 Yo, hello, let's go with the show! Hi, it's Anfa from AnfaMusic.com. Welcome to another episode of LZW, which stands for LMMS and ZunatsobFX Watch and Learn. In this episode, I'm gonna be covering symbols, synthesizing symbols like crash and ride. Yeah, that's right. We can listen to what these sounds are gonna be. Maybe something like that, or this, or that, or maybe even this. Yeah. You know what I'm talking about? Perfect. So let's kick it off. So in case you don't know what a symbol is, I'm sorry for this distortion. In case you don't know what a symbol is, I'm gonna draw you a picture. It generally starts with something like that, and then it goes something like this. Something like this. Yeah, it's something like that. And it's all made of, well, I don't know how this metal is called. And it'll get some little softy-fear and a little bolt here, to tie it up, and a little rod there. Yeah, and this is freaking symbol. If you know what I mean. Crap, not a good drawer with my mouse. Okay, so as you might remember, last time we covered hi-hat. And for hi-hat, we can use white noise. But white noise is distributing energy all over the spectrum equally. So if we have a decibels, which is energy, or sound volume, and hertz, I should call this f, and I don't know what. But white noise is something like this. It's going to be a straight line, and all this is sound energy, all here. However, with symbols, it's not like that. It's more like a very, very, very much tiny peaks and frequencies that creates something that is almost a noise, but it's not a noise. And noise doesn't really reproduce what a symbol sound is very well. And I was reading an article on Sound on Sound by Gordon Ride, who reads a great series of articles called Synth Secrets. And I say totally go check it out because it's where of the read. He really covers some very interesting aspects of sound synthesis and does it extremely well, with good information background, scientific background, and sense of humor. So that's a little commercial, actually non-commercial commercial. But back to the symbol. Well, I'm not going to be talking any much more. Let's just go get synthesizing. Here's the session as we left it last time. As you can see, we can kick snare, hi-hats, four hi-hats. I'm going to quickly add a simple instrument and assign it to an FX channel just to not bore you with this. Surprise. I've got two of them, Ride and Crash. Well, there are two of them. And how do they differ? Basically, Ride symbol is larger and played more often, like a part of the beat, while Crash symbol is smaller, has a brighter tone, and is used to attenuate... attenuate? No, attenuate. Add importance to quitting a break in a drum beat. Like you go on a ride and then you go on the crash. So that's just an example. Yep. Just let's begin with the Ride symbol. I'm going to enter four notes, like we do with everything, open its interface, obviously not some FX. And what I wanted to do is just follow a re-sype and not listen at all to what I'm doing. This is going to be a very different approach that we had earlier when we did something, listened to it, did something, listened to it, and applied everything as we go. Now I'm going to do something very different. And this is how what I learned from Gordon Ride's articles. I wanted to find out how the sound of Ride or Crash symbol was done in the old TR-909 Roland synthesizer drum machine. And I read about a pack of square waves that were tuned to different frequencies, and they were put together. Maybe I'll draw it. We had a few oscillators. An oscillator generates waveform. We have like say this. It was actually six of them. So this times two. Okay. And they were put to a mixer. So we have six of them here and just one here. And then it was split it with a filter, one hypers filter and one Lopez filter. So it's again now it was mixed in a slip split. And the higher part of the spectrum had an envelope and the lower bandwidth spectrum had a longer envelope. Yeah, it should be much longer so we can see. I don't know. So the brighter parts were attenuating more quickly than the darker tones of the ride. And they were mixed together back and there's the tone. So I'm going to try to simulate this. It's actually pretty easy in Superfx. So we have the first square wave. I'm going to detune it three octaves down, then open, use external one. That's a neat trick. You can select any of the previous waveforms or other oscillators done. So now you can see this is this change button turned blue. And when I change this one and get back on a voice, the first one also changes because now I'm just using, I'm using actually one oscillator for both voices. I'm going to disable this for now. I could just hit a clear button but never mind. And now I'm going to do the same thing. Yep. And that was two octaves, three octaves. It would be two octaves and some detune here and some detune here. And this one would be one octave and some detune here and some detune here. Just randomly detuning these voices. This will be nothing and a little bit here, a little bit here. I have eight of them and I'm going to use all of them. That's a pretty nice exercise. So I'm just going like this, switching to external one, detuning, moving along. Yep. And this should pretty do it. One more. Okay. So now we have eight square waves. I'm going to change your panning so they will create some serial field, not just total mono. It will be much more interesting to listen to if I just change this pan values left and right a bit here and there. And now I'm going to add envelopes to all these voices. So I'm enabling this, turning sustain all the way down and I'm just going to enter free mode and disable the sustain. So we have 1.7. That's a little bit short for a ride, maybe three seconds. I don't know. It just, you know, it depends. It depends. And maybe this, I don't know, let's leave the stretch function on because we can play higher notes and we will get shorter symbol hits that can be useful. Okay. And I'm going to be doing copy this, paste it here. No. Okay. It was the eighth voice. Right. So I'm going to be going the opposite way. Okay. I'm going to paste this. I'm going from the highest voice to the lowest one. I'm going to paste the same envelope over and over and make it more and more longer, just longer. So the lower partials will have more time to develop. Oh, I didn't grab the right handle. Yeah, it's very interesting to just, you know, let it go and then give it a listen and think how it's possible to make sounds when you don't listen to what you're doing. Well, if you know what you're doing or have some reside, it may work. Okay. So maybe I should make this a little bit longer. Maybe not so much. Okay. This is it. Now I have the final envelope of all of these. I'm going to do something to it too. So it would be, yeah, longer than anything else. Okay. Now I'm going to open the Lopez filter. Maybe just play one note. Three, two, one. That's nice. It's better than I thought. It's going to be. This is not bad for a totally randomly made symbol. But what's not nice about it? It's too dark. Or is it? Or is this harmonic? Well, that's for sure. It should be. We could use a hypers filter. And this is what I often do. Maybe make it a little bit shorter. Yeah. So that's the bass sound. Now what can we do to make it more believable? Basically add some reverb. It's a good time to show you something new. We haven't been talking about it yet. You see we have these two buttons here. Kit, edit and effects. Actually every part has three effects slot in here. One, two, three. There are no more that you can use just in this part. So when you're running out of the insertion effects, when you have eight of them, you can use this because you have some extra three effects per every instrument. And that's something you want to have sometimes with really complicated patches. Maybe I'll just use a single hit. It's easier. Now the reverb is all wet. So we have only reverb. Maybe it's too dark. Brighten it up. Cutting out down, putting some low tones out with a hypers filter and letting some more high overtones through. You can also release dampening, reduce dampening, which will also leave some more high frequency content and now mix it with the original dry signal. That's not bad. Yeah, you could use some equalization to spot some problematic areas that we don't want. Some, for some reason, always one kilohertz rings in my patches. I don't know why. Another one. It wouldn't be a bad idea to add some low content to this. We've got something painful out here. You could dampen it slightly. And then with a high shell filter, get back some of this high, high end top frequency. Let's see how well it would sound when we play it quieter. We could do something to change its tone while it's quieter. For example, we could make it darker when it's played softer. How to do that? Well, we have a few ways, but what I'm going to do is increase the velocity sensing of the highest tones and make it slightly less sensitive as we go down. So the lower voices will be louder than the... Yeah, that's much brighter than this. This is a little bit more natural. When you hit something softly, you don't give it as much energy in the high frequency range. Okay, so this is our ride. All right, it has... Okay, I haven't attached it to the... No, I had, but I made it inappropriately. Okay, now how will it play with the rest of the beat? It could be playing somewhere higher, and we can change this inside the Zenatsub FX or within the instrument window right here. You can see this blue, sorry, it's green, green square above the keyboard. It's the basic note. Right now it's a note. If we shift this and octave down, the actual played notes will rise up. Listen. Okay, they won't, because I'm doing this on a crash symbol instead of the ride, which is playing. Okay, that's almost like a cowbell. You can also change its pitch a little bit using this pitch knob. Let's hear it with the beat. Okay, this does it. Let's move on to the crash symbol, and now we will do it looking what we're doing, I mean listening to what we're doing. I've been experimenting, and actually after making the initial blind patch using the square waves, I started doing it with pulse waves, because they have more different harmonics, and it's like more different content to fill up the spectrum. So let's start with a new voice. It's gonna be our crash symbol with pulse, and then change it, and then add some other harmonic stuff, so we can have more overtones, brighter sound, and stuff. Oh, and let's make sure we, where is that window? We hear everything we do. Now let's try go with some more, with some more harmonic style. I'm going to change these a little bit now in the pan. You can copy and paste voices just like envelopes or filter settings. Maybe I'll make this one from scratch. You can hear the sine wave. Now let's change this filter to a hypers filter, and or maybe even the state variable hypers filter, make it very delicate. What I tend to do sometimes is I copy the whole thing, make this just the highest possible band, and then paste it to another voice, paste from clipboard, and then I use band vest filter. Yes, changes for some reason. And then this is what we do. We have both of them. We are distorting a bit, trying to turn them down. Now add some reverb to master, and this could do our crash symbol. Let's see. Yeah, it could use some equalization for getting more defined sound, and there was something really loud. Oh yeah, this. I'm going to cut this, and use a high shelf. Something like that. Not the best I've ever done, but it will do. Thanks for watching. See you next week when I will be doing what I'm going to be doing. Oh yeah, Klang's metal percussion. We're going to be using some filters to create specific funny resonances to emulate some cool metal-ish sounds of vibrating metal surfaces. Yeah, if you want to see that, consider subscribing this channel, and leave me some feedback. It's good to have some feedback from the people you're broadcasting to. All right, thanks for watching and enjoy your cymbals. Bye!