 Hey, it's Anfaa from Anfamsa.com and today I'm gonna show you how to synthesize a string pad sound using Zenith SubFX. Of course Before I do that, I want to thank all for you. Thank you all for showing support and interest in these videos and that You show me that you appreciate what I share Thanks, like it's it's good to know that what I do is needed. It makes me want to record more videos like this one, so Let's get to the Zenith SubFX. I want to make a string patch string pad sound and I'm gonna do this with pad synth. I have BODLINE here and the MIDI keyboard hooked up and I'm gonna start with pad synth because, well, pad synth is a very well-suited synth for that kind of sounds You can see that I enabled it and it doesn't make a sound because pad synth works by playing samples. It generates samples So you need to hit apply changes before anything can be heard because when you hit apply changes pad synth regenerates the samples that it's using So this is something to remember when you're using pad synth that you need to hit apply changes it's going to become red whenever you change anything that that requires the changes because the samples are played back and then they're filtered and Then they are processed with the amplifier section and they are pitched So these changes don't require recalculating the samples but changing the characteristics of the actual timber need So to make a string pad we need to change the basic waveform because right now it's it's a sine wave and that's just one fundamental frequency and It just happens so that a saw wave is very good for synthesizing strings You might hear that it sounds a little bit like a string orchestra, but not entirely quite like one So well, this is the basic thing. We have all the harmonics even an odd So there's plenty of tone like To sculpt but we need to change this a bit Now Pat synth has this very interesting feature that it enables you to sculpt up the profile of One harmonic of every single harmonic and we can observe that Actually, if we switch back to a sine wave, of course, I need to hit apply and can see this is our sine wave Which is for some reason having two overtones Or more maybe that's some aliasing However, this is so quiet that I can't really like hear anything of that, but I can see it. It's measurable It's more than 100 decibels below. So it's actually It's actually non-existent It's just a trace Okay, so let's get back to harmonic structure and What we have is the bandwidth. This is the main control We increase that You can see that our sound is getting wider and it's becoming more noise-like and this is very good for simulating sounds that Try to imitate a lot of similar instruments playing together However, using detune values more than 50 cents 50 Centio is a little bit risky because it starts Because the single harmonic starts to bleed in pitch so much to the sides that you can't you it actually starts to sound Detuned it's sound starting sounds this harmonic Let's change back to the saw wave And this is at 50 And this is okay. It's not like let's go to 60 77 90 like to me it sounds already like almost this detuned This might work for a very good Transpad Then well it almost he blends into white noise in the higher harmonics, which is a little problem But this might be what you want however, we're gonna go for some less detuned sound Because we want to make this sound like a well or just run and As you can see our harmonics Have the Gaussian distribution like this shape here and We have the chain we can change the basic type of the distribution function for example to a square and you can see that our harmonics actually like do this There's also a double exponential function which looks like this And it sounds more like the Gaussian one, but it's a little bit different Also what we can do is change the number of bands per a simple single harmonic and Then it sounds more like a few instruments playing together instead of just one And this is what we're after Of course, this sounds very detuned and you can see in the higher harmonics that the actual Sub bands that compose for a single harmonics like they are so close together that they blend into a Like metallic dissonant texture and I think if we can hype us this Well, this doesn't really sound musical. It sounds like a crash symbol a Hi-hat look like it's gonna it can totally work for a ride sound Especially if you play a dissonant chord, but we're not doing that today So let's get back to low pass Bring it up change the stages down and Bring up this sustain. All right. Well, this is kind of a more interesting but very very Mathematically correct. It's too rigid. It's too shape. It's too perfect So what I'm gonna try to do is mass around with this distribution of harmonics And you can do it in two ways. There's a stretch function, I guess which Make this distribution a little bit less boring and it already already sounds more like strings But we can do also something else and change the Make it asymmetric. I don't know really how this function is called or What is the theory that works beyond behind it? But what it does it makes this Energy distribution across one harmonic asymmetric And this is what we want. I think I can also change the bandwidth like tune it down a bit Yeah, we're getting there Also There are fine some other cool stuff that you can do for example You can change the discrete mode that disables the profile of harmonic and this means every harmonic generates just a single tone and kind of sounds Like a perfect saw But not exactly as you can see on the waveform that the Distribution of harmonic energy is like in a saw wave the phase relationship of all them is not not like a Saw wave and this is well interesting There's also a continuous mode It actually turns this harmonic well graph into a noise spectrum and Well, it doesn't make anything useful in our case, but we're gonna get back to that later and Do something interesting things with it? I mean in the other videos if you want Okay, so this is our basic sound and We need now to change the way the shape of our amp amplitude Envelopes So I'm going to dial in more attack and release So the sounds lasts longer after I release the key and well it starts to resemble a string Ensemble pretty well, however, there are a few things that we can Tune to make this more realistic because it would totally work in a song if you wanted to you have this sound But it can be more less synthetic and more realistic if we go further with this so the first thing I'm gonna do is Enable the Lopez filter Make it wider. So I'm decreasing the crab the cue the quality of the filler if I increase it We have the almighty resonance peak, but we don't want that it's not the sound we are after We could use some Frequency tracking for the filter so that the lower notes have the filter Filtering a little bit more of the high energy Let's try to dial it all the way up And we need to actually tune down the filters sinter frequency Cut of frequency the basic cut of frequency. I guess it's too much We can also make some motion by gently Adding an LFO to our filter Now that's a wobble we don't want that we make this more delicate more rare and sparse and still more delicate And also make it start in a random phase of the oscillator Because the LFO starts in a certain place Looks like it's going up Yeah, it's starting right on the peak here it is if we turn it all the way left it's gonna be a random You can see this note started somewhere in the middle going downwards and this one it was pretty on the low This might not be what we want because well now this effect is so huge that well it make the sound very random It might be cool for some effects, but not for realistic string ensemble, so I'm gonna make it very subtle And also add some randomness the amplitude randomness makes each peak And and start in a different vertical place And the frequency makes the cycles of LFO oscillator slower or faster So it should be a little bit less mechanic What we also have is LFO stretch LFO stretch makes the LFO Oscillation slower for lower notes. I Think it's disabled Actually because it's in the middle if we tune it for the right We will need to bump the frequency up also Yeah, this is what is it if we invert it like go for the left Then it's faster for lower notes, which is a very interesting and very counter-intuitive effect All right enough playing with this I'm also gonna Yeah, I think this is good Like you can see there's a little bit of motion and because it starts randomly if we play a chord It all kind of even sound between the notes, but the voices are slightly waving One is going up the other is going down and it sounds a little bit more natural But it's not gonna work for a single note rather like I wouldn't use that effect for a single note only if I want to play chords Because well Only if you have multiple voices is going to do his job properly Okay, there are two things I want to cover and this is equalization and reverb First Let's do for you and the general thing We've got this refreshed The general thing is that every instrument every physical instrument has its own Resonance its own body resonance like the The box the vibrating resonating body of a violin has some resonating peaks That make it It's has a it that gives the formant like The human speech has a formant actually every vowel has a formant because the chain shape over mouth changes, but also the But that's changing like this is that these are changing formants, but the instrument like guitars violins trumpets they have static resonances which also create a formant and Muddling this formant is sometimes Something you can do to make this sound really realistic or at least more realistic If you want to do like some reading there's a great article or on sound on sound about synthesizing strings and Different very different articles. I'm gonna link it in the show notes like in the description But from what I remembered are two main resonances for strings and I'm not like doing this by numbers I'm just doing this by ear and memory However, the overall sound is getting more midi More mid-range less bottom and less high-end However, we might want to add some low-end for our double basses So I'm gonna dial in a low-shell filter But it is this kind of artificial. It's not exactly like What it sounds like in real life actually like if you wanted to model a real string ensemble We would have to model the individual instruments Make a few copies change everyone a bit and you know, this can easy kill every CPU on the planet If you get more detail into it, but not we're not dealing with that We're making a simple string patch Stringpads butch patch. Okay, so we have our Basic sound let's add some reverb Let's try some different stuff because the default free verb sounds a bit too metallic for me But we also have random and bandwidth. I'm gonna try bandwidth first Let's dial it all the way to wet so we hear only the reverb not the original dry signal The big thing is that we have a bandwidth control Which kind of enhances the width of our ensemble and this might be good. It might be bad We have initial delay enabled And I want to dial it down a bit I'm trying to simulate something like a concert hall. Well, I don't think it's gonna be very good This is something Let's now try and make something new I'm going to disable Pat's in for now and enable subsynth Sub synth is a very different synthesizer. It generates white noise Stereophonic like different for left and right channel. So it's very wide in stereo image You can also make it monophonic you disable this and it filters harmonic Frequencies out of that using bands pass filters and We will try I will try to dial in simple saw wave Harmonic series So we have very simple Something to help us like Reinforce the Pat's in sound with something else to give it more life give it a little bit more character Because it's always good If you're coming for spacey sounds to like try different approaches and mix them blend them together You can hear this sounds nothing like strings I'm gonna change the scale The magnitude scale this is the like normally this is working line here But the lower you go with the decibels The the the more logarithmic it's gets it gets We're stunted we're starting with random Like every sample every first hit is in a random position in the aptitude So this creates clicks sometimes Like sometimes bigger sometimes lower but they're most of the time there is a click you can change this to zero Which will always give us a soft start let's change the bandwidth Give it more attack No more release This sounds like it sounds like strings, but a very distant ones. I wonder what will happen if I Like disturb the harmonic series by making it a little bit less harmonic You can see what this does Cool thing is that you can do this live. I guess I should be able to even automate this like CC control it Maybe not because I'm hosting at a Carla and I'm not pretty figured out how to do that somehow I Turn down the filter or velocity. Well, this doesn't sound like strings Actually, I don't want the extra low-end boost that we have on our EQ Because it sounds very very boomy with this so I'm going to dial back the low shelf I wish I could use an oscillator to like copy and paste a saw if harmonic series or just draw a line across this Maybe it will happen in the new UI but mark McCurry is is releasing soon Okay, I'm gonna make this a little bit softer and maybe give it a little more attack a little more I said, oh, I want to disable the envelope stretch Let's see. How does it sound if we? Play it together with our pats and On the pats in this very loud suddenly I think we also need to add Lopez filler for our substance because sometimes it gets a little bit too bright and Feed some noise that I don't want Yeah, it was substance. I don't want the velocity sensing because it will make the noise come back If I hit it the key is hard enough. I like the sound all right well One more thing I'm gonna do is a little bit like different because well the patch is finished and it'll be You can download it in the little link is in the description. I'm gonna disable It's not some effects internal reverb And I'm gonna try and see what can we do with m-verb which is also an open source plug-in And I got to use it because keg studio ships it and it's easy to get that way. Well, this is all wet You can make the bandwidth higher We have some more high-end Let's mix it with the original one and make everything louder. Well, I personally like the sound of m-verb and I like I want to say check it out because it's an awesome plug-in and there's also a Lats per version so you can use it with LMS and Other hosts that don't work with Lv2 Yeah, kick studio is the way to get the best in Linux software I think I'm gonna make a video about kick studio. Hey, let's get back to our isn't it some effects reverb The bandwidth version sounds really good nice, too. Yeah, well, I'm locking a sustain paddle to finish this with a D All right, this is it like we're 32 minutes in I think I hope you've learned something that what I showed you was Useful and let me know what you make like If you're happy or if you want me to talk about something specific if you have any questions about this or like Questions in general about Linux audio. Let me know leave them in the comments Download the patch if you want make your own that's the better way to learn I guess and Well, have fun with the dance of effects. It's an awesome synthesizer. I'm gonna be doing a lot of videos about it That's it. See you in the next video