hey, what up! It's Wick for wickiemedia tutorials, and today I am going to take a look at filters.
i've already got my cubase project opened up and I've imported this first audiotrack right here
and i'm going to browse to my inserts and i'm going to look for two different types of filters today.
I'm going to look at the 'tonic' filter, which is a standard filter which comes with cubase
and i'm going to take a look at the 'moog' filter which is a UAD powered plugin by Universal Audio.
So these are the two that i'm going to take a look at.
At first they look 'completely different
but as you will later see is that there's a lot of similarities
because they're both filters.
First I'm going to take a look at the tonic. I'm gonna disabled the moog-filter so that it doesn't work
while I'm just working with this 'Tonic' filter.
So I'll that bring that up into the middle...
and i'm gonna take a look at all the different controls that this one has.
One of the first things you will probably noticed is that this filter has been divided in to various sections.
The middle section, which is a filter-section, is the thing that we're going to be focusing on for the main part.
On the left we've got an 'envelope', on the right we've got a 'Low-Frequency-Oscillator'.
and here on the left bottom we have this X/Y-Pad which we can use to manipulate two parameters of the filter with
- not something that you will commonly find on all filters
I'm going to focus on the middle-part, which is really the filter-part right here.
If i'm gonna go on top here you can see the different types ,or filter modes as they call it here, that we can choose from
and if I click on it I get this dropdown-list of filters
which go from four different types of Low pass filters
that's the 'LP24' up to the 'LP6'
the '24' or the '6' stands for the dB per octave cut.
so the 24 dB per octave cut will remove frequencies a lot faster and a lot more than when we have a curve of 6 dB per octave cut.
And than we've got this 'Band-Pass' and we've got a 'High-Pass' filter.
For today I'm gonna just take a look mainly at the 'Low-Pass' and the 'High-Pass' filters.
i'm going to start with the low pass.
And then we see one of the few controls that we will see a lot.
In the middle right here we've got the cut-off frequency,
this is the frequency from where the filter actually starts working.
So we've got this dialog box here in the left which is really helpful indicating at which frequency we exactly are.
So now we can see that we're around 1000 Hz, going on the way to 2000 HZ, etc, etc.
On the left we've got our resonance.
And this resonance gives a little bit of a boost around this cut-off frequency.
Than we've got a 'drive', which is something we will not commonly find on all filters.
But this basically acts like a little bit like a distortion or a saturation
and that's something you don't always want.
So i'm gonna turn at all the way down to '0' for now.
Here in the bottom we've got a 'mix'.
This blends the left '0%' indicating our 'dry signal' or our unfiltered signal; the way it enters this plugin,
and at the end on '100%' we have our full filtered signal
so everything in between will be a blend of our 'dry' and our 'wet' signal.
I'm gonna put that all the way up to 100%. So we just have the filtered signal for now.
And than here in the middle we've got this switch so we can actually make our stereo-signal mono if we'd want to.
i'm gonna play back the theme song which I have already got loaded up
and i'm gonna play around with the cut-off frequency so you can hear the effect.
If I move that down you can hear I'm removing more of the high frequencies.
That's why it's called a 'Low-pass'.
I'm going to play around with the resonance, and increase that.
You hear it gets a boost around the 'edge' where the cut-off frequency is.
So this will give a lot more effect when we give the filter a 'sweep' like so..
Occasionally it gets to sharp when We're getting in a higher frequency range
so what you would probably do with automating
is that we would automate the cut-off with the resonance.
So what we would do is that we would increase the resonance when we're in the lower frequency range
because it gives a bump to the low-end
but we decrease that resonance en we get it a little bit lower when we get to these higher frequencies
so they're not that sharp.
when we're around here we want this resonance to be automated a little bit softer as well
so as you can hear the filter, the low-pass filter, is something that you can easily use in a production
and you hear that all the time.
I'm going to compare that with a High-Pass filter
where we just remove the low frequencies and keep the high content.
Now the cutoff works basically the other way around because you can hear we just have the high content now.
If I put that back...
I can play around with the mix
and actually have a mix between our original input signal and the filtered signal.
so we still get that effect of the filter but it's not on the whole complete signal
so we still have some of that original content
And this is the basic of how we can filter some of the low end or of the high end of our signal.
So now i'm going to take a look at the 'Moog' filter
i'm going to open that up
and as you can see, again, the moog filter has also been divided into these sections
on the left we've got our input
then we can actually apply this 'drive' which is again a little bit of a saturation
so i'm gonna turn that off
Than we've got our filter section here,
on the right we've got our Low-Frequency Oscillator and our output.
Again with a mix so we can mix between our input signal and our filtered signal.
Again a 'mono/stereo' switch, and this actually offers also an output boost,
so we can boost our output-signal even more.
So i'm going to take a look at the filter-section for now
starting off with the cut-off frequency
again, the frequency where we start filtering from.
Than we've got the resonance here.
And these different types of filter modes uses the symbols
So on the left we've got our Low pass filter
We've got our Band-Pass filter and we've got our high pass filter.
So again i'm gonna start with the low pass filter
and i'm gonna scrub with the cut-off frequency to hear the filter effect.
You can hear this filter sounds different than the previous one
Increase that resonance.
That gives it a too sharp edge when we're back at the full signal.
That's something you want to automate for sure. 0:07:10.879,0:07:14.040 We can switch between '2-Pole' and the '4-Pole'
The 2-Pole and the 4-Pole are the curve of filtering that is being applied
So we can hear that, I'm going to put it around 200Hz
It's hard to hear when you're not listening to this on headphones or on some good speakers
So I'm going to put it a little bit higher on around 1000Hz.
So you can hear that it filters a lot more on the 4-Pole.
We can switch between the 'Low-Pass' and the 'Band-Pass' filter.
- interesting effect
And we're going to use the 'High-Pass' filter as well
Increase that 'Resonance' so we can hear more of the effect.
The 'Spacing' option here on the bottom
actually allows us to filter just one side of our stereo-image when we're working with a stereo-signal.
So now i'm gonna take a look at his low-frequency oscillator, or this 'LFO' here on the right.
And I have imported a different sound from the 'Primeloops dubstep arena'
Which is just a bass sound. And I'm gonna turn off the filter for now so we can hear that
So just a one tone sound.
and what i want to do is i wanna play around with the cut-off frequency
I have got a Low-Pass filter set up
and i wanna play around with that
Because you can hear if i play around with that I get some interesting effects.
But, unfortunately i'm not fast enough with my mouse to create that interesting effect.
Well, that's were the 'LFO' comes in.
The LFO is basically an automation for the cut-off frequency and uses a frequency to manipulate that movement which i just tried to make with my mouse.
so how that works is
it's really an oscillator which generates a frequency; it generates a sine wave.
I 'm gonna draw that down here so you can kind of visualize what this does.
so here on the left i'm going to draw this 'LFO' and i'm going to draw it before the filter
because that's how we should visualize it actually.
I've got my LFO which generates a frequency. So how can we set that frequency?
We set the frequency with the 'Rate'. And that's actually the frequency that it generates
So if we set it on '1'
that means that it will generate a frequency of 1 hertz.
so that is one oscillation per second
We can even go below that. So we have a frequency that is lower than 1 hertz.
So we have a 0.34 hertz.
And we can go faster, and we have a faster rate.
you can see this blinking 'LFO' lighting up here.
So that means that the speed of the LFO is always indicated with this light.
So if you go slower you can see this is the speed at which it is opening and closing.
The type of wave that it's using is something that we can set here.
so we can set this to be more of a 'Sawtooth' type of wave.
So now it's a different type of wave manipulating this cut-off frequency.
So it would would go more like
'zeeee'
and then close automatically
opened and go back and open
so that's a different type of wave. So if were going to use this sine-wave,
it will be more of a continuous opening-and-closing-type-of manoeuvre.
i'm gonna just choose this one
And i'm going to choose the 'Amount' because the amount is
the amount how much influence this actually has on our 'Cut-off'.
So i'm going to turn that all the way up so we can hear the full effect
and i'm gonna turn that 'Rate' up a little bit more so we can hear it as well.
So if i'm gonna play it back now....
you can hear i get like a 'Swooshy'
like a helicopter-type of sound. So if I increase that rate,
and play it back again.
that's already getting a quite interesting effect. -I can even go up to a higher frequency,
and i could still play around with all the other settings as well.
I'm going to play it in a loop, so you can hear me play around
with the different settings
so i'm gonna turn it on 'loop'
- increase the resonance even more
- playing around with the Cut-Of
So you can hear you can do some really interesting effects by using a 'LFO'
so now we're just using a frequency
if we switch to this button right here
from 'free' to 'sync'
we can actually use musical values
so now instead of being the hertz, were actually seeing musical values so here we have..
- let's look for a sixteenth note..
i can browse through....
and here we had it. - this is a sixteen note
and i can actually see the speed at which my project is running
and that is at a 140 BPM
so now it's taking the sixteenth note of 140 BPM.
so this could be interesting for musical types of effects.
Let me just quickly import a different sound and let's try it with that.
so now I have imported this different sound, which is another at bassline sound
from primeloops.
If i play that, it's a distorted-type of saturated sound.
something like that some uh... gonna turn back on the 'MOOG' filter
and i'm gonna play around with the LFO-settings so i'm gonna make sure the amount is
going to be set to a hundred again.
and i've got my project running at hundred-forty beats-per-minute
so that's corresponding to my values right now so it's set to musical values
So I'm going to play around with that
So that was with the 'High-Pass' and now I'm going to do the same with the 'Low-Pass'.
And than I can change the curve of the wave
You can hear that sounds different
so a specially when we're doing these type of dubstep sounds this is one of the things that we want to automate : the rate.
so what I have done now; I have quickly made some automation track on this bass sound
and I've imported two drum tracks
and that's just to demonstrate how you can play around with animation on this filter.
what i'm doing here on this automation-lane
is I'm just adjusting
this 'Rate' here
so if i would play this back, and i'm gonna solo just the bass-sound from the start here
you can see this curve here represents the rate.
And than I have used just a filter on these drum tracks to get a little bit more interesting dynamic.
What I've done on the drums here
is that I have just automated the cut-off frequency
so it kind of 'filters in'. I'll put that on solo so you can hear it.
and than here it gives that boos, but than I decrease this resonance so we don't get that sharp edge at the end.
If I wouldn't have done that, -i can just remove that part here.
you can hear how sharp it gets. -so I'll just remove the whole point
and keep it around that point here.. so
-that would get way too sharp
So thats why I removed that resonance here
when we fade in
with the filter
that is just what i've done, I have created some dynamics and
some interesting effect with a filter
on his bass and some filtering on the drums. So that's all that i've done.
It's a real quick examples so that you will get an idea...
I'm going to look at some more filtering quite soon
the next episode is going to be about 'equalizers' and I'm already working on the next season
which is going to be about mixers, mixing-consoles and mixing-software in general
So there's gonna be a real interesting subject to talk about as well
so i hope you've learned something today....
once again this was Wick for Wickiemedia tutorials and i'll see you next time... -Peace!