 by the end of this video we will have a track that sounds like this hey it's Anfa and you're watching Anfa Vlog and today we're gonna make a track from scratch using Matt Titl's Helm synthesizer in Ardor so it's been a longer time since I made an episode because I made other things in our videos and if you don't know what I'm talking about you're not subscribed all right never mind today I want to refresh to myself Helm so a helm is a polyphonic virtual synthesizer created by Matt Titl I hope I pronounce the name okay and it has some interesting features most notably it has a very flexible and interesting system of modulating different controls you have a few LFOs and a steep sequencer and you can also use various MIDI input data like the pitch band or modulation wheel or the polyphonic aftertouch to steer your sound as the slogan suggests so let's jump into Ardor here I have a clean slate a clean plate I'm gonna add let's say eight helm helm lv2 tracks first thing I'm gonna do I want to do a little drum beat let's start with the kick drum a typical four in four let's just tap some tempo double clicking here on this marker all right 111 bpm I'm gonna cut the rest that's our tempo you can press seven to enable the metronome so I'm gonna just press D to draw I'm gonna change the resolution to beats I'm gonna click and drag to make a full bar I'm just gonna make this larger a little bit and because this is gonna be our kick drum I'm gonna double click here to name it kick and I'm gonna just right click here to make the note mode percussive and that means we input these onsets only that's gonna make it easier for us to take a look and see what our drum sequence is doing so now I'm gonna press G to go to grab mode which is the default I'm gonna select this press the right square bracket to set the loop markers around it and hit L loop playback I'm gonna stop it disable the metronome because this is actually playing the same thing as the metronome right now and I'm gonna open up this little guy and that's the helm synthesizer also we might want to give ourselves some spectral view of what's happening let's try it out okay I'm back so this is the main helm window and I'm gonna do a very quick overview in case you never used this synth before and in this video I'm gonna make a track with it but so we will discover some of its functions and play around with it and hear different sounds it can make so the basic thing we have two basic oscillators which can have various waveforms and we can alter the tuning they can also be multiple voices slightly detuned and we have a sub oscillator which can also do various waveforms and has a interesting thing called shuffle that I think alters the pulse width somehow or maybe it just alters the pulse width I don't know we would have to take a look at the waveform display and assess that maybe we might do this we might do this so we have our oscillators here's a little mixer we can choose the level of sound coming from oscillator one to the sub oscillator and the noise generator we have the main amplitude envelope which affects loudness of the sound in a given point of time we have two monophonic LFOs that means they go on all the time in sync with the song and here you can see that helm has received the beats per minute information from ardor and it sent itself to 111 bpm which is nice we have also a polyphonic LFO that means it plays for every note and then restarts with every note if you play a chord and you start the notes in different places each note will have a LFO going with different phase and that's interesting you have also a step sequencer which is also monophonic it doesn't restart for every note and you can see that it's going its steps in the tempo we have a filter one filter here that can do low pass high pass band pass notch and peak low shelf high shelf and all pass which really doesn't sound like it's doing anything but if you wiggle we're around with it as you play something it does something so it's not completely neutral as I would think it is maybe we have something called feedback that sounds a little bit like a comp filter but it can also like detune stuff and it's interesting doing and we also have saturation which is quite actually a distortion and also act as a loudness control because if you go below zero you actually reduce this the volume of the signal and you can make this very very quiet but we don't want that we have also an arpeggiator an effect that repeats parts of the signal in timing with this song of course and with what we play we have a delay effect a reverb effect we have a formant filter with two filters and we can just use this x y controller to do this we have master control and we have an additional envelope for doing whatever we want we have keyboard input a midi after touch the pitch of the note the velocity of the note we play the modulation wheel position and the pitch wheel position we have also a little testing keyboard and the amount of voices there polyphony it's by default it's on four you can make this monophonic by going all the way down to one we can change the range of the pitch band that is applied to the notes and change the amount of velocity tracking that means the if the keyboard responds to how how hard you play you can set zero and probably that makes the notes all the same loudness or zero oh yeah this is zero so it so it doesn't respond to loudness by default set the default value you can also do midi learn i didn't use that yet but we'll maybe try it out we have portamento and that it can be off which is default it can be auto so it also it only makes glides between notes that overlap in time so if you press one note release it and then hit another nothing will happen but if you press one note then press another note it the second note will start pitch and on the first notes level and then rise over the time that is the longer the higher is this value this is how long in seconds per octave it will take change the sound and also there's a legato mode which doesn't restart in monophonic mode when we heard voices one which is what i said it doesn't restart the notes as we play it if you overlap two of them they always sound they just didn't change the pitch but they are the same notes so the envelopes and LFOs don't restart okay that's a quick overview and the most important thing about helm is that you can use all of these helm icons for example for an envelope to assign different things to affect the sound so you can like you can use all these modulation sources the three envelopes and the three LFOs in the steep sequencer and the keyboard input or the MIDI sequence input input to modulate all the green lit controls and that creates some very interesting effects because well you can also modulate LFOs with other LFOs for example take a look at this we can modulate the speed of this LFO with that LFO and you see now it just does weird stuff and we can also modulate this LFOs speed with its own so it kind of gets feedback that's really interesting we can also like reset this with right click it's connect all so all right let's get to making our first sound and that is going to be a kick drum all right so enough me talking let's play L press L to make our four note loop in the background play and now the first thing i'm going to do is reduce this sustain level and a decay to make this shorter maybe i'll make this a little bit louder the whole thing and this is too high for a kick drum so i'm gonna transpose this octave down now we can hear we have actually two oscillators going on so i'm gonna disable one of them and this is still too high two octaves down 24 semitones now i need the pitch to go up in the start and then go down so i'm going to use this mod envelope i'm gonna drop the sustain level click this helm icon and now i can assign it to the transposition and i'll click this to return to my normal operation oh yeah it sounds a little bit like kick now i want to use the same envelope to maybe add a little bit of noise on the start of the sound we can use the filter to accentuate the body of that kick drum and remove someone wanted low end at the same time and also do some saturation oh sorry that's loud i'm gonna reduce the volume oh that's very very loud oh this is not the kind of kick drum i'm after right now how about going even lower with this pitch and maybe making this envelope a little bit sharper also we can see that this amplitude envelope by default it has a little bit of release but it also has a little bit of attack now it's much sharper huh that's very very short there's not much body to it all right that's okay drum let's close this helm instance now what i want to do is compress it a bit to make it a little bit more sharper more punchy i'm gonna add a cull compressor or cull and it's distorting and also is very hardly compressed so let's just fiddle around and listen what we can do with this compressor oh just a tiny bit sharper so i'm gonna move this before the fader i'm gonna also add a equalizer equalizer eq 10 q stereo the eq 10 q equalizer sounds really nice i weren't using them for a long time but i discovered them some time ago and i think like they are cool i'm gonna just maybe just cut off some low end like i'm just like doubling the thing that i did with the lupus filler anyway i'm just gonna see if i can add some high pass high high shelf sorry oh no that's too sharp it's it's going to be painful starting to be painful maybe there's some mud in the middle if you wonder i'm double clicking on the dots to enable or disable any frequency band and we have all of these here so you can actually do all this stuff here just tuning the values that's easier just double click here to enable move it around and use the mouse wheel to change the width or the q let's hear it without eq okay it's a little bit more focused maybe a tiny tiny bit of low end is lacking there so i'll compensate with a low shelf all right that's a kick drum let's go with a hi-hat this is gonna be a little different so let's go with hi-hat and i'm gonna start off by just clicking here control and middle click and drag down so we duplicate the media region gonna right click here note mode percussive yeah you see how it changed now i'm gonna go e for edit i'm gonna select these i need some high resolution because just the beats are gonna be not enough so i need more refined grid i'm also like i don't know i'll just leave this at bat i'm gonna solo the hi-hat press l loop it and this is our hi-hat so let's make it shorter make it snappier so like remove the tiny bit of attack make it start immediately and just to make things interesting i'm gonna use some random mesh oscillators and cross modulate them between and they are two oh yeah changing the pitch of them relatively or produce some semi inharmonic noise which is cool for metallic hi-hat sound but this is still too long okay let's try the noise nice let's add a help pipe as filter maybe some resonance and maybe reverb as you can see we don't have a ton amount of control like you know filtering the reverb sound or dry wet for the for the saturation but still we have quite a lot of stuff we can do in just one screen one very nicely very nicely done interface excuse me oh sorry all right i'm back oh that was a sneeze let's try making this more frequent maybe adding a little i'm gonna change the grid to beats by eight all the triplet here can change the the velocity by clicking and hover and using the mouse wheel to reduce it but helm by default doesn't react to note velocity so i'm gonna enable the velocity to track and let's you'll listen yeah now it responds yeah it's so quiet almost unhearable unaudible now that i listen to that it's it sounds very dual let's make three voices detune them more noise also we can do some funky stuff like use the velocity to affect the length of the notes okay so i need to turn it the other way nice now the quieter note will be shorter and that's very natural because the sound will die off faster i like this all right let's make some snare snare snare snare i'm gonna just do the same thing just duplicate with control and middle click and i can see that all my drum tracks need to have note mode percussive all righty i'm just gonna remove so i'm gonna hit e to edit and now shift right click on the notes i don't need i'm just gonna go to g grab mode and press l i'm gonna solo my snare for a while just to work on it's on it on its own i'm gonna press l again to play in loop let's make this shorter make it start all on the beat very quickly we shall very sharply enable just one us later and do maybe use the amplitude envelope then this time to drive the pitch that's interesting maybe let's try to change the triangle how about using cross modulation maybe with a triangle wave let's modulate this one so we're modulating with the cross modulation as i understand it it works the that what it does it if you enable this it modulates the us later two with us later one and modulates us later one with us later two at the same time but not with a feedback loop so it's like you have us later one and two or one and two and if they are duplicated and the duplicates are modulated with the cross modulation so this modulates that and this modulates that but they don't loop forever so you don't have feedback in the modulation that will cause wreck havoc on the sound let's try some different pitches oh that's some interesting tone but totally not snarish i'm gonna just reduce it well we can do some FM stuff with this okay it sounds very weird as a snare really maybe i'll use some the mod envelope to add some noise and make it shorter oh that's interesting but it's completely not a snarish sound yeah this will work better for a snare i'm gonna disconnect with right click so the pitch stays on the same spot oh no i don't want to modulate it oh now it sounds quite interestingly snarish because we have these a little bit of an inharmonic stuff about using a different waveform for modulation how about adding a few more voices a little modulating okay it doesn't affect the thing adding a few more voices here oh it's get wiggie and there's there's a the funky function that makes the other voices higher pitched i don't know i'm not sure exactly how it works but it does stuff okay but it's weird okay let's use a hypersfielder maybe i'll disable unison because it gives me uneven loudness among the notes like sometimes the low end cancels out between the voices and sometimes it doesn't so we don't have consistent punch to the sound and that's really bad for a snare how about making actually the noise the louder the longer sounding thing so i'm gonna just disconnect this make the noise sound all the way through this amplitude envelope and use this modern envelope to enable the oscillator one sound at some point okay we need more let's make the shorter quite interesting let's try using the reverb and let's listen what it does all in its own oh the interesting thing is we can actually modulate this stuff with the envelopes as well envelopes as well so we can create a gated reverb snare let's use the filler envelope the thing is that the filter envelope is here and it it's called filter envelope but by default the envelope depth is zero so it doesn't affect the filter at all and we don't have to use it for the filler we can use it for whatever we want only the amplitude envelope is like hardwired to drive the loudness of the sound but these two you can do whatever you want you don't have to use this for end of the filter and we won't i want to use this for the reverb oh maybe i spoke too soon maybe because this is oh sorry i know why we can also compensate us okay the envelopes are always polyphonic because they restart with the notes and that's why i can't drive these things with this envelope because it's gonna produce multiple values different values for multiple notes and we have only one reverb unit so it's processed on the mix of the notes not every single note so we can't do that but i can use a monophonic LFO to do this and because the LFOs are quite interesting let's use the mono LFO and maybe let's use this thing make it slower i don't know it this syncs the tempo so well if we change the snare pattern it's gonna sound differently but now that's interesting we could also use the step sequencer to make this exactly what we want so i'm gonna disconnect this and what do we want let's make 16 steps and make this really fast okay so now we have it plays over one bar or no it plays the step sequencer plays two times every bar and right in the middle we have our snare hit so i'm gonna do something like this enable slide so it will actually smooth out this shape let's see can i drive it yeah i can wood blend no it doesn't do anything why what is this frequency no free retrigger oh retrigger what does it mean sync to playhead all right i'm defeated by this for some reason it doesn't affect my wet value there's also a random LFO which is kind of a we have two modes for random we have the stair step random which is like sample and hold type and we have a smooth random and this is only an example that the real shape is what the dot shows if we increase the frequency it's gonna jump around like crazy jump around like crazy and we can see that this route moves rather randomly but that's not entirely what we want so i've guessed a simple downward okay let's try like this it sounds a little bit like a echo like delay on reverb but it is reverb interesting let's hear is in the context of the song all right so our snare is quiet i'm gonna add a compressor to add some punch now without it i'm gonna compress really hard just to hear what we're doing all right so that's very it's roughly what i would like to do like now we just need to compensate actually i want to add some reverb let's go with mverb which is a very nice sounding effect here it's only this increasing the bandwidth gives you more hype actually this is i think this is a lopus filter and this is another kind of a lopus filter and now let's just add an ecu ecu 10q stereo and on enable real-time analysis well there's some low stuff that we don't need but we can accentuate the body of the drum right here that's nice let's see if the highs don't need oh they need our attention oh yeah this sounds much more snarish let's seek some peaks that will hurt now that's that's not pleasant to my ears i'm gonna just make this a little bit slightly reduce and we have a peak here yeah let's hear it without whiff we also need to compensate the volume because comparing equalization doesn't do much good if your volume is off because we our ears are not linear in perceiving loudness and frequency louder sounds will accentuate the bass and the treble all right now we have these input and output meters they show roughly the same level yeah i much like this it is quieter actually in the field but much more punchy because we added the low the body the drum resonance and also we compensated for the highs and we moved some painful stuff that showed up so let's hear this with the rest okay so this is our very very simple drum kit let's make a bass line i call this bass and i have a little sound i want to do because actually the idea for this track is to make something like kind of an old-school techno vibe with the tb303 bass line i'm gonna try maybe recreating that all right i need some more notes i'm gonna compose a simple line oh that's too short i'm gonna control click select both of these and now hit alt release myself from the grid so i'm gonna make these two shorter nice maybe not all right i'm gonna go off one octave down with this down to C3 now it's kind of like having two voices one in the middle and one down okay let's get to making the sound itself so let's press the L i'm also gonna solo the bass right now where's helm hello helm show me your window i need to wet it the patch yeah yeah okay we even hand have harder or minimized just gonna maybe give ourselves back this way from display all right the thing is we could use the sub oscillator at some point but it doesn't have a pitch control anything so we actually need to tune everything for this sub oscillator oh ah i need to get back to order oh yeah oh so it's normally one octave down actually this pitch is okay i don't need to make the slower hey please give me that window i can see it but i can't touch it all right but i'm gonna change the pitch i'm gonna pitch this down one octave 12 semitones it's interesting because we can see what is the real way from we get and it looks very good i mean it looks alive okay if we want to pitch it down another octave i'm gonna play with the notes and this is a one rich pitch one rich saw and it doesn't show any artifacts that sound looks nice maybe it's a little bit too loud yeah we can do this stuff because we have the LFOs let's play with this oh also some interesting things we can do well we could automate some stuff i mean it's more interesting at the end but we'll try to keep it as self-contained as possible i want to add some maybe just i'm gonna tame the influence how about getting a second saw oscillator yeah yeah maybe use some cross modulation so that's interesting oh so now we have a filter on the below which is very short it's adding a little blip and also it's taming the it's accelerating the cross modulation amount of our second saw wave which is inverted that is modulating our first saw wave that is octave down and it's tuning slightly down this one so the phases don't match so well and we have a different modulation also how about making this super short oh no this doesn't sound good now it sounds muddy not good for bass also we want one voice and what we also want is portamento let's make it on that's a lazy sound but just a tiny bit gives us this slightly gliding effect that is so nice we have a polylipho what can we do with it some random stuff i don't know this is the feedback amount can transpose the feedback oh that's interesting it's kind of a comp filter with pitch shifting also what we have is stutter it doesn't really doesn't sound too well in the sound oh why did my review make this more slowly evolving i would like so are we using this yeah we're using this lfo we're not using this lfo let's make it very very slow you know there's tempo let's make this oh we can have this one in 32 bars that's i'm starting at one in 32 it's gonna be already planning of time to change okay so the new flow is still just a little bit too much our pager that's nice but it's altering our part i actually never was a big fan of our pagers i would prefer all voice to program the arpeggios myself because i have all the control in the world but sound does that's not what you need delay is interesting that it sounds like it's interpolating the sound with very big slow limiter so it's slowly changing the time but for that it's resizing the buffer when you change the pitch the tempo of it of the delay a tiny bit of this can be nice okay so this is our nice little techno trance evolving bass i guess let's get back to order and see what we can do let's hear with the drums oh the snare is very loud and the bass is very quiet so i'm gonna get back and make this louder louder also one thing that is kind of a cliche for this type of bass sound is distortion but i'm not sure i want to use it let's try it though i'm gonna turn it down because it's gonna get loud the interesting thing about all the effects here is that we can control them with these things so for example i can label i can use the filler cutoff to change the amount of saturation for each note oh so is this per note actually it has to be wow and this is also per note and this is also per note wow i need to make use of that because for some pads that's can make things really interesting all right but now with the distortion the reverb and the delay is too much so i'm gonna attenuate the levels of these to make this more dry uh all right let's stop for a moment now let's listen with the beat all right i want to make some real special effect i'd like to call this one pre-noise and it's gonna be like a little right before the end of the bar it's a slight touch but it's very nice like using sounds like that the pitch doesn't really matter we're gonna work it around work around this pitch anyway so i'm gonna maybe hit right square bracket to loop around that little guy i'm gonna solo it out um maybe i'll make this a little longer so i can hear it with a pause and that's nasty clicking that's probably because of the jump so but i need noise okay i can also use this to yeah now this interesting trick because the amplitude and the loop changes the the amplitude the noise anyway but by applying it twice i get a different curve like if i normally have a curve like that when i play it second time i get a curve like this it's a cubic curve so it's like slowly starting to get gain velocity towards the maximum and then it's speeding up and that's what i like and also i can try making use of the format maybe with some LFO maybe that's gonna be completely trippy and bad maybe not it's sculpting this spectrum very interestingly okay let's also use a bandpass maybe just with a own filler and globe just gonna up the sustain yeah that's nice it's a little slight touch maybe something oh i hovered over this part and it changed the mode you can have this in Hertz oh that's nice very weird and metallic i like that okay let's hear it in the context very quiet okay it's already maxed out here so i'm just going to use a compressor the input gain yep that's it it's gonna click on this right square bracket to change the loop markers all right let's make a quick pause and we'll get back to this track uh my pet dragon had to pee so i had to call the firefighters sorry about that it's funny because it sounds like i'm making with my mouth but i'm not okay so this is a little little little tiny loop i want to like maybe make some crash sound also crash drum for like a real relieving re reviving a change i'm gonna move it up or after the snare solo this what can we do can you do to make a crash with this sound let's use some weird sir step fish waveform another one must cross modulate them the hell out of them yeah awesome tight and top it up with noise what better can we do also there's a sub oscillator we didn't use let's try okay now let's hype is this mess oh i didn't use unison uh the problem is this is very short we need to make this longer and i don't think i don't think helm can like not care about the note release or can it or maybe maybe if i change the note type to percussive it also harder also sends different midi events that can that can be an option note mode percussive no not really oh damn right so let's go back to note mode sustained hit e make this longer make this whole bar long and use our superpowers to make this sound awesome i want to change some pitches just to make things interesting we have some phasing in there which is interesting can use some filter actually we have okay kind of works ah oh that's interesting it resembles every two no how about the metallic delay i'm gonna go to Hertz make this big amount also i forgot about the feedback you see we get a comp filter so it has to be a comp filter but with some special functions weird well just finish it off with the reverb okay so dumping down is a more longer sound okay let's just try this should work oh yeah it works it also sounds kind of kind of old Roland drum synthesizer tier 909 or something yeah it reminds me of that sound and that's good for this kind of music because it aims like it sounds like i don't know old school techno maybe minimal maybe too much for minimal i don't know sometimes techno is so minimal you can't really hear anything happening there all right let's maybe duplicate this a few times two four four oh yeah so we have this way way too often kind of just just to remove some of these let's listen also probably removing some of the drums yeah this one shouldn't happen so quickly after this maybe this one shouldn't happen and this one shouldn't happen here just we have actually the snare sounds a little or a lot like crap piece of crap i need to distort this i'm gonna use maybe called saturator heavily maybe even input gain all right i'm gonna disable the reverb at all because this thing well it was an interesting thing to try out but it makes the whole thing very messy and this reverb tail is also too long excuse me much better yeah let's listen again yeah this sounds better i want to kind of a jazzy tune here i want to just compose this or maybe i can play it but we're gonna make another bass sound for that we don't want to make our bass sounds boring bass too i'm gonna try make some different approach for a kind of a FM sound okay this is four bars no this is the full bar all right let's enable the keyboard input um maybe time you know this okay i guess it's gonna be easier to click this out oh play this gonna be longer uh it's gonna work i'm gonna hit g select this right square bracket l this is too early uh so it was too late whoa oh i didn't want to do that thank for the new note uh there you go control left click select multiple notes all right now we can extend this for the second bar and work on the rest of them let's just maybe go to e for edit we can select all the notes control and drag copy and now maybe this is it all right so i'm just need to move these two oh yeah there's some groove lacking to this i'm gonna get to that now let's design the sound i'm gonna also bring back my spectral view move this over a waveform wouldn't be bad too so as i do this with synence of effects i do one awesome sinus later with another one octave lower and i modulate one with this yeah this is the sound it works oh we can also modulate this with the envelopes yeah so it kind of sounds like a filter but it's not something else ah noise is messy noise is bad use some other stuff instead oh yeah that sounds jazzy by the way i want to see what is this oscillator shuffle maybe let's pause this just find a pitch that plays well with our oscillator view yeah i guess none what does the shuffle do no shuffle what is this what is that waveform squeezed that's just a square but it looks very interesting and fancy okay by this spectral view i can tell that we're just changing the duty cycle we're making a pulse wave out of square wave how about saw ah this is lovely lovely sounds oh this is so cool but back to our FM sound and we can also modulate this shuffle thingy with our envelope we can also use our second oscillator as a real sub oscillator because it's one octave down well this one is also one octave down that is an extra reinforcement i would like some more click to this so it will sound a little bit more like clank bass ah sorry in polish it's called clank in english it's called pluck no snap damn i forgot the hell of the name how is it called oh my slap bass yeah that's the name let's try it some more maybe a little bit tiny of um now this is way too loud why haven't you told me i should have turned this down and that's without any filter let's try a filter interesting i like the sound of the feedback which is also making it like maybe stupid but it makes it sound more hollow and square like they're off i don't know i like the sound let's make it monophonic and you can hear what legato does playing different notes but it's only changing the pitch now which one starts the envelopes ah there's some cool things we can do because for example we can use the modulation wheel to make an LFO affect her sound for example if i use this LFO for the pitch of the modulator ah i can use the mod wheel to actually change the amount of this LFO in effect and i guess this is why we have these controls of the LFO power at all because we can't it's non zero i would like this to be zero oh be zero okay i guess i have just too much influence on here this and okay it sounds unusual right now and with the modulation wheel i want to make this ah oh i can't do that oh it works for the poly LFO okay ah because it's per note oh without a wonder why that's weird okay so let's ignore this one let's make it slow so it doesn't look so weird and use the mod wheel to i just need to make this zero and now let's try it out yeah it works we can control the amount of vibrato with modulation wheel i guess i have too much of that anyway but that just some that's just some random funky business maybe we'll use that maybe not let's listen to our melody ah i want to make this little slight pre-note made with the priest volume so so i'm gonna use my mouse wheel and also i have to enable velocity tracking oh okay because it doesn't do that by default gorgeous yeah however it sounds very high i mean i need to move this one octave down so let's do it the good way control a is gonna be loud might be right click transpose octaves one down transpose bam okay that's our jazzy bass line now let's make some beat for that maybe not so long i need to make this bigger i'm gonna copy this for hi-hat and snare oh you know it's easier to drive drums with different notes but the same track however with helm it's now it doesn't have built-in midi filtering so we would need to use some midi mongling plugins to get that done but i just don't want to fiddle with this right now hey hello where's the drums is the bass so loud that we can't hear the drums oh yeah not good i'm gonna listen to this little part in a loop or maybe wow i didn't know i'm gonna nail it first time i try it interesting i'm using a different pitch for the hi-hat it's gonna give me a different sound and that's what i want oh i missed a spot i meant to put this note here but i put it here and it sounds nice i like this listen that's funny also what if i use some small notes with a little velocity just to spice the things up uh i wish i could just oh uh oh yeah it might be nice but i just use totally random spots and that doesn't sound good how about this i think the snare is badly tuned that's what i think oh i'm using dlfo nah no please don't actually i'm making something that's completely in contraintuitive to what i was doing previously but it just makes it sound more nice to my ears i want to use another dq because after this massive amount of saturation the whole thing is very distorted i need to correct for that how about this no it sounds harsh no more highs let's disable the solo maybe let's copy this beat another bar shift d for duplication and okay here we go i want to do something with the snare and draw and kick gonna make the snare and kick closer together so it's easier to compose parts yeah it sounds a little bit like chiptune right now it's funny i didn't intend that oh i have duplicated things way too much not uh not good let's listen to that whole thing oh what is this why does it sound like that why these notes sound so bad i guess that's something about the note length oh yeah we have some problem why is that so i must have messed up some is that it is that it okay let's listen snare fixing problems now are we sustained somewhere sustain is messed up or not they're all disabled how can that be messed up oh yeah that's better okay also i would like to automate the filter cutoff for the bass the first one so i'm gonna go for here is little box a for automation processor automation helm which is the name of the plugin and here we have all the parameters and i want to find cutoff let's die right there i'm gonna use right to just put the starting value now under with the touch i can record some thing let's just maybe put another value here shift right click to remove this one and click and drag this one so let's let's try it out yeah i like this funky real yeah shift the d1 now we have a duplicate i want to make the second bass part different oh by the way when you duplicate regions me regions in our door by default they are all linked so you have to go to session properties and there you have the where is mask oh yeah in the miscellaneous media regions media region copies are independent that's disabled by default so if you control drag some media region when you change something in the copied one the original will change also so you need to go to your session preferences because it's a session dependent and enable this media region copies are independent and then every media region you copy will become a new file on the disk that you can edit and it won't affect anything else if you don't want this because you might want to link copies just keep that off and when you copy a region you can go right click media link from other copies and that's what you got have to do because otherwise if i edit my second part it's a note here it's gonna be here too and this can drive you crazy when you don't know that it's on and what the hell is going on so just keep this in mind i want to make this part a little bit different wow i did something else that i intended but it sounds good let's keep it oh the bass is very loud i want to try out some little little pattern instrument that's going to be the end of the video because we're getting close to the one hour hour we're already at one hour or something like that and you can't take more than this at once and not make your head explode and we don't want that because who wouldn't be wanting to view my videos watch it watch them when i make people's head explode not nice i don't want that i'm wondering if this is going to be a lead let's listen i'm interesting i didn't intend the sound to be like this but it is and now it sounds cool no i just wanted to look at this one note not both of them random stuff happening not intended whoa that was rough oh my goodness e for edit shift right click yes we're back g for grab resize yes e for edit grab this one and shift it somewhere oh uh-huh no not enough notes on the screen there you go that's actually gonna be a lead sorry for this misnomer let's just work on the articulation and stuff and how it sounds i want to use the mod wheel yeah i want to make this i want to make the thing that we did for the bass too but we didn't use that and not using the modulation wheel to introduce the brato i want to use that in this particular sound i want to make it go and stuff like that maybe we can automate this or maybe it's gonna be easy uh i mean we could use envelopes to activate let's play around and see what we make it's gonna be good and you can also have the spectral view you can see some aliasing but it's like way below 80 negative ld decibel so it's inaudible like i can't hear this stuff it's there we can measure that but it doesn't matter yeah remember that stuff about all pass filter it doesn't affect sound until you move it you can make some motion with this i don't know how and why i don't know that's very blunt and not interesting and also ear piercing how about this let's use a poly lfo because we can oh maybe i'm effect tune that sounds drunk no no that's not what we want now i'm assigning the modulation wheel uh i also need to assign the keyboard input here will it work yeah it works oh that's so retro my goodness amazing i'm icing let's just try and put some automation for the mod wheel and have some fun whoa yeah let's see what is this awesome just awesome vundaba i'd say maybe let's try to trickle this a little bit of the vibrato and then just boom none of it cool let's listen oh something's wrong it didn't refresh properly what the hell also uh i want some portamento glide effect for this lead yeah like this let's hit l oh no oh i hit k k what is k knife l i did something oh so we need to make sure notes overlap because we are using auto well i want to make my notes overlap unless i don't in some parts oh we're playing polyphonic and i don't like that for lead sound no let's go voices to one ah and you know what a good lead sound needs a tiny bit of reverb and delay sounded like you know what like these the problem of this is that they are monophonic i mean i can't really get any stereo stuff from helm because it has no panning inside for the bow for the oscillators so i'm gonna use a separate cough vintage delay for this to get some more stereo phonic weirdness happening oh that's spacious plush greatness fabulous and some emberb sweet space gimme oh no that's so retro that's so ooh oh my let's listen it's gonna be awesome all right the rhythm of the lead melody is kind of wacky it's uh it's not exactly how it should be i like it oh so like retro wave i don't know power fist power glove stuff like that conch furion company and that bass filler is a little bit too resonant at least at the beginning and makes some trouble oh okay let's listen now you know what a bossam needs it needs pitch bands because pitch bands are awesome and they are part of the lead sound for that ah whoa i'm not not intended to do this we have the pitch band control and two semitones let's see what is their limit 24 great two octaves i guess just one octave will do whoa yeah come on come on 800 and 102 yeah that's the middle value that's the rest position whoa that's weird that yeah i wanted oh yes i want these pitchments yes so bad that's gonna be so lush so awesome but yeah how am i gonna tune this when i really want just pitch bands that are like one or two semitones for most and i have all the scale available not good i need to think this through i just don't need so much stuff here let's use the exactly what i wanted it's so good so delicious i just need to get with the spedgements back to the rest position before everything crashes in my head that's a bit a little bit too premature pitch downation oh let's move this out a bit make more late because it is hello i'd like to into some point here yes thank you alt alt will release me the grid let's try it again yes what can we do here i want to make some pitch band that i made this note start higher than it should and then go back where it should like oh i don't know let's try it again let's just put it here and listen oh but we need some context retro goodness all right let's just have enough of that i'm just gonna compress this slightly slightly i want some more delay accentuate the delays okay actually looks like this pitch band here is too much i just need one semitone i'm going for two it's great i have traveled this base it is it has way too much high end it it it bites it it hurts and it doesn't have to low and i maybe i just can't hear it on the speakers ah what can we do more should we the fact that you can't doesn't mean that you should and i think that should conclude this tutorial i video on making music with helm by matt tittle uh oh crap i hope i don't misspell matt tittle yeah that's that's the name that guy is awesome he made a really nice synth it has some limitations but hell he cramped so much goodness and so little space on the screen and there's no tabs and it looks great it feels nice i like using this instrument i wasn't using it for a long time because when i have them it's a bfx i feel like i don't need anything else but it's good to have different instruments they inspire you in different ways they make you think differently they make you approach problems in different ways because you have different tools and that often leads for you to discover new things that you wouldn't be making otherwise so try new synths learn them have some of your favorites i hope you've learned something if you have any questions or suggestions about what i should cover in the next videos in my unfa vlog please leave them in the comments and i will see you in the next video bye oh by the way the track will be available for download the whole ardor project maybe also helm patches but i don't think so because i don't know how i save them