 Hi, it's Anfa from Anfimus.com and today I'm back with another episode of LZW which stands for LMMS and SynapsebFX Watch and Learn. Today I'm gonna show you how to create a kick drum sound out of thin air out of nothing using synth in this. So I'm gonna be making a kick drum maybe more kick drums because it's always good to make the twice thrice or more times. The more times you do it the better it is and every time it's different so it's good to make it repeatedly not just make one patch and say oh I'm done this is my kick drum once and forever. No. You know I'm making kick drums over and over for new tracks for years and hundreds of tracks and many of them have original sounds made from scratch and they are always a bit different and I'm always learning new stuff so keep this in mind and well enjoy the watch and learn part. Okay that's it. I'm gonna switch my screen. All right so this is LMMS. First thing I'm gonna do is remove this kicker or no I don't have to remove it. I'll just replace it. Pressing left mouse button and dragging this on the kicker and dropping it. Here now it's replaced. Okay now I will input some notes left click here there so we have this. It doesn't sound like kick drum yet it will. I'm gonna assign it to the first mixer channel no real need but if we make more sounds I will make so send them to another mixer channel so we could quickly adjust their levels and add some effects here. Okay. Yeah so first thing I'm gonna do is play this. Then open the ZNUTSubFX entry phase window which automatically changes this stuff so I'm gonna move my face out of the view. Okay so this is the main ZNUTSubFX window. What I'm gonna do is open edit instrument and add synth panel click edit and now first thing I'm gonna do is mess with amplitude envelope. I'm going to click the E button so we can see its shape as you can see right now it's quite not percussive. It has short attack this is okay it has zero decay it doesn't lose energy over time and it has sustain which means as long as we hold the key pressed the note is not losing any energy and the release which is the time that it takes for the note to completely die after we release the key. So I'm gonna change the settings and this little window will reflect them as we go. So first I'm going to turn the sustain value all the way down. Now you can see and hear the difference if you can't I will make it louder. Now I will remove the sustain. We can't do this with the controls in this pane but something called free mode comes to lend us a help helping hand so I'm going to enable free mode it reopens the window and moves it in a slightly different place. Now what we can do is add as many points to the sound envelope as we want delete them and we can set which point is a sustained point and as you can see zero is disabled so I'm going to move this to one and zero which is disabled. So now we have no sustain you hit the note like you hit the drum and it it automatically just you know the sound fades out naturally you can't hold the stick against the drum and make it sustain its note no you would even make it even quicker silent this way. Now I'm going to shorten this and also I'm going to shorten this one because if I lower the first point in value and turn up using the filter I'm going to do it yeah even more maybe with the voice we need more loudness as you can see and hear that we have the envelope on level zero so there should be no sound at all but there is sound and if I extend it you can see here the total time 132 milliseconds also we have a stretch function stretch function makes the envelope lower the envelope longer for the lower notes it's somewhere in the middle if we turn it down all the way it will be disabled I guess or it's maybe it's disabled right here I think 132 milliseconds sounds like this so the level zero of the envelope isn't actually nothing it's quite some sound now we have distortion so if we had sustained value somewhere probably somewhere there we would never have real silence even if it was so short as you can hear we still have some sound and when we switch the sustain to zero it changes very much so when you're making drum sounds as a general rule for Zen sub effects use free mode and disable sustain if you have some strange tails of sound some bassy tones that you know are not going to silence themselves they won't shut up check the envelope and disable sustain okay so now I'm going to make something more like I want to get now this simulates hitting the drum and its natural energy gets dispersed somewhere and it's losing its energy so the loudness falls down but it's too high so I'm going to shift it in octaves to actives down now this sounds more like a bass drum however we can make this even better simulation when we play a bit with a frequency envelope I'm gonna silence it a bit and open my paint just for a moment to show you what I mean yep nice tool so if we have a drum head or if we have a drum let's say it's like this and it's attached here yeah it's a cross section when you hit a drum with a stick the membrane gets bent out of its natural zero energy position and when it's bent it it is forced to be longer to be more stretched than it is here so it's more tight it's so natural springiness of it makes it automatically want to return to the neutral position but it overshoots this position and does something opposite however it loses some of its energy because it is shifting the air particles here and here and the shifted particles are pushed by the membrane create sound waves and these sound waves travel to our ears or microphones or whatever and we hear the drums however this makes the original kinetic energy that is kinetic energy and potential energy or something like that makes it drain it's drained away into the sound so this membrane is slowly starting to make smaller changes smaller shifts it stretches not so far away and as it slows down the speed of the vibration also slows down so the energy slows down and the speed slows down so we have something like maybe I should drone this with black so we have a time and we have volume and frequency yep the volume and frequency are changing both with the time falling now we have simulated only the volume let's say that this one represents volume and this one represents frequency yeah so thank you my paint so as we are simulating drum sounds we need to do something analog with our frequency envelope so I enabled free mode straight away I'm removing sustain this is quite a long quite a long envelope now this sounds very much like a club kick drum if I lower the initial frequency it's gonna be more natural a little bit more like a real drum also if I make it fall all the time not only the initial interesting it depends on what you want to get so playing around with this you might even want to make something like that it's not a really kick drum but it's some useful sound too maybe a laser gun oh yeah this is high pitch then low pitch at the same time you can also you know create something like a logarithmic we have a logarithmic to line here switch in the loudness by default the envelope is logarithmic but we can switch it to linear it doesn't switch the look but it switches the sound this is logarithmic and this is linear see learn linear is generally more loud and um less precise I would say that and less gentle however these envelopes are linear by default I guess or not or maybe they are a logarithmic I don't know however shapes like that generally work but sometimes you just need one point two point I'm gonna shift it a little bit up and the frequency and maybe fine tune it don't be misled this is not half tones or something we have here a detune to type this is half tones so we should get the same result by 12 here and one here yeah but you need to change this what can we do we have a Lopez filter also a nice thing to add to your kick drum is a little bit of a noise or a click what I do is create another voice in the add synth or rather open it activate it by default it's a sine wave I'm turning down this volume before I change the sound type to noise and you should be hearing now the noise what I want to do is enable the amplitude envelope switch this sustained value to zero and reduce the decay time I also reduce the release time so you see we have this and I can leave this sustained value here because it's very quiet and we can get away with it however if you have time you can disable it now another thing is filtering what do you want to do with this band does filter it or narrow filter now let's listen to our kick without this addition and with this adds a bit to the sound another nice thing to do is to another nice thing I'd like to do okay drums is adding false not false fake reverb how this works I enable subsynth which creates white noise and filters out musical frequencies out of it and I shift it in frequency down so we have some basic tones then I make the bandwidth much higher then I make the amplitude a percussive one also disabling the sustain is an important thing here and finally I filter out everything below a certain frequency I don't want any bass frequencies present here I just want the higher ones I'm going to turn it up so we can hear it better I'm going to change the stage of the filter stages so it's a sharper one we could make this our kick drum however it would better work for a tom-tom drum or some other drums we're going to be covering this later in the series so for now I just want the higher frequencies also I'm going to do zero start so we don't have this click at the beginning or we could do max so we have this click always but no we have this click made already in the kick drum in the add synth engine so how will it sound with our kick drum it's a little bit too long yeah now it sounds like a reverb we can even do some weird stuff with this like it's compressed or limited or something it adds some life to the sound it's not so synthetic without and with our fake reverb another nice thing I like to do with kicks and any sounds in general is distortion so I'm going to open the insertion effects pad tab sorry tab and create a new one insert it to part one which is our kick drum and I'm going to select distortion now this is a little bit over overdone so I'm going to turn down drive drive is gain before the actual distortion unit it works like this you can make the signal louder before it gets into the distortion or quieter and this this here is gain after the distortion so I can make it quieter before and louder after giving it quieter after and louder before now this is a hard techno kick drum sound I'm not really after this one I just want to add a little bit of harmonics let's listen to it without and with too much also we have mono this is in mono so I can this enable stereo but you need to take care of this left right control when it's here everything is like in the original sound that is coming into this unit when it's here at 64 roughly we have mono so left channel is mono right is mono they all are mixed down to mono we have the same thing in left and right channel and if it's here then we have inverted channels left and right we have right and left it's a neat trick to do because you can have light the left channel distorted mixed with the right channel distorted undistorted and the right channel distorted mixed with the left channel undistorted it's a little bit wicked but weird but you can eventually make some use out of it but I'll leave it at normal oh and if you have this normal you can also use pan remember that it's inverted so now you should hear it in left now in the right good thing to do is to use several distortion units and pan them differently and also with hypers and low pass filters you can shape the sound and select some band default it's applied before uh sorry after the distortion but if you enable this it's prefiltering so it's filtering before the distortion i'm gonna turn the dry wet to add it to the original sound i'm going to copy this copy the clipboard second another unit p paste from clipboard clip and we have the same settings now i'm going to insert it again to part one switch to a different pan i'm going to use a little bit different filtering so we have not so boring effects and finally i'm going to add some reverb real reverb however it's really really long so first i'm going to turn the time down then i'm going to turn the initial delay down because if i turn it up it's actually acting as an echo delay which can lead to some interesting effects like this one when this makes the echo play one and two and three and four and but it's not necessarily what you want all the time so i'm going to disable it right in it right now and you also have like in the distortion unit high pass and low pass filters so now we're playing with the full band and now i'm cutting off higher sounds now i'm cutting up half lower sounds frequencies and it's generally a good idea to cut out low frequencies when you're making a reverb for something like a bass drum because it's gonna mad up and add business to your bass frequencies okay and the final thing is correction equalization so i add up eq and how this beast works well we have a graph 100 hertz 1 kilo hertz 10 kilo hertz and the dotted lines 50 500 5 kilo hertz and each line is a number number so we'd want 100 200 300 400 5 6 7 8 and 10 which is thousand 10 10 hundreds yes so we select the type of filter it's low pass high pass the ones are non resonant and the seconds are resonant so low pass it won't respond to q but lp2 will you have also you know high pass filters of course band pass filters notch filters notch filter peak filter which is the most useful for me because you can cut and boost widely or narrowly anything you want and you have shelves low shelf and high shelf respectively so what i'm going to do first is use high pass filter maybe it's strange and i'm using high pass filter for kick drum sometimes we have frequencies so low that we don't really want them or you we want to make room for our bass if you're making drum and bass for example which has might want some really deep low bass sounds you might want to cut off the kick to make room for it you know about the 50 40 60 hertz you might want to have the kick about 400 but not lower then we can even use the q to automatically boost this one and now it has a lot of energy and steel isn't using any of this very low sub bass range which is cool i'm going to use another pick filter this time and do a sweet sweep to find what i want to do maybe cut off a little bit of these 300s maybe not it's taking out the energy maybe we don't want so bright high top end for this kick drum yep this would do so i will name it to kick this channel can also be named kick why i'm doing it because over the episodes i'm going to be making a track out of this so i'm going to drag all these elements actually i could show my face for saying this no maybe no i'm going to drag all these elements oh no oh yes to create some finished track so in the end all the sounds we made are going to be put together to create a composition and i'm going to of course release the source files so you can mess with it see how it's done remix it make your own version and share it with me so i can play it back or or stuff anything okay i think this concludes the video about kick drum yeah no no more no much fun with the patterns very simple if we just take a look at the spectrogram i'm going to edit spec trim analyzer yeah it's not spectrogram it's spectrum analyzer and right click stay on top so now it won't hide even if i click something else ooh never mind and we can look what happens most energy is at about 150 40 30 130 kilohertz not kilohertz and yeah we have a little bit energy of down there but it's below negative 50 decibels i guess so it's pretty nothing more not very important if we want it we could even filter it further with a hypers filter kind of frequency 100 160 uh maybe not i think it's good as this okay so i could play a jingle or yeah that's all thanks and see you next week i guess when we will be doing let me show let me show you snare drum yep see you then bye