 Hello, Oslate Sync here and welcome back to the series where we are discussing the synthesis of drum and percussion sounds. In the previous video we took a look at kick drum sounds and I suggested at the time that that was a great place to start because kicks are very much the foundation of beat oriented electronic music. So maybe the expected next step would have been to take a look at something like a snare. But here's a potential heart take for you. If I had to choose only two bits of percussion to make electronic music with, what would be a kick? The other one wouldn't be a snare. It would be a cymbal. So in this video we're going to dive into hi-hats, rides, crashes and we're going to take a look at what makes them tick or rather ping. Speaking in broad broad generalization cymbal sounds kind of have two elements to them. You have the fizzy inharmonic noise and then you kind of have the metallic ping or ting and you can hear this in acoustic cymbals even on a single cymbal. So if we take a ride cymbal for example and we play across the bell, what we get is primarily that pingy, metallic, atonal but harmonic sound. As we play further out onto the cymbal we start to introduce more of that fizzy, noisy inharmonic content. And it's these two elements that we'll look at in terms of the synthesis of a cymbal sound. The noise and the metallic ping and how the balance between those two elements can sort of give you the character of different cymbals. Whereas in the previous video I'm going to be using the Volca drum as my drum synth and I'll be making use of my free online patch editor synth marta just because it makes it easier to see all of the parameters on the screen all at once. There's nothing that I'm doing here that can't be done on the unit itself and of course a lot of the concepts that we'll be talking about today will transfer to other synths as well. So I've got an initialized patch going so let's just hear that. Okay so obviously that doesn't sound like a simple tool so let's start by just bringing the level down on both of the layers there. Let's start by talking about the noise. And the first thing that I'll say is that sometimes in the context of the right kind of drum sound, noise might be all that you need and actually simple can be best. And just simply having a noise source and a relatively short, sorry an instant attack envelope and then a fairly short release that can kind of just do the trick. So let's bring up some noise, shorten that envelope and that's a very fine sound and especially if you can move that release around to give yourself a bit of a groove. That is a very fine sound to start out with. So where you can change the character of the noise really ultimately is when you start to filter it. And on the Volcker drum we have these three different filter modes. The first one that I've got selected here is a high pass so move up the pitch control as it is. We start to take away low end. It's slightly resonant as well so you start to pick out some of those harmonics, get those really sort of pingy, sitting the back kind of sounds. It's kind of quite a cool electro sort of crash sound when we have that longer as well. The low pass is quite cool for getting those sort of low-fi sounds. Obviously as you take off the high end this time you start to get that filtered sound. It gives you this quite cool sort of low-fi sound. And then we have a band pass here as well which one of the downsides of the low pass I should say is that we're not taking out any of the bottom end. So you can start to cloud the low end even with just noise. The band pass doesn't have that problem because of course we're cutting a chunk out of the sound instead. The one thing I would say is if we turn it down, it starts to sound kind of snarey and that doesn't really do what we want. I'm going to move back to, let's go to the low pass just for a second. So one way that we can, with just a simple noise source, get some more attack to the sound is by modulating the filter cutoff. So by applying a filter envelope essentially. So in the mod type here as far as our Vokchon goes, if we have the envelope mode here and we start to give a bit of mod amount and up the mod rate. Now for more conventional envelopes, when I say I'm turning up the mod rate when I'm actually doing on a conventional envelope is making the decay or release shorter. Something I should have said in the previous video it didn't. So if I start to move that filter a little bit, making it nice and fast, getting a bit more attack there. So if I move that down, out the attack with the attack, it'd be quite aggressive. And there's a, as with our kick drum sounds, there's the balance between the mod rate and the mod amount to get the right kind of attack. If I move the rate to low, you kind of start to hear the filter move, sweep back down and it starts to sound unnatural. So same deal with the band pass. If we want to get a bit more attack, we can do it the same way there. When we get to the high pass, what we'll find is that to get more attack, the way to do it is to have our high pass sweep the opposite direction. So we want it to let more bass in and then quickly go back to being quite tinny. So we sweep the mod amount the other way and that gives us a much more natural sound. I quite like that as a way of getting attack with our sounds as well. So one other thing if we're not looking for the attack that we could do with our mod section here is we could set the mod type to LFO and just have the filter gently sort of moving in and out and we can start to get just a bit of movement to our sound. And combining that sort of gentle movement with the LFO with say automating the envelope generator's release a bit fast. That can make for quite a cool thing. So it's worth pointing out that the other way that we can create noise using the velcro drum and this stands for any synth with a similar sort of layout is that we do also have a random mod type here. So if we go to one of our tonal oscillators instead and we just smash it with a bunch of random LFO there we do start to get an alternate sort of feel. It's a little bit different to our sort of standard noise which may or may not be useful. I think this is probably a bit more useful for snare sounds honestly but they just want to. Okay so let's talk a little bit about the metal side of things. So I'll use this other layer here. So one way that we can get kind of a metallic sound is just to take a tonal oscillator and tune it up pretty high. Now with just this sine wave oscillator here this is less metal and more glass to my ears. But here's something that's really neat with the velcro drum at the very least. If we switch over to the sawtooth which sounds kind of artificial at this stage. If we push the pitch really high up it starts to alias. Get digital aliasing and it starts to sound really cool in terms of getting a metallic sound right? And one trick that we can use once we know that fact is that we can actually double up our two layers and have them tune differently and therefore have more of that atonality to get a more complex metal sound. So let's get this back to being something less insane. And we're probably more in the realms of cowbell and triangle sounds. But that's a useful part of defining our cymbal. What's really interesting when you are working with the sort of two differently tuned oscillators given us this metal sound is that the relative release of the two oscillators will kind of inform the flavour of the metal that we're hearing. So if we make one of these much shorter than the other, that's a cool sound. If we flip the sort of lengths of these releases we get a different kind of flavour. So if we just go back to just one of them for a second. If we want to get more attack out of this sound, if we feel like we need it, we can like we did with the noise source we can apply some modulation to it. So here we're going to apply some pitch modulation to it. Again make it fast. So you don't hear the movement, it's just that attack. So that's with, that's without. Again it can be quite aggressive. So just in terms of the vocal drum in this case we have this additional processing section over here. And one thing that can be really cool with this sort of metallic sound is applying some of the fold controls. This is a wave folding. It gets a bit more clunky, which would be quite cool. Looks like we're getting some additional low harmonics happening there. It's a good cowbell sound if we were shorting that actually. So another way we can get metallic sounds rather than just having something that is tuned high is by applying FM. So let's get our mod back down to nothing at all. Go back to our sine wave for a second here. So we're going to move our mod type to being the LFO. But we're going to crank the rate so that it is running very, very fast, which is going to be audio rate. And as we start to bring up the mod amount, we'll start to introduce other metallic in harmonic sounds always. Move that fold down. Here it works really well here. That's almost a requirement I think. And certainly when it comes to different waveforms, you'll probably find that waveforms which are already more harmonically complex like a sawtooth is, you probably want to apply less FM, otherwise it'll start to sound very digital and weird. Which might be what you're after. I won't discount that idea. So I think I'm going to go back to my non-FM sound where I was just getting some of the stuff happening with the alicing. And let's move back over here and let's blend in some noise. And then we're really talking about how we blend these two elements together. Let's go for the FM actually. Just noise, just the metal and then blend it together. And then how we blend the levels and their relative decays is how we're going to find different flavours of cymbals. One other thing that we can do just before we finish on the Fulcrum drum. If we use the wave guide and send some stuff to the wave guide section. If we have the tune set to either 8 or 16 I think it is, start to get triplet grooves, which is really cool. Okay well I hope that was interesting and informative. If you enjoyed the video please do leave it a like. And make sure you subscribe to the channel so you don't miss out on any upcoming synthesis videos. Got some interesting stuff coming. Got some new gear to show off which I'm excited to do, which will be coming soon. We'll be looking at some more vulgar drum stuff. We'll be digging into some of this new gear. And of course if there's other things you want to see make sure you let me know in the comments. If there's bits of equipment that I haven't shown off for a while. If there's subjects that I haven't touched on that you'd like me to take a look at. Then I'm open to ideas and just let me know in the comments. As always thank you so much for joining me. See you next time. Take care.