By Daniel Rothmann – danielrothmann.com

Introduction

So, you’ve made it this far. If you’ve read my previous articles in the EGE series you should have a pretty good overview of how electronic music actually works. In addition, you should also be able to put together some pretty cool beats for your tracks! So, what’s missing? You guessed it: Synthesizers. Electronic music is all about synthesizers. You may be wondering how the heck these things work, right? I can understand that many people are intrigued by synthesizers; all those knobs and buttons can certainly seem very confusing! In this article, I’m going to give you a basic overview of how the common synthesizer works and what important parameters you need to know of in order to produce the sounds you want.

Choosing your synthesizer

Before we can get tweaking, we need a synthesizer to work with. Depending on which DAW (if you don’t know what this means, read EGE#1 – Getting Started) you have chosen for yourself, you may already have one or two basic synths included in the package. Or maybe you already own a hardware synth that you’d like to explore. I highly recommend that you start by using a simple synthesizer like Reason’s Subtractor or Togu Audio Line’s VST synth, TAL-Elek7ro. Both are what you call “subtractive” synthesizers. You can always get a more powerful synth later – You don’t have much gain of the power if you don’t know how to use it, right? I’m going to be using the TAL-Elek7ro synthesizer for the later tutorial since it is free and available for both PC and Mac.

Basic schematics of subtractive synthesis

There are several ways of synthesizing sounds with machines – Subtractive synthesis (also sometimes called “analogue”) is one of them. Subtractive synthesizers work by producing a harmonically rich sound (a periodically repeated waveform) and then subtracting elements of the sound, actually removing harmonics to achieve the sound you want. I don’t want to get into technical talk, but I will give a short introduction to the various elements of this technique:

Preset tweaking – The essential parameters

I’m going to quickly go through the parameters you need to know in order to begin tweaking your sounds. Choose a random preset on your synthesizer and try changing these parameters:

The oscillator:

• Waveform
  This parameter will change the raw oscillator sound that you’re working with. The waveform defines the basic sonic characteristics of the sound. TAL-Elek7ro doesn’t actually have a parameter labeled “waveform”; it has four buttons with different symbols illustrating the waveform.
• Semi/Pitch
  This one is pretty self-explanatory. Try it out.

The filter:

• Cutoff
  The cutoff parameter defines the frequency where harmonics are cut off (duh) the waveform, either above or below. If you’re unsure what his means, try it out, and you’ll notice immediately.
• Resonance
  By raising the resonance, you put additional emphasis on the cutoff frequency, making for some cool filter sweep effects. Also sometimes called “Q” or “Emphasis”.

The amplifier envelope (ADSR):

• Attack
  Defines the time the sound takes to go from no volume to full volume. A big attack value would result in a long “fade in”, while a small value would make the sound punch in very quickly.
• Decay
  The time taken for the sound to decay from full volume (when the attack reaches its maximum) to the sustain volume.
• Sustain
  Sustain defines the volume of the sound after the decay – If trying to emulate a flute sound, you would use a high sustain value, while trying to emulate a piano, you would use no sustain.
• Release
  The amount of time taken for the sound to “fade out” when you let go of the note on your keyboard.

Let’s get designing!

So, now that you have all the synthesizer fundamentals in place, all there is left is to start working with it. The best advice I can give you, is to start by fooling around, trying out all the essential parameters. Then, when you’ve developed a sense of how these things work and how they each affect the sound, try to imagine what kind of sound you would like to make, and imagine what characterizes that sound. Can you emulate the desired sound using the essential parameters? There is no way you can memorize how every cool synthesizer sound is made, so the best thing is to learn how the synth works and make it work for you to produce any sound you want, maybe even a sound nobody has ever heard before!

Tutorial: Creating a synthesized bass

Here’s a short tutorial to help you improve your sound designing skills. We’re going to be making a house bass/lead sound from scratch using the TAL-Elek7ro VST synthesizer. This is what we’re going to be making: House Bass

1. Load up TAL-Elek7ro. If it is not already set, choose the “BS Startup” preset.

2. Let’s start by setting the oscillators. The sound we’re trying to make is made up of 3 oscillators; The fundamental note, the octave below and the major 3^rd. To get the rich and fat sound, we’re going to use the saw waveform for all oscillators. Let’s start by turning SYNC off, and turn the sub oscillator (also called “OSC 3”) down a bit:

3. Now, we’re going to turn up the second oscillator. We want this oscillator to play the major 3^rd above oscillator 1, to give it that house feel. Adjust the “SEMI” knob until you find the major 3^rd.

4. Let’s move on to the filter. For starters, we have to choose our filter type. Let’s take “BassLine 18 dB” since we’re going to be making a bass sound.

5. The first thing I’ll do is to take down the cutoff value and raise the resonance value. It sounds a bit dull at the moment so we’re going to add some movement using the envelope below. Raise the “CONTOUR” amount, and you’ll begin to notice a difference.

6. Let’s set the filter envelope. At the moment, it is just quick attack, quick decay, full sustain and some release. You shouldn’t actually be able to hear a difference in cutoff movement at the moment, but you’ll notice the sound is brighter when contour is raised. What you’ll want to do is to lower the sustain and raise decay, and you’ll notice the sound is becoming more punchy and percussive.

7. Increase the amplifier envelope release time (we were working with the filter envelope before) and decrease the filter release time and adjust the cutoff until you like the sound.

8. As our final touch, let’s add some velocity control to the cutoff (VCF) to make the sound more expressive. This means, that when we play the notes harder, the cutoff will increase. This may require that you decrease the cutoff.

9. That’s a pretty cool sound, isn’t it? Congratulations, you have significantly increased your sound designing skills!

That’s all for now, hope to see you again soon!

By Daniel Rothmann (T7) www.danielrothmann.com

Introduction

So you’re new to electronic music production. You don’t know much about it all, but that’s OK, everyone has been at this point of experience. I figured the best way to start this series out would be explaining basic drum programming. While many may know very little (if any) theory on the subject, drum programming is quite a bit easier accessible than chords and harmony, since it doesn’t require direct acquaintance with music theory. Even for the inexperienced ear, you can usually tell if a rhythm just isn’t right, or sounds strange in some way. During this tutorial we’re going to set you up with the basic tools you need to get grooving. First, let me introduce you to the software.

The software

The two most widely known techniques for producing drums sounds on a computer are drum synthesis and drum sampling.

Drum synthesis is typically a polyphonic synthesizer that comes with a set of preset parameters that you can change to a certain degree. Some of these could be drum pitch, waveform, noise amount, saturation, and so on. Drum synthesizers are similar to regular synthesizers in the way that they generate (synthesize) a drum sound from scratch, live. Generally, drum synthesizers differ from regular synthesizers in the way, that the drum synth generally have some preset parameters that can only be changed to a very small degree. This could, for example, be the pitch envelope of a kick drum. The way the kick drum very promptly (in a matter of milliseconds) drop from a high pitch to a low one in order to generate a ‘punchy’ effect in sound.

Drum sampling is essentially taking a sample (a recording), i. e. an acoustic snare sound or an electronic hihat from a drum synthesizer, and playing it back whenever a certain note or switch is triggered inside the software. Drum samplers usually feature parameters such as individual sample volume, pitch, length, pan etc. Drum samplers differ from the drum synthesizers by not producing any sound from scratch, you utilize a sample that has already been recorded, prefabricated and modify it according to your musical aspiration.

First of all, let me introduce you to the drum sampler we’re going to be working with: Ableton Live’s ‘Impulse’. It is a decent-quality drum sampler, with some relatively typical features (and a few not-so-typical). In eight square slots, samples can be loaded and played back. Each sample has separate controls for pitch, decay, volume, pan, filter, saturation, timestretch and more. Some of these can be affected by velocity (how ‘hard’ the note is pressed on the keyboard, defining the strength of the particular tone) and some parameters can be set to select a random value with each new note. These things can come in very handy when you want to program a bit of variety into your beats.

Let’s get busy

In this tutorial, we’re going to program an electronic drum kit from scratch, using pre-fabricated drum samples from the internet. We’re going to be using Ableton Live’s ‘Impulse’ which is, as I’ve already mentioned, a drum sampler.

1. For legal reasons, I cannot supply you with samples, even if they are available for free on the Internet. The samples I’ve used are from www.Pettinhouse.com, a site that provides free drum samples. I chose their ‘VKE Modem’ drum kit ‘“ You can download it for free here: http://www.pettinhouse.com/html/vke_modem.html.
   
2. Download the drum kit (for NI Battery, even though we will be using Abletons Impulse, the raw samples are in that package) and extract the folder named ‘Modem Kit Samples’ to wherever you like to have your drum samples.
   
3. Open up Ableton Live and make a new MIDI track. Drag Impulse on to the MIDI track. Impulse is located under ‘Instruments’ in ‘Live Devices’.
4. We need to navigate to the place we saved the samples. Use Live’s browser (on the left, named ‘File Browser 1′), and locate the folder.
    
5. For starters, I’ll drag ‘BD_RnB_SS2′ on to the first free slot in Impulse. BD is short for bass drum. The sound is a bit harsh for what I am going for, so I am going to turn Transpose (Transp) down by -2 semitones (st), dial the Volume to -9 dB, and apply a low-pass filter (LP 1). You accomplish this, by pressing the ‘Filter’ button, make sure that Mode is set to ‘LP 1′ and turn the Frequency down to 825 Hertz (Hz). I also turn the Resonance (Res) to its’ minimum, 0.30.
   
6. For my snare, I’ll drag in ‘SD3_Modem’ and turn the volume to -3 dB. Next up I’ll add a clap sound, named ‘Clap’, and set the volume at -2 dB.
   
7. In the next 3 slots, I’ll load in some effects. I’ve chosen ‘SIGNAL’, ‘Tu3′ and ‘Tu’. I pan ‘SIGNAL’ slightly to the left (24L), and turn the volume down to -10 dB. Basically, I used the same procedure for ‘Tu3′, though I pan it to the right (23R), and dial the volume in on approx. -7 dB. I transpose ‘Tu’ up by 8 semitones, and set the volume at -12 dB.
   
8. We are now left with 2 empty slots. I am going to fill one of them with a hihat; The sample I’m using is named ‘Hat’. I find the hihat a bit too deep and harsh, so I turn the Transpose up by 4 semitones, Stretch down to -16% (this will make the sample slightly shorter, using a time stretching technique), Decay down to 120 milliseconds (ms) and Volume to -7 dB. I also throw in a low-pass filter (LP 1) at approx. 9.5 kHz to take off some treble.
   
9. All we need now is our last effect ‘“ Let’s use ‘Crash2_modem’. By itself, this sample does not sound very good. I am going to transpose it and make it shorter, controlled by gate (this means that when the drum note for this sample in the drum editor stops, the gate will cut off any of the remaining sample material that has not yet been played back. It makes us able to create a much ‘sharper’ release with this sample). Here is the parameter values I used: Start: 15 ms, Transpose: 7 st, Stretch: 48%, Decay: 9.14 ms, Volume: -21 dB. Remember to press the button that reads ‘Trigger’ so that it displays ‘Gate’ instead. This enables the gate function.
   
10. All we need now is a beat to play back on our new drum kit! I’ve chosen a electro-inspired beat I thought fit for these sounds.
    
11. Finally, I’m going to use a Compressor to get a bit more consistency in volume. I set the Threshold at -19 dB and Output -5.6 dB.
    

Enjoy your new drum kit! You can drag the Impulse instrument back up in your browser and create a preset you can use at another time.