 Hey! It's Anfa! In the previous video I showed you what GeonKick can do and I asked if you want to see more videos from me about it and your answer was a resounding yes! So here we are! Today I'm going to give you an introduction to GeonKick, a free and open source drum synthesizer currently available for Linux. Let's just jump into the DAW! So as usual I've created an empty arduous session, I'm going to add a new MIDI track, I call it GeonKick, I select the GeonKick from the list, here's the track. Now in order to be able to do anything or rather preview our sounds I'm going to enable MIDI input, so I'm going to plug in my MIDI keyboard and toggle the recording, arm the track for recording. Now you can hear the sounds that GeonKick is making. Okay, let's double click to open the interface and this is GeonKick. It's a drum synthesizer, it's intended to create percussive sounds. How it works is that it generates a sample and holds it in memory ready for playback, so it's actually a very simple sampler that just happens to synthesize the sample every time you turn a knob. That gives it a big advantage over other synthesizers I used before to make drum sounds, and that it's perfectly consistent between hits. It's very hard to produce perfectly consistent transients with other synthesizers. The envelopes work a bit differently at each hit and GeonKick really gives me the most thump and most punch and the most control over my drum sounds, which is why I started using it for everything since I've discovered it. And it's getting better and it looks cool. Alright, so I'm going to give you an overview of the features. In the middle we have a big graph with the current sample. GeonKick has three layers. You can see they are here. Layer one is enabled, layer two. With these switches we switch between layers. So we can see all the layers are the same right now. And right here on the top we can enable layers. Right now I enabled layer two and layer three. Because they are exactly the same, they produce the same sine wave, which is bowling on top of the previous one. So let's disable it first two and just let's play the first one. So this is the sine wave we have. Each layer has two oscillators, oscillator one and oscillator two and a noise source, which is here. Every oscillator also has a filter and you can tweak the envelopes of all the important parameters using this envelope editor here. So let's select layer one, it is selected and now go to oscillator one. And now we can choose three different parameters. We can choose the amplitude of the oscillator or frequency. Let's choose frequency. Now you can see that the graph changed. We have frequency in hertz. We can just get this second point and drag it down and now this is the sound that we have. A very cool thing about this is that you can tell what is the frequency of your oscillator at any given point in time and GMKick also gives you a hint what note is that. And this is very useful if you want to tune your kick, for example, to your root note of your track, which is something I started doing because I can do it with GMKick. It's pretty difficult to do if you don't have this in right in here. You have to use the external analyzer plugin and just tune it until it's good. Okay, so you can see the amplitude is a little bit low. I'm going to bring up the amplitude. So these knobs give me the maximum possible values for the envelopes. If I move the frequency knob, the maximum frequency of the graph goes up. So I'm extending the frequency range of the envelope and because it doesn't adjust the points by itself, you have to adjust them accordingly to have a similar result to what you had before. So I usually just ramp it up to like 5 kHz for a kick drum and so I have a nice click and then I use the envelope editor to create my slope. Now one might think, oh, why doesn't it have, you know, Bezier Curve Editor? And I thought, yeah, these are nice, but you don't really need that. Look, can you tell by the waveform that we have some points and also what's the problem of double clicking and adding another point and smoothing out the function? And I think it also gives you more control. It's easier to tell what the hell is happening because every single point has its frequency and you know that the interpolation is linear. With, you know, something like a cubic interpolation or a power function interpolation, it gets nicer to look at, but does it actually get nicer to listen to? I don't really hear a difference and adding just a bunch more points to the graph isn't that much of a problem to me. You can right click to remove points and double click to create points. Now I would normally use this for drums, but you can also use it to create some other weird effects. Okay, let's talk about the two oscillators. So we have oscillator one, oscillator two. Let's enable oscillator two and you can hear we have distortion happening, so I'm going to turn down the volume of oscillator one. Now these are added up. So one is on top of another. We can switch the envelope editor to oscillator two and now we can add its amplitude by default or frequency two and now we have two voices. Also you can note that GNK cuts off the sound when you release the note, which is something I think I requested because this way you can, you know, have a bit more control of the performance. It also reacts to velocity, so if I play softly and also another feature of media input is that you can change the pitch of the sound with a recent, in this recent version. It wasn't there before. So this is the default pitch and now the pitch shifting isn't perfect. You can hear it produces lots of artifacts. So it doesn't recentize a sample for different pitches to maintain the length. It's only shortening the generated sample, which I think is fair because this is really not something you need. Like you don't want to play melodies with this thing. It's a nice thing to have to be able to play this, to change the pitch a bit. You can make an 808 and play a melody right now with it, yes, but it's not really this synthesizer you would want to do it with. It's possible, but it's not what it's for. I don't use that too much. Okay, another interesting feature is that we have frequency modulation. You can enable it and now oscillator two is what we hear. So let's turn up the volume of that and oscillator one actually becomes an operator that modulates oscillators to frequency or phase. I'm not sure which one is it. So you know what? Let's initialize the patch. So you see we can have frequency modulation, which is useful for some effects. And also it gets useful when you can change the function of the oscillator triangle. And a new thing is you can use a sample file. Let's try that. Okay, so that's, all right. So now I'm just playing a sample for oscillator two, however you can see that frequency modulation doesn't work in this context. It's just disabled. So yeah, so there's some limitations. We also have filters for each oscillator. You know what? I'm going to close this, delete the plugin, edit once again, so we have a clean slate. Let's see. Let's use a sawtooth. An oscillator one, frequency. We have a filter. And the cool thing is that it updates the waveform display immediately. And of course you can add it to the filter cutoff dynamically. So if I rise it up, it can make us... This is pretty interesting for various percussive effects like one-shot sounds or, you know, turnarounds or maybe on risers. I haven't tried it for risers. And the fun thing is that this filtered sound is going to actually affect the oscillator two. You can see it changes when I disable the filter. So the filter is applied before the frequency modulation, which is cool because using a filter or frequency modulation, this gives you a lot of interesting options. We can make some really cool sounds, which are totally useless as drums. But you know, you can also just go to general or we have general all the way here, so we don't have to. You can change the length of the sample. Interesting. One thing about GeonKick that is a bit like a missing is that it has... It only produces mono sounds. There is noise source, but it is perfectly mono. Also, I've noticed that sometimes when you go too high with the filter on the noise, it breaks the waveform. Let's change the oscillator one or two, noise filter cutoff. It's pretty fun. Really cool sounds. Really cool sounds. So we have a filter for the noise. There's also a global filter for everything, so we can lop us the entire patch if you so desire. Now note, it doesn't refresh real time. It only refreshes if you release the control and play a new note. Sometimes it also takes a short while to update the sample under the hood. Anyway. There's some effects also, so we have a compressor. Not sure how it works. I wasn't really able to tune it up how I think it should work. It does create some distorted sounds, which is sometimes very useful. I'm not sure if it's broken or maybe I just don't know how to use it. I also use the distortion. Let's disable all the raw noise. This is so cool. So we can enable the distortion and the thing I do is I turn up the volume because it's a post distortion volume, so I don't use drive at all because it already drives way too hard. So I go and I tune down the general amplitude. And this gives me less pre-gain so that I have actually control over how much distortion I want. This almost sounds like the Striders in Half-Life 2. It's just way too high. Maybe if I pitch down the oscillator, actually, no, because oscillator frequency, oh it's because it's really fun sounds, but they're not drum sounds. I wonder what would happen if we tried to play a melody. This makes me want to record that and resample it. The ending is really cool. And we just used one layer. There are three layers. You can layer things. So let's disable the first layer. Now it's quiet. Layer 2. And we have to switch here. So in this row below, we choose what parameter are we going to edit. This chooses the layer we want to edit. This chooses the element or the part, the module, if you will, of the layer. And here we have parameters of each module. And also this plays a nice path here. Layer 2, oscillator 1, cutoff envelope, right? Frequency envelope. Amplitude envelope. It also shows you the total length of the sample currently, which is of course changed by this knob. There's also a layer mixer. So we can have enabled multiple layers and we can turn down each individually. Note that the distortion is applied after that. So it's applied to the master bus inside GeonKick after all the mixing is done. I must say this distortion sounds pretty cool with all the stuff. I wish there could be some way to have the noise in stereo or something. I think I'm going to make a request on GitHub for this. So we have three layers. You can switch between them here. You can export your sound as an all sample. By default it goes with wave 16 bits. I would personally go with Flak 24 bit because it takes less space and it gives you more headroom, more fidelity. Not sure why it allows you to export stereo files while the sound itself is really mono. But you can render the samples. You can of course save your patch. And this is indeed GeonKick 1.9. Now I've been using this as a plugin. I've been using it in my recent work to make all drums. But it also runs as a standalone program. And it behaves pretty much the same way, but you need to feed MIDI input into it of course. So this is GeonKick. It's a very interesting instrument. It's very inspiring. It gives me a lot of control to tune my drum sounds to my liking and the visual editor of the envelopes with the waveform preview in the back. It's excellent. I think it's a great idea. Of course this synthesizer doesn't invent that, but I think it's good to take inspiration from good sources and I'm really glad we have this synthesizer available in the free and open source music production ecosystem. Because we were missing such a tool for the longest time. But it's there. Okay, so now if you're interested in Hooked you want to install GeonKick. How do you do that? Well it's currently only available for Linux. Basically you need to go to GeonKick's GitHub page. I'm going to link it in the video description. You go to the releases and here you can download everything. The source code and a binary package with the program and the plugin itself. So you download that and inside there is the standalone version which is a program you can just run it or put it in your user bin folder for example. So you can run it more easily. There's the plugin. Now you would have to put this thing into your user lib lv2 directory or somewhere else. Your host program usually looks for different things. There is also like an lv2 folder in your home directory so you don't have to be rude to install this plugin. Let's go back to the code and let's see if there are some instructions. Yep. There are instructions of how to install it, how to build it from source. There are packages in Arch Linux. I'm using this and the package is up to date. It's version 1.9 right now. Oh, there are some shortcuts. This is really cool. Like you see we have there's a complete processing graph. You can like wow this is cool. By the way one day before I fell asleep I came up with a pun and that pun might spawn an extension of Geonicik. So watch out for that. So that's all I wanted to show you in this video. Stay tuned for actual tutorials on how to make a kick and snare in other sounds with Geonicik. Grab it and experiment. Thanks for watching. I hope you've learned something and if you have any questions or suggestions please leave them in the comments section below. I want to thank everyone who supports my work financially. If you would like to join them and help keep this show going, please go to patreon.com.anfa or liberapay.com.anfa. Now go and make some music with Geonicik.