 Hey, it's Anfa and you're watching Anfa rambling indefinitely today. I want to talk about why you should learn sound synthesis So if you are doing music production or sound design, I consider sound synthesis to be a crucial skill to have because synthesizers are extremely common in modern music and sound design even if you're not completely aware of it if if you take any Music track playing on the radio right now and Listen to it and try to write down. What instruments can you hear? I? Bet three quarters of that is going to be synthesizers Some of that are synthesizers Made in hardware the analog synthesizers some of that are virtual instruments So computer plugins basically computer programs running in other programs To create the sounds if you know me, you know, I synthesize my music nearly exclusively. I synthesize everything from scratch for every track even drums I'm not using drum samples Actually when I use drum samples That's very rare Like on the rare on the recent album out of 17 tracks one track had drum samples And these drum samples were acoustic percussion. I were acoustic drum samples that I recorded myself and The reasons for that are I want first to Develop an original sound I Want to have a sonic fingerprint that people will be able to recognize like they just Hear something and say that sounds like Anfos music and they do they actually do which is fun and the second thing is I don't want to care about copyright and Before I started learning sound synthesis so hard and decided to synthesize my drums even I Was using drum samples. I found on the internet Free drum sample packs and you know, I never knew actually who made what I'm using What where is it coming from? Maybe it's copyrighted? Maybe I'm breaking someone's copyright law or something And I don't even know and I don't really want to care about clearing samples. This is also why I don't sample videos that are Not released under creative comments actually I sampled my own videos as for now and I don't Sample, you know commercial music or releases or anything. I just I just don't I like to keep my music my my own Homebrew 100% I'm not going as far as programming my own synthesizers or building my own computers to run the program synthesizers to synthesize The sounds that I program myself. No, I just use synthesizers open source synthesizers and open source software But I programmed synthesizers myself. It took me many years and If you listen to my first album on bandcamp backside front you will hear that my My drum sounds are not actually as polished as they are today Like if you compare backside front to sin to suppressed, which is my newest album on bandcamp I guess you will be able to clearly hear a big change in how the drums sound and How the everything else sounds too, I've learned a ton about synthesis since then and Especially about drum synthesis and I'm sharing that knowledge in my videos from Anfa vlog series because I think it's important that you do that And now I'm going to go on a little ramble actually a rant. I'm going to go on a rant I'm rounding on the all the time in this series. So I hate to our 909 drum samples. I hate them Why because everybody use them? I hear the same kicks same snares same hi-hats Cowbells crash cymbals same. I don't know. What's that? Wooden stick sounds I hate them because they are so overused Everybody uses them if you turn on the FM radio Chances are you'll hear these samples Many times a day Why I know I know these samples These sounds because these sounds were made by synthesizers. There are no samples. The they are synthesized They are very well done and I actually admire how well they are crafted especially the hi-hat the right symbol the crash symbol the The metallic drum samples samples sounds patches are great And I I was reading articles on sound-on-sound how they made this and the hi-hat sound actually was made out of I think six square Wave oscillators tuned to different pitches and that was then put to a filter to Rooted out to two filters one was low pass and the other was high pass and they had different Length amplitude envelopes applied afterwards. So the hi-hats Frequencies were basically fading out earlier than the low end but It's it's both so simple and so brilliant and I'm using that knowledge to synthesize my own drums but I don't use these sounds I make my own and This is the whole point why Why use the same boring overused samples over and over when you can just Start digging in and make something new even if you just Added to the original samples just blend between the two you already have something new something that will sound fresher And this is another aspect of why I think you should learn some sound synthesis because reinforcing Acoustically recorded sounds like acoustic drums with synthesized sounds is a very good thing to do for example you can't really get as Clear and punchy drums from an acoustic drum kit. That's just the nature of the instrument They don't naturally sound super tight We achieve the tightness by doing transient manipulation by doing compression by doing gating by Equalizing Doing all sorts of weird stuff also adding reverb and gating the reverb and like there are so many tricks to make the drums sound punchy Because they are not sounding very punchy when you just Record them with a microphone and play them back. You just sound flat They sound punchy in real life because they are super crazy allowed That's the snare if you have a drum kit in your room And you just stand by it and someone hits the snare you're gonna go And you're gonna just want to Plung your ears because it's so loud and That's basically Why it feels so powerful because the sound just pierces through your body and you can feel it everywhere That's why I don't go to rock concerts without stoppers because they make it It's already so loud if you don't even you know if you put in if you put a small rock band in a small venue It's already so loud without even Using any PA and if you use a PA. It's already too loud even in a big venue. It's it's bad but In order to make this sound punchy and a recording without having this enormous Volume hitting you because we can only squeeze so much Loudness out of our headphones before we destroy our hearing and it's not really pleasing to do so So we use compression your is transient designers We use equalization to make the sound feel powerful. We distort the things distortion is also very important in doing this it adds harmonics and Actually, you know, we perceive distortion as an artifact of something being loud It doesn't actually have to have high levels of sound But if we distort it, it's gonna be perceived as being louder without it actually being louder We want there being any more sound energy. They're just more harmonics And if you even turn it down slightly It still sounds louder than the first thing that was clean Because you have these extra harmonics that make you think, huh, this is so loud. It was distorted somewhere tricks mind tricks anyway So sometimes I reinforce acoustic drum samples with synthesized drums First in one-size-project undoing Right now I use mostly acoustic not actually not I sometimes use acoustic drum samples I record it and then I reinforce that with strong with synthesized drums also to get a unique sound To make it more punchy Have more control over the thing If you layer these two It's it's something new. It's not the same thing anymore and I find this really nice So yeah, I think that I personally strive for originality when it comes to music Sometimes people tell me that my music is too complex and that it's hard. It's it's difficult for for people It's not very approachable because there's so much information. You can't really process it. It's just thrown at you at once and I think I'm slowly going out of that and I'm slowly making music a little bit more accessible a little bit more simply find maybe Yeah But I really like to create slow burners I really like to make music that has so many layers that you can listen to it 10 15 times 50 times and you uncover something new and you find new harmony or new rhythm or this little hi-hat that's going out there that's doing this thing It's really so cool with the whole beat and I didn't really notice it and these are the sort of thing that You just usually you hear new stuff when you put it on a different sound system because it emphasizes different frequencies It introduces some phase shifts Because of how the thing just shapes the sound and you hear different parts of the music that you didn't hear before It's especially Especially true if you used crappy headphones to listen to all your music and then you buy real good ones and suddenly you hear like Three times more fine detail in the music that was there But you didn't just hear it because you use crappy headphone headphones and That was something I discovered when I got some headphones that I really had a Lot of high-end and I I started to hear a lot more artifacts of MP3 compression because Yeah, and I then I started to realize how lossless files like flak or wave How much information actually there is It's it's like it's my new detail But once you perceive the detail you really like it and you don't want it to go away and going back to MP3 128 kilohertz Kilobytes per second is just not cutting it for you anymore Yeah, so That's my thoughts on the subject. I hope you enjoyed that and it's gonna be Something you will consider Well, if you want to learn sounds and scissors check out other videos on my channel If you want to check out my music go to bands come that come Or on foot that band come calm and you can buy my newest album If you want to support me or you can become a patron on patreon.com and donate Your money monthly so this would allow me to make more videos every month And do less other work instead Thanks for watching. I hope you learned something and now Go and make some music