What you’ll achieve: In this project-centered course*, you will create sounds and use them in your own musical compositions. Whether you're an aspiring producer, composer, or hobbyist, this course will help you gain skills in music production and confidence using software synthesizers. Along with your classmates, you will create a massive database of designed sounds, or patches, to use in your compositions. As part of the course, you will work with a free version of FXpansion Strobe 2. What you’ll need to get started: This course is designed for learners who are familiar with music production basics, and who have access to some basic music production equipment. Specifically, you should have experience with a digital audio workstation that supports VST, AAX, or AU plugins (Introduction to Music Production or Pro Tools Basics are recommended if you do not have this experience). You will also need a MIDI keyboard or controller (such as an oxygen 8), a digital audio workstation, such as Pro Tools, and FXpansion Strobe 2 (a free 90-day demo will be provided for Coursera learners in this course). *About Project-Centered Courses: This is a ‘project-centered course’, which means it is designed specifically to help you complete a personally meaningful real-world project, with your instructor and a community of learners with similar goals providing guidance and suggestions along the way. By actively applying new concepts as you learn, you’ll master the course content more efficiently; you’ll also get a head start on using the skills you gain to make positive changes in your life and career. When you complete the course, you’ll have a finished project that you’ll be proud to use and share.
LD: Leads
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Del curso dictado por Berklee College of Music
Creating Sounds for Electronic Music
164 calificaciones
De la lección
Creating Draft 1
This week, we'll look at organ, lead, keys, and arpeggiator patches. We'll start researching and adding these patches to our etudes.
Conoce a los instructores
Loudon StearnsAssistant Professor
Contemporary Writing & Production
[MUSIC]
So we're trying to make an expressive lead with this patch.
We want to have lots of different
ways of manipulating the patch during our performance.
So we'll look at how to get velocity to manipulate the patch,
look at pitch bend, mod wheel, and even pitch gliding between notes.
And we'll introduce the really big topic that's left, which is trans mod,
which is how we can really expand the number of possible modulations in Strobe2.
Let's see how to do it.
The first thing we're going to check is make sure our voicing section
is just a single voice, which it is.
So we have the ability to only play a single note at a time.
A monophonic synth, it feels a little constraining,
because it only can play one note at a time.
There's a beauty to that in that we can adjust how the note transitions work.
How do we move from one pitch to another?
And that's found over here under glide and key, and we'll turn that up a bit.
Let's see what happens even with our basic init patch when we start working
with glide.
[MUSIC]
We get that kind of movement between the note.
Let's turn that up even further and see what more extreme setting would do.
[MUSIC]
You get those great glides, and working with that amount can be really key.
[MUSIC]
Now what we have right now is it always will glide, so if I just play notes.
[MUSIC]
Which can be [LAUGH] it's kind of vocal in a way, right?
It has this kind of interesting quality to it, but it's not always what we want.
It would be nice if I choose to glide sometimes and
just jump to the note sometimes.
And that's what the legato function here is really good at.
Legato is kind of note overlapping, and if two notes overlap now we'll get the glide.
And if they don't overlap it will just jump to the new pitch.
Let's hear.
[SOUND] We get the glide but if I release both notes.
[MUSIC]
I can kind of choose when I have that glide.
Really key and
something you'll start noticing a lot in the songs that you've been listening to.
Now it's also nice to have like really dramatic pitch motion with pitch bend, and
pitch bend is on most controllers.
It's a really high resolution knob,
you'll notice it's the knob that kind of snaps back to its middle location
when you move it, trying to get back to that initial pitch.
We have to tell the synthesizer though, the range of this pitch bend,
what does that actually mean in a synth?
Does putting this down go down a semitone, or does it go down a whole octave?
Well we have that choice.
We have this bend section in Strobe2.
The bottom knob is if I bend down, how far the pitch will move.
And the top knob is when I bend up, how far the pitch will move.
And for this example, let's try making them different which is kind of fun.
I'll have bend up go +3 and I'll have bend down go -24 so I can play a note.
[SOUND] Get a big dive bomb kind of sound.
I can play around there.
[MUSIC]
[LAUGH] And you get kind of interesting control over it so
I like having those two different ones.
I also like the idea of just having it move a semitone in either direction.
It can be fun to kind of perform with.
So we're getting a nice performable patch.
But there's one other parameter that you really want to be working with, and
that's your mod wheel.
Because on most controllers you have these two knobs, pitch bend and mod wheel.
And I think what I'm hearing is this patch, it's kind of bright and piercing.
And I'd like to kind of dull it down a little bit.
And we know the filter's really good for that.
Let's try it.
[MUSIC]
So it gets a little more like a sine wave.
Now, we know that we can do MIDI learn, which we did in a previous patch.
And MIDI learned the kind of mod wheel to control that parameter.
But, we have another way we can assign this, and this gives us more flexibility,
it's using trans mod.
And trans mod will let me have one mod wheel, and you'll see as I move this,
Perf1 is moving, and if you don't see that, you can use your CC Learn,
just like we did before.
So, I could hit CC Learn, click on that mod wheel, and then move it, and
get out of CC Learn, and now we will see they're associated.
You see, above that, it says P1.
It stands for performer one, or performance one, and
we can use that to assign to multiple things.
See, the MIDI learn function,
it means a single knob on your controller is controlling a single parameter.
With the trans mod, we can have that single knob control many parameters,
which could be really, really interesting.
So I'll go up to slot one.
I'll go to Perf and choose Perf1+.
So that's assigning a mod source.
And I want that to control cut off frequency so
I can make the sound brighter or duller with that knob.
So with that selected, it has the yellow box selected.
I can hover over the outer ring, click and drag up, and
I'm establishing a modulation range.
I'm saying that performer one is controlling cutoff frequency over that
range, and you'll even see it says from +18 to +59 semitones.
Now.
[MUSIC]
We have that great control, and I might now want to adjust my ranges.
I can click on the middle of the knob to adjust the kind of set point,
the knob itself.
Then I can click the outside to turn that up a bit.
[MUSIC]
Gives us some nice control.
Now I could have that knob control other things at the same time.
I could have it go to this drive parameter and
actually crank up the drive as I move on a performer, as well.
[MUSIC]
And you'll see the blue line show you where that knob is,
based on the trans mod.
Now, we can use that same technique so that velocity,
or how hard you hit the key, can control a variety of parameters.
And I would like how hard I hit the key to control amplitude,
so I get some amplitude variations in my performance.
So the same thing, I'll go up to the second trans mod slot this time,
I'll go down to Poly, and I'll choose OnVel.
You might want to take a chance to look at all the trans mod sources.
There's a ton of them, and this is where the power of the synth really shines.
On velocity, I'll go over to my Amplitude section, click here and drag up and
that's going to establish the velocity range.
I might want to bring amplitude down a little bit here.
There we go.
[MUSIC]
And I'll crank that up even more, so that velocity has a major control.
[MUSIC]
So now we have all these various ways we can manipulate this lead.
I have pitch bend, controlling pitch over huge amount,
velocity controlling amplitude, mod wheel controlling filter cut off.
I can overlap notes to create a glide or
not overlap notes to jump to pitches precisely.
This is just the starting point, but when you have these kind of dimensions of
control, it won't take much more to make a really compelling lead.
[MUSIC]
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