Synthesis Made Simple: Using Your LFO Like a Simple Seqencer

Modulation is what brings synthetic sounds to life.  While there is something to be said about the starkness of a plain, unmodulated sawtooth wave, there is something about our hearing that craves change and evolution.  Think of how aggravated you feel when your neighbor's car alarm goes off for a half hour at 3 AM.  As mentioned in previous parts of this series, the LFO is a very valuable tool when it comes to a modulation source.  Quite simply, an LFO is a very slow audio wave that is used to control parameters of your synth instead of producing a audible sound.  Because synth waveforms tend to be cyclical, this means an LFO is great for creating cyclical effects, such as vibrato, tremelo, and wah-wah.  But it's useful for more than that.  Have a synth with no sequencer or arpeggiator, but want to simulate (a very simple) one?  The LFO is your key to making it happen.

For this tutorial, I'll be using TAL's NoiseMaker, a freeware synth that should work fine on both Mac and PC.  So go grab it if you don't have it already, and follow along.

1.  When you first open NoiseMaker, it defaults to an initialized patch, which is just 1 oscillator, a sub oscillator, with the filter wide open and no modulations applied.  We'll be using this "blank slate" as our starting point.  The first thing we want to do is to close the CUTOFF in the FILTER section.  If you play a few notes, you won't hear anything.  This is because we've filtered out all the frequencies in our sound.  We're going to use LFO modulation to fix that.

2.  In the upper lefthand corner of the GUI, you'll see a purple box marked LFO 1.  This is one of two LFO's offered in NoiseMaker.  First things first, click the SYNC button until it lights up.  This is telling the LFO to run in sync with your host's tempo, letting you match the speed of the LFO to specific note divisions.

3.)  Twiddle the RATE knob next.  If you look at the CONTROL section at the bottom right of the GUI as you do this, you'll see the DISPLAY readout changing to different note divisions.  Set the knob so the LFO will cycle at 1/8th notes.

4.)  Next, we need to tell the LFO what it should modulate and by how much.  So right beneath the SYNC button, you'll see a drop-down menu that reads OFF.  This is where you set your modulation's destination.  Click on this and select FILTER.  The LFO now knows to modulate the FILTER CUTOFF.

5.) Next, click the KEY TRIG button at the bottom of the LFO.  This will cause a key press to trigger the LFO.

6.)  You still won't hear anything until you turn up the DEST 1 knob next to the modulation destination menu.  Nudge it up and play a few notes and you'll probably hear something that sounds like a subdued dubstep wobble (and indeed, LFO's are key to those types of sounds).  Go ahead and crank the knob all the way up and the sound will become brighter and the modulation more extreme.  It still pretty much sounds like a dubstep bass, though.

7.)  Any well-appointed LFO will offer a variety of WAVEFORMS to choose from.  These waveforms simply allow different shapes of modulation.  The reason this sounds like a wobble is because NoiseMaker's LFOs default to a sinewave.  This would be great for vibrato, but we need something a bit more abrupt to simulate the retriggering of notes.  So click the little green waveform display for the LFO and drag up and down until you see the SQUAREWAVE, which looks a bit like the top of a castle wall.  This waveform produces a modulation that is either on or off, essentially.  The effect would be less extreme with a smaller DEST 1 value, but with it set all the way up, the LFO is opening the filter all the way and then snapping all the way shut at a speed that just happens to be the speed of an 1/8 note at your host tempo.  Play a few notes and you should hear a pulsing 1/8th note that repeats as long as you hold down a key.

Now, obviously, this isn't the same thing as a full-fledged sequencer or arpeggiator, but it can produce some useful effect and be fun to play around with, especially once you start layering on additional modulations.  A couple of notes before I go...

• If you have a synth that allows the LFO to modulate an OSCILLATOR'S AMPLITUDE, you can achieve a similar effect, with the advantage that it frees up the filter to do something else, allowing more complex sounds.  NoiseMaker just doesn't have this capability right now.

•  If you have a synth that offers a descending sawtooth waveform on its LFOs, try using this instead, as it produces a sharper, but more subtle sound.  On some synths, modulating the filter with a squarewave can produce clicks, but a descending sawtooth doesn't have this problem.  It just so happens that this isn't yet an option on NoiseMaker.

•  If you're feeling ambitious, try assigning LFO 2 to modulate OSC 1 (the pitch of OSC 1).  Assign it to a squarewave, make sure SYNC and KEY TRIG are selected, set the RATE to 1/4 notes, and the DEST 1 amount to .3987.  Play a key and you'll hear the note value changing.  Experimentation will yield more musically-pleasing results, but hopefully you get the theory behind it.

Roll Your Own Lead Sounds: The Hoover

There are some synth sounds that transcend mere coolness and enter the realm of the iconic - sounds so instantly recognizable that they almost become integral to the genre that spawned them. The Hoover is one such sound. The gnarly, detuned lead/bass sound started life as a preset called "What The?" on the Roland Alpha Juno, and after it made an appearance on a track by the band Human Resource, it went on to become one of the most popular types of sounds in the rave and new beat movements. Even today, these types of sounds frequently pop up in drum n' bass, electro, and even dubstep tracks. So today, I'll show you how to make your very own hoover utilizing TAL's recently released freebie instrument NoizeMaker.

1. Fire up your DAW of choice and initiate an instance of NoizeMaker.

2. In the OSC 1 section, change the waveform to the pulse/square wave.

3. On LFO 1 change the DEST 1 to PW to modulate the pulse width of that pulse wave. This will give us a nice, fat detuned sound out of a single oscillator. Set the DEST 1 knob most of the way to the right (at about .3732 in the DISPLAY) and the RATE to about 50%. You can hear the pulse width being modulated, but it's doing so in a bit of a disruptive way. Fix this by turning the PW of OSC 1 all the way to the left.

4. In the MASTER section, turn up the OSC 2 level so it is equal with OSC 1. (You'll note that OSC 2 is a sawtooth wave tuned an octave above OSC 1.) The SUB oscillator should already be up, but if it isn't, dial that up so it is equal as well. Turn PORTA to ON and set the PORTA knob (the rate of portamento) about halfway up. This is what gives us those sliding notes, so you may want to adjust it to taste.

5. In the filter section, drop the CUTOFF back to about 90%.

6. Finally (and this is optional), you turn on the CHORUS 1 button to thicken the sound up a little further with some chorus.

If you've done everything correctly, you should have something that sounds a bit like this:

Rolling Your Own Drum Sounds Part 8: The Clap

As far as programming drum sounds on a synthesizer goes, hand claps are probably second only to crash cymbals in their difficulty to synthesize convincingly. The truth is, you're not going to get anything akin to an 808 clap sound out of the vast majority of synths. However, with a little work, you can get the sorts of analog clap sounds you might hear on old Human League records. (And if you have never heard their albums "Reproduction" and "Travelogue", you owe it to yourself to do so. That were way more than "Don't You Want Me"). So today, I'm going to take you through the process of synthesizing an analog clap sound and I'm going to do it all without making any Chlamydia-based puns in the process.

I messed around with a couple of softsynths for this type of sound and found FXpansion's Strobe gave the most satisfactory results to my ears. You should be able to follow along with just about any decent virtual analog, though.

1. Start with an INIT type preset. Strobe defaults to this, so if you're using it, you'll be ready to go. Hand claps, much like snares, are primarily noise based. So the first thing you'll want to do is to head over to the MIXER section and raise the NSE (noise) slider all the way up. We won't need any tone like you do with a snare sound, so we'll turn the SAW and SQR sliders all the way down. Make sure all the Strobe's SUB OSCILLATOR sliders are turned down all the way, too.

2. The first thing we're going to want to do is to program the amplitude envelope which shapes the volume contour of the sound. This is a percussive sound, so head over to the AMP ENV and set the ATK (attack) and SUS(tain) sliders all the way down to 0. Set your DCY (decay) slider to a fairly high value (I set mine to 2.05 seconds), and jack the REL (release) slider all the way up. We want the sound to play all the way through no matter how long we hold down a key.

3. Next, let's set up the filter. Make sure the FILTER is turned on (the little power switch in the upper left hand corner should be lit up). You can experiment with different filter types, but bandpass filters are generally best suited for this kind of sound. So change Strobe's FILTER MODE to B4 for a bandpass filter with a fairly steep cutoff. Speaking of which, set your CUTOFF value to a fairly high value (I chose +57.00). This already sounds better, but to give the sound a bit more of a 'crack', turn up the RES(onance) up a bit to around 39%.

4. You should have something akin to a synthy snare at this point, but it doesn't really sound very "clappy" yet. That's because when you have a group of people clapping their hands, the impact of each person's hands is not occurring at the exact same time. We can emulate this effect by using a downward ramp waveform on the LFO to modulate the sound's amplitude. The 4th modulation slot from the left in Strobe should already be set to LFO+ as a source, so go ahead an select it. Strobe has a cool modulation system that lets you modulate any number of parameters from a single source very easily. Go ahead and turn the AMP level down in the AMP section. You'll notice the slider is split into two parts. Drag the upper part to the top and you should see a yellow line in the slider window. This represents the range of modulation.

5. We're almost done! Head on over to the LFO section and set the MODE to SAW-DN. The SWG, PW, and PHS values can be used to further shape the LFO that is modulating our AMP level. Adjust this to taste. Also, make sure the SYNC button is turned off. Now we have something that sounds a little bit more like a bunch of hands clapping slightly out of time with one another. If your synth allows you to set a fade out value on your LFO, set this to a fairly short length so we're just getting that chaotic bit at the initial impact of the sound.

6. You should have something vaguely resembling a hand clap sound at this point, but to take it to that next level, try adding a little bit of short reverb to flesh things out a bit. If you've done everything correctly, you should have something that sounds vaguely like this:



And here's the patch for Strobe users.

Rolling Your Own Pad Sounds: Making a Pad from Your Voice in Alchemy

When 10cc released their schmaltzy hit "I'm Not In Love" in 1975, readily accessible sampling technology was still years away from being available to musicians, and yet the song featured an incredibly lush, undoubtedly unnatural vocal pad throughout. Unbelievably, they achieved this feat by recording vocals of each note to tape loops, and sending each tape loop to its own channel on the mixer. With each band member assigned to a handful of faders, the band then 'played' the part by raising and lowering different channels to create the progression you hear on the record. It's a remarkable achievement, and years later when "proper" sampling hit the scene, many other bands began sampling their own voices to create cool, new sounds that were at once organic and synthetic and yet still retained the character of the original singer's voice. Now, decades later, sampling has matured significantly and it's so easy to make cool instruments from your own voice that there's really no excuse not to try it at least once. I'm going to be going through this exercise in Camel Audio's superb Alchemy softsynth, as it is especially well-suited for this sort of task.

1. The first step is obviously getting a vocal recording. This is actually probably the most difficult part, because it's not really the same as recording vocals for a song. You need to pay much more attention to being consistent in your tone, getting a nice, long note, etc. So make lots of recordings. We're going after something synthetic sounding, so just single a single note will do, but do several takes of each, so you have something to choose from in case one option doesn't work.

2. Go through your takes, and find the one you think will work best. Ideally, you want something without much pitch wavering or vibrato. Crop the sample down so there is no dead space at the beginning and end of the recording. This next bit is optional, but I think it helps add to the synthy nature - If you have access to a pitch correction program like Antares Auto-Tune or Celemony Melodyne, try pitch correcting it and smoothing out any tonal inconsistencies. This'll help get us towards that synthy timbre we're after.

3. Bounce out your vocal sample tuned up and with a little compression to smooth out any problematic volume fluctuations. Make sure you save it to wherever Alchemy stores its sample data on your computer. On Macs this is in the Library->Application Support->Camel Audio->Alchemy->Samples->User directory. PC users, consult your manual, I'm not looking it up for you. :)

4. Source A should already be turned on, so click on the little window with the waveform name until a drop down menu appears. Select LOAD AUDIO and locate the voice sample from the USER list. Your sample is now mapped across the keyboard using the default GRANULAR ENGINE (be sure to experiment with the other engines as well).

5. The first thing we need to do is to set up the vocal sample for looping. So, select A from the SOURCE menu and select EDIT from the page that appears. The loop start and end markers are likely located at the very end of your sample, so find them and drag the start close to the beginning, but far enough into it that you are past the initial attack of the sample and into the sustaining portion. Bring the LOOP END back a little bit too, so it is also in the sustaining portion of your recording. Now change the LOOP drop down menu to read FORWARD/BACK. You can use the other options as well, but FORWARD/BACK looping usually creates the least noticeable results.

6. Hit The EDIT button again to go back to Alchemy's main page. Head down to the ENVELOPE section and adjust your ATTACK to around 5 seconds and the release to around 8.5 seconds.

7. You may already like the results at this point and decide you're done, but I like to make a few tweaks to the DENSITY and STRETCH settings in the upper left hand corner of the interface. Messing with these takes you a bit further away from the original sound and can make it sound a bit more synthetic. I found moving my DENSITY down to 3 GRAINS brightened the sound up a bit and gave it a very subtle grit. Bringing the STRETCH setting down to around 54% added a nicely ethereal "slow motion" quality to the sound.

8. Every good pad deserves a good reverb, so go ahead and hit the EFFECTS button, turn one of the slots ON and insert an instance of ACOUSTIC REVERB. Obviously the end result will vary wildly according to the source material, but you should have something like this:

Rolling Your Own Drum Sounds Part 7: Make a Hard Techno Kick in ES2

Logic's included ES2 synth is seriously underrated, especially given how old it is. I think a lot of people were put off by the kind of odd interface, and that's a shame because there is an amazing amount of firepower in this synth if you take the time to learn how to use it. Today, we're going to make a hard techno kick drum using ES2. Note, however, that you should be able to follow along with just about any modern virtual analog softsynth.

1. Create an AUDIO INSTRUMENT track and initiate an instance of ES2 in it. ES2 defaults to a very nice sounding synth sweep, but this is a bit far removed from the sound we're trying to create, so call up the preset CLASSIC HOUSE ORGAN from the 05 SYNTH KEYBOARDS folder.

2. We're only going to need one oscillator for our kick drum, so go ahead and disable OSCILLATORS 2 and 3 by clicking by clicking on the numbers next to each one until they go from green to grey. OSCILLATOR 1 is a simple sine wave, which is handy, because the lowly sine is the most useful waveform for synthesized kick drum sounds.

3. Before we get too far into this, let's deactivate some of the modulation routings we won't be needing. The MOD MATRIX is right below the OSCILLATOR section. In slots 2-4, go ahead and change the TARGET to 'OFF'. With that done, go to slot 1 and change the TARGET from CUTOFF to PITCH 1. This is telling ES2 that we're going to want to change the pitch of OSCILLATOR 1 with a modulator of some sort (the SOURCE). Right now it's set to ENV 2, but in the interest of keeping things simple, we're going to change it to ENV 1. ENVELOPE 1 is a simple attack/decay envelope which is very well suited for percussion sounds. If you play a few keys, you won't hear any modulation taking place. This is because you still need to set a MODULATION AMOUNT by using the green slider to the right of the SOURCE/TARGET window. Go ahead and set it around 89% of the way up. If you play some keys now, you'll hear a percussive 'chirp' at the start of the sound.

4. The sound doesn't decay like a drum, though. It still sustains like an organ. So go to ENVELOPE 3 (which is the AMPLITUDE ENVELOPE), and bring your S (for SUSTAIN) and TIME values down to 0. Go ahead and make sure the A (ATTACK) value is all the way down too. Set the D (DECAY) level to around 240ms and your R (RELEASE) value to around 350ms.
We're getting there, but it still doesn't sound like a big, menacing kick drum yet.

5. Part of the reason is because the pitch is too high. So go ahead and change the OCTAVE setting for OSCILLATOR 1 down to -36 semitones (3 octaves down). You should have something similar to a kick at this point, but totally lacking the nasty attitude.

6. Remedy this by cracking the SINE LEVEL (a suboscillator useful for adding low end to sounds) and the DISTORTION level all the way up. Set the TONE of the DISTORTION to about 50% to brighten it up. Make sure to turn the INTENSITY level for the Chorus/Flanger/Phaser all the way down too.

7. We're pretty close at this point, but you may notice an inconsistency in the punch of the kick each time you hit it. This is because the OSCILLATOR is in FREE RUN mode. This is useful for emulating old analog synths, but not so much when it comes to drum and percussion sound. To achieve the same quality every time, we need the OSCILLATORS to restart every time we hit a key, so select HARD from the little drop down menu located above the DISTORTION dial.

If you've done everything correctly, you should hear something like this:

Rolling Your Own Drum Sounds Part 6: Synth Snares

(Click image for a closer look at the settings.)

I haven't done one of these in awhile, so I thought we might be due for one. Behind the crash cymbal, the snare drum may be one of the more difficult drum sounds to synthesize convincingly. It's possible to get some semi-convincing snare sounds out of well-equipped modular synths or even a full-featured synth like the Access Virus, but for most synths, the best you're going to do is an analog drum machine type snare. And that's actually pretty damn cool. If I want a real snare sound I can sample it. So we're going to use a synth for what it does best: make cool electronic sounds. Today I'll show you how to make a synth snare sound not too unlike the Roland TR-808. I'll be doing this with Sonic Charge's super cool Microtonic drum synth plug-in, but you can get similar results from any synth that allows you to pitch modulate an oscillator with an envelope that also has a noise source.

Your typical snare drum sound sounds the way it does because it consists of the initial percussive burst of the stick hitting the head, the ringing of the shell, and the rattle of the snare itself. With this in mind, let's dig in.

1. Open up an instance of Microtonic. If you want to program a couple of notes in the sequencer on steps 5 and 13 (the backbeat), it can make it easier to hear the changes you make as you tweak. The first part we're going to concentrate on is the combination of the percussive strike and the 'tone' of the drum's resonant shell. So for the moment, set the MIX setting all the way left to OSC, so we are only hearing this part of the sound. Because this is a tonal element, we're going to use a sine wave with an envelope modulating the pitch. The first thing we need to do is set the sine wave's pitch, so look for the OSC FREQ setting and set it somewhere around 150 Hz. The 'body' of a snare sound is often somewhere in the 150-250 Hz range.

2. This doesn't sound percussive yet, though, so let's take care of that by heading down to the FREQ MOD AMOUNT knob right below the OSC FREQ section. If you go overboard with this, you're going to get into 'laser gun' types of sounds, which are cool in their own right, but not what we're after. Set this around +6.45. The FREQ MOD RATE is less important here, but if you play around with it, you'll hear the variations in timbre it can provide. I'm setting mine at 0, but you set whatever sounds right to you. By now, you should have something that sounds similar to a TR-808 conga or tom sound. So now you know how to make those, too.

3. With the strike and the tone taken care of, we need to get that snare rattle taken care of, so we need to add in some noise. (This will also contribute to the percussive element of the sound). We need to be able to hear our noise source now, so go ahead and slide the MIX slider just slightly right of the middle so we have a more or less even mix of the sine oscillator and the noise generator (slightly favoring the noise).

4. It already sounds pretty nice, but we'll tweak things just a bit. Set your noise envelope's DECAY setting to around 100-100 ms. Longer settings will give you 'doofier' sounding snares more akin to the famous Simmons sound. Microtonic defaults to a low pass filter which works nicely, but I want a crisper sound out of the noise, so I'm changing it to a highpass filter (the rightmost button at the top of the noise section). Bring the FILTER FREQ up to around 370 Hz.

If you've done everything correctly, you should have something that sounds like this:




Now that you have a halfway decent synth snare, start messing around and seeing what other variations you can come up with.

Rolling Your Own Lead Sounds: The 'Tarnce' Lead

(Click the above image to enlarge and see settings...)

It seems like it is simply impossible to buy a synth these days without having some sort of trance lead among the presets. In fact, more likely than not, there are tons of them. It's become the most over-used sound in music for the past decade or so. The trance lead is to the 2000's what the dreaded DX-7 Rhodes patch was to the 1980's. So why bother learning to program one? Well, aside from it always being a good idea to know what makes a sound tick, the lowly trance lead can be the starting point for a myriad of other cool sounds. So against my better judgement, here's how you do it.

You can use any synth that offers pulse width modulation (PWM) and a unison mode, but I'll be using Korg's simple and great-sounding Polysix softsynth. The default sound on this softsynth is Fat Line Bass, so if you want to follow along, that's your starting point. Alright, so in case you're not familiar with it, pulse width modulation is, as the name suggests, simply modulating the width of a pulse wave. If you've messed with the width of a pulse wave before, you know that at wider settings you essentially get a nice, hollow square wave, and at narrower settings, the wave begins to take on a more nasal tone (think of an oboe or banjo). The magic happens when you modulate the width in real time using an LFO. When you are sweeping back and forth from a wide pulse width to a narrow one, you get a very nice, warm, fat tone sort of like a detuned sawtooth wave.

1. So our first order of business will be to set the Polysix's WAVEFORM to PWM. If you play a few notes, you'll hear pretty much your standard square wave. Let's change that and get into slightly fatter territory. Push the PW/PWM value up to between 7 and 8, and the PWM SPEED up to between 6 and 7. The tone should be a bit thicker at this point.

2. We want this to be nice and bright, so head on over to the VCF section and turn the CUTOFF value all the way up to 10.

3. The tone is getting closer, but our envelope isn't quite right. For most lead sounds, you want what is essentially an organ type envelope - you press a key and it sustains as long as you hold it, and when you let go, it stops sounding immediately. So go ahead and knock the SUSTAIN level in the EG section all the way up to 10, and bring the RELEASE value down to 0.

4. Finally, head down to the KEY ASSIGN MODE section and make sure UNISON is selected. This will sound several notes at once each time you hit the key for a thicker sound. Turn UNISON DETUNE up to around 7, and UNISON SPREAD up to 10. Play a few notes and there it is, the plague of all music kind!

The aim of most trance leads is to sound as big and impressive as possible, so you'll want to feed it through some reverb and a nice delay for best results. From here, you can easily dial up a whole slew of different sounds. Mess with different envelope settings and filter cutoff settings to create pads, basses and other synthy tones. Try messing around with the PW/PWM and PWM SPEED values for variations on the same theme.

If you've done everything correctly, you should have something that sounds like this:

Rolling Your Own Lead Sounds: Hard Sync Lead

Hard Sync is a popular feature on a lot of vintage analog synths. The technique involves using one oscillator to 'force' a second oscillator to reset its cycle (no matter where it is in its own cycle) to share the same base frequency - putting the two oscillators in sync, as it were. By itself, this doesn't sound like much, but when one alters the frequency of the synced oscillator dynamically (by modulating its pitch using an envelope or LFO), it results in an aggressive 'barking' timbre that can be quite a lot of fun to play around with. The synth leads in the Cars hits "Let's Go" and "Hello Again" are probably the most well-known examples of this type of sound. Old schoolers will also recognize Jean Michel Jarre's famous 'Laser Harp' sound as being a hard sync lead as well.

This is not a feature you're going to find on every synth. It's not quite as common to see around today as it was back in the 80's, so your best bet for finding it in software form is to look for emulations of old synths such as Native Instruments Pro-53, Gmedia's Oddity, or Arturia's Jupiter-8V. I'll be demonstrating this technique using Oddity today. The exact steps will vary a bit depending on what synth you're using, but the general technique is the same: select sync mode and modulate the second oscillator's pitch.

1. Call up an instance of Oddity. It should default to the 80's Bass sound, but if not, load up that sound from the factory bank as your starting point.

2. This particular sound has the second oscillator tuned down a fifth, so the first step will be to slide the COARSE FREQUENCY slider of OSCILLATOR 2 up to +0.00 so it is in tune with OSCILLATOR 1.

3. Next to the FREQUENCY controls for OSCILLATOR 2, you will see a little switch for turning SYNC on or off. Move it to the ON position. Right now it doesn't sound very interesting because we're not modulating the FREQUENCY of OSCILLATOR 2. You can play a few notes and move the COARSE FREQUENCY slider on OSCILLATOR 2 and hear the effect in action, but we're lazy electronic musicians, so we're going to automate the process.

4. Before we do this, go to the lowpass filter and open it up by sliding the VCF FREQ all the way up so we can hear the effect more easily.

5. Now, right below OSCILLATOR 2's FREQUENCY settings, you'll see the FM controls for OSCILLATOR 2. FM stands for 'frequency modulation', which in this case refers to simply modulating the pitch (aka frequency) of the oscillator. This is where you might add vibrato, for example. Push the yellow slider here all the way up, and select 'ADSR' on the switch directly below it. This is telling the synth that was want to change the pitch of the second oscillator using the ADSR ENVELOPE.

6. Head over to the ADSR envelope and set the SUStain level about 1/3 of the way up (-17.5 dB), the RELease value all the way down to 0, and set the DECay value a little over halfway up to around 585 ms. Play a few notes and you should hear your new hard sync lead sound!

There is a lot to experiment with when programming these types of sounds. Different waveforms will produce different timbres, different envelope settings will have great effect, different modulation depths in the FREQUENCY MODULATION section change the timbre, as will messing around with different frequency settings on your oscillators. Note too that you can use an LFO to modulate the pitch instead of an envelope.

To get closer to the famous Cars sound, lower the COARSE FREQUENCY of OSCILLATOR 1 by an octave (-12 semitones), change the waveforms of both oscillators to a SQUAREWAVE (the switches marked VCO 1 and VCO 2 under the AUDIO MIXER section) and bring down the yellow slider under OSCILLATOR 2's FM section to about a third of the way up. (You can click on the picture above to enlarge it and copy the settings). If you've followed along correctly, here's what it should sound like:

Rolling Your Own Bass Sounds Part 3: Dubstep Bass

(Click image to enlarge and see settings)

Although it has its origins in the early 2000's, it wasn't until the last 2-3 years that dubstep emerged out of the deepest recesses of the underground. Although still semi-obscure, the popularity of dubstep has increased enough that there are several dubstep-oriented sample libraries on the market now. But of course, it's much more fun to make your own sounds, so today I'm going to show you how to program a dubstep bass using Korg's excellent PolySix emulation.

1. Load up an instance of Polysix in your sequencer of choice. It defaults to the Fat Line Bass setting, which is as good as any place to start. For whatever reason, square (pulse) waves seem to be the most common waveform used in making dubstep basses, so go ahead and chance the WAVEFORM to PW or PWM. It doesn't matter which, as we won't be modulating the pulse width, we'll just be leaving it as a square. While you're in the VCO section, go ahead and drop the OCTAVE setting to 16', as this is the lowest.

2. The original sound is sort of short and plucked, but we want a sustaining sound, so head over to the EG section and throw the SUSTAIN level all the way up to 10. Your ATTACK and RELEASE should be set at 0, and because of the SUSTAIN setting, the DECAY setting isn't important.

3. Next, go up to the VCF section, and turn the filter's CUTOFF all the way down to 0. It's pretty dark and muffled now, but don't worry, we'll be modulating it to change that.

4. So head over to the MG section (Modulation Generator... Korg's name for an LFO). Change the MOD switch to VCF so we're telling the MG to modulate the filter. Make sure the KEY and TEMPO buttons are both selected. Dubstep is a style that relies heavily on syncopation and triplet feels, so we're going to set the BASE NOTE to 1/8T (triplet eigth notes). Note that changing the LFO rate throughout the course of a bassline is quite popular in dubstep, and you can do that by changing the BASE NOTE setting using your sequencer's automation.

5. Finally, we want this sound to be big and fat, so make sure your KEY ASSIGN MODE is set to UNISON. Crank the UNISON DETUNE up to around 6 or 7 and the UNISON SPREAD all the way to 10.

If you've done everything correctly, you should have something that sounds like this (note that I am automating the BASE NOTE setting here as mentioned above):

Rolling Your Own Bass Sounds Part 2: Electro House Bass

This time out I'm going to show you how to make an electro-house style bass/lead. Electro-house tends to use very simple sounds utilizing classic synth waveforms instead of anything especially exotic. For this exercise, I'll be using ReFX's Vanguard because everyone and their mother has it.

1. Fire up an instance of Vanguard. Click the FX button so it isn't lit up. This is a bass sound so you don't want stuff like delays and reverbs to muddy things up. From the preset browser, select the factory sound LD AlphaOmegaMS to use as a starting point. Hit the EDIT button to expose Vanguard's sound editing controls.

2. Change OSC 1's waveform to SQUARE and lower the SEMI setting to 0.

3. Change OSC 2's waveform to SQUARE as well, but this time, raise the SEMI setting to 24.

4. Finally, change OSC 3's waveform to SINE and lower the SEMI level to -12. While this doesn't necessarily contribute timbrally to the sound, it adds some low end weight that is useful for basses (and is often missing in Vanguard bass sounds, IMHO). You can turn up the VOL level of this oscillator as well to further boost the low end. And that's it! Obviously there is no one electro-house bass, but most others are just as simple to program. Here's a short example of what the result should sound like:

Rolling Your Own Synth Bass Sounds: EBM Bass

It's funny, but different styles of electronic music are almost identifiable by the types of bass sounds they use alone. Would drum n' bass sound like drum n' bass if it wasn't for the nasty, hyper-filtered bass shudders? Would acid sound like acid without a 303 or 202? Would dubstep be dubstep without the LFO wobbles?

Today, I'm going to show you how to quickly and easily make a typical modern EBM bass sound. This genre tends to favor fat and aggressive bass sounds that are very percussive to allow for rapid, 16th-note basslines. So those are the parameters we're going to follow for this tutorial. Obviously there is no 'right' sound you have to use if you're making a particular genre. This is just a starting point to one of many options. As always, you should experiment on your own to customize the sounds to your liking.

1. Fire up a synth or softsynth that offers Pulse Width Modulation and a unison function. I'll be using Korg's Polysix plug-in because it's a simple synth and the default patch already happens to be a nice synth bass. Go ahead and program a quick bassline in your sequencer. I find it's nice to have something playing automatically as I tweak sounds.

2. The default Fatline Bass sound uses a sawtooth wave, which is great, but we're after as juicy and fat a sound as we can manage, so change the waveform to PWM (may be marked as Square or Pulse on other synths). The sound suddenly sounds a bit hollow. This is because we are playing it back with no pulse width modulation. Go ahead and set both the PW/PWM and the PWM Speed value to about 6. (If you're using another synth, you want to make sure Pulse Width Modulation is on and pushed to about a 60% value, and to set the speed to something moderate... in many cases you will adjust this on an LFO that has been assigned to modulate Pulse Width. It should sound a bit fatter now, almost a little detuned. But we're not done yet.

3. Tweak the Filter Cutoff to a low value, but not quite all the way closed, and up the EG Intensity to around 75%. The EG intensity controls how much the envelope opens and closes the filter's cutoff level, which will give the sound a bright attack and darker body resulting in 'plucked' sort of timbre.

4. If you're using the Polysix, your envelope settings should be pretty good as is. Otherwise, you want your envelope (both filter and amp, if your synth has separate ones) to have zero attack, a low decay (about 1/3 of the way up), zero sustain, and zero release.

5. Now for the final, fattening touch. Put your synth in Unison mode. (If you're using the Polysix, it should already be on...) This plays back several detuned copies of the sound to create super thick, fat textures. On the Polysix, bump the Unison Voices to 2, so each time we hit the key, it will use 2 detuned voices. Next, bump up the Unison Detune level to about halfway. (Higher values can sound wonderfully evil and rave-y, too...) Optionally, you can turn the Unison Spread (this spreads the detuned voices out in the stereo image for a wider sound). Bass generally works best in mono, but if you create your arrangement carefully, using a big stereo bass sound can sound really good. Finally, turn the Analog level up to 5. This parameter simulates the unstable turning of old analog synths and varies the pitch randomly in a pleasing way. You don't have to use this, but I really think it adds a little more character.

(You can click the picture at the top of this post for a larger version if you want to copy the settings...)

Here's what the end result sounds like:

Rolling Your Own Drum Sounds Part 5: Self-Oscillation - It's Not as Dirty as it Sounds...

In the previous chapter of this series of tutorials, I took you through the process of making a synthesizer kick drum using a sine wave and a pitch envelope. But that isn't the only way to synthesize a kick. If you've got a hardware or software synth that has filters that self-oscillate, you've got another option.

The filters people work most with these days are much more likely to be non-self-oscillating filters, but on many older synthesizers, it was possible to set a resonance level on the filter that was so high, that it would cause the filter to oscillate at an audible frequency - even if you're not feeding any actual oscillators through it. So why is not as common to see filters with that capability these days? The down side of self-oscillating filters is that sometimes the output levels can unpredictably spike to ear-splitting, potentially speaker-damaging levels. So here's your warning. It might not be a bad idea to strap a limiter across your master bus to prevent any... unpleasantness. Or at least work with your volume at a conservative level.

One software synth that features filters that will self-oscillate is GMedia's Minimonsta, an emulation of the famous Minimoog (the original of which, of course, also has filters that self-oscillate), so that is what I will be using in this example.

1. Call up a mono instance of Minimonsta. Although not a hard, fast rule, when working with really bassy sounds, it is best to keep them in mono.

2. We won't need any of the oscillators here, so go ahead and turn them off by clicking the three blue buttons on the MIXER panel that correspond to each oscillator's volume knobs. When you press a few keys now, you should hear no sound coming out.

3. Next, head on over to the filter section and turn the CUTOFF FREQ knob all the way down, closing the filter.

4. Now set the AMOUNT OF CONTOUR (also known as ENVELOPE AMOUNT on many synths) knob to about 50%. This controls how much the filter envelope modulates (ie opens and closes) the filter.

5. Now, turn the up EMPHASIS knob (simply another name for RESONANCE) slowly, and as you get into the 60% and above area, you should start to hear the filter self-oscillate.

6. What kind of sound you are hearing depends on how your FILTER ENVELOPE settings are, so let's make sure those are where they need to be. ATTACK TIME should be set to 0% (1 ms), DECAY TIME should be set to about 50% (525 ms), and your SUSTAIN LEVEL can be turned down to 0%. If you've set everything up correctly, you should be hearing a pretty nice, vaguely 909-ish kick drum.

7. The fun part comes in experimenting. Playing with the CUTOFF FREQUENCY will take you out of kick drum territory and into more chirpy, 'laser gun' territory. Playing with the AMOUNT OF COUNTOUR knob will keep the sound in the bassy end, but will increase the filter sweep, resulting in brighter, bloopier, attack portions to the sound. And messing with your DECAY TIME knob in the FILTER ENVELOPE section with let you change your sound from something light and tight, to something sustaining and boomy, like the famous 808 kick.

Make recordings of different settings, and import them into your samplers or drum sample player of choice. Try combining them with each other, or other drum sounds in your library and you've got an almost limitless supply of synthetic kick drums to keep you busy for quite some time.

Rolling You Own Drum Sounds Part 4: Kicking it With Sine Waves

There's certainly no shortage of great drum sample libraries on the market today. Even a quick search of The Google will turn up tons of free ones. But there really is nothing like making your own. For one thing, it's uniquely yours and there's something cool about knowing there aren't 10,000 other musicians using the same sound. But even better, it lets you custom tailor and tune the sound to fit specifically into the song you're working on. Kick drums are probably the easiest type of sound to make, so that's what we'll look at today. I'm going to be using Sonic Charge's excellent MicroTonic, but you can do this on any synth that offers a sine wave and the ability to modulate pitch with an envelope (which these days should be most of them...), the process will just be a little different.

1. Fire up MicroTonic and go ahead and program a note trigger in the sequencer every fourth note. Hit 'play' on the sequencer. I find it's helpful to have a little sequence playing a sound while I'm programming it. What you'll hear right now is a sort of noisey beep. (If you're on a different synth, just make sure you have only one oscillator sounding, and that it's playing a sine wave).

2. We won't need the noise portion for our kick drum, so go ahead and slide the MIX slider all the way to the left towards OSC. This ensures we're just hearing the oscillator and none of the noise we don't need.

3. Now you should hear a sort of boring beep sound. The first thing we need to do is to get the sine wave in the right frequency range. One of the nice things about MicroTonic is that you can set this by Hz. This can be useful when building an arrangement because you can make sure your kick lives in a frequency range that won't interfere with your bass sound. For purposes of this excercise, let's set the OSC FREQ slider to about 60Hz for some nice sub frequencies. (If you're using another synth, simply set the octave tuning of the oscillator to a low octave).

4. We still have a boring beep sound, it's just lower now. That's where modulation comes in. Essentially, we're going to sweep the pitch of the sine wave to simulate the effect of a kick drum being struck. This is what will take us from boring beep, to percussive and deep. Right below the OSC FREQ slider, you'll see two knobs. One labelled AMOUNT and one labelled RATE. Let's play with amount first, since you won't hear any effect without it. Slowly rotate the AMOUNT knob to the right (towards the plus sign). As you do so, you'll notice a bit of a percussive 'snap' being added to the sound. Taken all the way to the right and you'll enter the territory of Kraftwerkian laser zaps. For now, though, let's set it just under half of the way to the right. (If you're using another synth, assign an envelope to modulate the pitch of your sine wave oscillator. The attack, sustain, and releases values should be set to zero, and the decay should be set long enough that you have the snap I'm talking about. Make sure your amplitude envelope is set similarly, although you might want to set the decay slightly longer on it. If your synth allows you to select a modulation level, that is precisely what the AMOUNT knob does in MicroTonic).

5. So if AMOUNT sets the frequency range between the start and stop of the pitch sweep, RATE simply determines how long it takes to sweep between those two values. For right now, we're going to leave this right in the middle. But play around with it and see what effects you can get from changing it. Higher values give more artificial, 'synth kiss' type sounds, and towards the lower end, you can emulate the famous 808 kick sound or big jungle sub drops.

6. As it is now, our kick drum lacks a little power, so we're going to let it boom a bit more. We do this by upping the DECAY level of the oscillator envelope. Let's set it to about 800 ms. If you've done everything right, you should have something not unlike the famous Roland TR-909 kick drum. If not, keep playing with the RATE and AMOUNT until you do. (On another synth, you can increase the length of the kick sound by adjusting the decay level of the amplitude envelope).

That's just one example. Playing with just this handful of parameters can yield everything from chirpy psytrance kicks to thippy Kraftwerk pings to thunderous sub drops. And that's just the start of your drum sound. Mess around with EQ settings, distort it, compress it... the sky's the limit. Go nuts and layer sound, and try using waveforms besides just the sine for weirder, synthier sounds. It quickly becomes very addictive. In the meantime, here are a couple of other good articles/tutorials on synthesizing your own kick drums you might enjoy:

Synth Secrets: Synthesizing the Bass Drum
The Mother of All Kick Drum Threads on the Israeli Trance Forum
Synthesizing a Deep Kick in Ableton Live

Rolling Your Own Drum Sounds Pt. 3

(In case you missed them, here's the direct links to part 1 and 2.)

In this episode, we'll be looking at a way to add a little more personality and uniqueness to your snare sounds.

In most cases, when we're mixing drums, we add some sort of reverb to to the snare either to make it sound more natural in the mix, or as an element of the sound design itself (as in the case of those 80's gated snare drums). Most of us also do some degree of layering to build our snare sounds. We might, for example, layer a snare drum that has a nice, tight 'snap' to it, with another that has less attack, but more body in order to have the best elements of both sounds. What I want to suggest, is using a combination of both in a way you might not normally think to do it.

The key here is to leave your snare drum dry, and then to take an entirely different second snare and feed it 100% wet into your reverb of choice. This gives the reverb a different timbre than you would get if you were feeding your main snare to it instead. The effect is subtle, but it can provide a lot of variety to your snare sounds, and taken to extremes, it can radically alter what your snare sounds like. Don't limit yourself to just using snares for the reverb track either... try toms, congas, tambourines, metal strikes, or even percussive synth sounds. Be sure to experiment with different types of reverbs as well, as this can also provide more variety.

Here's a quick example of the technique in action. The first pass through is the dry drum track, next is with a TR-808 snare being fed to the reverb, the pass after that is with a breakbeat type snare being fed to the reverb, and the final pass is with an FM synth sound being fed to the reverb.

Rolling Your Own Drum Sounds Pt. 2: Attack of the Phaser

The phaser is an effect a lot of us probably don't touch very often. While it's kind of cool, it's also a pretty dated-sounding effect, over-used as it was in the 70's and early 80's. So unless you're going after a decidedly retro vibe, you probably hadn't considered the phaser as a possible sound design tool. But in this exercise, we're going to use it to give us yet more variations on a snare sound. Again, I'll be working in Logic, but most of this should be do-able with any DAW and a decent phaser plug-in.

1. In an instrument slot, go ahead and load EXS24 and the same EXS 808 kit we used in the previous tutorial.

2. This time, instead of using an effects send, we're going to put the phaser effect on the sound as an insert effect. This just means we want 100% of the effect on our snare drum, and not a selectable wet/dry percentage like a send allows. So in the first Insert slot, go ahead and apply Logic's Phaser effect, located in the Modulation submenu of the plug-in menu.

3. The key here is to have a phaser with the sweep deactivated on it. So go ahead and make sure that LFO 1 and LFO 2 both have a Rate of 0.00Hz. With the sweep deactivated, a phaser can add an effect almost like sending the sound through a resonant body (like a snare shell), and a lot more too.

4. Go ahead and turn the Output Mix of the Phaser up to +100%.

5. Now it's time to play! Start by setting the Feedback to around 75%. You can play around with this later for varying effects, but be careful when you start to get into highest values, as the resonant quality gets very exaggerated and levels can get loud.

6. Now, try adjusting the Sweep Ceiling and Sweep Floor. You can move these individually by dragging on their respective sliders, or move them together relative to one another by dragging the blue space in between them. This is where you will get the most timbral variety and thus where you should experiment the most. See how adjusting the Feedback level against this provides still further variations. (Again, being careful of the upper range!)

7. The Order slider will give more subtle variations, but is still worth experimenting with.

8. For more synthy sounds, try setting the vertical Env Follow slider to +/- 100%. This will sweep between the Sweep Ceiling and Sweep Floor using the amplitude envelope of the sound rather than an LFO. (Further tweaking is provided by the horizontal Env Follow slider below, as well.

This example obviously isn't quite as extreme as the previous example, but when you feed it different types of drum and percussion sounds than just our lowly 808 snare, you will begin to see the possibilities. Here's a quick example of an 808 snare with some random tweaking of the parameters I mentioned above:

Rolling Your Own Drum Sounds Pt. 1

I don't know about you, but nothing inspires me quite like getting some new sounds to feed my sampler. Though the internet can be a great place to find an endless variety of free samples, finding exactly what you need can be a bit like finding a needle in a haystack. The truth is, if you have a vague idea of the sound you're after in your head, it's probably just quicker to try and create it yourself using your DAW and a bunch of plug-ins. Plus, you get the added satisfaction of knowing it's a sound you created and that no one else has. And sometimes that snotty elitism is what it's all about.

Recently, a reader was lamenting the fact that he was having a hard time locating snare sounds to use in industrial music. So on this post, I'll take you through how to turn the snappy, but perhaps a bit wimpy TR-808 snare sound into something a bit grittier. I'll be doing this in Logic, but you should be able to replicate it pretty closely in whatever your DAW of choice is.

1. In an instrument slot, load up an instance of Logic's sampler, EXS24.

2. Go up to the sound menu and select Factory -> 03 Drums & Percussion -> 02 Electronic Drum Kits -> EXS 808. Play a few notes and you will recognize the familiar Roland TR-808 drum sounds. Play a low 'D' on your keyboard and you should hear the snare sound.

3. On the instrument channel your ESX24 resides on, go up to the send section (located right above the blue EXS24 box) and select Bus 1. If you are on the arrange page, this should call up the Aux 1 channel right next to your EXS24 channel in the bottom left corner of the page.

4.On the Aux 1 channel, go up to the 'Inserts' section (right above the Sends). Here is where you can build an effects chain we will use to abuse your snare. In the first slot, load an instance of Space Designer (or the reverb of your choice) and call up a a medium-length room sound. For this example I am using the 0.4s Snare Chamber preset.

5. Immediately below the Space Designer slot, call up an instance of the free SSL LMC-1 plug-in. This emulates the limiter that was on the talk-back mic on the SSL 4000E mixing boards. Producer Hugh Padgham was working on an album for Peter Gabriel when he discovered accidentally that this was great for making big, explosive drum sounds, especially when placed after a reverb. This was the partial origin of the infamous, and mis-named 'Phil Collins' drum sound (the other part of the equation being a noise gate to artificially chop the reverb tail). A limiter or compresser applied after a reverb will exaggerate and 'embiggen' (look it up, it's a perfectly cromulent word...) the sound. Go ahead and crank up the INPUT knob on the LMC-1. We're not going for subtlety here.

6. In the next slot below that, add Logic's Bitcrusher effect. Set the Resolution to 12 bits and tweak the downsampling to 3X. This will add some grit and balls to the procedings.

7. In the fourth slot, go ahead and add an instance of Logic's Pitch Shifter II. Crank the mix level to 100% so we're only getting the effected sound, and tweak the Semi Tones value down to -2. Again, this will make everything a bit grittier and ballsier. Make sure you have the Drums box at the bottom checked. This helps preserve some of the transients that give drum sounds their percussive attack.

8. Now, if you're impatient, you've probably already been hitting the snare drum as we went along and wondered why everything sounded the same. This is because we haven't adjusted the wet/dry value on the Send yet. So on your EXS24 channel, go ahead and increase the wet value a bit by clicking on the little knob next to the send assignment. You should now hear the transformed sound. By varying the amount on the knob, you can control how much of the original 808 sound comes through and how much of the effected sound comes through. Any value between about 10-50% should give useable results, it just depends how extreme you want to get. Below is a quick example starting with the original sound and gradually increasing the Send amount:



9. When you find a send value you like, go ahead and sequence one hit of the snare, and use Logic's Bounce function to render the new sound to an audio file. Use your audio editor of choice to trim off any silence before or after the bounced sound and you now have a brand new snare you can load into Battery, Guru, EXS24, Ultrabeat, or whatever your sampler of choice is (where you can mangle it still further with filters, envelopes, layer it with other sounds, etc)!

By now, you can probably imagine that the sky is the limit in regards to what effects you can use on your send to transform your drum sounds. Go nuts and experiment with anything you can find. Part of the fun of this sort of this sort of thing is the experimentation. Before long, you'll have an entire drum kit of weird new drum sounds you made yourself and you can rightiously look down your nose at your lesser peers who just use 'presets'. Pfft. Amateurs. ; )