FL Studio Harmless Synth Tutorial

in this video i'm carrying on the fl studio basics series by showing you the harmless synthesizer i have a very simple three-step process to take you from the default sound to some more lush and professional sounds like this pad and also to take you from that default sound and just in a few quick dial turns and clicks to get some nice professional sounds like plucks or this bass the technique is all about simplifying and streamlining the interface because at first the gui is pretty intense and overwhelming but i'll show you how to look past it section it off and just affect the controls that you need so let's jump right in so i've started with harmless loaded up here inside fl studio and i also have an eq that i'm going to use as a visualizer [Music] because it helps us see the various frequencies that i'll be talking about in this video now one of the great things about harmless that i think is also its downside is that every single control is on this interface there's no extra pages there's no extra menus to dive through but this means when you first look at it it's absolutely overwhelming there's a whole ton of dials sliders and whatnots so my method is going to help you sort of cut through all of that noise and just start creating nice sounds the first thing to do is go up to the top right corner and load the default patch this just sets everything back to where we want it and the initial sound is a little bit like this [Music] depending on which octave you play and you'll notice that it sounds a little bit filtered so to open it up i just need to go to this frequency dial in the middle turn that all the way up and now we have our nice open sound and the first part of this process is sound generation shaping the sound and then how many voices do we want the sound to have first thing is this timbre section you get to pick what sort of wave you want now it starts with saw which is probably one of the most versatile and i just start there but there are other sounds you can choose and you can also load your own single cycle waveform but i would just start with the saw there's so much we can do with it initially our saw sounds like this [Music] but we're going to do some more to shape this so if you head over to these controls here you have attack decay release this shapes the volume envelope of the sound for instance if i increase the attack to say one and a half seconds it means that the sound is going to take one and a half seconds to reach its maximum volume and if i were to pull the decay down it's going to pluck away very quickly so depending on what kind of sound you want if you're looking for like a pluck base you might want a very short attack and a short decay but if you're looking to make a nice spacious pad you might want a long attack and a very long decay so i'm going to keep the attack short for now and we've got to sound like this i'm going to explain all of these other controls later i just don't want to get too weighed down with them right now the next thing to do after you've chosen the volume shape of the sound depending on what you're looking for is to go straight over to this unison box here so this immediately chooses how many voices we want so right now it's very mono very thin if i play a single note sounds like it's coming from right in front of you and even if i voice a full chord still sounds very thin so we can just turn the unison order up you can go all the way to nine i find that usually five or six is enough if you want a nice wide sound but just take it up to five or six and see what happens right away we have a nice spacious wide sound there are other controls to do with the unison for instance you can change the style classic blurred uniform i think blurred sounds the nicest it sounds a little bit more mushy to me but that's a that's a sound i quite like right now and you can also adjust the pan so do you want the voices to be spread very wide around your head around the listener or do you want them very narrow so narrow is going to sound like this somewhere in the middle and super wide and you can also change the pitch the phase and the variation of these different voices which is a little bit more advanced and something i want to show you very quickly before we dive into some of the finer controls is this pluck control so this is a special filter that sort of makes it sound like a placket it sort of very smoothly but quickly filters away the high end of the sound and you'll hear the result here so if you're looking to make sort of chunky plucks just sort of start there and see where it takes you so i think this goes quite a long way in shaping the bulk of the sound and that's the first step step two is all about filtering eq harmonic masking and it really involves this section here and also this section up here i'm going to turn the pluck off so this is the sound we have right now this equalizer allows us to cut away sound from various frequencies but what makes it quite special is it actually tracks the notes you're playing so if i play this c it takes away that first harmonic and if i go to number two it takes away that second harmonic and three and so forth up the frequency spectrum as you get higher up it starts notching out bands which you see here but a feature that i think is much more interesting is this harmonic mask so i'll play some notes and turn it on and then i'll explain what it's doing [Music] so this mix control turns it on and you'll see that you've got 1 through 12. i'm just going to reset all of them to their maximum amount i'm also quickly going to turn the unison back to 1 to make this example easier so if i play a c note here you can see all the various harmonics on this display and i'm going to selectively remove the third harmonic the fifth the first and you can choose to just remove them with much more precision than you could with this equalizer this gives you a whole lot of control over the tone and texture of the sound i'm going to keep it off for now but it's something you can experiment with and again this tracks depending on which notes you're playing so it has a lot more flexibility than simply taking an eq and notching out those frequencies along with this feature something that i have to introduce is sub and low harmonic protection so if i again play that c note i can use this sub feature to induce a sub sign an octave below then a harmonic above and another one again there so that's a feature that you can use to add a lot more weight to your sound and i'll explain what this low harmonic protection is along with this filter section here which is much more interesting so if i just get a sound that i like just give me a few seconds just to dial something in let's let's turn that unison back up okay that sounds a bit better to me this is your main filter section so this is the envelope for the filter attack decay this is what the filter is actually doing so what type of filter and the resonance of the filter right now we have a low pass filter and this selects the frequency for the low pass so if i play this chord again this is sweeping out all of those high frequencies because it's allowing the low frequencies to pass through now you can of course choose different filters you've got high pass filters which cut out the low end and only allow the high frequencies to pass through and this gives me a chance to explain the low harmonic protection if i turn this all the way up it means that the lowest note of your chord that you're playing is protected from the filtering so that you can still have a nice solid low end so even though i'm filtering away the low end you can still see it here and hear it and if i turn that off the low end is completely filtered away put it back up it gets through a little bit so this is something you can do to maintain some weight and integrity in your sound design even if you're filtering away quite a lot of the low end i'm going to go back and select a classic low-pass filter over to the left we have the envelope settings for this filter right now it's been static it's just set in one position but now i can use this envelope to make this filter uh swell up and down so say i put the attack to about one second and the decay to around a second as well and just turn the amount up you're going to hear and see the filter open and then close again so this is useful when you want sounds to have that sort of like wobb or pluck effect because you can have quite a short attack quite a short decay and it gives you that sort of that sort of classic wubb sound most of these settings for the envelope type of filter and resonance are very standard across every single synthesizer they're just laid out a little bit different here so this is for instance the shape of the curve where usually you might expect there to be a graph where you can move the points around and this is how you control the resonance of the filter where usually say on an eq you'd expect to just drag a point and change the resonance like that so after you've filtered the sound the way you want which is what we've got in this case the next step third step is just effects really this section down here and usually in a synth this would be hidden behind another page or in a sub menu but it's all just here in front of you now these are very standard so you've got phasers where you can phase the sound and again these ones at the bottom are pretty self-explanatory you've got delay classic ping pong or stereo and although they're simple they actually sound really clean to me so i do tend to use these if i'm using harmless it just saves you loading up some extra effects again reverb you've got different rooms and sizes and decays to choose from sounds nice and with the compression section turning up the mix will also increase the volume of the sound so just be careful with that i'll take you through a sound design example in a moment but that really is the three-step process there's just two little things i have to explain it's really just shaping the sound filtering it and then adding the effects so if you've watched my other sound design series you'll know how to create various different sounds and now using the synth you know which controls to look at when i'm talking about filtering changing the volume shape etc there are just two little things and that's some general settings for the synth up here like the overall volume and pitch there's also this interesting grit control that slightly detunes or tunes up or down various harmonics which can give you quite a metallic sound which doesn't sound good when you want something to be in tune but if you're synthesizing percussion it can give you a really metallic sound if you're sort of playing in the low end it can actually be a really interesting tonal or textural feature so i'm glad they've included that and the final thing to talk about is this lfo in the corner which maybe takes you into a more advanced feature but depends how you look at it almost every control has an lfo feature beside it i'm just highlighting some of them here and this is so that you can control all of these using an lfo which is a low frequency oscillator so what this does is that you select a wave shape and then pick a speed and it's basically like a predetermined automation clip that just goes up and down and up and down in this case following a sine wave but it could follow a pulse so it just turns on and off and on and off with no ramp up and down in between and to give you a practical example if i turn the pluck all the way up so that there's none of it and then i turn the speed up a little bit here i can control the filter frequency using an lfo so currently if i just play one note it's just like that but if i turn the lfo on it's very clear to here and see that it's oscillating up and down along with this lfo and if i make it faster or slower you'll hear the result controlling a filter with an lfo is quite a common example but this synth lets you control almost everything with one of those lfos if you want to but now i want to go through an actual sound design example so we're just going to go to the default patch and let's say for instance we want to create a bass sound so the first thing i'm going to do is with the initial patch just find the sort of octave i want to play in so let's say we're going to be there first thing is to pull the decay of the sound in i want a pluck base i'm going to try with this pluck feature nice so there's a little bit of a click in the top end that i don't want so i'm going to use the eq and just pull out some of the high end just a little bit the next thing i'm going to do is go to the compression let's add some distortion sounds good let's pull a little bit more of that eq out on the top end cool so we're getting there but i want to add a little touch of creative effects so let's go for some classic reverb and turn it all the way down they say you shouldn't add reverb on a bass but honestly a little touch makes it sound a lot more spacious let's increase the unison of our base that sounds a little bit more modern and wide again i might want to tune this with an eq later and make sure that my low end is mono and very solid but for now i've just shown you how you might create a plug base using this synth let's try one more example so default let's say i want to create a pad let's turn the attack up because i don't want my sound to start immediately perfect let's make sure there's a nice release and decay on it so that it fades away gently [Music] a little bit more release hear how it doesn't cut away immediately let's add a dash of reverb this time something big like cathedral wonderful let's add loads of unison let's just go firm let's just max it out nine voices also turn on high quality down here that's uh gonna make a difference to your sound of course sounds good so now we've got a nice evolving sort of textured pad and then of course you can experiment and use this harmonic mask and we get a much more sort of metallic tone to the sound and there's just a lot of ways to enjoy using this synth but my biggest issue with it is that the interface just gives you everything immediately right away which when you start out with this is really daunting but if you just break it down into little sections as i've sort of explained you'll understand where the sound is sort of generated how to shape the sound how to add effects and it's really not so bad to find many more classic and modern synth sounds to recreate please do check out my sound design series so not only do i have that beginner and advanced video but i've also broken down loads of different sounds everything from bases sort of 80s brass synths i've shown you how to make a string section there's all sorts of different synthesizer sounds that you can learn and apply with any synthesizer whether that is harmless serum helm massive whatever you use you'll be able to follow along so thank you very much for watching do let me know what you want to see next and i look forward to seeing you in the next video bye for now

Channel: In The Mix

Views: 179,123

Keywords: FL Studio, Harmless, Synth, Sound Design, how to, music production, fl studio synth, bass, pad, lead, chords, fl studio synths, harmless tutorial, harmor tutorial, how to use harmless, harmless synth, fl studio sounds, tutorial, lesson, in the mix, music production (genre), fl, studio, free, vst, plugin, harmless, harmles, fl studio synth tutorial, fl studio bass

Id: cOkFKrVR9To

Length: 16min 59sec (1019 seconds)

Published: Sat Oct 24 2020