 Hey, it's ANFA and you're watching ANFA vlog today I want to do a video about a technique for creating interesting distorted bass sounds with two tools Alpes filtering and distortion Now distortion, you probably know what it is. However, Alpes filtering not everyone knows what that is and I'm gonna tell you specifically what it does in the end of this video because I want to hook you up But I'm gonna tell you that like Alpes filters play on the artifacts Rather than on the other things that normal filters do Let's leave it at that and I'm gonna unwrap the secret later. So Let's make a sound shall we? All right, so here is my Ardor session. I'm going to add a MIDI track using Zinna SubFX I'm gonna call this ZIN and I'm going to connect my MIDI keyboard and enable record so I can play All right, so For this to work. We need a harmonically rich sound. So I'm going to open up Zinna SubFX interface and change the basic waveform to a song wave At first it looks like a triangle, but if you move this all the way left, it's a song wave One thing we are missing some higher frequency content because by default the filter is kind of it closed As the difference and now we can also disable velocity sensing so playing gentle notes won't turn down the filter if I leave this You can see not playing at full velocity makes it dimmer. Anyway, that's not important Okay, we have our saw Let's now add an alpase filter now There's only one plugin that actually does this On Linux and it's called 4x4 pole alpase. I believe it's by Steve Harris. Yes, it is by Steve Harris So now if I play Nothing change, right? Something changes when I'm moving the faders, but It still sounds exactly the same right alright, so now Let's leave it at that. I'm going to add distortion and I want to use a Wolf Shaper plugin so-called wolf shaper. This is a plugin that is under development currently and I've been Conducted by the developer. Yeah by Patrick this only yeah So this plug-in is a distortion that allows you to create your own function so we can make I'm gonna reduce the post gain and increase the pre-gain You can hear we are driving the waveform deeper into our function However, it's still pretty quiet. So I'm going to do something. I'm going to turn down the whole track and I'm going to turn up Zenitsu FX is a voice Yeah, we can hear now much more distortion you can see Oh Okay, now our peak peak indicator is right at the top so we are actually saturating the whole function Which is cool because now we can right-click to add some weird things You can also play with some warping functions Yeah Let's play a lower note. I think I will actually oh, I can just transpose my keyboard. All right, so we have a saw wave We have it filtered with an alphas filter and distorted, but what happens when I disable The alphas filter. It doesn't sound the same, right? Let's keep this one on top So now I'm not gonna enable our alphas filter. I'm going to maybe reset this to a simple very very simple distortion function So You see it sounds very different. Well, let's open up the alphas filter. Let's make it keep on top stay on top too And now I'm gonna play around with these faders That sounds really cool, but what is happening why why doesn't it I disable distortion The same thing nothing really happens instead apart from when I move the fader So what is going on? Well, here's the secret of how an alphas filter is doing its thing or what is doing Let's drop in another plug-in and that is going to be simple Simple scope No, and now. Oh, yeah. Oh Give me mono. Alrighty. Here is a Fantastic oscilloscope plug-in Let's make it stay on top so it doesn't disappear and now let's disable our wolf shaper and alphas filter What we have is of course a salt if wave I'm gonna give this sugar Nice and sweet right now if I enable the alphas filter We can see it sounds the same, but it looks completely different The key to understand this is the phase of frequencies in relation to their amplitude So this waveform you can see right now here has the same frequency content in Amplitude as a regular sort of wave. That is why it sounds exactly the same Because it has all the harmonics that a sort of wave has and in the same amounts What is different is that the harmonics are delayed slightly In relation to each other which makes them build up in a different way Creating this waveform So let's reset the alphas filter I think that's something which is not very not making too much difference, right? We have just a little thing You can see that actually what it does is it shifts the energy that is being Originally on this waveform on the top here in this sharp corner and it transfers that energy here lower So this is high frequency energy. It was Like shifted in time so that it is in a different place on the waveform What if I It's kind of reduced At some times we can create something that doesn't really sound Sounds kind of a bit different And I think it's because this Opus filter has four poles and each pole can be tuned to a different frequency Correct me if I'm wrong because I'm not super savvy with the electronic side of things So this filter has four sections each one has a frequency and the feedback amount I'm not touching the feedback because I don't want to emphasize any frequency bands, but I could If I want on bypass So another useful thing is using the feedback to actually change the frequency content But that can easily create some very harsh sound, so I'm going to reset this to zero I'm actually changing the placement of the poles on the frequency spectrum, so we can go from zero Hertz from one Hertz The Most The scale is not logarithmic It sounds almost exactly the same Until we distort it What happens when we The frequency content is the same in Coming into distortion, but the face is different so the shape of the waveform is different and Distortion operates on the shape of the waveform not on the frequency content so it cuts off it clips the waveform and Because the waveform is distorted even so it sounded the same the result of distortion is different and you can automate this stuff Let's make a baseline right I'm gonna call this base I'm gonna close all these For now, and I'm gonna make a base Riff I think it's too fast. Let's change the tempo to 90 BPM Could be let's now Maybe right click on this thing and Transpose it one octave down We don't actually want a whole bunch of very complicated melodies here We just want something simple to showcase what we can do with automation of this so I'm gonna add an automation lane for the frequency of the first pole and I am going to change it to play mode so the automation is being played out Now I'm gonna draw some ramps so Our distortion could be more harsh We could make this harder Let's insert a new point. Oh, yeah much more crunchy. Let's take a look at our scope now I'm gonna make it smaller so it doesn't Secure the view. I'm gonna okay if I disable the automation It's way more boring if I disable alphas filter all together It's just a square wave Really and if you distort any periodic waveform extremely high What you get is usually Kind of something like a square wave If it's a simple waveform like a sine wave a triangle wave or a sawtooth wave You can see that it's kind of stays a little bit saw-toothy Here and not really. However, the alphas filter makes it all different And if we make it move Now this is just one pole we could automate more of these so let's go and add frequency of the second pole and Let's make this one move in maybe higher frequencies a bit Maybe softer Faster I meant softer That's gonna be weird. You see going into two low frequencies makes it sound a little bit wonky Okay, let's disable automation of this first pole and listen to what this motion does Not much I reckon it's a bit too high Yeah, I think it's a bit too high in the frequency range and it affects only harmonics that are very minute in amplitude So they don't affect the shape of the waveform that much. So they don't and and They don't affect the output of the distortion that much. So if I move this to lower frequencies It has much more effect Let's of course exaggerated and bit not super cool, but I Bet it's gonna sound better if I add a kick to this. So Give me a second Okay, we have a kick much better now, huh? Alrighty, that's all for today. Thanks for watching. I hope you've learned something This Ardor project will be available for download so you can go to the description and there is a link You can download this session and play around with it I highly encourage you to check out Ardor and Zenitsu FX or Zenfusion if you haven't This is all open source software. Thank you for watching if you have any questions For this or the open source software for music production in general Please leave them in the comments if you have any suggestions for future videos Which is sometimes the same thing as the questions also, please leave them in the comments I want to say big thanks to all the patreon supporters who are helping me have more time to dedicate to making videos and less time to Do other work. I will see you in the next video. Bye