Sound Design and Synth Fundamentals - Using Free Software

welcome back to the channel and my updated sound design series in this video i'm going to show you how to control and understand the synthesizer so that you can start creating pretty much any sounds you want all the tools and synths i'm going to be using are free so while i'm using a midi keyboard to trigger the sounds as long as you have a computer you should be able to follow along with me so let's waste no time and get right into it [Music] let's start with a quick overview of the different tools that i'll be using so i'm using the vital synthesizer which is a free synth you can download and follow along with and you don't need to run it inside a digital audio workstation you can just use it as a standalone app but i'm running it inside fl studio 20 because i want to show you some scopes here i have a frequency spectrum here and i have an oscilloscope which is going to help you visualize some of the things i talk about in this video i do strongly recommend downloading and following along with me here because i think it's the best way to learn from these sorts of videos but you can of course just watch and you'll still learn a lot the first topic we're going to cover is oscillators and waveforms or wave shapes so this is where the sound is really generated in the synthesizer and in each synth it's going to be located in a different place but in vital we have an oscillator here and you can also turn more oscillators on just down here the oscillator generates the sound and it's going to generate it based on a different wave shape which will all make sense in just a moment you can also control the levels so the loudness of the sound the pan whether it's coming from the left or right and also the pitch of this sound but to start off with those four basic wave shapes that we're going to look at the first one is a sine wave which looks and sounds like this so you may have seen this in maths or physics but we're not going to get too technical it's the most simple wave shape you can see on the frequency analyzer we have just one note one harmonic and this is what the wave looks like if i play higher octaves you can see that we're moving towards the sort of mid and treble and you can see that we're getting more wave cycles per second if you add these waves on top of each other so a lower frequency sine wave and a higher frequency one you can see the way that they add together there on the oscilloscope so that's the first shape the sine wave and it's really useful for reinforcing sounds and for bases subbases basses 808 a lot of them use a sine wave like this just played in a lower octave to really reinforce the sound synthesizers let you choose the wave shape in different ways but in vital you select here in this case i have basic shapes and then you can use this slider to choose different waveform shapes but this is going to vary depending on which synth you use and the next shape i want to show you is the triangle wave so let's just take a look and i'll listen so it's a more complex wave shape you can hear there's more harmonics even though i'm just playing one note a c this is a great wave shape because it doesn't have too much harmonic content it's quite a nice sort of in-between sound we're going to go to the next one which is the sawtooth wave which is an extremely versatile sound if i play it here so i'm going to turn it down because it sounds a lot louder and you can hear that it's very harmonically rich even though i'm just playing one note there are a ton of harmonics added in the mid and the treble this is a great building block for so many sounds just because it has so much harmonic content you can take a lot away from it to get some really cool sounds the next one is going to be the square wave let's just take a look on a listen a ton of harmonic content but a completely different texture a different timbre let's take a quick listen to all four of those again the sign triangle saw and the square so you can hear that they all have different timbres different textures and we're going to use these as building blocks let's select a triangle wave and we're going to use this for the next part of the tutorial there are some more controls here but i will come back to them the next thing that we need to look at are envelopes in this case the volume or amplitude envelope right now when i press a key it's sort of all or nothing it's on then it's off but it doesn't have to be this way so there's a few controls here but usually it's a d s r which stands for attack decay sustain and release and that's really all you need to sort of dramatically shape a sound if you add a longer attack it's going to take longer for the sound to reach its maximum value horizontally we have time so we're going in seconds along this axis and vertically we have volume from sort of zero to maximum so if i add more attack it's going to take longer to get to the maximum value so let's just play one note [Music] you can either just drag these points or you can adjust the dials down here but you could also take the sustain down and then you could have a plucked sound so the attack is the time it takes to get from nothing to the maximum value and then the decay is how long it takes to decay down to the value where it will be sustained if i adjust these and play a note what we're going to hear is that it takes some time to get to the maximum while i hold the key it's going to decay down to this sustained lower volume and then when i release it's going to release just here now it's going to stay at this volume until i release the key so this gives you a lot of different options as i said you can create plucked sounds like this or you could create sort of longer more drawn out sounds [Music] or you might want it to hold just like this and it really gives you a lot of different options for shaping and controlling the volume because obviously you don't want it just to be on and off so let's just stick with this for now and the next topic we're going to look at is unison so if i go back to the oscillator this is going to allow us to add more voices to the synth because whether i play one note or a chord you'll notice that it sounds very thin as though all the sound is coming from directly in front of me [Music] and that's just because we only have one voice of unison here so most synthesizers allow you to adjust this i'm just going to take the unison d tuned down to 10 first and as i increase the voices of unison here the sound should become very wide and sort of spacious around the head more voices is not always better but in this case we're going to add quite a lot of voices because we're going to start by making a sort of pad sound and i'm going to go over to the sawtooth wave just to sort of mix it up a little bit we also need to look at the unison d tune so right now it's at 10 and this sort of determines how detuned each voice is from another because the reason it sounds so wide is because all of those voices are not playing exactly the same pitch exactly the same tone so if i take it all the way down it's going to sound very thin again and if i detune it too much it's going to start sounding really awful so let's take a listen start sounding really bad as you push it too far and a sort of general rule although there's no rules really is that if you have a lot of voices you can tend to push the d tuning a little bit higher if i have 16 voices at 15 percent detuned it sounds like this nice and thick and lush but if i only have two voices at 15 percent detuning it sounds a little bit sour a little bit wrong so you've got to be careful with that so let's just push up the voices of unison a lot take the detune in just a little bit and this takes us right on to our next topic which is filters now you may not have heard of filters but you've probably heard of eq so if i pull open an eq here and i play a chord you probably know that you can use an eq to sort of remove some frequency energy so in this case if you look at the graph here i've removed some of the treble or in this case i might remove some of the low end and filters are not exactly the same but they operate on a similar principle in vital you can turn the filter on here and you can see initially we have this high cut filter which is cutting away some of the high frequency energy our sawtooth waves have been smoothed out if i move the cut off you can hear how that dramatically changes the sound you can increase the resonance of the filter [Music] and what this does is adds a little resonant bump at that cutoff frequency which makes the cutoff more pronounced you can also change the filter type so you'll have low pass high pass notch filters let's take a listen to some of these if i move this here now the filter is cutting out the low end and our sound is very thin if i take it back to the middle and choose say a notch filter now we're notching out a particular band of frequencies [Music] and depending on what you wanted to achieve this again dramatically changes the sound i'm going to go back to that 12 db per octave analog filter and i'm going to keep it in a high cut mode or a low pass mode just like that so you might be asking why would we use a filter for this why not just an eq which is a good question one of the reasons is that the filters can be connected to envelopes and lfos which i'll explain in a moment so that you can have the filter moving along with the sound so we've already set up an envelope for the amplitude of the sound which is the volume which follows this shape but now we're going to use a different envelope and we're going to link it to the filter and have the filter move along in time with our sound so often in many synthesizers this is already set up and it would be called your filter envelope but i'm just going to drag i'm going to click and drag that's a left click and drag the envelope 2 onto the cutoff which is just here and now if i give this envelope a different shape you'll see and here the filter opens up and then closes back down along with this envelope and you can of course control how it does this [Music] and now you start getting sort of a lot more control over the sound and it starts coming to life it's not so static when you set it up with an envelope it just follows this shape and then stops [Music] so it just opens and closes but if i remove this link so i'm just going to remove that we're back to where we were so this envelope isn't doing anything this is where i introduced the next topic which is lfos which are similar to envelopes but instead of just being triggered once the lfo follows a shape and then keeps oscillating backwards and forwards lfo means low frequency oscillator and these can bring a lot of movement and rhythm to a sound i'm going to set an lfo this time to control the cut off and now if i sort of pull this in a little bit here you'll hear that it just keeps opening and closing along with this filter and we can have it open and close a lot [Music] or just a little bit so you could see if you set it up just a little bit it just adds a little bit of movement to the sound and of course you can change so much stuff about these lfos they can follow completely different shapes they don't have to be those that simple starting shape but i'm going to keep it simple for now the important thing is the frequency so right now it's sort of synced to the bpm but you can just set it to a number of seconds but if i keep it set to the bpm we can make it slower so that it opens and closes slowly or we can set it to be very very quick [Music] so it really just depends what you want what's your application but lfos are great because you don't just have to connect them to the filter cutoff you can usually connect them to any parameter so you could set an lfo to have your synth pan gently from left to right and the important difference is that an envelope just triggers once whereas an lfo just keeps oscillating backwards and forwards adding movement and rhythm to your sound i don't know about you but i'm getting a little bit bored of this sound so i'm going to initialize this patch and we'll make a new sound this time i'm going to keep it again with the sawtooth wave but i'm going to pull the envelope down to make a nice plucked sound like this i'm going to also transpose it down an octave which is just here the pitch and we're going to make a sort of more of like a pluck bass sound now what i'm going to do is use this filter turn it on to cut out that top end because we just don't need it and i'm going to set up another envelope to make this sort of filter pluck up and down like this just open and closed so i'm going to connect that to the cutoff so now we're getting a bit more of like a plug base but what we're going to do is layer on top a second oscillator just going to make sure that it's also sent through this first filter and i'm going to add a few voices of unison and take the level down if i briefly turn off the first oscillator and listen to the second one it doesn't have a lot of bass but it's a much wider sound and if i layer those together our bass has a nice solid foundation but also has a little bit of stereo width to it as well with this new sound example we're going to go on to the final part of this tutorial which is further effects so once you sort of dial in a sound you like in the synth you don't have to stop here you can go on to your mixer and you can add in lots of different effects more eq reverb chorus we're going to see how some of these affect the sound so in vital it actually has an inbuilt effects tab which is really handy because you don't have to go and use the mixer in your daw let's just go for some classic reverb here you can hear that now the sound is a lot more spacious let's add some distortion so if i turn that one on there we've got different types of distortion soft clipping bit crush seinfold let's just keep it on soft clipping and push the drive up i'm going to turn that reverb off you can see that our sound has really become a lot more gritty and aggressive and we may wish to you know apply other effects we might want a very subtle delay there i'll turn the mix all the way down just like this maybe we want that delay to be ping pong turn the mix all the way down let's push the frequency up just to finish off this video i wanted to show you some more sounds which we will sort of be creating throughout this sound design series if you keep watching the next videos uh some of them will create some of them are in my preset pack but i wanted to just show that they all work on the same basic principle start with some basic wave shapes adjust the envelopes filter add some effects and before you know it you have some pretty cool sounds so this is a lead for instance this is a string section created using some saw waves [Music] this is a moog pluck base again with some basic wave shapes it's just all about layering on the right kind of effects really fine tuning this filter i go into all these sounds and so many more throughout the rest of this series so i do hope that you sort of dig in and enjoy those but the best way to learn this really is to just open it up and start experimenting with it once you know these basics so thank you very much for watching i hope you enjoyed it and i hope to see you in the next one bye for now

Channel: In The Mix

Views: 165,143

Keywords: Sound design basics, sound design tutorial, sound design, sound, design, fundamentals, waveshapes, basic sound design, how to synth, serum tutorial, tutorial, music production, lesson, sound design easy, synth basics, synthesis basics, introduction to sound design, introduction to synths, beginner synth, beginner sound design, serum sound design, In The Mix, synthesiser basics, synthesizer basics, serum, tips, sound design tips, 2021

Id: cPxE9-Dr3EI

Length: 16min 52sec (1012 seconds)

Published: Sat Apr 03 2021