Free Vital Synth - Full Tutorial

hello and welcome to the channel today i'm giving a full tutorial for the vital synthesizer i'm going to be showing you everything from how to navigate the user interface generating sounds and changing the wave tables shaping those sounds adding effects and we're even going to do some modulation and a few of the more advanced features but my main goal for this video is that even if you've never used a synth before and you're new to all of this you should leave with a pretty solid foundation feeling very comfortable and confident in this synthesizer so that you can use some of the advanced features in the future so let's waste no time and jump right into it so this is vital and you can run it inside your daw or in standalone mode and i'd highly recommend downloading it and following along with me in this tutorial firstly let's get familiar with the interface so if it's the wrong size drag from the bottom right corner and simply fluidly resize it like this or click on the vital logo in the top left and choose a different percentage here we will of course be designing our own sounds in this tutorial but one of the quickest ways to get started is to just left click up here where it says initial preset and just start browsing different presets for inspiration and ideas especially if you're brand new to the synth this is the best way to get a feel for what it can do and you're going to have different presets depending on which version you have [Music] let's go to keys start playing interesting and exciting sounds without having to do any of the complicated stuff yourself however that's what we're going to get into in this video so if you click up here where there's these three bars you can initialize the preset do this at any time if you've messed up your sound and you want to start again it'll take you back to this initial sound the sound output of the synth can be controlled here so just adjust this until it's a good level for you you don't want to really be clipping the output and if for some reason your computer is struggling maybe you've got a lot of instances open a lot of plugins go to the advanced tab and change the oversampling to one or two my cpu seems to handle vital really well but everybody else's mileage may vary let's go back to the voice tab now i know that there is a lot on this interface and it looks really confusing but we're just going to take it step by step so the voice tab is where all the sounds in vital are generated and there's only four places that can generate sound so oscillator one is where you generate sound there's also two and three down here to turn them on you just select these gray dots and left click these are all identical it just allows you to layer and stack sounds in a really interesting and unique way and then there's also a sampler down here where you can play either a noise sample or any sample that you want you can just drag and drop into there there's also loads of different samples to choose from so i'm going to turn these off for now we're just going to look at one oscillator the oscillators are really the foundation of your sound so it's important to get this bit right we start with this sawtooth wave which sounds like this but there are loads of different waves to choose from if i scroll through here [Music] and they all sound a little bit different you can see in this menu there's lots of different waves to choose from depending on the edition or version of vital that you have i've just chosen a different wave table and i want to show you this position slider because this dramatically affects the sound as well and if i go into 3d mode you can see that there's lots of different slices of this wave table there's lots of different positions to scroll between and this is why so many producers obsess over wave tables it just gives you so much sonic capability this is where you really start the tone the timbre of your synth so making sure that you have high quality wavetables is a really important place to start i've just opened my file explorer because i want to show you how to drag and drop your own wavetables so i have this analog wavetable here and it just gives you the option for wavetable vocode or pitch splice wavetables a good option for this and i'll let you hear what this sounds like and seeing that in 3d you can just see there's lots of different positions on this wave table i'm going to go back to something more simple which is just the basic shape because that's all we really need for this tutorial and i'm going to select the middle position which is this sawtooth wave on the left are all the basic settings and on the right are some more interesting ones so we have the level here for each oscillator which is not the overall output gain of the synth it's just the level of this oscillator we have pan to go from left to right at any time if you double left click a dial it just snaps back to its original position then we have the course pitch here where i'm adjusting this in semitones so minus 12 takes it down an octave plus 12 up an octave the fine tune here which goes from minus 100 to 100 so it gives you a range of uh two semitones in total one down and one up below these we have a little uh thing about the signal flow so right now it's saying where does this oscillator want to go so do we want to send it to filter one the effects do we want to send it directly out of the synth and right now i'm going to send it to filter one but you might be wondering where is this filter well it's grayed out just down here there's two of them filter one and two so if i turn filter one on now you might be familiar with filters it basically just filters away some of the sound so in this case the orange is what's allowed to pass through and the black here is what's being filtered away so the top end is going to be filtered away let's take a listen hear how it sounds a lot more smooth and now more high ends being added so we're going to come back to the filter in just a moment but i will set it just here because it makes the sound a little bit more pleasant to listen to it's not quite as harsh and uh brittle let's go back to the oscillator and the right hand side because this is where things get really fun unison we can add a lot more voices so this is just one saw right up the middle let's increase the unison voices [Music] now we have a nice stereo and wide sound there is a little bit too much detuning and you can control the detuning here so less is going to sound more cohesive more is going to sound a lot more detuned but also wider let's take a [Music] listen there are more advanced unison controls but we'll deal with those in the advanced tab later you can also adjust the phase of the wave but for now i just leave that alone especially if you're new to this these two dials underneath however dramatically affect the sound we have the wave morph and the spectral morph let's take a look at the wave more first turning it doesn't do anything you have to select a mode so there's lots of different modes to choose from including some frequency modulation and ring modulation but for now if i just choose a mode like squeeze you can see that the wave shape is being altered and this also adjusts the sound let's take a listen so in this position it's a little bit closer to a square wave and if i choose a different one bend sync formant so as the name suggests this is just morphing the wave makes it sound a lot more unique but this one here spectromorph is very interesting this really messes up with the harmonics i'll choose a mode let's just start with harmonic stretch [Music] let's choose another one smear let's choose spectral time skew so we have a completely different sound now go back to the original one so these two controls especially when modulated later they can add incredible sort of dimension and i guess unique character to the sound but let's just keep going with this basic shape for now you've noticed that when i hit a key here i'm playing with a keyboard but you can audition sounds just at the bottom here when i hit a key the sound starts right away and you might notice this animation on envelope one so envelope one is the volume or amplitude envelope for this oscillator and for the other oscillators as well we have time along the bottom and we have volume from low to high along this axis here you can click and drag points or you can adjust their various parameters down here but this basically creates a shape for the volume to follow so this means that the volume starts small it takes a little while to get to the top it decays a bit and then when you release the key it decays quite quickly so depending on what you want if you want a pluck say you're trying to design a pluck base you might want to start with a shape like this whereas if you were wanting to make a nice lush pad sound you might want a nice long attack you can zoom using this zoom control at the top right or you can just scroll with your mouse wheel i'm going to use a shape like this for the rest of this tutorial because i think it's quite versatile but really there are endless possibilities with the sounds you can create from this synth so don't worry if you're looking for something in a different genre the synth can definitely do it let's go back to the other oscillators now two and three they're both exactly the same as oscillator one it just gives you a lot of opportunities for layering and adding more to your sound so you can choose a different wave shape or a wave table for each oscillator just be careful when layering right now this is set to go through filter two i want to send it through filter one along with the rest of my sounds so do what's right for your sound i might want to layer a saw wave at one octave below which is 12 semitones but this time i'm not going to add any voices of unison so i just want an octave down with one voice so let's take a listen it adds a lot of thickness and fullness to the sound without with i can just adjust the level there so this just gives you lots of opportunities for layering final thing i want to show you is this sample here right now it just plays white noise but you can load any sample into here literally just drag and drop from your desktop and there's also lots of other sounds to choose from whatever sort of takes your fancy and this is great because often uh patches can sound quite digital um sometimes a little bit too digital to clean layering a little bit of noise underneath your oscillators at a low level can often make things sound a little bit more analog a little bit more warm and friendly but you've really got to you know use your ears and set this to taste it's also good if you have attack samples so transients for the starts of kicks or snares or very percussive sounds you can load in a percussive transient sample here and play it along with your oscillators and it can really add a whole lot of snap and impact to your sounds and just like the oscillators you can control the pitch where you want to send this sample level pan and a few other options such as do you want it to play and then play in reverse or do you want it to keep looping do you want the pitch to change as you go up the keyboard so there's some quite specific controls there but let's keep this moving i want to go to the filter now because i briefly introduced the filter with this oscillator but there's a lot more good stuff to go through filters don't just roll off the top end of course there's lots of different filters to choose from left click up here you've got analog filters ladder digital diode comb filters these are really interesting let's take a listen [Music] so you can do all sorts of stuff and really mess up your sound there's also different steepness 12 db 24 and i'm sure they'll be more added in the future to change from a low pass to a high pass now it's cutting out the low end instead of the high end to change the resonance or cut off you can simply drag inside this graph and move your mouse up and down or you can control the resonance at the side more resonance is going to sound like this [Music] it gives you that sort of whoosh effect and less resonance is more transparent i would say there's also opportunity to drive the filter which adds in saturation i don't know how much you'll hear it on this particular sound oh no you do actually hear it quite a bit this just adds a little bit of saturation the mix just allows some of the original sound to get through [Music] and key tracking is a really interesting feature so what this does is if i turn it to the right now when i play a low key the filter opens up just a little bit and if i play a high key the filter opens up a little bit more so i hope you can see that there if i put the cut off down and play a very low key the filter is quite closed if i play a high key it's more open i tend to put this in reverse so that when i play a low key the filter is quite open and then as i go up the keyboard the filter closes off and this means that when you place stuff very high on the keyboard it doesn't sound too harsh but this depends on what you want in your sound design so don't uh don't just copy what i'm doing by any means i want to move quickly onto the effects and some of the stuff in the advanced tab but there's just a few more boring things i need to cover first down in this bottom corner these are sort of like housekeeping stuff uh voices polyphony so this allows you to have more voices basically being able to play more keys and kind of hearing more sound out of the synth you want to increase this if you don't want like large chords to be cut off by playing a new note but remember that a lot of the greatest synths in history only had a couple of voices so you you know more is not necessarily better the bend control sets how many semitones up or down the pitch wheel will adjust a note by so if i play a note and push the pitch wheel up and down that's just two semitones up and down but if i push this to 12 that's going an octave up and down around that center note so depending on how you perform with your keyboard definitely uh set that accordingly velocity tracking so right now no matter how hard or soft i play the keys the sound always comes out the same if i turn this up now playing soft will be a quiet sound playing hard will be a loud sound so i just have a little bit more control you can also set this in reverse so that playing soft makes a loud sound i don't really know why you'd want to do that but you know it lets you do it there spread is the overall stereo spread of the synth so this is mono very thin sound is like it's coming from right in front of you this sounds like it's coming from all around your head remember that wider is not necessarily better there's a lot of sounds which are a lot more focused and cohesive and central and that makes them sound better a few things down here you can glide from one note to the next and you can set that to be always on you can choose legato playing and also change the slope of this glide but i know that these are slightly more advanced or they're very specific to how you want to play the synthesizer and now we can get into some more effects which is where the fun stuff really starts i will be going over more about these lfos and envelopes so don't worry we're not just skipping over them they're just a little bit more advanced and i want to start layering on some cool effects so up at the top tab here effects you can turn on these just by pressing the buttons here the sound enters at the top and it hits each plugin and then the next one so it's not hitting all of them at the same time and going sort of right to left it's going from top to bottom i'm going to turn off some of these so that we can approach them one by one so we have chorus again these are sort of the industry standard controls you would expect but i do like the interface it really makes it nice and easy to dial in a good sound we have a multi-band compressor is a little bit like ott i probably shouldn't say that but it does look a bit like that you can change this from multiband mode to single band i tend to like the single band thing that's unique about this is that the thresholds and ratios are adjusted within here and here so it does take quite a little bit of i guess a fiddling around to dial in a good tone but when you're just doing sound design the controls are similar to all other compressors so if you want to learn how to use compression check out some of my other videos the delay plugin is really nice because it shows you the feedback and the mix on this little display here so if i change the delay frequency to quarter notes you can see how many decays there will be increasing the feedback we'll just keep these going forever pretty much and then you can change it between of course mono stereo ping pong where the delays go from left to right you can also filter those delays to turn off an effect you uh press this button here but if you simply want to bypass it you can click here and it will just remain grayed out until you want it again then you can press it there if i load up a distortion you can change the order of the effects very easily by just left clicking and dragging above or below in the chain and you can move these in any order you like but you can't load up more than one of the same effect so you can't have two different delays loaded up after each other again with the distortion you've got lots of different types of distortion drive mix filtering exactly what you'd expect same goes for eq it's just a classic sort of parametric equalizer i suppose a slightly hidden feature would be these buttons up here so you can choose low cut high cut band in the middle or you can just adjust these to get these uh sort of shelving or peaking filters instead so often on patches i'll roll off a little bit of the low end and then maybe add a small boost somewhere that i really want to accentuate a frequency you have another filter just in case two of the filters down here weren't enough you can now filter everything in your effects chain as well flanger and phaser are really interesting these mess up your sounds like this so in some ways they sort of thin them out um but they just make everything sound fazey a little bit wrong i find that if you're trying to make a sound a little bit more warm and a little less digital adding a dash of chorus and then either a bit of flanger or a bit of phaser i think it can go quite a long way in making it sound a little bit more analog and a little bit more warm and then finally the reverb this is one of my favorite effects there's so much control but it also sounds really really good it's such a lush reverb and you can cut some low end away cut the high end away there's all the stuff you'd expect you know gain size pre-delay everything you'd expect a reverb to be and i like that this one really does sound good and and i could say that for all of the effects to be honest they're not just added as an afterthought each of these effects sort of stands up as a good plugin in its own right and it might be cool to just have this reverb in standalone actually i'd probably just use it in my daw anyway it sounds really really nice so that's a quick look at the voice and effects tab but you're probably wondering what this matrix tab does and also what's going on with this advanced tab so to find out about the matrix we actually have to go back to the voice tab at the moment our sound is quite static so when i play and hold nothing's really changing nothing's being modulated you know we're not changing the panning we're not changing the filter the units and voices as the patch evolves and this is what you use these other envelopes and these lfos or low frequency oscillators for the first way that i want to achieve some modulation is using an lfo so this when i play a note this just keeps oscillating you can see the graphic just shows that it's going from low to high to low and back again so i want to link this lfo to one of the parameters and let's just choose the cut off to link these two together i just hover over here till i see these four arrows left click and everywhere that's green is a place that i can connect this to but i'm going to choose the cutoff here i'm going to play some notes because i can audition this before releasing the key and that's what i want it to do so now if i release the left key it's been connected and you can tell it's been connected because there's this circle here saying lfo1 and on lfo 1 there's the circle saying filter 1 cut off this circle controls the amount of modulation and also the direction so if i make it small the filter just opens and closes a little bit but if i make it bigger [Music] it opens and closes a lot if i increase the frequency [Music] or lower it and now you can probably imagine the different ways that lfos can bring movement and rhythm to a sound because you don't just have to have it set up like this there's all these different patterns you could choose you could choose [Music] crazy stuff like this [Music] so in its current setup this just starts at the original cutoff position it goes above the cutoff then back down to the cut off but if you want it to act on both sides you can right click and select make bipolar and now you can see that the green bar goes on both sides of the cutoff and this is also controlled in the matrix so let's go to the matrix tab and you'll notice that this has been added so the source lfo1 is modulating this destination filter one cutoff the amount slider here is exactly the same as that circle you can see them both move at the same time [Music] and make bipolar is just here so if you don't want to drag and drop envelopes and lfos you can simply select them here as a source i could say i want envelope 2 to modulate anything i want it to modulate let's say oscillator 2 the level of oscillator 2. to remove this just click here and set it to nothing so the matrix is really nothing to be scared of it just gives you more control and lets you see all of the different modulations that you have in place and if i show you some of the more complicated patches from my own sound bank which is available in the description shameless plug you'll see that there's quite a lot of modulation set up all over the place for various effects and oscillators so without this matrix tab this would be far too much for me to keep in my head and the patch would be impossible to stay on top of i'm going to go back to initialize the preset and create the sound that we just had and something that i want to show you is setting up an envelope now to control the filter cut off so i'm going to do the same thing dragging the envelope onto the cutoff and this time i'm going to shape it a little bit like this and now this envelope is going to control how this cutoff opens up so the filter will open up and then rapidly close again and if you set a filter 24 db this can be a great way to add some pluck to the sound as well the take home message about modulations is that you can use the envelopes or lfos to modulate pretty much anything you could use an lfo to modulate the detune amount of this you could use an envelope to control the level pan pitch anything you can think of as long as it's lit up in green you can modulate it and this is where you can spend literally hours in sound design patches just losing yourself having a lot of fun so do experiment around with that there's uh of course a few more features of lfos to look at but you'll discover this all in your own time you can change the mode so that instead of being in time with your key playing you can sync it to the bpm of your daw or you can have an lfo just act like an envelope so instead of repeating it just cycles once and then it's over so of course there's lots of little things to discover like that but they're best discovered just by loading it up and playing around with it these two random controls down here as you play you'll notice that they have this sort of random but lock to the tempo modulation and again using a random parameter to adjust something let's say let's just say the pan of this oscillator i'll make it bipolar and just have a little bit now my pan is being subtly adjusted by this random parameter here and i can increase the tempo or slow it down of course you can sync this to your daw there's lots of different types of random noise and there's two different random generators to choose from which is an another little fun trick here all of these tabs here this is to do with how you play your keyboard so for instance you can link the velocity of how hard you hit a note to any of the parameters so you might say okay as i hit a note harder i want to detune my patch a little bit more as i hit a note harder i want the drive of the filter to increase so i'm going to link the velocity to the drive and now if i play a note soft it's here if i play a note hard it drives a little bit all these things add personality and character to your patch and this is also where the mpe capabilities of the synth appear if you have one of those sort of crazy rolly keyboards or whatever the pressure slide all of these different features of your playing can be used to modulate parameters in the synth which is a very forward thinking feature for the synth to have i need to quickly cover these macros which are not so important when you're just starting out what these let you do is link lots of parameters back to one dial so i might say i want to link the cutoff i want to link the number of voices of unison and the phase all to this one dial and now they all move together depending on how you've set them up i've done this in lots of my different patches so for instance i choose this respace i've got a brightness control which opens the filter [Music] i have another control for distortion i've got one that adds reverb and this is just a nice way to control lots of effects without having to dive back through all of these different tabs i'm just going to choose a different preset this pad because i want to show you this advanced tab and it's quite a nice sound to listen to firstly we looked at this with the over sampling for the quality of your cpu struggling turn it down a little bit but you also have an analysis graph so you can see what's going on and more options for each oscillator so you can turn on high res wavetable and note tracking if you don't turn on note tracking then the synth isn't really sensitive to the pitch you play every key behaves the same and then you've got lots of different options for the unison so the most important one is the stereo unison i would say so this is the voices of unison are right now wide or they're thin [Music] so i'd keep them nice and wide and then the unison blend do you want there to be one voice in the middle and the unison to be quiet or do you want it all to be blended together there are other options for table spread spectral spread and distortion spread these are a little bit more advanced but what the table spread does is that it spreads the unison voices to a different part of the wave table which adds just a whole lot of variety to the sound and on this patch it's not so noticeable the spectral spread does a similar thing if you have a spectral mode a spectral morphing mode selected it it pushes the unisons to a different point in that spectrum morph which again can sound really crazy if you have that set up and then the distortion spread does a similar thing with the distortion these are really what i would call like very advanced features if you're very deep into your sound design they're great to have but they're not essential for getting the basics down you can also control how the unison voices itself so right now we have typical unison but if i play one note you could have say a major chord be created by those unison voices or a minor chord that's just one note on the keyboard or all of these other options unison is by far the most common and detune range just allows you to get a whole lot more detuning or a lot more fine control over that detune so that really is all of the main features of this synth cover there are a thousand smaller and more advanced features i could go into in the future but this video will just be hours long if i do all of that i know that that was a ton of information to take in in a relatively short period of time so to wrap this up what i'd say is feel free to re-watch sections of that video but more importantly just try to get stuck in with the synth and do watch my other sound design videos on youtube although i've been using other synthesizers and some of them mainly serum everything i do in serum can be copied on this so often the best way to learn a synth one once you have the basics like this the best way is to just get stuck in and start designing sounds one by one that really is the most effective way to learn so thank you very much for watching i do hope you enjoyed it and let me know what you want to see in the future bye for now

Channel: In The Mix

Views: 239,523

Rating: 4.9771466 out of 5

Keywords: vital synth, tutorial, vital tutorial, synth tutorial, sound design, vital full tutorial, beginners, sound design for beginners, vital synth tutorial, sound design tutorial, how to synth, in the mix, music production, best synth, best free synth, best synthesiser, vital sound design, how to use vital, matt tytel, vital vs serum, vital unison, vital pitch glide, vital filters, vital fx, vital matrix, expalined, vital advanced tab, vital wavetable, vital spectral morph

Id: 7qQX6YGBQEA

Length: 30min 14sec (1814 seconds)

Published: Sat Nov 21 2020