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Electronica: Stop Using the Presets!!By: Alex ScheibeAlex is an electronica reviewer and the audio tech article guy at raw42 music. He has a degree in Audio Engineering and plays around making his own music on his spare tire. |
| Electronic music has come a long way since the early days of midi. synths and samplers abound with features to shape their sound in any way the user sees fit. they also come with many pre-programmed sounds, some of which are totally amazing examples of sound programming. and that's what i think they should be. examples of how you can get the synthesizer to sound if you spend time perusing the manuals and playing around with the multitude of options. The problem i present in this article is this: any electronic musician worth his/her salt instinctively recognizes the 128 general midi sounds found in digital synths and soundcards and also many banks of preset sounds from various other instruments. while this may not seem like a bad thing, if an electronic composer listens to your music and recognizes the sounds used as general midi, they will invariably think, oh, i know that sound, i could have made this song. i know i have. Synths and Samplers Originality is a difficult trait to learn, and even more difficult to maintain. but there are so many options to play around with when it comes to sound manipulation that there really is little excuse for sticking to the presets. the way to go about manipulating your sounds depends a lot on the type of instrument that you have. for people with samplers and synthesizers with ram memory, the opportunities for using unique sounds are endless. you can start off with any sound source and treat it in a sample editor, then dump the completed samples to your sampler. i will get to that after the other type of synth, which is a fixed sound type, with limited editing options. these synths have banks of preset sounds and memory locations to store new sounds. the new sounds are usually variations of the preset sounds. if you have a synthesizer from the early nineties, the chances are that you will be very limited in ways to edit the sounds already contained within it. but there are always options. the most standard of these, but not to be underestimated, are effects. it can be surprising to find out how much you can change the sound of a preset by just adding a different type of effect to it. Effects Applying effects to preset sounds is an excellent way to make new sounds. here's how some of those filters work. reverb and chorus are included on all but the most basic of synths, so they are a good start. Reverb Applying a layer of reverb to a sample can add a sense of space, not found in the original. If you push up the amount of reverb you can even create a whole new sound that is bright and airy, a good choice for synth pads and the like. reverb is a nice effect but it can become a bad effect when it's overused throughout the song with every single sample drowning in reverb. this pushes all your samples seemingly to the background in your mix which can be the cause of a muddy or less prominent song. Chorus A chorus effectively doubles your sound and detunes (a few semi-tones higher or lower) one of the copies. chorus is normally used to push sounds to the foreground or to give them more volume or punch. a chorus alone can instantly add warmth to a sample but more interestingly, the amount of detuning can be modulated over time. if you set extreme values for your chorus effect, you can create sounds that are very different from the original. try setting a fast modulation rate and a larger amount of detuning for bubbly, science fiction like sounds. Flange, Phaser and Wah-Wah These 3 effects are fairly similar so i'll cover them in one shot. these effects are also similar to a chorus in that they add another waveform to the existing waveform. flanges, phasers and wah-wahs add sweeping, resonant (a sound that rings in your ears, it bounces around) frequencies to your sample making it sound either wobbly, digitized or like an echo. an extreme flanger applied to even the most basic sound wave can make it sweep and bellow like an entirely new sound. use with care though, as this is a very potent effect. adding too many flanged or phased samples to a song can be hard on the ears and annoying after a while. If you experiment with the capabilities of your instrument, you will find that effects can greatly change a sound, but the only way to truly make your own is by going into synthesis. whole books have been written on this subject alone, but i will keep it short and simple. Sound Synthesis Sounds in a synthesizer are composed of waveforms, which are nothing more or less than oscillations. multiple waveforms are overlapped to create complex sounds. here is where the capabilities of different synths vary most. some will let you edit everything from the ground up and others will let you create sounds using templates already contained within them. Starting from scratch requires you to select a waveform that will play. the source of the waveform is called an oscillator or tone generator. this waveform will generate a sound that plays continuously. to be able to play it properly, you will have to make it respond to pitch and on/off operations from an input, which, in the case of a synthesizer, will be a keyboard. most synths actually do this for you. when you select a sine wave as your sound's basic waveform, the synth will make sure that the sound is heard when a key is struck and that it plays at the correct pitch. a single waveform sound without any other processing sounds static and quite boring, so you need to add some elements to the sound that change over the time that it's played. The most standard of these is a volume envelope (ADSR envelope: attack, decay, sustain, release). The first part is called the attack and determines at which volume the sound starts playing when you hit the key and where it swells to. as with all the other parts of an envelope, the time in which it does this can be 0, in which case the sound will start off at the specified volume and go right into the next part of the envelope. Next is decay, which is usually a short drop in volume after the sound reaches its maximum level and before it goes into the stable volume part, or sustain. The sustain level of a volume envelope is the volume level at which the sound will play if you hold a key down and after the sound has gone through the attack and decay stages. this is the level at which a sound will usually be heard, unless you are using the attack and decay parts to create a sound that sweeps in volume. The release part of the envelope controls the speed at which the sound dies down to zero volume after the key has been released. you can achieve nice results when playing sounds that have a relatively long release in a melody, almost like an echo. In advanced synths, envelopes can be applied to any part of a sound and weird effects can be created by changing the pitch, for instance, according to an envelope. Another important part of sound synthesis is the filter. a filter is an effect that boosts or cuts volume in a specific frequency range, much the same as an equalizer. in analog synths (those old ones everyone wants to own) and most digital ones, the filter is a low-pass, which means it cuts off all frequencies above the currently selected setting. the cut-off frequency can be set, or, for excitement, changed over time. add to that the fact that some synths allow you to add resonant frequencies at the cut-off point, the level of which can also be varied over time, and you have the basis for some interesting sounds. Finally, a word about samplers, which for this intent will include synths that allow you to load samples into their ram memory. most of the sound manipulation options discussed will be available for these instruments too, but the waveform that a sound starts with can be anything. any sample you can imagine has the potential to be a great sound. noise from a radio, the neighbour's dog barking, the sound of falling leaves. if you can sample it, you can make it a waveform and therefore make it the basis for a totally unique sound. also, samplers usually include some way to transfer samples to and from computers, via scsi or midi, which is a big plus, because it will allow you to do your sound editing in your favourite software package and use your mouse and monitor to aid in selecting parts of the sample. This is, as i said, a very simple view of sound synthesis. there are many more options, and when you are done with one waveform, you can add another to the same sound and have it play at the same time, mixed or separate, and so on. depending on the level of editing your instrument will let you do, the possibilities are endless. all that is needed is a determination to use sounds that are unique to your music and steer clear of using the instantly recognizable and much overused presets that come with the synth. First appeared in raw42 music. Reprinted with permission. |