3 approaches to subliminal modulation

hi everyone this is oscar from underdog when you're programming electronic music there's a real risk of sounding too clean too robotic when you're triggering samples on your computer it's always going to be perfectly the same every single time but when a human tries to hit a drum the same way twice it's never going to be a hundred percent the same there's always going to be a slight little change a slight little nuance that's going to make it clear that it's a human hitting that drum so when we're programming electronic music we want to do something similar we want to introduce something called subliminal modulation this means that we want to introduce subtle changes to the sounds that are not dramatic it's more subconscious but just enough to make sure that no two hits are a hundred percent identical so there are many ways to achieve this kind of subliminal modulation and we're going to investigate three of them today let's get into it before we go any further click the like button subscribe to the channel click the little bell icon thank you so much okay technique number one we're going to call this tick tock tick tock just means that two hits of the same drum are not identical so one of them you're going to pitch up a little bit and the other one you're going to pitch down a little bit and maybe you're going to tweak the release time of one of them so that one of them is a bit longer one is a little bit shorter so it kind of breathes one is a little bit tick a lot of the ones a little bit talk so imagine we're gonna we're gonna use this sound now to make it tick tock what we can do is let's load it into a midi track in the midi track we're gonna program just two notes we're going to program here and here now you notice that it cuts off because the release time is really short and i've only done a very short little note in fact what we'll do is we'll automate this release time so show automation in a new lane let's automate the release time to be higher on one of them than on the other but let's put them all a little bit higher so it's something like this [Music] so there we go subliminal modulation what we're going for is something that's almost not perceptible okay and then like i said we're going to pitch one of them up and the other one a little bit down so we're going to go here to controls transpose detune so like transpose does semitones up and semitones down which is a bit too drastic because we don't want this thing to be singing we just want it to be pitching up and down as if the pitch is a little bit unstable so detune is what we really want we're also going to do show automation in new lane and one of them we're just going to pitch up let's say 20 25 or something you hear that so these claps are almost identical except they're not entirely our brain can tell that there's like a tick tock tick tock going on so that was number one number two we're going to call the pulsating filter the pulsating filter is really just a high pass filter that's going to scoop out the low frequencies every now and then of our sound so that it kind of feels like it's breathing contracting and expanding to the beat a good sound to do this with for example is high hats so let's program a quick hi-hat pattern this is a quick hi-hat pattern using the lindrum hi-hat samples very great we've done a little bit of a syncopated groove but after two or three repetitions this is going to start to get stale as well so what we're going to do is we're going to use auto filter on this auto filter has a couple of different modes where it removes all the high end or removes all the low end we want the one where it removes all the low end and we're going to find the point we're going to bring this up to the point where it just starts to affect the sound and then back it off again so it doesn't affect the sound first [Music] so there once i start to bring it up near 5 6 700 it starts to affect the sound so let's leave it down here at 400 and then what we're going to do is we're going to use the low frequency oscillator the lfo which is like a modulation source which will periodically so over time it'll bring it up and down and up and down so we just increase the lfo amounts and we synchronize it to our beat here and let's put it to one bar so that we can hear it pulsating coming up and down [Music] so can you hear the low end being removed there so that you can hear it kind of pulsating pushing pulling coming in and out we might want to do it even more subtly [Music] perfect and then we probably want the rates to be slightly longer than a bar because otherwise it's going to felt feel repetitive again anyway so let's go for three bars [Music] so can you hear that the sound now slightly gets like a little bit brighter and then a little bit darker over time again what we're going for is subliminal modulation not too obvious just enough to get that subconscious feeling that something is evolving and breathing now the third approach is to create a parallel moving layer what does that mean well let's take a very simple sound like a rimshot for instance okay and i'll program in the most basic pattern like every quarter note let's say perfect this is really clearly going to get stale very quickly so what we're going to do in ableton is we're going to use an effect rack to create a parallel chain so the effect rack that we're going to use will have two chains inside of it one chain will allow the dry signal to come through unprocessed just as we're hearing it right now and then another chain is going to have a lot of effects on it and those effects are going to create change over time and that second chain we're going to layer it in with the first one so that together it feels like something is moving let me show you we'll go to audio effect racks choose an audio effect rack this is going to create an empty audio effect rack what we want to do is we want to open it up here with this button and we want to create some chains we want to create two chains and one of them is going to be called the dry signal and one of them is going to be called the movement layer so when the audio hits the effect rack it gets split up into two exact copies of itself it goes through all the effects and then gets added back together so the dry one will leave no effects on it it'll just leave the audio come through unaffected and on the movement layer we're going to put a reverb at 100 wet there we go and now we're going to here so the dry signal plus the reverb signal added together perfect now this reverb signal we wanted to give the impression of movement and when we were designing it we're going to do it a bit exaggerated but then later on we're going to mix it in a more subtle way first of all let's bring down the decay time so that it doesn't sound like a big hallway and let's solo this okay perfect so we've kind of created like a shadow of our dry sound kind of is a layer that sits behind it and now to create movement over that we're going to use one of three effects either a chorus a flanger or a phaser those are classic ones that create these kind of rising and falling sounds let's try with the chorus now to get this characteristic rising falling sound out of the chorus let's try putting the settings pretty high and the rates let's not put it at one hertz let's put it slow so that it slowly rises and falls [Music] did you hear this rising and falling like that let's try putting it in front of the reverb so every single reverb hit now slightly different than the one before and let's layer this back in with a dry sound to hear how together they now slightly seem to move over time you could bring down the volume on the affected layer and then slowly creep it up until you can just about hear something there you go and then you can exaggerate it to taste let's try it with a little bit longer decay time now this was a pretty simplistic one but of course as you can see this parallel processing method can go really far you can start adding in delays you can start to create really intricate layers that just kind of fill the entire sound spectrum make things really stereo have them subtly change over time so the possibilities of this method are really endless now that was three methods to use subliminal modulation if you find that your drum loops are still getting kind of stale try adding in something called polymeters we did a video about that so i'm going to leave that now at the end of the video and just as a last point i want to leave you with a short philosophical clip by a mastering engineer called conor dalton which i found quite inspiring and why he thinks we should be careful not to try to listen to identical audio too many times in a row see what you think the thing with audio recorded audio is that it's really really new technology for our species it's only been around for a few decades and we don't quite know what to do with it yet so it's made us really intrigued and really interested by it but don't forget that audio is literally a slice of frozen time so we've captured time and you can return back to the beginning and back to the beginning and back to the beginning so your ear finds that incredibly fascinating at the start your ear your ear really wants to understand why this time is looping and there's nothing in nature that repeats over and over again identically like there's no two trees that are the same but when we have a piece of recorded music it repeats identically each time we play it and you need to be quite aware of that as a sound engineer i think it's really really really important to realize what happens if you expose yourself to this looped frozen time over and over again your body will start to reject it and attack it and treat it like something that's unnatural because it is unnatural for our dna like it's it's new technology in the grand scheme of our our makeup as humans i mean you might have even had this experience where you are working on a song for let's say you're working on a song for eight hours the first two hours you love it you think the bass line sounds amazing you're really happy about how everything's going you don't see any problems with the audio fast forward another two or three hours you hit the bass line all of a sudden you you think the drums sound dull you you start to attack the song because your brain is desperate for stimulation it's desperate for time to become unfrozen so it starts to see the song as a threat and what happens then is your brain starts to release cortisol and when cortisol comes into your focus you cannot make good decisions because you want to fight or flight you want to punch the computer you want to run away i think it's really really really important to be aware of this early in your career as a certain engineer because your ego will want you to sit in your chair until the song sounds good

Channel: Underdog Electronic Music School

Views: 8,011

Rating: 4.9723182 out of 5

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Id: KOVs5AarmUw

Length: 12min 30sec (750 seconds)

Published: Wed Dec 30 2020

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