How to learn any synthesizer

hey everyone this is oscar from underdog and today i want to teach you how to use any synthesizer whoa whoa whoa whoa that's a big claim right oh my god every synthesizer how can you say that well realize that a 90 percent of all electronic music gear out there uses the same controls the layout is just often different but the architecture behind it is very often the same so today i want to refresh what that architecture looks like i want to offer you a synth workout like a checklist of how to get familiar with any sin so you can immediately feel at home when you are presented with a new synth and three at the end i just want to do a bonus sound design tutorial a little advanced synthesis technique more about that later so without further ado let's go into chapter one a recap of the theory before we go any further like the video subscribe to the channel and consider signing up for one of our classes on underdog brussels we are an online music school not just a youtube channel okay so the theory how does any synthesizer even work well most synthesizers follow the logic that's called subtractive synthesis it means that you have a sound that's a bit overwhelming and too big and then you cut away from that sound to make it work in your song i did a longer video that explains this slower in more detail so check that one out if you have the time otherwise i'm just going to recapitulate it here real quickly the basic function of every synthesizer works like this you have an oscillator that makes a big sound that oscillator then goes into a filter which shapes that sound to be a less impressive version of itself and then that filter runs into an amplifier which shapes the volume of the sound the amplifier is the last stage after that it comes out into your ears so just three stages to think about really there's the oscillator the filter and the amplifier whenever you hit a key on your keyboard a few different things happens first of all the oscillator changes its pitch to correspond to the key that you're pressing then the amplifier and the filter both change in response to that to let some more of the sound through they do this using envelopes envelopes are just slightly more complicated ways of providing an on off switch it's a gradual on and a gradual off switch to give any envelope its shape you just need to understand four terms which is attack decay sustain and release if you understand those four terms you can shape any sound by controlling the way its amplitude or its loudness evolves over time and how its brightness or darkness evolves over time thanks to the filter this is it this is 90 of all synthesis done right now the only other theoretical thing that's worth knowing is that you can also include something called an lfo which is a low frequency oscillator which is just a signal source that slowly evolves over time and you can map it to any parameter in your synth so that you can give it some movement usually you'll map it to the filter to slowly open and close the filter in a more organic way overall this is what the diagram looks like you can print this off hang it above your bed it's all the theory you need to know to get started with synthesis now let's move from theory to practice and i'll show you if you're presented with a new synthesizer how to find out where all these controls are let's jump into ableton [Music] okay so in practical terms there are just a few controls that you need to find on your synthesizer it's not an endless list of controls it's a very manageable list so let's just go over them as a checklist okay first you find your oscillator on your oscillator you want to be able to select the oscillator's octave and also what waveform it's generating different waveforms influence the sound at the source so it's worth trying out sawtooth waves square waves anything like that and that's it at first that's all you need to know about oscillators then find yourself the filter the filter has a cutoff frequency it has a resonance amount how resonant is that filter a more resonant filter kind of goes more like rather than baobao it's more nasal sound then how much does the envelope affect the filter whenever you hit the key on the keyboard how much does the filter open and close be influenced by the envelope so that's usually just described as an envelope amount and then you find the envelope that's affecting the filter and you look at the adsr of that the attack decay sustain release if you got that your filter is done we can move on to the next thing the amplifier also very easy amplifier is probably the easiest one it just has attack decay sustain release it's a volume control then on your synth what's worth checking out is what does it sound like with reverb and delay maybe they're already built into the synth you can check that out what other built-in effects exist try them all out and see if you can find an lfo somewhere and make that lfo influence the filter cutoff and try then speeding up and slowing down the lfo rate to make it go faster and slower then feel what everything sounds like when you play low on the keyboard when you play high on the keyboard when you hold a long note when you play a bunch of short notes if you've completed this little workout you now basically get the synth you understand it now all you've got to do is use it so to try using it try making a few different synthesizer formulas a few that i could suggest are make a warm sustained deep bass line make a resonant 303 acid sound make a plucky lead sound and make a long sustained atmospheric sound with a long attack and a lot of reverb so this is your basic synthesizer workout it's how you get familiar with the controls of a synthesizer a lot of modern flagship synths can do a lot more than this you can map anything to anything you can make anything change anything you can create super complicated sounds however when you're just learning the beginning of synthesis consider finding yourself a slightly more limited synthesizer which can still produce powerful sounds and get intimately familiar with the controls on a limited synthesizer and then when you're confident with that consider then moving on to another synth that has other options that you desire to find a limited synth that works for you all you've got to do is look in modern history to see what the artists that you respect have been using and a lot of them let's be honest have been using a limited set of classic analog gear some iconic synthesizers that you can get in plug-in formats today a good example of this is roland whose iconic sounds have influenced dance music from the very beginning if you look at the wikipedia page of almost any roland product you're going to sadly see the words it was a commercial failure a lot of the roland synthesizers that were implemented back in the day didn't match the expectation of the market at the time and so they didn't have commercial success however later on they were reimagined or should we say rediscovered by dance music pioneers who put them to good use creating electronic music that we know and love today thankfully roland has also moved into the 20th century or are we in the 21st century luckily roland has kept up with the times and have produced digital versions of their analog synths so we can use one of these iconic models to learn the basics of synthesis and sure these synths can't do everything right they can't do everything that the most modern sins can however they can do most of it and the most important stuff of it so use them to learn so let's do it right now on the roland sh-101 this is a nicely limited synthesizer it's a bit raw and that's why we like it so imagine you jump into a synthesizer you open up a new interface like this and you don't recognize any of the controls don't panic remember the basic architecture we're looking for an oscillator a filter and an amplifier and really the key to that is looking for the letter o f and a and here you can see that there is the vco the vcf and the vca that stands for voltage controlled oscillator voltage controlled filter and voltage control amplifier because that's how it was implemented electrically in the analog gear so the terminology has kind of followed its way into the digital domain if you see under the vco the oscillator section there are a couple of controls that relate to the oscillator then you've got the vcf some controls for the filter and the vca some controls for the amplifier just the regular three parts that we saw in our subtractive architecture pretty simple right so if i hit a few notes on the keyboard you're going to hear something like this now this is a very high shrill intense sound and one of the things you can do on the oscillator is move down the octave cool [Music] all right and then the other thing in our checklist was to change the waveform and close to the oscillator you can see here a couple of waveform shapes you can see square waves sawtooth waves and something called sub oscillator let's turn everything down that we don't want and just turn up the sawtooth wave sounds pretty good to me great that's everything we need to know we now understand how the oscillator works here let's move on to the filter in the filter you can see here that there is the cutoff frequency of the filter so we can close this to make the filter sound darker [Music] so we can change the resonance of the filter to make it more nasal [Music] and here is the parameter called env which just means envelope amount so how much does the envelope affect the filter off so here we've set it to the maximum so the envelope really opens up the filter quite far now down here you can see adsr attack decay sustain release just like we saw in our training how long does it take the filter to open and to close so let's program something like a little plug sound by moving down the sustain and moving up the decay a bit [Music] so as you can now see every time that i hit the key the filter opens up and closes again with very high resonance which makes this kind of squelchy sound pretty nice but with this we have understood everything that we need to understand about filters sweet let's move on to the amplifier even simpler under the amplifier the vca there is just the adsr envelope and we're good to go so we keep the sustain up and maybe we give it a bit of release so that the sound doesn't cut off when we let go of the keyboard simple now we're done now let's look at effects how about when we add some reverb and some delay to this synth so [Music] pretty cool pretty cool suddenly we get a much richer camera and something specific about this synth is that there's also a bit crushing effect which gives this gnarly digital noise check it out pretty weird pretty weird uh if you like it weird this is a godsend now i've turned down the reverb and delay and set all the settings a bit more towards the medium and i want to show you the lfo the lfo is here on the left it's called modulator in this case it's often called somehow modulation source or something like this and what we're going to do is we're going to map it to the filter we're going to set this thing here with vcf we're going to set it up and we're going to see what happens you see how on a regular basis now it opens and closes and we can now move the rate of the lfo [Music] up and down you can speed these things up and down amazing the last thing that i think you might want to see in the synth is the portamento or glide function which just means that it takes a longer time to get from one node to another especially in monophonic synthesizers like this one where you can only play one note at a time glide is a really cool feature so you turn this up and then you play higher [Music] notes there we go we've completed the synth workout i now feel like i understand how the synthesizer works and i can get pretty much the basic synth patches out of it let's really quickly make the four synth recipes that i was talking about the sustained low base what we need is a low note [Music] let's say that sounds about right let's bring down the filter let's create a little plucky start of the sound so bring it down like this [Music] love it and then keep the release open and make the sustain of the filter not completely zero so there we go [Music] pretty sweet sustained bass line done next sound let's re-initialize the thing next sound is a squelchy acid baseline all we need for that is to play a kind of a medium pitch let's play this yeah and bring down the frequency again make it like a pluck but make it really resonant so here we go cool there you go acid synthesizer pretty much ready a simple pluck sound let's reinitialize play it relatively high make sure that the filter also set is set to a pluck sound kind of like kind of nice a little bit of release bit of delay [Music] perfect little pluck sound now let's reinitialize for the last one which is the long drawn out long attack long reverb atmospheric sound so it would sound like [Music] something like sounds about good huge reverb huge delay [Music] with a little bit of movement maybe [Music] there we go and cool that's our four synth recipes done there are still a lot more synth recipes in the world but if you can do those four you understand how your synthesizer works now from here where do you go next what other synthesizers offer which advantages well there are a few obvious ones that we need to talk about first of all many synths offer multiple oscillators with multiple oscillators you can detune them against each other and that creates beautiful new possibilities for synth recipes like the super saw the hoover and the reese baseline those are really common techniques that you want to be able to do on your synth probably as well then this was a monophonic synthesizer you probably also want to be able to have access to a polyphonic synthesizer where you can play multiple notes at the same time that allows you to make chords that allows you to create harmony and do slightly more complex things more advanced synths also have more complex routing abilities so you can route the lfo to pretty much anything that you like you can have all really complicated things working either through patching cables like in you he's basil or using something like a mod matrix on ableton's wavetable or pigments mod matrix a lot of synthesizers that are called wavetable synths they work like this but for the oscillators they have these really gnarly options that create really weird waveforms like human voice waveforms and things like this pretty cool to play with those there are scenes out there that are called fm synthesizers but actually they take us a little bit away from this architecture so let's not talk about them right now that's maybe for a specialized video the same goes for things called physical modeling synthesizers they kind of simulate how you hit an object with a stick also a bit too outlandish for this tutorial right here do a little bit of research about what exact machines your musical heroes have been using because some essential sounds are really associated with a particular piece of gear like for instance the roland 303 acid baseline or the korg m1 synthesizer and sampler having a synth like this in the physical domain so actually having a real synth in your hand with with really like seductive buttons to turn is very very fun and a good workflow thing to do and certainly lets you appreciate the nuances of how these parameters work well together but it's not essential because also a lot of the digital synths sound as good as the analog equivalent now i told you in the beginning there was one advanced technique i wanted to show you so let's get into it really quickly it is the concept of self-oscillating filters if you turn up the resonance on a filter so high really really high that it's screaming what you can really do is just turn off all your oscillators and leave the filter to scream as if it was its own oscillator weird right but let me show you here so i reinitialized everything and what we do is this is what the regular oscillator sound like i can turn down all of that all of the oscillators so no sound is coming through now when i try to play notes but what we're going to do is we're going to set the envelope of our filter to zero we don't want the envelope to affect the filter frequency cutoff at all we want to bring down the frequency to somewhere in the middle and then we're going to turn up the resonance until it starts to scream now do be careful a little bit with your ears on this one because the volume can jump very quickly so let's try it there we go now when i move the frequency around it's pretty wild right now if we set this keyboard modifier what will happen is that the frequency cut off will follow our keyboard up and down the keyboard and so we can play notes so check this out so this filter is now acting like an oscillator crazy right it really comes into its own when you add a little bit of glide to it so check this out excellent and if you want an example of that in practice just check out jamie xx's gosh video near the end you can hear almost exactly this probably with a bunch of reverb a delay and voila that is an intermediate sound design technique that you can take away and try in your house but as i said mind your ears resonant filters can get loud really quickly let me know if you found this helpful in the comments watch one of my other videos here stay producing be good to one another and bye bye

Channel: Underdog Electronic Music School

Views: 179,178

Rating: 4.936244 out of 5

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Id: JfJ9Dbjz6cs

Length: 20min 6sec (1206 seconds)

Published: Mon Jun 07 2021

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