We talked a little bit about frequency in the Filter post earlier.
You must have in mind music, physics, and mathematics are related. This goes back to the old age of studying music. We can set a scale to headings in typography and that comes from music harmony. Fibonacci, Da Vinci that’s not from yesterday – sounds familiar ?
The reason why I made comparisons earlier between an organ and a piano is because when you learn of fundamental and harmonics you are able to pick up other musical concepts. If you learn how to make an organ, then the sinewave stack can be understood quickly as well as fundamental and harmonics. The idea of FM synthesis is also introduced.
you know what you will be able to approach FM with your analog four and its very powerful LFO.
How cool is that ?
But for now lets come back to our main subject here.
If you stack a piano and an audio spectrum in front of you, everything is clear, notes are fundamentals – and frequencies are what we called a timbre (tone)
When you look at a sinewave waveform what you see on the little picture below is cycle. (this portion is exactly what a single cycle waveform is – you probably notice about this subject and the octatrack) The longer cycles in the length are the sounds played is in the bass register, the shorter the cycle length is the the higher frequency sounds played.
And that why frequency matters, if you design a bass you design your bass sound in a specific range of frequencies corresponding to the keyboard octave. That why sometimes you see people turning the octave lower when you are designing starting at the C3 note which is the sampler root note by default. They stay in the middle octave and instead of going down in octave if the bass patch is designed starting at C3 but bass patches can be played 1 or 2 octaves lower. It can make sense if we consider range and usability of a sound (but it’s not a rule).
Keep that in mind because sometimes you design a sound in the lower register then you reach a point where the sounds is not going in the right direction. You also will notice that in the higher ranges the sound is pleasant to your ears. So here’s a tip: Just because you focus on a bass sound you should also be aware of how the sound is responding in the higher octaves.
Another thing to consider about bass design outside of the Analog Four world is octaves may be labeled in feet like 8’, 16’. This idea comes from the pipe organ (Yes I am bringing up the organ again!) The concept between feet and the organ design is kind of logical at the end and will help you grasp other synthesis concepts in your learning.
I will approach combining oscillators later in “Lowend101” but speaking about the organ is a good starting point.
On how to build an organ patch for instance, without using FM Synthesis
The sinewave is the simplest of all waveforms but i spoke about that a few times already and even if you don’t have a sinewave on your Analog Four there will be a focused part on how to achieve it later.
Keep in mind the sinewave contains only a single fundamental and no harmonics. If this is one is simplest waveforms and we say the other ones are more complex, it is because the sinewave has no harmonics.
The closest candidate then on the analog four is the Triangle waveform. It contains of course the fundamental and a few harmonics. Considering the Filter chapter you can lessen the amount of harmonics to make your Triange waveform sound more like a sinewave.
I will also make an entire chapter on how to get interesting timbre but it is the addition of harmonics to a wave that makes it possible to distinguish the timbre, of the instruments.
Insight on Synthesis
For decades, people try to emulate real world instruments with synthesizers, probably all sorts of synthesis are part of the process when thinking about emulating an instrument. If there’s sounds emulated that aren’t a convincing replica of the real instrument – we can say the synthesis methods did not work.
That’s why you see all these Kontakt libraries. (Kontakt is a powerful sampler from Native Instruments – of course that’s not the only powerful sampler available)
I think what’s makes me love electronic music so much even if i am not listening to it all the time. This is my favorite music genre is because of “the never heard this sound aspect” when I go through artist’s songs.
So I’m one of those who think of synthesis as a sound laboratory, i’m not looking to just one device on stage (or a workstation). I’m looking to experiment and be surprised by something I have never heard when going through multiple instruments.
Another thing to mention is this knowledge regarding fundamental, harmonics is one of the key components of mixing. Maybe you already heard about the frequency to note chart (or cheatsheet) – it became handy to mixers because of all the instruments playing together you’ll eventually end up with frequencies overlapping. Part of mixing process is making room so every instrument sharing the same space are heard or can stand out more than the others.
As fundamental are usually higher in amplitude (volume) you can notice it easier in an spectrum analyser even with some simple sounds you can deduct what chords are played with the frequencies : that’s why also, frequencies matters !
Also, two tones produced by different instruments might have the same fundamental frequency and thus the same pitch, but sound different because of various harmonics and overtones. This leads us to the timbre (tone) but let’s stop there for now.
I will add the Note to Frequencies chart here on a button for download later.
