How to make every sound you ever heard

yo everybody what's up everyone this is Oscar from Underdog and today let's talk about how to make every sound you've ever heard I know that's a spectacular title I really just wanted to talk about Samplers because if you listen to some people online in music production you would think that being a sound designer is a core element of being an electronic music producer and for some people it is for some people it is and and that's awesome right that's a it's a great field to do but it's not the only way to make sound sometimes you just find sounds in your environment and you arrange them into music you don't need to create every sound from scratch and that's what Samplers are for Samplers are basically empty boxes that you put any sound that you find into it and then you can play that sound up and down the keyboard you can do all sorts of complex things with it basically you can do everything with a sampler that you can do with a subtractive synthesizer and once you understand how a sampler works there's really nothing that can stop you from accessing even the most complicated Danvers because you can see simply sample them from elsewhere let me show you really briefly the basics imagine I'm working on this track and I can just record my microphone microphone is right in front of me right here I'm just going to record on a channel and I'm just gonna sing one note just a single note right and I'm gonna sing badly sorry here we go okay see that audio there now let's listen to it you already listened to it but I haven't it's no good but it doesn't matter it's okay what we're going to do is we're going to put this into a sampler and play it as if it was an instrument right and so the workflow for that in enabled in live it's as simple as simply dragging that into the into a midi Channel like this up and dragging it down here and then boom it appears here in a in by default in Ableton it's a unit called the simpler I believe this one is called right which is a kind of a simplified sampler I mean the type of instrument that it is is a sampler this particular device is called a simpler Ableton has two devices which are Samplers there is the simpler and the sampler I mean just to confuse things a little bit but I think you get the point right and so now that we've put it in here let's call this the simpler I've armed my midi Channel and I'm soloing it and playing it keyboard I'll go down an octave okay when you press C like the middle C on a keyboard usually that means that you're telling the sampler to play the sample inside of it at its original pitch however that doesn't necessarily mean that when you hit a c on the keyboard that a c is going to come out so to help this you can just use a tuner I'm going to press C on my keyboard and you see I'm a very shaky like a little bit flat on the E I was trying to sing an e obviously and I go very flat on it so what I'll do in the sampler is I can just Loop a very short section of it so just hit Loop and shorten it really shortly and let's move the loop around so it doesn't restart all the time cool let's put a fade on there so we don't get that shock so much and look I'm kind of well I'm still very shaky here let's take an even smaller section okay let's maybe find a section where I'm a bit more stable those singing classes really didn't pay off did they here's a section where I'm on key but so what I could have done was over here under transpose and detune I could move the detuning up or down until I'm hitting the note consistently and because I want C on my keyboard to be really C in the audio domain I'm going to transpose down from E down four semitones until I'm at the C awesome so now that's actually playable so then when I take the chord progression of my song and I just hit play awesome nice so now my voice has become a synthesizer and if you look on the controls here you see that they're all the same controls as on the subtractive synthesizer so it works just the same as a subtractive synthesizer in that there's an oscillator that goes into a filter that goes into an amplifier except the oscillator has now been replaced with my voice but the filter is still there and the amplifiers still there so if I wanted to make some plucks I could just bring down the sustain and to create some plucks and that could be cool imagine putting a whole bunch of delay behind there foreign [Music] that's a cool sound that's a cool sound just to bring it the tonality up a bit I would put on an OT not so bad and then honestly enabled and what I would really do is I would right click do simpler to sampler where you can just change the crossfading a little bit better so it's a little bit smoother on the attack I would maybe put one or two milliseconds of attack nice then all you got to do from here is EQ out some of the some of the more obnoxious frequencies that Ott is really doing crazy stuff and then inside of the track foreign [Music] you can even put an ARP on there you can do anything with it but a synthesizer can do [Music] whoa that's pretty crazy that's pretty crazy let's make it even tighter look at that it's an interesting sound right there it's kind of percussive and it's all for my voice another fun thing that the sampler allows you to do is to put on some spreads so that it makes two copies slightly detuned from each other and makes a very stereo wide and also you can put a pitch envelope on there at the start of every hit to make things more percussive because having a pitch envelope that sweeps down very sharply at the start of a sound can make things a bit more percussive if you want I don't think that would suit this sound so I'm not gonna do it but I just wanted to mention it because those are some really classic techniques but you don't have to sing into your dot if you're not comfortable with that you can also just go find some sounds out in the world for example this Waldorf iridium synthesizer I can't afford it right now but I would love to use its sound well let's find it [Music] let's find a nice clean section so that I can just drop it in [Music] oh that's good that's a cool section I feel like if I looked at it could become a really cool Washi drone I like it let's do that all right I use OBS to screen capture stuff you can do YouTube to MP3 or whatever websites or stuff you use to download sounds from YouTube do be careful for viruses those websites are sketchy as heck alright cool here's the sound enabled loving it so let's find the Washi sounds [Music] okay that's the section let's Loop that so let's first of all do command e and just delete some of this and this is what we're going to load into a sampler right okay let's delete all that I'm going to do command J which consolidates this so there's no like information before or after this little clip so what I'll do insert midi track on that midi track I'm going to go to instruments and take a sampler this is the non-shortcut way right so then we drag that into the sampler and here is the sound that we want and so when I hit C it's going to play from the beginning so first of all let's set the starting point to where I want it to be love it let's set the sustain mode to back and forth and let's make it Loop some section in the middle and Crossfade that I dig this I dig this and so the idea behind this now for me is I just want to wash this out into a Reverb so I'm going to take an effect I'm going to take something large like a Valhalla room make it really long so there's no real rhythm in it I just wanted to kind of yeah wash out what a great sound what a great sound and now let me draw in a little midi clip here command shift M and just play a note and remember now I did not make sure in this case that c on the keyboard actually corresponds to C on the synthesizer I'm going to do it by ear right so I'm going to hit play [Music] not too bad it's a little bit Out Of Tune but not terribly so and so as you can see now we can start puzzling because basically I've just found a sound in the wild that I want to put into my production and now the job just becomes how do I fit it in a way that's not intrusive that's actually adding something and in this case I'm not going to puzzle too hard because I didn't really give it a chance but I want to share with you the moment that this technique really clicked for me as a legitimate technique I watched this movie called Annihilation which has this really crazy soundtrack and at the climax of the soundtrack there's some super freaky synths that are absolutely beautiful and a friend of mine in Frankfurt called Ollie only if you're watching this miss you man what he did was he bought the soundtrack of this right and he loaded it into a sampler and then he triggered it in a rhythmical way so that he could use the Timbre of those crazy synths but make it completely different composition from it so for example what you would do is you'd make yourself a midi device go back to instruments you'd put the sampler in there you take the soundtrack which you bought and then convert it to Wi-Fi right and you're going to listen to the various parts that could work [Music] that's awesome that's a great sound notice the clicking on the start you hear that that's something you hear a lot in audio when you hear that little click at the start that means that your envelopes are starting or stopping too quickly and so all you have to do is go into your envelopes and just like in subtractive synthesis add a tiniest little bit of attack to the start like one millisecond no more clicking clicking no more clicking so now you can play this on your keyboard and you can make crazy riffs with it speaking of crazy riffs for example if you took the reason rack plugin and you added a player device specifically the Baseline generator this is included in the reason Plus subscription by the way I am their Ambassador after all and so you take the midi that comes out of this and you feed it into this channel you hit in you select reason and then you get this nice now let's search for some sweet spots let's increase the octave [Music] here we go it's the start of a track [Music] okay imagine you've got something like this right now as a synthesizer I would say I want control over the envelopes which you can do here you can go into the envelopes change the release nice and then you can also change the filter you can have the filter be closed you can then for every note make the filter open up by increasing the envelope amount where is that again yeah here amount nice let's change the shape a little bit [Music] put the release on there yeah close it even further make it a bit more mug mug like and here you go now you're doing subtractive synthesis using timbres that come from special magical universes that you might be emotionally attached to but you didn't have to create from scratch using this soundtrack as a starting point may be nostalgic for Frankfurt so uh yeah funny times anyway I hope this helps you understand the potential of a sampler and if you want another idea to get you out into the door try taking a vocal phrase right and setting the sample start Point somewhere in the middle of a vowel like ah right then putting that entire sampler group it to a drum rack and duplicate the instrument into a couple of different Paths of the drum rack and for each of those Samplers change the starting point to a different vowel then play that drum rack like an instrument so you get like that kind of stuff try that out if the subtractive synthesis part of this was at all confusing I highly recommend that you check out the subtractive synthesis videos that I've done button or follow my foundations of electronic music of course it's on my website come show us on the Discord Channel what you've done with this and until next time stay producing be good to one another and take care [Music]

Channel: Underdog Electronic Music School

Views: 221,164

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Id: dVp6AK2h4SY

Length: 15min 24sec (924 seconds)

Published: Mon Dec 05 2022