 Bang! It's time for a hi-hat! Oh, it's so recording. Funny. Well... Hi everyone! It's Anfa from AnfaMusic.com And in today's episode of LZW I'm gonna show you how to make synthesized hi-hat sounds. Actually, it's gonna be a few of hi-hat sounds because there are many different ways to do it and I'm actually using all of them. Well, maybe you know some more. Hopefully this will get you started and give you some idea of how to make nice hi-hats, how to interpret it all your own way, how to experiment. Well, whatever. So, let's just start off by not making music but drawing. Yep. So, if you don't know what a hi-hat looks like I'm gonna quickly draw you. It's a very special kind of a hat which actually is two hats put together in a very special way. Of course, it's gonna be simplified. And for some reason I'm drawing it with some strange angle. Never mind. Yeah, I'm going to draw the pedal. Yeah, this is it. This is hi-hat. Hi-hat is made out of two hats. One is on the top and the other is on the bottom. So, we have one and say two. They are different because the first is actually it can move up or down along with the pedal. When you release the pedal the hat goes up. When you press it, it goes down. And the second one is static. It's not moving at all. It's just there. Whatever you do, it's gonna be there. So, this gives the drummer very much freedom of how to make the sounds and what sounds can make because when these are open or half open the hi-hat can produce long sounds like a ride symbol or crash. Of course, it has different sound because the hats are smaller so it's generally higher in pitch. But when they are closed it can create sharp short sounds that are great for creating groove and very nice rhythmic patterns. And the tighter you press the pedal the shorter the notes. And this is a phenomenon that we're going to be replicating with our hi-hat patches with ZenitsubFX because it's possible. But it's gonna be on the very end because first we need the basic sound and then we can play around. So, let's kick it off. As you can see, here is our previous session. We have the kick in the snare and I've created just the empty patch of hi-hat and assigned it to channel 3 on the mixer and we're ready to go. So, a hi-hat sound first, the simplest way to make it is to get a noise source and then create a short percussive envelope like this one. I'm also going to reduce the release enter free mode and remove the sustain so it will never play a tail just a short note and let's hear what this sounds like. It's pretty quiet. I'm going to turn it up a bit. It's not very hi-hat-y mainly because we have a Lopez filter. As you probably remember, ZenitsubFX by default has a Lopez filter enabled right here. You can see it's LPF2 so it's resonant Lopez because all the two are resonant and it's turned down. The center cut of frequency is not all the way up so I'm going to turn it all the way up and let's listen again. Now, that's more like it. However, it's still very harsh and hard. Maybe it's a little bit too loud or maybe it's just a frequency. Well, what I do is I simply change this to a hi-pass filter turn it down somewhere where it was and listen again. Now this is much more like a hi-hat but still lacks something and maybe because it's a little bit too long and a little bit too loud. Oh yeah, this is what I was looking for. Okay, so this is our basic patch. White noise with amplitude envelope with no sustain and a hi-pass filter. Okay, I'm going to duplicate this and basing on this one I'm going to create another it's going to be hi-hat 2 and it's going to use the same mixer channel. We're not going to make ourselves too much stuff. You can always rewire it. I'm going to change this one to a different type of filter because ZontsebaFax has analog formant and state variable filters implemented. The state variable filters are a little bit different. As you can see, we have much less to choose from and the names are different because in the analog filters we have LPF1 and in the state variable filters we have one LPF. Well, I'm not sure why but it makes the difference much more visible. So I'm going to use hi-pass filter and I like the way these filter sounds on hi-hat especially. It's different. I can't really tell the difference but somehow I like it. Maybe now I'll just pan this left or right, this left Play them both. Maybe offset one so we can kind of compare them. I don't know. I just like it. Let's make another hi-hat sound. I'm going to duplicate this. No, I'm going to make something from scratch. Wait a second. Actually, I routed the hi-hat 2 to a separate mixer channel and I created hi-hat 3 which is now empty and it has also a separate mixer channel. Let's open the interface and now I'm going to use subsynth. Why? Because the noise source in that synth is mono. We have everything exactly the same in the left and right channel. Of course, we can override this by creating two voices with noise and panning them left and right but it's a little bit doubting plus we're going to do it anyway but for now, let's go with subsynth. As you might remember, subsynth is a noise synthesizer. It's a substrative synthesis which means it generates noise and then it subtracts everything that's not musical frequencies and this way it sculpts out musical sounds out of noise. So, how to do a sound of hi-hat? I'm not going to mute it but solo this and let's just do it. First, I'm going to change the percussiveness turn up the loudness enter free mode remove the sustain shorten the tail I mean the release and now I'm going to pitch-shift it up and increase the bandwidth. This is nice. What's even nicer is that we can cut the sound and add some color to it by adding different harmonics which actually adds different bands of noise to the overall thing and we can change the relative bandwidth to make something tone-ish more like a tone and more like white noise. This is pretty nice. I'm going to enable filter which is disabled by default and as you can see it's by default and cut off somewhere low. So I'm going to change the state variable filters and use one hypers filter play a bit with the cue yep and change the start value to max so we have a click plus I'm going to turn it up this is another hi-hat another way of making a hi-hat now I've created another hi-hat instrument hi-hat 4 there are more ways to make hi-hat sounds and we're going to just dive into it I'm going to be using frequency modulation this time and if you haven't heard about frequency modulation yet I'm going to quickly draw you what it is let's say we have a signal a sine wave it's pretty and we have this is the basic signal and we have another signal that is modulating the previous one maybe not maybe something different maybe this a saw wave whoo I didn't know I can do that hey this way I can correct this hi-hat make it actually upright cool dude this is amazing have you ever seen a problem where you can rotate the canvas? wow I'm impressed okay so we have two signals the sine wave and the saw wave did I say square wave before? no it's a saw wave saw-tooth wave crap I keep doing that so this saw wave determines the changes of the pitch of the oscillator so the actual output would be something like this I guess or maybe something more like this you get the idea the frequency increases and when the saw wave goes back to zero our perfect and oh my I can zoom this wow our perfect sine wave gets reset I mean its frequency gets back to what it should be where's the tool? okay where's the tool? yeah please I just didn't disable this so we have another time our sine wave is just lazy and then it gets faster and faster and denser something like this so this creates a lot of harmonic content very interesting maybe I'll just leave this at the hi-hat it looks much better because it's colorful and stuff nevermind so how do you do frequency modulation with ZenitsubFX? well it's easy let's open the new instrument add synth show voice parameters yes here is our first voice we have our sine wave now we're gonna do exactly the same thing turn on the modulator in the frequency modulation mode or type and we have another sine wave well let's change it to saw wave so it's gonna be what we drew earlier in my paint and well let's listen to it that's neat that's actually interesting but how can we make this actually a little hi-hat? well if we overdo this let me play and show you when I decrease the effect we get sine wave and slowly increasing let's listen don't you think that this could be a nice thing to feed our hi-hats out? it lacks just one thing stereo image but it's easy to do because we have a unison option down here what does the unison do? it multiplies the oscillators and all this stuff and detues them slightly and processes them separately then mixes them back so let's listen okay now let's add the envelope the percussive envelope here and remove the sustain and shorten the release so we have no extra noise now we of course have the low pass filter I'm going to change it to state variable filter and of course change it to high pass and here's our frequency modulation a hi-hat man listen it's beautiful great so here is fourth hi-hat so now we have to go back to what we can do with the hi-hat pedal actually shortening the notes making them shorter and longer and what we can do more with this patch well let's maybe clear the notes for now wait a second I will just clean the mess here okay I have a pattern please listen and without the kick and snare so now let's just play around for example with hi-hat free see what we can do with the piano and the roll with the notes if I shift the note down it gets longer so it's like I release the hi-hat pedal having a looser note or even if I open it completely so with this I can even make crash-like sounds so this is very powerful now we can also control drag select and control up arrow or down arrow to shift by octaves so it's an easy way so of course shifting it up will also make the notes shorter louder will make them brighter because of the filter velocity sensing so it's interesting because we have actually make a lot of very different sounds from one hi-hat patch maybe let's add something crashy here it's so nice and crispy completely computer like but it's super ah man this is nice so I think this is all I have for today sometime later we could further mix the hi-hats and some reverb and such but it's not essential these patches will do and you know mixing is a different thing so here we have it thanks for watching see you next time and next week or maybe earlier because this episode was a little bit late and wait a second what I'm going to do next week let me just see this was hi-hat so hi-hat is off cymbals that was gonna be cool so next time cymbals ride crash and stuff yep thanks for watching see you next time bye