 Hello. Hello. Hello? Yeah. Okay. This is Anfa and he will be presenting the talk From Fine to Fantastic, Beyond Static Sound Design. Let's welcome him. Who's ready to rock in the Sunday morning? It's not a Sunday morning, but we can rock still. We can rock hard. All righty. So this is talk from Fine to Fantastic, Beyond Static Sound Design. And before I start, I want to ask you some questions. Quiz time. Question number one. Who's first time on Sonoy this year? You're lying. I see one, two, three, four, five people. Six? Okay. Who is the first time on Sonoy at all? This is what I'm asking. The question is who wasn't here last year? All righty. I see one, two, three, four, five, six people out of how many we have. That's something good. Who is making music with open source software here? Oh, nice. That's like 70% of you? Who is not making music with open source software then? One, two. Yeah. You're making music on Linux, but with Fruity Loops, right? Okay. Shame on you. I love you anyway. Never mind. Oh, nice. Okay. He's not making music with open source software. All right. Who knows me? Do you know my face? Oh, nice. That's lots of people, like 60%. Who doesn't know me then? This dude is lying all the time. Are you all know me? I shouldn't be introducing myself. I guess someone doesn't know me. Okay. Good. Then I have the excuse to follow on. Have you heard my music? Maybe you know what I'm doing? Stuff on Bandcamp, some of them is YouTube. Yeah. How many? That's like 30%, I guess. I'm trying to say it out loud so it's on the record. Have you saw my videos on YouTube about open source music stuff? Who saw that? Lots of people. And now 35%, I guess. Nice. Maybe some of you are supporting me on Patreon, actually. No? I don't know. There's 24 people worldwide, so it was a slim chance, but still. All right. For those of you who don't know me, there's a quick introduction. Can we turn it up a bit? You probably have heard this piece of music last time. So I'm making videos about open source software for music production. I'm also on Patreon and there are some people supporting me so I can do it more. Here's some of that stuff and I want to show you some excerpts from my recent work. Now, explosions with all distortion is like... That's a totally legit video. Now that's an explosion. That was a video about Love Shaper. It's a distortion plug-in. Start the shit out of it! It's too little distortion. That's a music video I made with Blender for the track that is playing there. And that's a piece from my last year's album. It's on YouTube. The school visualizer made it in Blender. What a drop. This was done in LMMS, by the way. I also play some guitars. This is from a two-hour... More than two-hour video on YouTube. So I plan to maybe make some more videos about guitars. Third and last. You need to install Ardor and Zinfusion. So I'm gonna add Sudu and this will do it. 219 megabytes. A different note. And that was last year's Sony. This sounds just like a cable. And that was last monthly livestream I made. You know the air horn meme? Tricking awesome! That was live. I know quite a few have been here on this recording. And that's a track I made for the Wolf Shaper video. I also discovered my phone can record in slow motion and I had some fun with it. I think it's really interesting. My wife didn't really love it, but I think it's really cool. I like this moment. And then it fades out into a coffee mug. I think it's just... I love this part. What's going on? Tobiasz, what the hell are you doing? I'm introducing myself to the audience. Don't you see, honey? Yes, I'm watching the livestream. But it's bullshit. Cut that off now. But that was so funny. You don't enjoy the video? No, it's not funny. Nobody gives a shit about your stupid coffee being flush in the toilet. I do. Oh, and send my love to Nils. What? Is there something I don't know? You should always never tell your rude password to your wife. That's the thing. You already know my wife, Kasia. She's lovely. We made some music together. We've opened her software. I don't know why she's calling me right now. It's rude. All right. Today I want to inspire you to shift your music productions to a higher level and give you some knowledge and show you the tools that we have. I'll be using Ardor because that's my weapon of choice. In the end, there will be a Q&A session like in every talk. But I guess there will be a practical session also. I think you can give suggestions during a practical session and just throw your questions at me then because it's not totally planned, so we may shift directions. I want to take a selfie from the stage in the end, if you don't mind, because that's really cool, I think. No? Yes? All righty. More questions ahead. But first, I'm going to play two pieces of music. I want you to try and spot the difference. So here comes the first one. Okay, so what do you think about this? Was it interesting? Not so much, right? Actually, it was the same loop repeated four times. Boring, huh? That's lazy. That's criminal. Okay, now I'm going to play the second version of this. Listen closely. What do you think of that? Oh, thank you. I deem you think it's much more interesting, right? Needs more cowbell. Needs more cowbell? Yeah, definitely. I miss cowbell here too. It's interesting, when I listen to these two pieces, I always feel like the first one is much longer. Do you feel the same? It's actually the same length. It's just that the second one has much more expression. Things are changing. You're not bored. Things are doing things. So I want to ask you, what do you think I did between the two things? I have some suggestions. Do you think I added new instruments in the second part? And you are correct. There are no new instruments. Shit, I rehearsed this to say, ah, no, you were wrong, but you were right. There are no new instruments. Do you think I played with the notes? I changed the MIDI data? No. You're way too smart. What the heck? It's just filtering. What do you think about effects? Have I added new effects? Yes. Ha, gotcha. Yeah, I didn't add any new effects. However... There's a filter, no effect for you. Some effects were set up in the first part in such a way that they didn't effect the sound. They were always there. They weren't on bypass. I know it's kind of cheating. Yes? But in the same way you could just add new notes by having the velocity set to zero. So it's like looking at that way. Oh, I didn't do that. I didn't cheat in that way. Okay, yeah. If you cheat in that way, you can cheat in more extreme way. Yeah, sorry. All right, but the point was what do you think is the tool I used to make the difference? Yes? You're right. It's automation. It's lots of automation, actually. So, another quiz time. Do you know what is automation? Who knows what is automation? Okay, see like 40% of hands in the air, right? Okay, so how many of you have used automation in a project? One, two, three, four, five, six, and oh, this is quite, quite, still 35%? Okay, and do you use automation in every single project? One, two, three? One, two, two hands? I do. And you fucking should be because automation is the key to survival in the post-nuclear society. When the bombs fall, when the fallout comes, you don't want to be coming to me and saying, oh, I'm fatigued with automation now. It's too late. You had a fucking lifetime to learn this stuff and you did nothing. And now you're all going to die of radiation poisoning. And all your backups are going to be destroyed, too. Excuse me. I'm sorry. I think this is from a wrong talk. Moving on. So, what is automation? Automation is a way to make the DAW turn the knobs and move the faders for us. It's a tool that makes the computer music more expressive, more humane. Computer music can get very boring and we can feel very detached from it. But with automation, we can make things change slightly or not so slightly during the course of our piece. So, we don't have to just make our presets and leave it there. We can make them evolve over time. And that creates very interesting effects. So, this is what I want to be talking about. And also, it's not that hard, actually. I think a lot of starting out people are afraid of automation. They think it's so complicated. I don't know what it is, but it's not. Let's just dive in and I'll show you that automation is not that hard. So, now I'm going to do a practical demonstration. I'm going to show you how to use automation in Ardor 5.12. Ardor 6 is not out yet, so we're sticking with that. There are some problems in Ardor 5.12, some difficulties, and hopefully I'm going to show you some ways I found to work around the limitations to get the music done how you like it. Yeah. Let's just dive right in. Nope. For some reason my keyboard is not working as it were working. Okay. You know what? I'm going to disable Wi-Fi because that can... There are hackers here. I want to be on the safe side. So, I have a little piece that I made. It's a different piece, but if we have time I'm going to open up the session for the track I were playing in two versions, and we can take a look there at what I did, what I used, and how it affected, how the automation affected the whole thing. So, I have some music here. I just made some simple things. Not too much stuff, hopefully. And let's start with the basic basics. So, every track in Ardor has this button here with order A for automation. And if you press it, it opens up a menu. We can access different automation parameters. We can automate different parameters of the track. We can automate the fader, which is this guy. We can also automate the mute button. So, we can basically make a track go off for a while. We can also automate the punning. It's in two parameters because we have the width and we have the punning. Of course, we can switch this to a stereo balance and then we have just one track for punning. Okay, I'm going to close the two. Let's just focus on this fader automation now. I'm going to switch this back to stereo and reset the punning. So, by default, this is an automation lane. So, it's like a track that is assigned to a track or a bus. And it holds automation data so we can draw some points here. Now, if I play it, nothing happens. Because the automation tracks have four modes. The basic mode is the manual mode. It means it's going to ignore everything that you have on the lane and just go with this value that you put here. So, it's the manual control, no automation in use. If we want to actually read the data from here, we can use the play mode. And now it should follow this automation. So, you see the volume of the track is changing. And that's very useful because we can alter our mix. And this is also something that exists in the industry. You have a static mix where you just find the perfect setting for your faders when everything plays as good as it can. And then you go to the dynamic mix. You use automation to alter the balance in some parts of your song to make it feel more musical. There are other modes. There is a write mode. When you play in write mode, everything on the lane is going to be overwritten with what you have here. So, we can record some motion. Let me play this and move the fader. So, it records everything. However, as you can see, there's quite a lot of points and it will be quite difficult to edit. So, this is something you can use, but maybe it's not optimal. I personally prefer to use the draw tool in the draw mode to just insert the points on my own and move them around it. This way it's easier for me to manage later. And there is the fourth mode, which is now automatically enabled. When you enable write mode, you play and you stop the transport, Ardor will automatically go to the touch mode. And that is very wise because if it wouldn't do that you would be again with the write mode and trying to listen to what you've done would overwrite your automation. Let me just show you. If I leave this in write and just want to listen, just erase all my work. So, that's no good. That's why it switches to touch mode. Touch mode is like a combination of the play and write modes. When you are in the touch mode, it will play back whatever is there but we can also touch the control at any time and add new automation information to the session. So it won't remove anything unless we touch it. That's why the touch mode is pretty useful. If you don't want to mess up your automation I suggest you just put it on the play mode because then you can't break it. If you accidentally move a control it's the safest way. Now, more things. If we right click on an automation lane, we have some options. We can change the state of course and we can clear all data. And that removes all the automation points we have and switches it back to manual mode. So if you decided this automation isn't really needed for this, you can just right click, go clear and then you can just hide this automation lane. Now, hiding the automation lane is not the same as clearing it. You can have some data here just not make it too loud and we need to make it play and I can just hide this automation lane let's play it again and watch this fader it's still in effect. Actually the automation mode play shows us that the fader is in different color and we can't touch it. We can't do anything. You see this fader here we can do things. We can do move it and it has dark background. This one is still light background. It's locked because it only plays automation. So the play mode is good if you want to lock down the automation and not break it because you forgot there was automation. I tend to keep all my automation lanes open but sometimes if you have too much and the session you're trying to crawl is too long it's going to get in the way. However, there are tools to help with that when you go to the automation menu for a track we have some options here on the top it says show all automation when I click this we get all parameters for all plugins on this track. I can scroll forever here and we could actually do something and change something record something but it's not really a good way to discover what is there I think but there are other options there is hide all automation so it just clears it for us it doesn't remove any data it only hides it from the view and there is also show existing automation that is very useful because it only shows the automation lanes that actually contain some data I find this very useful alright so let's have some fun and see what we can do with this baseline to make it more interesting with automation I'm not going to use the fader I'm going to clear this automation and hide the track and now let's just loop it I'm going to go to the grab mode and press the G key I will select all these regions I'm going to select the press the right square bracket to put loop markers around the selection and then press the L key to loop it it's a bit quiet there is some sidechain compression with the kick I'm going to disable it for now so we have a clear view just click here now what I want to do is because it's not really fun when I move it when I leave it it's just static I don't want the static sound I want it to move so I'm going to go to the automation processor automation and here there are all the plugins I have on this track as you can see in the same order that they are in this plugin I'm going to go to the call filter and select frequency it's this knob so when I move it you see this failure moves too let's see if I put it in the touch mode it doesn't really work this way that's not a problem I really want to put it in the play mode and now I'm going to make this larger press D key to go into the draw mode or click here and that was just at some points and listen see what happens let's play it this is a little bit too deep I'm going to move it up when I click or just hover my mouse over the point we can see the value in hertz so that's helpful to know what you're doing there's one problem the scale should be logarithmic it's not it's quite troublesome because you have too much resolution in the bass and too little resolution in the high so it's a bit difficult but you can get used to it I hope order 6 is going to do something about it so you might think we could do this with an LFO like a low frequency oscillator maybe just in the synthesizer maybe but we can do something like this with an LFO so LFOs and envelopes can only take you so far because they are actually doing the same thing every time you hit a key and that's boring and automation allows you to include an expression that is dependent on just the position of the play head in your song so it is actually expression for example many MIDI keyboards have something called expression wheel or expression lever like if you would use this expression wheel for every single note exactly the same way it's kind of pointless because expression is something you use to accentuate parts of the music and I think automation is perfect for that ok so our bassline is done let's see what else we have let's maybe re-enable this sidechain compressor and hear it with the drums I have here synthesized that's a bit quiet now without the automation it's gonna be pretty boring if I switch it to manual and just pick a value boring we don't want that alrighty let's move on what else can we mess up with automation make it more interesting let's see about the drums do you have any ideas, any requests what should I mess up oh yeah sure let's go hi-hat so let's automate the panning right I think it might be good to switch it to stereo balance so we can do this ok so let's open an automation lane for pan for hi-hat and now we can make it zoom across the room yikes ok if I do this it's a false cycle let's change it to play give it a go works there was a glitch I think looping in an arduo isn't perfect oh no sorry I have a different thing here there's a slightly different pattern here to play on the drum transition however I had also another idea for the hi-hat I have added here an A delay plugin which is a stock arduo plugin it's pretty useful and you can see if I play this we can get some crazy comping effects and I really like this so I wanted to make this automated I can actually try and go with right right in here this works because that's a generic plugin interface created by arduo all the led spa plugins are exposed in this way because they don't have a custom user interface and now I can just play it now it's changed to touch so if we won't break it let's listen if it works kinda crazy I like it alrighty what else can we mess up I have some ideas but maybe you have better ideas yes? tempo? hmm you have found a loophole I wasn't prepared for that tempo is a little bit different but sure we can change the tempo during the song here's the tempo lane and you can actually add a new tempo marker you can change the tempo say make it dramatic 100 bpm and now it can be a ramp so if I change this it can click ramp to next and now it's gonna smoothly change the tempo so now I haven't tried this it might break everything let's try this is trippy it works however tempo is not handled with automation it's a different thing but you can do that however I would like to return to the static tempo for now so I'm gonna right click here and remove this tempo marker so we're back to where we started as you might have noticed that the automation didn't stretch properly along with the tempo change our automation turned out to be too short so we would have to correct that manually I don't know if Art or Six is gonna do it better maybe I should stop talking about Art or Six because it's not there okay I have an idea this is something I really like to do let's go with the snare bit crush it we can do this we can bit crush the snare let's see crush I like Calf Crusher it's pretty short I expected it to be more spectacular oh yeah somehow I lost all audio do you get sound from me? it could be I think it worked like that I think the plugin just broke the stream see I know what I'm gonna save the session trouble shooting no talk is good without proper breakage to reload the session demonstration practical demonstration that won't help me now unfortunately may I ask how much time do I have left once the show because we began later alright we're not sure, perfect alrighty I have an idea for the snare actually I want to use Mverb which is a very nice sounding reverb unit I'm gonna play with this mix knob and automate it to enable the reverb just for some parts so I'm gonna go to process automation Mverb and go find mix and now it's gonna be fun go play coming from the distro pause what time is it? I guess yes I think so Falk TX is maintaining that I guess so he knows so we can have some fun just enable the reverb for a short while and then disable it or even make it like reverse reverb tail just increase it here and then just cut it get a reverb interesting things the hi-hat delay was still going let's see how does it sound together with this bass it's kinda blurring out I think I should make it louder oh yeah now we can hear the shink it's kinda delicate cause there's lots of other sounds happening we could do something with the lead I guess disable the side chaining I think we can do something with the OBXD synthesizer right now we've been only automating parameters of effects but you can also automate parameters of synthesizers and that is super fun too we have an LFO we can make it do these things let's see OBXD many options this is one thing that is difficult about automation that it's not always obvious what you should pick but let's see LFO frequency let's take that what else do we got LFO amount 1 and 2 I think amount 1 is for to sending it to pitch let's do this let's play it it's funny we get kind of like a formant sound like someone is saying something a little bit like frequency modulation because the LFO is so fast it's actually in the audible range so we get kind of a frequency modulation thing actually let's draw some automation for this and see what we can do maybe let's leave it somewhat I guess so all plugins that expose parameters all the parameters can be automated unless they don't expose them some plugins don't expose parameters or not all parameters I think that was a frequency can also have some fun here it's kind of sounding detuned I use automation a lot because I already know that it's really fun let's do more than one thing maybe I'm gonna make it much less deep so this is some expression things are changed we have accentuated different parts this is what I think automation is really cool for what else do we got here's a little super saw super saw what can we do with it we could automate any cue that's a neat thing I really like using notch filters very nice let's change this band which number it is 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 to notch we're gonna cut a hole can you hear this? I think notches are really cool so we need to automate frequency of band 6 we need it A process automation EQ 10Q filter 6 frequency there you go I'll just set it to play let's draw something see what it has what does we could start somewhere lower oh yeah this scale is messed up yeah it's really not very pleasant oh yeah we have some sound you see we could just try to add some modulation effects that have their own LFOs like phasers or choruses and it's all fine and dandy but you don't really get this amount of expression unless you drive them with automation if you just put them on and let the LFOs go and go your listeners brain is gonna figure this out oh just using an LFO there's nothing special about it but if you do it with automation make the parameters change it's starting to get interesting let's try to maybe do something totally weird here just go like this I think it's not weird enough let's try this still not weird weirder maybe we can change the Q so it's a little bit wider so we can hear the effect more I like it I like it hey I think that's it do you have any ideas questions answers do you have any questions I have a question there's a microphone so it will be streamed and recorded hello if you try to automate for example the volume is there a way to do it accumulative instead of just take over the slider entirely so can it be like overlaid on top of what you have on the fader exactly because if you automate something you want it to be slightly louder in some pieces lower in others it will increase the entire volume of the entire track is that plausible I would use an amplifier plugin then because you have it in the stack you can disable it because this fader section is basically an amplifier that is just tied to the interface in a very nice way so we can just add a new plugin and let's just go amplifier and there is a plugin a built-in plugin called amplifier I'll just add it and we have a gain control here and we can just automate that and then it's independent from our main fader so we can just have the static mix here and the dynamic part here let me just do it let's automate the gain so let's see we want to let's make it zero we can right click on a point and do edit and then you can type a value it's sometimes very useful and what I also do, by the way it's a little bit of a sidetrack but I think it's important you can go to the settings edit preferences and there is audio editor, yes preferences editor you have ignore y-axis click position when adding new automation points actually by default have this enabled it's very handy because when you have this on if you click the point is added on the line so it can be very precise you can then just move it if I, when I have the disabled, when I click here I have this point right here and I have to move it in position if I want it here I think it's easier then again then it's easier also when you have zero disables here I can click multiple times and say I just wanted to make this last phrase louder so I just added zero disable points then I can make it louder switch it to play let's solo it here is our amplifier amplifier so it works and I can still use this fader and it's all like layering on top of each other so it's relative you can also have multiple amplifiers for different things and you can disable them and listen if it's good if it's better then I emphasize this or not yeah I guess you could also use some VCA's maybe and automate the VCA or VCA and maybe it will superimpose on top of each other but I haven't tested it so I'm not sure any more questions can you pass the mic so let's assume I have like a controller in front of me with a mod wheel is there like an easy way that I could use the mod wheel for whatever specific parameter I have selected so I could first record cutoff and then record the fader automation without doing like crazy complex readjustment somewhere in the background can you pass me a keyboard because I haven't took one this time because my backpack can stretch there is a way to assign MIDI CC controls to automation lanes oh yeah thank you do we need power or just over USB there is a port yep perfect okay oh now it's I think it it's reversed okay let's see if it's detected automatically I guess so sweet so I think maybe I have to enable this first option so I go to edit preferences and there is control surfaces what is this let's go with generic MIDI I will enable this show protocol settings and now I just select the keyboard I think it will be this I don't know let's try now I think if I control middle click yes if I have any control surface enabled when you control and middle click on anything it will open this little box and you can operate a controller and it will assign it however there is something you need to keep in mind like this is now like it's in a safe mode if it's not detecting movement close enough to what it already is said to it will skip it so I can move it too fast it's gonna ignore it so I always go again to the settings control surfaces the protocol you use the settings and I make the smoothing all the way up isn't that I haven't used that in a while so please forgive me if that's alright yeah now you can do it you can also record this way so let's take a different part but you know what let's copy the drums ah interjection another important thing to copy automation data or move it around unfortunately you need to use ranges here is a range tool range mode so you can select a range of time and then holding control you select your tracks and you have to select your automation lanes too separately it's a bit tedious sometimes they don't want to select like now so it's sometimes flaky most of the time it works and now I can go control C and copy this into memory now make sure your edit point this is the edit point is set to whatever you want it to for example I've had set to play head that means it's going to be pasted wherever my play head is so if I place my play head here I can have my mouse whatever control V and there it is but I can also use my mouse so now I can push my mouse here snapping takes effect so I have magnetic snapping to beats that's why it's not it's precisely on this beat not because the snapping helps so this is how I rearrange pieces or duplicate parts with automation it's a bit troublesome right now but it works so let's record some bass or maybe someone wants to record some bass that's the last thing for now there's a bass recording ok let's go to the grab mode deselect the tracks let's find the bass track let's go to touch mode and put it here and I can just shift space I know it sounds terrible I didn't prepare for that but you can do that with MIDI and automation data so if you are a hands-on on the controller type guy Ardor can do it for you alright any other questions? thank you the live stream ended here but there's more alrighty I wanted to practice for that Skype discussion between live and record that was tough but it was also very fun I wanted my wife to participate a bit I think she enjoyed it a lot me too I never been a movie director and it was kind of like this fun ok so I guess this is it I'm over? yes or no? ok thank you so much thank you for having me so my forever