 Hey, it's Anfa and you're watching AnfaVlog today. I want to talk about a track that I started Yesterday and finish it today kind of finished. It's not finished yet, but there's already some interesting stuff I want to tell you so usually before I was only making tracks from scratch Not really talking about things I already done and today I think I'm gonna tell you about a track that I have done I'm gonna let you hear it and then I'm gonna just talk about every single element Pointing your attention to some parts that may be interesting some ideas that might inspire you in your sound design and music production Journey. Yeah, so enjoy You can download the session it's arthur 5.12 and it's using Xenofusion You can use a demo version if you don't want to buy the full one Or you can try using the regular 2.x interface for Xenax of effects It should work apart from some automation stuff. Let's give it a listen Quickly go through what I've done in this track so the first thing I've been making some spaceship engine sounds For some game developers and this is the nuts up effects doing a modulation Multi operator modulation and then it's fed through a notch filter lots of reverb a Chorus that is giving it that distinct phasing effect that is very very much used in Star Wars any sound of an Engine of an of a Starship flying by it's heavily using chorus or flanger with module with manually automated Modulation depth, so this is it It's not that much We have this lead and that lead Is fed through a band pass filter Which is let me show you it's a glam band pass analog filter And that is has a very fun thing because it has the center frequency and the bandwidth in Hertz So I'm effectively doing you know very wide Sorry very narrow band pass and then I'm making it wider until it's actually passing through all the frequencies So it's non-effective. So this is the curve the automation curve. It starts from 20 Hertz of width It's getting wider and wider So it's a nice way to reveal the sound It unwraps So it's it's something a bit more, you know interesting than just a simple high-pass filter that is you know Giving through more mids and lows because that sounds very sharp very Very, you know, it hurts the ears when you play it because you can hear only the high frequencies Especially if you use a compressor after the filter because it's going to make it louder But there is no, this is the last thing We have also a kick that is using the same effect and it sounds like a metronome a bit And then the band pass Widen's until it's a proper kick We have a snare what is used afterwards I Have some problem with the hi-hat because I wanted the you know the the envelope stretch function to make the high-pitched notes Be shorter and the low pitch notes be longer. So I would have like I Couldn't achieve this for some reason it didn't work. So Oh Then I made this PWM bass Which is using Modulation it is mapped I'm gonna show you it is mapped with the macro learn to mini CC one which is basically the mod wheel and That is fed to frequency. Actually. It's not frequency modulation. It is pulse width Modulation here we have at synth voice one is modulating voice two is the carrier and it's using pulse modulation using the more the voice one as the modulator and This control is basically automated with the modulation wheel. Why am I using modulation wheel not? The usual sense of x slot one two and three Because the modulation wheel data is copied with the media region so I can duplicate the region and this automation is copied with it Which is a bit easier to maintain I know the resolution of this control is far lower, but it doesn't really break anything in this case So it's just easier. Otherwise to copy this I would have to use the range select mode Select first the me track then the automation lane control C put my Mouse or play head where I want to paste it and then go control V Do you have it placed it with modulation right now? It breaks because you know it's not for that you can just copy and paste just the media region and the data is The automation data is embedded into this because it is MIDI CC automation and that's very useful but it's also easier is moving the data around because When you have when you're using the CC the MIDI CC for automation You just can move the media region and the automation moves with it if you're using external automation you have to actually Select with the range tool select your automation lanes and then cut Your selection and paste it where you want it. So it is a bit tricky I hope the order deaths are going to make this easier for the ETM folks because yeah And this this modulation wheel gives us a lot of expression so Then I took some parts and shifted them to a different instrument this super super saw To create kind of a hawk it and the super saw I'm gonna show you Super saw is nothing super fancy. Actually, it's not a super. So I think Yeah, it's a power wave using unison with quite a lot of detune and Then It is being distorted once distorted twice and then high-passed However, there is something interesting about it. I am using the Frequency envelope. Actually, it's the voice frequency envelope. Yeah, and it's starting with the frequency way down low Without that It's regular With it, you know, it's starting low and then going up. It is also going down after the release You see without this envelope. Well, this pitch envelope. It sounds way more dull and uninteresting with this pitch envelope We give it some interesting character. So it is not as boring, which is This is a very interesting trigger that you can apply to many sounds Sometimes it's better to use portamento for this So we go to part settings you enable portamento and then you make this monophonic or legato Do not have them both notes play when you use portamento But just one pitch and then you have colliding pitch Which is very useful then you control the portamento settings here the time make it longer shorter I use that for the bass. I'm gonna show you in a minute Also, we have this fill lead It is fed to a sidechain bus instead of the master The sidechain bus is here and it basically has a cough multi band compressor Sorry, it coughs sidechain compressor, which is crushing it very hard using the kick basically So when I play anything Kick stumping and it's giving a lot of Gain reduction which makes it pump. I also made a crash cymbal You see this one, but it is actually coupled with playing a melody So when I'm using the lower notes it is Sounding like a crash cymbal more or less, but if I'm using higher notes It actually plays a melody the crash cymbal I'm you know using any cue to high-pass it and accentuate some frequencies to give it a more Natural character. It's just you know done by ear nothing nothing super, you know special No math and then I'm heavily compressing it to make it To make the reverb tail louder and make it blend with the original sound So it you know it decays very long And it's interesting because on the higher notes It has a fundamental that gives you the hint of the note plate It has also some inharmonic overtones, which give it this metallic bell like Character and it plays very nice as a melodic instrument Also wanted to show you this bass too I told you I told you about using portamento and this instrument is using portamento To give it some expression so basically this part looked like this you see there are some notes we can see all right However, I added some notes that overlap just to add a pitch ramp So I have an upwards pitch ramp here pa-pa-pa-da-pa-pa-pa-da And I have a downwards pitch ramp here Which is more expressive. It's more musical that way It is kind of hard to do this you can't do this with pitch band automation. Just go to Automation bender and channel one if you're using channel one and you can use this But it's way harder to do that and you have way more control And if you need to change the portamento time So how fast the pitch ramp is happening you can always You know assign it to Zinfusion some slot or even you know the midi CC like The modulation wheel and automate the portamento speed or time Now I made this arpeggio here on the saw Super saw instrument and how I made this is I basically I'm gonna just redo it for you I'm gonna go D to draw. Oh, I guess I need to change to miles. Yep So I made a note So this is a chromatic passage that I made shorter With alt I am unlocking myself from the grid so I can make it shorter and then what I did Copied all of that Pointed my mouse here Paste it it now shift alt up arrow shifted by one octave then I pasted it another time Shifting my mouse another beat to the right control V Shift alt and two times up arrow And another time control V shift up three times and I have an arpeggio and This this serves here to kind of lead you to a key change because that two-step bass here I Kind of made it and it kind of sounds in a different key So I thought about shifting it to semitones Down, but it didn't really sound well. So I just tried to glue the two parts together with this Arpeggiated chromatic passage to you know, could you lead you to a different key? So this transition isn't so abrupt Like this bass I I wanted to make a Started with a with drum beat So I just started with this guy And I was like dude that is two-step this is UK garage all the way I never ever made a UK garage track and I and I was like whoa awesome now I can try these awesome two-step basses So I tried it However, I didn't really know how to begin So I searched YouTube for some tutorials and I found some fringe guy talking about doing this in serum and I've Looked at two minutes of that and he's just you know having one sine wave Then another sine wave oscillator bit shifting the second sine wave oscillator two octaves up and using that as a frequency Modulator for the first one and then using an LFO that just makes it Modulating deeper and lower what I did so in Zanzib effects Sweet I love that it's so bouncy just makes me want to dance So let's disable all the effects and Also, I will reassign it to master output so we don't have this side chaining I'm gonna just open up this instrument to show you So basically we have Pitch shifted these two octaves down for the begin for the beginning. Oh, I have learned enabled I should not touch anything because I'm gonna mess up my Yeah, disable learn It's something I always forgot about I enable learn I learned something in the macro learn and then I leave the learn on and I click something else and I break everything So be cautious when you use that So I have the voice First voice you see it's piss shifted three octaves up. It's Oscillating it's just a sine wave However, I'm also enabling us I Modulation for this Modulating voice so we have voice to which is a sine wave a low-pitch sine wave And then it's modulating It's being modulated with the voice one, which is a high-pitched sine wave and I'm automating this No, sorry. I'm not automating Nope, I'm not touching the Modulation depth on this voice. However on the first voice. I am using amplitude LFO I Don't know why it's not doing the effect it should Did I break something? Yeah, you disable the modulation on voice two. Oh, man Okay, I broke it. All right, never mind. Let's reload the session So I'm going to show you how this bass works here. We have the two-step bass It's only two voices The voice to is what we hear so as you can see in the amplitude section of the voice the velocity the volume This is what we hear and go to the voice list you see we have two of them This third voice is just an additional sine wave of oscillator just to fill in the low part of the spectrum This is what we hear and this is the modulator It is it has the volume of zero. So if I give it volume This is the sound that is modulating voice to and I'm gonna show you voice one has an amplitude LFO Which is bound to Mod wheel I can play with this It also uses frequency modulation and has its own Modulation enabled It also has modulation To give it a more character more high frequency going to make it more sharp and It has more bite. So when I give this volume of zero and enable the second voice Let's go to voice to and voice to is also a sine wave and In the modulation tab we can see that it uses phase modulation and it's referencing voice one as its modulator We have a fixed amount of Modulation depth We are using a lot of Volume sensing velocity sensing. So if I play softly There is very little modulation if I play hard So much modulation that it turned into white noise So by combining note velocity and the mod wheel we can get have quite a lot of control over the sound Oh There is also Pornamento in place if we go to the part settings you can see we have Pornamento enabled with the legato mode So that is that we have Global filter is I think it is being bypassed on the voice to No It gets rid of some of the high frequency noisy rubbish that we produce with the phase modulation Then it goes into effects. I'm gonna disable the distortion. Let's go Let's bypass all of that listen to the raw sound So this is a very classic FM sound actually you know here it's very We can't hide the character of the sound and where it comes from but if we use distortion We Can hide this character at something new and make it less obvious how the sound is made The reverb using is using hypers filter so only the high frequencies are being reurbated if I make it all wet There is no bass in the river Because the river would mess up the low frequency content pretty badly So yeah, then this Goes out and is being processed with these effects So we have just the frequency modulation the distortion and the reverb Now we have an exciter in place we can Listen to just the harmonics that it's producing This is basically a distortion unit with high pass filter that is being blended in to add the high frequency content You might remember we removed some with the low pass filter and now we're restoring that we're bringing in a more Hyper high frequency kind because we were lacking some Here without it Now we're giving it more edge then heavy compression Compression is mainly to bring out the reverb So you can see if I play a note Then the gain reduction slowly Falls down revealing our reverb tail You can especially hear this when The reverb tail is being cut short when we play another note then it's a there's a de-esser because Sometimes you can get very nasty high frequency content when I hit the note too hard There's a lot of Modulation going on and we get lots of high frequency content which is kind of harsh on the ears So I'm using a de-esser to just cut it down. It is basically listening to a hypersignal As you can hear it's really accentuating these irritating frequencies and then it's applying a Compression to that. It also has a peak filter here to accentuate about 4.5 kilohertz make it even more To these frequencies and finally an EQ Oh It's hypersing unneeded low-end frequencies As you can see our main bass tone is somewhere around 50 I am boosting around 200 hertz It's basically the second harmonic Often I'm cutting some around five hundred a bit and then boosting something I would do it's just random ringing noises that I just didn't like and then I bring out lots more high shelves However, these are just on the edge of human hearing range You can see that there's not much source material here so this enormous High-shell boost isn't really doing that much because there isn't much there to be boosted But still that's the base. Let's get back to the original video because this was recorded in post because I had bad audio recorded Notes to give it some interest make it less boring For the beginning I just had this note, so it was just like that I Also modified the velocities of the notes so we can see this is 53 64 68 58 64 70 and I have mapped the velocity of the note to Mmm To modulation depth of the first voice so the first high-pitched sine wave is also modulated with another sine wave and I have all the way the sensitivity for that, so This has lots of influence so it adds more high-pitched content And finally I have recorded some vocals Let's AB plugins I Chop them up and you know revert some parts then I High-pass the thing cuz cuz I had lots of low frequency content that I didn't want I used auto-tune I thought about maybe pitching this to a musical Pitch but it didn't really work So I It's just not not doing anything. Actually. I can remove that then I used ma pitch shift to pitch shift it And it's not automated. It's just a static thing I just played around to do a pitch shift with enough window blur and Crossfade to make it in sound interesting in less default and normal and then I added a Delay which is using eight subdivisions and six time. It's it's stereo Then I compressed the hell out of it to to make the the volume More consistent and also to ramp up the delay after the the initial sound stops And then I added a guitar X stereo chorus effect, which I really like it It's I don't know why but this chorus I so much like the sound of this chorus effect GX chorus stereo awesome to add some width to the signal because it was mono And then I feed it to the sidechain bus to make it, you know quiet when the kick hits so it doesn't I interrupt with the beat with a pumping groove and Another one I added Argot Lunar, which is a an amazing like along with ma pitch shift It's my favorite mess it up style of effect it It's a granular processor So it split the signal into short time chunks and processes them independently and I'm transposing each one so it's actually doing a job of a Pitch shifter right now, and I'm automating the amount so 0.5 here is the neutral pitch shifting So it's no change above 0.5 is Pitch shifting it up and below 0.5 is pitch shifting it down So I'm just automating this having fun Without the effects the raw sound Yeah, we have the Sidechaining also audible. Excuse me. I'm a bit sick. So when Argot Lunar is enabled I also use Rise up whatever is hidden, you know, just give more detail Bring it up to be visible and then because I had some high-pitched sounds that that were hard I just enabled a I just added a DSer so it would attenuate parts of the Of the recording where there are high-pitched sounds That is just a lazy way to Make the sound not be painful in the high-frequency range when you just don't want to manually automate it or EQ everything Because I want to maintain the high frequency content in all the other parts And that's pretty much it. I hope you've learned something if you have any questions or suggestions Please leave them in the comment section below. You can download the session for this track It's for Ardor 5.12 so the stable version No more Ardor 6 until it's stable and it's probably going to be stable in a couple of months or maybe a year. I don't know Wait a minute. I also want to thank everyone who is supporting me on patreon and everyone who is buying my music and bandcamp You are giving me the hope that I will be able to do this as a half-time or maybe even a full-time job and that's fantastic because I have so many things to teach you and And Honestly making videos is very time-consuming. I wish I could do more of this and do it better But I just it's hard to you know Find the time between my full-time job and other activities to do it So the growing support on patreon is giving me the hope that I will be able to take out one two or three days every week or Even every month like I know three days every month just for making videos that will already be a big upgrade So we're slowly heading that direction and if you feel that Videos like this are needed and if you want to help me help the open source musician community grow Consider becoming a patreon subscriber Thanks for watching and I see you in the next video. Bye