Buckle up, newcomers! This video is a short and sweet introduction to the wonderful world of plugins. What they are, how they work, and most importantly, what you can do with them. Intrigued? click the video, but only if you’re buckled up… I did warn you.
VIDEO TRANSCRIPT
Plugins. What are they? If you are new to making music in a computer, you have definitely come across the term plugin. I’m gonna tell you what they are, how they work, why you should care. So first let’s start with this synth application. This is a regular, standalone app, this is not a plugin. It’s Syntorial. You download it, you install it, you open it, and here’s your synth.
Now the only problem with a standalone synth like this is you can’t record it into your recording app, right? Like you’re using Ableton or Logic or one of the many applications out there, also known as DAWs, that you use to make music. And I wanna use this synth, along with other sounds, but I can’t here in this synth application.
That’s what plugins are for. A plugin is just like an application except it’s designed to be opened inside of a recording app, so you can use it to make music alongside other plugins.
So, let’s hop over to Logic. So I have installed the plugin version of Syntorial synth, it’s called Primer. And I did it the same way, I just downloaded it, and I installed it, that’s how you install all plugins. However, once it’s installed, you won’t see it in your applications or program files folder, you can’t just open it directly, it’s only designed to be opened and used inside a recording app.
And each recording app does it a bit differently as far as the layout is concerned, but for example, here in Logic, my default track is electric piano. But I wanna open Primer in here. So in their case, go into this menu. Go to AU Instruments, I’ll explain what AU means. And Audible Genius is the name of our company. And there’s Primer. And now, it’s the same synth from the standalone version, the same controls, same exact sound, but now it’s inside Logic, so I can record it into Logic and play it back. And there you go, and I can make another track, and I can open up a different plugin and I can do drums, and bass, and whatever I want. That’s why plugins are such a huge part of computer music, is they are the sounds, they are the instruments.
As you can see, I’ve got a lot going on here. So whenever you install one, it just gets added to your DAW’s list. Now, this is a synth. There of course are also samplers like for drums or real instruments like piano. And then you can also use effects. So let’s say I wanna add some reverb, but I don’t wanna use Primer’s built-in reverb.
Well I can grab a reverb plugin, let’s grab this first one. So now, my Primer plugin is being routed through this Chroma Reverb. So you can see, you have an endless variety here. There’s so many plugins and you can just kinda chain them all together and create whatever sounds you want. Now, you’ve probably come across different plugin formats, like VST, AU, and maybe even AAX.
This isn’t your ordinary synth tutorial. This is Syntorial. Making programming synths easy with video game-like training. Teaching you how to program synth patches by ear. Each lesson starts with a demonstration, then an interactive challenge, with over 200 lessons. Once you complete the program, you’ll be able to create the sounds you hear, using almost any synthesizer. Try the award-winning Syntorial today.
Now, you’ve probably come across different plugin formats, like VST, AU, and maybe even AAX. These are simply just file types. The Primer, for example, comes as a VST and AU. The synth itself is identical. You won’t get a different sound, different controls. It’s all exactly the same. Where this matters is with your host, whether it’s Logic, Ableton, FL Studio, whatever your recording app is, you need to check what file types it allows.
So, for example, VST is the most common. Almost all recording apps allow you to use VST plugins inside of them. So much so that the term VST is often used instead of the term plugin. What VST do you have, how many VSTs do you have, oh I got a new VST. It’s actually a specific format but it’s such a major and popular format that it’s kind of ubiquitous. However, Logic, for example, does not allow VST. It only allows AU. And there’s another DAW called Pro Tools, it only allows AAX. So as far as you’re concerned, look at whatever host you’re using, find out what formats it allows, and just get your plugin in that format.
Now each developer decides what formats they wanna create. We decided for VST, AU, some might only do VST, you know. So you may not have access to the exact plugin you want, but, once you know the format your host accepts, look for that format. And by the way, there’s VST and now there’s VST3, which is the latest version of VST. But again, as far as you’re concerned, just check your host. If it supports VST3, get the VST3. If it supports VST, get the regular VST.
So this is Mac. Windows works the same. Download, install, open your DAW, there’s your plugin. However, IOS is a bit of a different story. Now in IOS, there’s only one format, AUV3. And instead of being called a plugin, they’re often referred to as extensions because they’re actually extensions of the regular standalone app. So at the top left corner you see Primer. And we downloaded that from the app store, just as you would any other app. And if I click that and open it directly, it’s basically just a standalone synth.
Now if I wanna record it, I’ve gotta go into a recording app. Let’s go into GarageBand. Now GarageBand, like other apps, give you different types of instruments you can add. And a lot of them have an AUV3 extension, so we see at the bottom left here, audio unit extension. Tap that, and now you see Primer. Because any app that has an extension version automatically installs the extension when you install the app, so you don’t have to go searching for an AUV3 extension.
You just have to find apps that have extensions built into them. Once you install the app, here it is, and I just tap Primer. I can play and record Primer inside GarageBand. Okay, well I hope that was helpful in understanding the whole plugin system. And if you have any questions, post them below in the comments and I’ll happily answer. And don’t forget to subscribe to our YouTube channel. We post videos every week about synthesizers and sound design.
We’ve all heard realistic orchestral sounds… those are made with samplers and that’s no fun. How about designing string-like sounds with your bare hands?
In this video, I’ll show you how to get that string character out of your synth. Much easier than learning cello.
When you’re done watching the video, head on over to our forum and upload your patches for discussion.
VIDEO TRANSCRIPT
Synth Strings. I’m gonna show you the different things we can do to a patch to make it more string-like. Now if you are looking for real accurate string sounds from a plugin, what you need as a sampler. If you want to be really, really, really real, sampler. They sound amazing, especially the ones they make nowadays. But this is more about getting that string character out of your synth, getting something close to it or even just incorporate it into a patch.
So we’re gonna go over all the different techniques that give us and patch a string-like character. So here we are, we’ve got a saw wave and that’s it. First things first, we need some voices so we can create a chord. Gonna go for that sort of orchestral string sound.
Now, right now, a waveform by itself, very static, unmoving but strings a bunch of violins and stuff like that playing at the same time, they all have a similar sound playing the same note, yet they’re not exactly the same. So they have this sort of smearing pulsating sound. We can get that with unison. We create four copies essentially of our saw wave then now they start to wave against each other.
However, we don’t want their phases to start at the same time. That gives us a very abrupt attack transient. And this is way too fast at the detuning. We need it to slow down. Much more string-like. And this is an orchestra so we want to spread out. Next, amp envelope. We’re gonna make two small changes here, they make a big difference.
First off, our sound is immediately starting. It’s just like very sudden it’s synth perfect, but we’re making a more realistic string sound and bowed strings tend to kind of ease in. So we’re gonna increase our attack. Same goes for the release. We don’t want an immediate let go. We want a tiny bit of a tail. All right, amp envelope.
Next filter, we’ve got a really bright, bright sound. Strings are bright but they’re not this bright. We want to take some of that sizzle off the top. That sounds nice. However, listen to notes in the lower range. They’re too bright, they’re starting to sound like a synth again. Not really strings anymore. So if we want a lower cutoff in the lower range, higher cutoff in the higher range, key tracking. Turn this up and now adjust this a little bit. Go back up to our mid range.
Key tracking is great when you know you have a patch that’s across a wide range and you wanted more of a consistent, even cutoff across that range. You just turn up your key tracking, adjust it until you get what you want. And you’re gonna have to adjust the cutoff as you go along too.
Okay next, our orchestra is gonna be in a hall, so let’s give us some reverb. All right, so this is a nice basic, very synthy analog kind of string. But this is legato held notes. What if you want short notes? Well, let’s take our sustain down and our decay. Great, wanna increase your volume when you do that. Good, now what if we want it to hold so we get this sort of a staccato attack but the notes hold.
Excellent, and if we want a pluck, bring that back down and then bring our attack down. That starts to sound pretty synthy. That’s better. It’s still pretty synthy but that gives you your pluck. Once we lose that sort of bowed character, we also start to kind of lose the string character. So put that back in, bring this back up. Okay, how can we make this a little bit more realistic?
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How can we make this a little bit more realistic? Well, the first thing we can do is start messing with our waveform a bit. So this is just a saw but I’m gonna switch over to oscillator two and we’re gonna to do a pulse wave. It’s a bit more of a stringy character but I wanna take it one step further. I wanna morph this waveform. We could do that with pulse width modulation, which essentially let me turn it off, this will go like this. It’ll morph it.
So again, we get that realistic changing of sound. We can do it automatically with an LFO. You can hear it there, it’s too obvious. Okay, that’s very stringy. It’s kinda more of a stringy character but it still sounds kind of artificial. That’s kind of one of the downsides of a pulse wave. So I like to mix the two together. I like a little bit more saw than pulse. Listen to our saw without the pulse. With the pulse. Also with our pulse on, we can bring our cutoff down a bit.
Also to add yet another bit of movement now that we have two waveforms, two oscillators, we can just detune them away from each other a little bit. All right, so we took a step closer by morphing, our waveform and mixing in a couple of different waveforms. But if I wanna take it even closer, what I’m gonna do is hop over to a wavetable synth, and we’re gonna use Serum.
You can really use any wavetable synth. Right now, this is set up just like our basic Primer saw classic analog string synth. Okay, before we get into wavetables, one realistic step you can take is a filter with a more shallow slope. So Primer had a 24 DB slope, which is pretty steep. That’s what we have set up here but if I make it a little more shallow, let’s go to 18. Adjust my cutoff.
It can be little bit more realistic ’cause in real life, these sort of sharp, steep filter slopes aren’t as common. So a bit more of a shallow thing kind of just helps give us a more realistic, bright shape.
Okay, now let’s talk about wavetables. So we’ve got our saw here. We wanna mix in a different waveform just like we did with Serum or with Primer. So I’m gonna copy oscillator A to B, I am going to pitch them away from each other, like we did with Primer but this one for this waveform, I wanna find a very stringy wavetable and if you have a synth that’s got an actual string wavetable, great. You’re gonna get really close to being a little bit more realistic sound.
This one for me, I was able to find one called bowed metal. Now by itself, this sounds like this. Definitely got the right vibe. I wanna find a more realistic spot though. And when you’re looking for this spot, you should do it with it mixed in because something by itself sounds a little different than it does when it’s mixed in. I like right about there. But more importantly just like with Primer, we wanna modulate this. So we’re gonna take our LFO, right on here.
Just a subtle modulation and slow modulation. All right, so this is a bit realer than that pulse width, ’cause this is actually probably taken, it’s a tiny little portion of an actual recording of some metal being bowed. So it’s an actual sort of bowed sound that we’re now sort of layering in. More realistic. So that’s our bowed sound. What about staccato? There’s some things that we can do to make staccato a little bit more realistic and that is, first, we wanna obviously shorten it.
If you can curve your decay stage up, a little bit too much. Turn your cutoff down a little bit more. Here we go. We got this staccato sound. Now when you attack a string, two things happen and an initial attack, it’s a tiny bit brighter than the rest of the sound, but also there’s almost this kind of like the bow rubbing against the string kind of creates this almost noise this SHH right at the beginning. So we’re gonna layer in some white noise, just as an attack though.
So right now, it’s… We want it to be shorter than the sound. Just the very, very beginning of the sound. So I’m gonna take this envelope we’re gonna make it really, really short. And we bring a little bit… And we’ll straighten the curve up a bit. And then we also wanna route this same envelope to our filter, just a really small amount. Compared to without. And there it is.
So again, if you need something that’s very, very real, go for a sampler. This is more about how do we bring a string character into our patch. So if you’re looking to do that, you can try any of these techniques and they’ll help get you there.
You know how you’re always emailing me about making videos covering specific synth models and I’m always like “yeah, maybe later” or “that’s not a synth, that’s a calculator sir”?
Well those days are over: here is the first ever video in our new Synth Spotlight series where we will -you guessed it- spotlight synths! Again with the creative naming here.
First up: Spire. We’ll be covering:
Wavetable integration
HardFM
Super Saw unison
Analog/Digital/Hybrid Filters
Shaper Filter
Roland-style Chorus
X-Comp
EQ Character
Envelope Slope Time/Level
LFO Waveform Morphing
Weird LFO shapes
Stepper
If you have any questions or if you want to join the discussion, head on over to our forum, just please stop it with the calculator requests. I beg you.
VIDEO TRANSCRIPT
All right, welcome to the first “Synth Spotlight.” In this video, we’re gonna talk about Spire and specifically, we’re gonna talk about how this synth is different from others. Why you might pick this synth over another. That’s the whole point of this “Synth Spotlight” series.
There’s tons of synths out there now, which is a great thing, but they- most at least share the same core parameters. Can make the same core sounds. We talk about those parameters in Syntorial. That’s why Syntorial works, `cause you can take what you learn there and apply it to lots of different synths but, that’s also what makes it very hard for you to pick a synth. If they all can do the same core things and they all share so many features, why should you care about one synth over another? That’s what this “Spotlight” series is all about.
Now, I’m just gonna cover specific things I like about the synth. Things that kinda stand out to me. But, if you wanna discuss more about the synth, you have more questions, requests that I cover more parameters in another video, just in the description of the video you’ll see a link to our forum. There’s a topic there I’ve started for this synth. Ask whatever questions you want and either I or other users will get back to you and help you out navigating Spire.
Now, at the time of the making of this video this is version 1.1.14 and overall, the biggest differentiating theme of this synth is that, yes, it’s a very modern sounding synth. But it has all these analog emulation elements in it that you can incorporate in it. You’re gonna see it time and time again as I walk through some of these features and it’s a really cool concept. So first, let’s start with our oscillators.
Now, you’ve got a lot of different options here. Classic, which gives you saw or square, you have a noise, FM, sync. You can even create kind of vowelish sounds like a formant filter. But then, along with all of these which kind of changed what happens right here in the middle of our oscillator, you have this additional set of waveforms and the ability to kind of mix them into your main oscillator type up here creating a basically, a wavetable option to go along with all of your different options up here.
So let me, let me show you an example here with this classic. With classic, we can choose between a saw or a square. We can even pick a hybrid between which is nice. I like a saw square. Meanwhile, down here, we have a different choice. We can, for example, choose sine wave and we can mix that in instead. We go full sine and if we want. So you essentially create a wave table that is morphing between whatever you choose down here and whatever’s going on up here. So it takes each of these oscillator types and multiplies what you can do with them. It’s a really interesting approach this sort of wavetable plus a design structure.
Specifically of all these options, I really love hard FM. It’s this really interesting approach to FM. Before we can explain how that works and why it’s beneficial, let’s first look at FM. So, if you’re not familiar with FM, it’s where one oscillator modulates another oscillator and you usually get these kinds of metallic string-like tones. So by default, what we have is whatever is selected down here, modulates a sine wave and this is the amount of modulation.
We have a basic sine wave now, but as you turn this up we get that metallic tone. Then over here, this sets the pitch of one of the oscillators. Shows us how high or low that FM sound is. That’s FM. This is very straightforward. It’s a nice, simple approach and I like it. It’s easy to use. However, FM has one downside and that is the pitch of your overall sound can change. Right now am playing in G. It does not sound like a G anymore. Almost sounds out of tune. If you wanna mix in this waveform, it’s really out of tune because this is actually controlling the pitch of this one, the modulator. That’s just the downside of FM. You can run into pitch issues. So they invented HardFM.
So, HardFM is a little bit different. It essentially takes whatever way from what you have chosen here and it modulates itself. So this again by default, is a sine wave modulating a sine wave and on the surface, it sounds similar. Okay, great. So what’s the difference? The difference is over here, in the pitch. It’s gonna jump between pitch settings, frequency settings, and it strives to always say in tune till we removed that pitchy issue. You hear it snap? It’s really cool. So it’s a FM, but it makes it way easier to stay in tune and as sort of an extra side bonus. This, instead of mixing in one of the sine waves, this will mix in the next waveform on the list One octave below totally unaffected by FM. So it’s like a sub oscillator.
So here comes a triangle. One octave below For just an extra dimension. So now this sort of becomes this wave table mix. Now becomes a sub oscillator volume knob. You can do this for any sound So for example, This is a violin, when it gets a real raw FM and then mix in the next violin two, right? Violin two an octave below it All right. Hard FM.
Next I’m gonna jump over to our unison section. So by default, it’s pretty straight forward. You pick the number of voices and then you can detune. You can mess around with how the voices are spread out. You create chords and stuff like that but what I really like about this is this density knob Essentially, density changes the sort of spread of all the different voices, it makes them less uniform. It just changes the pattern a little bit. The description isn’t very specific. I don’t know exactly what’s going on but you can hear the nature of the unison change as you increase it
Specifically, they say in the manual that if you crank density, what you get is an emulation of super saw from Roland JP-8000. It’s a classic analog synth that was kind of known for this specific saw unison. It’s just a real lush, thick unison. Compare it to density up here, which they describe the sort of seven voice middle density as a hypersaw, which is a well known saw from the Virus TI a famous digital synth. Just compare. This is a little more cleaner and precise versus it’s just more going on there. It’s lusher, it’s thicker. You can really hear it with nine voices. This is the first example of being able to kind of dial in an analogish emulation into this otherwise very modern digital synth
Alright, next. Let’s hop over to our filter. So, this is yet another example of the sort of analog digital hybrid approach. This isn’t your ordinary synth tutorial.
This is Syntorial. Making programming synths easy with video game like training teaching you how to program synth patches by ear. Each lesson starts with a demonstration, then an interactive challenge with over 200 lessons. Once you complete the program, you’ll be able to create the sounds you hear using almost any synthesizer. Try the award winning Syntorial today.
We’ve had a lot of different filter types here. Let’s take a look at Acido. This is an emulation of the TB-303. Another classic analog synth bass synthesizer and our envelope is much like our cutoff, by the way. We’ve got different slopes for our low pass. This is like a 24 dB, this is like a 6dB Alright, so there’s an option. There’s an analog style filter Or we can go Infecto, which is like an imitation of the Virus Ti. So this is a digital approach. This is our low pass, this is a 12 dB slope bandpass, high Pass, Notch.
All right, great! so we got an analog option, we got a digital option. But then, since they can do this they created two hybrid filters. This is perfecto, this essentially inside the algorithm is taking elements of a digital filter and elements of an analog emulation and combining them. we got a 24 dB low pass, bandpass, High pass and a peak and they did the same thing with this Scorpio. This again is an analog digital hybrid with various types of low pass and then a high pass, a bandpass. So, you have options here. If you know you want a low pass, high pass or bandpass, try these different things out. Do you want an analog approach? Digital approach? Do you want something in between?
Nice options, what I also like about this filter is they have this one option, Shaper. This combines like a distortion wave shaper with a low pass/high pass filter. So our resonance, we turn off envelope. Our resonance becomes our basically, our distortion amount and saturates a very kind of warm distortion. You can dial in how much of that distortion you want and then you can use cut off. If you lower it, it’s a low pass. Raise it – a high pass. Noon is no filtering.
Alright, so here’s a nice warm kind of style saturation. You can incorporate in your sound or you can go more of like an aggressive digital. It almost kind of starts to sound a little bit crushy at points. and then we can… Very nice, cool little touch to have in the filter. Since there’s two filters here, this is more like an effect. You run through this first one, you can then set your second filter as like a regular low pass-high Pass bandpass. If you want that actual regular filter to come after the shaper. Cause by default, filter one runs into filter two. All right, that’s our filter.
Next, let’s hop over to our effects. So you got yet another wave shaper, but here’s a ton of options. So this is like a more detailed wave shaper. Phaser, got delay, reverb good, just good solid effects with lots of parameters. What I wanna talk about is the Chorus `cause here’s yet another example of incorporating an analog element into the synth.
It’s got a lot of modes and by default J8 is selected, which is JP 8000. Again, this classic Roland synth. One of the things it`s known for is having this wonderful chorus. It’s kind of like the chorus that other choruses try to emulate. What I love about this is you don’t have to set anything. If you just want this classic lush chorus, just increase your dry wet. Ah! So nice. But again, maybe you wanna kind of start to move over into the digital realm.
All right, so it’s a cleaner, more precise chorus We get thinner and thinner. So eventually, with one we have more of a flanger. Increase your full back, turn on your delay and then you can get this. Real flangery sound. So I love their approach to chorus.
Next effect I want to talk about is this X-Comp. This is a multi-band upward downward compressor and if you’re not familiar with that, usually they’re way more complex. There’s a lot of different parameters. This is literally just one knob. Everything else is set internally for you. It’s kinda like a secret sauce of this synth You turn it up a little bit and it instantly makes your sound more kind of upfront louder and aggressive. Just that like sort of It’s a real sort of typical kind of compressor result that you want.
All you need to do is turn up one knob and on a plain saw it’s not so obvious. So let me show you on a couple presets. See here we go without it with it. Ah! It`s kind of in your face now. Ah! It’s just instant oomph. Let’s look at the next preset this one doesn’t have it on it. Now with it. Ah! if you want your sound louder, more aggressive, just dial up this knob If you go really far with it it squeezes the life out of it, which is kind of a cool effect in itself.
Typically, you wanna keep it right around here. All right, and last in the effects is this EQ. Now, for the most part, it’s just sort of a boring simple EQ. It’s there for you to use. No need making EQ complex. It is what it should be. You got a shelf, peak and shelf. However, it has these character presets up here. So here’s a plain saw You can boost it, That just makes it louder pretty much. You can also make it warmer. Listen to the low end the body of the sound. Kinda thin.
There’s another example, of like bringing this almost kind of analogueish sort of warm characteristic into the sound. Then you also have the soft option which just takes a little bit of the highs off Again, that can kind of get rid of some of that sort of precise high digital sharpness. Very nice. Okay, that’s our effects.
Let’s move on to some modulation sources. Let’s talk about our filter. Oh, excuse me. Our envelope and you’ve got four envelopes. One, two, three and four. Three is set to cut off by default. So let’s enable it. We got a decay going down to a sustain So, it looks like an ADSR at first attack, decay, sustain, release but there’s two parameters in between. This is slope time and slope level. It’s really like a second decay and sustain.
Let me give an example. You know, oftentimes an envelope with the decay sustain part, you usually use it for one of two things You either can create an attack transient like this. Right, so I’m shooting my cutoff down really fast increase this DEOW attach transient or you can create kind of a longer fade like this. But what if you want both? what if you want a little transient followed by a fade? That’s where this second set comes in. So I bring my sustain at about, let’s say, halfway, I create a little transient Great, there’s my transient I leave my slope level all the way down and I increase my slope time. Now watch what happens. It completes this first decay/sustain for my transient and then it goes into this second decay/sustain All right, so just you know, it’s a simple ADSR plus two additional settings making it just a little bit more of a complex envelope, ADSDSR.
All right, next, let’s talk LFO. We have four LFOs as well. One, two, three and four. Let’s route this to cut off and what I like about this is how they handle wave forms. So by default, it’s a sine wave. But you can morph between a sine wave and a triangle or a square. So first off, you know, sometimes people ask what’s the difference between a sine and a triangle when it comes to LFO? Sounds about the same.
The difference is what happens the top and the bottom. So sine wave kind of curves more softly So the sound kind of hangs out at the top and the bottom a little bit longer Triangle just hits a point immediately turns around So just listen to the top and bottom. See how abrupt that is? but this allows you to get best of both worlds.
All right. So it lets you really dial in exactly how long you want this to hang out at the top and the bottom Or maybe you like square You want the jump, but it’s too jumpy Dial it back. Then we can determine where it starts in this waveform right. So now, every time we hit a note it starts right at the top or right at the bottom of say.
So thats kind of a nice core use of this LFOcause really this sort of sine, triangle or square. Those are some pretty common shapes for it. However, if you wanna get a little weird, if you wanna experiment with shapes, we’ve got a whole huge amount of options down here . It`s very similar to our waveform options over here. So I’ll just pick a random one, let’s do vocal. So you can just get some really bizarre shapes and you can morph these as well. Could be really nice for let’s say, like a pad where you want some sort of irregular just sort of movement in it. That doesn’t sound like it’s such a pattern the way a square or sine is so obviously a pattern. Alright, that’s our LFO.
One more feature. I’d like to talk about and that is our stepper. The stepper is, it’s kind of like an LFO by default, right? So in order to route it, you go into matrix. You select stepper, which is off screen. Stepper one and I’m gonna set it to cut off. I need to disable envelope, okay, and increase our amount. So just executing into this little light. It’s executing one saw at a time and I can reduce it. So now, it’s just gonna use the first four. One , two, three, four. One , two, three, four. So right now it’s like a saw LFO. It`s just repeating saw over and over again that I can change each one.
So I could say go in here and drag this shape down or I could select a different one and it’s got some kind of presets like this. Or I can create multiple repeats within one little column so, Right, so you can create these really complex sequence of modulation shapes.
Let me show you some examples here. This is that kind of classic dubstep wub but it’s complex instead of being you know, repeating shape from an LFO, it’s changing as it goes along. That’s kind of a real fun use of the stepper but you can also do more simple things with it. Like for example, this guy. This is just routed to our oscillator two’s volume I’m gonna turn oscillator one and three off Just oscillator two and it doesn’t retrigger. That’s what these buttons are about.
Just goes through it one time So it’s basically like an envelope, right, it just kind of really fast attack and then it kind of had two decay stages But unlike the envelope, you can really mess with the shape of each column of each stage So it turns into a really precise envelope. T
hat’s one of the reasons I love this. Yes, you can do these long, complex sequences. But you can also treat it like a customizable LFO or a customizable envelope. It’s just sort of a really, limitless modulation source.
All right, that’s my take on Spire Those are some of the really the coolest features from Spire again, if you have any questions, you want me to cover more parameters, you just want to talk about the synth in general, just check out the description below for the link to the article.
In this video, I’ll take you through the process of creating an evolving pad from scratch using Serum.
We’ll learn how to design the ebb and flow of a long, lush, moving pad. We’ll also answer the question “How many adjectives are too many adjectives in a blog post?”
If you have an evolving pad and would like to share it, visit our Forum. We’ll stop talking about adjectives, I promise.
VIDEO TRANSCRIPT
An evolving pad.
This is a pad that changes in different ways continually over a long period of time so here’s one I cooked up.
All right, so the key to a pad like this is two things: layers and tons of modulation.So I wanna to recreate this from scratch. Bring the original over here. Look at it… all right and now, we’ve got just a good ol’ plain saw wave so, first thing I’m going to do is just give ourselves a long release.
For the amp envelope, simple here just so when I let go of the key it rings out. Then I want to just smear the sound a little bit, so I’m going to give it some unison. Great. Then I’m gonna filter it and this will be our first sort of slow, evolving sound. By modulating it with a LFO. So, let’s enable it and I messed around for a little while and I just ended up liking how the 18 dB slope felt.
All right, let me take LFO 1,modulate the cutoff and I don’t need a ton here just a little bit up and down. And that’s way too fast. I’m gonna set it so it’s not syncing to the tempo make it really slow. There we go! Okay, so that’s our first point of evolution, right? It’s a very slow change in our cutoff And I also made this change so that it always starts at the top. You don’t have to do this, this is just a preference for me.
I just kind of like to how I’m always getting this nice bright attack on the sound and I really want to accentuate this cutoff movement,so I’m gonna increase the resonance. All right, so there’s our filter movement.
Now, let’s add another layer of movement and we want to be in a sort of a different pace so that it sort of kind of interacts with the filter movement in unpredictable ways, so I’m gonna take our oscillator over here and let’s switch to a wavetable again I was just experimenting and I like the way this one sounded.
Right around here.Now this doesn’t sound terribly different from a saw. However,I am going to modulate it with an envelope. I’m just gonna route envelope two here I messed around with the ranges and I liked this range. And we are gonna go with…I’m gonna lock this envelope so I can see all the stages a really really slow attack. So much, about nine seconds to get up and then instead of sustain down here and again our decay will be nice and long. We’ll also do nine seconds.
Now what do we have? So you see, by the time it takes this envelope to get all the way up and down for this wavetable to change all the way and then come back, the LFO for the filter kind of goes through this little less than two times, right? So you get these sort of conflicting cycles. Modulate two different things so it creates multi-as I hold this down it’s just going to change even after the wavetable is right here starts coming back, cutoff starts over.
So at this point the cutoff is moving up and down while the wavetable moves up and down.But when the wavetable is done moving so now we hear the cut off moving up and down without the wavetable movementSo we just created a very long complex layer of change.At first we’re hearing cutoff movement and wavetable movementand then we’re hearing just cutoff movement Right? so that’s two large stages of change. Right off the bat we have this long changing evolution. Okay.Let’s bring in another layer-
This isn’t your ordinary synth tutorial, this is Syntorial. Making programming synths easy with video game-like training teaching you how to program synth patches by ear. Each lesson starts with a demonstration then, an interactive challenge with over 200 lessons. Once you complete the program you’ll be able to create the sounds you hear using almost any synthesizer. Try the award-winning Syntorial today.
Let’s bring in another layer using our noise source and in serum it’s more than just noise. I like this atmosphere 7, track the pitch, see the settings. Now again, I don’t want this just to come in and stay there, I want to you know bring this in and take it out, do something with modulation so,I’m gonna route our envelope to our level.
Start the level at zero so then now,if I give it a fairly long attack let’s say this is going to be about almost six seconds now that means we’ve got noise taking six seconds to come in versus our wavetable taking nine seconds to get all the way to the end. So now our noise is going to come in kind of partway through this wavetable modulation and then the wavetable modulation will continue. There’s the noise.
Now, I don’t want the noise to just stay there. Right? I want it to kind of start to go away but never fully away cause later on, it’s always still kind of there creating a little layer of complexity. So I’m gonna take our sustain and bring it down to about 64 percent and our decay to about 8 seconds. So now, here comes the noise now it’s gonna kind of start to drift away and there it is. it’s gonna sit there, so it’s present but it’s not in your face. Okay.
Let’s add yet another layer with oscillator B and for this one I want to make a really distinct sound that’s sticking out, bring ’em down a bit, filter ’em. I’m gonna bring them up two octaves. We’re gonna go heavy on the Unison: six voices I’m gonna leave it strongly detuned. Okay now that’s kind of abrasive, it’s really on there really visible or audible so let’s modulate it.
We’re gonna take an LFO and I want to do something a little different here. I’m gonna go square and I’m gonna route this to our level and let’s hear what it sounds like right now. Make it faster. Okay now, actually I like that,but I want it to swell in, right? Again kind of like with the other things, I don’t want this to just be there right away I want to gradually come in so we’re gonna use this LFO’s rise method and that basically- it does a fade-in of the LFO itself and so what we’re gonna do is set the level of oscillator B there. Max there. Now:
And if I increase the rise, you’d think okay it’s gonna start quiet, and then it’s gonna get loud but it didn’t. This confused me at first. You see, it’s actually starting up here at the top Why is it doing that? well because Rise pays attention to where this LFO waveform starts and it starts at the top so that means it’s gonna start up here and it’s gonna rise like that.
Alright it’s gonna stick up here then it’s gonna gradually increase the range until it’s using the whole thing. So what we want to do isthere’s a few things you can do here but I like this solution. what I particularly like about this is it almost sounds like the LFO has several fade ins. Right? You have the initial fade in from the LFO and you get another fade in as the cutoff comes back up again. Rising in and then the cutoff is increasing and then it’s collapsing, increasing again but without the wavetable, so it makes this one more audible.
All right so there’s almost three different stages of this oscillator B thanks to the cutoff in the wavetable movements and the rise of the LFO. Alright, let’s do one more thing. Let’s throw some chorus on there to kind of glue things together a little bit. Nice. And then let’s do a reverb and I want this to be pretty heavy. I want to do one other interesting thing here: I want to modulate the reverb mix.I love doing this. It really kind of -it’s an odd sort of thing that it does to the perspective.
We take say, LFO 2, make it bi-directional and again we’re not gonna sync ourselves we’re gonna go pretty fast. Listen to what it does I love that. It’s like this dimensional pan that, you know, it’s just kind of otherworldly. I really love the sound of that but again, I don’t want this on the whole time but kinda want this to fade in and fade out. And I might use rise, right?but that would only fade it in and then keep it in I want to fade in and then fade out.
This is where we can use our auxiliary source. So essentially here’s our modulation for our LFO2 to reverb wet. I can set auxiliary source to envelope 2 Now remember, envelope 2 is gradual over nine seconds. This is what’s modulating our wavetable. So now, that reverb modulation of the mix will fade in with this envelope and then fade back out. Listen. Here it comes
That’s an evolving pad! Again, I’m not telling you what to do here,I’m just giving you examples. What you want to focus on are layers and modulation.
Ah, the elusive Filter Slope: the bigfoot of synthesis. Some people have seen it, most don’t quite understand it but no one can deny its existence.
Here, I explain how it works and how to use it (by this point, the bigfoot analogy is over).
OR IS IT?
VIDEO TRANSCRIPT
Filter Slope. I think that’s something that a lot of synth users, don’t really understand. And even when we do understand it, we’re not sure how to use it, what it’s for. So I’m gonna tell you what it is, but more importantly, I’m gonna show you a patch that really makes it obvious. And also one, because it’s so obvious, it means it’s really important that you pick the right slope.
So first things first, what is slope? Let’s take a look at our filter over here. I’m going to turn our resonance down for a second. So as you know, a low pass filter like this, allows you to cut highs off your sound. So when I have my cutoff all the way up, it does nothing. full brightness. And then as I turned it down, Starts to cut highs off for our sound making our sound rounder. Our cutoff is right about here.
Now, a lot of people assume that, you know, whatever your cutoff is, everything above that is just chop right off. But in actuality, it’s more of a gradual cutoff, as you can see here So our cutoff is here and then it just kind of starts to gradually remove some highs. Our slope determines how steep that is. So this is a 12 DB low pass, by increase it to 18, it got steeper. Watch this line increase. Increase it to 24. So as you might guess, the steeper the slope, the rounder the sound gets, right?
Cause we’re cutting off more highs, a steeper slope is removing more highs. So you might think, and I think a lot of people think, well, why not just, you know, if you want it to remove more highs, rather than change the slope, why don’t you just turn the cutoff down. And you’re partially right However, in some cases it really matters. It matters that you change the highs using the slope instead of the cutoff. And this patch right here is a great example.
This isn’t your ordinary synth tutorial. This is Syntorial. Making programming synths easy, with videogame-like training, teaching you how to program synth patches by ear. Each lesson starts with a demonstration. Then an interactive challenge, with over 200 lessons. Once you complete the program, you’ll be able to create the sounds you hear using almost any synthesizer. Try the award-winning Syntorial today.
So with this patch. See it’s an envelope, modulating our filter’s cutoff, just make an “EEUNG” sound with a ton of resonance, really showing that cutoff. And this is what I had made. This was a patch request on our forum. And someone had put up a patch that sounded like this. And mine sounded like this. It’s really close, but the big difference is, as you notice the hidden patch, it’s brighter.
Its all the sizzle up top. Mine is. so I’m thinking, well, if the hidden one is brighter, mine’s darker, I should just increase my filter envelope amount right? So that it starts higher. I get some more brights in there. So, that’s what I tried. I tried increasing this. So I get, you know, start my filter from a brighter point. Okay. So it was brighter.
Let’s compare that. Now, I achieved the brightness, but it’s different. And more importantly, that EEUNG sound? Right? That envelope, movement, cutoff, resonance, that shape that it’s generating, it’s different now, mine starting higher than the hidden one. Its got more of that at the top, whereas theirs is more of So it loses that really important character. So I knew that wasn’t correct.
And I brought that back down. Yet still, I had this problem. The other patch is a brighter. So how can I make this brighter, without messing with my cutoff? And that’s when it hit me, slope. I can lower my slope to make it a more shallow drop here. And that won’t change my cutoff resonance at all. It’ll just add highs onto it. So let’s see. Let’s try going under 18. That’s better 12. There it is. Let’s hear the hidden one. There it is.
So you see that shape. That really Important cutoff resonance envelope shape, stays exactly the same, no matter what my slope is. But my slope lets me add or remove brightness on top of it. Too bright. All right, well I hope that helps kind of make clear what filter slope does and why you would want to use it.
While ear training gives you the ability to create the sounds you hear, it will still be an imperfect process. This series is meant to show you the actual process I use to recreate patches by ear.
In this particular video, I’m highlighting our upcoming feature called the Randomizer Challenge – a magical place where patches are randomly generated and you get to spend as much time as you like recreating them. And I do mean AS MUCH TIME AS YOU LIKE… Just remember to eat every once in a while, mkay?
VIDEO TRANSCRIPT
Today I’m gonna do a patch walk-through. To give you an idea of the true process of recreating a patch by ear. And I’m gonna do it using a new feature we’ve been working on, called a Randomizer Challenge.
So, Randomizer Challenge is very similar to a group challenge, and in a group challenge, as you may know, you recreate a hidden patch using all the controls you’ve unlocked so far. In a group challenge, the patch that you are recreating is one we’ve created. However, with the Randomizer Challenge, rather than one of us programming it, the app itself is gonna create a new patch, right then and there, for you to recreate.
This is great, because you’ll be able to just endlessly practice; you can have as many new patches as you want. So let’s give it a shot.
All right, so I like to start with the most obvious things first, and right off the bat, I hear a long tail. It’s longer than that. Okay, I hear a sub-oscillator. Okay. Now, there’s some width in there, and we could get this a few different ways. We can get it from unison, from chorus. I think- I wanna say it’s chorus; let’s see. Yeah, I think that’s right.
I had to slow it down a little bit, and I only wanted to mix in a little bit, but… And then I think here’s a little bit of high end taken off. Okay. Now I gotta check a few performance-related things, like let’s see how many voices I can play.
All right, just one. Oh, that’s the shown patch. Let me try it with the hidden. All right, one note at a time, but I hear some bending between the notes. So there’s definitely portamento. Question is, does it happen every time I play a note, or only when I connect them? It’s every time, so, it’s mono, and we’ve got some portamento; let’s see. Eh, slower.
Okay. Could be a little rounder? No, definitely there. Now let’s check the mod wheel. I don’t hear anything. Pitch wheel? That’s two semitones. Oh, and I’m noticing right now that I hold the key, it’s fading. So, sustain.
All right. And let’s see, what else? Velocity. Now, there’s one little cheat here. When velocity is enabled, you can see the keys change color, like a light touch, we’ll get a very light blue color. I can see that’s not happening. But normally, you’d just hit a hard key, hit a soft key, that’s how you could hear the difference.
All right, now we’ve got to check key tracking. And right now I’ve been hitting middle C, and middle C is not affected by key tracking. So I’m gonna do a higher pitch to see if there’s a difference. No, no key tracking. So, I’m gonna play a little bit, just to make sure I’m not missing anything.
A little slower portamento? No. And I know for me something funny happens. When I listen to it enough times, sometimes I almost trick myself into thinking there’s still something different. Especially if you’ve ever had one of those patches you submitted and it was so close, it was just a tiny difference.
But I think that’s it. All right, let’s go for it. All right! So that patch was, you know, kind of intermediate. Nothing too crazy. I wanna do more of these, just so you can see what the process is like and you can really get a feel for it, and this randomizer feature will be released soon.
This isn’t your ordinary synth tutorial. This is Syntorial. Making programming synths easy, with videogame-like training, teaching you how to program synth patches by ear. Each lesson starts with a demonstration, then an interactive challenge. With over 200 lessons, once you complete the program, you’ll be able to create the sounds you hear using almost any synthesizer. Try the award-winning Syntorial today.-
Have you ever thought to yourself “Man, it would be awesome if I had an 8-minute video that shows me how to synthesize a kick, snare and hi-hat beat from scratch”?
Well today’s your lucky day! Also, that’s a very specific thought you had. Weirdo.
If you are overcome with an urge to create and share your new drum track, join us in the land of forum posts.
VIDEO TRANSCRIPT
Drums. So we got a kick snare and a hi-hat all synthesized in this case using Primer. But you can really use any pretty much any synth.
We’re gonna start with our kick drum. Sounds like this. Now, I’m gonna reset this so we can design it from scratch. So here’s what it sounds like just as a plain saw. So it’s a really, really low pitch C negative one. In fact, it’s the pitch I’m playing. We’re gonna switch over to a sine wave.
Now you not gonna to really be able to hear it at all. Barely hear it. To get that kick sound, what we’re doing is we’re just starting our pitch up really high and dropping it really fast with a mod envelope or in this case, a pitch envelope. So I’m gonna crank it. And with a really long decay, here’s what we get.
I’m playing kinda short note so, Here is what sounds like if I hold the key down. Now, when we do that really quickly, I’m gonna set to about four or five milliseconds, that drop in pitch starts to sound percussive. For whatever reason, that quickly dropping pitch gives a percussive sound. This is essentially our basic kick.
Now I’m gonna add a little distortion to it. Kinda beef it up a bit. Now, if I hold the key down. You get that note at the end. We don’t want that. So we gonna take envelope and make it real short. Just like that, we can match it with the release. Now, we had that little ‘T’ at the front of our sound, we can get rid of that if we don’t want it by increasing our attack a little bit. But you might want that.
Now I use the sine wave, but you could use other wave forms, if you want a bit more of open, brighter sound like here’s a pulse sounds like we gonna filter it. Almost kind of flabby but it’s just a different tone. Saw, try triangle But sine will give you the cleanest. So that’s our kick drum.
Now let’s move on to our hi hat. This is a combination of white noise and a really, really high, medium pulse wave. So I’m gonna reset this. Here’s what we have. So I’m playing a really high note C7. And, we’re going to start by switching to a medium pulse wave. Not a huge difference, but it’s a little bit more So a little bit more of a metallic vibe. So what we’re getting from this oscillator is the kind of just like the metallic tone you get when you hit an actual hi hat because they’re made out of metal.
Next, we need to shorten big time. So that gives us a little bit of that metallic attack and then we can high pass it. We’re taking as much of that bottom off as we can. We’re just up at this very tiny top. And then we crank our noise. I turn off the oscillator. There’s just the noise. So you see how they combine to create this sort of metallic tone and the actual shh-shh we get that we really want in the hi hat.
Now I kinda like to dial this down a bit so that the metallic little pitch isn’t as noticeable. To do that in Primer, I’m gonna turn off oscillator two and start to turn the mix away from oscillator one. So it’s all white noise. It’s up to you. How much of that metallic do you want in there? I like to be pretty subtle.
One more detail I want to mention about the hi hats is the volume. Right now it’s very stiff. Every hi hat is the same volume. But it’s more common to have the volume changing so that some of the notes are louder than others. This creates some bounce in our feel.
We could do this by routing our velocity to volume. We’re gonna do max amount. And now when I recorded this hi hat, I hit some of the notes harder than others. So here’s what it sounds like. There’s a bit more bounce to it. Compared to when there’s no All loud now. It’s subtle, but you can really feel it. And that’s an important aspect of the hi hat.
Now, snare. Snare actually consists of two different sounds. You have the drum kind of like a kick, and then you have the wash. You combine those two to create our snares. Let’s start with the drum. For this all by itself, sounds like this. And to do this, I literally just took our kick drum, which is this And just played it at a higher pitch.
So if the kick I was playing at C negative one, now I’m playing the same exact preset at C zero. And then dial the decay down a little bit to make it shorter. Yeah. That’s the drum part of our snare. Almost identical to the kick. Now I’m gonna bring in the wash.
The snare and this It’s just white noise that’s been band passed. So if I reset this first I’m gonna turn off our saw turn up our white noise to about here. And then we want to shape it. Maybe a little longer And then… And I like a little distortion in this too just make it more aggressive. Now I bring the drum back in There they are together. Here’s just the drum. Now, the wash. Now, the whole kick. Drums!
Look at me! I’m posting about #PatchFriday on the blog!
This week is all about Frequency Modulation and the giddy fun that comes with making a synth growl. It’s funny cause Synths don’t growl! You’re thinking of lions, common mistake.
Feel free to talk amongst yourselves in the comment section below.
VIDEO TRANSCRIPT
Operator growl. There’s a million ways you can do this. They all sound different because of the different wave forms used, different distortions used, you know, whatever. There’s a lot of ways to do this so here’s just one way. I’m gonna deconstruct this, turn everything off.
Started with a square wave. We want something nice a bright like that, and I adjusted the level all the way up to zero and turned the main volume down. I like having this a zero; it helps me, you know, understand how these are interacting a little bit better ’cause it’s all about the volumes of the different operators.
And I pitched it up to two ’cause that’ll allow us to put an operator one octave below and then yet another operator one octave below that. Why? Well, ’cause that’s where our growl comes from. So if I bring in this second operator, I set it to saw 64, I liked how those two interacted.
Again, you can experiment with the waveforms you want. This is down one octave below that. We start to get some growl. Let’s listen to it. Now, we’re gonna do it again with this third operator down yet another octave. This one’s square. Now we’re really growling. So, that’s our base sound.
Now we wanna shape it and do things to it. Filter. So, this is giving us that wow, right? We set a really low cutoff and our envelope has a pretty quick attack, the wah part and then a slow decay, a wow, just like that. Envelope ’em out here; I set it to almost halfway. However, one reason I like this OSR is because it gives us filter drive. Without that, all right, still growls, but that really pushes it, saturates it, it sounds nice. We’re looking to get aggression from wherever we can.
So, we got some growl from here, we got some saturation distortion from the filter drive. Now, let’s add our pitch movement. This is simple enough; you can go with a falling pitch or rising pitch. I went with a falling pitch and took this up to about 46% and then I just elongated the decay, so we just kinda get a Okay, so there’s a basic sound, but it’s not nasty enough, so we bring in vinyl distortion.
I like this because it allows you to kinda put in the frequency spectrum where you want that distortion. I like it right there. I mean, you can do it anywhere. I like it there, and I widened it as well. It was like this. The drive is cranked all the way up, and you gotta keep in mind that their volume here really matters; the higher the level going into this, the more distortion you’re gonna get, so, you don’t want too little or too much.
Back it off, if you really wanna make it nasty, but I like it right around here. And then, ambience, and I just use their preset called ambience for this, adjusted the dry/wet.
In this synth tutorial, Joe Hanley, the creator of Syntorial, will take you step-by-step as he creates an analog-style bass patch. Don’t forget to download the Monark patch below:
Hi, I’m Joe Hanley, creator of Syntorial, and welcome to a quick synth tutorial on how to create a fat analog-style bass. Here’s what it sounds like. It’s a really simple patch, doesn’t require a ton of programming. But it’s a collection of very subtle changes, and some changes that not many people even think about. And it’s kind of a sought-after tone, how do we get that fat, warm analog bass particularly from a soft synth?
This isn’t your ordinary synth tutorial. This is Syntorial. Making programming synths easy. With videogame-like training, teaching you how to program synth patches by ear. Each lesson starts with a demonstration, then an interactive challenge with over 200 lessons. Once you complete the program, you’ll be able to create the sounds you hear using almost any synthesizer. Try the award winning Syntorial today.
Now this is a soft synth modeled after a analog synth the Moog. This is called Monark by Native Instruments, but there’s tons of synths like this. And really, to get this sound, all you need is a synth that has an analog style filter with a filter drive option, which I’ll talk about in a second. All right.
First, I’m gonna initialize this, so you have a plain… Sound. And I’m gonna increase our range up one octave. And I could have just played up higher on the keyboard but I had to do this because later on, we’re gonna get into key-tracking and it’s dependent upon this setting. Now, we have a square wave right now. But I wanna go with a saw. A square would work as well, but after all the settings are done, you’ll see how this saw really gives us that kinda true, warm, classic synth sound.
Now, to get our bass sound, we need to take some highs off so that our sound is more focused on the low end, so… Let’s bring our cut-off down. And now we have a simple round bass. This is fine. This is good for just like a subtle low end. It’s great for layering in with other bass sounds. Let’s say you’ve created a bass sound that’s got way more personality. It’s brighter, but it’s missing bottom end. Sometimes a simple analog style synth with a saw, cutoff turned down layered in just gives you that nice bottom.
But we want this sound itself, to be a bit more noticeable and a lot fatter and that’s where our filter drive comes in. Now this synth they call it load, but it’s the same idea. We are increasing the level of sound going into our filter. So listen. You hear this overdrive. A little bit of a warm distortions that’s coming out of the filter. Analog style filters love to be overdriven. Oh, such a nice sound.
This is really the key to getting an analog character out of an analog filter. It’s all about this filter drive. And you see this on other synths, so then our example would be Sylenth1. It has a really nice analog style filter, and its filter drive gives you the same distortion, same overdrive. So that’s really the key to getting that analog tone.
But there’s other subtle things we could do to get a fatter sound. One is increasing our amp release by just a little bit. So, in this synth, we have attack, decay, sustain, but there’s no release option, which, yeah, it’s a bit odd right? Well, there is a release option it’s hidden. And if I enable these switches, our decay knob controls it. So whatever our decay knob is set to, also sets a release time.
So right now, when I let go of a key… It cuts off very abruptly. If I increase it just a little bit. It just gets rid of that awkward cut-off. If I increase it a lot. You hear the note fade over time. Zero. It’s kind of unnatural, but also it makes the sound a bit smaller. With this tiny tail, it just creates a bit more sound, and it actually creates fatter notes.
It’s one of those really subtle things you’d never think to do when you’re going for kind of a fat sound. It also mimics an actual electric bass a little bit more. You know, when you stop a note, it’s not zero milliseconds, it’s the real world right? The string stops vibrating quickly, but there’s a tiny tail. So we get just a bit more of a kind of a human real sound here.
Next. Again, to get a bit of a sort of a real sound to this give it some subtle character, we want the note to start a bit brighter, and then get darker. We wanna add a subtle attack transient. We could do that with our filter envelope. So I’m gonna turn up our decay first. Nothing’s gonna happen yet. But if I increase the contour, I’m gonna do it a lot so you can really hear what happens.
What happens is our contour, sets a higher cut-off point, for our sound to start at. And our decay takes it from that brighter point, down to our cut-off. If I increase our decay, it’ll take longer But we want pretty quick, so it’s just at the beginning of our sound. Let’s do around here. And, we don’t want it to get so bright. It’s just that tiny little transient at the beginning. Now that’s just a little bit more playable. It’s not so static, it’s not so stiff. It just feels better.
Now, remember what I said before it was actually starting as a square. Well, let’s try square let’s see what it sounds like. It sounds pretty good. A little bit of a heavier feel to it, but… There’s something about how the saw interacts with the cut-off. It just gives us a nicer bottom end. That’s why I went with the saw. All right, so here we have a nice fat analog bass. It’s got a bit more of a playability to it because of our filter and our amp. Sounds nice.
But let’s say we wanna take it a step further, we wanna do some kinda little bass fills with it. We want to be a bit more noticeable, but we don’t wanna lose that bottom. Key-tracking. Key-tracking when we enable both of these switches, will make higher notes significantly brighter than lower notes. So here’s my lower note without key-tracking. It’s a little brighter. But this change is pretty subtle. Now let’s compare the higher note. Way brighter. So now I still have these low notes. When I jump up there, the note really sticks out. And since I got a little bit of extra brightness on that low and I’m gonna back off on the cutoff. So now I get both my low end for that bottom, fat bass and then these nice… Fat fills up top.
And then I’m gonna boost the resonance a little bit. And what this does is, it kinda does two things. It actually makes the low note a bit boomier, a bit bottom endy-er, and it makes the higher notes a bit more shaped and pointed, so let’s, first let’s listen to the bottom. I’ll crank it so you could really hear. It’s subtle but it almost kind of adds this boom underneath. So that’s nice, now what about the high note. You hear that? It kinda just shapes ’em a little bit. Makes them a little pointier. We just want a subtle.
Why is this happening? Well, our resonance boosts our sound at our cut-off point. So if your cut-off is turned down, you’ll get a boost in the lows. If your cut-off is in the middle, you’ll get a boost in the mids etcetera. But we have key-tracking enabled, right? So even though our knob is set to here, the higher we play the higher our cut-off actually is. So when I play that low note. I’m getting a boost in the low end. When I play the higher note. I’m getting a bit more of a boost in the mids, so it’s giving it shape instead of bottom end.
Again, a simple change but really subtle. It’s these kind of things that separate you know, okay patches from great patches, these tiny little finishing touches. And last, we want to add a little bit of kinda swagger on those top higher notes. Let’s increase our glide so that the notes bend between each other. That’s a little too much. Compare.
They just kinda bend between each other, they get a little bit of attitude. Problem is when when I wanna go back down. it takes a while. So if I enabled legato. When I play notes separately, space between them. No bend. But when I connect ’em. They bend. So now with my playing, I can choose when the glide kicks in and when it doesn’t. So I can… I can connect the upper notes to get that bend, and separate the lower notes so I could jump back down to that heavy bass. So there you have it, a nice fat analog playable bass.
This isn’t your ordinary synth tutorial. This is Syntorial. Making programming synths easy. With video game like training, teaching you how to program synth patches by ear. Each lesson starts with a demonstration, then an interactive challenge with over 200 lessons. Once you complete the program, you’ll be able to create the sounds you hear using almost any synthesizer. Try the award winning Syntorial today.
Watch Joe Hanley, the creator of Syntorial, as he demonstrates how to draw a distorted waveform in Serum’s Wavetable Editor. In this excerpt from the Serum Lesson Pack, we’ll be taking a look at exactly what distortion does to a waveform’s shape.
Get 4 more Serum videos for free via the Syntorial Demo.
VIDEO TRANSCRIPT
In this video, we’ll be going over how to draw a distorted wave form in Serum’s wavetable editor. So we’ll be looking at exactly what distortion does to a waveform shape. And personally, I find this really fascinating.
Now this video is actually an excerpt from the Serum Lesson Pack for Syntorial. Syntorial is a synthesizer training app that teaches you how to program synth patches by ear. It does this by combining video demonstrations with interactive challenges in which you program patches on a built-in soft synth.
The Serum Lesson Pack adds 55 videos that show you how to take everything you learn in Syntorial and apply it to Serum as well as covering all of the many additional features that Serum has to offer. And you can get the first four videos from the Serum Lesson Pack for free by going to syntorial.com, clicking Try For Free, and downloading the Syntorial demo for Mac, PC, or iPad. This has the first 22 Syntorial lessons but also the first four videos from the Serum Lesson Pack.
Once you download Syntorial, just go into this dropdown, Download Lesson Packs, and you’ll see this Serum Lesson Pack at the top. Just click the Download button. We also have lesson packs for Massive, Sylenth, and a couple others. And I like I said, the demo will have the first four or five videos from each of these packs. When you buy Syntorial, all of the packs and all their videos are included. Alright, on to the excerpt.
Let’s start with distortion. At the end of the day, distortion gives us really two types of sounds. They can create this sort of warm tube saturation distortion, or it can create this sort of nasty, top-end, buzzy sort of distortion. And in order to draw these shapes in, we need to understand better what distortion is actually doing to our shape. So here we have an oscilloscope.
An oscilloscope just shows us the actual wave form of whatever sound that goes through it. So right now I have a plain saw, so when I hit a note, you’ll see saws. So, I’m gonna put on a distortion, so you can visually see what it does to the sound. First I’ll start with some filtering, and let’s do zero drive, what do we get? Okay, so we’ve rounded out those sharp turns. Now watch the shape as I increase the drive. It becomes more square-like. That’s kind of the essence of this sort of warm tube-like distortion. It’s just adding a kind of square tendency to your shape, and it will put in that sort of warm tube distortion.
Let’s try it with a random wave-form. Let’s go in here and I’m gonna freehand. Okay, there’s our sound. Add our distortion, no drive, So look at this big square that was put into it. We still have some other things go on in there, ’cause it’s a way more complex wave form than saw, but again, we have put in a square-like tendency. So if we wanna create a wave form, that’s got some distorted tube warmth in it, we need to draw in this square-like tendency.
So to draw a distortion, I like to start with a square. And then I’m gonna shift it over a little bit so we can see all the edges. And I’m gonna freehand a sort of rounding, of these sharp corners. So now, instead of having this really clean square, we have this slightly rounded square. And it has a nice distorted sound. This is similar to what we got when we cranked the drive into the distortion unit.
Now we can kinda mess with this, and try to create a sound that maybe doesn’t sound so typically square, but still has that distorted body. Like if I kinda take a harder slant here, Now it’s kinda like a distorted saw. Or if you remember one of those end results of that random shape I made, kinda had an extra guy in there like this. So still has that nice tubey squarish body, but now we’re throwing in and editing our highs as well.
And that’s the key here, you know, can you change this wave forward without losing that distorted body? So let’s take that back out. So we have a nice smooth sound. And that second type of distortion, I mentioned that sort of top end nastiness. I find the best way to add that is with just some random jagged shapes.
So let’s take our kind of round and square back. And we can kind of throw in, and we started to get that top end buzz in there. We can actually apply it across the board with this noise here. And when you’re at zero zero, if I just click in here and drag up and down, I’m not getting a whole lot. So what you want to do is kinda shimmy up and down As you go from the left to the right side like this. And if I want more of it, I just wanna shimmy up and down a little higher on the screen like this And that’s drawing distortion. Next I wanna talk about creating 8-bit and Lo-Fi sounds…
To see the rest of this video and the 54 other Serum videos, you’ll need the Serum Lesson Pack for Syntorial. But again, you can get the first four videos for free. If you download this tutorial demo here and then in Syntorial, go into Download Lesson Packs, and, Download This Lesson.
Watch Joe Hanley, the creator of Syntorial, as he demonstrates making a two-tiered Mod Wheel in Serum. In this excerpt from the Serum Lesson Pack, you’ll learn how to set up the Mod Wheel to activate one type of modulation with its bottom half and another modulation with its top half.
Get 4 more Serum videos for free via the Syntorial Demo.
VIDEO TRANSCRIPT
In this video, I’m gonna show you how to make a two-tiered mod wheel in Serum. What I mean by that is a mod wheel whose bottom half activates one modulation and then the top half activates another. To learn about this, we’ll go over modulation curves as well as the modulation auxiliary source.
Now, this video is actually an excerpt from the Serum Lesson Pack for Syntorial. Syntorial is a synthesizer training app that teaches you how to program synth patches by ear. It does this by combining video demonstrations with interactive challenges in which you program patches on a build-in soft synth.
The Serum Lesson Pack adds 55 videos that show you how to take everything you learn in Syntorial and apply it to Serum, as well as covering all of the many additional features that Serum has to offer. And you can get the first four videos from the Serum Lesson Pack for free by going to Syntorial.com, clicking Try for Free, and downloading the Syntorial Demo for Mac, PC, or iPad.
This has the first 22 Syntorial lessons but also the first four videos from the Serum Lesson Pack. Once you download Syntorial, just go into this dropdown, download lesson packs, and you’ll see the Serum Lesson Pack at the top. Just click the Download button. We also have lesson packs for Massive, Sylenth, and a couple others, and like I said, the demo will have the first four or five videos from each of these packs. When you buy Syntorial, all of the packs and all their videos are included. All right, on to the excerpt.
And then you’ve got these curve boxes. So, what the curve does is it makes the source focus more of its time in the top or the bottom of its modulation range. So, for example, let’s say I were to route LFO. Now, if I curve this up, what I end up doing is kind of swaying it to the top of the range, so now it’s gonna spend more of its time near the top. You see how it’s hangin’ out up here and just shooting down and back up? What if I do the opposite? Now I’ve pushed it down to the bottom.
It’s spending more of its time down at the bottom and just shoots up and down from the top. This curve is also good for the mod wheel, so let’s say I route our mod to cutoff and I’ll do it for resonance, too. So, maybe I wanna be able to move slower through this lower range; like most of my mod wheel work, I kinda want it to be here, and then have the option to shoot up to the top when I need to.
Well, curve to the rescue. Now I can move the mod wheel pretty drastically and the cutoff, you know, it stays in this lower area. But I have that option, once in a while I can grab a high value. And if I do it real extreme, all the way up, now when it’s all the way down, I’m good. All I have to do is barely move it up and it flicks to the top. So, it turns your mod wheel into an on/off switch.
Next, LFO amount. So, there is no LFO amount now, right? There is no modulation amount knobs. The modulation amount is always done on the destination itself, right? So, what we need to do is modulate this amount setting, but you can’t just drag a source to these little knobs. Instead, we go into the matrix, we see our current LFO modulating cutoff setup, we go into this section here, auxiliary source.
Whatever is set as the source here will now control the amount here, so if my mod wheel’s all the way down I have zero amount, no modulation, but as I turn my mod wheel up it’s gonna increase the mod amount up to this point. This is a nice design, ’cause now you can modulate any modulation amount set here by setting your auxiliary source over here.
Now, this curve box over here, it’s the same, but it works on the auxiliary source. Again, this is great for the mod wheel. Let’s say I’ve got a vibrato thing. And I route my mod wheel here, so now well, I can curve it. Maybe I want to just flick it on. Let me give it a little bit more.
Let’s look at an example, an interesting example of this in use, actually, So these two rows right here I find interesting. Our mod wheel’s controlling our LFO amount and this mod wheel’s also controlling this LFO amount, but there are two different destinations; one’s to master tune and one’s to noise level, and they have opposite curves to the mod wheel.
What this means is when I turn my mod wheel up just a little bit, this curve is gonna jump up. So, right away I’m gonna kinda get close to my max noise, and you’re gonna hear the noise kick in. Right around there, you hear the kind of hhhhg But this is curved in the opposite way. So, this small amount will barely create this vibrato, this LFO master tune.
As I push the mod wheel higher, then you’ll start to hear that kick in. So, it’s kind of a multi-layered mod wheel; push it up a little bit for noise, a little bit more for vibrato.
To see the rest of this video and the 54 other Serum videos, you’ll need the Serum Lesson Pack for Syntorial, but again, you can get the first four videos for free if you download the Syntorial demo here and then in Syntorial, go to Download Lesson Packs, and download the Serum Lesson Pack.
Watch Joe Hanley, the creator of Syntorial, as he demonstrates the Serum LFO’s Envelope Mode and Loopback Point. In this excerpt from the Serum Lesson Pack learn how to use these together to get a hybrid LFO and Envelope, AKA LFEnvelope.
Get 4 more Serum videos for free via the Syntorial Demo.
VIDEO TRANSCRIPT
In this video, I’m gonna show you how the LFO Envelope Mode and Loopbacks work. When we use these together, we can create a hybrid LFO Envelope, or as I like to call it, LFEnvelope. Now this video is actually an excerpt from the Serum Lesson Pack for Syntorial.
Syntorial is a synthesizer training app that teaches you how to program synth patches by ear. It does this by combining video demonstrations with interactive challenges in which you program patches on a built-in soft synth. The Serum Lesson Pack adds 55 videos that show you how to take everything you learn in Syntorial, and apply it to Serum.
As well as covering all the many additional features that Serum has to offer. And you can get the first four videos from the Serum Lesson Pack for free by going to Syntorial.com, clicking Try For Free, and downloading the Syntorial demo for Mac, PC, or iPad. This has the first 22 Syntorial lessons, but also the first four videos from the Serum Lesson Pack. Once you download Syntorial, just go into this dropdown, download lesson packs, and you’ll see the Serum Lesson Pack at the top. Just click the download button. We also have Lesson Packs for Massive, Sylenth, and a couple others.
And like I said, the demo will have the first four or five videos from each of these packs. When you buy Syntorial, all of the packs, and all of their videos, are included. All right, onto the excerpt.
Envelope mode runs through our LFO only one time. Goes from here to here, and then stops at this value. So it essentially turns it into an envelope, right? ‘Cause our envelope only executes one time. And so what this allows us to do is create really unique envelope shapes. You know, over the envelope, we’re stuck with what they give us, a standard ADSR with a hold. Over here, we can do anything we want. So let’s look at some examples.
So this LFO is assigned to this sync warp On normal, you hear how it goes “Yip”? To this value, but it’s only there for a split second. And then it starts over. It’s just repeating, repeating it. But an envelope, it hangs out there. Another example So this LFO is routed to our volume. And what we get is this LFO creating this and then swell up. And then our regular amp envelope keeps our volume at the top for a while to allow this to be heard, and then fades eventually.
So you get two amp envelopes, essentially. You get one with the unique shape, and one with the standard, just, kind of hold gate shape. Now, within this envelope there’s a couple features. We’ve got loopback points. So, I’ll route you to you. Okay, so let’s go envelope mode. All right, so just, one time through. But if I set a loopback point on this note here. You see a little “L” pops up now, Ah, so it executes the whole LFO once, and then it repeats from the loopback point. I can put that on a different note, and now it’ll loop back from here. I can move it. So effectively we get an LFO and an envelope in one.
Great example of this in use… So this LFO is largely in this wavetable position. And I can almost guarantee that this was an actual sample, like a bottle blow, like a “Hoo” when you blow over the top of a glass bottle. Imported it, because the first part of this wave table is the attack. When you pass over this area quickly, it’s that , it’s that initial blow. The attack transient of the bottle blow. Then this is all the body.
Now… What we get here is this quick sweep, Alright this “shoom” That gives us that attack transient. And then we move up and down and we loop through this. Okay what’s the point of the loop? Let’s remove it. See it’s the movement of this wave table. Oh! Sorry. So when you move it that’s when you get that kind of airy sound.
So movement’s really important for the sustain of this. But, with a regular LFO, we’d hear this attack. Over and over again. So, perfect solution. We hear the attack once ’cause we’re in Envelope Mode, and then we loop back just for the body. We can apply this same principle…
To see the rest of this video, and 54 other Serum videos, you’ll need the Serum lesson pack for Syntorial. But again, you can get the first for videos for free if you download the Syntorial demo here, and then in Syntorial, go to download lesson packs. And, download the Serum lesson.
Watch Joe Hanley, the creator of Syntorial, as he guides you through Massive’s Wavetables and their related controls. To find your way through Massive’s huge list of wavetables check out the Massive Wavetable By Attribute tool.
This video is an excerpt from the Massive Lesson Pack for Syntorial, which contains 41 videos, over 2 hours of footage, and covers every inch of Massive. Get 4 more Massive videos for free via the Syntorial demo.
VIDEO TRANSCRIPT
In this video, I’m going to be showing you how the wavetables, wavetable position and intensity work in Massive. And I’m gonna go beyond the manual. Instead of talking about this in a mathematic sense, I’m gonna give it to you in a more musical and pragmatic way. So that you know why you would actually use these things in a musical sense. What is its effect gonna be on your actual sound?
And this video is an excerpt from the Massive Lesson Pack for Syntorial. Syntorial is a synthesizer training app that teaches you how to program synth patches by ear. It does this using video demonstrations and interactive challenges in which you program patches on a built-in soft synth. The massive lesson pack adds 41 videos that show you how to take what you’ve learned in Syntorial and apply it to massive.
And you can get the first four videos free by going to Syntorial.com. Click in the try for free link, downloading this Syntorial demo for Mac PC or iPad. And that demo comes with the first 22 Syntorial lessons, as well as a sample from each lesson pack. You go into this drop down, download lesson packs, and you’ll see here at the top the Native Instruments Massive lesson pack. Download that, and you’ll get the first four videos. We also have lesson packs for Sylenth1, Z3TA+ 2 and the Minimoog Voyager, at the time of the making of this video.
Let’s get started. Massive wavetables, part two. So as you already know, you’ve got a ton of wavetable options here in Massive. And at the end of the day, it really boils down to experimentation, just kinda going through them, getting familiar with them, finding the sound that works for the patch that you’re making. But with this many, it almost starts to feel like you’re working with presets.
You know, it’s hard to know exactly what these are gonna sound like the way we know a saw and a square is going to sound like. So I found that re-categorizing these into sound attributes really helps kinda understand and get your brain kinda wrapped around all the wavetable options that we have here. I find these categories are not particularly helpful. So I’ve made my own. And you can check them out on Syntorial’s website.
You’ll see they’re grouped into nine categories like distorted and metallic and organ. Simply just click a box and it’ll show you the wavetables that have that attribute in Massive. Let’s look at some examples from each of these categories. So the first one was subtractive, which we’ve covered already. That’s our Square-Saw or Sin-Triangle or Sin-PWM.
Next category is Metallic. These are wavetables that have the kind of metallic tone you can get from FM or ring mod like, escalation, or Sonic. Next category is Distorted. These are waveforms that sound like they’ve been put through distortion. First one is these Drives, or a nastier example with Dirty Needle And the position knob just giving a sort of a different tone within that distortion.
Next category is Bitcrushed. If you remember the Bitcrusher down here, it’s a really nasty, almost kinda papery digital kind of distortion, it’s different from the sort of warm distortion that we’re used to. Couple examples are Crusher, or right below it Reducer Next category is Formant. These are wavetables that have a kinda vowel vocalesque sound to them. Let’s check out a couple Gentle Speech, and our position knob changes the vowel. Or right below that Modern Talking This one also has a kind of metallic or distorted sound. So you could put this one in multiple categories.
Next category is String. For these wavetables, they kinda have the texture like a wired string. So like an electric bass or guitar, or Rhodes or a clav. The first two obvious ones will be Guitar Pulse and E-Bass pulse. Just a very string-like texture. Additive mix V, if you turn the position knob all the way down, we get an electric bass tone. Or with Roughmath-I, we get a very clav sound. And with Herbie, we get a Rhodes-like sound. Next category is Organ. You’ve got some wavetables that just sound like organs, like these Flenders.
Next category is Multi. These are wavetables that contain multiple notes. So like Polysaw, and our position knob changes the notes. Or Multiplex. And then the last category is Dissonant. These are just real messed-up sounding wavetables like Camchord. Sounds like a demented old school telephone ring or Cicada. So as you can see, a lot of these wavetables have a lot of personality in them. It’s almost like some of the programming has been done for you. Some are kinda distorted, some are sort of FM sounding. So in some cases you won’t have to do as much programming if you find a wavetable that kind of gives you part of the sound you’re looking for.
Now, we know what this position knob does. Our wavetable has several waveforms in it and the position knob just scans through those wave forms. But what is it really doing to sound? At the end of the day, what is the end result effect on our sound? Well, in some cases, it’s switching between very distinctly different waveforms. like Square-Saw. Or this one Carbon. Several different sounding waveforms within this position. It really changes as you move this knob.
Another example is changing actual pitch. Like we saw with Polysaw. In some cases, we get a harmonic shifting effect. Like when you’re using something like Hard-Sync, it actually moves one of the synced oscillators. Or with Additives, we get the same kind of effect. It’s like we’re changing the pitch of an FM to oscillator. In other cases this position kinda acts like a low-pass filter. Like with the Acid wavetable. We just get a rounding effect. Or with a Formant style wavetable, it just kinda changes our vowel.
Now again, it’s not actually doing these things. It’s simply just scanning through waveforms within the wavetable. So for oscillator sync for example, this HardSync wavetable, it’s not doing any actual oscillator syncing or changing the pitch of an oscillator. They’ve pre-made these sounds, pre-made these waveforms, put them together in a wavetable, and this is simply just scanning through it.
Next we’ll move to the Intensity knob. Now by default, this kinda acts like a low-pass filter. Let’s switch over to just a Plain old saw, Just kinda rounds our sound out. Now you also hear it sort of adds other qualities, almost kind of like an FM-ish quality over here. You hear a little bit of metallicness. But it’s predominant characteristic by default, I find is usually kind of a low pass effect. However, if you change this drop-down up here, it will change what the Intensity knob does.
Now by default, we are in spectrum mode and that’s what gives intensity a low Pass like quality. Now in reality, intensity goes in and it grabs your waveform and it morphs it and changes it in different ways. However, instead of understanding what each intensity mode does to your wave form mathematically, I find it much more helpful to compare each mode to a sound attribute we are already familiar with. So with Spectrum, it’s kinda like a Low Pass filter.
Or for example, let’s look at Formant. This adds a sort of Oscillator Sync sound to any wavetable. It doesn’t matter which one, just grab a different one. So you can apply that sort of harmonic shifting from Oscillator Sync using this Formant Intensity.
And then we’ve got these three different Bend options. Let’s start with the Bend minus plus. For the bend, I find that the most predominant characteristic is that of a kind of Pulse Width changing. If I set this to the middle, it does nothing. So Bend Intensity is totally neutral in the middle. We’re just hearing our wavetable. But as I turn it away from middle, it has the kinda sort of thinning effect that Pulse Width has on our square wave.
Now it has some other effects in the sound, but it primarily has that kind of Pulse Width like effect. And I just find it helpful to compare it to Pulse Width. That way I kinda know what to expect and know when to use Bend Intensity. Now, in this case, our max to the right or our minimum to the left, it’s the same sound. It doesn’t matter which way we go from middle.
But in some wavetables case, it is going to be different. For example, Multiplex. So keep that in mind. If you decide you wanna add this sort of Bend Intensity sound, try both directions. As in some cases you’ll get a different sound. And when it’s different, one way or the other, that’s kinda where this minus or plus option comes in handy. If you just want the plus half, the half up here, you can switch to Bend plus. }
Now when your intensity is all the way down it’s neutral, and turning up gives you the plus range. Vice versa, when it’s Bend minus all the way down is neutral, turning it up, gives you the negative range. Now you may be wondering well, why even bother with the Bend minus Bend plus when we have them combined here? I find that useful for modulation. Maybe I want to modulate this with an LFO, have it moving back and forth. And I just want one of the ranges, I just want the plus sound. It’s easier for me to just set Bend plus, put this wherever I want it and set my LFO up.
Last thing about our Intensity knob, is in two cases, it changes its behavior altogether. So, pulse width modulation, wavetable, it’s an actual pulse width control as we’ve covered. And our sync wavetable, it’s an actual sync knob. So, we’ve looked through our intensity. We’ve looked through our wavetable position, all these different wavetables and we’ve been able to compare the different sounds to things we already know how to do. Like Low Pass filtering or distortion or FM, all those different kinds of things.
So in many ways, this kinda programming is done for us. It’s sort of built into the wavetable. We don’t need to do it in other places. However, where this really comes in handy is with modulation. We can modulate the position or the intensity, and it allows us to sort of morph between these different sound attributes in ways we couldn’t otherwise do.
For example, to see the rest of this video, as well as videos covering every inch of Massive, you’ll need the Massive Lesson Pack for Syntorial. And remember, you can get the first four videos for free by going to syntorial.com, click in the try for free link. Downloading a demo, and then within the demo, go into Download Lesson Packs, and Download the Massive Lesson Pack.
Watch Joe Hanley, the creator of Syntorial, as he demonstrates synth patch layering techniques with Sylenth1. This video is an excerpt from the Sylenth1 Lesson Pack for Syntorial, which contains 38 videos, over 2 hours of footage, and covers every inch of Sylenth1. Get 4 more Sylenth1 videos for free via the Syntorial Demo.
VIDEO TRANSCRIPT
In this video, I’ll be showing you some synth patch layering techniques using Sylenth1. Layering our synth patches allows us to create richer and more detailed synth patches and Sylenth1 is perfectly designed for layering.
This video is actually an excerpt from the Sylenth1 lesson pack for Syntorial. Syntorial is a synthesizer training app that teaches you how to program synth patches by ear. It does this using video demonstrations and interactive challenges in which you program patches on a built-in soft synth. The Sylenth1 lesson pack adds 38 videos that show you how to take everything you’ve learned in Syntorial Synth and apply it to Sylenth1. And you can actually get the first four videos from the Sylenth1 lesson pack for free. Just go to syntorial.com, click try for free and you can download the Syntorial demo for Mac, PC or iPad.
Now this demo comes with the first 22 Syntorial lessons, but also you can go into the menu select download lesson packs and download a sample of the Sylenth1 lesson pack, as well as a pack for Z3TA+ 2 and a Minimoog Voyager and will be adding more in the future.
So let’s get started and talk about some layering. Sylenth1 part A and B. So throughout these videos I’ve showed you a lot of different examples of how you can use part A and part B, but we really just hit the tip of the iceberg here. Part A and part B are absolutely great for layering in this synth and there are endless options on how you can combine them.
One of the most obvious is creating two very different sounds, which essentially treats part A and part B as two different synths. Show you one example in the factory presets patch 103 Moon Cloud. We’ve got two very different patches here. We’ve got this round smooth pad and then we’ve got this rhythmic noise. And it’s a cool use of different amp envelopes.
Part A we have the slow attack to create that swell, but part B immediate attack so that, that noise comes in right when we hit a note and we get a nice combination. This is treating part A and part B as two synths in one, and in the factory presets there are so many cool examples of this, but I wanna show you a way to use part A and part B that focus on the two filters.
We can do all sorts of interesting things using filter A and filter B. First one I wanna show you, patch number six. So let’s take a look at our filter setups here, for filter A we’ve got oscillators from A and B coming in. So that probably means our filter B is disabled, we’ve talked about that a bunch. Let’s take a look. Nope, filter B is doing the same, oscillators from A and B are coming in here too.
So essentially what we’ve done here is we’ve taken all four oscillators and made a copy of them. One copy is going through part A’s filter another copy is going through part B’s filter. Why? Well, let’s take a listen to them individually. Now, when you use this solo button where you’re actually soloing is the filters output. So when we’re in part A and we’re soloed we’re only hearing what comes out of filter A which in this case is the oscillators from both part A and part B. All right, so we’ve got an LFO moving a band pass up and down in our sound.
What about part B? Okay, just a wide open filter, no movement. What did we get when you combine them? We basically get a phaser effect. This is a very simple, straightforward, chunky phaser, another cool use for these dual filters is this patch. So what’s our setup here. Filter A takes the oscillators from A okay that’s normal. Filter B takes the oscillators from both A and B, but the B oscillators are disabled, zero voices for both.
So the only oscillators that are making any sound are the oscillators from part A, and those are being doubled they’re being sent through filter A and filter B. Okay, so let’s solo filter A, what do we get? So this is our main sound, it’s the body of this flute sound.
What’s part B? Okay, it’s a sharp band pass sweeping down creating kind of an attack transient. So let’s, un-solo what do we get? It’s subtle, so I’m gonna un-solo and re-solo and listen to the difference. So it allows us to just layer in the attack transient, so it’s not upfront and loud, it just is kind of subtle. We can control just how subtle it is now with mix B, that controls the volume of our part B filter.
One more example. I’m gonna disable the compressor in arpeggiator and what’s our setup here. Okay, so filter A is taking oscillators from both part A and B and filter B is doing the same, taking oscillators from part A and B. So again, we’re taking all the oscillators and making two copies of them, one to go through filter A and one to go through filter B. So what are we hearing in A? A big nice low end base, part B? This is a more pronounced high band pass with no low end. Combine them.
So this is nice ’cause maybe you want that really pronounced sharp band pass movement but you wanna keep your low end because it’s a bass patch, this allows us to combine the two. Now, sometimes when you layer A and B they can combine in an unexpected way.
For example, this patch had the compressor on so let’s turn that on and listen to how much quieter part B gets when we un-solo it, so here it is by itself, un-soloed. This is because when we un-soloed both part A and part B are activated and it gets a lot louder, we’re sending a lot higher volume through the compressor. So the compressor is gonna smack down on it harder and ends up reducing our part B volume. It’s just an unexpected combination.
Another example is patch 11. Listen to part B soloed. Un-soloed. It almost disappears. Let’s go to part A and solo that to hear What part B adds. So instead of it being all bell like when it is soloed, it just ends up being this sort of high edge once we combine them. This is due to the distortion. If I turn this off, it stays bell-like when we combine. But like the previous patch when I enable both parts, we’re getting volume from both filter A and B, so we’re increasing the volume of the input going into this distortion, which is similar to just increasing the amount. Everything is gonna distort harder now that you have two parts going into it. So you have to be very careful when you combine the two parts.
My advice is when you decide to add a second layer to your patch and you go over to part B, try to program part B without using the solo button, you’re gonna have a much better idea of how things are gonna combine and exactly how the parts sound together if you program them while they’re both playing. It can be trickier but can save you time and give you a much more accurate patch.
Well that’s it, thanks for watching. Remember, you can get four more of these Sylenth1 videos for free just by going to syntorial.com, try for free grabbing the demo and then inside the demo, click this drop down, download lesson packs and download your sample for Sylenth1.
In this synth tutorial, Joe Hanley, the creator of Syntorial, will take you step-by-step as he rebuilds the introduction from Chvrches “Gun”. Joe will be using mostly free and donationware plugins, and will focus on classic hardware synth emulations. Don’t forget to download the presets and MIDI files. Plugins used:
Hey everyone, today I’m gonna show you how to remake these synth patches from the intro of Chvrch’s “Gun”. I’m gonna be doing these videos on a regular basis on different sounds, songs, techniques and stuff like that. And I’m taking requests. So if there’s something you want to learn about, just click the link at the top of this video, it’ll take you to the Syntorial website’s tutorials page. And on the right side there’s a forum where you can submit a tutorial request. Type it in, send it and I may cover it in a future video.
On this page we’ll see this video along with many others, check them out while you’re there and below each video, there’s a download link where you can get the presets and MIDI files from the video. And if you wanna be notified when a new video comes out, just scroll down to the bottom of the page and sign up for our newsletter.
Lastly while you’re there, check out the free Syntorial demo, which comes with 22 free synth lessons. Syntorial is synthesizer training software that teaches you how to program synths and design sound, all by ear using videos and interactive challenges. So check it out.
So for this video, we’re gonna be using mostly donation ware and free plugins. All except one, and whenever I open a new plug-in a link will appear at the top of the video so that you can go and get it. So now let’s listen to the finished patches before we start building them from the ground up. So starting with the bass, we’re gonna use Moog.
The guys in Chvrches use vintage hardware synths like Moogs, Juno 106, Prophet. So I decided to use emulators of those plugs of those synths. So I’m starting with the Moog and this is the one synth plugin that I’m using that isn’t free. It’s made by Arturia. However, there is a free one for Windows users and you can check that out Mini Moog VA and that’s link at the top of the video. For Mac users, there’s a pretty simple patch actually so you can use any synth to follow along.
So starting with the Moog, we’re gonna reset it, so that it’s just plain old saw wave. We want to use a medium width pulse wave. And we want to bring it down, two octaves. Good. And then we’re gonna bring in the second oscillator, turning it on. This is gonna be one octave above the first. It’s also gonna be a medium width pulse wave.
And we’re gonna turn up just a little bit, it’s just gonna add a little bit of high end. And then we’re gonna de-tune it down a little bit and this is gonna add a little just a touch of movement, a little bit of thickness to the sound. It’s pretty subtle. Just adds a little thickness to the sound but it keeps that nice solid single oscillator, sound as well.
Next, remember to bring our cutoff down to get a bit of a rounder tone. About there. And then we want to use the filter envelope to give it an attack. We want the sound to start bright and immediately get down to this nice round point. So we turn up our contour to determine that tss bright starting point. So it’s not that much brighter. Just a little bit, it’s gonna be another subtle effect.
Now the way envelopes work is they start at this contour and they go down to the sustain level. Sustain level of zero, is the same as your cutoff frequency and that’s what we want. We want to start from this brightness that our contour knob gave us and make its way down to the cutoff frequency. So we turn our sustain all the way down and here’s what it sounds like. Now these are short notes, so it’s not moving from contour to cutoff quick enough. So we’re gonna bring our decay time down to make that happen faster. So without contour. So it gives their sound a nice shape.
And lastly, we don’t want the note to cut off so abruptly when we let go of the key. It definitely cuts off quickly but when it’s this abrupt, it sort of sounds unnatural. So we’re gonna increase it just a little bit. Now on the Moog, the decay stage of your amp envelope also determines your release stage. So we just turn up the decay time. It’s a little subtler. But it gives it a more natural sound. It also kind of fattens that sound up a bit, cause when you cut it off, you just have that short distinct note.
When you have a little bit of a tail, it just sort of gives the impression of more sound. it’s kind of a nice little trick. So that’s your basic synth sound. It’s a real simple typical bass patch but it’s kind of puny. so we’re gonna add some overdrive. Some tube distortion.
So we’re gonna go to TAL plug-in here, grab the TAL tube effect. By default, you don’t hear much. So we want to do is increase the input, we want to send more of our signal, more of our synth into this thing. So we’re driving the the tubes harder, getting more of that rich warmth out of them.
And then the distortion itself, we want that to be as nasty as we can make it so we’re turning the drive up all the way. And that gave us quite a boost in volume so we’ll bring the output down a little bit. And then this gives you the option of a hard distortion you can make it more aggressive and edgy. So we turn that on. We beefed up the synth a little bit, we made it kind of angry. Now we want to make it even fatter.
So we’re gonna bring in a compressor and I’m not gonna use a typical compressor with you know attack release threshold ratio all that stuff. Because all I really want is just a nice fatness from it. I just want to change the sound of it. And I love the Camel Crusher plug-in for that. This also has a distortion, a filter all that. We just want the compressor.
So I’m turning the distortion off. And by default the compressors on, it’s turned up pretty high and fat modes engaged which we want. So that’s off. On. Fat mode off. On. So kind of squashes it, smears it and thickens it. We’re gonna back it off a little bit though. So we have a nice fat angry bass and we just want to add a little bit of low end.
So I’m just going to bring in Ableton’s EQ. You can use any EQ for this. It’s pretty simple. We just want a shelf, we want a frequency of 155, and I’ll turn up the gain. So it has that nice bottom in, just make sure use a shelf because by default uses a sort of peak but a shelf will just really raise up the whole low-end. And that’s your bass patch. I’ma turn down a little bit so that when we bring in the high end or the lead it doesn’t overpower it.
Next, the lead. For this, we’re gonna use another TAL plugin. TAL plugins are great and almost all of them are donationware. So you can download them for free but if you like them I recommend you know donating to the guy because he does an awesome job of this plugins or buying one of his premium plugins.
Let’s see, so this one is an emulation or it’s inspired by the Juno 60. And the Juno 106, which is a different synth, used by the Chvrches guys and I chose this synth which is similar to that one in its sound. For a particular reason, which I’ll get to in a second.
First things first, we want mono. And we’re gonna turn off this sub wave, we just want a nice single saw wave. Now we want to add a tail to it because the notes cutting off right away. We want the note to ring out after I let go the key so we turn on the amp envelope and we increase our release. Good. And we don’t want any filter envelope, so we’re gonna turn the envelope all the way down for that. And I’m gonna bring the frequency down the cutoff to make the sound a little rounder.
Now if you compare that to the actual sound it’s much rounder. That’s because we’re gonna add a distortion plugin later on, that’s gonna sort of rebrighten it back up. The distortion adds its own brightness. So we make this a little bit round or just sort of create a palette for the distortion.
Now lastly is the chorus, and this is why I chose this synth, in the Juno lines of synths like the 60 and the 106, they had these choruses built into them and they’re kind of a signature aspect of these synths. They’re really simple, they’re just basically on and off buttons. You can’t really tweak anything but they had a very distinct sound. And that’s why I chose this because it sounds like they’re using those choruses.
So we’re actually gonna engage both of them. So it widens it, gives it that sort of subtle instability. Which is really important for this track. Next we’re gonna compress it. Make it nice big and fat. And again we’re gonna use Camel crusher. Turn off distortion. And we’re gonna crank the compression. That made it a lot louder so let’s bring it down.
Now we’re also going to add some distortion and I liked the distortion from the Camel Crusher plugin for this. Problem is, it goes into the distortion and then the compressor. After messing around with it a lot, I found that I wanted the reverse effect. I wanted to compress it first and then distortion.
The reason is because that chorus in the synth, makes a really unstable sound. It makes it kind of louder, softer, louder, softer. The volume fluctuates, it moves around. And when you run that into this really fat hard hitting compressor, the two sort of fight. The compressor fights the chorus and you get that really unstable sound. And it’s kind of a signature aspect of this patch.
So I definitely wanted the compressor right after the synth. So instead of just using the distortion within this instance of the plug-in, I’m gonna bring in another Camel Crusher. And use this distortion. So it goes compressor then distortion. Turn off the compressor. Crank the tube effects. This is like a nice warm distortion. And then to really give it some more nasty edge we’re gonna use the MEK distortion, turn it up halfway. That’s really loud, so let’s turn it down.
Next is delay, go back to our TAL plugins. TAL-DUB III plugin. Now this plugin is cool because it not only is it you know do the regular delay stuff but it sort of emulates old school analog delays that they saturate your sound. So if you drove them hard enough you get that sort of compression as sort of a distortion effect like we have.
Now that’s cool and everything but we already got that through our Camel Crusher plugin. So we’re gonna turn the drive down a bit so we get a nice clean delay. Then we want the delays louder, more of the delay, so we’re gonna turn our wet up. We want it to be synced. The delays for an eighth note.
Now this plugin’s got a cool feature where you can change just the one of the delays, the right or left. You can make it twice as fast, with these times two buttons. So like right now the left delay is an eighth note but the right delay is a sixteenth note. We don’t want that, we already have a nice wide stereo still going in. So we just want one set of delays going down the middle that are just as wide as the synth. So we turn that off.
And then these low-cut, high cut allow you to sort of shape the delay sound with filters but we don’t want that either, we want no high cut, no low cut. So we turn the little cut down, high cut up and now we get the full sound being delayed. And then we’ll lower the feedback just to make it a little shorter.
Last we’re gonna add some ambience or sorry some reverb. I’m using this free ambience plug-in. You can use any reverb plug and it’s pretty pretty simple. Number one, our dry gain’s at zero right now. So all we’re gonna hear is the reverb sound. But we don’t want that. So now we have our dry. And then it our wet’s too high. We just want a little, not so obvious. And that’s your sound.
Now there’s one important note I’m gonna show you. That is looking down here at these MIDI notes, each phrase is about eight notes long. I’m gonna play this twice as slowly so you can hear it. Now, since it’s a mono, every time you play a new note it cuts the previous ones off. So you get these two high notes then that gets cut off by these two low notes. High notes cut out by the low notes. But in the actual patch the high notes kind of ring out.
So, I separated them, up here. Pair of high notes, pair of low notes. Pair of high notes, pair of low notes. You have the patch, exactly the same patch on both tracks but now they’re separate. So the high notes ring out while the low notes are playing. Back to this guy. And this allowed me to turn the low down a little bit so that the highs are a little bit more dominant than the lows.
Now you might be wondering why didn’t I just use one synth and make it polyphonic, and the problem is yes if I change it so say six voices, now they’ll all ring out over each other. But since I’m ringing through distortion when those voices stack on top of each other they push the distortion and the compressor really hard. So it’s uneven. If I’m playing a single note it sounds right but if I play multiple notes at once which polyphonic with long releases will do then it pushes the distortion of compression too hard.
So stick with mono voice and just split them into two. You know all together. Thanks for watching. And again if you have any requests, just click the link at the top of this video, go to our tutorials page and sign our mailing lists, and check out the Syntorial demo. Thanks for watching.
In this synth tutorial, watch Joe Hanley, the creator of Syntorial, as he recreates the chorus track from James Blake’s “Retrograde”. You can download the presets and MIDI files from the video. Joe will be working in Logic using the Z3TA+ 2 synth. Among other things, the video will show you how to use pitch envelopes to create a “swarming bees” effect.
VIDEO TRANSCRIPT
Today I’m gonna show you how to recreate the synth patches from James Blake’s “Retrograde.” We’re gonna Z3TA+ 2 to do it. Before we get started, I just wanna quickly mention a piece of software that I made called Syntorial.
Now, Syntorial is video game-like training software that’ll teach you how to program synth patches by ear. I’ve designed it to give you the ability to do what I’m doing in this video, which is take the patches you hear in your head or in other songs, and recreate them, just know how to make them.
We do this by combining video demonstrations with interactive challenges in which you actually program a built-in soft synth, and there’s over 700 patches throughout the whole thing, almost 200 lessons. And we recently just added a special Z3TA+ 2 lesson pack that has 37 videos that go over every inch of Z3TA+ 2. So if you’d like to try it out, there’s a free demo, 22 lessons, just click the link that’s popping up on the video right now, and there’s a special Z3TA+ 2 version of the demo as well, and that’s the link popping up now. And of course, both these links are in the description below the video.
Anyway, let’s get started. So, here’s the beat. So before we get into the synths, the drums are real simple, it’s just an 808 kick clap. I’ll start right here. I used battery, but anything that’s got 808 samples will work. I tweaked it a little bit, I pitched the kick up a bit and I pitched the clap down a bit, but that was just to match his track.
Now let’s get right to the lead, ’cause I’m sure that’s what you’re watching this video for. Now, I’ve had a lot of people write in and request a tutorial on this lead, and a lot of them describe it as polyphonic because they hear multiple notes. But it’s not, it’s monophonic, it’s one voice, he’s only hitting one key and holding it, but it’s got multiple oscillators, and each of those oscillators is having their pitch manipulated from a different amount, which makes it sound like three voices turning into one. So let me show you how it works.
Go up into here, initialize Z3TA+ 2, so now I get no sound. And it’s a saw wave, so we go to oscillator one, we do a saw. Now, they’ve got four saws here, four Vintage saws, I always go with One, it’s got the fullest sound, I like it the most. Now, like I said, it’s three oscillators, so we’re gonna make oscillator two also a saw, oscillator three also a saw. Before I play a note, it’s gonna be kinda loud, so let me turn it down over here. And back up a little bit, let’s go over to about there.
Now, it still sounds just like one oscillator. But I’m gonna de-tune the first one up a bit, and you’re gonna hear it start to thicken and start to kinda move a little bit. And then I’m gonna take the third oscillator and pitch that down about the same amount. This is a very, very, very old trick, when you take the same exact waveforms and de-tune them from each other you get a nice thick, moving sound.
So we’ve got our three oscillators, three saws, slightly de-tuned to give us this nice, moving, thick sound. Now we wanna take an envelope and apply it to each oscillator, and we’re gonna use that to bend its pitch. So I’m gonna take oscillator two and disable it, as well as three, so we can just hear one for now. It’s gonna be easier to understand how these envelopes work when we’re just looking at one.
Mod matrix, here’s where we set up all of our modulation routings. So we want envelope one, we’re gonna route it to oscillator one’s pitch. Now, almost always when I am modulating pitch in Z3TA, I always go into curve and select one of these pitch curves. This simply just allows us to set amounts according to pitch amounts, so octaves, whole tones, semitones, it helps us pick out specific notes in our modulation a little bit easier.
I’m gonna set it to one octave, and I’m gonna max out the range. So now we can use the envelope to go to as much as one octave now. So I’m gonna go over to envelope one. And right now, we’re not gonna hear anything. No pitch movement. This envelope amount is at zero, that’s why nothing’s happening. I’m gonna hold down a note, and as I raise it, you’re gonna hear the note go up, and we wanna raise until we get to where we want that note to start. ‘Cause when he first hits that key, you hear one of the oscillators start higher and then move its way down.
So I’m gonna hold down until we get to that pitch. There we go. Now, our envelope is currently at the top, it just holds the note up here. That’s ’cause our sustain level is maxed out. I’m gonna take it all the way down, and now our note’s gonna start here and make its way down.
That’s a little fast, so we’re gonna increase our sustain time. This is a little confusing, most of you would think of this as decay, which is pretty much what it is, but Z3TA calls it sustain time, but you can think of this as decay, and this is sustain. Now that’s a better length, but if you notice, at the very end it shoots down really fast. But in “Retrograde” it really slows down near the end and it kinda almost sounds out of tune for a bit, it’s what creates all that tension.
So we wanna slow it down at the end by changing the curve right here. See, now you see it goes down kinda fast, but then it slows here, so now we get this. You hear how it hangs out at the end for a while? Now, overall it’s a little too fast, so we’re gonna bump it up to about here. And there you go, that’s oscillator one. I’ll turn that one off.
Oscillator two, we want it to do the same thing, but we want it to come from below and bend up. So we’re gonna give it its own envelope, envelope two, with similar settings here, one octave, but this one’s going to oscillator two’s pitch. And we want the envelopes to be almost the same, and what you can do with Z3TA is right-click, copy, then right-click, paste, and now two and one are the same.
But we wanna set a negative envelope amount, ’cause what this’ll do is, instead of shooting the pitch up and then gradually coming down, it’s gonna shoot the pitch down and gradually come up. Even though it looks visually like it’s going up and then back down, when we set it to a negative amount it does the opposite of what you see. So now we get this. If I went above: But I am going below.
Now, the third oscillator’s also gonna come from below, just it’s not gonna start as low as the second oscillator. So, envelope three, maxed, pitch one octave, and oscillator three pitch. And we’re gonna copy and paste the envelope, and we want a negative amount, just not quite as much, so let’s bring it up to about here. And our third one is like this. Bringing the second in. Bring the first back in. And that’s how you get that swarming bees, bending pitch effect.
Now, we’re not done yet, it’s way too bright right now, we’re gonna need to filter it. So we’re gonna route all three oscillators to filter one, just like that. And we’re gonna do a low-pass filter. Now, that’s way too dark. What the sound actually does is it starts kinda dark, and as those pitches are bending in, it brightens up a little bit. So we’re gonna set our cutoff to the darkest point, how it starts, which is about here.
And then we’re gonna use another envelope to brighten the cutoff, to raise it up, in that beginning part of the note, so envelope four, max this out, route it to filter one cutoff. And then, just like we raised this amount to find the highest pitch with the oscillators, we’re gonna raise this amount to find the brightest cutoff that we want. And it’s not much. It’s about there. And now we use the attack to take us from cutoff to envelope amount. About 1.6 seconds. There.
Now, the sound is a little flat, it’s not cutting forward as much as I’d like, so we’re gonna use a heavy amount of resonance, and listen to what it does. About there. It makes it a little more aggressive, makes it push forward and kinda cut. This is great for leads and basses. Or for anything really, resonance can really make a patch go from flat, and it can make it come alive just by pushing it out a little bit.
And then if you listen carefully, the sound kinda fades in a little bit, it doesn’t come in strong. So we’ll go over to our amp envelope, and just increase our amp attack. And that’ll kinda ease in right there.
Now one last thing. Every once in a while, you hear one of the oscillators bend down a whole step and come back up, it’s like , it does that every once in a while. So he triggers it whenever he wants, and so you’d wanna use some kind of mod control with your hands, so maybe the pitch wheel or the mod wheel. But for this, I particularly like to use aftertouch.
Now, for those of you who don’t know, aftertouch pretty much comes standard on most synths and MIDI controllers now, and usually when you play a note you just hold the key down. But when a keyboard has aftertouch, you can push it even further, you have to give it a little more strength, and that further push, going deeper into the key, can trigger a modulation. You’ll find it in this control column, channel aftertouch. And we want to modulate oscillator two’s pitch. Now, with Z3TA+2, when you wanna use one of these controllers, you have to set source to On to enable this row. And this is gonna determine just how far down that pitch is gonna go, I’ll come back to this amount in a second.
Now, right now by default, when I push this key down further, it would raise the pitch. But we don’t wanna do that, we want it to lower it. So to reverse this sort of natural, positive modulation, we go into linear, and we go to unipolar linear minus. Sounds fancy, but really it just reverses the direction. Now if I press the key further down, it’s gonna bend oscillator two’s pitch down, listen. And let me disable these for a second, okay. That’s normal press, now if I press further in: That’s what it did. And I can press slowly in and then slowly out to do kind of slow bend.
I particularly like it for this track because it sounds like it’s struggling, and if you have to physically push into your keyboard, you kinda get that struggle feel into the sound. And by the way, the range will just determine how far down that pitch will bend when I push in the aftertouch. I just set it by ear, just tweaked it until it sounded about right. So now we’ve got that set up, let’s bring these guys in, and now we’ve got our patch.
Now here comes the aftertouch, right here. So I pushed in, then I slowly eased off the key. And here comes some more right here. I pushed in to bend it down, and then slowly let it up. Next we’ll do the bass and the sorta organ synth.
By the way, you can download these patches for Z3TA+2 and the MIDI file, so you can see what notes I’m playing just by clicking the link that’s popping up on your screen now. It’ll take you to a special page with this video on Syntorial’s site, and there’s a link underneath that you can click and download. And by the way, we’ve got a lot more of these tutorials and articles, free stuff on Syntorial’s site. When you go to that page, you’ll see a newsletter signup on the right side, just give us your email and we’ll send you a link to a page full of this stuff.
So let’s do the bass next. Solo it for a second. So just a super round, subby bass that’s kind of moving and swirling. Let’s open her up. Fairly simple patch. Also let’s initialize. And this is a saw, and at first I thought it was just a simple sub-bass, that’s what I programmed first. It’s kinda loud down in this range, so let me bring our master volume down a little bit. So there’s our saw.
Now obviously, to get that round, subby sound, we use a low pass filter. So we’re gonna route this to filter one, and 24 dB, low pass, and we’re gonna turn it pretty far down, in this case it’s gonna go all the way down to 175, right there. Now, if you really wanna make these… Just give these sub-basses some oomph, you can use resonance, and I’m gonna turn it up fairly high. Yeah.
Resonance will just push out part of your sound. If you have the cutoff set right, it’ll push out just the right part, and it really made this sub-bass still sound nice and round and heavy, but it kinda pulled it out and pushed it, stopped it from being flat, just like it sorta unflattened the lead as well. Just makes it step forward in the mix a little bit.
So this is what I originally programmed, but if you listen to the track, you hear the volume kinda fluctuate, and you hear the bass sort of moving around. So I did a doubling and de-tuning. I’m gonna copy, paste this, and we’re gonna de-tune them. We’re gonna do 16 up, 16 down, let’s actually listen to it as I do it. There we go. Yeah.
Now, keep in mind, these are synced right now, and that’s really important. When you double and de-tune sounds… Sorry, when you double and detune oscillators, you’ll get a little point on the beginning of each sound, it gives it a natural attack transient.
Now, some synths, if you’re doing this on a different synth, particularly analog synths or analog-modeled synths, they don’t have that. But with these digital synths, you can sync them, and that’ll give you a point on double and de-tuned sounds. That’s what gives this bass a on the beginning of each note. That is important.
For example, if I switch to free, it unsyncs them, and listen to it. The beginning of each note. Some have a point, some don’t, it’s very inconsistent. So this sync is very important. If you have this sort of option on whatever synth you’re using, make sure it’s on for this bass. So there’s our bass. Let’s bring other things back in. It’s a huge sound.
Lastly, we have this organ-like synth really filling out the middle. And that sounds like this. So initialize. This is gonna use a combination of saw and medium pulse wave. But since we’re playing a bunch of notes, I need to compensate by turning our volume down here, otherwise it’s very loud. So saw, oscillator one. Oscillator two, we’re gonna go to a square wave, and we’re gonna use this control right here to narrow the pulse width.
Now here’s our combined sound. Now, we wanna add some movement, thicken it up a little bit, ’cause an organ-like tone has that. So we’ll double and de-tune them. Not a lot, but a little bit. Now, there’s this attack on the sound that’s kinda crisp, like every time we hit a note. In this case, we don’t really want that, this is meant to just fill out the middle of our track, we don’t want that point sticking out.
So, like I mentioned with the bass, when it’s synced, when you’ve got double and de-tuned oscillators and you sync them, you get that point. So we’re gonna take that off, and let’s see if that helps. It helped a little bit, but we’re playing a bunch of notes of a very, very bright patch, so we’re still gonna get that crisp attack.
So we’re gonna use an amp attack and just cut off the very beginning of the sound with a very, very quick amp attack, 0.04 seconds. So you won’t actually even hear a swelling up of volume, it’ll just cut off that front end. There we go. Lastly, we wanna throw on a flanger. So I’m gonna go down to, let’s see, mono flanger, and here’s what we have by default. So it’s not moving, the default speed’s very slow, so we’re gonna increase the speed so you start to hear the flanging move up and down.
And then feedback we can use to really accentuate the flanger sound. Next we want this flanger to go deeper down. If we increase our delay, it’ll kinda reach a deeper point, listen. Very nice, and then lastly, our depth we can use to bring that high end down. Depth also can kinda bring the low end up a bit, it’s kinda like LFO amount if you’re familiar with LFOs.
And to be honest with you, depth and delay I had to experiment a lot with, it’s not always obvious what they’re doing. But you can just think of them as a way of controlling the highest and lowest point of that flanger, and that’ll help you kinda figure out how to set them.
Now, this is way too wet, there’s way too much flanging on this, so we’re gonna bring our level down. It’s a subtle flanger. Interesting thing about this patch, if you listen, it sounds like there’s two layers, it sounds like there’s almost a round body and a bright, sizzly top. So much so that I actually spent most of my time trying to make this patch with two patches, one for the bottom, one for the top. And I succeeded, and then as I was making this video, I realized this might just be a wide open patch with no filter. And it was, much simpler than I thought it was. So one thing to keep in mind is always try the simplest solution first, or you can waste a lot of time trying to do something unnecessarily complex.
So, altogether, we got… Oh, let’s take that loop off. Before we play the whole thing, I copied this first one, pasted it, so this is the exact same bending lead, and then I have it come in later. ‘Cause if you hear, when the chorus starts over, ’cause he repeats it a few times in a row, you hear that bend lead come in again, but the first one’s still being held, so that’s what happens right here, take a listen.
And that’s it. Again, you can download the patches for Z3TA+ 2 and the MIDI file so you can figure out what notes are playing. Check out Syntorial, 22 lessons free with the demo, all the links are in the description, and thanks for watching.
In this synth tutorial, watch Joe Hanley, creator of Syntorial, as he re-creates Calvin Harris’ “Let’s Go”, using Ableton Live and various free plugins. You can also download the midi files, synth presets, audio files, session files, and everything else you’ll need to follow along at home. Plugins used:
Welcome! Today we are going to be remaking the beat from “Let’s Go” by Calvin Harris. We’re going to be using all free plugins and effects when it comes to the synths. So, you can download and follow along exactly.
Uh, we have made all the presets, audio files and MIDI files available for you to download. Just click the link at the top of the video. It’ll take you to the Syntorial kickstarter page. Scroll down to the bottom and you’ll see a bunch of tutorials here. Videos, each video will have link above it.
So, find your video, click the link and what you will get is a bounce of the audio, a file with the links to all the plugins to download, Ableton and Reason sessions. For the Ableton users all you’ll need is those free plugins and it’ll be ready to go. And then for those of you who do not have either Ableton or Reason, we’ve got all the MIDI files and the presets for each track as well as the drum audio.
So, you can just bring it all in to whatever software you use and set up the beat there. While you’re at this page, check out Syntorial. It is the ultimate synthesizer tutorial. “Fully interactive training software that’ll turn you into a synth programming guru.” Let’s get started.
Starting with the drums. Right now these tracks for the drums only are audio. I originally made them in Reason. So if you want to get the MIDI, if you want to rebuild with your own samples or just to see exactly what the rhythms are, you can download them with the link at the top of the video.
Breaking it down we’ve got, kick, clap. Clap’s being sent to medium hall reverb. There it is without it. There it is with it. I just put the medium hall on “no return” and then you can send whatever tracks you want to it, which includes the clap. Hi-hat. Tambourine. And at the end of this loop, you got this big crack sound. That is drenched in reverb. Maxed out. And that’s the drums.
Next is the Big Synth from the chorus. We’re going to be using synth one, which is a VST. For those of you who need an audio unit, for garage band or logic, we have presets available for Automat, which is a great free audio unit synth, but for the video, we are using synth one.
Now to start, we need to load an initialized patch that I made, which kind of sets all the values to zero because by default synth one loads one of its patches. And before I push play, I’m going to turn this down because it’s really loud. A little bit up. Okay.
First, we want to switch over to a saw wave, and then we’re going to detune it. This basically doubles that wave form and detunes one of them, so you get this big swirly effect. Next, we’re going to add a sub oscillator, one octave below. We want saw wave. That really adds body to the sound.
We add one more oscillator, as a triangle wave. Here’s what it sounds like by itself. It’s kind of bell-ish. We obviously don’t want that much. We want that much. Next, we want to add some attack using the amp envelope. We keep the decay short, which it already is. I’ll show you what it does.
We bring down the sustain. It adds a kind of abrupt attack to it. We don’t need that much, we want that much. Then to add a tail to it, we increase the release. About here. Then we want to take just a little bit of the highs off. Not too much. So we switch to a low-pass 12dB. And bring the cutoff down to about here. Just a very subtle cutting off of the highs.
Next, to make it even bigger and swirly, we add unison. We want three voices per note. Now, when you do this you have to make sure you have enough voices available because basically, the three voice unison is tripling every note you play and then de-tuning each one. So, if your voice count was way too low, just to show you. See, you’re losing tons of notes.
So, we need to increase ours to the point where we can get all of these notes in. Twenty seems to do the trick. Next, we want to spread our sound and now its covering the whole stereo field. Nice and big. Next we want to detune it more. So, each of these voices detune slightly from the other.
But, we want to do it even more. This kind of makes it more intense. If I really did it, it really starts to get out of tune, so we don’t want to go so far it gets out of tune, but you want to go far enough that you get the kind of intensity you’re looking for. Last, we want to add delay.
We’re going to spread the delays from each other a little more, so you hear that in the left and right channel. You want to increase the number of delays and decrease the feedback. And we don’t want it to be so loud, the delay, so, we bring it down to about there and that’s your sound.
There’s also a bit of reverb on it. I’ll show you what that sounds like. This kind of adds some space around it by increasing it. Its kind of subtle because the delay’s already kind of giving a lot of space, but this just gives it more. And that’s the Big Synth. Now, we have the Synth Bass. This is a real simple synth bass sound. We’re going to be using Tal NoiseMaker, a great free VST/ audio unit synth.
First, I’m going to turn it down a little bit. Oops, too much. About there. Now if I turn the sub oscillator off, all you hear is the main oscillator, which is a saw wave. The sub oscillator is one octave below that and it’s a square wave. That’s where that nice low end is. So, there’s your full waveform sound. Next, we want to add a little bit of tail. Not too much, just a little bit. This prevents it from sounding too abrupt, but also helps it fill up the space.
If there’s some kind of notes trailing off between each note it kind of just fills that low end, which is what this track calls for. Now, we want to set the lowest point of the sound, the roundest part of the sound to here. .43 But we don’t want to start this low and round, we actually want to start bright and work its way down to that.
So, we set the contour to the point where we have to start, and then increase the decay and lower the sustain. So, we bring the sustain down to where the cutoff is, because this where we want the envelope to go and bring the decay up to there.
So, now it starts at the contour and it quickly makes its way down to the cut off. Now, just to make sure that notes that are released early do the same as the decay, we set the release to match decay. So then no matter how you play this patch, really short notes or longer notes, its going to go, the filter’s going to go down from the contour point down to the cutoff point the same way no matter what.
When you use a filter envelope and apply it at this speed, at a really quick decay, instead of hearing the sloping down of the cut off, you’re going to instead almost kind of hear just like a bright attack on the front of the bass sound. That’s kind of what we’re going for. It helps it poke through the mix.
So, with all of the other stuff, Last, there’s kind of a bit of a pitch bend in this. So, we set this all the way so it bends at a full octave and then you can hear it. A at the end of that line. Next, is what I call the Big Noise.
In this track, there’s this sort of noise in the background. This white noise. It’s all over, in the left and right, it’s moving around, and it’s cool because it just fills this sound. It makes it sound like it’s just that more active and big. So, what I’m going to do here, is show you how to make that with a synth. Now right now, Tal NoiseMaker, I’m going to turn it down before I get this going.
Okay, right there. So, now it’s an actual wave form. No sub oscillator and we want to switch this wave form from saw to noise. There you go. Now, that’s the simple sound itself. Now we just need it to sort of drift off. There we go. And we want to get rid of some of the lowness in there because it will fill too much space and make things messy. So, we put on a high pass. In this case, I went with a 24dB high pass.
We obviously don’t want to cut everything out because that would make it nothing. Uh, let’s see here. How low do I want to go? I’ll put it down to about here. And that’s your white noise. It’s the same rhythm as the Big Synth. Hitting at the same time. Next, we want it to be really wide so, we’re going to use a delay widening trick. This is Tal-Dub delay.
Now, right now you can here like, the delays and the tail of it. We don’t want that. Instead, I’m going to show you how to use this just to make the sound wide. So, first things first. Make it wet. A hundred percent wet. We don’t want any damping, we don’t want any resonance.
So, now you really hear those delays. We want to get rid of that. Instead, we’re going to make this manual instead of synced. We’re going to make one channel zero.
So, it’s basically just the noise going through, nothing happening to it. The right one, you want to set, as far as you can without hearing the two separate delays. If you go too small, we don’t want that too far to hear them separate so, we’ll go to about here. Feedback now. This is where it gets tricky. Too low, and you don’t get anything. It gets quieter and quieter and quieter. Too much, whoa, we get a little feedback.
We’ll set it to about here. There you go. Wide noise. Off, it’s in the center, on, and it’s wide. Now last, we want to give it some reverb, so lets turn everything on again. Kind of subtle. Here we go. Here we go. It’s very subtle now. Off. On. I’m going to turn it up so you can really hear it. We don’t want it. It’s more of just a subtle fill in the background. That’s the Big Noise.
All right, last there’s this Bending Noise sound on the fourth beat of every measure. Uh, it could be a sample, but I’m going to show you how to make it from scratch with a synth, a filter, and a flanger. So, start with NoiseMaker and we’re going to turn this down considerably. It’s made with noise, so no sub oscillator and switch this to noise. Very good.
We’re going to add a little bit of attack to it now. I’m gonna to show you how to do that. Bring the sustain down about halfway. Then bring the decay up. So, I don’t know if you could hear that little TSK at the front of it. If I bring the sustain down you can really hear it.
So, it has a little attack on the front of it. We don’t want that much, we just want this much. Now, we’re going to take off some of the highs and lows with the band pass, set it up to about halfway point, good that shapes it. Resonance will shape it even more, give it some kind of mids, make it bite a little bit more. There it is. It makes it kind of cut through. We want to cut off some more lows, just a little bit more subtle cutting to help it really bite through the mix.
So, another high pass and set the high pass to about here. Yeah, it gives it just a little bit of more of edge. And then the flanger is what makes it swirl and bend. This is a stereo flanger. All we need is mono though so it stays in the center. So we send the spread to zero, the gain to zero so it doesn’t make it quieter or louder.
The delay is the most effective part. Right now, if we reduce it, we get less to the grainy metallic-ness and we get more swirl and sweep. Yeah, there we go. Depth, we want it to go really high and really low, so it’s an extreme flanger. So, we bring that depth up. There we go.
And then lastly, we slow it down just a tiny bit. And that, is your Bending Noise. Now, with everything else in. Now, turn it up for a second. I’m going to give it some reverb. Helps it sit in the mix a little bit. I’ll be turning it back down. And that’s the Bending Noise.
Thanks for watchin’! Click the link at the top of the video to download all the stuff you need to make this at home, and check out Syntorial while you’re there.
In this synth tutorial, watch Joe Hanley, the creator of Syntorial, as he recreates the synth lead from “Phantoms Can’t Hang”. Video includes valuable info on layering synth patches, and using sound design to build a track. Don’t forget to download the presets and MIDI files. Plugins and software used:
All right, today we’re gonna go over the synth lead from Deadmau5 Phantoms Can’t Hang. And this is an interesting lead, because it goes throughout most of the track, but it changes, it actually goes through four different stages. The notes stay the same, but the sound itself changes in layers, it’s a really interesting thing.
Before we get started, I just want to quickly tell you about Syntorial. Syntorial is a video game-like training software, that teaches you how to program synth patches by ear. I designed this specifically to give you the ability to do what I’m doing in this video. Take a song you hear in your head, or on another track, and recreate it.
It does this by combining video demonstrations with interactive challenges, in which you program over 700 patches on a built-in soft synth. And you can try it for free the first 22 lessons with our free demo, just click the link that’s popping up on the screen now.
Now Phantoms Can’t Hang. So as I mentioned before the lead goes through four different stages. So we’ll start here. Starts with this sound. It repeats this for a while, and it eventually gets replaced by a more aggressive version. This repeats, and then they add a layer an octave higher. And then they bring in the trance lead.
So we’re gonna start with that first lead over here. This guy. Now. We’re gonna use Synth 1 for this. Synth 1 is a free synth, that you can download the link that’s popping up on your screen now. And it’s available as a VST for Mac and PC, and they just released an audio unit version for you logic users. So just click the link on the screen and you can download it there.
And our first step is initializing it. Now I’ve created this initialized patch. And you can download this patch now, with all these other patches and the MIDI files for this from the link that’s popping up in your screen now. It’s gonna take you to a page with this video and the download link. And when you’re there, you can subscribe to our newsletter and we’ll send you to a new page that’s got this tutorial, along with a bunch of other video tutorials, interactive stuff, all sorts of synth goodies there. So sign up for the newsletter while you’re there.
So we’ve got our initialized sound. It’s a little loud, so I’ll turn it down for now. And you probably hear some reverb. I have a reverb set up as a send effect over here. So that way I can take all these leads, and send them to that reverb. I’m gonna turn it off right now. I’ll come back to that reverb in a second. So now here’s our true raw sound.
First things first, we want a different wave form. We do want the pulse wave, but we want it to be full square width. And then, this sound starts bright when you hit a note, and goes dark by the end of the note. So we’re gonna use a filter envelope to do that.
First, we set our cutoff to the darkest point, the end of the note which is. About. There. But, we want it to start bright. So we use our filter envelope amount. That determines the beginning of our sound, the brightest point. And our sustain, if we turn it all the way down, the filter envelope will take us all the way down to our cutoff. Zero sustain is our cutoff.
So now, if we take this to zero, our sound starts at this filter envelope amount and goes down to our cutoff like this. And we want that downward motion to be quicker, because we want it to really be a nice quick pluck sound. So we’re gonna make the decay faster. So now we’ve created that pluck transient. I’m just gonna turn it up, because lowering the cutoff makes it quite quieter. Let’s go to about there. There we go.
Now, one interesting thing about the actual patch on the Deadmau5 track is the higher notes. These up here, are brighter than these lower notes. Now by default, a low pass filter, it does the opposite. It makes lower notes brighter, higher notes darker. And we can use key tracking to reverse that effect. But in this case, not only we’re going to reverse it to even it out, we’re gonna take it even further, and make the higher notes brighter, the lower notes darker. So I’m gonna crank key tracking. And now our highest note, Is gonna be brighter than our lowest note.
Now unfortunately, this brightened everything. It made our higher notes brighter than our lower ones, but it brightened everything including our lower notes. So we need to compensate for that by bringing the frequency down, the cutoff down. Now, we have, What we’re going for. So before, we had this. The bottom notes sound great, but the high notes aren’t bright enough. Turn this up, bring this down. Now. Just those higher notes got brighter.
And then, we’re gonna add a little resonance, to give it a little bit of point. Pull that sound out, kind of push it out a little bit. Adding a little bit of resonance is a great way to sort of un-flatten a sound. Kind of, make it more present, bring it forward in the mix.
And then, we just wanna cut the note off a little shorter, it’s ringing out just a little too much. So we’re gonna bring our amps to stand all the way down. Now, that’s too much. So I’m gonna elongate the decay. There we go. Now, before it was this. Now it’s. Just took a little bit of that end off. This is a mono patch. And then, we want to spread it. So we turn on unison, and we crank the spread.
Now, like in Deadmau5’s track, the sound kind of moves left and right very subtly, and we’ve got that going on with the spread unison. But, it’s happening kinda fast. That’s a little manic-sounding. So we’re gonna slow it down by reducing the detune amount. Perfect.
Now, we want to bring that reverb back in. So I’m gonna increase this send. I’m gonna overdo it, so you can really hear the reverb for a second. Now, the reverb I’m using is something called ambience. It’s another free plugin, and I’m gonna delete it, and then bring in a new one, so I can design it from scratch. And all I did was one little change. Here it is by default. It’s too short. So I just increase the time. And then, we don’t want it so wet. There we go. So it’s a long reverb, but it’s not really, really wet. It’s just kind of in the distance. Our sound should still be nice and dry up front with this sort of long reverb tail in the background.
Next, we have the little bit more aggressive lead. We’ll come back to that. And let’s initialize it. Here’s our raw sound. Turn it up a little bit, for now. And this one, we’re gonna use a pulse wave too, but we’re not gonna go full square. This too, we want to have brighter notes up high, darker notes down low.
So we’re gonna crank the key tracking ahead of time. And we also want this to start bright, using a filter envelope and get darker. But, we want it to get so dark, that we can’t even hear it. So we wanna use the filter envelope, kinda like an amp envelope as well, we’re gonna use it to cut the sound off. So we’re gonna start at about. This brightness. And if you wanna go all the way down to cutoff, we gotta turn off sustain to zero. There we go. And by the way, we have reverb on this as well, you can hear it in the background. We have reverb on all of these leads. And it’s the same reverb we’re using for all four leads.
And then, we want this to be a little bit longer, give it a little bit more body. It’s subtle. But, it’s there. Make the release the same as the decay. Just gives it a little bit more length. Now, it sounds nothing like it right now. So we’re gonna use filter saturation, which is basically kind of like overdrive. If you push this filter hard enough, it starts to overdrive, distort it in a nice warm way. So listen. That’s where we get our distortion.
Now, he may use an actual distortion plugin overdrive, but when you can overdrive the filter within the synth, it’s nice, it’s usually a nice, warm overdrive effect.
Again we get a mono patch here, just one note at a time. And we’re gonna use unison like we did the last time to spread it. So unison stick with two voices, crank the spread. And then, we’re gonna increase our de-tune just to thicken it a little bit. Usually, the more de-tuned you make a patch, the more thick of an effect you get. We don’t need a lot more.
We don’t wanna overdo it. But, I’m gonna increase it just a little bit. It’s subtle, but it gives it a little bit more action, a little bit of pulsating, a little bit of thickness. And then, I’m gonna bring the volume down. Actually, I’m gonna bring it up. There it is. We’ve already got the reverb on there.
Now, the last difference is the patch in the tracks got a little more oomph, it’s got a little bit more, sort of low mids going on. So I’m gonna bring in an EQ, and you can use any EQ for this. And I’m gonna boost 450. So listen to the difference with and without. With. Without. Just gives it a little bit more of an ooh ooh.
And then, I’m gonna cut off the very bottom. This can sometimes tighten up your sound, and it’s great for mixing. If you get rid of that bottom end that you don’t need, it kind of clears up the mix a little bit. So we’re gonna make it a shelf. Gonna take it all the way down. And there. And then increase this guy so that we just wanna cut, kind of abruptly as you can see. But, we just got to cut this bottom chunk off.
But, we don’t want to affect this bump that we added here. So we give it some oomph and we tighten it up a bit, at the same time. So there’s that sound.
Now, the next sound is actually the same sound, but an octave higher. So all I’m gonna do is, I’m just gonna copy this synth. Move it there. This midi right here, is just the same as this, but it’s an octave higher. So what we get is. That. And then, when you put the two together. Now, there are a couple differences.
For this higher one, we wanna reduce the volume, we don’t want it to be so loud. It’s gotta be the layer, and not the main sound. The lower one’s our main sound. Good. We want it to ring out a little bit longer than the lower one. This is a great trick, if you want a sound that’s quieter, to be more heard, without cranking it up, you just increase its tail. Increase its length, and it’ll ring out just a little bit longer than the other.
So I’m gonna increase the filter decay and release just a little bit. So now, it’s still quieter, but we can hear it much better just by giving it a longer tail. And then, we’re gonna EQ it too. ‘Cause right now, when it comes in, not only do you hear that high end, but it changes the lower patch, listen. It’s harder to hear that lower patch by itself, they’ve kind of blended together.
Now, if that’s what you were going for, this would be perfect. But, we’re not going for that. We want this higher one to be smaller and separate. So I’m gonna cut off a big chunk of the bottom end, using a shelf, turn it down, and let’s go all the way to. About. Here. And fix it. It’s kind of steep. And now, without the high lead. When I bring it in, it’s not gonna change the lower patch. It keeps it more separate. Without EQ. Listen to what happens to the lower patch when I turn the EQ off. Here it is on. See how it changes the character? So in this case, we’re using EQ to separate these two patches, so they sound more distinctly different from each other.
And then lastly, we bring in our trance lead. This one’s gonna have EQ on it too, we’ll delete it for now. Synth one, initialize. Lets bring it up a little bit. This one’s gonna be saw. And then, to get that nice, thick, detuned sound, we use our de-tune right here, and this will double this, oscillator and detune it. Nice, thick and washy.
But, we want the tail, when we let go of the key, to be shorter. We want it to be a little bit more abrupt. So we’re gonna turn our amp release down. And I wanna bring out that top sizzle a little bit more. Since our cutoff’s already at the top resonance, we’ll do that. I wanna bring that sizzle slightly down, so it’s a little less white-noisy, a little more sort of edgy. And then, we’re gonna add some of this saturation, this filter drive, to give it a little bit more aggression. It’s a mono patch. And then, we’re gonna use unison to not only spread it, but to thicken it a little bit. So we’re gonna turn it on, and go for three voices. And add a little bit of thickness by cranking the detune.
This is kind of the background layer, so we’re gonna bring the volume down. Reverbs on it, let’s hear it all together. Now, I’m gonna turn off the high one, so we can just hear the main lead and this trance lead. When the trance lead’s added, we lose some of the body of the main lead, listen. Suddenly, that main lead, you just hear more of the clipping of it, the attacking of it. The sort of, edge of it. But, you don’t hear that ooh, body of it. So that means something from this trance lead’s masking that main lead.
Now, if you remember with this main lead, we boosted 450. So we’re gonna go into the trance, and we’re gonna cut 450. We’re gonna remove that, that chunk of body from this trance lead, and that’ll allow us to hear the main lead’s body much better. So that was 450. And we’re gonna cut it. When you cut, you always want to narrow it a little bit.
So listen to the main lead not the trance lead when I turn this EQ on and off. On. It’s subtle, but that main lead suddenly gets a little bit thinner, a little bit lighter. It loses some of the body when this EQ is off. So again, we’re using EQ to separate the two sounds.
In this case, these three layers need to be distinctly separate. So we use EQ to cut different aspects of them out, so they all play well together. It’s basically a mixing technique that we’re using in the sound design capacity. And that’s it. Thanks for watching.
Through the development of Syntorial I’ve formed some pretty strong opinions when it comes to synthesis. So I figured I’d share them with the world in the form of a Top Ten List. I organized them into a Top Ten List because I once read that people like Top Ten … Read more
In this synth tutorial, Joe Hanley, maker of Syntorial, will re-create Ellie Goulding’s “Lights”, in Ableton Live. Don’t forget, you can download the midi files, synth presets, audio files, session files, and everything else you’ll need to follow along at home. Plugins used:
Welcome. Today we’re gonna be remaking the beat from. Ellie Goulding’s “lights”. I’m using free plugins when it comes to the synths and it’s effects, so regardless of the software that you use, you can follow along exactly.
To download the presets, MIDI files and audio files, just click the link at the top of this video. It will take you to the Syntorial Kickstarter page and scroll down to the bottom. tutorial section, each video will have a download link.
When you download, you will get bounce of the audio, a file with links to all the free plugins, everything you need to remake each track including the MIDI files and AU or VST presets and if you use Ableton or Reason, the full sessions. For Ableton, all you’ll need is those free plugins and everything will be ready to go once you open it.
While you’re at that page, check out Syntorial.It’s the ultimate synthesizer tutorial – a fully interactive training software that will turn you into a synth programming guru. Let’s get started.
Alright, starting with the drums. Now these drums were originally made in Reason and then the audio is bounced and brought into Ableton, so you got your kick audio snare audio, hi-hat audio, etcetera. Included in the downloads are all these audio files as well as the original MIDI from reason so you can either just bring these audio files in the way I did here or you can bring the MIDI file in, get a closer look at the way the rhythms are and then rebuild the drums using your own samples, it’s up to you.
Breaking down the drums we got: a kick, snare, snare, hi-hat, shaker, floor tom, and then a mid tom fill coming up here at the end. And then, two cymbals. It’s the same crash sample, just on different sides, so it starts on the left coming up about halfway in here you hear it again on the right. That’s the drums!
So now we have the bouncy synth, the thing that you hear at the very beginning of the song. The MIDI’s already recorded and you can of course download that, to see what notes are being played and what rhythm. I like to have the MIDI recorded and playing as I program, otherwise you have to play the keyboard with one hand, program with the other and this is much easier. So we’re gonna solo this.
Synth we’re using is TAL Noize m4k3r, nice free synth VS/AU, Mac/PC. So this is the default sound, which is nowhere near what we need. First we need multiple notes, poly. No sub-oscillator. And the shape, it’s like a mallet, a short note so we’re gonna bring the sustain all the way down cause that’s where we want the sound to go as we play, we want to fade to zero and we want that to happen pretty quickly. So we bring the decay to about… here.
That gives us a short note and then when you want a mallet-like sound, you want it to react the same no matter whether you hold the key down or release it, so you make the release and the decay equal and now it responds the same no matter how you play. Um, also the actual sound on the track is a little kinda softer on the attack of it so we raise the attack – a little bit, just to soften it.
Alright, now back up here to the tone. The note’s way too low, so bring it up to here. Waveform is not a saw, it’s a pulse and right now it’s full square but we actually need somewhere kinda in-between. Filter type is 24 dB low-pass. After experimenting with the sound, I found that this other 24 dB low-pass sounded more accurate.
Cutoff we can turn pretty far down to get that nice round tone. And the resonance! The resonance is the key to this sound, this is where we get that very mallet-like percussive sound by cranking the resonance. Just like that. Now it’s starting to sound much more like it.
Key tracking. For those of you who don’t know, key tracking essentially adjusts the cutoff. It raises it as you get higher on your keyboard, lowers it as you go lower. The whole point is that without it, higher sounds will sound duller than lower sounds that will sound brighter, so if you’re playing a part like this where you got high notes and low notes, you want to have key tracking on them to keep a nice, even, rounded sound across the whole part.
That’s your basic sound, we’re gonna turn it down a little bit. That’s your basic synth sound. Now we just need a nice delay. This is the default delay in TAL-DUB, it’s kinda close but not quite right. The timing’s right, you got eight note on the left, quarter note on the right. Damping, let’s see… a little damper. Very common to dampen the delayed sound so that the source sound is kinda bright in front and the delay is a little rounder behind it.
We don’t want any of this resonance, a nice smooth sound. The feedback, which is how many times the delay is….it’s a little long. we’re gonna cut it to about here and we could use a little bit more of that delayed sound. That’s your delay. Let’s bring the drums back in. The last thing is: for this track we’re gonna have a reverb on a synth so that we can just send any tracks we want to it.
This is a Church preset in Ableton but you can use whatever big hall reverb you have in your software. And we’re gonna send a pretty hefty amount to…. you know, cause it will add space and ambiance. And that’s the bouncy synth!
Next up is the bass, we’re gonna be using. TAL Noisemaker again. I’m gonna turn it down a little bit before we start because it’s really loud. Also gonna turn down this sub for now. We are gonna use that but just not yet. First thing is I’m gonna bring up the second oscillator to match the first. So… Turn it down a little bit…and bring the pitch down for the second to match the first.
So now we have two identical waveforms at the same pitch with the same waveform and the same volume. So now, all you gotta do is detune the second one slightly. That gives us that swirling sound, kind of a chorusy effect. That’s kind of the main tone here.
Then we bring the sub oscillator back in to give the low end. There is your bass. Sub oscillator in this synth is a square wave. It’s set that way permanently because that is the most typical sub oscillator waveform. It’s just a sturdy waveform a nice, solid low end. I almost always use square and have to with this synth.
So this is a bright version of the bass. The bass starts bright but then it goes down to a round, it’s like a round sound at the end So, we set the cutoff to where we want it to go. That’s gonna be the darkest point it reaches at the end of each note. Let me bring the contour, which is the filter envelope amount back up to where we want the sound to start.
Yeah so we want them to go from that bright toward that cutoff. We bring the sustain level all the way down to zero, which is the cutoff. And then we raise the decay until…about there. So it starts a little brighter and gets darker. Apparently the key step is resonance. Kinda gives it a wah-ish effect. Whenever you have a filter envelope in use, you can increase the resonance to really show what the envelope does and essentially give it a kinda wah effect.
Now, volume-wise…bring it back up. And that’s your bass sound. Now the only difference is, this is very narrow in the center. In the actual track it’s kind of a wider sound. So, we’re gonna use a delay to widen it.
Now we don’t actually wanna hear all these little delays so I’ll show you how to just make it wide without hearing delay. First, make it wet 100%, we don’t want to hear the dry sound, then we’re gonna ignore these synced values, we’re gonna set the left delay to nothing and we’re gonna bring this one down to about here.
If you bring it too low, you get weird sounds. If you bring it too high, you hear separate notes. So, just right. No damping, no resonance. Feedback: too little and the sound starts to go away. Too much and you feed back, so boom. And there’s your wide bass. Narrow bass. Wide bass. That’s the bass. So, altogether we’ve got:
So now we’re just missing the string sound, the synth string sound- a very bread and butter, common sort of pad used a lot of tracks. Gonna turn it down first, cause it’s gonna get way too loud but if I don’t… ok! So what it sounds like right now is: Single notes, first off, but we’re playing multiple notes so we gotta give it more voices.
No sub-oscillator, that’s a little bit better. Too low so we’re gonna bring this up- oh too high. There we go. Now we want the same swirling effect that the bass had, so we bring on a second oscillator at the same volume as the first. Now the reason the pitch just went up is because when you put two waveforms that are identical on top of each other, it can do some funny things.
Watch as I detune it to get the swirling sound and the pitch will go back to normal. There we go. So there’s our basic sound. Now… We want it to drift off a little bit at the end. So that way when you go from chord to chord, it kinda tails off a little bit.
And right now we’re using a low pass, the whole thing open, but in reality the sound’s got both some of its highs and some of its lows kinda carved off. This means it’s using a band pass- a band pass literally cuts off some highs and lows, so when you put it at about the mid point, you can hear it. It’s not super bright but it doesn’t have a lot of lows either, it’s a nice way of thinning out a sound.
Now we actually want the sound to start bright and get dark kinda like the bass, but we want to go all the way down if you hold the key long enough. So it goes down to nothing but it starts at about there. So we wanna go down to nothing, sustain to zero to match the cutoff and decay up here. Nice.
Now you may have noticed we lost the tail, even though our amp release is still up, it’s no longer tailing off. That’s because when we let go of the key, the cutoff is slamming down super fast cause release is zero. So we bring up release to match our decay. So that if you let go of the key, hold the key, no matter what, the filter’s gonna operate the same way. So there’s your basic sound right there.
Only thing missing is some reverb. Give it a little wet. I’ll show you what it really sounds like. Puts a lot of space around it, we don’t need that much. Bring the volume back to… and that is the entire track.
That’s it! Thanks for watching, click the link at the top of the page to download all the things you need to recreate the track. See ya next time.
