Painting with sound - a techno exercise

hey everyone this is oscar from underdog and today i'd like to offer you an exercise that i suggest that you do at home it's a sound design experiment that's designed to give you goosebumps and to get you thinking differently about damper and about delays and about reverb someone in the comments once said that i was like the bob ross of techno i don't know if they're right or not but let's lean into that metaphor a little bit further and call this painting with sound here's an example of the kind of thing that we'll do so as you can hear what we're going for is a very stable pattern with a lot of repetition and then we make a short change in the timbre of the sound for just a moment and that change knocks on over time and creates these beautiful smears almost like a sound landscape and that's why it's a painting metaphor it feels like the audio equivalent of watercolors where everything is wet and blends into one another but before i go too deep into my painting metaphors let's jump into ableton and bring it back to sound let's go [Applause] [Music] before we go any further like the video and subscribe to the channel hit the little bell icon and have a look at our online courses at underdog.brussels consider supporting the channel by pledging to the patreon as well it helps ensure that i can find the time to make these weekly free videos for you speaking of helping us with the algorithm do consider sharing your favorite underdog videos with people who you think will like them or on your favorite subreddits or facebook pages because this kind of sharing really is the fastest and most effective way to help a channel like this grow but enough about that let's get into ableton okay so this technique requires two big concepts the first concept is that we need a synthesizer that's stable that's almost a bit boring that's just doing a very repetitive thing over and over and over again and on that synthesizer we need to be able to control the filter cut off if you're a little bit unsure about what a filter cutoff is check out this video and this video because they explain in much greater detail what that is you don't need to fully understand it to be able to follow along with this exercise though you just need to find the one parameter that's called filter cut off now once we've got ourselves a synthesizer doing a stable repetitive boring thing and we have control over the filter cut off the second part is that we need to smear it but smear it massively we need to smear it all the way across the horizon so what does that mean we need really long delays with high feedback settings multiple delays feeding into each other and a big reverb to splash it all out over space and time so let's implement that in a simple version right now so i'll make us a new midi channel by right clicking and doing insert midi track and i can control r to rename that and i'm going to call that the synth now i need to drag a synthesizer onto there right because this is just a midi channel it doesn't make any sound in itself so over here on the left we can go to instruments and find ourselves any of these that will work i like to use wave table use whatever one you have available now i dragged the basic version of wave table on there but that's just a very boring sine wave sound we're probably going to want something that has a little bit of texture to it and i don't want to get into sound design in this tutorial so let's select any kind of presets let's go in here find ourselves maybe a base preset and what is this basic 303 base let's have a look i can test run this synth by clicking on my keyboard the middle row of keys acts like a midi keyboard as long as on the top right here this little yellow button is activated with the keyboard so that works but now let's move up and down the filter cut off like i said it's the one right here and let's see what that sounds like [Music] okay maybe but let me try one or two other ones [Music] this is gonna sound great this is gonna sound great so let's program ourselves the most boring pattern that i can possibly think of which is just straight sixteenth notes all across the board let's select one bar you know the distance between one and two here let's zoom in a little bit and you can create a new midi clip like this ctrl shift m or command shift m that's a shortcut you really want to get into your fingers there we go and we find ourselves a place where hitting every 16th note will lead to good results so nice and low down there i'm just gonna spread this loop out stretch it out and do control or command l which makes that a loop and then when i hit play this is what i'll get okay now notice when i open up the filter cutoff i get that it's kind of wild huh i notice also that it feels like the notes never stop because they run into one another so let's select all of these notes and drag the back back a little bit to leave some space yeah that's nice much better so now interesting okay that's exactly what we want so this kind of movement in itself is already kind of exciting but what we want is we want to create really long and complex consequences from just one small move like this and for that we're going to need delays and reverbs now truthfully this is a place where you can be super creative and do a lot of different things there's a lot of different approaches to reverb and delay but i'm going to show you a combination that's pretty much guaranteed to work that's pretty much guaranteed to give you satisfying results and get those goosebumps that we are looking for so under audio effects you just get yourself abletons standard delay and we look at the settings here and we remind ourselves that what we're looking for is long feedback so close to like 70 or 80 percent feedback dry wet at 50 is super fine and i like to activate ping pong which means that one echo will be in one year then one echo will be in the other ear that's going to create this kind of cascading stereo effect and let's see what it sounds like when we do that [Music] see what's happening now actually this feedback is already a bit too long let's keep it like this and let's let's use this filter that's on here this filter what it does is it filters out the frequencies of the echoes to make the sound thinner than the original that way it really feels like these echoes sit sort of behind the original so let's move this dot up until we're getting pretty much only the high frequencies and let's try that again [Music] that's excellent that's exactly what we want now let's add another delay behind that to give it even more complexity and so it doesn't feel like you just put the default ableton delay on there so here's another one and to make this one slightly different from the first one what we might want to do is choose a different length of time but also have a relatively high feedback move up the filter and activate ping pong and to make it different in terms of time what i suggest you do is deactivate sync that way it's not synced to the grid it's going to create these pushing and pulling echoes off the grip so let me just move this around and see what feels right i prefer to set it to fade because now when i change the length it's going to sound like a tape is speeding up or slowing down and that's not really what i want for today that's not the sound design approach that i want to follow i'm not convinced let's find the sweet spot here we just want this to enrich the sound not mess it up [Music] that's pretty good okay that's pretty good i'm liking that now for the next step is we want a massive reverb and i've been liking ableton's standard hybrid reverb quite a lot because what hybrid reverb is it's a combination between something called convolution reverb and algorithmic reverb that's why it's called hybrid in this case but these are two different ways of creating reverb and you can choose mostly the algorithmic one or mostly the convolution one and they just have different characteristics and the key control for that is down here the blend blend 5050 means that it's 50 algorithmic 50 convolution and i'm just gonna move it all the way to convolution because i do like convolution reverbs quite a lot that's going to disable the algorithmic reverb in there and only focus on the convolution reverb now without getting too technical convolution reverbs are reverbs that mimic very very closely realistic spaces they're created by going into a real physical space playing a really loud click and recording how that click gets fed back in and then creating a mathematical model around that to be able to apply that same transformation to any sound if that sounds pretty spacey it's because it is now let's find here the different impulse responses aka the different physical places where we can place this sound and what we're going to look for of course is bigger spaces that's what we're doing in this particular tutorial we're going to bigger spaces and we're going into maybe something like over much let's see what that gives [Music] wonderful let's maybe make it a little bit drier [Music] now let's add in a beet [Music] i love it i love it so much i could do this all damn day so there you have it that's painting with sound so some other things i want to give you right now is some advice if you like the beat that you're hearing check out the techno rumbles mastery tutorial right here and the hi-hat programming tutorial right here these are good starting points to start creating your own techno beats i'm going to put this project on the patreon so if you want to use this exact rack or these exact settings you can get it there you can support the channel by pledging there come say hi on the discord channel and share the results of your techno paintings there watch another one of the music production videos right here and in the meantime stay producing be good to one another and take care bye [Music]

Channel: Underdog Electronic Music School

Views: 64,085

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Id: bzofNOWGeHk

Length: 11min 38sec (698 seconds)

Published: Mon Aug 30 2021