Advanced sound designing and Synth Tutorial

hello and welcome back to the channel today I'm going to be introducing some more advanced sound design techniques

here article really follows on from last week's article which was the fundamental sound design video so do go check that one out if you haven't seen it it lays a really good foundation to build on in this video in the future my sound design videos will be more focused on how to create a bass plucks pad those sorts of videos but this is a general video about some more advanced sound design techniques all of the techniques are written in the description down below if you want to skip around the video or jump to the bit that's most interesting to you but for now let's just dive right in the first topic we're gonna look at is FM synthesis which is frequency modulation synthesis as with last time I'm going to be using serum to demonstrate some of these sounds because it's really visual and I find that it helps a beginner understand what's going on starting with the basics you'll know from the last video that this is our oscillator this is what's going to be creating the sound and with FM synthesis

we're going to refer to this as the carrier so the next oscillator I'll just turn it on here but this time I've turned its level all the way down so if I play it on its own there's actually no sound going to be generated for this this is gonna be our modulator and we're going to use this waveform to modulate our carrier signal so I'm not going to go into the maths and how all that stuff works I'm just gonna look at the sounds and sort of give you an idea of what it actually sounds like because I think that's more important and when you're starting out so on the first oscillator there's this dial here I can just right click and select FM from B and then I can induce some FM synthesis so if I just sort of hold a chord [Music] if you look down on the frequency analyzer you can see that a whole load of harmonics are being added to that signal and this will change depending on the waveform you use to modulate and also what pitch that waveforms are so if I turn the pitch of this waveform down and then induce some modulation so already we've got a sound that's just an awful lot more harmonically rich I've got a keyboard down here that's what I'm playing on by the way I like serum because it just kind of makes it easy to control the amount that you're using so you can just dial it in until it until

it sounds right to you [Music] until you've got something that you think that might work for your song and then of course if you use this carefully with filters and with other effects you can really get some usable sounds now let's look at some different wave shapes so if I just sort of hold a chord and then change the modulator you can see that depending on your carry-on modulator you're gonna get completely different results naturally let's see how we can use FM synthesis to make a bass sound a lot more interesting so I start with this simple sort of sine plug bass you know it's nice plucky sine bass but if I turn on oscillator B level all the way down this is just a slightly distorted sine wave and then I start inducing some of this FM synthesis we get a sound that just has an awful lot more harmonic content in it and it's really changed the character of the sound we've also lost a lot of the low-end so I'm just gonna add another sub to this I'm just gonna add a dash of reverb on it and we've really made a very interesting base here just dial it until it's perfect and I find that this is a particularly useful way to add a lot of character to a

sound what I find with FM synthesis is you might want to layer some sounds like make a high base then a low bass and combine them together so that you're not trying to make one synth to do absolutely everything however if you like one synth to do just about everything this is the plug-in version of an incredibly famous synthesizer called the synclavier and this is heavily based on FM synthesis and there's all sorts of sounds you can create from this you know you've got all these sort of marimba and bell-like sounds you can have some incredible sound effects incredible pads so this is one synth this is just a plug-in version but a very very famous synth another incredibly famous synth is the yamaha dx7 this is again just a plug-in version of it but you can really get the most incredible pad sounds out of it [Music] just some really really gorgeous rich sounds and you know FM synthesis is one of these sort of rabbit holes where you can just there's just so much to it and if you really want to have a lot of fun and you know spend many many weeks months or years figuring it all out I would recommend it if you're that sort of person that's very curious about sound design there's just so much to learn about FM I find that although there's a lot of theory

and maths behind how FM synthesis works really you get to a point where you do it so much that it just becomes you know intuitive you know what sort of wave tables and wave shapes you're looking for what you want is your modulator carrier how to add how and where to add your different effects to make it sound the way you want so FM is really one of these things where it's gonna take your time but it really is fun if you want to dive in and try to figure it all out it would you know I could make an entire tutorial series just on FM synthesis the next topic I'd like to look at in more detail are envelopes so both for the volume like the amplitude am envelopes of a sound but also the filter envelopes and how these are quite important in defining the sort of punch and shape of your sound so last time we looked at volume envelopes and we also looked at an LFO controlling the filter so what I would like to try and create now is a plucky sound and I'm using a saw wave so I've got quite a lot of high end in the sound naturally and I've shaped the sound with my volume or amplitude envelope to be a pluck you know it rises very sharply cuts away quickly as well and I end up with this [Music] but although the volume envelope seems to be doing the right thing even if I change and make it even more plucky I feel like I'm not getting any sort of thump or punch out of it and there's just a lot of high-end so what you can do is instead of using like an LFO to control the filter like in the last video you can actually use the

same amplitude envelope or another amplitude envelope to control the filter cutoff so let's just start without an envelope and I'm just gonna manually control the filter cutoff so the sound becomes a little bit more bearable but the transients gone we're not getting that thump or that actual pluck sound even though my amplitude envelope seems perfect so let's use this second envelope here envelope two I'm just going to drag it onto that cutoff and I've created a link and now I'm just gonna fine-tune this cutoff and the envelope until we get more of a plucky sound and just for more clarification this envelope here is just controlling what this filter does so when it's low the filter is closed when it goes to the top the filter opens up we got all the high frequencies and then it cuts back down again and that's what really gives us that pluck or that thump it's the result of the filter moving very quickly through all the frequencies and then cutting back it gives you like a sharp sort of punching effect so we're getting an awful lot more of a plucky sound here so now that I've adjusted both the amplitude envelope and an envelope to control the filters cutoff we get a sound that's a lot more punchy and plucky but maybe I can fine-tune this again and choose a different filter shape

that sounds a lot more like the kind of plug I was looking for if I combine that this pack that's a lot more professional sounding than the first sound which was just too brassy and too full and if you fine-tune the filter you can get even more out of this so let's say that I change the resonance of the filter you may be familiar with this it just adds this little bump just above the cutoff or corner frequency here so let's see what this does to the sound really changes it entirely into a completely different sound so doing now is adjusting the drive of the filter which can really saturate and make it sound great and just to reinforce this point about the filter adding that thump if I go back to this bass patch which I showed you a moment ago which has a really nice pluck to it if I turn the filter off all of that pluck just goes away we still have low-end but it's just it's just not the same kind of thump in the sound so the filter is really important and what you find is that synths are often chosen or or praised or or loved due to or because of their filters you know the filters on a mug or a Moog synthesizer the resonance the cutoff the the you know the slope it just imparts a character on the sound and a filter is definitely not just a mathematical filter that's just doing a task it really adds as a spirit a character to the sound and it's worth diving through the filters to really find what you like in serum there's loads in most since there's there's plenty to choose from the reason there's so many to choose from is because they all are subtly different and having lots of different filters or you know it helps you create a sound that is just exactly the way you want it to be the next topic I'd like to look at is a closer look at LFO so I introduced this in the last video but let's look into some different different techniques here so the LFO I showed you last time looked like this it just raised and lowered and we used it to control the filter but I'm going to show you some different ways you can use lfos to control things so what I'm gonna do first is just show you the sound which is

just a pad like this it holds for as long as I hold the keys and if I drag the LFO onto the volume here and then make a little adjustment what you'll see as we get something like last time where the sound just goes up and down like this but now if I choose a different LFO shape so there's loads already built in here or you can just select your own shapes here for instance this is a square wave where it's full volume then cuts all the way down what we can get is different effects like this where you create sort of a stutter pad when I'm not pressing the keys here I'm just I'm holding it down with my pedal and it's doing the rest so you can create sort of stuttering effects like this from within a synth what I wanted to use this for was to show the different sort of triggering modes for LFOs an LFO can be triggered every time that I press a key or it could just be set to be on the whole time no matter which keys I press it's sort of internally clocked to my door so if I just hold the keys down now it doesn't matter if I add new keys they're all going to be stuttering on and off at the same time however if I turn it to a different mode like triggering and I press the keys at slightly different times there all of them are going to stutter on and off at different times so you know they're not turning on and off together so there's lots of different sort of nuances and subtleties to LFOs that are important to consider because sometimes if you want to have a sound just continually sidechaining but you're playing more than one note if you don't hit them at the perfect time it might stutter that LFO and really mess up your sound so definitely dive into the settings and see

what you've got available to you in this LFO tool for instance if I hold a chord down you've got smoothing so if I turn that off it clicks all the weights you're completely smooth so this might just be a really good way to create a nice sound the next thing I want to use the LFO to do is to subtly control the pan of a sound can link the two together LFO and pan and then change the area which it operates over so if I do this fully this is you're gonna pan from left to right it's gonna sound really intense but if I lower this area it's just gonna subtly pan from left to right and if I lower the speed a bit [Music] and it's added a huge amount of movement to the sound so it's important to remember that the LFO might have sort of different boundaries on on what it's controlling it might not be turning something fully on and fully off there might be more sort of subtlety to it in the sense that you're using the next topic is how to move from one synth to another so how to apply what you know on one synth to other synthesizers because this one here is an emulation of the Prophet and this quite frankly looks nothing like serum but there are so many similarities if you just sort of don't panic

and just take each control one by one because when I started I would shy away from since they look like this and I would always go for a serum because this just is more modern everything you know it just makes more sense to me at least but there's a lot of people who this makes an awful lot more sense to so I'm going to show you how to break something down simply so this is a preset called mild brass that I've just loaded up right now so we're gonna try and figure out what's doing what because you know there's no obvious wave tables so what I'm gonna do is just show you sort of how to up how I would approach this and figure out what's doing what from sort of a beginner's perspective you never press the keys I'm listening for any other effects so I can hear that there's a delay so the first thing I'm gonna do to simplify things is just turn off the delay so look for anything that says delay or reverb let's just turn that off so now we're left with a much more simple sound the next thing I look for is some sort of master volume or a mixer and also our oscillators because we know that the sound has to start with those oscillators so poly mod wheel mod filters okay we've got mixer oscillator an oscillator so we've got a and B so what I'm gonna do is look at this mixer and this is oscillator a B and then noise so if I turn these all the way down there's no sound at all if I turn oscillator a up we have one sound oscillator be another sound so let's look at oscillator a I'll just turn it up a bit and we can see that we have a frequency and some shapes so if I just change the shapes saw wave more sort of square wave sound and that's simple you know we're just sort of breaking it down bit by bit oscillator B so this appears to be pretty much the same sound it's as a

sawtooth wave but on the frequency on the fine tuning it's actually been adjusted here so I wonder why because if you push this too far it sounds bad now do you remember on serum if you have a sound you can change the unison detuned to make it sound wider so this is likely what this here is doing is the fine tune makes it sound wider so if I play oscillator a and B together they sound pretty much the same now if i push the fine tuning up this will probably sound a lot more wide and lush Wow that changes the sound dramatically try different wave shapes not a huge difference but a little bit and now the next thing I'd look for are those envelopes because that makes a huge difference to the sound so I see a few here I see cut-off resonance for a filter envelope that's the filter I'm looking for the amplitude or the volume envelope which is amplifier here so attack decay sustain release let's increase the attack okay release so die away over a longer period quicker simple so do you see how if you just sort of take it step by step these sorts of synths aren't actually as intimidating as they might first seem so don't be afraid of trying things like this because this sound here you know it just right away it sounds good and it just sounds very different to the way that serum sounded serum was definitely a lot more digital I had to do a lot more with the filters to really try and make it work having variety in sort of sounds and synthesizer samples is so important to producers there's not many producers you'd ever find you would say yep I only ever use one synth that's the only thing I've ever used I'm never gonna use anything else we love sort of collecting toys even if they're just plugins once you sort of create one sound maybe try to create it on another synthesizer or what I like to do as well is open up a preset that's complicated on one

synthesizer and then open up another open up the same synth so another patch and then I just try to slowly match every single setting and then I listen to it as I go and see what's changing so this is something that I do in serum for instance there's loads and loads of sounds in here so if I just select any sound here [Music] that's quite a nice like plucky sort of bass sound but it's extremely complicated so now what I do is open up another patch of serum beside it where they're completely initialized patch and I just start here match these to start with this oscillator I'd match all the wave tables and I just match it until it's exactly the same but at each stage I'd be listening out to see what each dial does this is I mean it's a long sort of tedious process but it is enjoyable and it's a way to really develop your sound design skills the final topic that I wanted to go into more detail in is sort of effects and the order you use your effects and why this matters or why it doesn't matter so I've got this sound here which is just that pluck from earlier so we've got that sort of pluck sound and what I'm going to show you is just adding effects and the way this just dramatically changes the sound now if I open up say a distortion plug-in and maybe I choose downsampling distortion I could add a little bit like that and then mix it in [Music] completely change the sound again really nice and subtle add some reverb often when you're using reverb with sound design you've got to be careful to see if there's any sort of low-cut on it if you don't low cut it the reverbs gonna have a lot of sort of rumbling frequencies underneath which might be okay but it also might be pretty bad [Music] let's add a little subtle delay to this I'm just gonna use this EQ to sort of cut off some of the low and the high and now it's important that you consider the order you use your effects in so if I push the reverb on top of the delay it's actually gonna sound subtly different to having the reverb after the delay so it's really important when you consider your effects that you don't just stop with the internal effects inside a synthesizer because some of them don't have many effects but that you also consider your mixer and don't be afraid to layer loads and loads of different effects on the end you could be using anything it doesn't really matter what it is when it comes to sound design you just got a try and you know work towards that tone I won't go into too much detail because I have a whole video linked here which is which sort of details which effects you should use in which order and why and why it is so important but with sound design there are no rules you can really try absolutely anything and when it comes to effects I tend to sort of listen to sounds that I like in songs from my favorite artists and I just try to sort of match the sound as closely as I can when when you're sort of learning sound design it really is a good idea to copy what the professionals are doing and if you don't know you know with the name of something ask people if you've got a sound and you're not sure even what you might call it or how to name it you know you know ask on YouTube ask and find a good reddit server a discord

server you know join in the community join in the conversation and ask people because most of us people in the music industry producers beatmakers whatever where we're really happy to help people we don't mind being asked a question like this sort of this style of distortion is called downsampling adds that sort of classic sound like that on top of it for very many months when I was starting out I didn't know that that was called down sampling or bit reduction so I was going through these different distortion modes assuming that distortion was just you know crunching a sound up I didn't know that there was some some sort of other sort of beautiful options in there as well so don't be afraid to ask if you don't know the name of a sound or or 1oz so overall don't be afraid to ask for help when it comes to sound design just join in with the community join in the discussion and you know it is a long process so I don't rush it and have fun with it so I hope this video has been helpful thank you very much for watching and I hope to see you in the next video - bye for now you.