Learn Physical Modeling Synthesis with Objekt from Reason Studios

all right folks it's happening we are Crossing the Rubicon through the Looking Glass into Narnia and going somewhere that very few of us have gone in our synthesis Journey I'm talking of course about physical modeling synthesis and physical modeling is a different type of synthesis than any of the other more common types of synthesis like subtractive wavetable FM granular or additive synthesis physical modeling all right I'm just gonna say it it's weird it's complex and you know what here's maybe the craziest part to grasp inside a physical modeling synthesizer even we don't know exactly what's happening and we made it that's because physical modeling synthesis models the physical world and the physical world is weird and it's complex so when it came time to design object we decided to represent all that chaos and complexity in a form factor most familiar to reason users as a synth which makes sense because well it is a sin but object Works differently from any synth you've ever used so today let's get to understand what makes physical modeling work and how you can quickly and easily move around object customizing and perfecting sounds that are entirely unique to you object is capable of creating a wide variety of sounds and organic instruments from Majestic tympanies enchanting Bells acoustic Bass [Music] electric keys [Music] and even otherworldly pads [Music] and the way that object can make this in each variety of real world acoustic sounds is that it makes them using the same acoustic Concepts found in the real world on a really fundamental level all acoustic instruments are made up from things that resonate or vibrate and things that get those resonating things to resonate pick any instrument a guitar for example the strings resonate which travel down and transfer their resonating energy to the bridge which then begins to resonate the wooden top which then begins to resonate the back and sides in other parts of the guitar but the strings don't resonate on their own something needs to get that going on a guitar that's usually a finger or a plastic pick which excites the string to start vibrating for a drum the Sonic result is entirely different but the basic components are the same we have a large resonating body which gets excited into its resonating State when struck in some way use something hard and dense like a wooden drumstick and the resonance has a high sharp end quality to it use something softer like a felt Mallet and the Exciter being soft gives the resonance a soft quality as well now looking at object the front panel will start to make sense when you realize that its main sections deal with the same two things the resonating and the excitement of that resonation let's talk about those two sections as we explore the sounds that object makes starting with very basic sounds we get by resetting object to its default State at first when we initialize to this basic patch we've got something that sounds sort of like a string sort of like a synth [Music] so what's happening here well remember the resonating bodies that make up acoustic instruments object has three different resonators which we either call a modal resonator or one of two objects that resonate depending upon which style of physical modeling synthesis is being employed we can activate or deactivate each resonator above its tab so let's deactivate object one and move over to the modal Tab and activate it resonating frequencies on the modal tab are based on tuned resonating filters that produce tones not too unlike the sine wave operators we find on the algorithm FM synthesizer so if we reduce down to just one modal frequency and play a key on our keyboard we'll hear a short but rather pure tone if we wanted to increase the decay of the note we could max out the Decay scale and use the Decay time knob to increase our note's length turning up release mute unsurprisingly allows us to mute the notes sustain when we release the key adding in another modal frequency we can tune that frequency to the perfect overtone series or start experimenting with the imperfection found in the real world when frequencies outside the overtone series resonate alongside a note's pitch we can scale the Decay for that overtone down so that it decays faster than our fundamental [Music] total frequency that's even high enough and let's turn off the keyboard tracking after the second modal frequency so that whatever node I play on the keyboard that third modal frequency will stay the same always [Music] now we're still far off from any real convincing acoustic instrument but already you can start to see how the qualities of something like a marimba is coming into focus and how acoustic instruments can be represented in physical modeling by the way their frequencies resonate together if we deactivate the modal Tab and now activate the object one layer we might start to recognize certain similarities from the modal tab but also some new stuff too the object 1 and object two layers use a style of resonating that is based on a very fast feeding back delay and if that sounds weird to you allow me to demonstrate using an actual delay effect if we add a little blip sound running through the Echo and set it up in a pretty normal setting it would sound just like a normal delay effect but if we set the timing really fast and crank the feedback up to nearly a hundred percent well now we've got a tone which rings out and decays kind of like a string kind of like a synth see where we're going here the same basic thing is employed for object one's resonator frequencies listen again does this sound familiar [Music] but just like the modal tab we can tune and layer additional frequencies on top so we could add another frequency at 3.0 and another at 9.0 and of course the same fractional tuning is also possible for each frequency as well but one other thing that we can also do with object one that the modal tab can't do is turn on coupling coupling changes these frequencies from being independent resonating frequencies to instead feeding into each other so that one resonating frequency interacts with another resonating frequency which is how objects in the real world actually work think about a crash symbol for a second when a stick strikes a symbol various parts of the metal start vibrating at different frequencies and those vibrations all happen on the same sheet of metal so they each interact with each other it should therefore come as no surprise that when we turn coupling on the result instantly starts to sound more metallic in nature thank you okay now believe it or not all of that was a giant tangent I mean I want you to have some understanding of the resonators but from here on out I probably won't be messing with the resonator frequencies very much at all by way of manual adjustment because the truth is that object is absolutely packed full of presets where sound designers more clever than me have created amazing Sounds by dialing in these resonator frequencies and making blended layers of sounds take this attached string patch for example [Music] has a rather mathematically perfect set of overtone frequencies set up but if we head over to object 1 you'll see something far more nuanced if I turn off object 1 in the mixer I'll just hear object 2 resonating and likewise I can listen to only object one okay so that makes sense overtones give us the almost plastic Blue Man Group resonance and object one is set up to provide a short sharp percussive quality put them together and we get this unique but sort of unidentifiable instrument that has acoustic qualities of a plastic resonator with strings on it being struck sort of like a Hammered Dulcimer now knowing when each layer is doing we could adjust our mixer to for example accentuate that percussive sound foreign but before we go even deeper with these resonators let's remember what I said at the top of the video resonators are only half the sound in fact actually they're less than half the sound because on their own a resonator doesn't make any sound at all I mean here this is the sound of my guitar's resonator on its own it's not until we get a resonator going with an Exciter that it makes any sound at all so let's turn our attention over to the Exciter section so what does a typical Exciter actually sound like well if we turn off object 1 and 2 over on our mixer and turn up the Exciter fader we'll hear the sound of our Exciter on its own yeah that's it I mean it sounds kind of insignificant on its own but anyone who's ever played guitar will recognize the sound of a pick on a fully muted string same idea to learn more about the Exciter section let's make a new really basic patch from scratch so that all we have happening is an Exciter exciting a resonator I know I said that I wouldn't be messing with the resonator frequencies manually anymore in this video but one handy feature of object is a collection of template material types you can choose from these are like frequency overtone recipes that instantly start us off with the Sonic qualities of wood metal [Music] or even a Flawless reproduction of the snare drum on Metallica's album Saint anger [Music] sad but true let's choose one of the glass templates and right out of the gate we've got a pretty convincing sound of crystal glasses being tapped with a plastic mallet if we turn the Exciter level all the way down what do you think will happen if you set our resonator goes silent well you're correct if we turn it all the way up however it doesn't just mean that our resonator gets louder I mean it does get louder sure but just like if we hit a crystal glass in the real world harder turning up the Exciter level changes the quality of the glasses ringing tone [Music] and here this is the whole ball game this is the benefit of physical modeling synthesis when you do naturally expressive things the instrument responds naturally I mean I can't tell you how many times I've been playing an object patch and I find myself connecting to it like a real instrument because it's giving me back when I'm putting into it and I can lean into that and it responds to make this class more realistic I can dial up the velocity control that feeds directly into the Exciter level to take my incoming performance velocity and replicate how hard my Exciter is striking the crystal glass foreign the rest of the impact controls help us further adjust the sound of our Exciter and thus the style and method for how we might be playing these crystal glasses if I were to turn the frequency of our Exciter up we might move away from this plastic Mallet type of sound to something more like when you tap silverware against a glass to give a wedding toast if we turn the frequency down instead and maybe dial the hardness of the Exciter down to a lower setting our mallets now have more of a felt wrapped quality to them [Music] or we can bring up the frequency and hardness but use the diffuse section to change the style of the Exciter from something that sounds like a mallet striking the crystal in a single crisp transient to more of a rubbing or plucking type sound where the contact of the transient strike is sort of spread out and diffused for a special softened type of attack I'll max out the time to make it obvious here's without diffusion and here is with in more subtle settings it can just add a slight imperfection to the Exciter in a way that adds realism foreign so that's the Exciter impact section there's two other ways we can excite our resonator bodies but before we do that let's load up another patch because there are so many good patches that come with object I'd hate to spend the whole video on a crystal glass check out this totally chill Vibe I've made [Music] if you want if you want me to [Music] for you [Music] I'll make it all alone up to you and yes all the instruments you're hearing besides the vocal are coming from object no that's right the Jazz Rush drums and symbols [Music] the upright Bass [Music] the Rhodes Electric keys and this melodic top Vibe called Mellow Yellow that comes from objects synth and keys folder of presets foreign [Music] right now you can see how the Mellow Yellow preset uses all three resonators which are being excited by that little impact Exciter we've been tapping our crystal glasses with if I were to turn the impact Exciter level all the way down [Music] we can still hear a sort of Haunting Decay tale from our sound so what is that is it something technical like a pre-fader Reverb send tail coming back to us now it's coming from the second section of the Exciter the Exciter noise section we don't only have to excite our resonators using a short click sound we could use noise which is exactly what's happening here if we change this to a more traditional White Noise you'll hear our resonators reacting to the Fuller frequency spectrum that white noise provides [Applause] if we wanted to design our Exciter Sound by hand we could turn off the resonators in our mixer bring up the Exciter fader and now we could go about dialing in certain controls like let's minimize the delay between pressing the key and getting our noise and let's shorten the Decay and sustain so that we have a sharper noise burst rather than the after tail or preset originally had turn back on our resonators and turn down the Exciter fader and you'll hear our instrument is less mellow and has a sharper attack by experimenting with the Exciter noise you can really create different Vibes like what does our instrument sound like if excited by Static [Music] or how about the random pulse [Music] I can slow the rate of these noise generators down as well [Music] and by adjusting things like the attack time this instrument gets more textural and Atmospheric than melodic like it once was [Music] and of course you can combine noise exciters with impact exciters to create different effects and textures well that combination of impact exciters and noise exciters is particularly useful for pads and evolving sounds one of my favorite presets in the factory Sound Bank for object is called prepared piano because it starts out getting a pretty decent rendition of a piano but then goes about messing it up exactly the way a modern classical composer might do when they create things called prepared pianos which means modifying the piano in weird ways like sticking forks and screws and even dry ice inside a piano to make it buzz and rattle unnaturally prepared piano has a lovely detuned sound and a random rattle or Buzz courtesy of objects static Exciter oh [Music] and I don't know I just I just love all those little gremlins in the piano and they're different every time too this type of sound gives me instant ideas about a fairly emo kind of instrumental I'll bring in an orchestral type of bass drum [Music] a little synth-based pulse [Music] and then if I play the French horn preset from object in its higher range I end up with a rather nice soprano style saxophone whose note Dynamics and phrasing I can shape with the mod wheel [Music] oh [Music] [Music] below the Exciter noise section there's this little unassuming section it's up to you to explore and try out but if you got interested in the idea of static noise and pulses acting as the Exciter then you'll love the idea of routing any audio into object on the backside to serve as an Exciter that could mean anything from your own custom noise and static Creations from Thor for example or it could be a sample like this bucket drum Loop [Music] thank you now that we've mastered the Exciter section and its relationship to the resonators let's head back over to the resonator section to check out the last big unknowns on object's front panel and those are the controls which handle the behavior of the resonators and the style of resonating those overtone frequencies we were previously tuning are only one piece of the way an acoustic body might resonate and like I said earlier I'm not one to spend much of my time manually tweaking those frequencies but one place I definitely do spend time tweaking and having fun is the section below the resonator frequencies in fact adjusting the so-called CP triple d section as Adam Dorn coined it instead of adsr I'm CP triple D I can take presets already in the object Factory Sound Bank to entirely new places here we've got a Koto preset which sounds as it should like a nice plucked string [Music] if we check out the layers in our mixer the modal resonator is doing some transient attack work foreign object one is the ringing part of the note and object 2 is some more realism sound design so let's focus on object one starting with the damping controls damping is a type of filter that lets us control how long and prominently certain frequency bands from a resonator ring out and although it looks like a three band EQ these are not low mid and high frequency boost or cut controls let me try and visualize it for you the low damp control is a frequency sweep which starts off not dampening the low resonance at all and then moving in and damping it off as we turn up foreign [Music] ly but in the opposite direction the high control damps and chokes off the Resonance of the high frequencies from its left position and sweeping the range of the knob moves the damping frequencies away revealing higher Buzzy overtones in the upper range foreign the slope control is not unlike the slope found on an analog filter the mid frequency controls behave differently here we can choose a frequency using the mid knob like 440 Hertz and then use the gain knob below to dampen our mid frequencies and either accentuate the chosen frequency to ring out [Laughter] or to notch itself out even faster for a hollow metallic effect to the right of our damping controls we have more Global Decay controls for this resonator that behave as you'd expect [Music] but over on the left we've got some other controls that are unique to physical modeling so let's discuss them Collision simulates the often physical limitations of any vibrating object it's maybe most easy to think about a string in this case but if it vibrates strong enough eventually a string will often collide with the instrument it's attached to like the fretboard of a guitar and when that happens the louder Dynamic playing is met with the choking off of the sound like this foreign [Music] and sometimes a string might even bounce against that surface [Music] but keep in mind this doesn't only apply to Strings it's the same concept that makes snares rattle underneath the snare drum pitch mod is another real world emulation anybody who's maybe plucked a string too hard or played an instrument like a zither where this is very easy to do will know the sound of pitch mod a high performance velocity plucks our virtual strings so hard that it actually pulls it sharp at first and then returns to its correct resonating pitch [Music] while too much pitch mod will make your instrument sound like a bow and arrow firing off a more subtle setting can go a long way to sounding like a real world instrument that is responding to the player's Dynamics [Music] well this just leaves dispersion dispersion is a weird one but we've all heard it before when someone bangs on a steel cable when someone escapes on cracking ice that's dispersion in the real world dispersion is when the frequencies as they've been defined above in our resonator travel through our virtual instruments material at different speeds causing the low frequencies to shift lower The High Frequency overtones to move higher and for everything to just you know disperse the Sonic result is something like a metallic Hollow detuning effect that can even change the tuning of our keyboard [Music] adjusting the mod and filter controls will further tweak the behavior of the dispersion but be aware these controls can cause the sound to actually feed back internally and run away from you but you know just dialing back the controls get things back in line [Music] will surprise us by going in and making a landmark album by riding those dispersive feedback controls to create whale sound okay now that we've gone through nearly every knob on object one by one I want to show you my favorite way to never touch them again well okay I'm kidding but I want to show you the randomizer because that little corner of object is a super powerful sound design tool let's load another patch Kalimba from the bells and mallets folder is a nice metallic but melodic instrument foreign if I like the general style of the sound but I'd like to explore variations on it there is no better tool on object for doing just that than the randomizer it's pretty straightforward I select which layers I want to randomize I click randomize and my settings are randomized [Music] every time I click I get a new randomized sound [Music] [Music] however I'm not stuck simply rolling the dice each time using the percentage slider I can actually morph between my original and the new randomized sound and determine where I'd like my actual sound to fall on that morphed Spectrum zero percent and sounding like my original foreign totally overtaken by my randomized settings or in between characteristics of each sound are still present [Music] if I never find a sound I like more than my starting point I can cancel out of the randomizer or if I do find a sound I like I can click ok to commit those settings to object when used to a subtle degree the randomizer can take acoustic instruments like this Kalimba and tweak it just enough to be your own personal Kalimba or a bit more until it's a new acoustic instrument that sounds real but unidentifiable foreign [Music] I've got a confession to make remember back when I demonstrated how hard mallets and soft mallets sound in the real world on an Irish drum use something softer like a felt Mallet and the Exciter being soft gives the resonance a soft quality as well [Music] well it's time I come clean the sound you were hearing was actually coming from object to create the Irish drum I just loaded up the timpani preset I clicked the randomizer a few times and I landed here a totally convincing sounding bowran this is probably a good time to mention something to be aware of you might notice that while experimenting with the randomizer and this is also true if you're manually adjusting resonator overtones turning on coupling or even getting bold with dispersion you might find that the tuning of your instrument shifts from the a442 instruments we all know and use if that's the case like it is here for my modified Kalimba [Music] all I need to do is to click the analyze button for object to determine the tuning offset and then click fix to calibrate my keyboard back in tune with all my other instruments foreign folks that was a lot of information to go through and a whole new style of synthesis to learn with its own terminology too so if you made it this far into the deep dive congratulate yourself I hope I've helped make this new synth not feel so foreign and Abstract in fact if I've done my job you'll feel ready to dive in and make your own sounds whether that's using resonator templates putting the randomizer to use exploring the exciters or modifying the damping collision and other behaviors of each resonator layer until you end up with a sound that's entirely realistic entirely otherworldly and most importantly entirely your own thanks for watching and we'll have more to show you about object because believe it or not there is deeper to dive than this deep dive dove [Music] oh [Music]

Channel: Reason Studios

Views: 49,730

Keywords: music production, music production tutorial, reason, reason studios, reason rack plugin, reason 12, reason daw, propellerhead reason, propellerhead, ableton live, fl studio, logic pro x, reaper, bitwig, objekt, physical modeling, physical modeling synthesis, chromaphone 3

Id: Fzr2VYnQ2-c

Length: 29min 19sec (1759 seconds)

Published: Thu May 11 2023