Make your melodies less boring using 'ratcheting'

[Music] hi everyone this is oscar from underdog and today i want to give you a little tip on how to spice up your melodies to be a little bit less boring so imagine you've got yourself a melody which is basically just a monophonic sequence it's a bunch of notes that all have the same length and they're playing good notes and it's all fine and well well let me introduce you to the concept of ratcheting put very simply ratcheting is just playing notes at faster speeds while maintaining the same overall sequence so imagine all the notes in your sequence are eighth notes like they were in the example if you would ratchet a few of those notes that would just mean you would divide the time of some of those notes into smaller portions not so complicated right but let me show you a workflow that makes it really fun to do and the main concept i want you to hear about here is called the envelope loop now if you remember from our basics on subtractive synthesis what you've got in a synthesizer is basically a sound source which goes into a filter which goes into an amplifier and both the filter and amplifier are governed are managed by envelopes and the envelope is just a curve that starts every time you hit a key on your keyboard it opens up and closes but what we're going to do today is we're going to take the envelope of the filter and we're going to set it into loop mode and that just means that when you get to the end of that envelope it's just going to start again as long as you hold down the note itself it's going to keep looping and seem like it's playing multiple notes because the filter envelope keeps opening up and then playing with the length of that envelope gives you a parameter that's really really fun to mess with way more fun than just clicking in notes on the piano roll let me show you how it's done inside of ableton [Applause] [Music] before we go any further like the video subscribe to the channel and consider signing up for one of our classes www.underdog.brussels or sign up for some one-on-one coaching with myself the link is in the description down here okay so here we are in ableton and this is just the sequence that i had going earlier it's just a simple four bar sequence that plays eighth notes it's quite predictable and it plays basically an arpeggio over some chord changes i'm not going to go into that here that's material for our next video one thing to notice is that all of these notes are exactly the same length right and that's kind of what we're going to be playing with today we're going to spice it up by adding some what seems to be variable length to the notes even though actually we're only going to keep triggering it the same way as here so let's look at the synthesizer first of all i just had an operator on there because i like just the default sound of operator as a way to start choosing notes instead today we're going to work with wavetable so i'll drag in wavetable and this is what you see right now i'm not going to explain the whole synthesizer but what i basically want to do with you today is i just want to set up the simplest subtractive patch and then we're going to tweak the envelope okay so the simplest subtractive patch to me would be we move to a sawtooth wave we set the sustain of the amplifier completely full so it's just going to play the notes the whole time i'm going to bring down the filter so that now instead of this bright uh sawtooth wave we're going to get like a filtered or dark sawtooth wave and then we're going to set envelope number two to modulate the filter cutoff so that every time we hit the node it's going to go bow and not not just going to stay dark so to do that we go to envelope number two bring the sustain all the way down so it's kind of like a pluck we go to the matrix and filter one frequency envelope two that's we set that up to let's let's put it at 50 to start with now when i hit play let's see what happens so cool so that's just a sawtooth wave with a filter on it right now here's where the fun starts we go to envelope number two and we activate something called loop mode here not all synthesizers can do this like i checked a few of even like the the pro vsts and some of them don't have this function so good job ableton for including this set it to loop and what you're going to see now is that as long as we hold down the nodes this envelope is going to trigger from start to finish and then start again so one thing we want to do is we want to set the release down to zero and now you're going to see the entire envelope is going to take about 800 milliseconds to complete and then start again and so what we're going to do is we're going to tweak this delay parameter and see what happens [Music] now that's cool right that sounds kind of like when you add a delay effect to a sound but it really is fun because it increases a sort of a snappy intensity to the sound and then kind of a relaxation and there's some real emotional dynamics in there so from here we can go sound designing and add quite a lot of like detail and nuance to this sound but one thing i want to advise is to group it and open up these macros here and then map this to a mackerel what does this do well this just puts this value over there right but the interesting thing is that here you can set when you hit map you can set what the minimum and maximum is of this button here you can narrow it down to just the sweet spot where you can say here are the values that give me the best emotional result for instance when we hit map 20 seconds is probably way too long let's say the two seconds would probably be considered a long envelope especially because we're only talking about one-eighth notes right it's really short notes so we set it to about two seconds and one millisecond is way too short i mean once you reduce it to that amount it's going to start giving like audio garbage so we'll probably increase it to let's say about 60 milliseconds and now let's see down here this button if we tweak it now it has a very satisfying range of parameters and it doesn't go from ridiculously short to ridiculously long it just goes close to what i would think is a sweet spot let me see how that sounds yeah perfect this is really good now this i could map to a midi controller and have fun messing around with or in fact what i probably would do here if i didn't want to move into the hardware like physical area i would just show modulation in a new lane open it up a little bit and start drawing in some values so let's say we start this up high so it's like long notes and then bring it in for like some of the some of the extra notes do there you go you see already we're adding some kind of like organic nuance to the sound just because of this now to make this sound more interesting there's a lot of things we can do and we get into really like sound design territory but with wavetable a few things i would advise is don't be afraid of checking out all the different basic shapes don't be afraid of making the interface way larger so you can so you can see all the details of oscillator 1 oscillator 2. and also an important thing with all of ableton's internal synthesizers is that they don't have reverb and delay inside of them and a lot of the external and like the the more expensive virtual instruments the vsts they do have that built in so they're automatically going to sound better so don't hesitate to just drop a delay on there and maybe also a reverb automatically going to sweeten the sound [Music] [Applause] [Music] so as you can see you can go down the sound design rabbit hole pretty quickly here and so after a little bit of messing around i got to the following [Music] then add in some cords [Music] and some problems [Music] if some of this was a little bit confusing for you check out our introduction to subtractive synthesis video for sure it goes into the basic concepts that you need to understand to understand what's going on here otherwise check out some of my other videos stay producing be good to one another and take care bye you

Channel: Underdog Electronic Music School

Views: 255,765

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Id: H7oY1sV5ykE

Length: 10min 7sec (607 seconds)

Published: Wed Feb 24 2021