Sound Design and Synth Fundamentals

hello and welcome back to the channel today I'm going to be teaching the fundamentals of sound design so that no matter which synth or software you use you can start understanding what's going on and start creating the sounds that you really want to create all the topics covered in this video are going to be written in the description along with time stamps and we're going to be covering the four basic shapes additive and subtractive synthesis filters adsr LFO unison you might have heard of some of these terms before maybe not but either way I'm going to be simplifying it all in this video so let's just dive right in almost every complex synthesized sound stems back to the same four basic wave shapes so let's learn them right now on my screen I have an oscilloscope and a frequency analyzer here to help me visualize what's going on and I'm using a very basic synthesizer called the three times oscillator it's called that because it has three oscillators now an oscillator is pretty much an engine that is going to create this wave form or this sound for us so the first basic wave form is called the sine wave so I'll just play here it's the most simple wave shape as you can see your basic sine wave you may have seen this in maths or physics but I'm not going to go into anything technical and on the frequency analyzer we have only one note one harmonic that's all it's the most simple wave and you can hear that it's very smooth this waveform is particularly useful in bass sound design if you lower it down a couple of octaves you can get a really nice sub and often kick drums are reinforced with the sine wave so that's all you really need to know for now that's what it looks like that's what it sounds like with just one note playing the second basic wave shape is the triangle wave here so on the display you can see these pyramids two sloped sides and you can see that it's got that main fundamental note but there's many more harmonics added which gives it that slight buzzing sound it's a little bit more harmonically rich you might say with just one note that's what it sounds like the third basic wave shape is the square wave so I'm gonna select it most since we'll show it like this and it sounds like this so as you can see perfectly squared off wave form there and many more harmonics added you've got a lot more buzz a lot more harmonically rich in the top and there and the fourth and final waveform is the sawtooth wave this can be mistaken for the triangle wave it sounds very different and as you can see there Sawtooths here only one slanted side there's no pyramids like the triangle wave and this one sounds even more harmonically rich again it's really really buzzy really really full in the top end different synthesizers will have different ways of changing the wave shape in the oscillator for instance serum this is the oscillator looks a bit different and there's different ways to select your basic waveforms sine sawtooth wave triangle wave the square wave etc and all through the oscilloscope showed you the waveform just to clarify again if I record out those sounds and I put them on to my playlist you'll see that on the actual playlist the waveforms are signs triangle square and saw wave just like this to summarize this section just learn those four basic wave shapes try to identify what they sound like try playing them with single notes and also chords and just get used to it so the next thing we're going to look at is additive and subtractive synthesis I've got each type of synth just playing one note and they're all sent to the mixer and this analyzer is on the master output so if I take all the volumes down and just press play and raise the sine wave up you can see that I have a sine wave if I raise the triangle you can see that I have this triangle wave here now the idea behind additive synthesis is that you start with one wave shape and you make it more complicated by inducing more waves and more sound on top of it so say for instance I start with a square wave but then I add a sine wave to it you can see that the tops of the square wave are rounded off and now we have a combination between a sine and a square or if I was to start with a sine wave and then introduce a saw wave to it you can see that I'm getting all that buzz enos and we're combining those two wave shapes this is really the basic principle of additive synthesis I'll go into it more in more detail later now let's look at subtractive synthesis which is the opposite of additive this is where you start with a complex waveform and you take away from it to create a new sound so if I start with a saw wave and I put in EQ and filter off the top and you can see that I'm subtracting frequency away and I've changed what it sounds like so it's not no longer as harsh in the top end but instead of having to use external plugins like eq's many synthesizers have these all built in they have various filters and effects which allow you to modify the sound from within the synth itself the next topic that I'm introducing is unison because this is a really quick way to completely change the sound so we're still only playing one note and I'm working inside serum and this is the oscillator so don't worry about everything else here it's not important this is what's creating the sound you know you've got your volume your pan and whatnots and what I'm gonna do is increase the unison and this adds more voices to the sound so instead of having just one saw wave just buzzing it's going to sort of duplicate pan and D tune them around the stereo field and if you look down here to the ozone imager this vectorscope is going to help you see the stereo information change but you'll be able to hear it so as I increase the Unison amount listen and look here and see what see what changes you can add unison to any of the basic wave shapes so if I was adding unison to a sine wave it would sound like this or to a saw wave to triangle wave or to a square wave and that really goes a long way in the making the sound a lot more rich and getting it sounding really professional so far we've just been playing one note so I'm going to change it play some chords to make it more interesting and the next closely tied thing to unison is D tune and so far we you know we've got we've created all these extra voices and we've panned them but to make them sound thicker and fuller you slightly detuned them from the original voice but you've got to be careful you don't detune them too much I'll show you what I mean so I'll play this chord and I'll start adding some unison it'll make it sound a lot better [Music] [Applause] [Music] now if I change the detune amount at one point it starts sounding really bad so you've got to be careful you don't do too much detuning and while more voices of unison sounds good when you start off it can be common just to add sixteen voices or as many voices of unison as you can to everything definitely experiment some of the best sounds I've made only have three voices of unison some have seven adding too much unison can also just really hammer your CPU of your computer so be careful with that the next topic we're going to look at is filters almost every single synth has a filter they all act in slightly different ways but they follow the same basic principles so usually you select a filter type and if you don't know what a filter is you've probably heard of EQ where you can remove frequencies from a sound a filter does pretty much exactly the same thing so in this case I have a low-pass filter try to ignore everything else in the synth it's not very important right now I've got this oscillator creating the sound here and I've got this filter that's all that's really important I have a low-pass filter so as I move the cutoff it's going to allow the low frequencies to pass and it's going to cut away the high frequencies so let's take a listen to this now you can only hear the low frequencies of the sound the high frequencies are cut off now I can introduce them again and usually you can select different filter types so I could actually select the high pass filter which instead would cut away the low end and only let the high end through like this and as well as those normal filters you've also got all sorts of crazy combing and phasing filters that sound like this [Music] so there's all sorts of different possibilities I'm just going to quickly set it back to that low-pass filter because I quite liked it the next topic we're going to look at our envelopes and adsr which stands for attack decay sustain and release and this determines the volume and shape of the sound when we press the keys and then when we take our fingers off the keys so we have attack decay sustain and release serum also has a value called hold I'm going to use this because this has a really graphical way of showing it looking at this graph from bottom to top we have no volume all the way to the maximum volume at the top and then from left to right we have zero seconds and then we go along in time so one second two second three seconds so if I have an incredibly short attack and I hold my fingers on the keys like this the sound is just going to jump up to its maximum value instantaneously but if I have a much longer attack it's gonna take more time for the sound to develop and grow to its maximum so you can see that might be better for like a pad sort of sound the next important parameter I would say is the release so this determines how the sound dies away once you release the keys or once the MIDI stops if I have a very very short release it just cuts away immediately the sound just dies away very sharp and sudden if I have a longer release the sound dies away quite gently and gradually and usually you can adjust the shape of these curves as well so maybe I have a longer release but it's a more sharp curve you know so you can really fine-tune it using serum which is why I like using serum the decay and the sustain in the middle are very very closely linked so what the sustain is says okay after we've reached that maximum value what value do we actually want the sound to hold on so say for instance I want the sound to rise up to the top and then cut down to a certain value and just just sustain there whilst I'm holding the keys let's play this [Music] and the decay is about how long it takes to decay from that top value to where it's going to hold so in this case let's just take a listen in that case it decayed very quickly to the sustained value but say for instance I want it to start very loud slowly decay and then hold at this value here in my opinion simply adjust in the Unison filter and adsr is where you really create the majority of your sound like at least 80 or 90% of it so instead of having sustained sounds if you adjust the attack and release like this you can have a nice little pluck sort of chords sound just like that it's now time to look at LFOs which stands for low frequency oscillators and this is where people can often go quite wrong when you're starting out low frequency oscillator it doesn't mean that it's affecting the low-end of our sound or the bass it means that it's oscillating at frequencies which are relatively low so you know maybe 0 to 30 or 40 Hertz something that we can recognize if I have this LFO here again the graph is exactly the same as the adsr is zero to maximum and then this is time and the LFO is just going to keep going backwards and forwards the way I like to explain what an LFO is is it can add movement and automation to mode well in serum any parameter in the synth really but usually the filter instead of having the filter just be static in this case I have it set to this value and it stays there it just stays there all the time what you can do is you can assign an LFO to the filter and then have that cutoff move all the time in serum you just drag it together how I create this link doesn't matter it only really matters that it can be linked for the sake of this tutorial what you'll see is that the cutoff starts very closed and then it opens up and closes back down again and you can adjust how quickly it does this so right now it's every four bars now it's every two bars and you can start creating all sorts of complex and interesting sounds and right now I have it triggered to the BPM but you can actually just set a certain value of Hertz like this and the reason LFO so great is because to achieve this sort of modulation or automation you would usually have to create an automation clip on your playlist and assign points and then link the two controls together which can be done but if you do it with the LFO it just saves you an awful lot of time and what's great about the LFO and serum you don't have to have it follow a shape like this you can have any sort of shape you want so say I just want it to rise very slowly over the course of two bars you can just set it to have any shape you want which could be awesome for sidechaining or any sort of sound design really and the final topic I want to look at is just adding extra effects on to this because sound design doesn't just stop with the synth engines so in your DAW or in the synth there's usually an effects chain where you can add distortion chorus EQ delay all sorts of stuff so in this case I have this simple plug sound and I can introduce some distortion some downsampling distortion just add a little bit of reverb simple some chorus and you've highly affected the sound there if I turn off these effects you'll match something very very simple so there's all sorts of different ways to design your sound but that really is it for this basic tutorial but it was hoping to achieve with this video is that no matter which since you use serum three times oscillator an analog modeled synth that you'll start recognizing what these names are the adsr the envelopes the oscillators and you'll start to sort of understand how they're linked and what they do to the sounds so hopefully that's worked please do let me know in the comments how it went or it was all just too confusing I want to make more videos like this I want to keep making them really really helpful so feedback is much appreciated but anyway thank you for watching I hope you have a great week please do leave a like if you enjoyed it and I'll see you in the next video bye for now

Channel: In The Mix

Views: 948,705

Rating: 4.9804087 out of 5

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

Id: NJLIS2MkFe4

Length: 14min 42sec (882 seconds)

Published: Sat Jun 08 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/likemanyofusnotfill]

This is a great video, really well explained. 🔊

[u/AniMouseMusic]

Interesting content. It reminds me of an old course back in the early days of the internet where you could learn the fundamentals of sounds and try to recreate synth sounds yourself. Thank you for this!