This time we are using the Filter to generate the sound. Not all synthesizer filters are capable of this, but it’s a cool option to have.
The Exercise
1. For this exercise, We use the same session like the : Sinewave, Triangle Filtered exercise, we only replace the Signalizer VST with the Ableton plugin Spectrum.
2. We set both OSC1 and OSC2 Levels to 0 (We don’t need to heard these waveforms for now)
3. Now we are going to adjust our Multi-Mode filter (F2) and we will analyze at the same time what’s happening by using the Ableton Spectrum tool.
Set the Keytracking of the filter to +32
That’s the parameter that gives you a range of notes otherwise you will only have a fixed value. It can be desirable to use fixed values for designing drums. In this techniques article we want to make a range for the sinewave.
You can find your own machine reference points. You can also manually set a good range which is between FRQ : 52.50 to 52.85 (for my machine it’s 52.70)
You should lower the volume for your monitors and/or headphones now. Whenever you use any instrument that gives you controls over resonance you should have your levels set to low. Resonance doesn’t stand out all the but then depending on the sound patch you are working with it will rip through your speakers or your ear drums!
The next step is to raise the resonance (RES) to 127 and you will hear and see a C3 in the Ableton Spectrum plugin.
Note: We don’t use the Ladder Filter because it’s not stable enough to track correctly and get notes playing chromatically.
4. The value I have saved for reference is 52.70 this one seem to gives me the best values on more than one octave. When the machine warms up then it can drift a little bit so you probably have to refine the value to your liking. Most modern analog synthesizers take about 15 minutes before everything is warmed up. You can always turn on your machine and work on some chores for 15 minutes and start playing afterwards.
5. Watch your channel meter, as you can see when we can have the levels at around -9 to -12dB and our sinewave sounds pure so it’s a great improvement for people who really want a pure sinewave.
What we can do from here
This technique is fairly easy to follow and gets you satisfying results. There are a couple of drawbacks. The results may not be 100% stable, sometimes you will feel like few notes do not sound really full (like in the case of a phase issue) it’s less noticeable in the Lower Register which is the focus of this book. We lost one Filter in the process to make Multimode F2 a sinewave generator. This can make the sound design process a bit more complicated.
- We can now introduce back in our tuning OSC1 and OSC2 while benefiting of a SUB sine. We can still use the Ladder Filter to shape our sounds.
- We can modulate the FRQ of the Multimode Filter for the attack portion of the sound. We’ll see this being discussed in the 808 Bass design examples later.
Conclusion
Pay attention: Mixing those techniques can be tricky sometimes especially when it comes to phase. When detuning a Sinewave while filtering a Triangle Wave and adding the self-resonating filter function does add a challenge. The challenge is you now lose an oscillator option when thinking about your sound design tool available.
One obvious trick is but I know when starting a lot of people make this mistake. When starting to designing a sound you probably put yourself in the range of the sound you want to shape. You playing few notes on your keyboard and think that’s where your settings should be. Then you start to fine tune the shape of the sound. There will be a point when you add the OSC1 Sub maybe it works on 1 octave but it won’t sound good 2 octaves out.
First thing you don’t want to do is remove the sub. One thing you can do to work around it is just put yourself one octave higher and start to filter the sound even more. This will keep yourself and your ear in tune of the sound you are after. There’s a lot of sounds who have stacked multiple fundamentals and all sounds don’t have to be in the same octave. (For now I won’t introduce intervals notion in the design) keeping that easy for now. We are only speaking about tone right now, later we will see pairing, altering, and of course movement.
So if the sound is weird when introducing the SUB set OSC1 to +12, or select the upper range to play your notes. Then Filtering more because filter is here exactly for that. You can’t go in the extreme lows and hear a nice pure tone at some point especially with a square as a sub oscillator. It is even more difficult to catch when you reach the limit of your headphones’ low frequency range, or do not have a sub monitoring system.
The Lowend 101 Patch : UTILBATWO
is based on this technique
