 Hey I'm Ron from TC Helicon and today's video is the first of a series where I show how to make synthesizer sounds using the sample synthesis engine in the Perform VE. Let's get into it. Today we're going to be making a synth lead sound. The goal is to make a monophonic digital sounding lead synth so we'll just kind of mess around and see what we can come up with. The first step with any synth sound on the Perform VE is to record a sample so we're going to do that. We're just going to use an O sound. Now what's great about VE is it doesn't matter how bad the sample input is because the VE pitch flattens it and stretches it to time. So let's just see how that sounds with no effects on the sample. Sounds pretty good but the first thing we're going to do is we're going to add some keyboard gender morphing in the style section of the morph button. So what this does is the higher up the keyboard you go, the more female the gender is and the lower down the keyboard you go, the more male the gender is. So we're going to dial in like 75%. So you can already hear there's a big difference. There's a lot more variation in the notes I'm playing. It's not just pitch. It's also kind of the timbres different. But one of the things that we really wanted was a monophonic synth lead and this is polyphonic because I'm able to play multiple notes. So if we go to the mode section of the morph button here and we turn the knob up, this is affecting the release. But once we go past the release and it turns red, now it's monophonic and we're adjusting the glide or portotempo rate. So I'm going to give it like medium and portotempo. So now I can only play one note at a time and you can hear the notes are sliding between each other. That's glide. So now you can hear we've already got kind of a lead sound. It's pretty dry, but the notes are gliding nicely. It's monophonic. But I think I'd like to add a little bit more ambience and just make it sound better in general. And my trick for that is always to just add reverb. So I'm going to add some hall reverb and a bunch of delay. So here we have a little short delay, a bunch of reverb and it goes from sounding quite dry to pretty pleasant. So next what I'm going to do is I'm going to add a little bit of gender shift to this sound. Now the gender shift parameter isn't affected by where you are on the keyboard. It's just like a static shift of up or down, like more male or more female that affects all the notes you play. So I'm just going to shift it up a little bit here. So it goes from, it has a nice effect on the timbre. And I think that's the sound I want. It's kind of a corny synth lead thing. I like it. But let's just see how it sounds if instead of using the gender shifting style, I use a vocoder style. So I'm going to go to a saw wave on the vocoder here. And I'm going to add a lot more reverb and it's going to go from kind of a corny digital sounding lead to an ambient almost analog lead. And there I'm just using the low pass filter that we have on the filter button. So yeah, that's how you could make a couple of different lead sounds on the Perform VE. What's really cool about VE is it's a synthesizer. You have to mess with it and figure out what sounds you like. Personally it's like any synthesizer. I can make sounds and kind of show you sounds but the sounds that I gravitate towards and you gravitate towards might be different. So I really recommend getting your hands on one of these and playing with it and experimenting with it because it's really fun and it's really inspiring.