 Hey, it's Anfa! Today I'm going to show you how to make that interesting psychedelic voice-like lead instrument that sounds like this. Actually we're going to make the whole track from scratch. But first we need to make a basic beat and bass. No worries, I'm going to do it quick. Okay, so the first thing I'm going to do is a kick drum. Actually I'm going to use the new Geon kick version to make all the drums and a single MIDI track. It's going to be easier to program. And yes, let's configure it for fan output and 16 channels. And at first we might not use it, but then we might use it. So this gives us 16 drum instruments that are already rooted to their own respective buses. Now I'm going to give it input from my keyboard. And let's see. Okay, so this is going to be the kick. Let's also go to the kit. And the kit is going to be channel output number one. Yes, so this is first audio channel, right? And let's give it a 4. Which one? Which is it? Alright, so I have it there. Cool. Alright, let's make this kick very quick. Pan intended. Let's make the oscillator. Let's make this louder. Let's give it a bit more frequency to start with. Okay, let's go oscillator frequency. Yes, we starting with 1.8k. That's cool. Let's go ramp down to maybe go with G. We don't want to go below these 47 Hertz then. Maybe slightly above. Okay. Alrighty, now for the envelope. That's already the amplitude envelope. I don't want it to be as loud. I'm sorry, as long. Let's also make it louder. I'm missing some of that very high frequency click at the start. So you know what? Let's turn up the frequency even more. And now we need to, of course, manually correct the frequency of our lower part. Oh, nice. That's click. That's very clicky. Nice. We can also spice it up with some distortion. I'm going to reduce the input gain and max out the volume instead. Alrighty, now I'm going to use the general amplitude envelope, max out the basic volume and reduce it. So we have like, like distorted transient. And then it's a bit more clean. I think that's going to be good. That sounds like a pretty fat kick. But it's also like sterile. And that's what we need for this kind of track. Now let's go to the kit settings. Let's create an entirely new part. I'm going to call this the kick. And the second one, I'm going to call it hi-hat. Later we may add a, so this is going to be, okay, maybe not, maybe not a station B. It's going to be easier for me to play. And I want this to be on the audio channel too. So now you can see when I play the kick, it plays on this channel. When I play the hi-hat, it plays on that channel. Actually, you know what? Let's add another one and make a room for, I believe there's an option to move them up and down. Or isn't there? Maybe there isn't. Okay, let's call this snare then and make it like that. So this hi-hat is going to be the third one. So we have kick. It's going to be snare and it's going to be hi-hat. So this channel, okay, this channel one and this is channel two. But they count from zero. It's a bit counterintuitive. All right, so let's make this, this is going to be the snare. I don't want to do this right now though. I want to focus on the hi-hat. So let's make the hi-hat. Maybe we'll do the snare, but it's not necessary. Spoilers. I never did the snare! Let's use two oscillators, FM them together. Let's make it two triangle waves, make them very loud, make the frequencies vastly different. Okay, maybe not as loud, a second one. Now the amplitude envelope for the oscillator two, which is the result. Okay, now I'm going to also bandpass filter the result. Yep, and now add a noise component. We want to make this noise also last pretty short and hype as it make it shorter. Oh yeah, that's a, it's pretty piercing, but we're going to EQ it soon. That's the most we need so far. So I'm going to close this and that's our drum kit. Well I'm going to call this first one kick. The second one is going to be snare and the third one is going to be hi-hat. Okay, we don't need much more. Now let's make a basic, basic arrangement. So this is our kick note. Also the tempo. Let's go 140 maybe. Um, no, not 1,040, 400, no 1,400. Let's sync to beats and just, okay, we need to shorten the notes because Ardor has a little bit of timing errors and that causes them to glitch out. Actually, I'm going to make these go on every, on every, oh, that's swinging. No. Oh, okay. I've placed them on, yes, that's the pattern I wanted. Now let's duplicate this a bunch of times. We can hide the unneeded or unused channels right now. Let's, or even deactivate them so they don't use any processing power and we can hide them too. Oh, well, that's, that's silly. Now let's make the bass really quickly. Um, so that's a MIDI track. What synthesizer should we use? Something I haven't used in a while. Maybe Helm. Actually, I should have called it a bass. So what we need, I'm going to just copy the pattern of our drums. We need a bass that, oh my goodness, that's pretty loud. Sorry. We need a bass that plays on like 16ths. So I'm going to control drag this and we have our 16ths. I'm going to make them tiny bit shorter so they don't overlap because of the timing errors Ardor has. Now I want to go to the G note because that's what we tuned our kick to. And that's going to be the bass of our, I'm going to make this hide a little bit quieter. Let's open up Helm. Okay, there is Helm. So now we just need one oscillator. You know what? Let me just assign it to the keyboard so I can play it. Ah, no, this one, this one. Yeah, that's the note we're playing. It's a bit quiet now if we turn it down. Okay. Now what we need is a filter. We need the filter envelope. Let's also want sharp attack and fast release. Oh no, the release could be a bit longer, but we need one voice. We don't want any chords to occur. We could maybe use the sub oscillator. Let's try. How about some distortion? Maybe not. Let's clearly keep it relatively clean. Okay, let's see how that sounds. Kind of lame. We know what we're missing. We're missing sidechain compression. Okay, let's use, what can we use? We can use calf sidechain compressor. Okay, so first go to pinout, enable the sidechain input, send the kick output here. So the kick drives our sidechain compression. Now we can close this. We need to activate the sidechain. So it's actually used inside of a compressor. And now I would actually play this in a loop. So let me select all that, hit right square bracket, press L. I'm gonna put a limiter. Could use X 42 DPL, a digital peak limiter. It's pretty simple, but okay, now I'm feeling the kick. The kick's impact much more because it actually hits harder. So that's the basis of our super simple side trends track. Now let's move on to making this talking lead instrument. What we're gonna do is record my voice and then forcefully pitch shift it to a MIDI track. So it will follow a melody. After that, we're going to enforce that the voice is quiet whenever the instrument is not playing any notes. And basically we can achieve this with two tracks and two plugins. So first we need an audio track to record our voice. Second, we need a MIDI track to store our notes. And now I'm going to call this the talking lead MIDI. Now this is not going to be using any vocoders. And this is going to be the talking lead voice. Now let's record some nonsensical voice lines. Okay, let's just perfect. Can we hear that? Now the important thing is that we maintain a stable-ish pitch so that it can be tracked and corrected with our plugin. Now I'm intentionally going up and down because that's going to give us a changing timbre as the sound continues. Now we need some MIDI data to play with. So let's just, I don't know, go and play. Okay, let's just use this and repeat it twice. That's a, oh wow, it doesn't actually, okay, didn't snap properly. Oh, because I'm aligning to timecode frames again, not to bars or beats or whatever. That's not super great. Oh, the same happens to my bass line. Okay, now what we need instead of this general MIDI instrument is some synthesizer tone. I'm going to use Helm again. And what I want is something that has, basically, we're going to sample, we're going to take the MIDI data to set the pitch, but we're also going to need the audio to sample the volume of envelope and impose it onto our recorded voice. And we're going to do that with a sidechain gate. So I want a pretty high pitch and I think a square wave is going to be best because it's like it's peaking for the most time and it's going to help the peak detection of the sidechain envelope be very consistent and clean. I just need one oscillator, no need for two. And yep, that seems good. Now, we don't want to listen to that because it's going to be painful to the ears. I'm going to make it very, very quiet. I think we actually could maybe turn it down a little bit, just 24 semitones, like two octaves. It's going to be enough. Okay, we're not going to actually listen to that. We can mute it. Now what we need is the first very important plugin, which is Auto Tune. Now this is a plugin by X42 and it's called X42 Auto Tune. And what it does, you can scale the user interface up, so it's a bit bigger and easier to see if you're watching this on a phone, for example. So what this does is helps correct pitch, but you can also force it to take input from MIDI. So we can use the pin out and you can see it already prepared a MIDI connection for us and the sidechain accepts MIDI. You can see this purple pin. So now we can just select our talking lead MIDI and we already have the MIDI input connected so that when I now play, you can see that Auto Tune receives the notes and activates them here. Now if we were to play a chord, for example, let's give it two notes. Also I'm going to move it here and make it stay on top. Oh, the graphic user interface scaling just turned off. Now if we play two notes, it's going to activate two notes and it's going to pick the closest one to what it detects. So it's not going to play a chord, it's going to give us alternatives, but we don't want that. Okay, so now we can just listen to the voice. Well, it doesn't sound particularly good yet. So what we can do is change the the filter and make it fast so that so that it doesn't really sound natural, but we're not going for a natural sound. We're going for a robotic instrument. Okay, so what we want is pretty much done in here. Now we need another plug and we need to impose the envelope. So I'm going to add a LSP sidechain gate and it might be stereo. Actually, it could be mono because we are dealing with a mono signal so far. Let's move it up and let's open pin connections and you see we have the first input and we have the sidechain input. Let's activate the sidechain and we have a blue pin here, which means we are connecting audio. Let's click here and select talking lead MIDI. Now it's called MIDI, but it outputs audio from the end because we have a synthesizer in there and that's why we can take the audio output of that synthesizer and plug it in here. Now let's go here and see what it looks like on the talking MIDI track. So we have the synthesizer, we're sending the MIDI signal to the autotune plugin, then we're sending the audio signal to the sidechain gate and then there's the fader. That means our muting it here is going to mute it after these sends have already occurred, which is perfect because we don't really want to hear this but we still want the sidechain gate to receive the full level signal. So this is LSP sidechain gate. It's a very powerful plugin as all LSP plugins are. It can be a bit overwhelming when you look at it first. The first thing we need to do is change the type from internal to external, which basically means now we're going to use the sidechain input and you can see our value is going up here and you can see we have these pulses that represent where the notes hit. Now what we need to do is tweak the settings. So first thing I'm going to draw the reduction way down so that when it mutes it mutes completely our voice. Another thing that isn't right is the attack and release times and we can see they're here. The attack is 20 milliseconds and the release is 100 milliseconds, which is very long for this purpose. So I'm going to first make them the slowest or the fastest they can be, which is zero. And we're going to listen to the result and see if it fits our needs. Now what we can hear also is that the voice underneath is very quiet. And the problem is that the volume varies across the recording and we are imposing our own volume envelope. So we want the volume to be very consistent except for what we impose with the sidechain gate. So let's use a compressor to even out the volume before we sidechain it. We can use a sidechain, sorry, a Calf compressor plugin. I'm inserting it right before. Actually, this is the stereo version. Let's use the mono version just for consistency. Calf mono compressor. Okay, there it is. And now let's just squash this signal. Let's bring the input gain all the way up, bring the ratio all the way to infinity and the threshold about zero. Now let's make the attack and release around like maybe 2020. Okay, it's starting to sound like what we want. Now, I think we need to tweak the sidechain gate a bit. Now, I want to move the threshold up so we are activating really only when we are hitting that impulse. Also, there is this zone setting, which give us potentially a wider dynamic range so that if we now go to this helm instance and actually use a make the sustain zero, for example, give it some decay. Now just our notes are very short. If I make this note longer, we're going to hear that, I guess. Yes. So that now allows us to have an actual volume modulation imposed. We are first like smashing this input signal with a compressor to level the volume completely so it's very consistent. And now we're imposing our own volume envelope with this sidechain gate. Gonna make it stay on top. And we can also play around and probably use an LFO. So let's maybe use this mono LFO to modulate the volume of the oscillator. Now let's see what that that makes. Let's close this. Okay, it seems it's frozen. Good news. It has some recovery data. Maybe we are not completely screwed. It's pretty much the way we left it. Just the first region is bugged out and disappeared. What I do is copy it from a different copy and add an A or another letter to the name because that prevents it from happening again. I don't know. This is a long-standing bug. I've been reporting this years ago. Alrighty. Let's listen to our instrument. I'm gonna turn it down a bit. Now the thing is our material doesn't extend. So we can just copy something. There's no pain in actually doing some really weird vocal chops in there. Actually I would recommend it. You can totally mess up with that stuff. It's really fun and you can get some really interesting results if you just play around and edit this underlying vocal. Now I have a hard time hearing the actual melody and I am not sure if it's imposed correctly. What we can do is maybe duplicate that MIDI track and give ourselves another instance of hell and make an instrument that we can actually hear playing. Let's move this above the fader. Okay, maybe my performance isn't ideal and because I'm changing the pitch a lot it might be confusing the autotune plugin so that can't really follow very close. So I'm going to try and give a different performance and let's see how that works. I'm gonna create a new playlist which is like saving that take and having a new empty slot that I can fill with a different take and see how it can work out. Am I using the right input? I'm using the right input. Okay. Okay, now I was holding a steady note to give it the best chance of following the pitch very closely. You can tell it sounds much better now. You can actually read the melody. However, I've started a bit too late so let's correct that. Also, I think I want to change this helm instance and instead of give us full sustain but up the speed of this LFO and see what can it do. Okay, does it actually modulate the volume of that or did I somehow not do that? Okay, let's maybe make it slower and less pronounced. Can also move it quieter. Let's play. Okay, now it makes our voice completely gone when this is quiet. Okay, I think this we should actually refrain from using this LFO. I'm going to disconnect it and just leave the volume as it is. Okay, this is our line. Now we can have some fun and the first thing let's add some effects so it doesn't sound so dry and empty. Let's maybe let's use the pin connections. Now I don't want to switch this track from, let's just add another audio output and root this in and we have a stereo signal now. So we're splitting our mono to stereo so we can have nice stereo reverb. Now let's play with it a bit and maybe not make maybe you could add us as huge and some high pass. Now a very fun thing I also do is include a pitch shifter before the autotune and automate it to make the autotune interpret my input vocal differently and for that I like to use sometimes MA pitch shifter or MA pitch shift sorry. So let's move it up before autotune and now let's open up the automation MA pitch shift and ratio. Let's make this play so we can start off with one which is neutral. Now let's ramp it up. So you see we can do some weird stuff now. Because you see autotune is going to try and snap the detected signals pitch to the pitch you give it but it's going to do so in the closest octave. It's not going to move more than one octave so by shifting the input in octaves we're forcing the output to also shift in octaves but it's going to try and compensate so we can do some lousy movement here and not really fit the pitch but it's going to snap to the good pitch but it's also going to jump up and down between octaves and also the artifacts that MA pitch shift is giving us which are significant it's not the cleanest pitch shifter in the world but I like it for that. They can give you some really interesting results so we can have some fun and make a pitch automation curve. Okay it seems that sometimes autotune can't just keep up with the pitch changes so I'm going to try and make this a bit more blocky. What if we make a pretty slow ramp here? Okay so we're just snapping in the middle so let's snap it and we can snap back or go even lower and then go back to the default pitch. Let's maybe make the second note higher and we can also play with these. Okay when we do such quick ramps it can't keep up and it's a lamb landing with the pitch somewhere in the middle which isn't what we want. Okay that's a bit huge pitch. How about starting higher with this one and then going low after maybe like eighth note. Alrighty that's starting to be pretty funky. Now let's add the sidechain compression the same we have with the bass. We could just create a sidechain bus and route them all in but I want to have like fine grain control. I want to be able to tune to tweak the attack and release times and make sure they sound right for this particular instrument. What sounds right for the bass might not sound right for this vocal lead. So I'm reassigning the kick as sidechain input all the settings are the same because it was copied. I think it's starting to sound pretty psychedelic. Now what you'd also do is add a little bit of delay. Let's use cough vintage delay because it syncs to BPM and it sounds pretty nice. We could reduce the width a bit and of course we could make it before the sidechain. Now the whole vocal instrument is a bit too loud so I'm going to turn it down and that's how you do it basically that's that's it. We can also have some fun you know and record some weird parts like oh it's a bit too late to do that sorry and insert that as well as our pitch shifting experiments. I could do the same singing a low note now the high note was much louder so I'm going to up the gain of the region. Let's see what we can do with here. Yeah maybe just for these two notes. Actually we could like have this low note recorded but up it with the pitch shifter. So it's going to give us a different timbre not necessarily a different pitch but we can use it here maybe. Okay yeah I'm going to maybe replace some high notes for that. It doesn't doesn't sound to be very clean. Trying some weird sounds. Let's see maybe use it here. Yeah. Okay they had some problems with grabbing the pitch in the first one so I'm going to maybe yeah let's hear it again. Does it work now? Yeah it's better. Let's cut it right after this so it can like reanalyze. No I think it's a bit too. I think the recording is a bit not clean enough let's try it again. Okay maybe that's going to be easier to track the pitch off. Nice I have one more idea and that is the sound of brass. Kind of weird. Not sure what to make of this. What if we listen to that alone? Oh we need to mute our LSB sidechain. Okay another thing we can do is pitch shift the actual audio material. I'm going to pitch shift this one octave and preserve four minutes. Let's see what it sounds like. Pretty weird. Maybe that's going to be great. I don't know. Let's see how autotune deals with it. Oh we need to re-enable our sidechain gate because okay it doesn't sound like it's a stable pitch. And what else can we do? Oh I know we have this. I don't know what this is from but we can record it. Okay let's see we can get a stable pitch from that at least for the moment. Let's mute this sidechain gate. Oh perfect sounds like a flute. Awesome nice and this. Okay let's try and use it for a lower note or use it for a higher note but lower it in post and we can lower it with the pitch shifter. I'd like to insert a point here. Okay let's go like half the pitch so one octave down. That's interesting. Let's solo this instrumental listen. Oh we didn't enable our sidechain gate. Let's try again with it. I think we should back that off right there. Okay we could trash all that or just mute it and keep it for a later. Maybe we're going to use it. The volume is kind of shaky but we have this insane compressor just smashing everything. We have delicate clicks but this is actually what I like. Remember we have this attack and release at absolute zero and if we change this detection method to peak it's so fast that we are actually imposing the amplitude of the oscillations of that so we are actually like doing ring modulation with this. It's pretty insane. What if we really increase the release tiny bit? Yeah this way we can have it even more clicky and just something like 0.06 millisecond of release already allows us to make the volume amplitude, the detected volume amplitude stay consistent when it's jumping between peaks and that's because we made this pitch so high you know if I play this. Now if we oh sorry select all these notes and move them three octaves down I'm pretty sure it's gonna sound different or will it? Let's move it. Another two octaves down. I think we kind of can hear it. No really. I know why we can't hear it because I'm using a square wave that's why if I use this sine wave that will make it different. Let's experiment. Let's try that. Let's change this oscillator to a sine wave. Now that proves my point that using square waves for the sidechain gate trigger is a good idea because it gives you much cleaner results with very little like sloppiness so we can have a very snappy gating. Now probably we could just generate DC direct current so don't have like oscillating waveform just have a waveform that goes up and stays up but we can't actually do this with helm but we don't need to just use a square wave okay with this time and this pitch it doesn't sound clean at all. Let's move it up back up and now oh wait it's not clean at all what the hell okay it looks like that's... okay it looks like it doesn't really make a big difference if I'm using a square wave or a sine wave just the fact that I'm having a little bit of release makes it work okay I have a stuck note that's all for today thanks for watching I hope you've learned something interesting I wanted to make this video for a long time but I just have so many ideas and topics and it's a little time to make them all real that it often takes years to just sit down and make the video you want it to make because there's many of them yep so big thanks for watching and also huge thanks to all the people who support this channel with their money if you dear viewer would like to join them and help keep this show going please go to patreon.com slash anfa or liberapay.com slash anfa now go record some weird vocals and make some psychedelic music bye