform. And this waveform. For now you can just assume that this wave form will continue. Just, just loop round and round and round and round until we release the key. The y-axis is the volume or the amplitude, your volume and amplitude, you can pretty much use those terms interchangeably. So this will be the amplitude. So this is how loud the sound is. At any point. 10. BASIC WAVE SHAPES: As I said, to really get the most out of this course, you really want to be wearing headphones. And this will allow you to hear the subtle changes that we're gonna make to the sounds that we generate. I popped on a pair of headphones and we'll take a look at this first wave shape. Now this is called a sine wave. You'll see that it's a very smooth curve, raising an amplitude and then, and then lowering the amplitude. As it moves across the wave shape, it oscillates very fast. If I play a key, a key on the keyboard, you'll hear it's a very smooth sounding, very plain noise. And it's not something that we use a great deal, but it's got some very particular uses, insights synthesis. This is what a sine wave sounds like. Okay, So you can hear it's a very, very, very plain, smooth tool. If I bring up on a silver scope and we'll have a look at that wave shape. We can see that's the sort of scope. We can see exactly what's reflected that the sound that's generated. And you'll see that as I press a note. This same, this same wave shape is repeated over and over again. The wave shape that we can see at the top. You'll see that as I change notes. We further, further down the scale. The wave gets wider and wider. So the wave wavelength gets longer and longer. And we can, we can say that the wavelength therefore is affecting the pitch. So the higher the pitch, the much shorter the wavelength, the lower the pitch, the wider the wavelength. The same is true of all all audio waves. Let's have a look at the next one. So if I go back to the oscillator, if I just take this slider on the right-hand side of the oscillator wave shape here. Oh, by the way, before I forget, you can actually oscilloscope that I use, that I think is very clear and easy to use and playing for you to see. But there is actually an oscilloscope built-in survival. So if I pop back out here, you'll see that if you go to the Advanced tab at the top of the screen here and you click on that. In this analysis section down the bottom, you'll see a very similar thing. So if I press Add Motes now, you can see inside here, this is the wave shape that I'm generation. Anyway, back to the batch of the oscillators. So on the right-hand side, I can move this little slider up a couple of frames. So we'll go, we'll go past this one, but we'll look at perhaps this one next. This is known as a triangle wave. And you can see that it's very similar to a sine wave, but it's not so rounded and this is reflected in the sound that it makes. So if I just bring up the oscilloscope once more, where is it here? If I bring up the stereoscope, you can see that when I play this sound, I'll see that same shape repeated over and over again. You'll notice this time that the sound is a little harsher. You can see this in the shape, so it's not so smooth. It just sounds a little bit harsher stories than the sine wave did before. Okay, Moving on then, the next common one that we see is known as, let me pop back up here. The next, next common shape that we see is known as the sawtooth wave or the soar wave. This is used a lot. It gives a very interesting even harsher tone than the sine or the triangle. Let's again pop up the, pop-up the oscilloscope. Let's have a look at this one. Again, you can see this is very much harsher than the sinewave and, and even of the triangle wave. Just by itself, it makes quite a reasonable kind of lead sound out of your synthesizer. Onto the next one. This is the final one that we're going to look at for now, this is called the square wave. You'll see that it's not as harsh as the, as the triangle wave. But let's just pull up the oscillator or the subscript rather. Zoom in on that. And you'll see that this produces the square wave. And you can see, in fact, if I, if I pause out there, we can keep the shape on the screen. Don't worry too much about these kind of little spikes at the corners. But you can see that the amplitude is up and down. There's no middle ground between the two. It gives quite a sharp, almost aggressive sound, but, but not as sharp as the, as the sole wave. Again, these are incredibly useful to us in terms of our very bass sounds. So these are the sounds. We're going to take them again to sculpt using the other features of synthesisers that we're going to talk about in this course. But really, this is the first decision point that you should make is, what do I want the sound to sound like? What's the, what's the closest base oscillator shape that I can use to achieve a sound. If I want a very, very smooth sound. Once I've applied on my filters and modulators and envelopes, then probably I want to start with something like a sine wave or a triangle way. Perhaps. If I'm looking for a slightly harsher sound, perhaps something closer to lead sound or a guitar sound or a string sound. Then probably I wanted to look at either a square wave or most likely a sawtooth wave. 11. EXPLORING FUNDAMENTALS AND HARMONICS IN WAVE SHAPES: So the way that a sound is made, the world or what constitutes a sound, it comes from many, many factors to it, but two of the most important factors are the transient, and that's the initial attack of the sound. So that's the initial, usually a split second of a sound that makes up the beginning portion of a sound wave. And for something like a drum or a guitar player with a plectrum, this will be a very, very fast attack and I've quite a harsh sound at the start. For something that's a bit more dreamy and pad like that transient, it will be much smoother. And the transient is where, where we move from no sound to a sound is that first initial portion. The other part that makes up a sound or the difference between other sounds, something called the harmonics. Let me try and explain this to you. And I can do this if I move down to a sine wave and I just bring up the, this is the standard kind of equalizer inside logic. Daw that you're using or have an EQ. There are many that you can go and get. Very good free ones and some exceptionally good paid VST and AU plugins. But if I look at the sine wave, what this is, this is a slightly different representation of the sounds of the one we saw before. So before we saw the shape of the way from the oscillator, this one is going to show us along the x-axis. These numbers along here, going from 20 to 20 thousand, these are frequencies. So these are, these are, these are pictures of sound. If you're moving from left to right. It goes from 20 to 20 K. This is the normal range of human hearing. Human hearing. For most people, the 20 hertz is about, and this is why we've moved two hertz instead of semitones inside vital because a lot of the, the other instruments and other synthesisers and other things that we talked about within sound design operate on hertz rather than semitones. But normal human hearing about the lowest that most people can hear is about 20 hertz. Some people can hear perhaps 19. As you get a little bit older, you're hearing becomes damaged in some way, then perhaps usually this will start to creep up a little bit so you won't hear anything. You can pretty much guarantee you probably won't hear much below 20 hertz. In the other end of the scale, we don't really hear much above 20 thousand hertz. 20 thousand hertz is an extremely high pitched noise. And this also degrades as you get older. It's unavoidable and will certainly be can be harmed by some sort of hearing damage. While we're talking about hearing damage. It's just reminded me just to just to remind you that when you're listening on headphones, and particularly when you are doing sound design at either end of these, free of this frequency spectrum, just remember to take some breaks. Don't play it too loud and take some breaks, give your ears arrest. This will this will help prevent damage, although certainly can't guarantee it. But you'll also find that you're just like your eyes become fatigued when you're reading or you're watching a screen, your ears will become fatigued over time and you'll start to lose that sensitivity and start to, it'll start to become difficult for you to really identify the nuances in the designing and making them really get that perfect sound that you're looking for. Anyway, back to this. 20 hertz is the lowest. Most humans will hear, 20 thousand hertz. So 20 kilohertz is the, is the highest frequency, the shortlist noise. But most humans will hear this end of the scale. It tends to mostly be children and young adults who can hear this high and it's used to, used to. I don't know if it's an advantage, but it is used by certain security companies. I remember there was a shop in my local town that used to admit this extremely high pitched around the 20 K, 20 K hertz mark, shrill noise from speakers outside the shop and this was to stop kids hanging around. I couldn't hear a thing, but it used to drive my kids crazy. Anyway. Slight tangent. But let's, let's, let's have a look. Let's try get back to this. So along the x-axis, as I say, this is showing us the frequency. So this is a very low pitch noise on the left-hand side, very high-pitched noise on the right-hand side. And on the y-axis. Then we have amplitude or volume. This is how loud a sound is. Any one of these frequencies. I am, I'm using a sine wave at the moment. And we'll see that when I hit a sine wave. If I just I'm sorry if I just pause up there for a second. You can see the eye at the pitch. I was playing. You can see this was a relatively low around a 130 hertz, hundred and twenty hundred and thirty hertz mark. That's the that's the picture I was playing. If I just remove this one and play a higher pitched note. You can see that moves, moves up the scale and we're playing here around the 500 hertz mark. Again, if I play even higher, There's another one about the one k. And if I go up another octave, that goes up to k. Let me just clear this and I'll show you something interesting. If I just put down some lower octaves on my keyboard, I play this note which is a C. There's my first note. You can see that this note that we're seeing here, that this is the note that we played. And we refer to this as the fundamental. So you might hear me refer to this as the fundamental. It's the note that we actually played. And this will become clear why we need a word for this later on. If I move it up an octave, there I am about the 120 marks. So I've gone from about 6060 hertz to about 120. Backup here. I'm playing this note. I'm here around the 240 Hertz mark. Forgot about the four hundred, ninety five hundred heads market. And you might be noticing a pattern, but move up another octave. I'm the one kilo Hertz, 1000 Hertz, or move up, this will be at two. Can you guess what the next one is gonna be? The next one is going to be for the next one. Next octave up will be at eight. And you say, you can see that this is just a factor of physics that for every octave that we move, move up in pitch. We move up, we double, double the frequency. But again, just to remind you that the notes that we actually play, in this case, it's a C, it's around 500 in 2530 hertz. There's actually charged. You can go and look this up. That is known as our fundamental. Now the reason we need a name for that is will become very clear. Now, if I move to, let's say a, let's go to one that we use common enemies bring that backup. If I move now to a sawtooth wave. When I play a note, you'll notice that they're much more appears than just the fundamental. Fundamental still here. But it is a harsher sound, but it's at the same frequency. And the harsh sound is just, I've been dictated by the, again, the type of wave I've chosen, as we saw earlier. Sawtooth wave sounds harsher than a sinewave. But why is that? Well, I've only played one note here. It was just one note that I pressed on my keyboard. You can see that the fundamental here is the same as before with the sinewave, but just the nature of the wave shape that we chose. Introduce all of these other frequencies, even though only play one note, lots of other frequencies sounded. You can see that these kind of tail off in an amplitude or volume over the higher-up they get. All of these are called the harmonics. Now, this is not a course about music theory and perhaps I'll opportunity costs on music theory in the future. But the, but the harmonics that are played here determine the kind of tambour or the very big part to play in the sound you're hearing. We can see that then we've got these these hair which is which are from a sawtooth wave. If I clear that. And we'll move on and we'll look at a square wave. A square wave. Again, it's produced a bunch of harmonics. So here's our, here's our fundamental. Exactly the same note played. Here's our fundamental. And we produced a set of harmonics, but a lot less harmonics than the sawtooth wave. If I go to the triangle wave, pump this backup again. You'll see that when I play this one, again, even less harmonics are played. So we've got our fundamental here, and in this case 12345 harmonics or plate. We can see from this assignment I've had no harmonics. A triangle wave had very few harmonics, a square wave slightly more harmonics, and a triangle wave, the maximum amount of harmonics that we've seen. And so therefore we can take from this that the more harmonics we introduce, the Harsha, the tone, the more raspy the if that's a word. But the harsher the tone, the more aggressive the tone. In fact, this is how distortion work. So let me look at later on at the effects that we can use on our synthesizer. We might look at our distortion or saturation. And we'll see that, that actually, that works by at least in part by introducing harmonics into the tone that we're creating. Let's just try something here. If I move this down, he's still see that you can. So if I get rid of this, if I move to disappear every time, if I play a sine wave, we can see that 500 thousandths and I'll leave that there. If I didn't move to a triangle wave. If I play the same note. Again, we can see some more harmonics have been introduced. If I then go to a square wave, we should see a few, few more harmonics are introduced. And if I finish with the sawtooth wave, a bunch of harmonics are introduced in-between the harmonics produced by this square wave. We'll talk a little bit more about oscillators. But when we think about the filters later on, we can see that the filters in particular aim atom each query called the subtractive synthesis. So we produce all these harmonics and then the filters at least in part, work by adjusting these harmonics, the fundamental, but also the harmonics that come after it. We use filters to shape those harmonics and the fundamental in order to tailor the sounding and get exactly the sound that we're looking for for our composition. 12. OSCILLATOR LEVEL AND PAN: Let's close this. Let's, let's, let's stick with a sawtooth wave. Let's talk about some of the, some of the basic functions that we have within, within the oscillator within vital. And these will be the same, or the majority of these would be the same. Within any synthesized. There were lots more advanced things that we can do inside the oscillators in vital, but like I say, maybe opportunity costs and that in the future. But for now, let's just focus on the common elements that you will find across, across almost all synthesisers. So that you can take the knowledge from this course and go to apply it to whether you've got a hardware sit the size on your desk or modular synthesizer, semi modular synthesizer at different piece of software. You can, you can take that and apply it. And I will show you how I would go about doing that later in the course. There's a few basic operations that we can do inside the oscillator. The first of those being the level. The level is simply the volume. The volume. So if I bring this right down to move anything inside vital, it's the same as I imagine you've seen in inside most kind of plug-ins within your in your door itself. Just simply click on the note that you want to turn on. Just drag up and down. And this will move it up and down. In this case, we're affecting the level so I can go right from, right from no volume. Let me just zoom in a little bit here. If we write from having nothing coming out all the way up, on, all the way down again, let's leave it somewhere around there. If you want to. If you've got a little lost inside the inside here and you've changed a few knobs and you want to get them back to their default. If you just simply double-click any of these, any of these knobs, it will reset it to its default value. Also, if you want us to enter precise values for anything inside, inside vital, you can right-click and choose this enter value here. And this will allow you just to simply just enter a new value with your keyboard there. For now, we'll leave it at the default. Next to the, next to the level of the volume. You can set the pan. The pan is simply how much of this sounds you're hearing in the, sometimes people refer to this as balance. Certainly on my hi-fi amplifier, it is referred to as bounced invite, so it's called pan. This is just how much you hear the sound in your left ear and how much you hear of it in the right ear, sit in the middle here we should hear an equal amount in the left and right. But if I move it all the way over to this side, and this is, like I said, this is minus 100. This is like I said, that you weren't anybody going to hear some of these things if you're wearing headphones or you're listening to it through good speakers is probably not going to be so effective for your use. Things like this throughout the course. But it's not gonna, you're not gonna hear it so effectively on a mobile phone speaker or your laptop speaker. But anyway, the sound should always, should be all the way up to the left. Now, as I rotate this round, you'll hear the sound move over to the right of the middle, Double-click that and send it back to its default value, which is to play an equal amount of the sound in the left and right ear. 13. OSCILLATOR TUNING: Okay, the next thing we can do is to look at the pitch so we can tune the oscillator. So by default it's going to play the frequency for the key that you press on your keyboard. So for example, this is a C. But what I can do in here and there'll become much more apparent why this is so useful later is I can actually alter their pitch. So let me just knock it down an octave so it's not so shrill. But if I play a C level down so you can hear me as I'm playing that note, if I click and drag this pitch or I right-click and enter a value, I can actually alter the pitch of the story so I can effectively detune this oscillator. I can go down and these go in semitones. This is one semitone, lower, whole tone, lower. Four semitones, or a whole tone low. Sorry to whole tones. Liver. If I go down to seven semitones below, that's now a fifth below. The important ones to know really are there are 12 semitones in an octave. So when I hit this, see now it's still a C, but it is exactly one octave balloon. So if I double-click that, we can hear that. That goes, if I go to minus 12, we drop an octave. I can go in both directions. I can go down to four octaves. So four octaves below. That's gonna be pretty hard to hear. But if I can also go for octaves up, now, you see me scrolling through these things. Right now. There's actually a tip inside vital that is to hold the Shift key when you're doing this and this will jump then in whole octaves, 12 semitones at a time, rather than having to scroll through from 48 semitones below and scrolling 96 semitones up to get to the top. But if so, if I just hold down the Shift key, it will jump to our time. Now I've gone to four octaves up. An incredibly high pitched noise there. Yeah, I can choose to detune the oscillator for anywhere from four octaves below to four octaves above. Now that goes in semitones, but what I want to be able to do also is to be able to tune in smaller increments in a semitone. If I want to do that, I can do that on this one here, which is kind of a fine tune. Now this is referred to as sense CEN Ts. In this there are $0.100 within a semitone and I can scroll, I can go in both directions. So for example, I could play this note. And if I just turn this down a few seven, I minus a $0.100 on now one semitone below. And I can do the same in a positive direction. But often you'll just need to fine tune slightly. You can see that that tuning is much, much finer grain and the semitone tuning. The reason this exists actually is because of the old circuitry and as the old circuitry used to warm up in old oscillators are always slightly, perhaps begin to wear out the oscillators themselves and the analog circuitry inside them. It's like start to go slightly out of tune. And so you'd need these kind of tuning controls or the, certainly the fine-tuned control on your analog synthesizer in order to get it back into in tune with the rest of the band. And other instruments that would be in plate. But actually people, as they will do musicians being musicians found interesting creative uses for the, for the fine tune and the control within their, within their oscillators. We will have a look at that in, just in a second. One of those potential creative uses. 14. OSCILLATOR UNISON AND PHASE: But I just want to have a look on this, on this side over here. So over here we have the unison and the face unison. You can think of this as being like a chorus effect for an individual oscillators. So if you've used course Effects before, you know that it's basically, it plays multiple, multiple voices. So you press one key, it plays a number of voices, so it multiplies it. It plays each one slightly out of tune. So it sounds like a group of instruments, rather than just a single instrument. By default, it's set to one voice. But actually, if I just take this and scroll it, it sounds like this, but it isn't scroll it and make this, I know ten voices. We get a much, much, much wider sound. Ten Bosch is quite a lot, but often you'll see things around three or four voices. Just adds a little bit of width from that, just really quite a thin sound wave. As I scroll up, you will get wider and wider up to, up to 16 voices. This is the number of voices on this side, then we have the detuned. So as I say, if we had 16 voices and they were all playing exactly the same tune with exactly the same wave shape. It would be effectively the same. We might see an increase in volume, but we wouldn't hear a difference in the sound necessarily. What this detuned as it says y, how much do I want to detune either side of the fundamental that I've played. So we talked about fundamentals before, basically, any other voices that are playing, they're gonna play either side of that fundamental. So slightly lower in pitch, slightly higher in pitch, slightly lower in frequency, slightly higher in frequency. And this tells us how much we should go either side of the fundamental. So again, if I play 16 voices, we are all playing in the same tune, so it's not detuned at all. Just sounds like a slightly, perhaps a slightly louder sawtooth wave. However, as I increase this number, we start to feel that real spread and thicken it. As we get a little higher, they will start to face against each other. So you'll hear some still relatively thin down here. Higher we get. The more kind of out-of-phase and wider and stranger than noise becomes. Let's set that back to one voice for now. You can see that already just simply with, just using an oscillator without the filters, the envelopes that modulators, and just with a single oscillator, we can already producing quite interested in sounds. And of course they sound different depending on the wave shape that you've chosen. So if I go and choose a sinewave, I introduce unison. Stick down to solve. Suddenly voices. If I just simply go and choose. Let's take a triangle wave. As recently as this is. Giving us a policy is it already creates some interesting sounds. But there's more to do still within the oscillator. So let's reset this. I want to explain this side and this side over here where we're talking about phase. And we're going to ignore these knobs and selectors underneath. These are much more advanced feature of vital, which we're not going to cover here. But the inside this facing, this basically tells us where on this wave shape we want to start. When it's set at 0 is going to start on the extreme left hand side. If I go all the way up to 360, is going to start at this point in the wave. So when I press the key and it's down at 0, is going to start at this point. If I set this to 90, which is a quarter 360, I set this here on this one. Here. If I said that to around 90, get there. We know that it's going to start on this peak. If I sit through a 180, it's gonna start right in the middle. And if I said it's a 360 is going to start at the end. Now, you're not going to hear much difference really when you're just playing a basic wave with no effects or modulation and it filters. And a single way by itself, you're not really going to hear it. However, if your list again can be used for creative purposes, but if you set the face to start at a place where the amplitude is not 0, sometimes it's going to introduce a click. The transient phase in that very first phase of the, the note that you're playing. This becomes much more interesting when we have perhaps multiple oscillations playing at the same time. We don't want them all to start in the same place so they can have them face against each other. When it comes to that in a bit. This one on the right is again another percentage and this basically goes from 0 to 100. And it just says, Okay, well, I want it to be at a 100. I want to start at 180, but I want it to be choose a point. 39 is fine. So Thirty-nine percent either side of this, this point that I've defined, I wanted to use to start somewhere between there and there. So if I set this at, let's say 100%, it will start anywhere within, within the same. But if I set it to randomly, I set this to 50%. It's going to start my sound either at the center, which is what I've defined with a 180 or halfway or 50% either side. So at this point here, anywhere from 92270 back, I say to start with the defaults with this one hundred and eighty one hundred percent. This can cause some some clicks and pops, which you can be difficult to go into hump down later on. So I always, when I create a new opening vital to create a new a new sound, Holloway, set those down to 00. And then if I want to use them later than I'll introduce him, I didn't stop with them on. 15. USING MULTIPLE OSCILLATORS: Okay, Let's have a look at multiple oscillators. So we've got three oscillators in in vital. As I switched them on with this little, this little purple button just above the oscillator. So I've got three, OS2 and OS1. Now, let's switch off oscillator three right now. Remember that when we, when we create a new, create a new patch that we want to, at least for now, just click on this right-hand arrow and move to basic shapes and set the phase, the phase randomization down to both, down to 0. Now if I play, if I move this basic shape to, let's put them both at sources wave, which is a wave you're gonna use a lot. If I play them both now, it doesn't really sound any different. But I have two oscillators play. Now remember before we talked about the, the tune. So let me set these levels back the same. I could, if I wanted pan one left and one right. Again, it won't sound much difference. But if I, um, I just set these back to the center, one of the things that the multiple oscillators are often useful is to slightly de-tune them or massively teaching them. So if I want to make this sound broader, I could set this one down, one down to one octave below. When I play one note, I'm gonna get the fundamental note at the picture I played. And I'm gonna get the same note one octave below. Using, using the second oscillator. I can introduce a third one, and I might want to purchase one down, one down, two octaves, so 24 semitones down. Let's just put this two basic shapes. I told you I forget every time. Let's just drop these to 0. But when I play this, I should have my oscillator number one playing at the pitch that I play on my keyboard, oscillate number to paying one octave below an oscillator, three playing an octave below that. There we are. So a really basic shape, but actually now a really useful sound. We can see that we are clipping up here. I'm just going to just drop this one down a little bit. Up here on the sorry. Let me just show you what you can see it up here on the top right there we've got a master volume. I was playing it here before. You can see it's turning red is starting to clip, is far too loud in my headphones. We can just drop it down there to a more reasonable volume. But anyway, back to the oscillators. We can here we got, we got three oscillators all playing the same shape, but octaves apart. And perhaps I might want 11 octave up so I can go here. Now I've got my fundamental pitch that I'm playing on oscillator one, an octave below, on oscillator to an octave above and oscillator three. I can start to play some more. So maybe I would want to use different shapes on different oscillates. And so maybe I'll have quite common to have your base as a sine wave. And then let's make this one a bond may be at a triangle. If I change the shapes, one's quite good. Let's move this one to ultrasounds for a bit more of a deeper by sound. Maybe let's introduce some, some unison. We could introduce them, use them here to maybe, maybe a bit more on that in a bit wider, massively useful sound for me. But nevertheless, we can play around him and we can play with all of these things within the oscillator. I'm really now, as I said, the important thing is that we really understand what they're going to do. We can think about it and we can predict what effect it's going to have on the sound. Familiar, super powerful thing. When I started playing with synthesisers, of course, played with a synthesizer. I play with it by pressing the keyboard and changing knobs at random until I, until I was getting some sounds out and I gradually learned what, what sort of thing would happen when I, when I changed the different knobs styles switches on my synthesizer. But having this really real understanding of knowing why a sine wave sounds smooth and knowing why a sawtooth wave sounds harsh because of the harmonics, knowing how unison works and how the spread of unison works in terms of the De Chu. And you'll often hear units and each unit sometimes called units and spread. When we learn about phases and started at different phases and how to layer these kind of different sounds from oscillators within each other. The real understanding of that means that you can get onto your synthesized within a sound in your head. And that's what it's all about. It's not about playing with the knobs and dials and switches. It's about having an idea in your head, having some inspiration, opening your synthesizer or working with your hardware synthesiser and knowing how to get that sound that's in your head out through your speakers onto your track. Having this understanding can really help. There's just one more thing that I wanted to show you in a, with regards to the oscillators. So I'm just going to set these back to the defaults. Set all three to be a sawtooth. Just doesn't really matter that much. Some of these things you don't hear so much in a sine wave or an, a triangle wave simply because there are, there are less harmonics. So there's the, there's the sound with less rich, less aggressive or raspy. It's just sometimes can be a little easier to hear. There are few things we could do in here, so let's go to, let's go to the picture of this one. Let's reset this to 0. As I hear now, it sounds like a simple, a single, a single noise. But what I can do here is actually just pitch up a little bit. I could pick this one up to five semi-tones. I can purchase one up, maybe seven. It sounds like I've got a quarter money playing. If I just go out a little bit wider here. You can see on this keyboard or department actually, I did mention at the start, they don't necessarily need a midi controller keyboard to play vital. You can just use your mouse to click notes in here. But you can see what I'm playing. I'm playing a single note, but I'm getting a CT effects by adjusting the semitones here I can, I can produce different types of kind of triadic chords. Chords with three notes. Because I've got three oscillators. You will rarely see more than three oscillators in a honest synthesizer, but they do exist with digital. That's increasingly possible. With digital is probably not much of a limit to the amount of oscillators you could have, depending on the speed and power of your computer. But certainly when these were built out of analog circuitry, it was, it was unusual to find something with more than three oscillators. But certainly there's some very famous synthesisers with eight or more oscillators. But three is probably your default standard. Some will have one, so we'll have two. Most will have two or three. The other thing I could do if I just picked all these back, sorry, if I just picture all these back to 0. So back to us effectively are single sawtooth wave. I told you about the fine tune earlier in the idea of the fine tune, as I said, was to make sure that you can get exactly in tune with other members of the band, with other instruments that are being played. Sometimes because the circuitry wasn't up to match. Sometimes because the, because the tune of the oscillator was affected by heat. The heat on the actual individual resistors, capacitors diodes within the, within the analog circuitry. So we have this fine pitch control, control. And as I said, musicians, musicians will find creative uses for anything that can make a sound. So people started to experiment. I'm just going to just knock off one of these oscillations for now. But listen to this. If I just detune one of these slightly, Can you hear that slight phasing sound that's going on? And this is it works in both directions. It's often referred to as the oscillators beating against each other. It's just the kind of I wanted to show to you because it's an interesting technique that you'll hear quite often on, used, particularly back in the day with, with analogue synthesisers and they will play the oscillators against each other. And the fact that the ball, I put this out of de-tune and this tune here, remember is a 0 to 100 or minus 102100, but you can detune it by a $0.100 or a 100 steps or within one semitone. And the higher up I go with this detune, the faster bat beating becomes start at 0 and I'll just slowly move up. Now can make some really interesting sounds, and particularly if I add a third, so let's just teach you in this one slightly. If I had a third oscillator in D2 in different amounts, can make some really, really interesting noises. But one thing to be careful with this is if you've noticed when I'm playing this, that I can put it completely out of tune just by, just by using the fine tuned. I can push these so far that they sound really, really out of tune. No longer, no longer playing a C, right? So I can see if I add these in, but just with these fine tunes, I can really, I can really knock it out. So just something to be careful off. But fascinating and a great way to really add some width and some interest to adjust to a very simple wave being generated by oscillator. Like I said, that will work in any with any wave shaped. But the more harmonics you have, the more kind of width and interest that those kind of detuning and course techniques will give you. 16. THE NOISE GENERATOR: Okay, I think that's about it for oscillators. Let's move on. Oh, I'll tell you what, just before we go, there is one other thing that you will have spotted down here in vital. That is this SNP. This is a sampler. It's not a waveform generator, or it's not. The oscillators are. However, I'm showing this to you because it is actually a very common thing, even on older analogue synthesisers. This is a way of just being able to play some noise. Now, the one in vital is quite advanced. Nick can play any kind of sound that's similar in lots of software synthesizers. But this was really common, just used with white noise, brown noise, pink noise inside. Regenerated with analog circuitry inside synthesisers. Sounds horrible, manager ears. This is just playing white noises is just random frequencies. It's just, it sounds awful, but we will use it later just to add, to add a bit of depth and a bit of interests. And there are very specific use cases for white noise, for brown noise, pink noise, etc. Within, within synthesis and within sound design will come back to later. But I just thought I'd point out here while we're in this kind of oscillator section. But that's just quickly in here. We've got we've got the level plan as you would expect. We can alter the pitch slightly. This is not so useful for white noise, but like I said, with vital can bring in all sorts of waveforms basically anyway, form into, into the sampler so we can, we can affect the pitch of that. This one here, this little keyboard here means that the picture will be altered based on the key that I'm playing. This one is just playing the bottom right one here. This kind of looped arrow just means that the sample will loop round and round and round. If I switched on off, I get to the end and it stops. If I, even though I've got the key held down, if I play this one, it will play round, round and round. If I, the top right one here means it will start at a random point within the sample. And you'll be able to see this visualized. Now, if I play a note and just keep playing the same note. You can see this kind of visualization are just need to put this loop on because we're getting hit in the end. But you can see that I'm slightly lighter patch that you're seeing there, but I'm starting at different points in the sample each time. This one here will means that gets at the beginning of the sample and then I'll go back in the opposite direction. So just go backwards and forwards inside the sample. If I click the loop on at the same time, I'm just going to ping pong backwards and forwards across that noise. Now that is perfectly enough white noise for now. So we'll end it there for oscillators. And in the next section, we're going to look at the amplifier. 17. AMPLIFIER VOLUME AND VOICES: Okay, so back to our diagram of the synthesiser. So in the last section, we looked at the oscillator. We saw that we generate sound waves using an oscillator or various different types. And how we can actually create some quite interesting sounds just through the use of the oscillator itself. The next part of the synthesized, we're going to look at it. And remember we have this signal chain going right through, from our keyboard through a number of elements, all of which we're gonna cover, following this blue arrow along out to our speaker at the end. The next one we're gonna talk about is this final part, which is the amplifier. Let's switch over to switchover device on and have a look at the amplifier within vital. Here we are. Inside vital. We're going to look at the amplifier section. Now what the amplifier does is we've had all these separate controls for the separate oscillations, and you'll see that there are separate controls for all the other parts of the signal chain within the, within the synthesizer. The amplifiers sits at the end right before the sound comes out. Effects everything within the synthesizers. That final bit that will affect everything that the synthesizer does. It affects all the modulation or the filters, or the envelopes and all the oscillators altogether. Now we've already seen the one part of the amplifier and it's split across two places, really inside vital or certainly the bits of it that we're going to look at a split across two places in vital. The first one is at the top here, and this is the master volume. So I can just drag this little, this little white arrow to the left and right. And you'll see that when I play a note, this shows me how how loud the sound is. If I drag it all the way to the left, nothing gets emitted at all. If I drag it all the way to the right, I won't do this. But if I drag it all the way to the right, I'm going to get a very, very loud sound. The visualization at the top here will remain green, where I'm playing the sound that's not being clipped at all. I e, where the, where the whole sound, the whole sound wave is coming out of the amplifier. If I move it up a little bit, you can see that it turns red. This means that the signal is being clipped, that it's too loud to come out of the amplifier so that the signal is being distorted has been the top of the, of the amplitude is being cut at the top and the bottom of the amplitude waveforms being cut. So we always want to keep this, unless we do it for artistic reasons. We want to keep this keep this green right here so that you can hear me at the same time as I play the synthesizer. The other part of the synthesizer. And remember I said that was kind of split into two parts in vital is down in the bottom right, down in this bottom right section, in this section right at the bottom. These kind of these two boxes here, what are the things that we consider as being part of the amplifier in that they affect everything that they amplify does. So these are kind of performance level effects. Now, we call an amplifier is not labeled as that in vital, and you'll often find that it's not labeled as the amplifier is what it is. But some synthesisers you'll see quite clearly labeled in others, it's not labeled at all, but you'll come to recognize the elements or the basic elements here of the amplifier. As I say, there are others. There are others withinside vital. But these are what we're aiming for in his courses, this common understanding of synthesisers so that we know generally when we look at a synthesizer, these are the basic controls that are common across them. All that we can expect to go and look for within the user interface where that's hardware or software synthesizer, so that we can take the real understanding of the knowledge we have here. And rather than just sitting in a new synthesizer and sort of limit all the knobs until we find what we want to find. We can go and identify that and know what that control is gonna do for us and how we can, how that's going to enable us to get the sound that we want. The sounds in our head is perfect for our track. Out of our synthesizer. Sometimes you'll see amplifiers labeled or unlabeled. Sometimes you'll see them labeled as amplifier. Other times you'll see them labeled as perhaps VCA. This is very much like the VCO, which we said was voltage controlled oscillator. Vca. No prizes for guessing this, but it stands for voltage-controlled amplifier. So sometimes you'll see this labeled as a VCA. As I said, it affects the whole synthase are a few controls in here. We've looked, we've looked at the master volume, which is on the top rights. But we also have some controls down here, but we'll just work across these. The voices simply tells us how many. Keys, we can press at the same time and get sound. Now, sometimes it's useful to have many sounds you would think automatically that is really, really useful to have. Be able to press all the keys and have every key make a note. While there are certain instances such as percussion and base, where we only want one sound played at a time. So for example, we created, we will do later create a snare drum sound. We don't want, we don't, it's not realistic to have a drum kit with what we got an 88 keys on our keyboard, 37 on the keyboard that had gotten in front of me. But even 3070, we won't want 37 snare drums playing at the same time. We might not list down to one. So what this means, this now it goes from being a sometimes referred to as a polyphonic synthesizer. I probably find it just means it can play many sounds to a monophonic synthesizer. Sound. You'll see this. So there's a lot of rates, synthesisers, a lot of the old moke synthesizes called Roland real. Behind the real. Traditional, very expensive. If you buy them, second-hand synthesizes a monophonic back in the day because every single voice that needed to be added needed a whole other set of circuitry, which is clearly very expensive. So a lot of the synthesizer sounds that we've come to associate with MOG and these kind of seventies and early $0.80 when they were monophonic. A lot of the sounds that we've come to recognize from there. The music that's been generated from synthesisers, that area of the era. Actually, a lot of that comes down to the fact that they were simply monophonic. When they only have one voice. Only one loop gets played at a time. Even if I play two notes. You can see here that I press this see, I press the highest, see the lowest C stops and the highest he continues when I release, then the highest see, book go back down to the lowest C. Only one voice is played at a time. We can change this to, I don't know what the maximum is. Vital, but it's a lot. 32 voices, same time, certainly more voices and I've got fingers, so there's plenty in there. Let's not respect down to, back down to one by default is set at eight. So as I said, by default in, inside vital and they're not on most synthesizes the newest note that played. So if I'm playing a note and then play another, the latest key or the newest key that I've played. We'll take that voice inside vital. I can change this. Let me just move out to here. In fact, let's have a look at the Advanced tab. We're not gonna spend a great deal of time in this course in the advanced tab inside here, inside vital, I can actually tell it how I wanted to do act. So inside this bit down here under voice, under note priority by default, like I said, the newest note will be the one that sounds, but I can set it to be the oldest note, the highest note, the lowest note. Or I can ask you to do a round robin which is just to cycle through them, literally the newest notes, but that is there if you wanted to go and have a play around. This is really like I said, when I'm pressing more than one key, when I'm set into monophonic voices, it will also apply if I, for example, my voice is set to three and I play for five or six notes. It will, it will use whatever set within this note priority section here. For now we'll set this will lead us at, at, at the newest note being the priority. 18. PITCH BEND, SPREAD & VELOCITY TRACKING: The bend section here. On my keyboard, I have a pitch will often on a, on a midi controller or when an artist synthesizer, you'll have two controls over to the left, which are to the left-hand side, usually the keyboard, sometimes right next to it, sometimes slightly above it. They are shown here in the user interface. Down on the bottom left-hand corner. We have on the right the mod wheel. We're not worried about that so much for now. But the pitch will just does exactly as you would expect it. It changes the pitch of the note. If I play a note, It's good on an octave. As I move the picture up, it will bend the pitch up. As I move the pitch fall down, it will bend it down. I can do some interesting effects in there. Just simply by moving the pitcher up and down. I can, I can kind of emulate vibrato just by moving up and down very quickly. All sorts of, all sorts of things can be done in there. The down on the amplifier section here on the bench just says how many semitones? I should bend the pitch in either direction. So by default is set to two. So this is a whole note. It moves a whole tone up or down depending on whether I move the pitch wheel up or down. But I can set this to as many as I want. So for instance, for instance, if I move this up 12 semitones, this is going to move our whole octave. When I move the pitch wheel to the top. If I play a note, move the patrol. Sorry, I'm even a whole, a whole octave in either direction there. Also that binds to the next one is velocity tracking. Velocity tracking. On a modern keyboard. The keyboard is able to detect how hard I press a note. Actually, it's not how harder for us to note. This is a common misconception, but the clue's in the name. So it's actually how fast I press a note. Not how hard a person note. The slower I press a note down, the soft of the sound. Or the quieter the sound, the faster I press a note down, the louder the sound or the the hash of the sound, if you'd like. At the moment, is set to 0 by default. And it doesn't matter whether I press the keyboard hard or soft, or fast or slow. It will always play at the same, same amplitude, same volume. Press it really softly. I can press it really hard wood, and it will always play the same if I turn the velocity tracking up. Now when I press slowly Anki bit too slowly, you can see that I'm pressing a key. Then I go faster, I press harder, I press it. The louder it becomes in its tracks. This is very much like a piano. When you're playing a piano, if you play the keys very softly, you'll get a very soft note. And if you play the keys harder or faster than you'll get a much louder, brighten it. Set that back to 0. Okay. Next along we got the spread button hour the spread knob. And the spread determines the stereo spread of the signal we've got when I play a note right now, you're going to have both the signal governing equally to the left of noise can be a full stereo spread as wide as it can go. If I bring this all the way down to 0, this is effectively going to turn it into a, into a mono signal, out of a stereo signal, and into a mono signal. The spread just determines the width of that stereo field. Hard to demonstrate right now, because we've already looked at oscillators. I'm not really going to hear any difference if we're planning right now. But something to remember for later on. If I want a monophonic signal, I can set the spread to 0 and I will get a mono rather than a stereo signal. Generally, we leave this kind of sat in stereo, but we can be set at any point from mono or stereo. 19. GLIDE: Let's move on and look at Glide. So you will often see this called glides are sometimes referred to as slide. You'll sometimes hear it called portmanteau, which is a slightly nuanced version of it. But basically this is this set or not set at the moment. Every time I play a note, it just plays that note as soon as I switch on glide. And this is because glide is set to 0 seconds. Basically, this glide knob controls how long it should take to get from one node to the other. And it plays every, every tone between the note the first night I played and the second. This glide control basically determines how long it should take to get from one node to the other. This is much easier to demonstrate. So if I set this about halfway, I play this lower see here. When I press the upper see, it will play every note between that lowest C and the upper C, and it will take no 0.78 seconds naught point naught, 0.078 seconds to get there. So listen to this. Maybe let's try that a little bit higher. So it's going to take about a third of a second. Now. Every note I play is going to be, it's going to move from one to the other. Glide. Now, you'll notice that when I played all, perhaps you didn't notice, but when I play this, I was sure to hold down the, the lower key when I press the upward. If I wanted to always glide without having to have the original key held down, I can click on this always guide button here. And now I can press a key. I could say, I can come away from the keyboard, I can press another key and it will always, it will remember the previous note that I played and glide up from that note up to the new one. Hands-off again. I can affect slope of that glide. So this is how how it accelerates or decelerates between the two. So at the moment it's just very linear. And so in a linear fashion it will move over the glide time from my original wrote to the next one. But I can change the slope so I could say it right. I want to go quite fast to start with and then slow off. If I just increase the glide time a little bit more. You can see this one is accelerating into the, into the new note. And I can do the other way round. Initially, it's not going to change pitch very much. And as I move along this curve from left to right and up, the pitch change gets much faster. Double-click that to set that back to linear. The octaves octave scale. The octave scale. It determines the glide time based on the distance between the two notes that we play in through midi. For example, gliding. If I was to play two notes, three octaves apart, that would take three times as long. They either slide would be three times longer. The glide would be three times longer in terms of time than if I was to play two notes one octave apart. It's pretty simple. Now, legato is interesting. What legato is done. It, it means that you'll see this later as we're coming into the course when legato is said, that means that nothing else is really triggered. We're not coming through when it comes to a new note, it will continue with any, any modulations and envelopes that I've applied to my sound. And I realize these are kind of new to you, but we'll cover it later so that when I'm in this kind of monophonic I a single voice mode, I go onto legato. It means that the envelope won't be changed. So you can think of legato. Legato is often thought about in terms of strings. If you've used any sample libraries, you might have chromic come across legato and some of the big MO, feature-rich sample libraries. You can think about a violin player. When a violin plays a note, there is a slight attack to a violin. And there's a slight rasp when the violinist starts with a bow, there's a slight rasp at the beginning of that note. That graph doesn't need to happen every time because a violin can play one note and keep pulling the bow, but actually with the left-hand changed notes. And so we don't want that slight raspy sound at the beginning or they can, or a guitarist could, could play a note with a plectrum and there's an attack. But then slide their finger up to a different note. And we don't want that same attack again, this is a good example of legato, and it's basically being able to perform that slide without restarting the sound from the beginning. So we don't necessarily have the transient or the beginning of the sound, the attack of the sound play again, for example, legato. This will become much clearer when we come to use it later on. In fact, we'll be using that for one of the bass sounds that we make towards the end of the course. That's a quick run through of the amplifier. As I say, the amplifier is applied to everything within, within the synthesizer. Whether that be vital or any other synthesisers is the last bit of the chain before the sound comes out of the instrument and out through your headphones or your speakers. That's the end of this section. In the next, in the next section we're going to, we're going to look at envelopes, which are our way of shaping the amplitude or the volume of our sound when a note is played. 20. INTRODUCTION TO ADSR ENVELOPES: Okay, so, so far we've looked at the oscillator and we've looked at the amplifier, which are the beginning and end of our signal path within the synthesizer. In this section, we're gonna look at envelopes. Envelope is basically a way of adjusting the volume of a sound or the amplitude of a sound. You can use those terms pretty much interchangeably here. But it's a way of adjusting the volume of a sound over time. An envelope can be applied to a number of different items within the, within the synthesizer. Lot of synthesisers, we'll allow you to basically affect anything with an envelope on our diagram here. Just to keep things simple, I've said that we would apply envelopes to both filters into amplifiers. Right now we're going to concentrate on applying the filters to the amplifier. So let's have a look at how envelopes work. Envelopes are, as I say, a way of affecting the volume or the amplitude of a signal over time. So if we look at this graph here, we can see that time is moving along from left to right and volume from, from bottom to top. So this bottom left-hand corner here, we can see that the sound has just been triggered. And there is there is no volume. And as we move along in time and this time is generally very short, we can see that the amplitude or the volume becomes loud very quickly up to its maximum point here. This maximum point is determined by various factors, but usually the level of the oscillator. So the level control within the oscillator, or the eventually the master volume within the amplifier. Then the sound alters over time and each one of these stages has got various different names. Commonly, this is referred to as ADSR. And I'll explain what that means that now. But in your amplifier, these will commonly be called envelopes. But you might often see them simply labeled as ADSR on your, on your synthesising. The a stands for attack. An attack is this very first portion of the signal. So when I press a note, this is how long it takes and this is measured in terms of time. How long it takes to get from no sound to the maximum volume. That's what the attack is. If we want a very slow pad, dreamy, washy kind of sound, then we might want that sound to build up gradually over time and that volume, the attack to be very slow, to take a long time to get from no sound at all item to its maximum volume. If I want a very fast percussive sound, I might want to note attack at all. If you think about the, if you're trying to make a sound that's got a physical equivalent instrument. Say for example, a drum. When I hit a drum, as soon as I hit that drum, the sound is produced straightaway. And so the attack for a drum may be 0 or very, very close to 0. Like I say, for something that's a bit more washy over time, it will kind of dreamy or paddle-like. The attack might be quite long and different instruments will have different attacks. And this ready. We talked earlier about the transient. And this can be a lot to do with transient is it's the, how the signal gets from all how the sunlight gets from 0 to its maximum amplitude. Moving along. Then we've got, we've got the next portion, which is this part of the the the ADSR envelope, which is between these two dashed lines here. This is the decay. Decay of become a little bit clearer when I talk about the next stage. But there's decay is how much time again, it's measured in time. How much time it gets down to, how much time it takes to get to the volume that I want to have the notes sustained that so I have that initial attack and then I will drop down to the level that I want that note to wring out out for a long time for the remainder of the notes. So examples of this may be, when I play a piano, if I hit the keys very hard, I will get the initial very loud attack initial portion of the sound. But if I keep my same panel down or keep my fingers on the keyboard, the sound will come out to a more sustained sound over time, which is lower than the initial attack. Now, again, we don't have to have a decay at all. But we might want to do this over a long period of time or a short period of time, depending on the particular sound you're going to go into. Create. Decay is the amount of time that it takes to get from its maximum amplitude at the end of the attack down to the, down to the level that we want to sustain it at. And that's the next part which is the, the sustain. We have the initial attack. We then perhaps want to drop down in volume using the decay. Then the S stands for sustained, which is the only one that's not mentioned time this is the only one of ADS and odd is measured in terms of amplitude or in volume. And so the sustained is the volume at which you want the note to be sustained after the initial attack and decay. Finally, we move on to the r. Again, this is measured in terms of time when this is the release, this is how long? Once I release the note, once I take my finger off the key, How long should it take for the for the volume to return to 0? Again, if it's a very often lack a very percussive sound, I should attack very quickly and released very quickly as soon as I take my students, as soon as that happens, or perhaps with a piano sound, do you want it to the volume to die by very quickly when you take your, take your hands off of the, off of the keys. For other sounds, you'll wonder much longer really. So I take my fingers off the sound. Just kind of tails off over time. Again. Attack, sorry, attack it. Decay and release are measured in terms of time. This graph here and sustain moves up and down to determine the volume of the sustain. Let's, let's have a look at this in vital. And you'll see from here, this is one of the big reasons that I chose vital to users for this course because of the very visual way they represents things like envelopes. 21. DESIGNING ENVELOPES: Okay, so here we are back in vital. The envelope section of vital is over here in the top right-hand side, m1, m2, and m3. These are the envelopes that we have to play within vital. Let's just zoom into that bit and we can see that we have a number of kind of knobs down the bottom here, which will relate to what we've just saw. The graph of the ADSR envelope. To start with, we have attack. So let's see. What we can do is let's, let's just play with some of these and see if we can get a graph that looks something like the one that we just saw. This initial portion here. And I can adjust this by either moving the meltdown about more. I can grab these points on the graph and move them. As I said, attack is set in terms of time. And so this is how quickly the sound shouldn't move from, from 0 volume to maximum volume. You can see along the bottom here, hopefully this is showing up on the screen recording, but certainly if you've got vital open on your computer, you will you will see this along the bottom here. These grid lines give us kind of a portion up in terms of time. So this first grid line here is 2.5th. This is 1.5 second, 1 seconds, two seconds, 2.5 seconds, three seconds. And we can, we can continue going out to longer attack times. Let's hear just something with a set, this kind of something about this. So we don't have to worry about the sustained release and older decay and release. Let's set this here. We can see I've got two oscillators here. Just so you can see, I've got two oscillators here that both putting out a, in fact exactly the same sine wave. So I will just, I'll just choose one of those done. Just gives them more interesting. So here's our sinewaves. Looking back at the envelopes, we can see that the decay at 0 as soon as I press the key. In fact, it's more useful for you if I see my hair, so you can see down the bottom here, this is the key. I'll be playing. The C here. As soon as I press this note, the note sounds. But as I increase this attack, it takes longer than from the, for the sound to get from nothing to the full volume. So if I set the attack, let's say over here. Now take 1 second to get from the, we also have set it at 1 second, 1 second from the sound to get from 0 volume to its maximum amplitude. And I can set that to even longer. For I kinda pad sound. That might be a useful thing for a more percussive sound. Fatty soon, Let's, let's move on and talk about the decay. So the decay is how long it should take to get to the sustain level. So this is really hard to demonstrate without setting a sustained level. So if I said the sustain level, to be here, I move the attacked me a bit longer. You'll see that when I press a note, the amplitude will rice over the first 500 milliseconds or so. Then take another 2.5th and then take another 2.5th to get down, roughly 2.5th to get down to the level at which I want to sustain it. How it is. Since this you can see it rises and then falls. This is the decay that controls this and I can make this even among them. Let's set the sustained to be a little lower. So make it a little bit more pronounced. As long as I keep my finger on the key, the nut sustain level is going to be maintained. I can set this to be. Once it gets to the end, it will remain. Like I said, it's been very, very short. Again, we can start to really think about sound design and how we want this instrument to react, how we want the synthesized to react to me. Let me press a note. Sustained. We've kind of covered there, it's very hard to cover decay and sustained independently of each other. But the sustained is, as I said, the only one that's mentioned in terms of volume from the ADSR envelope that we talked about before. This is simply the volume at which we should sustain. If it's set very low. Replay a little bit of a higher note, just so you can, perhaps here that a little bit easier is still playing. But it's playing very, very quietly. And as long as my fingers held down on the key, or I've got the sustained pedal pressure in my foot. That is the volume at which side is going to be output. So if I go a little higher, you get the points. The release is how long it takes once I release my finger from the key to die away to 0. If I set this at the moment is very short. As soon as I say my finger off the key, the sound is gone. If I set this to a bit longer, an acidic somewhere out here. You can see that when I released my finger from the key, and if you can see this down the bottom here, and I can say down on the keyboard here, you can see when I released my finger from the note, all the time that my fingers held down. It will remain at this point. This is the sustained points. It will stay at that point until I release my British. The key. Slowed over time or over the time that I've determined, that note will fade away to 0 volume. Now, in order to keep this quite simple, I've left this order straight lines, but actually within vital and within a lot of, particularly within software synthesizers, I can actually kind of shape these in different ways to get different effects. This is going to rise very fast, very slowly to start with, and then very fast and it sounds the attack. So I can really mess about with these to get all sorts of very sound design techniques to, again, further shape at all. And this is all synthesis is all about, is starting with some initial sound source in all cases is also latest. But we've already briefly mentioned kind of wave table synthesizes and FM synthesizers, other types of synthesizes, but we basically stopped within a sound source, um, and then we reshape that to be exactly the way we want it to be. An envelope is one step in that. As I say again, envelope is concerned with controlling the amplitude of the volume of the note over time. Some of you, the eagle-eyed amongst you would have noticed that our envelope in this case has got an additional part which we haven't played with yet, which is whole. So let's just set this back to a more straightforward kind of envelope. Knock the sustained down a bit. Make this a straight line again. Released down just because it takes $2 play notes hold. So this is fairly common. So most sense sizes will have ADSR in front though. The vast majority will have ADSR. They will certainly have a and usually so they attack how fast to get to maximum volume and how slowly release that maximum body back down to foster slow to release that maximum body back down to 0 when I release the key. Some very simple synthesisers may just have an A&R. Some may have. Most will have ADSR, this one. And it's not uncommon. Also has the H. If I just raise, it should become fairly obvious what it does. Adds this extra bit at the top here. Can you see at the top of the attack? So as I move the hold, it brings out an extra, extra piece here. What this is is once, how long I should remain at the maximum amplitude before I decay is added between the attack and the decay. So I attack, I go up from 0 to the maximum amplitude. I then add the hold and it will hold it there for a period of time, and then decay down to the sustain level. Hold it that until I release the key. Then it will use the release time to determine how fast or slow to go from the sustain level down to 0. Let's have a look at this. So whatever is at 0, it just dropped. This drop a little bit more pronounced. With the whole set to 0 or thereabouts. The sound goes, the volume goes up and down and then dies away. When I release the key. If I introduce a hold, it will stay at that maximum volume before dropping off. And this is not doing anything other than holding the ketone. I'm going to reduce the key down through the release. You can see it's just another attribute within, within the envelope that again allows us a little bit more control over the the way that the sound is generated. There is another bit here which is delay. And you'll see that when I increase, this just moves the whole graph to the left and the right. By default is set to 0 in the vast majority of cases. In fact, I can't think of a single instance in this course by this won't be set at 0. But what it does mean is it allows you to have some time between when you press the note and then the attacks dot. This is quite unusual to see actually, but very, very rarely used. But in this instance, just to demonstrate, I'll set the decay, set the delay to around a second. You'll see that when I press a note and there'll be a second before the attack starts. Precedent now, as a second before the note sounds. So again, precedent now. Then we also just wanted to reiterate in here that they just remove the whole to go back to our ADSR. Let's move to sustain up. In an ADSR envelope. As long as I have to key press down, the sound will stop here. And you can see this in the graph inside module. And again, vital so good for this and such. Well that was a really advanced and complicated looking synthesized. The visualization of it makes it so suitable and so, so good for just demonstrating these kind of techniques, no matter how elementary or fundamental they are. You'll see that the sustain is where the note will be held. And it will be held that as long as I hold the note down, it will remainder that sustained volume until I release the note than the release bit will be triggered. You can see that guest is remaining on the sustained point until I release the key. But what happens if I release the key before I hit the sustained note? Let us have a look. Hopefully you can see that. But what's happening is even though I'm release the key as I'm partway down on this kind of slope for the decay, before I reach the sustained point, it jumps immediately from this point on plays the release. So it plays the whole release cycle every time. 22. USING ENVELOPES: Equivalence can be applied to all manner of things. And then we saw that in the diagram before we apply it into filters in our diagram. Let's just pop back there. In our, in our diagram here, we said that we would apply filters to, sorry, envelopes to filters. And two amplifiers were actually, of course, we can apply them to oscillators as well, and that is what happens by default. So by default are envelopes are applied to the oscillator. And the way that we attach them in vital is really good, really, really, really, really simple. By default, envelope one will attach itself to every single oscillator. No matter how many oscillators I have 123 oscillators. Envelope, envelope one will apply to that oscillator. But I have multiple envelopes. Let's just set this envelope to something that's going to be quite distinctive. And let's set this. Maybe you have two oscillators. There's changes once something that's very different to a, the sine wave V that we have so that when we play a key, now, here we've got a noise or a quite a high pitched, quite high pitch, sawtooth wave, and a sine wave at the pitch that I'm playing. Let's, let's set the release to be a bit longer. Now, by default, this envelope is attached to both oscillators. But I can create another envelope. So I could create this envelope here which has got a much shorter release time, is still playing an ambulant one. Hey, but I could attach this envelope here simply by C where these kind of circle and the four arrows, or I can grab this one and I can attach this to the level inside here. I certainly pick it up from here. Anyway that's suitable as a target. Anything that can be used as an embryo, which you can see is a lot. Anything that an envelope can be attached to will be highlighted. And I'll drag it over here. And this instance, I'm going to touch it to the level inside the second oscillator. I'm going to set that level all the way to 0. When I hover over it. And I've got this envelope. When I'm looking at this envelope, you can see that underneath the level on oscillator two, I get this little pie chart looking thing. And you'll see that when I hover over that just above it on the level knob, I get a green line and as, as I drag up and down, that green line becomes bigger and more of the pie chart gets for them. This is how much it's going to affect. How much is envelope is going to affect the level for oscillates. And number two, probably the easiest way to demonstrate. I'll set this around somewhere around here. The easiest way to demonstrate is to, is to play it. What I'm expecting to happen is let's move this up a bit, a bit further. What I'm expecting to happen is for oscillator, Let's do it. It won't be just because of the nature of this as a saw wave. It'll be, it'll be easier to hear like this. What I'm expecting to happen now is with envelope one which is attached by default to the level of every oscillator. But in this case, we're looking at oscillation number one. I'm expecting to happen is the sine wave to attack very quickly and then to sustain a reasonable level and then die away over 1.5 seconds when I release the key envelope too, because I've attached it to the level of oscillator two is now going to affect the level of oscillator two. So I'm expecting the sawtooth wave, the higher pitch sawtooth wave, to take a 2.5th to attack. So it can take a 2.5th to get from minimum volumes and maximum volume. And then when I release the key is going to die away almost immediately. Listen out for those two things. Can you hear that so straightaway, as soon as I press the press the sound, the sinewave attacks straightaway and maximum volume almost immediately. We can make that even less. Then when I release when I release, excuse me, I'm pressing the wrong the strategies grab this thing here. So we're not released. It's going to release over a long period of time. Let's just hear that. It's attacking immediately. As soon as I goes to the sustainable, when I release the key, it takes a long, long, long, long time to release. If I turn on oscillator to oscillate too, has been affected by envelope. Envelope too. Because I've attached it. By dragging over from here to the level of oscillator to set the level to 0. But then I said I wanted to affect it kind of 75 per cent in there. This is going to attack much more slowly. But as soon as I release the key, it's gonna, it's gonna release straightaway. Now what becomes interesting? And you can see how this could build up into a whole bunch of things and bear in mind how many different things we can attach a envelope to play these two oscillators at the same time. You'll hear that the sign by uses its envelope and the, and the sawtooth wave uses its second envelope, envelope number two. We can make it attach because we can have oscillates number three with a square wave or a triangle wave and make it attach, we can either create it. So another envelope for oscillates number three, by default is going to get the envelope number one attached to the level. Or again, we could take envelope number two and attach that to the level over here. And again, because such the envelope to a whole manner of things, for example, we might want to attach it to the unison voices. We're gonna go over the envelope. We're gonna go from one unison voice to 16 universe users and voices. For the square wave. If you're interested. We can attach it to an envelope, can be used to attach to the pan. We might want to press a note for it to move from our left ear to our right ear or from move from right air to stereo in the middle. Want to attach it to the pitch. Just create some different envelope shapes. I would suggest that you start with envelope one attached by default to the, the level of the oscillators. And just get a real good understanding of how it impacts overtime. Create yourself a quite a percussive sounds. So somebody with a fast attack and fastest release create some more padlock sounds. As I say, just play around inside the inside the envelopes here, create some envelopes and before you attach them to a sound, create the envelope. Really understand what that envelope is going to do in terms of ADSR and add some hold if you want to. Then attach it to various different things wherever you wherever you can find to attach it. At the moment only attach it to controls that you know what to do. So at the moment, we've looked at oscillators and we've looked at the amplifier. You could attach it to the spread, you could attach it to the level, the pan or the oscillators, the pitch that fine tunes the unison, the phase. So have a play around in there, create some envelopes and an attach into various different things. See what crazy sounds you can get up. In the next section. Then we're going to look at the next way. We've got modifying the sound that's been generated by the oscillator. I had to filter out the envelope pi to it. And that's gonna be filters. 23. INTRODUCTION TO FILTERS: In the last section that we looked at envelopes and how we can use them to shape the amplitude or the volume of our sound. In this section, we're going to look at the next item in our signal path that can be used to really begin to shape the sound that we want to hear. That is filters. Let's jump over to vital and I'll have a look at how filters work. Filter section is down here in the bottom left. But before we get there, I'm just going to show you quickly how to we're still set up here from it with the envelopes that we looked at in the last section. So rather than going reset those all back to something sensible, there's, there is a quick way to do this and vital. And if I click on these little, little, little three bars at the top here, I can left-click that and choose initialized preset. And that will always take me back to the initial preset that I wanted to save. I want to start again from a blank patch. If I want to save, if you've got some work that you want to save, you can, you can choose here to save the preset and you can give it a name. And then you'll be able to go and click on Browse presets. Lay says I didn't go and find that patch that you've created that you love and that you want to use again in the future. There are a bunch of presets that you can, that you can buy or find online that you can load into vital for, for sounds that other people have made. Depending on the basically depend on how much you paid for vital in the first place, whether you got the the free version, I think that comes with about 25 different presets, right up to the kind of pro, the top end version that would come to with, with hundreds of different presets. That may be a banker presets in there. When vitals installed that you can kind of click around, but not going to look at those in this course. We're much more interested in in B9 to create our own sounds from scratch rather than the news and other peoples to give our sound. And I'm using that distinctive and unique quality. But anyway, I'm going to click in here into initialized preset. This is gonna take us back to our initial preset, but our basic envelopes. And we'll be back in the initial preset over here in our oscillators. Remembering, of course, that we need to click on this arrow here to the right to bring us into just the ones into basic shapes. And to set our phase and phase randomization down to 0. Let's have a look at, Let's have a look at filters. Filters really used to shape the sound. And so we've shaped the volume. And so now we're going to shape the frequencies that are produced by ASO. And we saw that earlier on when we looked at the let's pick up, pick one hand, just have a look in our thing here that when I play a sound, this I can see the shape of the wave. But when I open up my EQ, I can just create this down and bring this back up when I play a, a sawtooth wave in this case. That I like all these harmonics. And the filters for the most part are interested in these, in these frequencies, in the harmonics either enhancing or, or removing some of these harmonics and some of these frequencies from the note that we generated with our oscillator filters in vital, there are two of them or two main ones, and they are found out in this bottom left-hand corner here. So I'll just zoom in there so we can see them a bit more clearly. We've got a sine wave, a sawtooth wave. And let's enable the filters I need to go and click on the little button. As with all the other panels are going, most of the other panels are going to click on this little button. The filter will light up and we can see that we've got filter one applied here. By default, this is an analog 12 decibel low-pass filter. We're going to go through all the different types of filters that we've got here or the basic types of filters that we've got and what they mean, and how they affect the sound that we've got, and how we can adjust them in different ways. Again, vital comes with a sensible set of defaults and that is that oscillator one will by default be routed to filter number one. But I can change this by either clicking up here to send it to different filters. I might want oscillator to also to go through filter one. For example. I can go through filters. I can send it to both filters at the same time in parallel, I can send it straight to the effects which we're going to have great inside, invite, inside vital. We're going to look at it later. Or I can send it direct out. So this is direct from the oscillator. It won't pass through, anything will go. The envelope will be applied, and it will go straight out, bypassing all the filters, all the effects. Straight out to straight out, straight through the amplifier. Let's set this back to go to Filter one. If I turn this filter off, this is just to remind you of the noise of you've had it plenty of times already, but this is the sound of a standard sawtooth wave. And as soon as I apply this filter, we're going to get different noise. Much smoother and less raspy, less aggressive noise. Now this is, this is applying a low-pass filter. So what this is saying is that all the low frequencies can pass anything that's where the frequency falls within this orange graph it anything, any frequencies at full down in that scale, they're composite, ie they get admitted by, then they get passed onto the amplifier and out through headphones or speakers. Anything that's outside of that graph gets cut. This is a low-pass filter. Sometimes you'll hear this referred to as a high cut filter here because we're cutting the, cutting the high frequencies out from the signal. But most commonly and within vital, certainly. This is called a low-pass filter. Just while I'm here at one other way of doing the routing. You can do it through here. You can routing the oscillators, the sampler, and actually the other filter. To filter one, we can say, okay, well, we're accepting signals from, in this case, just oscillator one. But I can switch on the other oscillators here if I wanted to. And you'll see that if I just enabled this to make it a bit easier to see, if I look at oscillated three, I can either roots, root here or I can go and switch oscillator three ON and OFF. Directed to the filter from this button, it's reflected in this oscillator. Let's switch it off and let's talk about the, the different types of oscillators. Sorry, the different types of filters. Now, again, on your synthesizer, if you're planning to use one outside of ISO, not highly recommend that you have a look around at different types of different types of synthesisers and whether that be hardware or software. You'll often see them referred to simply as filters. Sometimes. Particularly some of the older analogue synthesisers, we'll only have a low-pass filter and high-pass filter, there'll be separate and there'll be maybe late labeled as lowpass. Highpass, it might be labeled as high cut, low COP. Quite often you'll see them referred to as LP or HP for low-pass or high-pass, will look at the different types of filters. Low-pass and high-pass is in just a second. The other thing that you might see filters labeled as is VCF. Voltage-controlled filter, same as we had voltage controlled oscillators. Voltage-controlled amplifier. We also might see it as a voltage controlled filter. 24. FILTER TYPES: So as I said, we turn on the filter here and it does make a distinct, different for Sandy already. This is because we're applying a low-pass filter and we're saying that everything down here, it gets passed through and all the high frequencies get cut off. So if we think about the harmonics that we saw in the equalizer, all those little harmonics off to the right-hand side. They've all been removed from the signal on only the harmonics on the left-hand side and the fundamental have been passed through. Now down the bottom here I can move this to the left and the right. And fairly obviously this will mean that as I move this, as I move this further to the right, more and more high frequencies are being allowed to pass until eventually all the way up here. And actually you can make some pretty cool noises just by simply what we called a filter sweep bytes, which is where we are just adjusting this, which is known as the cutoff from left to right. So a filter sweep might sound like this. We'll look at some really fun things we can do later on. To automate this. Automate that sound is our plane. We have a bunch of filters inside of vital. We're going to look at the analog ones primarily on one other. This is a low-pass filter. If I take this blend at the top here and turn this around, you can see that this, everything that's in orange is going to pass. So if I go all the way to the other end, what have I effectively made is now a high-pass filter. So only the high-pass frequency or only the high frequencies are going to pass through to the amplifier and the low-frequency you can be cut and that sounds. So a low-pass filter sounds like this. That's somewhere in the middle. And a high pass filter. Removal of those lower sounds and just let the high one serif. So now it sounds like this. Low-pass filter is by far, by far the most common type of filter that will apply to your, to your sounds. This is the one that you'll see used more often than anything else. Now, you'll notice at the top here this is analog. And there are, if I click this, there are various different types of filters in here. We're going to stick with the analogue ones for now because the others are pretty much the same, they just use a slightly different algorithms. So once you've learned the analog ones, y'all know what all the rest are. And because I use a slightly different type of algorithm, which is based on different types of electronics. Analog one is a very traditional sounding kind of analog filter. Latter filter for the ladder filters for example, this is something that is a different type of circuitry designed originally emulated as using computer algorithms now, but this was something that it made very popular. We have algorithms based on purely digital from the digital synthesizer era. Various other ones. We're going to look at some of the others in a bit. But certainly not going to look at all of them in something that you should definitely explore. Once again, once you've been through this course and you really, really understand how the synthesizer works and how we're able to sculpt the sound that we want, then is the time to start going through all these other different types of filters. And really just kind of seeing the nuances of these different kind of filter algorithms and filter types. For now, let's stick with the analog. And so the first one that you'll see is, by default is analog 12 db. This sounds with decibels. This is a measure of volume. What this is saying is that for our cutoff point, which is set to semitones, and it's just going to set that to hertz as I suggested. The only reason I'm doing that is because just about every other synthesising that you'll ever use, we'll use hertz instead of semitones is a unit of frequency. If I flip back here and I'll set this frequency to be 600 hertz. For every octave that I go above 600 hertz. In terms of frequency, in terms of pitch. The volume will decrease by 12 decibels. We get this kind of, let's just knock this down for now, but I'll explain what this is. You see this thing here? That's the residence. I'll explain what that is in a minute. From this cutoff point, where the volume is maximum, where everything is getting through for every octave that we go above that, the, the volume will be caught by 12 decibels. This gives a relatively shallow slope. If I change this to be a 24 decibel slope, you'll see that the slope gets much, much steeper. So what this says for every frequency that's above the cutoff, for every, for every octave that the frequency is above the cutoff, the volume will be lowered by 24 decibels. You can see that you can hear the difference. So you can hear that there are many more high frequencies. They're kind of the higher pitch sounds being led through. If I change this to a 24 decibel, can you hear that? Really, really high-pitched raspy noises? There are many more being led through here. That slight buzzing. And this can be a really useful way when Ms. sculpting our sound. If we are getting some sort of some sort of bars, some high-pitched frequencies that we don't like. We can apply a steeper, steeper curve to our filter. I apply a 24 decibel per octave filter rather than a twelv decibel in order to cut some of those frequencies a bit more sharply. The same the other way round. If we move to a high-pass filter, again, the slope is the same. So we cut the low frequencies much more quickly and much more harshly with a 2424 decibel per octave filter than we do with a twelv decibel. Like I say, a low-pass filter is what you're going to use more than any other type of filter when we're doing sound design. So we'll stick with the low-pass filter for now. Onto the next thing. I guess we can look at some different types of filters. So we've looked at the 12 decibel filter, the 24 decibel filtering. And again, they are usually uses a low-pass or a high-pass. We have the notch blend. If I go down here and get this where we can see it, what the notch is going to do is not just going to, if you've used EQ before, you're gonna find this really simple to understand. But basically everything that's in the inside, the orange portion is going to be allowed to pass this notch. It means that we have this, this part in the middle where those frequencies is gonna be cut. We might have a really, really, once we've generated our sound, we might have one particular harmonic or one frequency which we don't like. And we can use a notch filter out that, that one or that small band of frequencies onto the next one, which is a notch spread. And you can see that this one then allows you to cut out a few more, a few more frequencies. I'm really just kind of as an another shape of filter. Not massively used again, but it's useful. But you do want to use it. Again. Really useful sound design tool. Not a massively used type of filter, but definitely if that's the kind of sound that you're going for, you can play around with that and get some really interesting noises out. And then we have a, this filter here, which is a BPN. It stands for band peak, notch. This is kind of a blend of different types of filter. We can just kind of get a really emphasize a particular band or a particular peak. So we could, the easiest one, the easiest thing for me to play a note and use a hill with us. This enables us to pull out a particular frequency or band of frequencies and really, really, really emphasize them having consequences streams here. But we can put, again, like I said, these other types of filters are useful. But I think it really just takes some playing around. I can show you what the graphs look like and the kind of effect that you can get with them. But it just takes a little bit of experimenting. So I definitely encourage you to do that. Just start with a really basic oscillator. We have here, just a simple sawtooth. And just work your way through those analog filters to start with and have a play with them. 25. RESONANCE: There's a pretty standard looking, looking low-pass filter cutoff here. And this is the point at which the slope starts. So this is the point at which frequencies and volume starts to get. The volume of frequencies start to get cut. Now, we have this other control here on the right-hand side. And this is for resonance. And what resonance does is basically gives it a little bit of a boost just before the, at the cut-off point, just before the slope starts. You can see this in the graph. As I raise this resonance up, I get this little peak just before the, just before the slope. This can really alter the sound. So let's with the residents of 0. And then I can really emphasize that point. Just gives that little bit of a boost at the very highest frequency before, before the cutoff. And you'll see that this is quite often used again to sweep. But we talked before also about the changes to the effect will be greater. We talked before about the cutoffs suite, which is a really common type of modulation that's done for now by hand, but I'll show you something more about that later, how to automate it. But this causal sweep. If you listen to any music from the 70s or 80s, you will surely have heard that the synthesized music, if I increase the resonance, that affects becomes much more apparent. That is, resonance is just a raise and volume of a particular band of frequencies that is just before the cutoffs at the beginning of the cough slip. 26. DRIVE, MIX, KEY TRACKING & ROUTING: Dr. this simply adds a little bit of saturation is not a massive overdrive distortion saturation effect. We'll have a look at how we do that later. But it just adds a little bit of drive to the filter, to the sound as it passes through the filter. And it can be used to add some, a little bit of warmth to us. Like I said, it's not much. But it's just adding a little bit of drive. Again, adding a little bit of interest, a little bit of warmth, I think to the sound, the mix. This is the wet, dry mix. So if you've used any kind of effects before, this is all the way to the right here. This is wet. So this means that the whole signal from the filter gets passed to the amplifier. If I move it to this site, you'll see that the, there is effectively no filter here now. And as I move this through here, we change it through. We changed the shape of the filter to make it more or less apparent. So here, for example, we still have our low-pass filter. But we are allowing some of the higher frequencies through but lesser volume. So this is effectively giving us a wet, dry mix. So to allow more of the original sounds to pass through the filter. Set that to here for now. The final thing is key tracking. So at the moment, the same, the same filter is applied at exactly the same frequency, whether I play very low note or a very, very high note. So high, you can't hear a very high note. The cutoff for the filter is applied exactly the same frequency. With Creek key tracking on the filter, the filter cutoff moves directly in relation to the key that I pressed on the note that I've played. So if I play loner again, you can see me moving the cutoff. That's just the cutoff moving down that frequency in relation to where it's set. If it's originally set up here, for example, it moves down to relative, as I say, to the, the key that's played. If I play very high note, the cutoff actually moves up to meet that notes relative to the key that I'm playing on my keyboard. So that's the basic controls of the cutoff of the filter. We have two filters. We can go, we've got a number of options here. We could go. Because let me just go into a bit of a wider shot here so you can see we could send, we could have oscillator one because send that to filter one. We could have oscillated to then move to base basic shapes. And we might have a square wave coming out of oscillator two. And we might send that to filter to oscillator one goes to filter to, we might have, let's just be different. Let's just have a high-pass filter on, on, on Filter number two oscillators number one is going to send its signal from the oscillator to filter number one and then out to the amplifier. Oscillator two is going to send its signal through filter number two and out through the amplifier. I could choose to send both to filter to, I can send both to filter one. I could send oscillator one to filter one and out to the AMP. Or I can send oscillated to two through both filters. So both filters in parallel and then out to the AMP. I could skip the filters altogether and just go out to the effects or just go direct out. I could say that I want to in here, I could switch on filter one so I can say, Okay, go from oscillator one to filter number one, and then filter number two except a signal from filter number one. So it goes oscillator filter one, filter two, and then out. These are all ways. Thinking back to our diagram or we talked about our signal path here. These are just called, sometimes it's called routing, sometimes it's called the signal power, signal flow. It's just different ways of routing the sound from always from the original sound source, but then out through a number of different elements within our synthesizer and out to the amplifier, and then out to our speakers or headphones. So that's how we can route our filters. There's just one last type of filter that I'd like to talk about. 27. COMB FILTERS: The last type of filter I like to talk about is the comb filter. As I said, there are others within here, but a comb filter is Mark. Comb filter is markedly different. So the comb filter looks like this. So if you just increase this a little bit, there are different types of comb filter, which you'll see in here. They're all slightly different. But I'm just going to explain what we would use one later on. We'll use one to create one of the sounds that we're going to create towards the end of the course. But there are really interesting thing. If you think back to when we looked at the equalizer and we played, we played our various different types of wave shapes through the oscillator. So our sine wave, a square wave, a triangle wave, a sawtooth wave, through the oscillator. We were able to see that it produced a number of harmonics. Not the sinewave, but the others did. It looks very similar, so this doesn't it. So what's a comb filter can do is to raise the harmonics. This is particularly useful with key tracking on, and you can see that when I moved to keep tracking it on my default. But this means that if I, excuse me, if I use this one here and go back to a sine wave. This means that now I can take my sine wave and I can raise particular harmonics within the sine wave using the comb filter. My comb filter allows assignment to go from this kind of sound to this kind of sound. As I sweep the cuts off, cuts off matches the fundamental, then I'll start to produce all these harmonics afterwards. It sounds much more like a square wave from a sawtooth wave. You can just use key trucking done with key truck and switched off on this. See, I can adjust that to get those harmonics after that. See, I don't get them anywhere else because those harmonics already applied to Nazi because that's where I've set the cutoff. If I put key trucking not we'll now move the cutoff or the comb filter. Sorry. We'll move the comb filter along relative to the keto. I've pressed that I will pull this harmonic sound for Africa with key tracking off. It sounds like this. Now and again. I'll hit one minute, sounds quite harsh. That's just coincidentally that I've hit a key that is one of these other spikes. Instead of the fundamental. If I send the key tracking on, you'll see that the comb filter moves. It can be quite tricky to chew. But once I've got it tuned, the cone photo moves along with it. So it's putting, it will pull those harmonics out wherever, whenever I hit the keyboard. So that's one. Comb filter can be really, really handy for putting out some extra harmonics, but also that with key trucking. And you can see that that's a really good useful key tracking needs to be able to pull that comb filter backwards or forwards along the kind of frequency spectrum to when it's tuned off fundamental notes to pull out those harmonics in the way that we wanted to. Just shooting. You can use the residence to determine the you can see on here is quite evident that as I'm moving the, the resonance slider is putting out. Those different harmonics are different. They're a high wind, low amplitude not covers the filters, but there's actually one more interesting thing that I just want to show you the filters. Again, the way that I'm trying to describe this, the functioning of a synthesisers to build block by block by block. So you can really, really understand each block of the time I didn't know, starts to look at how these different blocks green interact with each other. 28. COMBINING FILTERS AND ENVELOPES: If we look back to here, let me talk to my envelopes. We said that by the filter can affect the sari, an envelope can affect the the oscillates or the amplifier. We looked at how we can adjust the volume and pitch and things like that given time. But actually a filter can affect, not sorry, an envelope can affect the filter. Back in here. And let's go back to a filter that we know and love. So let's go back to 24 deaths about low-pass filter will add a bit of resonance. Let's just choose what we've, what we've got here is our pretty standard. A little bit of residents on 24 decibel low-pass filter with a triangle wave. As we move the cutoff, as we saw before, we get some cool and interesting effects from the filter. Now, earlier in the course, we talked about envelopes and we said the envelopes by default apply to the level parameter of an oscillator. But an envelope can be used for all sorts of things. So let's demonstrate that. Let's, let's create an envelope here. So let's just create an implement that maybe looks a bit like this. Let's take the envelope. And by just hovering over the envelope. But here until we get these kind of little light, lighter gray arrows for lighter gray arrows with a circle in the middle. Let's drag that over here, and let's just drag it over to the main part of the graph and our filter and apply this to the cutoff. And how to think about what we expect to happen. I will set this a little bit, a little bit higher. What we expect to happen is for the envelope and the graph here within the envelopes of the attack, the decay, sustain and release to effect now, the movement of the filter. When I press Enter, notice it will sound like this. This can be really interesting. So it's going to be interested with a very fast attack. This filter, all sorts of sounds hard, but you can see it's automated in the bottom left-hand corner. Now, let's play with this amorphous. Let's up the resonance. You can see there's residency. I can also keep track it. That's how we can use the envelope in conjunction with the filter to adjust the way that the sound is emitted over time. In the next section, we're going to look at another way to do that. And that is with low-frequency oscillators. 29. INTRODUCTION TO LOW FREQUENCY OSCILLATORS (LFOs): Okay, so, so far we've seen how we can use oscillators to generate our noise or the sound that we're going to begin with. How we can use envelopes and filters to both adjust the volume pitch and various other parameters of the sound. Finally, now we're going to look at the last building block of synthesis, and this is low-frequency oscillators. You'll find these on. Synthesized are usually labeled as low-frequency oscillator, but often as LFO, which obviously stands for low frequency oscillator. So what is a low-frequency oscillator? What we know about oscillators, right? So we know we've got oscillators, they produce various wave shapes. The difference really between the oscillators that we, that we have used so far to, to generate a sound initially. And a low-frequency oscillator is that their low-frequency oscillator? And the kind of by its very name, is a oscillator that admits at such a low frequency that we can't actually hear it. It's something that will typically traditionally would have omit annoys below that 20 hertz. So below that lower level of human hearing. These days with software and with digital synthesisers. We don't have to worry so much about the frequency. The US is still identical, but actually nowadays it an emit any sound at all. Not that it makes a great deal of difference, but traditionally a analog. When it was analog circuitry and analog low-frequency oscillator would admit still a bit as sound, but it'd be so low-frequency that humans can hear it nowadays, they don't admit any sound at all, but they work in exactly the same way. If we have low frequency oscillators or an oscillator that emits sound so low that we can't hear it. Well, what's the, what's the use in that? Well, you can think of a no frequency oscillator is just a signal. It's just a signal that's evolving over time that we can attach very much like the attached our envelopes and our filters to our envelopes, to different things to change sound. Every time we get we attached a envelopes to the level and the pitch. And we attach an envelope to the cutoff in our, in our filter to make a different shape of sound. We can use our low-frequency oscillator to modulate. And that's the word that's often used modulation as. In fact, sometimes you'll see that on synthesisers to, there'll be a section of a synthesizer called modulation, which will contain your low-frequency oscillators. We can use a low-frequency oscillator to modulate. Basically anything else on the synthesizer. You can think of. If there is a knob, slider or switches. You can turn slide or switch on a, in a synthesizer, you can use a low-frequency oscillator effectively to automate them. Let's just have a quick scoot over to vital. Here's vital, I am going to initialize the preset as we did before. I move that, I always seem to click that twice. I don't know why. We'll move that two basic shapes. And we will bring the phase and the phase randomization down to 0. And so we have a sinewave. Let's move that up an octave so we can hear it a bit more easily. Okay, So one of the things that I could do in here, so for example, if I wanted a, a simple sine wave like this, we're not going to mess with the oscillator just yet. But if I wanted a sine wave and for the sound design that I wanted, I wanted the sine wave that got slowly louder and quieter again and then slowly louder and quieter again and just went round and round, modulating its volume up and down. But I could do it like this, couldn't I? I could, I could bring my level down to 0 and play my notes. And you can see that the keyboard below. Then I could, with my mouse or with my hardware controller. I could move this up and down by hand. This would work. But it's got a few restrictions. One is that it is not accurate at all, so it's just doing it. As I move the mouse up and down, I can't get it. But to any particular tempo. It also has a restriction that I couldn't do one at a time. So if I wanted while not adjusted the level like this, and then also adjusted the pan, hope bloats and 11 up so we can hear it. I also adjusted the pattern from left to right. Well, I've already got one mouse pointer. If I was focused on hardware, I could do both at once. If I wanted to note that was to adjust in level. And at the same time, how would I do that? I can only do that. I couldn't do one at a time because I've only got one mouse pointer. If I've got hardware than I can possibly two knobs at the same time. I can move to knobs at the same time, but I can't play a note at the same time because I've only got two hands. So we have this kind of inaccuracy. We have this inability to change multiple parameters at the same time. There's a limit to that. One thing that we can do using a modern door that we couldn't do before using analogue synthesisers is actually kind of record that in so we can automate using our door. We could automate through the ADCC values, perhaps some of these things. But but actually, there's another way. And it's been around for a long, long, long time. It's through the use of LFO. So we can actually use the low-frequency oscillator, which goes up and down, up and down or wherever wave shape you want. But in our instance, up and down, up and down linearly to control the panning. So rather than, than sitting there yourself and adjusting the knob by hand or with your mouse. Or perhaps if you're lucky enough to have an assistant haven't then do it. Or an intern, you can get the synthesis, synthesized and do that for you. It's over here in this panel. 30. USING LFOs: Let's have a look at LFO. So it's just there and it's just underneath the envelope. This is our LFO panel. It should seem fairly familiar, follows a similar pattern to the to the ambulance envelopes panel above, which is here. So you can see it's a very similar looking thing. The way that an envelope, sorry, the way that an LFO works is that the value is adjusted. So there's the value, whatever that value is, whether it'd be, we're going to attach it to level or pan or, or anything else. Is represented on the y-axis. This is the value on the y-axis and time is over the x-axis. To take our really simple example where we want to take this note. We want to oscillate it in level over time. We can do it by hand like this. Or we could attach our LFO to it. What I can do is I can use an LFO to modulate anything within my synthesizer. In our case, we're going to modulate the level. As I said. Let me just zoom out here a little bit so we can, we can take our LFO here, which is going to overtime, is going to raise, an amplitude. Value is going to raise until it gets to the top. And then it's gonna come back down again. And it's gonna cycle as we've got it set up right now. It's gonna cycle round and round this pattern. So it's gonna go up, down, up, down, up, down, the same way that our wave shapes cycle overtime. I will take our LFO, we will attach it to our level. We'll set the level all the way down and then we'll hover over this little pie chart thing here. Remember here, this is where I can go and I can use my left mouse button and drag up and down. So I'll set that and you see the green line around the outside of the dial. I've set that to where I want it to be as maximum. We've already said it to his minimum, which is where it is at the start of this wave. Now when I press the, press a key on the keyboard, I should hit this. You can see over here in the LFOs cycling round around this. As we go along here, we get louder until we get to the maximum point, and then we get quieter again. We can use this to control multiple things. We might want to also attach it to our wireless. Let's choose the pen. That's what we were doing before. So we're going to pan from a center and we're going to pan it. This is going to pan it all the way to the right. This is another useful tip inside vital. That is, if I right-click on this now and I can choose make bipolar. What this means is that at the moment, this, excuse me, this is goes from it, from its default, the value or the value of where it's set. And I can set it all the way up to a maximum value. Or I can set it the other way all the way down to a minimum value. Now because this is a pan control, this is an interesting thing because, because it's a pan control, we want it to be go all the way here so the sound is always in the left ear, all the way round until the sound comes in our right ear there. Now with the with the attachment from the LFO is it is it's only going to move it around to the left or to the right. I want to want to do is just right-click and choose make bipolar. And this way, when I hover over this and drag it, you can see that it's growing in both directions. We'll move it up to its maximum value. So it's going all the way to the left and all the way to the right. Now, when I, when I play the note, the LFO is going to effects, oscillates a one level, sorry, the volume of oscillation. And it's going to affect the oscillator one pan. So it's going to pan it from left to right. This isn't too that we can hear that as that goes round and round, we are moving the sound from one end to the other. 31. LFO SHAPES: So we can attach market, we can create multiple f LFOs by default, they've got this triangle shape, but we can be caught different shapes CFOs. Let's let's just remove the pan one for now. I would just again to remove attachment and vital. Just right-click and choose Remove. We've still got the the volume. We can choose different shapes for LFO. So by default we've got a triangle. We might have a sore down. This is going to be at maximum body to start with. I'm just going to slide down over the whole of the graph and then jump straight back up again to the maximum value. Given us a kind of a pink noise. That sounds like my door open on my car. Now you know how they made that. There are various other so we can drop this down. We've got a whole range inside. Inside vital. The most common bonds are the ones we're going to focus on our soil down, up. We've got a sinewave exactly the same as the oscillation regenerated. So listen to that. Again. Very similar to the triangle one that we had before, the default setting. And you see that from the oscillators when we use them as noise generators or sound generators, the wave generators wherever you want to call them, sinewave and a sine wave and a triangle wave are very, very similar. Just that the, the sine wave is a little smoother. There are others. We've got the square, so this is maximum volume, minimum volume. We've got a stack I stamp. We have to try and go, which is the default. Then there are various others. Quickly fixed. Triangle and up. These are fairly common, perhaps not the stack, I just wanted a bunch, but certainly triangle, square sine waves, as you would expect, a fairly common and you will find them in most, in most LFOs. These others are slightly more specific to a vital. But you might find something similar in different synth. Nervous grief is just a very random sound. Anything? Posterior. Random pulses, shuffle gates, and so on and so forth. So the bond is breaking a concentrate sold down, so up sine, square and triangle. 32. LFO FREQUENCY: So let's go back to the triangle. As I said, it's affected overtime. They can affect how how long that time is. The moment. This is sync. Sync to the door, the sink to my tempo in logic, which by default is 120 beats per minute. So this frequency now is going to be a half note inside, inside logic. But I can make this into, I can just drag this up and make it into, let's say two sixteenths. Much faster. A few seconds. 64 flips. And I can come all the way down to 30 seconds is going to stick out a little long time. He went to wait for the end of that one. The other thing that we can do is if we click this little note next to it, then we can change the frequency from the way that we calculate the frequency in a number of different ways. So we can set it to seconds if we wanted to get a precise number of seconds. So it's just going to take 2.5th. Now from start to finish. I can set that to be anything from very, very, very slow. Over two minutes, a thousandth of a second. I can also set it to, as I say, the tempo of the door. I can send it to a dotted eighth note. Triplets. Sorry, dotted eighth notes. Then we have triplets. 33. MORE USES FOR LFOS: Okay, so we've removed the volume. The NFO touches the volume, we could attach it to. We can touch it's the pitch that such that now a variation in the notes. Again, we can adjust this using either this pie chart here or the one that's on the NFO, they both affect each other. You can see both moving at the same time. We could attach it to remove it from that because it's such it to the function. Get this kind of wobbly, wobbly sound. Again. This will depend on the type of oscillation that you want. Again, we can adjust the frequency that faster or slower. We can attach an allophone. It doesn't have to be attached to an oscillator, so we remove that and let's add a triangle with a sawtooth wave. Great Filter. It seems we did before. Out a little bit of resonance. I really find that one tip for using LFOs is to go have a play. So go have a play and move some knobs around when you get a sound that you think it sounds cool. Overtime. Then go attach another photo. It, I think this sounds quite cool. Sounds cool just to adjust the, the cutoff low-pass filter. Let's choose a triangle. It doesn't have to be a triangle. We could use choose a good assignment. We can take out of focus. We can attach that to make an attach that to the cutoff here when I play a note. Now, while I'm expecting to see is for our cutoff to move over time following this sine wave shape. If we drag is Donald little bit. And then make this a little bit bigger so we can see the little green bar. If I just take a look at the filter as I, as I click on here and I adjust this, you can see the green bonds. So the left-hand side of the green bar is where is where it's gonna be at its minimum. So they the lowest points on the cutoff over here, on the LFO over there. At the top of the green bar is where it's gonna be when it hits its maximum value and the LFO. Let's make this quite extreme like this. So when I hit, hit a note, then if I add a second oscillator, every time, basic shapes, we'll choose another, another sawtooth wave, and we're just teaching this one a little bit. And so we get this. But the second Celsius wife here hasn't actually been affected by filter to filter one because this is being routed to Filter button. So for CO, from this sound, which is the default, if I set this to also be affected by filter one, I get this. Again. We can, we can basically assign if I click on an LFO and I go to assign it to something here, I can drag this in anywhere, anywhere that's highlighted. I can I can attach my LFO to it. By that be the number of units and voices over time. Whether it be somebody that we can, we can even modulating the envelope. All sorts of things that we can modulate overtime using an LFO. 34. LFO MODES: So let's have a look at some of the other features of the LFO. Let's just switch this off and now go back to LFO. We complete that. We'll go back to LFA-1. On LFO one, we can see that by default. I'd move that by mistake, but by default the the mode is set to trigger. What happens with the mode is set to trigger on the LFO is that it starts at the LFO, at the start. Or actually, that's not quite true. So see this slider underneath here. This is the phase slider. And this is, this is the same as the phase for our oscillators. So basically this determines the start point. So wherever the slider is, that determines a start point. So if I set this a little bit slower, so we can see it. When I you can see that in the, in the LFO there they started, starts from wherever the start point is. So we started from here. I can start from the middle of that, so that's just the face start of the LFO. We'll leave that over to the left. Let's look at the different modes of the LFO. Again, this is very common across all kinds of synthesisers. Let's just first attach LFO 12. Let's attach it to the tune again, this is just a nice obvious example. What we'll do is we'll look at these different trigger types. The first one is basically it takes the starts, the LFO, wherever the face slider is. And every time the note is played, it starts back at the beginning and it loops around. No matter where I finish on that curve. Next time I press the key, it will start at the beginning. I stopped around here, but this time, but when I press a key again, it will start at the stock in sync mode. Sigmoid starts the LFO at wherever the slider is. Again, we'll ignore the slide for now. We'll just leave it over to the left-hand side. Then. Looks at the beats per minute, beats per minute of the door project that you're in. Wherever you are within the beats per minute at the moment I'm in logic 120 beats per minute. Wherever I am within that beats per minute. It will start at that point within the face. And this is just a way of keeping some of the modulations within your, within your synthesizer in time in the same tempo as your, as your overall track. And this can make it just a more pleasing sounds sometimes depending on what your modulating. An envelope, which is the third one down this list, acts exactly like an envelope. So an envelope works is when you, when you hit a note, it starts at transitions through the envelope. When it gets the end, it stops exactly the same for an LFO. It goes all the way through the cycle, gets to the end and stays there until I release. And the sustained envelope is slightly different in that it will modulate until the phase slider is reached like this. The loop point is slightly different. So what this is gonna do is it will, it will loop all the way through on the first pass through the LFO. Then for every point that it goes background again, it will stop the loop at the face slider. Again, this is one of these things. It's much easier just to demonstrate than it is to explain. So here we go. Okay, so there's that. And then finally we have a loophole. And this starts the LFO at the beginning. And then when it reaches the phase slider, it will start again. Okay. Let's set this back to trigger, which is what it will be in. Quite often. You'll just leave it in trigger mode. So this is just looping round and round and round against the slip face slider up there. That noise is beginning to get on my nerves. I don't know about you all, so let's just lower a little bit better. Let's add a noise a little bit harsh. We know what to do about that, right? So let's just add a filter. That's a bit, a little bit easier to listen to. A few other controls in here. Now, there's lots that you can do inside, inside vital with regards while always but with regards LFOs, one of the things you can do is you don't need to stick to these shapes. Very much like the envelope. You can drag the drug and shapes around or to the curves. You can double-click on the line to create a new, new point that you can move. So we might create something that looks like I didn't know, let us create another point here. Okay. 35. SMOOTHING, DELAY & STEREO: So along the bottom here, we've got these three dials. So this is smoothing. Smoothing or do it will kind of crossfade between the beginning and the end. So because I'm able to create custom shapes here, so maybe I will kinda gonna kind of automatically do it. But what it will do is it will allow me to, if I have a shape pretty much like this by default, when I move the start and end, it will move them both together. And that's to ensure that when it loops around as a kind of jarring bit. Even so, the smoothing often still here. Those are very harsh transition. Smooth will do it will, it will cross fade from the beginning of the loop to the end of the audit, rather, cross fade from the end of the loop to the beginning of the loop to try and remove some of those kind of jarring things. So if we put ups around, we can see that we've gone from kind of house hush, hush, finished the loop to something that's a bit smoother. If we go all the way, we can get some very strange effects. Indeed, delay does exactly the same as the delay for the envelope. It just, although you don't see the graph move or it does, it doesn't stop the LFO until that whatever period of time has passed. So you'll note, we'll just play it here. Again, easier to demonstrate, but it will play a role play the note exactly as you've defined it without the LFO, and then it will start the LFO at that point. This instance, two seconds after the after the notice started. So this isn't to them. You can get some really interested in fact, effect by combining the delay and the mode. So two seconds myself. Finally the, the stereo. So this one's interesting and something that's quite often used for kind of potluck effects where you want the sound to really move around from ear to ear. In the stereo field. What you'll see here, let me just turn the delay off. The moment you've got one line, it moves along. If I make that a bit, you can see what kind of circle that moves away along the line and it just follows that curve, effects whatever it is that they are attached to. If I make this stereo, I get now is I get two little circles on a line. One is the left ear, when is the right ear? And they move at different speeds. They move at the same speed, but they started different places. And that's what this, what this affects. This is how far apart the stereo image stock for each of the two starting points on the, on the curve, on the other folk curve bond for the left ear, one for the right ear. This style here determines how far apart, how far apart they, when they start. Things on here that the left ear and the right arrow moving independently of each other. And so the pitches are raising and lowering differently in your left ear on the right. 36. DESIGNING CUSTOM LFO SHAPES: A couple of, a couple of last things to cover in here. One is the epilepsy to move from a kind of a curve, drawing me from curves to straight lines. This is just to make it a little bit easier. You can, you can, you can still draw curves. But by default it won't round the corners. When I said like this, it will kind of round when it hits, hits the nodes that you've drawn on the graph. When you're drawing, when you're drawing the LFO shapes. You can also change this, this grid here. So there's a grid that you can see behind. Let me just zoom in a little bit so you can see a bit better. But you'll see there's a grid behind the LFO and by default it will snap to these points and it just makes it a little bit easier to draw the shapes. I can affect that grid here. So at the moment, I've got 29 divisions on the x-axis. And I can make that small aerobic edges by dragging this number up. This gives me more or less bits to kind of lines to snap to. It can also be useful to set the y grid. So the moment there was only one, but if we can add some in here, and this gives me lines on the y-axis up and down. I can also snap to. Now, this is really useful because one of the uses of an LFO is to draw, is to use it a bit like a sequencer. We could draw. We can draw a bunch of shapes in here. So the other thing we can do is we could these drawing tools here by default, it's just gonna be set to draw an and drag around as you like. But we can click on this thing here and we can choose the shape that we want to draw. So we could draw steps in here instead. Let me just go along and in fact, let's just make this eight, nobody much easier. If I go along in here and just draw eight steps. When I come back to here, I can raise these steps up and down. Because I've got this grid. I could do something like this and treat these as semitones. For example, I could say at the beginning of the LFO, I wanted to be, I want to, if I touch this to here, what this means is that I didn't mean semitones. What I mean is sustained notes if you'd like. So as I play this, let me just drag that stereotype. And then the amount that I adjust in here will adjust the amount that it takes offense. It effectively. I can use this in a similar way to the way that I might use a sequencer. But I can draw a graph like this, attach it to the pitch, and have it steps through. So that's why these grid lines can be really useful to give you a kind of because, because we snap to it and we can use these drawing tools. We can sorry, let me just draw a step back in there. We can really make quite an accurate LFO that we can use for generation. Not just a note, but perhaps some melodies, some sequence from the synthesizer. The final thing that I wanted to talk about was if I right-click on the label that says smooth, I can choose fade in. And what fading does is it starts off with a dry on altered signal and then gradually fades in the effect of the LFO over time. So right now when I, when I play a note, I get the, get the LFO right from the moment that I play the note when I fade in, rather than just being delayed and let me solo delay earlier. Didn't do anything and then started a failing is going to gradually bringing overtime. That's about it for an LFO. So just remember that an LFO is, we've looked at some of the more kind of slightly more advanced features. When we looked at these kind of step kind of sequencing kind of thing that we can do with an NFO inside vital. But if we go back to its normal form, sine wave, a square wave, a sawtooth triangle, whatever inside. I'm inside an LFO and using that to modulate various different parts of our, of our synthesisers, whether that be filter cutoffs, pitch pan. The tuning we can even modulate envelopes. The what it allows us to do is to automate the turning of a dial. That's really what an LFO does. Instead of playing a note and having to muck about and kind of alter things as we play as part of performance. We can use the use the LFO to do that for us. And it's the advantages are that it is much, much more accurate than the new turning a knob by yourself. It is much smoother, generally, much square. I don't know what the right word is, but it's very difficult when turning the level knob, for example, to go from maximum to minimum in in a very short period of time, you'd always notice some transition with an LFO. You can go from maximum amplitude and minimum amplitude or maximum value, minimum amplitude in just the next step. The other massive advantage it has is that we can modulate many different parameters at the same time. Whereas with our hands, we can modulate perhaps, perhaps too, as long as we figured out some way to play notes at the same time. But we can generally, we can only there's a finite number of knobs that we can turn at the same time. Whereas with an LFO, we can automate it to do as many as we like. Okay, so that's it for four LFOs for low-frequency oscillators. Do have a play around, create some shapes, experiment with the drawing tools. But remember that we're not here to talk specifically about vital. We're here to talk about the building blocks of a synthesizer and how we, I'm able to use a synthesizer to create exactly the sound that we want for our track. Play with the LFOs. Experiment, how it works with different modes, with different frequencies and very, very fast or very slow highway. How we're able to attach it to all the different parameters within, within the synthesizer and within vital to really make an interesting sound. The alters over time and the main use of the LFO, the low-frequency oscillator is to provide some movement to note as it transitions over time, whether that be panning within the stereo field, whether it's slight fluctuations in, fluctuations in pitch. Perhaps even you do something like you have multiple oscillators. So perhaps we have a, I don't know, a triangle wave. We haven't used Triangle waist for awhile. So we'll have a triangle wave in one oscillator will have a sawtooth wave at a. Let me just get this back to the default. And let's move this one down to, I didn't know, seven semitones below. Let's remove this oscillator. Remove the, sorry, remove the attachment of the LFO from the oscillator. We have this noise here, but perhaps we could use an LFO to attach to the level of just one oscillator, bring it down to 0 and set the level to come up to there. And I set this oscillator to be very slow. Let's do it in terms of seconds so we can copy or an idea. So we can say that every, we wanted to take four seconds, 4.5 seconds to get from one end of this oscillator to the other. What this is going to mean then is the triangle wave is going to play. Then every 4.5 seconds, sawtooth wave is going to fade in and fade out again. This. Then perhaps if we were to take that and maybe combine that with an envelope which had a bit more of a bit more of an attack, then a bit more of a release. Perhaps we could end up with, let's just leave it like that, that's fine. We could end up with some interesting patterns. If we combine that with movement within the stereo field, we can see that we can start to combine some of the the LFOs, the envelopes, the filters, all these building blocks built on top of just those initial oscillators create some really, really interesting sounds that have, have width and movement. And much more interesting than just really just playing sounds that say at the same pitch, the same amplitude, and don't alter overtime. That's all of the fundamental building blocks now of the main part of any synthesisers in every synthesizer, you will always find some sort of noise generator. In most cases, oscillators. You will always find envelopes. You were always fine filters. You will always find low-frequency oscillators. In the next section we will look at some additional things which you'll often find in, often find a synthesizers but not in everyone. And these are the effects that can be applied to the signal chain notes and signal path before it passes out to the amplifier. 37. INTRODUCTION TO EFFECTS: Okay, So we've, we've seen oscillators and filters, and envelopes and low-frequency oscillators. And we've really got the fundamental building blocks and we're able to construct a sound and then send out through, through the VCA, through the amplifier using whatever parameters we sat on that as well. But there's one final thing that you'll find in a lot of synthesizers, not in every synthesizer button and lots of synthesisers, they include some effects that can be added before they get to the final bit on the signal part before we get to the amplifier. So let's hop over divisor and see what we've got included there. I'm just here with a very basic sine wave. Sounds like this. By now he really got to learn what a sine wave sounds like. Let's change that to what we've not use a square wave for awhile. Square wave again, harsher than a sine wave or a triangle wave, but not quite as harsh. So not quite as many harmonics as a sawtooth wave. I've got everything set to its default values apart from the phase which I've reset to 00 as we've been doing throughout to get to the effect. So the within vital, we need to come up to one of these tabs at the top, which is the Effects tab. Now, effects can be rooted in a number of ways, but affects will always apply just before the, before the amplifier. We can either send our shapes or a filter. So in this instance we might go through filter one and apply a low-pass filter. Say about there. And then that will go on to the effects and then out through the amplifier. Or we can go direct from our oscillator and we can skip the filters altogether and we can go straight out to effects and then output the amplifier. And of course, if you want to skip effects and filters, we can go direct out. In this instance, let's go through the filter. Then we'll apply some effects to them. There are a number of effects built into, into vital and they are good, Very good. Now, of course you can. If you're using a DAW and you have a bunch of effects that you'd like to use props as a particular reverb that you like or a particular chorus or, or, um, I'm set of distortion plugins that you particularly liked to use all the time. Of course, they're still open and used to. It's just a virtual instrument the same as anything else. However, the ones inside vital are very good and so definitely worth taking just a few minutes to look at. We're not going to them in, in a, in a great amount of detail. But we will just flip through them. So just so you can see the kind of capabilities if you like. 38. CHORUS: Starting at the top of this, we have them or they're just not arranged in any particular order and you can change the order of things, which I'll show you now. But by default they're just arranged on this left-hand side. In alphabet scroll. Nothing more than that. I will flip through them in that order. The first ones to enable it again, you go and click the little circle to switch it on. This has given us a chorus effect. Now we've seen chorus before in the oscillator is referred to as unison. Courses are slightly more advanced version of that, but a very similar principle. This is a play multiple voices, slightly out of phase with each other. I was slightly out of tune with each other. But you can see this one's a little bit more advanced. So by default here we've got 16 voices and with a frequency of 41. So watch this. We can just here, it's just adding a bunch of voices. If I change this template with the tempo, the level, this is a very slow course, but I can make it much faster too. We'll just leave it as default, but you can get some pretty crazy sounds already. There are a bunch of controls here which we're gonna go through very quickly. Starting with some of the easier ones. We have the mix. And this is just how much of the core signal is, how much the core signal is mixed with the dry signal. At the moment it's 5050. Out to the amplifier is half of the dry signal, 1.5 of the course signal. All the way round here we are effectively turning the chorus off. Now we're just getting the dry signal all the way round to the right. We're getting a 100% of the course signal, none of the original signal. By default, that's set to 5050. Over on the left. As I said, we have the number of voices that we want in the chorus. We can go from four voices up to 1216. We can set the frequency here. So this again can be related to the pizza per minute of the project within your door. Or we can set it to your number of seconds or dotted notes and triplets. We have depth and delay here. The depth is the depth of the course. You can see this is represented, so this is kind of giving you the much tighter chorus courses, which is much further spread out. And then we have the feedback, feedback NOP here. And this determines how much of the core sick course, excuse me, how much of the chorus signal it gets fed back into the chorus. There we are. So that is the course control is pretty basic. It works extremely well, but it's very similar to any chorus plug-in or, or chorus pedal or hardware unit that you've used before. 39. COMPRESSION: The compressor basically bought a compressor does, is it adjusts the limits, the limits at certain frequency. So what it aims to do is to try to take a, what you might be able to do is to take a very dynamic way for and squashes. And that's essentially what this, what this does. We can use it in multi-band. So multiband will give us a set of frequencies. This will control the frequencies of the bottom. So this will bring the LOS, this will constraint whether laws are, this will constrain the highest. This will give us a middle set of frequencies, and this will give us the very highest frequencies. But we can set up in different ways so we can control the low separately to the rest. We can control the high separates the rest, or we can just have a single band compressor if we want to compress, everything is same, separating all of the high amplitude signals down on all the low amplitude signals up across the frequency bands. It's very easily controlled if I just go back to multiband so we can see exactly how much we're affecting it in terms of volume. For each band. We can slide this up to basically set that band. So let me just here we are kind of squashing those kind of middle, middle simplification. We can squash on. So quite often, compressors are used for very dynamic sounds which have got a lot going on. Perhaps. Something where we really want to accentuate. Attack and release are simply there to determine how quickly, exactly the same as the attack and release on that envelope. Determine how quickly the compressor act, so how quickly it squashes sound, and how how quickly the compressor is released once the, once the note has been released. 40. DELAY: It onto the delay. Delay just works like any delay. All these just weren't like any kind of plug-ins that you've had that you've used in the past. But delay basically just repeats a note over time and each time it's repeated against quieter and quieter. Delay might sound like this. Sometimes you'll see these referred to as echoes. We can set the frequency of the delay here. A slower frequency. Very fast to faster here. Again, quite often. Click and all sorts of things quite often you'll hear. People would like to use a dotted eighth notes for delays because the delays come back between the beats. We have the feedback. So how much of the delayed signal, how much of those echoes are fed back? In? The easiest way to demonstrate that is by turning up. This will just go on forever because it's feeding everything back into the academic. Just, just keep repeating yourself. I can turn it down. But more often than not, it's just used it to see how many, how many echoes you want. Before it fades out to 0. The mix is the same as before, wet and dry signal. So how much of the dry signal versus the wet signal way? How much of the dry on or unaltered original signal is fed to the amplifier. And how much of the core signal is fed to the amplifier. We have the same kind of filters below. So we got, we can do a filter or band-pass filter effectively. If you move it like this, it becomes a high-pass or low-pass filter. But then often it can be used as a band-pass filter in the middle. Again, all of these can be automated. So all of these dials controls parameters, if you'd like within the, within the effects can also be modulated by LFOs, bye, bye envelopes. I can simply drag an LFO and attach it to anything within within any of the, within any of the effects. Let's just set that back to the default there. So affects everybody got no filter. Another thing we can do is change the type of delay. So at the moment we have a mono delay. Then we can go to a stereo delay. With the stereo delay we can, we can do different ears at different speeds, different, different years, different stereo channels, different speeds. We could do a ping-pong. This is going to bounce the, this is going to bounce the echo from one end to the other. Finally, we can do a mid ping pong, which is gonna go from one ear to the center, to the other end and the centrum, and then back out again. Okay, So that is the delay. 41. DISTORTION: Onto distortion. The way distortion works is there are a bunch of algorithms, are different algorithms here that you can use to basically shape your waveforms in different ways. The way that you can think of distortion is that it is adding harmonics. You remember the harmonics that we saw for the different types of waves that we looked at in the EQ. Distortion is basically going to add harmonic steel signal, which makes it sound much core, so much raspy are much more distorted. So the more harmonic she add, the more distorted the signal becomes, more. The harsher are more aggressive. The signal becomes, we saw that the difference between, for example, the sine wave and the triangle wave with the sinewave had no, no harmonics. And the triangle wave had a few harmonics. And then right up to the sawtooth, which had loads of harmonics and sounded much harsher. Distortion. That distortion is very good actually. So there are withinside vital, there are various different types of distortion from soft clipping. I'm too hard clipping, which gives us, if I just turn this up a little bit. So you can see with soft clipping is a much smoother type of distortion. With hard clipping, it's a much, much, much harsher. So let's just look at the soft clipping. I can adjust the amount of drive from very little distortion all the way up to quite harsh distortion. Now it's important to remember distortion that you can give either an actual increase in volume or a perceived increase in volume. So just watch the top here to the master volume to make sure it's not getting too loud. With a hot chocolate. Weren't here a lot now, but you will hear that much more so and suddenly my percussion with it, which is quite a harsh percussive sound. But you can start to play some chords. You're about to hear a difference a bit better. So let me, let me soft clip. Slightly smoother sounds of the distortion when it was chocolate. We have various different types in here. We call it linear folds. Seinfeld's a slightly different algorithm that gives us a slightly different type of distortion. It really is just a matter of taking your sound, applying the different the different distortion types to it until you get one that's pleasing for you. And then we've got a bit crushing and downsampling, whichever type of distortion we've got, we can adjust the amount of distortion so that the kind of drive using the Drive knob and then the mixed is exactly the same as before. With the other effects. This is how much dry signal on how much, in this case, distorted sooner gets output to the amplifier. By default, all of the distorted signal goes through. But you might get some quite, you see that is very, very over driven. But say you might already want to send half of it through. It's just another way of affecting the sound. Down the bottom, we got to filter various different types of Not types of filter, but various different stages in which the filter can be applied. So it's quite common to apply high-pass filter before we go into a distortion. So we might want to set this to pre. Again with this blend knob, we can, we can change that to be a different type of filter. So perhaps a high-pass filter. Low-pass filter, sorry, is that is common to apply before we go into a, into a distortion effect. Then we have, or we can apply the filter after the distortion has happened. 42. EQ: Moving on, EQ, I'm not going to spend a huge amount of time explaining EQ. I'm sure most of you have come across EQ before. It's got a relatively simple kind of three band equalizer inside here. Again. These effects are great and they work really well, but they are pretty basic. But you can also use your own effects outside of vital. But this just works exactly as you'd expect. So we have the frequencies going from left to right. Then we've got this, we've gotten a cup, the three bands that we can apply, and we can drag this up to emphasize particular tones within within our sound. If I want to cast off all the loser's who can act very much like a high-pass filter. Or I can do certain things, can cut the tops off. And basically I can just kind of tweak my sound to get exactly the tone on the I'm looking for. Now. This can be useful after distortion or after some of the other effects to remove some of that kind of things that we find less pleasant once we've applied those effects. And the only one really to talk about here is that the gain just affects how high each one of these is high or low. The cutoff shows us what frequency this starts to operate at. The resonance just determines the width of the curve. Sometimes this might be referred to as the q-value. One thing I should mention I just because I've just done it by mistake. But one thing I should mention is that we can either completely remove a filter months. We've added it by, by deciding over here on the left. If I just want to bypass it for now, I can use this one here in. The filter, will stay there. Still be displayed, but it's just bypass for now. And this can be useful for just playing around and just switching a particular fillStyle. For example, if you got some tweaks that you want to do to the distortion, but there's a lot of reverb and you'll find it very difficult to do it. You can just bypass the rebirth for awhile. For example. 43. FILTER: The filter. The filter I'm not going to explain to you at all because it is exactly the same as the, as the filters that we've used over in this bit down the bottom here. So the filter is just exactly the same. It just gives you a third filter. 44. FLANGER AND PHASER: We have a flanger, phaser. Flanger will look similar from the, from the comb filter. But what it does is, is it's giving it an extra dimension was his kind of modulating overtime so we can set the frequency and this is basically just how fast it moves. We can, we can offset the flanger in different ways. Basically, you know, the frowned at Florida sound, it kind of sounds like this. Okay, so by adjusting the controls inside the flags works exactly the same as at any fungi values. You can kind of just, just another strings to the bot in terms of the effects. Phasor, similar kind of thing, slightly different. But again, it's another effect which modulates overtime. 45. REVERB: Then finally we have river. I use rebounded lot. But this is really useful for, particularly for Pat sounds and things like that. But, but a little bit of reverb can be applied to most things. Reverb basically just gives you a simulation of being in a big open space. So not like a delay, which is just that. The same note played over and over and over again, slightly like an echo. Reverb is just the kind of impression of being in a wide, wider open, more open space. You can hear that tails off there without the reverb. In fact, let's make the reverb a little bit. You can here. Without any reverb at all. As soon as I release my key from the figure, from the key, the sound cuts away straightway. With reverb. It gives me a more of a tail, a few controls in the, in the reverb. So we've got a high or low cut, which we do before the filter. And this allows us to filter out any kind of high frequency or low frequency bars or moneyness or just kind of things. Because when we have reverb that I can really build up. If you've got quite a bit of high-frequency noise is coming from, you know, from the sound that we've created. When we put on reverb, it hangs around for a long time. And as we play more and more notes, those, those frequencies can really build upon each other and become quite unpleasant. So we have the better C2. Use a high cost, low COP filtering here. Exactly the same as anything you've done before. With filters inside vital. We can just adjust the gain in just the cutoff either by using these knobs here or by dragging rounded saw this little panel here. But the most important things inside the brief up the size of the reverb. So you can think of this as effectively as the size of the room that you're in. We have the time for the river. So how long how long the breve up should hang around for? And this can be set to relatively short periods of time to just over a minute. Brief Abu continue. Now for the next minute. We can say, see it's still growing if we looked at the meatus and that's all they say that that would go, that will go on for a long time. Mix is the same as the other controls. So knocking it down to 0 was killed the reverb, as you can see, because now it's only sending the dry signal. The signal in around 100% will send all of the Riva wet signal to the amplifier. 46. STACKING EFFECTS: Quite often we want to use more than 11 effect, and that's perfectly possible to do. So. Let's add a little bit of sort of bit of distortion and a bit of reverb. Perhaps let's add a compressor as well. This is the sound just with whatever values are in that. So this is what it's going to sound like. Massive, massive. Let us just turn this down a little bit. Okay? So we can add multiple effects, they are executed or the effects chain goes from top to bottom, as you would expect. We might want to kind of we can set up our compressor distortion now reverb, but we can change the order of them in the way that we change the order of them is by dragging them into a different order. And on the left-hand side, that's the only reason I've pulled these up really is it can make quite a difference to your signal depending on the order in which things happen. For example, if I was to either know why you would put, put the reverb first, we end up clearly with a very different, very different signals. And if we put the ribo back where it was the same with the move the compressor. We're getting compressed now after the socialist happen and I can move the compressors are after the reverb. Now we're compressing both the distortion signal and the reverb signal. They can be put in any order. But it can have a huge effect as to the sound that you output based on the order in which those those things executed do have a play around. And remember, when you load it up, they are simply in alphabetical order. It's not necessarily the correct order for the sound that you want to make. So do feel free to drag them around and get them into the order that makes sense for the sound that you want to make. A quick run through the effects inside vital. Like I say, you won't get effects in every synthesisers built-in. Lots you will. But vital gives, I think you're really nice set of basic effects which you, which are commonly used and can be applied to your sound. They sound very good. Saves you adding a whole bunch of other things inside your signal Chinese side your door. And I've used them quite a lot and found them to be, found them to be quite good. There are instances where I want slightly more advanced effects are slightly different sound from some different effects. In which case I have just used another plugin applied to vital, but the majority of cases, and certainly in this course, we will be using the effects built into Po, into vital. They're quite good. Go and have a play with them. And that's about it. 47. WRAPPING UP: If we go back to our picture here, we've really covered every aspect of architecture of the basic synthesisers. So we've started off with our input from our keyboard or from most cases gonna be a keyboard from whatever midi input we have into vital or input we have into our synthesizer. We've used oscillators to create a wafer and to alter some parameters of that waveform. We've seen that the different waveforms produce not only a different shape of signal, but also a introduced different harmonics in the signal. We saw how oscillators we can affect the volume that the panning, the unison chorus, the tuning of the oscillators, and how different are having. We can operate multiple oscillations together, an alter them slightly, in order to get some very interesting effects. For instance, slightly detuning some oscillators to create some widths of the sounds, interests of the sound. We then had to look at envelopes and how envelopes are used to, in the majority of cases, are used to affect the amplitude or the volume of a sound over time. Remember, ADSR, attack, decay, sustain, and release. We looked at filters and how filters can be used to shape the harmonics of our sounds. So by that be a low-pass, high-pass band-pass notch filter. And we looked at the comb filter as well for, for altering the amount of harmonics pass through to the amplifier. We looked at the amplifier itself. So we looked at how we can alter the number of notes that can be played at the same time, whether that's kind of a more of a mono synth up to a polyphonic synth. We looked at how we can glide between notes, so how we can play, we can have the synthesizer play all the notes in-between two notes automatically. So we'd gliding round between notes. The different ways of achieving that. We looked at the stereo spread and the pan. And then we looked at low-frequency oscillators and how we can use a low-frequency oscillator that can't be heard. The humid air, and how that can be used to modulate other parameters in an automated fashion. So any of the controls within our synthesizer can be modulated from LFO with a low-frequency oscillator. Now in vital, that's certainly true and the vast majority of parameters within most software synthesisers can be altered using an LFO or modulated using an LFO. That's not always the case in hardware synthesisers. Sometimes it's just the filter, or it's just the pitch, or it's just the volume or small subset of the parameters that we have available to us. But the idea of a low-frequency oscillator is to, is to kind of automate, automates the changing of any parameters within our, within our amplifier. Sorry, within our, within our synthesizer. That really covers all the basic building blocks of a synthesizer. Like I said, those building blocks, so particularly filters, LFOs, envelopes amplifiers will apply to every type of synthesized that you use. We've looked at subtractive synthesis. There are other types of synthesizer, but mostly the biggest difference between, between the types of synthesisers, how they generate that noise right at the staff. Whether that be from a wavetable, some sort of physical modeling oscillators as reviews now, but they would all have envelopes, filters, LFOs, and amplifies. Next we're going to have a look at some specific sounds. So how to create some specific sounds using vital, we're using an amplifier, using a synthesizer. Then after that, we're going to just prove to you that you can take what you've learned in this course now. Go and apply that to any synthesisers. What we're gonna do is we're going to look at a couple of other synthesisers are nothing like vital. Really know that we really understand all the basic building blocks of those synthesizer, which means that we can take that and we can apply that to any synthesising that we sit down with. In the next section, we're going to look at some of the specific sounds that we can create in order to build a palette of sounds that we can use for music composition. 48. SOUND DESIGN: SUB BASS: Synthesized, the lesson is over or the architecture of a synthesizer. We know what all the individual bits of a synthesizer does. Let's have a look through, look through building some sounds that we can use to create a truck. So let's start off with probably the most basic of those. So we're gonna start off with a couple of a couple of base patches. And a patch is what we call the kind of the collection of parameters. So once we've, we've set all the parameters that we want to on our synthesized. That's what we would call a patch. And we can go in and save that if we want to invite all in, certainly in all software synthesizes. If you're using a very old analog synthesizer hardware synthesiser, you simply could not save the patches. So you really kind of either have to remember it and be able to get back to it very quickly or keep a notebook of patches of exactly what not be changed and what dao you change, and what value they were at. In our case, we are very lucky and we're able to use, were able to just save our patches. But let's build them. Build them all from scratch. So I've started with, I've reset vital. I've gone to basic shapes. And I have set the phase and the phase, the randomization to 0%. Let's start off with probably the most basic patch, and that is a sub bass. So just a very, very low base where we play almost imperceptibly below our track just to add some real depth and some real kind of substance to our truck. Subbase is really, really simple. And it's based on just a single sine wave. What I usually prefer to do is of course, if you want to play here, if you want to play in lower down, you can just play lower down on a, on a keyboard. If you've got a big keyboard, I've only got a 37 key keyboard on my desk in front of me. What I prefer to do is I know that base is going to be low in sub base is gonna be reading. I'll hold down the Shift key and just move it down two octaves. There's my basic sub basin, you can leave it there and many people do. I'd like to make a couple of small alterations to it. So I'm just going to adjust the envelope a little bit, just to give it a little bit of, little bit of an attack just to stop any pops and clicks. So I'm going to set that to about naught point, naught one seconds. And I'm going to just move the sustain level down a little bit. I'd like to give it a little bit of release, not too much, kind of 2.5th, something like that. Again, this is really only just to help it blend it. It's just there for adding, for adding depth and substance to our, to our sound. I'm going to add a couple of, a couple of effects. So I'm going to add a little bit of distortion, just a little bit soft clipping, move it around. It's kind of again, with all of these things, I would definitely encourage you to sit there with a keyboard and just kind of keep playing, adjusting these promises. You get two, you get the thing you like. Yeah, I didn't mind that. Okay. I'll leave it that. And I might do a little bit of EQ here. Just because we're not really, perhaps just see that monopoly on here. I call this kind of this real strong base. Now here, you can see this is interesting. So you can see in here, can you see those harmonics have been introduced? If I go to cohere, we know that with a sine wave. We know that with a sine wave we just get a sine wave, right? But we know that in the EQ. Let me clear this from earlier. Within, within the EQ. We just get the fundamental. We don't get any harmonics. But look how I've added that distortion. And as I said, distortion kind of works by adding harmonics. We can see them. So we've had a little bit of distortion. You're not going to add a great amount of harmonics to assign way through distortion. But with this, unless you use a large amount of distortion or perhaps a different algorithm. But then we also have added a couple of harmonic style distortion. You can point that out because I noticed that in the EQ here. But what I want to do is just, just here, just raise this a little bit and just change the residence little bit and just give it a little bit more driving the bottom. And there we are. There's our sub bass. So as I said, this is gonna be used right at the bottom. It's not really a kind of musical feature of a truck, if you'd like, but it's just there to give a little bit more depth and substance and move some air. I'm in the speakers. Again to save a preset, simply go here and click on Save Preset and we can go and give this a name and click on Save and it will be there next time we want to. Next time you open vital will be able to get to it just by clicking on Browse presets, scrolling through and finding the one you want. Next, we're gonna look at more of a plot based on. 49. SOUND DESIGN: PLUCKED BASS: Okay, so let's try and make more of a plucked by Sandwich. Sub bass is really going to be used a bit more musically to create a baseline within our track. To do this, I'll probably assign wave is quite sub bass C and it's not really distinctive. So I probably going to choose a sawtooth for this little bit more of an aggressive shape. Again, I'm going to, I'm going to pitch this down a little bit. Let's go down to octaves. I think probably I'm gonna add another oscillator. I just need to remember to go to basic shapes again. Change the phase down to 0. And we're changes to be a sawtooth as well. So we can hear that already. We're getting that kind of thicker sound from having the two oscillators, they're going to purchase one down as well a little bit because I don't like that. Hi Ross be noise. Normally pushes down on octave, but actually to make it a little bit thicker, I'm going to pitch it down 17 semi-solids. That's giving me that slightly interesting kind of detuned five to it, which I quite liked. Next, I'm going to look at the envelope again, a very similar envelope to the South Bay. So I just got a little bit of a tax or ink and he clicks and pops. I am going to just drag this down a little bit and just drag the release out over. It. Sounds a little bit harsh still. In. In order to do this, I'm going to add a low-pass filter. So what I do need to do is remember to attach both oscillators to the filter. I'm going to, I'm going to bring the resonance down. And I will change this to be a bit of a steeper around here to make sure that I key truck out a bit so that it sounded sounded pretty good. But I would like a little bit more of a pluck sound to it. I'm going to create a second envelope. I will just create a bit of a little bit like this. So it's just got a little bit more of, a little bit more of a pluck. And I'm going to achieve that by attaching the this envelope here. But the shape, maybe I'll just make out a little, a little bit more tension, a little bit more concave, and attaches to the cutoff filter one. That's going to give me that plucks Ana. I can adjust the amount of plug by adjusting either here or over here. The amounts that the filter cutoff is affected by the envelope. We are asking me quite a, quite a good pluck sound. I'm pleased with that. Lastly, then I'm going to move on and just add a couple of effects perhaps. So let's have a look about distortion. I always, as we did with the sub bass, but perhaps just a little bit of soft clipping distortion just to enhance the sound. Not too much. Without just makes it a little bit more aggressive. We also, again, we've just started off with two very basic oscillators to a sawtooth waves. Both detune slightly, so wanted to bring it down a couple of octaves just so I didn't have to play down or shift the octave too much on my keyboard, or just makes it much easier to play with a small keyboard. The other one pitch down as well, just to give it a little bit of just slightly out of tune obviously, but if the other oscillator, but just pitched down, page down there to bring that kind of slightly wider sound. We added a filter just to take off the high-end is a base and give it a more aggressive sound. The envelope is fatty standard and didn't change a great deal from the default envelope, but we did add this. This envelope here is an interesting use of an envelope just to create the shape here to make a plot of sample. One thing that we didn't do, which can be really handy with a base, is two. Bring the number of voices down to one. And this just makes sure, let's just make sure that we didn't play to bass sounds at the same time. This gives us another interesting opportunity because actually, because we were on a single voice now, we can use legato and we can add a little bit of light. Now when we are pressing individual notes and releasing them before we hit the next one, we still get that pluck sound. But if I hold a note, I don't get that initial envelope. This is what legato does. So I don't get that initial attack. If I'm holding down a note and then press a note either side of it. Like that. That's all plucks out. 50. SOUND DESIGN: ATMOSPHERIC PAD: Okay, so how can we create a really sweeping ethereal paths? And while we call the tools that we need, so let's just get started. I think we'll start with a basic shape. And then maybe we'll change that up to maybe a soul wave. Again. This is our sole way. Then if I want to make the sound a little bit richer, a little bit, a bit wider. Maybe I can add a little bit of unison to it. So let's maybe choose five or six voices that will either unison about 20% there. It doesn't sound very Paddy to me, it sounds, sounds more like a lead sound. So one of the easiest ways to make something sound more like a pad is to alter the envelope. What we want generally for a pad is a much longer, much longer attack and a much slower release. So let's move the attack over some kind of long attacker, almost a 2.5th second, something like that. But drop the, drop the sustainable down a little, but not, not too much. And then we'll have a much, much longer release. So a similar kind of length of releases we do for the attack. We can adjust these curves a little bit, but I quite like to adjust them a little bit like this when it comes to the attack of a pad sandwiches kind of rather than a linear, kind of more predictable attack, then I just like to have that curve and make it a little bit smoother. So now that sounds like this. But the sound is still a little bit harsh. So I am going to low-pass filter. As I said, the low-pass filter is by far the most common type of filter that we use. I'll change this to a slightly steeper slope. I'll leave a little bit of resonance there probably won't be sounded like now. Already. See that the effect that filter had, I think, but just adjust the cutoff too harsh, just just around that maybe drove that residence a little bit. To me. It still sounds a little bit thin. I think. Probably. What I'm gonna do is to add another oscillator. That's how I didn't oscillate it to. Let's see what this sounds like. Definitely sounds, definitely sounds thicker, but I think probably, which is pitches went down off to see what it sounds like. I'm not getting that. I'm liking that. Another way that I might want to affect it is just really looking at the modulating overtime, given it some movement of some kind. I think we want to use another fo for that, right? So this is an LFO is the thing that we would use to kind of create some movement over time independent of the notes that you're playing. I think probably start with the shape of an LFO, so we use that one. But probably want to use a sine wave is kind of a smooth a thing for a Padlet seems to make sense to me. What are we going to modulate with the NFO? So we want some movement savvy could modulate, modulate the level of one of these oscillators. My work could modulate the units are, I guess, most common use of an out-of-focus too much in a filter. Circuit modulator every time. And in fact, if we pass also, they should choose through filter one as well. I've got an idea, so we're going to use LFO one, we're going to pass out to, we're going to use that too much like the cutoff of filter one. That is far too much in Fauci fast for a soft pad sound. So let's change this to seconds. A lot longer. Around that. I think that's modulating lipids you want. So I'm just going to turn, turn this down a little bit better. I think 11 final thing that we might add a little bit more width to it there is just to add a little bit of stereo effect to it. So remember in the LFOs, if we use this stereo kind of dial here, we can have the left and right channel of the stereo start at a different point within the, within the wave. So let's try that a little bit there. As I play that you can see down the left, the bottom left of the filter. You can see that because I've got the stereo channel split out the LFO. And the LFO is affecting the cutoff of the low-pass filter. Then you can see that when I play a note, you can actually see it represented both of these things in parcel. You can see that only on the LFO, we can see that these left and right channels separately for each other. Also filter which is actually effective. We can see these filters may be independent in terms getting some really nice kind of phases. Just interested in movement to the sound. Okay, Very cool. So let's have a look at if there's any effects that we want to apply to it. The effects then let's have a look. Have a look at some chorus. This does add some more movement to. It might be a bit too much, I think. Sometimes with the course and we can just add too many voices. And I think we already added, and we did, we added six voices of unison on the saw-tooth oscillator already. Let's, let's maybe knock that down to four voices, eight voices, something like that. That sounds okay. Maybe a little bit of delay. Again, these are things like delaying course. They can really build up. So it's important if you're creating an instrument that that is not going to be monophonic, you're going to want to play more than one note at a time polyphonic. Then be really, really careful with the things that you add, which are likely to build up things like chorus, things like delay, reverb. Be very careful about buildup in certain frequencies as well. So if there's a particular band or a band of frequencies that are building up. Sometimes That's a lot of high-end, sometimes a lot of low end, sometimes it can be quite, can build up quite a lot in the middle. Make sure you're using EQ or filters to make sure that those dealt with so that they didn't build up as you build. Note afternoon, afternoon, good afternoon. Can become really quite noticeable and distracting. Because we've dotted eighth notes on the delay. And I think I'm going to kind of really kind of tell us down quite a bit. So let's turn the feedback right down. Let's turn to mix down a bit. But what I really like is the kind of stereo spread from this. You can just tear on the tail of the note. Okay, So very, very subtle, but definitely does add something to our sound. Then That's how we don't want any distortion. Eq is okay if we could add a flanger phaser, although I think that with the delay and chorus and the unison on one of the oscillators. The filter cutoff moving over time, I think to add a flanger or phases probably going to be far too much for the sound. Maybe we'll finish off with just a little bit of reverb. But I say a little bit rebirth. What actually mean he's quite a lot of rebirth. It's a pad, something that we just wanted to smoothly move between notes, so Biden or not reverb, it gives us a lot of time to change your different code without, without the previous ones still in the air. Let me, let me show you what I mean. So let's add a bit of, let's just make it massive, and let's add 810 seconds of rebirth. But we've got ten seconds on our LFO here. So let's say a similar amount of time in the reverb. I'm I'll turn that mixed up. We get a good amount through into the mix and this is what we end up with, that we are apart from me hitting the microphone at the end of the kind of really relaxing, kind of ethereal pad sound that will fit really nicely within a mixin and just really add some movement to the sound rather than just being a couple of oscillators straight out. Remember with all these sounds, these are kind of basis for you to build on remote. Feel free to use them as they are, but, but to really bring out your individuality, take these sounds and go and apply some different types of modulation. Just play around, go into the effects and just add some effects, renew some effects out, some modulation to change my mess about with the filters, with the wave types, with the tunings, and just really kind of experiment. Make the sounds your own. But like I said, that the way that I want to demonstrate these patches to you is Jess using the parts of a synthesizer which could be commonly found across almost every synthesisers. Maybe slightly different names which we've talked about. But you should be able to take these basic building blocks of these patches and say, Okay, I know what a pad sounds like. I know how to make a pad. I probably want a couple of oscillators. I probably want to try and split the stereo field if I can use in unison or an LFO or something to move the sound around with the panning. I want to, I want to really slow attack. I want really slow release. I'm definitely going to want some reverb, probably going up on some course and a little bit of delay might help as well. I can go find all those things. I can go find all those things. And to add some movement, I'm probably going to use an LFO to maybe be done here, changed the cut-off on a low-pass filter, or one of many, many other things that we can do inside, inside of synthesisers service is really about reading, knowing what the bits of the synthesizer do and knowing the basic recipe if you'd like for a, for a particular sound. And then being able to take that to any synthesizer and build that sound. Know what the basic recipe for a paddies. Know what the basic recipe for a plucky basis. Know what the basic recipe for a lead or a hi-hat snare or whatever sound is that you're trying to make. Onto the next recipe. We're going to look at some lead sounds. 51. SOUND DESIGN: 80s LEAD: Okay. So as you can probably tell by the gray beard and the gray hair, I remember the eighties quite well. So what we're gonna do here is we're gonna create that really classic 80s lead synth sound. The kind of thing that you'd hear on a hard fault or my attract or the soundtrack to some crazy sci-fi movie. We will, we're going to create a thing that's quite often called the superstore. Okay, here we go. You will definitely, definitely recognize his sound. Super saw is called a superstore because it's made up of a whole bunch of soil ways. Now, in our synthesized here, we've got three oscillators. This is pretty standard. You don't get many with. Certainly not. Since in the eighties with more than 33 oscillators. So there was some, but they were unbelievably expensive. Now, even ten times more than that to buy an original. But let's start. So we've got completely reset patch. We know that we need so a wave. So let's, let's create three sore ways so you know what they sound like. Let's create another one. Again, we go into basic shapes. Close this. I'm already doing that because I seem incapable of clicking this. Once. Every time I click it, it goes to goes onto and a half to go back one. Anyway, perhaps it's a bug, perhaps it's, perhaps it's user error. Anyway. So we've got three oscillators at the moment. They are, once I've adjusted the face, they will all be set up identically. So it'll sound like maybe a slightly louder saw wave. Very loud salt wavelets. Turn that down a little bit. Let's, let's try and separate those outlet where the first little trick that we learned much, much earlier to create a bit of width to a sound is to slightly de-tune the oscillators. So let's say, let's just put these down a little bit and we don't wanna go too far off once we start getting into double figures, mid-teens, we start to affect the actual tuning of the instrument. So let's not go too far, but maybe let's go a little bit of width there. Let's do the same again. Don't want to use the same number that effectively will have the same automated twice little bit width. The other thing we can do to add width is to add some unison. Let's add tons of unison. Now we're getting there. We're getting there. Okay, so let's let's do the same here. But too much maybe ask them to this. I'm starting to hear that it's just starting to detune. I think it's probably because, because we've got these slightly out of pitch and unison and then let me do that one as well. It was, it was slightly beginning to feel like it was going out of tune a little bit. Which is something you really have to watch when you start to mess about with the detuning oscillators that you don't actually shift the perceived tone, although still hitting, still hitting a C. If I start to detuned oscillators and start to use a lot of unison, which I have used a lot of unison. Unison works by detuning as well. So all those things combined, although I'm still here to see the perceived sound once all that detuning has taken place, can shift and they can knock you off by a semitone or I will leave it there. We've got quite a nice, quite a nice thick sound there, but we do need to just adjust the envelope and quick because it's a bit, a bit blunt. So like I said, I just like to take the attack up just a little bit, even though it's a lead sound and something that I want to bring out as soon as I hit the keyboard. Little bit of attack can just remove any potential for kind of pops and clicks. Let's move the sustained. Now that we've got a little bit of an attack and we'll just add a little bit of, a little bit of release that Santa, pretty good. Another thing I've done in the past is just use a triangle wave like this. And maybe a little bit, a little bit faster than that. And just use that to to just fine tune. Again, just add a little bit of pitch variation. One thing what this will do is it'll just add a little bit of, a little bit of variation to the pitch. So we'll just add it to both these oscillators detuned already. I'll just bring one. You can see this one's kind of round or 0.1. I'm just going to bring the other one, the other side. So negative No.1, something like that. Just adds like not even a if it brought on it it's just like this. I guess it is a vibrato, but it's kind of this kind of real subtle wobble to the second. That is sounding very, very 80's. What we're gonna do now is we'll just add some effects to it, see if we can make it. Make it even nicer. Let's go to the Effects tab. And we probably don't want to edit any course. We've got the course we need, but we might want to add a little bit delayed. Today's cool delay. Delay is great. And it's certainly very 80's. But can you hear that? When I, when I play one note, it sounds sounds quite good. But as I started to play it, I kind of lead line. The delay is far, far too long and is bleeding into all the other notes. Really is just making something that should be carrying perhaps the main melody of a particular section of the track. Almost. You can't make the notes, so let's turn it right down because I do like it, but let's just turn it right down. Let's barely there. Too low. Okay. That's not bad. Let's just change this to dotted eighth notes. And what we'll do is we can play around a little bit with these kind of stereo imaging as well. So at the moment, everything is coming straight down the middle, straight down the middle of the kind of stereo image. So let's just choose one of these. Let's try the mid ping pong and what this is gonna do, it's going to go from one to the middle, to the other ear to the middle to the other ear to the middle, etc, etc, across your head. If you're listening to this with headphones or you've got a good set of speakers that you're watching this on. You're definitely notice that effect. Let's do a little bit of EQ. I think that it still feels really quite little bit to think of a better word than raspy in the high-end. Bit too. Saturated, that might be a good word, saturate in the top end. I'm going to bring that down. And actually if you look at the, if you look at the EQ here, you can see there's all one, hold it for too long where there's a lot of, lot of very high frequency information. I'm just going to use the the low-pass filter without the high COP of the EQ. Go too far sampling. It sounds really muddy and loses some of its kind of grit, some of its punch, but you want enough in there to fruit, fruit to be able to really cut through the mix bus. But that's kind of like fizzy noise. It's almost like it's almost like white noise. Just because there's so much of it has such a high frequency. So without cut some of that out, again, not a massive need for it. It's always worth if you've got the Q out, it's always worth just having to hunt around for kind of unpleasant, unpleasant frequencies. You could do that just by raising them up. I think it's around here. Again, these are, this is entirely to your tastes. Have a muck about with the EQ yourself and kind of get that just right. An EQ depends so much on the rest of the track. So it depends so much on the mix of the track as to what other, what other frequencies are being combined in there. And it kind of EQ is already trapped by track thing, but this is getting somebody. Finally, because I love it on everything. Let's add a bit of reverb. So let's stick in a massive room. We're going to be playing two arenas. And let's make it a little bit longer than the standard. So we are, There's our lead. The 80s. You are welcome. Next we're gonna look at some percussion. 52. SOUND DESIGN: HI-HAT: All right, So percussion, percussion is a massive, massive area. You can go right from click into drumsticks together to timpani drums in gangs and shakers, maracas, the full drum kit, drum kit and symbols. And we're not gonna sit here. We're not going to produce every one of those. What we're gonna do is we're going to produce the basics. And from there you'll be able to experiment and develop the other sounds from it. But I think the three things that you must have for a drum kit, hi-hat, a kick, and snare. And from that, you can produce beats for a whole variety of genres of music. That's what we're gonna do. We'll start with the hi-hat. We wanted to kick and snare. And that will give you enough of a drum kit to be able to then just take those same techniques and produce the rest of the drinking or other types of percussion they want to do. But you'll have the main, the main techniques nailed. We start with a, we've got an initialized preset in here. Normally, I would go here and change this to basic shapes. Choose, choose the waveform that I want. Make sure I turn the phase down to 0, 0%. In this case, to make a hi-hat, we're not going to use any oscillators. We are going to use the sampling. Now. It's called the sampler in invite or because it truly is a sampler, you can play any waveform through it. But on most, most synthesisers you might see this referred to as the noise generator. Now, most synthesisers, we'll have a noise generator going back right to hardware, analog knobs and dials. Mo Coke wrote and synthesisers back from the seventies and eighties. They will have a noise generator. In the vast majority of cases. You'll be able to choose the type of noise in a lot of cases. So white noise, brown noise, pink noise. If it doesn't say what type of noise that noise generator is generating, this generates in white noise, which is great because that is the kind of noise that we're going to use to create a hi-hat. If you don't remember, white noise sounds like this. It's very, very unpleasant, but does sound a bit like a bit like a hi-hat, right? We're going to use that and we'll take that initial sound. And it certainly sounds much more like a hi-hat then a sine wave or a square wave or even a sawtooth wave. So this is gonna be the great, a great base. This is the initial sound for creating our hi-hat. Hi hat is not terribly complicated. It's basically some white noise with a very short envelope. To create the envelope that all we need to do is to drag the sustained down to 0. Then we just want to drag the decay. Almost. There. We have our hi-hat. We can make a couple of tweaks to it. So I think it might be useful to have it keep track. Only switches off just by default, we don't need it because we'd never get to the end of the loop, right? But just switch off. It might be so directly key track. This. The only reason being is that it, although it's white noise, that the pitcher is not gonna change a great deal. It will give some variation across the keyboard from one end to the other. It means that you will have effectively slightly differently pitched high hats. Now, you don't need that necessarily. Certainly drum kit doesn't have slightly vary, slightly differently pitched high hats. But depending on where the drummer hits the hi-hat, whether it's in the center, towards the edge. Um, how, how, how close to the hi-hat? Here's how hard the drummer stood on the pedal will give a slight variation in pitch. So what this means is as you're programming in your drums, you can use different keys, is spread apart and it will give a slightly different pitch to the hi-hat. It's really useful, just adds a little bit of realism. More than realism. It adds a little bit more interest to the drum pattern, perhaps. Changes envelope slightly. I'd like it to just change the shape of this a little bit. Just to get that initial put a bit quicker, but I'm gonna drag this in. This will take some fiddling to double-click that. Again. If I double-click this little magnifying glass in here, it will expand the envelope to fill the whole window. Now instead of back in its default when I was kind of a 2.5th between these grid lines. Now it is 30 milliseconds or so between these grid lines, 31 milliseconds between grid lines. That's pretty close. All right, the only thing left to do on here really perhaps, is perhaps it might be worth applying a filter. The only reason I'm saying that I don't think it's gonna make a huge amount of difference. We'll stick with a very simple filter, but white noises, noise at every frequency. So we don't want any kind of low-frequency noises and they're not really making much difference. One thing, however, a can be good invite on in particular. This is probably a vital specific thing. Is too is too. I'll tell you why it wasn't making a difference at all because I wasn't routed to it. So you need to remember then to route from the sampler, from the noise generated through the filter. That makes more sense. But one other thing, it's still my, my point is to apply. One other thing that we can do is we can apply a little bit of driving it, add a little bit more saturation. But as it is a very, very small amount of saturation to that signal, I think that's sounding pretty good. We might want to just add a little bit of reverb to it. So into the effects. And add a little bit of reverb just to let it bring out a little bit more, but we probably want to take that down to be something a little bit smaller. You can adjust that to taste. But there we are, There's our hi-hat. There you go. You can hear the slight pitch variation. Somebody actually four notes apart, but there's very basic hi-hat. Like I said, these are, these kind of recipes are there for you to build on. So there's a very basic high hat. We probably want to change. The one thing I always forget to do is just change our voices. We don't want to play more than one hi-hat ones. There's a basic recipe for a high hat and you can see quite easily how we can take some white noise. That was really the point in this patch, is to take some white noise, apply an envelope to it, and a filter once you've remembered to route it properly, you can use that instead of an oscillator. And this is really the first time you've done that, that we've used no other oscillators at all. And then we've used the noise generator to as the basis for our patch. Next, we will take a look at creating a kick drum. 53. SOUND DESIGN: KICK DRUM: All right, So kick drum, not a particularly difficult patch to create. We're going to start with a sinewave. Clearly one thing that we know about drums is that the suitable envelope. So we'll start by just doing the same as we did for the hi-hat would just drag this second marker here, which is the kind of delay sustained marker. So it's sustained here and delay that way. And we just strike us down here somewhere. Maybe adjust this curve a little bit. While we're almost there. One thing that I do know about, about kicks is that they are very deep. So let's just transpose this time maybe one octave to somebody. If you are not listened to this with headphones, then you are probably not. Probably not here in this very well. So are definitely either, if you haven't got headphones with you just maybe even skip this and come back to it later with a pair of headphones on or a good pair of speakers. But this one's gonna be very difficult to hear, particularly the nuances of it on a mobile phone speaker or something like that. Let's look at our filters now we have a basic, basic shapes up there. Let's look at the, let's look at the filters. It's definitely wants to be a low-pass filter. This really just adds a little bit of a little bit to the transient. It just adds a little bit of, a bit of a knock at the start of an interesting trends into the heart of the cuts off. The more we get. So we can just round that out a little bit about already. That's looking like a pretty good picture. I'm just remember to set the voices to one. We only want one kick drum out of time. But it feels like, it feels like this could easily get lost in a, in a mixed race. Perhaps we want to add a little bit more punch to it. So one thing we could do is we could set the we could add a bit of white noise to it. And so white noise, we can often use it just to add a little something to it, a little bit of grit to a sound. I think that's probably what we need right now. Sounding better is sounding better process. We need to just turn it down a little bit. But it feels like. So by default, the envelope, the envelope one that we've got, which is controlling the level of oscillator one. By default, that is also controlling the level of oscillator too. But I feel that we know we've got plenty of envelopes that didn't cost anything, so we might as well use them. And it allows us to, if we wanted to make an adjustment to the envelope of of oscillator one. Or in this case, I want to make an adjustment to the envelope of the sampler of the noise generator. I can't do that without also affecting the envelope of the oscillator. What I'll do is I will, and in fact, I'm going to take a very similar envelope to start with. Very, very similar looking shape. I'm going to drag that over and I'm going to apply it to the level of the noise generates a purchase. Turn this down. I want to do is just can you hear that? So what I want I could hear is the white noise was just starting a little bit early. It starting right at the others. I didn't really hear the thump of the kick. But by making it, given it a separate envelope, I can just adjust the attack forward a bit. And I still feel that that is probably almost sounded a little bit snare. So what else could we could be, could bring us down a couple of octaves, three octaves. That is being caused by this filter. Go to the Effects. Okay, let's, let's put a different filters. Let's try adding a bit of a sharper filter. This is what I thought was happening. I thought it was residence on the film. So it was kind of creating a tone effectively by creating harmonics. Because of the resonance. This is coming from the song platform, the noise generator. We can actually pull individual frequencies out of the white noise, raise the resonance of them, and create a tone, even though it's just coming from white noise. And this is a technique we'll use it again later in one of the other patches. They're in a slightly different way. Anyway, let's concentrate on the kick and getting this just right now we begin to get them. All right. I think that's as far as we are gonna get with filters and envelopes. So let's pop into the effects. One of the things that we can use to really bring a sound out is perhaps a compressor. So let's have a look at that. We don't need all the bands, so let's pick a we just want to be want to, sorry, low band compressor. Can you hear already? Without even, without even making any adjustments just for the default values. How already that's given that that sounds some real extra punch. Maybe adjust this a little bit. Pull this one down. There we go. Can you hear that? Could you hear when you hear that clicking that you get sometimes at the beginning of the person the key. It's because this attack on the envelope for the sine wave is, is set to 0. And sometimes that can cause the symptoms to kind of create this pop. I always try and just turn up a little bit. Just almost an entire perceptual amount and certainly a very small amount. Just enough so you don't get that knock it anymore. Kind of click. Cool. All right, Back to the, back to the effect. So certainly you want the attack to be really, really fast because it's a drum. The thing that's got the attack, that's what gives the kind of Picasso element to it. But you don't want that weird synthesizer kind of artifacts in the front. So just adjust the attack a little bit. Okay, so that's sounding better already. Let's carry on with our compressor. We can probably turn the we want to check to be quite fast the release less so with peaking, clip in a slightly, turn that down with the compressor. The compressor. Okay, so take some time play about with the compressor to get it ready to be that, to give you, give you a sound that really cut into a mixed because before it's going to get lost, it's got a little bit of a knock to it, which the white noise has given us. But obviously with a compressor on it. You may not want that much. It depends on the style of music that you're going to create with it. Let's just add a little bit of EQ just to make sure that we don't have too much high-frequency noise in there. I'm just wondering whether perhaps very good. Just because it's made without a little bit of reverb. Just to put it in a room ready. It sounds very, very dry, doesn't it? So we said a little bit of reverb, not too much. I've just taken the size down a little bit. We'll take them mixed down a little bit just to put out a bit. Way too much. Just a little bit, just to give it a little bit of making it a little bit boomy, I guess. All right, so there's our kick drum. Certainly could start in place starting point for the kick drum. So very simple. We detuned a sinewave down to town a couple of octaves. Again, you don't really need to do that if you've got a massive keyboard and you can just play down the left-hand side. But we teach you now, we did the same for a noise generator. We applied a filter to each separately. Just because we want to treat the two sounds independently. We've got a filter for both. We also did the same for the envelope. So we've got slightly different shapes of envelopes for envelope, envelope to envelope one effecting the sinewave. Just a very fast attack, but a non-zero taxa, we remove that click and then a very fast decay with a slight curve to it to give it just so it's not so linear. Then on envelope two, we've got a very linear, very fast attack, but slightly slower, slightly slower than the sine wave. So we get that kind of more interest in transient. That slips away. Again slightly slower than the, than the sine wave. Then any effects then we have just added, I can press on which made a huge difference. A bit of EQ just get the balance quite right and a little bit of reverb, just because I always feel like a kick drum and bass drum is a boomy instrument. If, if someone was to go into your lounge and stamp on based on pedal, it would boom. Just add a little bit of reverb. There we go. Good starting points. As again, again, a massively encourage you to, hopefully you're following along, if not, go back, follow along, belt the basic patch, save it, and then go and make it your own by messing him out with all the things that we've seen so far in the course. One more piece of percussion to do so we've done a hi-hat, we've done a kick. The vital missing ingredients, if you'll forgive the pun, is the snare drum. So that's next. 54. SOUND DESIGN: SNARE DRUM: Okay, so to finish off our drum kit today or are very basic rudimentary drum kit today. We're going to create a snare. We've got the kick, we've got the high hat, now we need the snare. There's a bit of a trick to the snare. We'll cover that now. But it starts off in a very similar way to the kick drum. So we start off with a basic sine wave. To that we are going to add a noise generator. So some white noise down here, and some white noise. We don't need to worry about any of these being on. So there we are. What we are gonna do is, if you think about a snare drum, snare drum is a skin on top of the drum that you hit with the drum stick, with a brush or with a stick. Underneath it is a bunch of springs are kind of y as excuse me a bit, why is a bit like but they're kind of like if you've got a spring and pulled it apart. So it's a very loosely coiled spring. There are, I don't know, maybe 201020. There's a drummer out there. Knows the answer to this, but they are kind of stretched across the bottom of the snare drum. When you hit the snare drum, you get the noise from the, from this hitting the skin itself and the residents of the drum. But also you get the noise of these, these kind of loosely coiled springs underneath kind of reverberations means. And that's what gives us that distinctive snare sound. It's quite a high pitched sound. That's the kind of resonance from the snare, snare wires themselves. So we'll pick this one up because it's high-pitched, but make a huge amount of difference because it's white noise after all, but it will make some differences we saw in the high hat. So now we have this. All right, we can see, we can see that that could, that could become a snare. Have our envelope here. So normally we would take the envelope for a drum, we would take the envelope and we would drag the k down, the sustain, or sorry, the sustaining the decay across and set them all to 0 and basically just have that very short envelope that we saw both for the kick and for the, for the hi-hat. But in this case, I am going to use LFOs as envelopes. As a reason for this. When I am using an envelope, I can only use Attack hold, decay, sustain release. And in most cases, the vast majority of synthesisers, it's ADSR, attack, decay, sustain, and release. That's it. I need to use more points than that to make a snare and that will become very obvious later. So for some of these things on your use LFO for, you could use an envelope. But actually I'm going to use LFOs for all and just prove to you that you don't actually need an envelope. You can use an LFO. And in some cases it can be advantageous to do so. First we're going to do is, is envelope. One of course is currently modulating, controlling the amplitude of the level of both the oscillator and of the sampler, the noise generator. But I'm going to want to use those separately the same as I did for the kick drum. Lfo one is going to go to the level of the oscillator one. I'm going to drag that down to 0, which actually is probably more sensible to me before hand drag, drag, drag out level down to 0. So I know that. And then I'm going to set this to around 70%. Around, if I look at oscillator to there, I can see that there's a default value, which is, which is it around that two o'clock point. So I'm going to just make my goat to around about the same point, something like that, something like that. I don't switch off oscillator 2's, we don't want it. I know that my LFO when it's at its lowest point, I'm not going to hear a sine wave is highest value. I am going to hear that kind of default values around the 70% volume Mark. I am going to want a slightly different shape for this one. So I'm going to drag this up here and I'm gonna create another point by double-clicking. I'm going to drag this one up here. And I'm going to divide this into, just to make this a bit easier to snap with these grid lines. This is a little long, but they tend to snap to grid lines. So I am going to, it is possible to have them not start to realize what they will do that by default. So I'm gonna make this into a grid of about eight. And I am going to make this look a bit like this. I'm going to drag this down there. So I end up with is a B at full amplitude, amplitude for the first, for the first portion, I hit this and I'm going to drop down to 0. Now I need to remember to make this an envelope because I only want us to play through once. I'm gonna set the frequency to a fourth quarter. It's a percussion, so we don't want to smooth anything. Percussion should be Loudon and an aggressive. We could end up with this. If I remove, if I just switch the white noise or for a second, you can hit my drum. You can imagine that. Let's say I've paid good money for keyboards with drums, that sounds like that. So that is the just the sine wave. What I want to do for the the pitch of assignment, what I'd like to do is want to hear the pitch to change slightly. So I'm going to take, sorry for LFO T2, so oscillator one, I would like the pitch of oscillator wanted to change slightly when I hit the drum. This is quite common in a drum noise. I didn't drum sounds. So I am going to take this shape here and I'm going to create another and other points on it here. And I'm going to bring it down to around kind of the same kind of point, roughly the same point where it hits 0 here. I'm just going to add a little bit of a curve to that. Just to make it a little bit smoother. I am going to attach this to the pitch. Now I get this perhaps a little bit, a little bit too high. So I'm going to I need to remember to change this to an envelope. I didn't like that way faster. That pitch shift is happening really, really fast. Remember to remove the smoothing is happening really, really fast, but it's just adding some incident. If I didn't make an, a transient in a bit more interested, given it a bit more, a bit more punch. If I add in the white noise generator again, white noise is still going on far too long. So I'm going to create, use another LFO. I am going to just drag this across here. And I'm going to double-click here. I'm going to drag us down to quite a short. I just want a little bit of the white noise at the beginning, but it's going on too long. That should do it. I need to, again make it an envelope. Make this a little bit quicker. I'm going to add it to the level of the noise generator of the sampler. I'm going to make that control the level kind of a, a 1000%. That's quite an interesting, interesting sound. But I said that there was a trick to snares. This is the trick. So I'm going to double-click this line here. And I'm gonna drag a line up from here to about here. And all of a sudden I'm going to have a snare drum out there. But just doing this and adding this out in this line in here. And it's given us this. So we get this first kind of decrease in, so we get an initial hit. And then it's kind of like we hear the string, this nanowires rattle afterwards. Now we've got, now we've got a snare drum. Turn oscillator one down a little bit until we get what we want. Now let's have a look at some effects. First of all, there's a little bit of EQ to do so. What are some of the low end? So let's put the EQ on first. I'm going to leave a little bit this, we could do this with a filter. We can do with the EQ here, that's fine. And that just a little bit there. Then. This is where this peak here is wherever getting the getting assignment like this, I might be in there. It's good because one of the snare drum, you do get some tone from the scenario itself and you actually have to tune snare drums. Want to just cut a little bit about out. I'm just going to hit this one. Just turned us turn this down a little bit. Maybe bring Okay, then I can see there's a lot of buildup on the spectrum as you'd expect, because we are generating white noise. So I'm just gonna call it little better there for a reason, but we just want to cut that out a little bit. We'll add a compressor. Again, the remember when you add these things that come in alphabetical order, but actually we want to do the EQ first. So let's do that. It doesn't make a huge difference, but it's the way it's done in the past. So we're gonna use a high band because we want to separate this out slightly. Again. We're going to not make adjustments to it, but we're just gonna keep playing the snare until we get a sound that we liked. Maybe I should just turn this down a little bit. What I've done there is I've just started playing an octave low and I do prefer the sound. So maybe I'll just put this down an octave. All right. I think another thing that I'm gonna do is I'm just going to still has a bit too much of a title on it. There we go. So just play with that. I know it's an LFO. What we're using is an envelope just needs to play them with a little bit and it's really worthwhile spending some time. Just don't, don't sell, just go in and really work on everything. And just kind of if there's something that you don't like about, you synthesize, you know, what? Everything in a synthesize it does. Now, we've been through it in great detail over a long period of time. You know, absolutely everything that is synthesized, it does all the basic functions or the building blocks and architectures. You know, how to go and change your sound. I was sat there and this was it was it was just not quite right. It was just something about the tail of that white noise I didn't like. So he went and created just added another point in here and just brought that down because we know what that's gonna do. It means that it's going to be at 0 volume sooner, right? So this means that from here to here it's trading down in volume, so it's effectively the release. So you can think about that as like a release of an envelope. And like I said, this is the main reason that using LFOs instead of envelopes, because I can't make that shape. And an LFO company, they're shaping an envelope, but that portion effectively becomes a release. The release was too long. What do we do? We just shortened release. Now we've got a real, real punchy snare combined with that kind of lower octave on the, on the oscillator. So we've got that lovely tone from a drum, and we've got that snare from the snare wise. It's like it, I like it. Without compression. Compression again, compression just really, just bringing those kind of amplitude together, just really squashing things and making a real much tighter sound. Then of course we'll add some reverb as we always had to regroup. And you shouldn't always prefer. I like ribo, just really again, just to put it in a room. I liked the sound of it. Adjust to taste. That's a lot of reverb. So maybe let's just bring that down a little bit. See, it just brings it from quite a really, really dry sound. Now, if you're gonna add reverb late when you're mixing, you've got push reverb or a favorite reverb that you'd like to use. And that's completely fine. But using the volume vital, it just adds a lot. Really makes it into an array. And I sound so I think again, but run through it very quickly. So we started with a sinewave, which gives us the tone of the drum itself. And then we've got a reuse of white noise generator again. Just really to give us a percussive hit, that kind of crunchy noise. We didn't use envelopes this time because we couldn't get the shape you want. So with an envelope, so we've used LFO one to give us this shape. So quite an initial hit. And then dropping down to, dropping down to nothing very quickly. But NF2. In that same period of time that we come across and then go down to nothing and that same period of time, we're using this to detune. So going from very high to very low, just to kind of emulate that kind of slight resonance detuning you get when you hit a drum. The noise generator, the sampler is controlled with this, this LFO, this is controlling the level. So effectively being an absolute amplitude envelope. But this is really the one where we couldn't create this with an envelope. So we use an LFO. And this shape here is just a bit of a trick. It gives some initial white noise, which dives down to 0. And then it gives you a second burst, which is the reverberation of the springs underneath the snare drum itself. The effects, we did a bit of EQ, just really cut out any unwanted frequencies at either end of the spectrum and just lower the effect of that sine wave a little bit. We did some quite heavy compression, but it's really give a punchy sound and you'll often find compressors use a lot on drums. And then we added some reverb just to put it in a room and make it sound a bit more lovely. So there is our final snare sound, that's our drum kits. We are done. One final patch to make before we have all the things that we need to really make a track. Although certainly there's enough there already. But I just like to show you how to create something. I guess you would call it key. So something a bit like a kind of electric piano. 55. SOUND DESIGN: KEYS (SYNTH PIANO): In this patch, I want to do is create something that's piano, like not an emulation of a piano, but something that is kind of recognizable as being a piano type instrument and electric piano or something, something of that kind of the same kind of characteristics as a piano. It is perfectly possible using synthesis. There are some amazing piano synthesized out there. There's some great sampled instruments, but actually there were some great sample, sorry, synthesized piano sounds out there using things like physical modelling and things were not going to go that far. We are going to use a vital and, and the things that we've seen in this course up to now, to create a quite a good piano sound. I hope you'll think it's good. I'm usually we are. When you think of a piano sign, anything but quite warm, rounded sound, bit of a plucky sound. So maybe we would choose a fast envelope. And, or reasonably fast. I'm not percussive fast, but similar to what we did with the base block maybe, and maybe a sine wave or a triangle wave is not a soul wave kind of sound. Actually make it into a throw a bit of a curve ball here. And we're gonna start with noise. We're not gonna use any oscillators at all. The time you've done this before was to create a hi-hat. Actually, piano is a percussive instrument. The habit inside the workings inside a piano is very similar to the way that kicked around works with a kick drum. A beta comes forward, a hammer comes forward and hits the skin of a big drum. Piano does the same thing, but it hits strings are not a drum skin is kind of a percussive instrument. Kind of loosely. This makes some sense. Let's start off with, let's start with some white noise and sounds like this. As you well know. Now remember when we talked about resonance earlier and we talked about the very, very early on, if you remember that long ago. Much earlier today we talked about harmonics and how that's when we had a sine wave. He pulled a single harmonic out of a. It was a single harmonic or which we call the fundamental, excuse me, which we call the fundamental. And then as we looked at different types of waves, you are adding more and more harmonics. Kind of. If we have white noise, we take a filter and we make a bandpass filter, add some resonance to it. Sorry, root it correctly. I've left, I'm going to leave that left that mistaken on purpose just because I always do it and I'm sure that some of you may do so. If somebody is not working as expected, it's not because you don't know what you're doing. Often. It is because it's a simple thing like routing. I mean, there's been a few times over this course in playing with a filter and realize that it's not been rooted. I've just done it. Again. It's an easy mistake. Anyway. So I've created this band pass filter. I've raised the residents, residents up to a 100% on this filter. And I can even about that. And if I turn on key tracking, now somebody's, sounds like something that's someone playing a very old keyboard over a very bad radio set. But you can see that even without the filter from white noise, using a filter, we can, by raising the residence of a frequency or a band of frequencies, or a set of frequencies, we can create sound. Now, this is exactly how a comb filter works. We looked at them very briefly before, and I promise you that we'd go and have a look at them in more detail. A comb filter. You can see it's very similar to what we've just seen is we've pulled out lots of frequencies. We can use this band spread comb here from the white noise and we pulled out a bunch of harmonics. The resonance has an effect on how much they bring out. Then we can use this blend here to kind of determine, determine how much is there. So the next thing to do then is to. Just remove some of the hashes before we start to really sculpt with sounds. So the way we remove harshness, again, it's fine frequencies. By now, I'm sure, you know, we're going to add a low-pass filter, will add quite a harsh low-pass filter, a 24 decibel low-pass filter. We need to make sure that we're actually reaching it. So we're going to route this from filter one. So we're gonna go from the noise generator into the filter, into the filter and the comb filter than infiltrating. We've got a much, a much nicer assume. So. We're getting, we're getting closer to a piano like Sam. Okay. A couple of things we're gonna do. We are going to have a little bit of a talk about the quirks of what kind of photos do they add a lot of residence resonance to a lot of frequencies? The envelope one that is there by default in sorry, is that in an invite or by default when affect everything, anything that we haven't attached to another ambulatory, which means that the envelope also affects the output of the residence of the comb filter. If I don't want that white noise playing all the time. So what I'm gonna do is I'm going to create a separate envelope to control the level of the white noise, which was still let the resonance come out from the comb filter. So as I said, it's quite the customer instrument instrument. And I set this down to 0. I'm going to create a percussion type of envelope, which we know looks something like this. I will attach that to the level of the level of the noise generator. Okay? Although this, although we can see that this envelope is going all the way through, the sound is still running out, and that's because the sound is storing out through eminent one. This is sounding better already. One thing I don't like, it doesn't matter whether you use this nukes on rough, but I switch off with I'm not using it identifies just habit. One thing I don't like is it's beginning to get that machine gun effect. So every time I play a note, sounds exactly the same. So one thing I'm gonna do is I am going to switch on. The round robin now won't make a great deal of difference when you use them white noise because it's pretty similar frequencies all the way along. You can see it begins to make some kind of difference. Another thing that I'm going to do here is just a bit of a play with this cutoff. We're getting a Keys type of instrument. One thing I'm going to try, so inside vital, and you won't get this in every synthesizer, but inside vital, you don't necessarily need to do this off white noise. Now it works perfectly well off white noise and we'll get into a noise that we could, we could use. But actually in the software it doesn't need to be borne. Noise is white noise, brown noise, pink noise. And you'll see these commonly on a, on a lot of things. But one thing we do have in here is various different months. So these are various different Waves that you can kind of scroll through and just find the ones you want. Now, if depending on the level of again, how much money you paid for for vital, whether that's free. For free, it comes with a few wave tables here. Few samples here for the highest Ej get many more. But we've got more noisy instrument you can make some interesting, interested in. Notice. Now without the comb filter, there's just sounds like a wave. If I started from his thought. Bypass Assembler, I'll do a lot of undoing a lot of work here, but it just sounds like the way it is. Just a sample of a wave. Brown noise, sounds like this. Pink noise by this white noise we open, we know all about bonds. I'm not sure what that stands for, but it sounds like that box fan. Grinder, an 8-track two units or academic unit. Jackhammer, River. And I think we've background to waves. So you can see that there's just with, if I just reapply these envelopes just undo or redo all the wet logs on, so on bypass that switches filter back on. We can make some really interesting sounding instruments by applying comb filter. So the white is one isn't particularly good. And I'll tell you why, because I wanted to use the random for the round robin. But you can see that the amplitude is very different throughout the, throughout the wave. It just makes the notes sound too different. So let's scroll through. Brown, light brown noise, the same brown eyes, you get some very low points in very high points. Pink noise might be better. White noise, white noise sounds quite plucky. I wanted to synthesize a guitar using this, I might start with some noise. You see that? You see that one box fan doesn't sound bad. Grinder sounds a bit distant paycheck in it. Okay. That's not bad, is it? Residents a little bit. I'm going to get the residents high, so we've got a nice ring out, but if we set the residents to a 100, it doesn't go away. It's like when I hold the key down a sustained forever. So we just drop it down. A nice level to a reasonable level like that. Okay, so let's have a quick look at this low-pass filter and see what difference we can make with this. That sounds much brighter. I'm not sure it sounds better. You can a little bit of resonance. Now, one thing I have noticed as I'm playing this, I didn't have any sensitivity in the keys at all. No matter how hard or softly or faster, slow, as velocity says, I hit the keys anyway, it makes no difference to the sound that comes out is always the same. Velocity tracking up. It doesn't need to be up all the way up all the way. It makes it really, really, really sensitive and can actually mean that if you hit it to Sophie hidden, no, not at all. So I usually set it around right here, kind of sixty-five, seventy percent Mach, But that seems to work quite well for me. But again, it really depends on your style of playing keyboards. Now, this is because we were relying on resonance here. This is quite quiet, so I'm just going to use my master switch, attend this up. It doesn't matter if I turn it all the way to top as long as I'm not clipping, that's fine, but not enough. Instead it down. But it's not the position of this, this kind of volume slider that I'm interested in. The output serves as hard as I hit the keys, particularly if velocity tread, turn it on so the maximum impact or the fastest I can hit the keys, as long as I'm not turning red than them. I'm happy. That sounds pretty good. So I think a couple of things I would like to try. I know that when I played the piano and I didn't play the piano very often all very well. But when I do play the piano, I know that the the lower notes are on the left-hand side. The highlights on the right-hand side, that's fairly obvious. However, I also know that the strings that are being hit by that hammers inside the piano. The lower note, lower tone munch on the left and the height are ones on the right. And that means that that's where the sound comes from so that I know that I can expect to hear the deeper tones in more than my left ear and the higher tones more in my right ear. And we can do the same here. We have a thing we haven't looked at this before. This is the only bit of any of these patches that we've never looked at before. But there is the facility inside, inside vital. This is not in every synthesized, but it's quite, quite fun and it's quite nice. Let's do it while we're here. I'm basically this one tells us how, how high up the notice. So you can see on the left-hand side, this is kind of little indicator. See if we can zoom in to see that. So you can see that if I apply a very low note, the indicators down here, the little green lights down here play very high note. As much higher up. We can use that to perhaps attach that to the pan of the noise generator. That when I play a low note, pans to the left slightly, I'm going to play a high note your pants the right slope, right slightly. Now of course, you don't want to pan all the way because you do hear some of the high notes in your left ear and the low notes. But we're planning a little bit of the way. So What we're gonna do then is we are going to take the notes. We're going to assign it to the pan of the track unit of a sampler. We want to make this bipolar so that it moves in both directions away from 0, the same as we've done previously. And we just want to pan a little bit, not too far right about there. This will mean that now when I play very high notes, they appear, they appear to me to be in the right ear. They sound, they sound in the right stereo channel. I went to probably lower notes further over to the left. This is completely unnecessary, completely unnecessary. But it is quite fun. Of course. It will make a difference. It will make a difference in the mix because it will translate through into your track. But it's much more, I would say, be careful with it. It's a bit of a trick, is quite good fun. But remember that's only really the person playing the piano. Here's the high notes to the right and the low notes to the left. An audience member, or if someone farther away from the piano doesn't hear that, it doesn't hear it like that at all. So if you're writing, if you're using this piano, It's quite an intimate piece, then come up quite well. But yeah, just be a little bit careful with that, but they kind of with the gimmicks. Okay, so I think that's sounded quite good. Now, Let's just add a couple of effects. Might be able to stop and look if you want to add some effects as just the final finishing touch. Double chorus. Let's have a try little bit of distortion. Interesting. Actually clicking on it. Particularly when he distortion and they cannot quite a lot of extra fall semester again, that's probably a bit too much. Let's try. Without much. Let's add some reverb he knew that was coming next, right? Probably we can leave this about stock is pretty sensible. Okay. We also instrument in the spirit of a piano, at least if, even if it's not a fully accurate representation, but certainly, certainly good fun, a different technique and something that's worth just kind of exploring. And again, playing around with and you couldn't have, you can make, you can hugely affect the sound using just kind of adjusting the field says and play with some effects. So that's the end of this section. There is, at least for now. So I plan to add some more patches in the future. So please do let me know if there's a particular sound or after. I will happily create those, record them and add them to the course. The very last section. Now what I want to do is just open up a couple of other synthesizes. I'm only going to spend a couple of minutes with each, but I just want to open them up and just to reassure you that everything that you've learned in this course. Because we've really looked at the fundamentals, that kind of underlying architecture in the way that synthesisers work. How you now have the ability to take that knowledge and apply it, not just invite or which is a great synthesizer and certainly a much deeper than we've looked at in this course. But, but, but to be able to take that knowledge and apply that to any other synthesising that you come and sit down, sit down with. Without further ado. Let's go and have a look at on the synthesizer. 56. SYNTH 1: TAL NOISEMAKER: Okay, So this is the first couple of synthesizes we're gonna look at. This is another free one, and it is a great synthesizer. This is called noisemaker. You can get it from the URL that's on the screen right now. And like I said, is free of charge thing. It's available as a plug-in for doors. But it looks really different to vital. Right? So completely different. So let's go through it step-by-step and think about the building blocks of synthesisers of the way that we know and see how we can easily look at this and say, okay, well we recognize the bits. Now we know how to use them to make the sound that we want to. Once again, when we think about synthesizing the first thing, either end, we think about the oscillators. They might say, oscillator might say VCO. In this case, it says the same as it does in vital. It says I was C1 and C2 oscillate one oscillator too. If I look at oscillator one, I can see that I have some tuning and fine tuning. I have a, the face where whereabouts in the, in the wave, where I start. I can choose a wave type here, right? So this has a bit more limited the vital, I've got a sawtooth wave and a square wave, some noise. So I recognize all of these things. This is just white noise. Then over here we've got oscillator to this has got tuning, fine tune phase the same as the others. Just set those down to zeros are never BR. Frequency modulation, which we haven't covered this, but I've got more choices in ways like I can see I've got a triangle wave and a, and a sine wave. So maybe pick that. What do we get? What we would expect, right? So we're effectively getting a wave. I'm not hearing much of the sinewave. I can't see where the levels are set here. So I know that perhaps there's an amplifier section where these are sets, so I don't see a VCA or amplify it, or do you see an amplified down here? But this looks like an envelope. This is ADSR, so this is perhaps the amplifier envelope, okay? But I can see that over here I've got oscillator. Want an oscillator to oscillate at one oscillator two is not. So if I turn off oscillator two, here's my, here's my sine wave. So I'm going to shooting up, I'm going to, I've got a sub. So you'll see this on some synthesizes. There is this third oscillator. Know, it looks like we've only got two oscillators, but actually there is a third is called the SOP, only comes with a level. And basically what this is gonna do is he's going to play a sine wave, Probably two octaves below, where you're playing on the keyboard. Let's just stop by swatch on that down. Much more like the noise that I would expect from a kind of middle C being played on a soil wave and the sine wave. Okay, so I've got porter here. This is probably the slide pulls them off, so let's put it on. This is a bit like the Gothic thing and it's got an overall master volume. Then I get how the oscillations are working. The next things we looked at where envelopes, I believe this to be the amplifier envelope. What we see here is ADSR. This is how we know it's an envelope because I've got AD SNR. Now remember that a, the attack, the decay and the release are all in terms of time. So the lower down the attack and the decay and the release are the faster that will happen. And sustain is in terms of volume when compared to the maximum volume which is achieved at the top of the attack. So here we've got no, no attack, no decay, sustain and release. Simply a on my keyboard, just an on-off switch. I can ask them attacker should expect, or should expect the sounds of brown pups lay out a bit of release. Maybe not so much. Maybe I'll add a short decay. Now begin to get more of a pat on the triangle wave sound and really harsher. So I'm going to try squarely. I'm also going to untuned that. I'm gonna go the other way. Filters. I want a, we recognize all these. So the low-pass filters, high-pass filters, band-pass filters, notch filters. We recognize all these sets have a low-pass filter. The cutoff is set to the top, which is going to be set at probably around 20 K. This is gonna be effectively no filter. So let's, let's just revisit this ADSR here is an envelope which is attached to the filter, maybe use this also shows the past. One thing that's not obvious here is an LFO. Up the top here. Every synthesized will be laid out in a different way. So we've got a sine wave, LFO. It's, we want this to affect. I don't know, let's just pick something. So let's effect the effect the filter cutoff. Let's turn the write up. The mountain. We can hear loud, effective, effectively. Let's just switch off for a second. Effectively the Mercedes during that really fast. So we know that that is LFO one is now affecting the filter cutoff. We are, we've found the oscillators, we find the amplifier, we found the filters. We have found the low-frequency oscillators, LFOs. The only thing left at finding the effects change is the effects. Now not every synthesized will come to the effect, but I can see a few words I recognized down here. So here's some course. Crashes, probably like a big crusher. It sounded pretty cool. Reverb, like a bit of reverb. These are high-pass and low-pass filters. There's some delay. That'd be awesome. That is tau noisemaker. Again. Go download it. It's free of charge and it makes them cool noises. Alright, Let's just let me know. With that. That's one synthesizer and you can see that it looks completely different, completely different to device will yet, actually, when we sat there and looked at the interface, we could recognize all or most of the pattern at enough that we could make a strange base paths out. Let's look at one more. 57. SYNTH 2: LOGIC RETRO SYNTH: This is one that is built into just one of the stock. Since for logic, I've chosen this one because I've had logic for a long time. And I have never used the synth. I knew it was there, and I have never played with it. So we're gonna go through this together. Let's think So. The first thing I want to think about it is by Howard generated by wave. So my oscillators, so I can see that I have oscillators here on the left. So it looks like I can pick from a square wave, a sawtooth wave, and this is probably noise. Yeah, it sounds like that's noise. Then it looks like I can have slightly different variations of the square wave. Just basically moving the shape of the square wave into it, more of a kind of pulse wave there. What want to do this time is kind of try and create if something is a bit more like synth bass. Here's my second oscillator. Like I said, not every, every cell has the same number of oscillators. We've got two on this one. This looks like it's churning. Yeah, absolutely. That's tuning. This is sentence. Okay. This is detuned the bottom oscillator. I would think we can prove this by changing this one's a noise. So there's no need to teach you both oscillators is what one's going to stay at the right pitch and mom is gonna be detuned. This is probably given some mix between between the two. I kind of balance, if you like, between the two oscillators. It looks like we have the ability to modulate the shape of the wave using LFOs and filters as we'd expect. Let's look at the next thing we've got. So we've got an amp and this is, this is labeled as I'm pair, so the amplifier, so this is simply the volume and the sign level. This is similar to the the sub that we saw on the last one. This appears to be adding a sinewave. Wanted two octaves lower than the pitch we're playing that. So it's just kind of maybe it's I think a small dip below. So let's have a look at the envelope. Looks like it's the amplifier envelope. This is the envelope that's going to, or the amplitude envelope. This is the, how we originally saw envelopes in vital Is being able to kind of modulate the effect, the volume over time. This looks fairly simple. Adsr, we know what they mean. Maybe if I just drag this up, I can make the the attack longer. I don't want that for my deep bass sound. So that's the decay, sustain and release. This is just given us a very, this is going to be very simple and unrecognizable display for the, for the envelope, they've got the LFO. At the moment. The LFO is the LFO is a triangle wave. Okay, so we have this low-pass filter here. If we can, we get the LFO. Effective filter cutoff. Maybe. I've got a filter working. Nfo is baffling me. It is because this seems to me intuitively, this seems the opposite way around. So we have the NFO which is going to affect the filter cutoff. Is this slider. I thought that this was going to be at output units maximum to the filter. But actually an operating on the filter to the maximum ability is actually the other way, other way around. Okay? Yeah, so some of these things can be a little quirky, take a little bit of getting used to. And then we have this filter envelope. So we have an envelope that can directly affect the felt so sodas and see what that does. We can see that without, with a longer attack, it takes longer for that filter to take effect. So there's our bass sounds. Perhaps a little bit. We are, now we're getting somewhere. That's not playing with that. So you can see that as again, it took a little while to get through this. Well, I've never seen that that particular use, that particular synthesizer before. But just methodically going through it. Here are my oscillators. Here's my filters, here's my envelope, Here's my LFO. There are some effects here. I can see on the right looks like we've got a chorus or a flanger there as well. A very simple sense, but laid out completely differently to what we've seen before. And it just takes a little time, but we recognize all the words we know. Most importantly, when we, there's something wrong with the sound, we know the kind of thinking that we control, that we're looking for, the kind of control we're looking forward to go and alter it. Also that we can predict before we move, before we move our control. In most cases, apart from this one down here, which I got very confused whether it still seems backwards to me. We can predict what's going to happen to the sound when we move one of the parameters. Let's look at one final synth. I was adding a new YouTube, but I'm really enjoying myself. 58. SYNTH 3: CHERRY AUDIO MEMORYMODE (MOOG MEMORYMOOG): All right, this one was quite intimidating. So this is the memory mode, so this is by cherry audio. And again, this is a paid for synthesising, although I believe that there is a trial and it's actually not too expensive. But there's a free trial period. I believe. You can go and have a look at. I have just bought it. I enjoy doing the retro Synth. Not just seeing some new. You said that I have not played with before. And what I wanted to do is it's like there was fair enough with the retro since there's only a few dials and it doesn't look too intimidating. And apart from a bit of weird UI, which I didn't quite get, how we're able to get the Sami wants it pretty quickly. What I thought I would do is go and find a much more intimidating synthesized already is one that looks more intimidating. This one is the memory mode. It is based on a classic synthesizer called the memory MOQ. Moq synthesizer from back in the seventies. I believe. It looks wildly more intimidating. There is a lot more knobs and buttons and we've seen on the other two, both on noisemaker, on the, on the, the logic, retro, retro Synth. So let's have a look. I can see already that has got much more, got many more of the kind of traditional things. So I can see in here that it talks about LFOs. It talks about voltage controlled fields, filters, voltage controlled amplifiers. So this is good. This is originally where those, as I said, where these acronyms came from, VCA, VCO, VCF. The first thing I'm looking for is the oscillators handily. They are right in the middle. There appears to be three oscillators, 123. I can see that I can chew needs at different octaves. This is interested in, so these are measured in terms of feet. So 16 foot, eight foot forefoot and two for this is both the length of the white, but also actually works out to be the length of the pipe required in a, in a church organ. But anyway, so I've got three oscillators. I've got, looks like they've all got square. Sorry. It's getting really like a square sawtooth and a triangle. So this is the default noise. We're getting something from. It looks like with oscillator. I can teach you nuts slightly against your classic kind of detuned sawtooth wave or teaching soil wave. Again, I can do the same on oscillator three. Interesting. This is how I turn all the oscillators on and off. I can I can, I can kind of mix the oscillators. I can mix a sawtooth and a triangle, for example, all within the same oscillator. That's really cool. That's really cool. So I got various combinations. It's way too late for me to start doing the math to work out by lots of combinations or different oscillators I can use. I can teach you in them So I understand the oscillators. I haven't gotten to switch. This is just my octaves is just the US during the course detune the sense the tune that they're kind of the minor tuning we were doing before. And vitals here, switch on a couple of sawtooth waves. Next thing I might look for, it might be the amplify. This is where I am to the major stuff. So as I said here, over here we've got the the outputs and the master volume. We have got some tuning, like I said, back in, back in the day, we've got this kind of master tuning, so we can tune two through five semi-tones in either direction. But back in the day things the electrons used to drift out a little bit and you can end up eat, especially if you're playing to synthesizes together, maybe slightly out of tune. So we've got this kind of this drift functionality here, which will tune the whole synthesizer. Imagine. Notice is how much it drifts in tune as your actual plague. Then this is obviously the duty or actual tuning that back to some of my near-zero. Okay. I've noticed on here as well we've got some controls which may be related to the, what we consider the amplifier. So we have the envelope of the amplifier. Over here. We've got some other bits and pieces. So we've got the glide, the gloves and on, but we can switch. Let's go into mono mode. Back in polyphonic mode. On the glider. Interestingly, this is one of the first polyphonic synthesizers are most incisor, and this time we monitor the sizes. We've got some unison, so we can switch on 16 voices of using noise. Goodbye, something. It looks like we've got a pen depth which will affect how much the pitch will affects the bend. We can shoot up and down an octave here. We've got an arpeggiator. That's cool. Phasor. Again, these are kind of effects, right? So reverb echo ensemble. Over here, we've got the, we've seen the oscillators, we've seen the effects because I just spotted them and I couldn't resist. But we've seen the amplifier. The two things that we haven't, haven't seen is the first being the envelope. And I believe the envelope is the three things we have seen, envelope, filter and elephant. The envelope I believe is this attack decay, sustain, release and velocity amount. This is probably to do with this velocity amount is how much it should react to me playing softly or loud U on the keyboard. So 0 doesn't matter how fast or slow or play a key, it plays the same note. Whereas if I turn this up by playing very quietly, faster I play, it gets louder. So this is, we use this in the piano Demeter, just make it a little bit more natural sounding. We've got ADSR, so, so a slower attack. We've got the decay. So how, how long in seconds it takes to get down to the sustain level, sustain a set of ten at the moment and says that the maximum amplitude, but we might not get down and let's knock it down to five so we can see that. Then we have the release of the moment. When I release the key, it takes approximately two seconds to get from the sustained volume down to 0 volume. Two things left to figure out. One is the filter. So it looks like when you see a filter that's not very clear what it is on a synthesizer. It's usually a low-pass filter. They are used more than any other type of filter. Filter here, it looks like we've got a envelope which ADSR attack decay, sustain release. An envelope which can affect that filter. So how quickly that filter is applied and then what happens to it throughout the lifetime of the note, if you'd like. But let's just have a look at the filter itself. So it's probably a low-pass filter. You can see when it's set down here, we already learned that when the cutoff is lower in Latin, the very low-frequency. Notice as we go up, emphasis isn't just tend to something away. Emphasis sounds like it's what we've been calling resonance. The keyboard track. This again, this will be very much like the keyboard tracking the key trucking in vital in that it relates to the key that you've played on your keyboard. So it's shift the cutoff up and down. Finally then we can look at LFO. Isn't it really interested in that? We're looking at this, this is, I've never used this before. It is pretty complicated looking, pretty complicated looking synth. And yet we're just going through it. We're just going through it using all the terminology and understanding the beginning of the course just to really go through it bit by bit systematically go, Oh, that's cool. That runs through this. That must be this behavior in an exactly the way that we would expect. May have spoken too soon. Let's have a look at the LFO. This looks a little bit more complicated. So we haven't LFO, let's set it looks like we can choose a different, different styles here. So let's, let's choose a triangle wave. I would like to do is what I would like to do is that's true. Okay, so what we can do is we can set our LFO up here. This is the, how, how much the LFO should affect whatever we're modulating. This is, this will sync it with your door, but this is the rate of the LFO. This is in hertz. Again, this is why we set vital to be in hertz, not because I think that vital is a bad thing with ISIL to be in semitones. It's just that every other synthesizer uses hertz. So it's much easier to take that knowledge and apply it elsewhere. Now we're getting cool. I'm excited. I'm really, really glad I bought this in size. We can see this is affecting the field. So this row here is saying, okay, So we understand that if I was right, it's just a low-frequency oscillator. We set the frequency, we set the amount. Now underneath here it looks like we can just press the buttons for what we wanted to effect. So if whenever we see we cannot effect a filter, we know it's gonna be the cutoff. This is let me just, this is the cutoff. So let's attach the LFO to the filter. Exactly what we were doing. But we could have much faster. I'm just changing the wave, waveform there. But we can set it to other things. So we could set it to the API flat. Maybe take it off the filter. This filter. I bet we can also set it to the oscillation. This is likely to, it changed the pitch, I think I could all day. But anyway, that's set up a reverb. That's even too much rebirth for me. I bet you couldn't do that on the hardware. They have echo, this would be the same as the lake. Let's just turn the VCR for now. The LFO, so we can hear the echo. Maybe turn the attack down a bit. There we are, so we can hear the echo work in there. Now. Turn the LFO by hoax. I love it. If Subway we played with before, it's gone a bit. Weird course. The kind of thing I think phasor we know about, and there's an arpeggiator in here, which will allow you to play multiple keys on your keyboard. And instead of playing like a code, it will play them in order. At least that is how arpeggiate his work. I've never tried this one. Okay, this is very cool. Alright, so very, very complicated. We synthesizer. But actually everything we turned on there, we understood everything, everything we saw that we understood this must do this. When we're able to say this must do this. This means we have a real fundamental understanding of how the synthesizer works or how any synthesizer works. I just want to show you through those synthesizes. I spent a bit more time on it than I planned, but I was having fun. So thank you for bearing with me. Just really to prove that even though we've used vital, the very modern, very capable, very visual synthesizer, the knowledge you have can be applied everywhere else. Hope you take this away and I hope you have lots of fun with it. I hope you make some fantastic music. Remember the basics. If you forget something, please go back. Just, just view that section of the course. Remind yourself and I'm sure we'd be aware again, if there's anything that you think I've missed. If you've got any feedback for me, could hold bad, then please do please do get in touch and let me know how that is. I'll keep an eye on the on the Q&A and the comments in the various sections on the platform. Go away, makes the music, makes some sounds. Share your patches with people. Share your music with people, most of all. Above everything else. Have some fun with it. Thank you all very much for watching. And I will see you in the next course. Thanks a lot. Bye bye.