Maybe you like electronic music but the complexity of a synth is overwhelming.
Or maybe you only write for real live musicians.
If you want to work on film and video game projects I have a reality check for you.
Most projects, especially when starting out, don't have the budget for a symphony orchestra.
And what do you do anyway if you get a gig
and the director wants you to incorporate electronic elements?
Today I'm going to cover five basic ways you can take an existing synth preset
and make some simple changes to make it your own.
For the examples I'm using Arturia Pigments but the things I talk
about are standard in pretty much any synthesizer.
Thank you to Loot Audio for providing me with the Chapter One Exile Pigment
preset pack which I'll be using for the examples in this video.
So why are we starting with presets?
Well I think there is a lot of value in building your own sounds from scratch,
but if you don't really know your way around a synth or you don't have a lot of time,
finding a preset that's 90% close to what you want is a reasonable thing to do.
Then by understanding what's actually going on with the sound you can bring
it even closer to what you want and even add a personal touch.
Once you've found a patch you like the first thing you should do is isolate the sound sources.
Depending on the synth this could mean the oscillators, wave tables, samples, even noise.
So let's say for example I find this Meadows patch that I like
but there's this kind of low washy long reverb happening that's kind of muddying up my mix.
So what we can do is isolate the different sounds and figure out which parts are doing what.
So in this case I'll start with engine one.
You can hear that that's that kind of almost marimba like sound.
Engine two. There's our long washy tail that's filling up that mid low end.
And the utility engine, this is a little tight square wave.
So if i just take engines one and utility
I get the character of that sound I really like without that big washy mud kind of filling it up.
So just by isolating those sounds I can kind of customize this to be more useful.
Or we could take another patch, let's try flavors.
So there's two engines here. So engine one is this.
Engine two is this.
So if we only use engine 2
we get this really nice ambient kind of lead. It's kind of somewhere between a lead and a pad sound.
So again the first step is just to isolate the different sounds that are building up the patch
and making the different elements, so you can figure out which ones you like.
The next section to play with is the envelope, which might also be called ADSR.
That stands for attack decay sustain and release.
These settings basically control how the sound speaks over time.
By playing with these settings you can turn an existing patch into a very different
sound or even just bring it closer to the rhythm or tempo of your specific track.
So we'll use a simple square wave for demonstration.
Attack controls how long it takes for the sound to go from
silence to the full volume after you press the key.
So here it's almost instant, if we have a very long attack
it takes a lot of time to build up.
So slow attacks are good for pads and maybe expressive lead sounds
and short attacks are better for keys and more percussive sounds.
Let's skip decay for a second and look at sustain.
So sustain is basically the level your sound will settle to
after hitting its initial peak from the attack.
So here it's at full sound but we can bring that down
so we'll have that loud attack and it will settle down.
So that's how you can get a very kind of punchy attack sound
is by having a strong attack and a low sustain.
Of course we could also have it build up and come down.
So now we'll look at decay.
Decay is the time from the peak of your attack until it settles to the sustain.
So you can see here visually we're extending that so it can be instant
or it can be very long.
And the last part is release and release is how long it takes from when you let go of the key
for the sound to go from its sustain level to silence.
So right now we have a pretty short release but if we make that long...
And see that it fades away off into the distance.
So it's not exactly like a reverb effect but it does give you
more space and kind of a washier sound.
So pads will have a longer release but a very short percussive sound or a bass
you probably want a shorter release.
So by playing with these different settings we can take an existing patch and make it into a pretty
different sound or even just one that better fits our tempo or the rhythm of our track.
For example we could take this patch a new turn
and shorten the decay for a punchier more percussive sound.
Or we could lengthen the attack for a softer sound.
Nice. Or let's take another one, here's Just Now.
If i extend that decay and lengthen the attack
we've now turned that from kind of a keyboard sound into a pad.
Next up is filters.
Generally speaking filters are used to cut or boost certain frequencies in the sound.
Most commonly you'll cut the high frequencies to make your sound mellower and softer.
So here's our basic square wave again.
If I lower the filter here the high frequencies will get cut off.
So if we look at this patch Tenderness
and we actually turn off filter one, you can hear there's this kind of warbly
reverby pad in the background that was actually being hidden and filtered away by filter one.
So by finding a patch that was kind of interesting and just
exploring it a little bit we can find new sounds that weren't ever necessarily intended.
This patch Mr. Room is a good example of how different elements can start to work together.
So here the filter is actually being controlled by envelope three.
Using those same settings of attack decay sustain release,
it's controlling the amount of time that gets affected to filter one.
So if you see if that's at 3.6 seconds, if I lower that down the filter will open up
almost instantly.
Notice how this curve here is matching the shape of the cutoff.
Another way to change things over time is with an LFO or low frequency oscillator.
Low frequency is basically another way of saying
slow and it's an oscillator because it keeps repeating back and forth in a cycle.
An LFO can be patched up to anything you want to change in your sound,
for example pitch or the filter cutoff.
So we could take this patch No Clowns, set the LFO to sync to an eighth note,
and have it modulate our volume.
Bring our main volume down a bit.
Let's have LFO 1 modulate the volume.
Now we have this pulsing sound
which is also connected to the tempo.
So in any track where you want
a consistent eighth note pulse you can use an LFO to control different things.
We could even have it affect the cutoff.
Or we could take an ambient patch, here's an atmospheric one,
and apply.. let's take LFO 3 and apply it to the pan.
So now it's moving back and forth left and right, taking advantage of the stereo field.
Another common way to change things is with the mod wheel.
Mod being short for modulation or change.
If you use orchestral VSTs you're probably already
used to using the mod wheel for expression or dynamics.
With a synth you can use the mod wheel for anything.
Filter cutoff is a common choice, so as the mod wheel goes up the sound gets brighter.
But of course we can do more than that.
So here just on our basic square wave again
I'll take the cut off down a little bit and have our mod wheel raise it up.
So now as I play the mod wheel, switch this to keyboard,
which lets you be more expressive as you're playing your patch.
But we can do other things with that, so let's take Distraction, this evolving pad.
What if we took LFO 1 and actually patched it to the filter volume
and then assigned our mod wheel to LFO 1.
So it's both the rate and the amount of cut off.
So as i raise the mod wheel now...
We have this kind of vibrato effect almost.
Thank you again to Loot Audio for providing me with the Pigments Preset pack.
Starting from a preset is a really great and efficient way to work
and can teach you a lot about what your synth is capable of,
but at some point you're going to want to graduate to building your own sounds from the ground up.
That's why you have to check out this video here where i make my
case for why Syntorial is the best way to do that.
Thanks for watching, I'll see you in the next one!