Latest / 52 Cues - A Production Music and Sync Podcast / Software Synths Demystified (with Jon Audio)

Transcript

Software Synths Demystified (with Jon Audio) · 52 Cues - A Production Music and Sync Podcast

0:30
Speaker 1: go back and listen to your first patch and you're gonna see the progress that you've made if you actually stick to it.
0:34
Speaker 1: Because there's a concept when you learn something, don't spend eight hours every single day learning something for like a week.
0:39
Speaker 1: Right, spend one hour every day for one week.
0:41
Speaker 1: It's gonna be much more beneficial for how the brain receives that information.
0:44
Speaker 1: What's?
0:45
Speaker 2: doing reps right it's like weightlifting you know, if you wanna bench three hundred pounds, you can't.
0:49
Speaker 2: You can't try to bench three hundred pounds.
0:52
Speaker 2: Yeah, like every day for a month.
0:54
Speaker 2: No, I gotta start off with a couple of fifteen.
0:56
Speaker 2: You go from there, right?
0:57
Speaker 1: yeah, god, that's so true.
1:09
Speaker 2: What is happening, everybody, and welcome back to another episode of the fifty two queues podcast, your weekly insight into all things production and library music.
1:18
Speaker 2: Whether you're just starting your sink journey or maybe you're ready to pitch to publishers, I promise you you are in the right place.
1:25
Speaker 2: My name is Dave croft and it is so good to be with you today, and if you find this video helpful, then why don't you give it a thumbs up here on YouTube or maybe a five star review on your podcast app?
1:36
Speaker 2: And be sure to subscribe, because I talk about production and library music every single week.
1:42
Speaker 2: This episode would not be possible without the support of our amazing friends, family and neighbor subscribers of fifty two queues, who not only Help keep the community alive and thriving, but as member subscribers, they also get access to extra perks like live streams, workshops, hundreds of hours of Video archives.
2:01
Speaker 2: They get feedback sessions and opportunities to submit to real music publishers.
2:08
Speaker 2: So if you are ready to take your sink journey up to the next level, then why don't you head over to fifty two queues dot com and join us?
2:15
Speaker 2: It's free to sign up and memberships start at around four bucks a month.
2:22
Speaker 2: Well, it's been a really good week.
2:24
Speaker 2: We are wrapping up week.
2:26
Speaker 2: Is it week five?
2:27
Speaker 2: I'm starting to lose track a little bit.
2:29
Speaker 2: Yeah, I think it's week five Of twenty twenty four, and after last week super productive week I think I knocked out three queues last week this week has been actually going a little bit slower.
2:42
Speaker 2: I had a backlog of client work I needed to do, and as I am getting more into the publishing side of things, that there's a whole administrative arm that goes along with that, whether it's writing briefs, replying to To publishers, answering emails, fielding questions and all of those things.
3:04
Speaker 2: So I actually Haven't written a ton yet this week and so that's feeling a little icky and I've made sure that later in the week that I've kind of blocked off some times, just so they're.
3:19
Speaker 2: You know, if I find I need time, I will actually put it on my calendar so I don't Accidentally double book or get a meeting called or or a student coaching session or something like that, and so I've needed to do that.
3:32
Speaker 2: I'm feeling the kind of the I don't say pressure, it's not really pressure, it's it's the it's the I need to be writing, and so coming off of a really productive week last week into this week is a little bit of a whiplash, but I still have a queue for you to listen to today.
3:53
Speaker 2: This is called through hell and heartbreak, which is featured in our expedition fifty two.
4:00
Speaker 2: And actually I got I got my weeks a little mixed up and last week's queue that I featured, which was called jen and tonic, was In this week's expedition, but through hell and high, through hell and heartbreak was last week.
4:17
Speaker 2: So I got a little mixed up.
4:18
Speaker 2: So if you're watching the expedition and wondering, hey, where this is, that that's what's going on with that.
4:23
Speaker 2: But through hell and heartbreak is the first queue of a series of queues that I'm writing for a master's movie documentary, and it is a tension, emotional tension type queue.
4:38
Speaker 2: And so let's take a listen to this week's submission for my expedition fifty two.
4:43
Speaker 2: This is through hell and heartbreak Music, music, music, music.
6:46
Speaker 2: So that was through hell and heartbreak, which was my submission for my expedition 52 week, and there are a lot of really interesting things.
6:54
Speaker 2: There's Thunderdrum and there is a nylon string guitar and really balancing this tension versus emotion, and so if you want to see a breakdown of this cue, including the instrumentation and the mix and all of that, then that is going to be published over for our friends and family subscribers in this week's cue breakdown.
7:16
Speaker 2: You know, I definitely know my way around synths and synthesis.
7:21
Speaker 2: You can't do, you know, music production in a DAW for long without having to interface with some kind of synth, be it Omnisphere or Serum or Alchemy or whatever.
7:31
Speaker 2: But you know, for me there's only so far I can go before I kind of start going all blurry eyed and I get scared.
7:41
Speaker 2: John.
7:43
Speaker 2: I get scared, so I wanted to bring one of the experts that I love on YouTube is John Audio, who is the synthesis guru, the synth guy.
7:54
Speaker 2: Is it Mr Audio, or what is your honorific?
7:59
Speaker 2: How should I address you?
8:01
Speaker 1: I don't know man, I just love synths.
8:03
Speaker 1: I love manuals.
8:03
Speaker 1: I stay up late reading manuals.
8:05
Speaker 1: It's relaxing to me and then you get to try it in the morning and it usually works out.
8:10
Speaker 1: Sometimes it doesn't, then you read it again and it's just fun all over again.
8:13
Speaker 1: But that's kind of.
8:13
Speaker 1: I don't know if that's for everybody.
8:16
Speaker 2: Yeah, you were the kid that read the instruction manual that came with the video game Absolutely Every word.
8:20
Speaker 2: You didn't just jump in and be like you know what the tutorial.
8:22
Speaker 1: No, like, stop guys, stop, stop, stop.
8:24
Speaker 1: This is how we can't.
8:25
Speaker 1: No, no, step two, we skip step two, we have to go back.
8:27
Speaker 2: Yeah that would be me.
8:28
Speaker 2: I got to admit I was like rules and manual, nope, I just jumped right in and hopefully intuitive my way through it.
8:38
Speaker 2: But you know, as a grownup I can see how I probably could have gotten further in my gaming had I done a little bit of the homework on the front end.
8:50
Speaker 2: Because the same spirit of jump in, we'll do it, we'll figure it out Right.
8:54
Speaker 2: I probably held me back a little bit because I do get.
8:58
Speaker 2: I do get scared of sense.
9:00
Speaker 2: I'm not going to lie man.
9:02
Speaker 1: They're always intimidating.
9:03
Speaker 1: The first time you lay eyes on something, especially if it's modular, if you're catching chords or something you're like, oh my God, where do I even begin?
9:09
Speaker 1: Right, that's the first kind of thought.
9:11
Speaker 1: What is this?
9:12
Speaker 2: Yeah, like I love reason, and one of the reasons I love reason is it has the.
9:16
Speaker 2: It looks like gear.
9:18
Speaker 1: You flip it back and you can flip in the back and the cables are really impressive.
9:22
Speaker 2: But, dude, if I'm being honest, I would flip it around and go, oh, and then flip it right back around because it freaked me out seeing all those waggling cables.
9:30
Speaker 2: But for somebody like you who is wired that way, that's not intimidating to you.
9:35
Speaker 2: How did you work through that kind of the fear factor of all of these knobs, all of these buttons, all of these parameters?
9:46
Speaker 2: What do you think is something that, if somebody's listening, who's like afraid?
9:51
Speaker 2: Somebody out there, not me, somebody out there, yeah, but probably me how do we get over the fear of looking at all these sense?
9:59
Speaker 1: I think it's really starting at the basics, right.
10:01
Speaker 1: So we see all these wires.
10:03
Speaker 1: I guess, if we're talking about something modular or something kind of like that, right, we're looking at all these cables, we're looking at all these inputs, outputs.
10:08
Speaker 1: What are these things?
10:09
Speaker 1: And what's happening?
10:10
Speaker 1: Really, it starts at the oscillator, right.
10:12
Speaker 1: What's generating sound?
10:13
Speaker 1: This is the starting point of this.
10:15
Speaker 1: And then we take this where do we want to put it?
10:16
Speaker 1: Do we want to put it to a filter, which is, for the most part, how most things work.
10:20
Speaker 1: The oscillator comes out, goes into the filter, we do some filter modulation, maybe some cool cutoff stuff, and then from there, do we want to add effects?
10:27
Speaker 1: Do we want to add different modulation?
10:28
Speaker 1: So, really, every synth I should look at, it starts just at the beginning of the oscillators.
10:33
Speaker 1: Where do we want to take these and where do we want to send these?
10:35
Speaker 1: And each category can be a whole kind of worms, right?
10:38
Speaker 1: What waveform do we have?
10:41
Speaker 1: Are we doing any kind of modulation?
10:42
Speaker 1: Or are we doing FM?
10:43
Speaker 1: Are we changing this waveform somehow?
10:45
Speaker 1: And then, right, you know what I mean.
10:46
Speaker 1: So it's like every category has its own, like subcategories, and it kind of tunnels, but at the end of the day, oscillators, filters, modulation and effects and generally that's kind of broken down into the easiest components, I guess.
10:58
Speaker 2: Okay, let's actually because I'm speaking to you listener or viewer out there, if you are like me, you're like, oh, he started saying a bunch of words that sounded super sciency and techy.
11:09
Speaker 2: I want to roll it back even more, so explain the basic flow, like what is an oscillator?
11:18
Speaker 1: Well, I mean, you generate sound, right.
11:20
Speaker 1: You have a thing that kind of just cycles every so often in Hertz, right?
11:25
Speaker 1: So like 500 Hertz is going to cycle 500 times every second, right?
11:28
Speaker 1: So it's something generating sound.
11:30
Speaker 1: So that's kind of the bare bones, right.
11:32
Speaker 1: And you might ask yourself what sound is that generating?
11:35
Speaker 1: What is it giving you right?
11:36
Speaker 1: So you can get a pure tone of sine wave or you can get saw waves, which is just a lot of different sine waves up on the series, and that's really the interesting part, I think.
11:44
Speaker 1: Right, so every sound is just different sine waves all smushed kind of together at different pitches, at different phases, and that's what's going to actually make your sound right A square wave of just odd harmonics all across the board.
11:56
Speaker 1: And that's something that I've been trying to get across in the synth fundamental thing that I've been working on.
12:01
Speaker 1: I think we're on video three at the moment, but it's kind of just a little bit slower pace because I know I talk super fast.
12:06
Speaker 1: I get a lot of crap for that.
12:07
Speaker 1: But yeah, it's kind of just saying this is the beginning, this is where you start, right.
12:12
Speaker 1: This is what sound is right, because if you don't really know what sound is at the end of the day, how are we supposed to kind of control it or manipulate it to do what we want it to do?
12:21
Speaker 1: And then later on comes the effects right.
12:23
Speaker 1: If something's too dynamic, we can press it, or if something sounds muddy or it's clashing, it's something, we cue it right.
12:28
Speaker 1: So there's other tools to kind of help carve it.
12:30
Speaker 1: But the initial getting out of the factory or the bakeries, as you said, so to speak because I always see cooking and mixing in audio- You're speaking my language.
12:39
Speaker 2: You're speaking metaphor.
12:40
Speaker 1: I'm with you, buddy.
12:41
Speaker 1: It kind of works right.
12:42
Speaker 2: All right.
12:43
Speaker 2: So the oscillator and again, this podcast episode is for those of us who feel intimidated by the whole synthesis process.
12:52
Speaker 2: So the oscillator creates a.
12:54
Speaker 2: It's a sound generating engine, right, and it could be a waveform, such as a square wave, which is called that because it looks like a square wave, or a triangle wave.
13:03
Speaker 2: And the faster these waveforms repeat or oscillate, then the higher in frequency it goes and different wave shapes create different timbres.
13:15
Speaker 2: Am I getting that?
13:17
Speaker 1: right, absolutely A.
13:17
Speaker 1: Timbre is an interesting topic as well too, and I think people sometimes listen to timbre.
13:22
Speaker 1: Okay, it sounds like this, but really timbre is the thing where, first off, I'm not a singer right, there's no singer behind it, but I could sing a C note.
13:31
Speaker 1: You could sing a C note, we're in the same pitch, but you're going to know if it's my voice or if it's your voice and those overtones that change depending on the sound.
13:39
Speaker 1: That's going to be the different timbre.
13:40
Speaker 1: That's why guitar sounds like a guitar, violin will sound like a violin, and that's that different timbre, that different texture.
13:45
Speaker 1: Even though it's the same note in the same pitch, it's different, and that's kind of an important thing, I think, gotcha.
13:52
Speaker 2: And so the type of synthesis we're talking about right now would be wavetable synthesis.
13:58
Speaker 2: So you have a Technically Am I saying that right?
14:02
Speaker 1: Well, so wavetable is basically just a lot of snapshots of individual waveforms, right, if you have kind of either just a basic synthesizer, right, and most of them will even give you options for like a sine wave, a triangle, a saw, a square, whatever, maybe something in between or who knows what.
14:17
Speaker 1: But a wavetable is basically taking a lot of different frames of those cycles and kind of putting them together and then you can kind of morph in between them, and how those morph is kind of what makes some synthesizers sound a little bit different than others.
14:29
Speaker 2: Okay, so what is the difference then between a wavetable synth and FM synths and like granular synths?
14:39
Speaker 1: Like, let's start with.
14:40
Speaker 2: FM synthesis.
14:41
Speaker 2: So what?
14:42
Speaker 1: Yeah, FM is interesting because I mean you have two waveforms, right and just think about the basics, right, we have frequency how fast something moves, right.
14:48
Speaker 1: And then we have modulation.
14:50
Speaker 1: So think, change something's changing something.
14:52
Speaker 1: So we get one waveform and we're modulating its frequency by another one.
14:56
Speaker 1: So if you have a waveform that's what like a thousand hertz second back and forth, then you can kind of choose the other waveform.
15:02
Speaker 1: How fast do we want this one to move, the pitch of this one that starts wiggling and moving and does crazy stuff, especially once it gets into audio rate territory, so something that we can actually hear, because LFOs they're way below our hearing but we can hear their influence when something's moving really really, really, really fast, and then we use that to modulate the pitch of something different.
15:20
Speaker 1: It's just crazy what we can make with that.
15:23
Speaker 2: Okay, now again, I'm just helping those of us who might be getting a little turned around in the terminology.
15:30
Speaker 2: Sure, sure, lfo, right.
15:33
Speaker 2: So explain what an LFO is, because, oh yeah, I'll let you go yeah.
15:37
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, all good.
15:38
Speaker 1: So modulating, changing things right.
15:40
Speaker 1: So if we want our filters to kind of move back and forth and have some kind of motion in our sound, we're generally gonna reach for an LFO and that's just a waveform, that kind of just cycling slowly.
15:49
Speaker 1: Generally for most intense and purposes they say it's below our hearing, so to below 20 Hertz, below 20 cycles a second.
15:57
Speaker 1: So in that case we can't necessarily hear that tone, but we can hear what that's doing to something else.
16:02
Speaker 1: So if we make that motion of that, that waveform move, a filter cutoff, we can hear that slow motion, even though we can't actually hear the pitch of that waveform.
16:10
Speaker 1: And as soon as we start bringing that up louder or faster and faster, so we can start kind of hearing that tone if we were to listen to it.
16:16
Speaker 1: That's where it gets crazy with frequency modulation, because you're moving something a thousand times, maybe two thousand, three thousand times a second and that's moving something else and it's got just so kind of my LFO.
16:26
Speaker 2: Lfo stands for just correct me if I'm wrong low frequency oscillator Correct, so it's using a waveform that we just used to create a sound.
16:35
Speaker 2: So if it's a square wave, it sounds like this.
16:37
Speaker 2: If it's a sine wave, it sounds like this right at a certain frequency Into the human hearing.
16:42
Speaker 2: But if you take that and use it at just maybe 10 cycles per second or per minute or whatever the metric is, then you can use the shape of that waveform, whether it's a square, which is flat, and then down and then on, or a sine wave, which is a Round curve.
17:00
Speaker 2: You can use that to control other synth parameters.
17:04
Speaker 1: Right.
17:04
Speaker 1: Is that in an easy way to kind of tie this in if someone's kind of just watching this and kind of Trying to make heads of tails of the whole thing?
17:10
Speaker 1: So we always hear singers, right, we hear them seeing singing notes and then they have a vibrato that kind of oscillates between the pitch right.
17:16
Speaker 1: Generally for most of patches.
17:18
Speaker 1: That I'll do if I want that kind of vibrato, that movement.
17:21
Speaker 1: It's generally gonna be somewhere between six maybe as low as high, five Hearts or cycles per second and that's gonna be kind of a decent range where that's gonna be.
17:30
Speaker 1: You can kind of fiddle with it a little bit, but that's gonna generally the range where you're gonna find something like that.
17:34
Speaker 1: So we do hear those slow motions of cycles and that would be a good case.
17:38
Speaker 1: We're like, okay, I know what a vibrato on a vocal sounds like.
17:42
Speaker 2: Gotcha so.
17:42
Speaker 2: So if you hear a singer doing a vibrato, like you can tell them, hey, that you're implementing a low frequency oscillator at five, at five Hertz, and that's the sound, sound like you're on your vocal that's moving at four Hertz per second, or four Hertz.
17:59
Speaker 1: So you're like okay, you're elephoing exactly.
18:02
Speaker 1: That's exactly what we do in synthesis, right when we modulate some type of pitch or something like that, that's, you're modulating the frequency of that, but in FM we do that way faster though, so it creates way different sounds.
18:14
Speaker 2: Okay, all right.
18:14
Speaker 2: So we have FM synthesis, we have wavetable synthesis.
18:19
Speaker 2: What about granular synthesis?
18:22
Speaker 2: I know that you know, omnosphere has a fantastic granular engine, but also things like far light and stray light from native instruments.
18:32
Speaker 2: I mean, those are granular since.
18:34
Speaker 2: So unpack what granular means right.
18:38
Speaker 1: So granular is kind of a Kind of a step further from just sampling is have you having a sample right like a sound that you have?
18:44
Speaker 1: Maybe it's Someone singing or it's some weird noise you made or something like that?
18:48
Speaker 1: You have a sample, you have a slice of audio and generally when we think about that, we press play and there's the playhead and it kind of moves right and then we listen to that sound granular.
18:57
Speaker 1: Imagine if you have 50 of those and they're all moving at the same time or different times.
19:01
Speaker 1: Some are moving forward, some are moving backwards and we get this Humulative sound of all these different grains.
19:07
Speaker 1: I guess you want to call them right for the granular stuff.
19:09
Speaker 2: Snippet of the sample itself.
19:11
Speaker 2: It's not the full sample, just a teeny tiny exactly.
19:15
Speaker 1: It could be like 200 milliseconds or some of them could be random, and that's the cool part, especially in pigments.
19:20
Speaker 1: Right, you can.
19:20
Speaker 1: You can change how long those granting those grains live and die, for some have a slow Mercer or slow merciless death or something like that.
19:28
Speaker 1: That's kind of how I try to approach it.
19:29
Speaker 1: Some are a little bit longer and kind of hang around for a little bit and you can change the pitch randomly of those.
19:34
Speaker 1: And when you Put all this stuff together it's kind of crazy, but it does eat up your CPU pretty good.
19:39
Speaker 1: I've cooked my computer quite a lot doing some of those patches.
19:41
Speaker 1: But man, there's a whole different dynamic to that type of synthesis and it's really fun, especially on, like a way for him that has a lot of Harmonics, it's really rich, and then all these different things and it's a huge sound.
19:53
Speaker 2: Then you get these little grains and move them around and it's it's really cool and create really like kind of complex dense sound like anytime you've heard like a big lush pad, chances are it's probably made with some kind of granular synthesis especially, it makes a huge.
20:10
Speaker 1: I mean, if you have a nice pad even to begin with and then you sample that and then put that back into the synth and put granular on top of that, man you're in for a good time.
20:18
Speaker 2: All right, I think, I think I'm getting there and hopefully, listener or viewer You're, you're getting your brain around it.
20:22
Speaker 2: And the last type of synthesis is Modeling synthesis, which I know reason has just come out with object, which is their modeling synth.
20:31
Speaker 2: And I know that there are some other modeling, since expressive expressive, a kind of came out with their modeling sense, and those, the sculpture modeling synth.
20:43
Speaker 2: Can you, can you talk about like physical modeling kind of stuff like that Right exactly.
20:47
Speaker 1: Yeah.
20:48
Speaker 1: So that's definitely an interesting spot of synthesis, right, because at the end of the day, we can take a real sound, we can put that in our computers, we can look at that on the spectrum, look at that on an EQ, kind of look at it as far as volume, what's all the envelopes doing?
21:01
Speaker 1: So we're like okay, this is basically the recipe of trying to recreate a real sound, and a lot of times it sounds very Synthy, right, if you go back to the love of the old analog sense and you dial up a flute or something, it's like it's trying to be a flute, I get that, but if you heard someone actually play a flute, you can tell the difference, right.
21:17
Speaker 1: So with physical modeling, it's kind of crazy how far things have become, especially with additive synthesis.
21:23
Speaker 1: That's a whole nother can of worms, right, because you're kind of create, trying to recreate an exact sound from what reality is, and that, to me, is just is Fascinating, right.
21:33
Speaker 1: Once you're like okay, what is this sound?
21:34
Speaker 1: And that's the best way I would say if someone's trying to actually physically model something, whether they're using one of those kind of synthesizers or they're trying to create something in the real world is, bring that into your computer and look at every single harmonic, look what it's doing.
21:45
Speaker 1: How loud are these harmonics in what time in the sound?
21:49
Speaker 1: Or how loud are these?
21:49
Speaker 1: How quieter though?
21:50
Speaker 1: What's the envelopes doing?
21:52
Speaker 1: Where is there any motion going on?
21:53
Speaker 1: And that's kind of the concept of physically modeling something.
21:56
Speaker 1: That's just.
21:56
Speaker 1: It's crazy to me.
21:57
Speaker 1: It's really fun when you get close, but there's a lot of books out there to read if someone's curious about that.
22:02
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's kind of like the, the audio equivalent of computer graphics.
22:06
Speaker 2: You know if you want yeah, a picture of a guy walking.
22:09
Speaker 2: We know what that looks like and and that we can, we can kind of spot that.
22:14
Speaker 1: Oh, you're trying to model.
22:16
Speaker 2: Yeah, if you're trying to physically model the sound of the human voice, that would be really really tough.
22:21
Speaker 2: But yeah, physically modeling other things like percussion instruments, which have Significantly fewer variables which impact the sound.
22:28
Speaker 2: I mean, if you hit a cowbell, there's only so many days, exactly that's going to be be subtly different.
22:34
Speaker 2: All right, okay.
22:35
Speaker 2: So so if somebody is like okay, I think, I think I'm ready, I think I'm ready to to go into the, the deep ocean and just into the shallow end, maybe with our, with our, we can still see the Shore, where would you encourage somebody to start, like my first, my Fisher price, duplo block a sin, okay.
22:55
Speaker 2: Where would you encourage folks to start?
22:57
Speaker 2: Because there's a lot out there.
22:58
Speaker 2: There's obviously like, oh my god, the Omnisphere's, and even like how serum can get a little bit intense, sure, but but is is there a synth that you would recommend?
23:09
Speaker 2: Somebody who is willing to brave these waters?
23:12
Speaker 1: you know there's that's.
23:13
Speaker 1: That's an interesting question, because there's two Different kinds of people, I think, out there for that approach, that question there's.
23:17
Speaker 1: There's people on one side that say, pick one synth and Just do that and don't look at anything else.
23:23
Speaker 1: And I remember reading those kind of comments.
23:26
Speaker 1: I'm like, oh, but that's weird, I can't do.
23:28
Speaker 1: That's not me, right.
23:29
Speaker 1: I would have to go to every single one because I play with one for like a month and then I'd be like I can't board of this.
23:34
Speaker 1: I go to the next one, I'm bored of this after a month and then I'd cycle around with like the same six or seven since and just kind of, and it would Always be fresh every single time.
23:42
Speaker 1: And I think that's kind of an important thing, right, this kind of excitement, this Novelty of looking at these different synthesizers, and then you kind of you don't burn yourself out as much.
23:51
Speaker 1: So that's my side.
23:52
Speaker 1: That might not be somebody else's, but if you're the other kind, I would say definitely start off with a synth that has a good interface.
23:57
Speaker 1: And for me I would say that's probably going to be pigments, because you can see so many different Modulations going on.
24:04
Speaker 1: You can see everything what's going on.
24:06
Speaker 1: Hopefully your computer is good enough for it first off.
24:08
Speaker 1: But yeah, you have all the different kinds of synthesis as well.
24:11
Speaker 1: So if you want to just focus on subtractive, just use the analog right, just kind of stick there for a while, look at the different waveforms and see how you can make something out of that.
24:18
Speaker 1: Once you kind of feel like you're growing a little bit further out of that, you can maybe go into the sample engine or maybe you can go into the harmonic engine, something like that, or the way table, if that's something that you're kind of getting into, because, wait, tables been pretty big for a long time now and that's kind of the cool part of that.
24:31
Speaker 1: It's difficult, man, because there's there's so much to learn in the beginning.
24:35
Speaker 1: It's just it almost feels like you'll never make heads or tails of it.
24:39
Speaker 2: Well, part of it is kind of like you know, once you learn how to play a flute, you can kind of play a saxophone and you kind of get your brain around, right, like once you know the fingerings, then a system matter of trans, translating it to a different instrument, or Learning a DAW, like once you understand kind of DAW workflow, going from logic to Ableton to Pro Tools, fl studio is just a matter of learning the ins and outs of that specific thing, right.
25:04
Speaker 2: So I would imagine, once you kind of get your brain around the synthesis flow, yes, that's that's.
25:10
Speaker 1: The most important part really is, just like you said, the flow.
25:12
Speaker 1: Like you have to learn.
25:13
Speaker 1: What do oscillators do, what?
25:15
Speaker 1: What do they sound like?
25:15
Speaker 1: What does this solid sound like like?
25:17
Speaker 1: The sound of a solid is so burned in my head that I just know exactly what it sounds like.
25:21
Speaker 1: And it's a good way to test different headphones or speakers on a certain synth.
25:24
Speaker 1: If I load up diva and I like play a sound, I've been like, okay, interesting, right, you kind of just know what to expect and that's kind of the spot you have to get to.
25:31
Speaker 1: And on top of that, this sounds different.
25:33
Speaker 1: Filters sound like right, you're gonna have way different sounds like a ladder filter or maybe like a diode, or I mean there's so many different kinds that you can kind of play with.
25:40
Speaker 1: People model the same type of filters slightly differently, right?
25:43
Speaker 1: Some people like the fact on ladder filters you crank the resonance and you lose the low end.
25:46
Speaker 1: Some people like that no, it all depends on what you're trying to go for.
25:49
Speaker 1: And then there's the effects and that's a whole other kind of worm.
25:51
Speaker 1: So at first it seems so overwhelming, right, how do we bring this in?
25:56
Speaker 1: But just the slow steps.
25:57
Speaker 1: Every single day.
25:57
Speaker 1: There's an exercise I try to tell people to do Pick a synth that you really like.
26:02
Speaker 1: Like whether it's serum pigments, who knows?
26:04
Speaker 1: Whatever synth, the choice you have.
26:06
Speaker 1: And if you want to get to learn this thing, take a month's time, every single day, maybe set aside an hour's time and make three different patches and they create your own path.
26:15
Speaker 1: Absolutely, they don't have to be good, they don't have to be great, but you have to make them and you have to save them into a folder every single day and try to use a different parameter.
26:23
Speaker 1: You know, if you don't want to make the same super saw every single day, right, you kind of want to branch out a little bit, maybe see what this effect does or what that does.
26:31
Speaker 1: So, three patches every single day.
26:33
Speaker 1: Once you get to the last day of that month, go back and listen to your first patch and you're going to see the progress that you've made if you actually stick to it.
26:40
Speaker 1: Because there's that concept when you learn something.
26:42
Speaker 1: Don't spend eight hours every single day learning something for like a week, right.
26:45
Speaker 1: Spend one hour every day for one week.
26:47
Speaker 1: It's going to be much more beneficial for how the brain receives that information.
26:50
Speaker 2: Well, it's doing reps, right, it's like weightlifting you know, If you want to bench 300 pounds.
26:54
Speaker 2: You can't try to bench 300 pounds like every day for a month.
26:59
Speaker 2: No, you've got to start off with a couple of 15s and go from there, right?
27:03
Speaker 1: 300,.
27:04
Speaker 1: Yeah, God man, that's so true.
27:05
Speaker 1: You can't expect to play guitar for eight hours a day for one week, whereas you could spend one hour every single day of that week, and you're going to learn so much more than that.
27:13
Speaker 2: No no, I totally get that All right.
27:15
Speaker 2: So your YouTube channel, which I really like and I've subbed and it's fantastic and we're going to circle back to your YouTube channel, but there are a handful of synths that you have gravitated towards that show up, and so I want to kind of go through the Mount Rushmore of synths that as I see them on your YouTube channel, and I'd love for you to kind of tell us a little bit about each synth.
27:40
Speaker 2: Maybe what are its strengths, maybe what are some of the things to watch out for and who each of these synths is probably for.
27:47
Speaker 2: And I want to start with Diva.
27:52
Speaker 2: Diva by Spectrasonics.
27:53
Speaker 2: No, yuhei Yuhei, sorry, so my apologies, yuhei.
27:57
Speaker 2: So tell us a little bit about Diva, what it does and who it's probably best for.
28:02
Speaker 1: So, oh man, so this is a very, very special synth.
28:04
Speaker 1: This is one of the synths that, in the sea of synthesizers so many synths it's the one that you really want to have because it covers the ground of just the emulation of old analog.
28:15
Speaker 1: There's a lot of synthesizers out there that'll claim we sound like this, we modeled this synthesizer, and maybe that's true, but there's none of them that sound like Diva.
28:24
Speaker 1: And the charm of this is that it's not just we're modeling just like a mini-mogue or a Jupiter or something like that.
28:30
Speaker 1: They modeled the individual modules, so there's like the oscillators of the Mogue, then you have like a filter of the MS-20.
28:37
Speaker 1: And you can kind of see what that sounds like, because we wouldn't really know what that would sound like either or otherwise.
28:42
Speaker 1: Right, and it just sounds good.
28:45
Speaker 1: Right, there's something that they do.
28:46
Speaker 1: Every single note that you press it's going to be slightly, a little bit different and the argument can't be made, right, we can do that in any other synth.
28:52
Speaker 1: It's like.
28:52
Speaker 1: Sure you could, but you don't have to.
28:54
Speaker 1: Indeed, it's just set up that way and it sounds huge, it just sounds rich, or something about how they make that synthesizer, but it does come with a little extra CPU cost.
29:02
Speaker 1: But they did do the multi-core feature on there to kind of help with that.
29:07
Speaker 2: But it's good man, so it's emulating classic synths classic analog synths.
29:12
Speaker 1: Yeah, and that's the cool part, like I'm a big fan of the MS-20 from Korg and that filter is really really good.
29:17
Speaker 1: And then you have the oscillators of that and then there's a little special stuff in that one.
29:20
Speaker 1: So if you were to dial up the MS-20 oscillators and if you put the volume of the oscillators a little bit lower, maybe like on one or two, and then start cranking the peak not resonance, but the peak right and do some filter cut-offs, you're going to get a much different tonality than you would have had in the oscillators, full volume.
29:36
Speaker 1: So there's those little subtleties in there.
29:37
Speaker 1: That's really cool about it.
29:38
Speaker 1: Okay, all right.
29:39
Speaker 1: So that's Diva.
29:40
Speaker 1: Tell us about Hive or Hive 2.
29:42
Speaker 1: Oh man, another love of mine.
29:44
Speaker 1: So that's also by Yuhi.
29:45
Speaker 1: And the reason dude I used that one almost is much, if not more, than pigments.
29:50
Speaker 1: And there's a couple reasons.
29:51
Speaker 1: One is just it sounds very, very good Low CPU, so I can have 100 instances of of hive in my set in my session, right, if I'm listening back, I'm like okay, maybe I need like a whoosh, whoosh, being being being some weird crazy sound like okay, load up hive, do the modulation at it.
30:07
Speaker 1: It's done.
30:07
Speaker 1: I can keep continuing on with the track, because there's two hats that we wear.
30:10
Speaker 1: Right, there's the producing have writing a track and there's like oh, now I have to sound design right and so hive kind of narrows that gap so you still have the energy and the excitement to keep writing your track while you still throw us on the cool insider track and you listen to it back and then that's in there and then you kind of feed off that and you feel more inspired and it kind of just it rolls off and everything's right on the front page.
30:29
Speaker 1: It's easy to access.
30:29
Speaker 1: You're not going to be like in menus and menus and menus and stuff like that.
30:32
Speaker 1: If you want to have some crazy features, there are advanced stuff under the hood.
30:35
Speaker 1: Right there's hidden features all over the hive so you could go a little bit deeper if you want to.
30:39
Speaker 1: But it's quick, it sounds good and it's super CPU efficient.
30:43
Speaker 2: That's really the main takeaway, I think Gotcha, and it's not like diva in that it is an emulator, it's more of a kind of for a modern sound right and that kind of thing.
30:53
Speaker 1: Yeah, and it does have a couple synth engines right.
30:55
Speaker 1: You have like the clean, the normal and then the dirty, which changes the sound, like you have a diode filter for the dirty and then you have different.
31:02
Speaker 1: It's almost like a three synthesizers and one.
31:04
Speaker 1: I guess you could say you can make a whole patch in a certain synth engine and then think what does this sound like in dirty?
31:09
Speaker 1: And you switch it over like oh, that's kind of cool.
31:11
Speaker 2: So you kind of have three patches every time you make one, if that makes any sense, okay yeah, as far as beginner friendly and let's back up to diva is on a scale of, I don't know, one to three, how beginner friendly is diva with, with one being totally beginner friendly and three being probably more advanced.
31:30
Speaker 1: That's an um and that's an interesting one, because so diva, when you first kind of look at it you think, okay, this seems pretty simple and like once you learn it and you kind of get in your brain like, oh yeah, this thing is very it's almost too simplistic, but that's kind of the charm of it.
31:43
Speaker 1: But when you first approaching it you're like, oh, my god, what is this?
31:46
Speaker 1: And I hear that a lot of people are like dude, I've been trying to use diva for a while and like I don't get some of these settings and they kind of feel like they get stuck.
31:53
Speaker 1: But they went through the whole course of it and they're like, okay, now I feel like I'm comfortable with it and I bet now they look at diva with different eyes.
31:58
Speaker 1: They say, oh right, what was I so scared about?
32:00
Speaker 1: You know, because it is simplistic at the end of the day.
32:03
Speaker 1: But once you kind of get down to it, there's not really.
32:06
Speaker 1: You don't really see the modulations as much.
32:08
Speaker 1: You know, it's not as modern UI as as we have now.
32:11
Speaker 2: Right, yeah, I guess I should probably for me.
32:15
Speaker 2: How I define beginner-friendly is in a couple of things.
32:18
Speaker 2: First of all is the UI.
32:19
Speaker 2: Do the UI make your eyes bleed just on opening?
32:22
Speaker 2: I'm looking at you like massive.
32:24
Speaker 2: Every time I open up massive, I'm like and closed, yeah.
32:28
Speaker 2: I get totally overwhelmed also with with zebra.
32:30
Speaker 2: We'll come back to zebra, oh yeah.
32:33
Speaker 2: But when you open up, like Omnisphere, for example, it's like, oh yeah.
32:37
Speaker 2: Omnisphere you start yeah, it's super clean.
32:39
Speaker 2: And so there's the kind of the overall UI and the the preset support, like beginner-friendly preset, okay, so hive, how beginner-friendly would that be based off of?
32:51
Speaker 2: You know, ui and pre preset support, the I think it's.
32:57
Speaker 1: It's a little bit more difficult than I would say, some of the more.
32:59
Speaker 1: I don't want to say modern, but UI does interfaces differently right, like one if you're, if you're beginning, you're approaching it.
33:06
Speaker 1: It kind of might not make sense at first, but then, once you kind of break through that barrier and it starts to make sense and you feel comfortable, you're like okay, this, I feel comfortable, I think that they did it right.
33:14
Speaker 1: You know what I mean it's kind of one of those kind of aspects, I guess yep, all right.
33:18
Speaker 2: Next synth serum.
33:20
Speaker 2: What, what, what is serum do really really well?
33:23
Speaker 2: What are some of the challenges?
33:25
Speaker 2: And how beginner-friendly would you?
33:26
Speaker 2: Would you say it is?
33:28
Speaker 1: see what's funny about that.
33:29
Speaker 1: That's one of the first courses I started was using serum, kind of showing just sound design, because it was just so good at showing that right.
33:35
Speaker 1: So when serum came on the market there was really what massive that was competing with it.
33:39
Speaker 1: I mean, that was kind of like the main thing.
33:41
Speaker 1: The serum comes out and it's like, okay, the game's changed.
33:43
Speaker 1: So everybody kind of gravitated towards serum, and for good reason.
33:45
Speaker 1: Right, it sounded great and it's still still does.
33:48
Speaker 1: It's still good to this day.
33:49
Speaker 1: But it's easy to use and we can see what we're doing.
33:52
Speaker 1: If we want to see this modulation ring going on the filter cutoff, you know it's easy to change an LFO like we're talking about earlier, right, so those oscillate positive and negative, for, like, we don't want our filter to go positive, negative, we just want to go positive, right, we just want to kind of go one direction.
34:04
Speaker 1: It's easy to change that little quick command key and click on the mouse and boom, it changes that and it would just set up in a way that I think Steve saw this as well.
34:12
Speaker 1: He's like this is kind of how sound design should be approached and a lot of other manufacturers kind of saw hey, that's a good idea, steve, and they kind of almost adapted that kind of modulation workflow because it works and it's great.
34:23
Speaker 1: I mean see them still huge.
34:26
Speaker 2: Yeah, and serum.
34:26
Speaker 2: I have serum because I bought it like rent to own and so that's a really, that's really kind of forward thinking.
34:32
Speaker 2: I think you know retail, retail strategy, it's good with a 10 bucks a month or something like that.
34:37
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
34:38
Speaker 2: And then, like, I got it through splice and so I didn't use it for a long time, I paused it and I picked it back up later and, yeah, I mean I paid full price.
34:46
Speaker 2: It wasn't on a discount, but I also basically had an interest right there, that's.
34:50
Speaker 1: That's what I'm saying.
34:51
Speaker 1: Yeah, might as well, all right next up.
34:53
Speaker 2: You mentioned this, this synth a couple of times.
34:55
Speaker 2: Pigments and pigments is from Arturia.
34:57
Speaker 1: Yes, yeah, oh man that is, that synth has struck a chord in my heart that, no, I don't think any other one has really, I mean from us, depending on what we're doing, right, but that one is just a workhorse, it covers every single ground and when that thing came out, I was like, okay, this looks really cool.
35:13
Speaker 1: It's very pigmenty, right, it's very bright colors, and that's when one thing kind of brings you in there's all these colors and modulation, the windows, like this is interesting, and I bought it instantly.
35:21
Speaker 1: And I got this and I was like, oh, this is really cool, read the manual, like front to back, lot, right, read it again, read it again, read it again.
35:28
Speaker 1: And it does so much.
35:30
Speaker 1: And then they came out with two and then three and then 3.5, and now we're on four and it's insane how much they've packed into this synthesizer.
35:37
Speaker 1: It kind of just does everything that you really want it to do.
35:41
Speaker 1: And it, the interface, is probably, in my opinion, the best one out on the market right now.
35:45
Speaker 1: It's just so easy to drag and drop and the cool thing, you can even drag from a modulator onto a destination and before you even let go, you can see what it's already doing to kind of like hover over.
35:55
Speaker 1: Oh, it's doing that.
35:56
Speaker 1: It's moving the cutoff.
35:57
Speaker 1: Let's move it on this before you can kind try it.
36:00
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's.
36:00
Speaker 1: There's all those weird cool little features of pigments right there.
36:04
Speaker 1: It sounds so good there's.
36:05
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's a feature I didn't know I needed, let alone wanted, and.
36:09
Speaker 1: I know, right, you're like, yeah, that's it loaded up now.
36:11
Speaker 1: Let's see, let's check this.
36:12
Speaker 1: Oh, whoa, that's kind of cool, yeah very good.
36:14
Speaker 2: So on a scale of one to three, beginner, intermediate or advanced, how beginner friendly, would you say, pigments is?
36:21
Speaker 1: I'd say, very beginner friendly.
36:22
Speaker 1: That's one of those ones where they I don't know how they came up with this design, but if you're beginning to pick it up you can see, oh, this kind of makes sense.
36:29
Speaker 1: And then if you feel like you're an advanced sound designer, like this is pretty cool because it does have all the advanced stuff I want.
36:35
Speaker 1: So they've covered the ground from beginner to intermediate to advanced, I would say, and then you can kind of get into later stuff.
36:41
Speaker 1: If you want to, way deep down the road you can load a VCV rack and go nuts.
36:45
Speaker 2: But I mean that's another, that's a whole another story yeah, now obviously we could, we could go in and we could talk for a whole other hour just going down every synth made and I want to mention two more yeah, first of all Zebra, or Zebra if you're in the UK.
37:04
Speaker 2: Yeah, zebra.
37:06
Speaker 2: Who do you think is really that?
37:08
Speaker 2: That is for?
37:09
Speaker 2: What are some of its strengths, what are some of its challenges, and how beginner friendly would it be?
37:13
Speaker 1: well, the I guess the challenges are the interface, because everyone looks at like, oh my god, what is this?
37:17
Speaker 1: You get this big grid in the center with all these looks like an excel sheet and you're like, oh what, what is happening here?
37:23
Speaker 1: Right are you?
37:23
Speaker 1: Are you talking about me?
37:24
Speaker 1: Because that is exactly.
37:26
Speaker 2: I'm like what do I do right?
37:27
Speaker 2: Load up a patch and it looks like a flow chart for chemistry good like making a sense out of that, just wires going to that one.
37:34
Speaker 1: Yeah, exactly, no, I get it.
37:36
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's the, that's the.
37:37
Speaker 1: That's a hard part, I guess, about that one, but with what it can do, you kind of it kind of does require that complexity.
37:43
Speaker 1: So one thing that's really cool about that one is the hz version, right, so that they made for Han Sima, right, that version is way cool because they added the diva features in there, there's like in lane compressors, which is really nice.
37:54
Speaker 1: And then plug mon made his own version of his skins that.
37:58
Speaker 1: I don't know how that guy makes this, but he makes these interfaces a little bit more approachable in my opinion.
38:02
Speaker 1: So that's kind of a little bit easier to look, to approach zebra.
38:07
Speaker 1: And that's a synth for someone who probably has spent a while first in sound design or synthesizers and you're kind of outgrowing certain things for certain occasions.
38:15
Speaker 1: And then you go to zebra and you say, like you have, it is a workshop, right, is a huge playground, I guess, of sound design.
38:22
Speaker 1: Yeah, you have all these different modules and lanes, like the course I finished.
38:26
Speaker 1: Man, I think it can't play 38 videos, which was a lot of the holy crap.
38:30
Speaker 1: This is a lot to cover.
38:31
Speaker 1: There's every little module in there.
38:33
Speaker 1: What all the stuff in the modules do?
38:34
Speaker 1: You have a lot of filters.
38:36
Speaker 1: I mean just all the different, different modules.
38:38
Speaker 1: There's different filter modules with different filters inside those modules and it's like it gets super in depth but you can do almost anything.
38:44
Speaker 1: That sounds really good.
38:46
Speaker 1: That's the thing with you he all of their synthesizers.
38:48
Speaker 1: There's something about if you load one up, you put up a solid wave.
38:51
Speaker 1: Maybe put some unison on.
38:52
Speaker 1: You're like holy crap, they just.
38:54
Speaker 1: And then how they make filters.
38:55
Speaker 1: It's mind-blowing.
38:57
Speaker 2: Yeah, and I have found Zebra is relatively lightweight, yeah, oddly enough, yes, it is yeah for what it does, especially compared to like Omnisphere, which can really start choking it down.
39:08
Speaker 1: Oh yeah.
39:09
Speaker 2: And as much as I want to talk about Omnisphere, the last one I want to talk about is Vital.
39:14
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, Vital is unique on our list because Vital is a free download right.
39:19
Speaker 2: Isn't it Vital free, or what?
39:21
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's free.
39:22
Speaker 1: You can purchase the full version, which it doesn't really change the features, to get presets and different other stuff with it, which is what I did, because I kind of love supporting this stuff, like for Sierra, for example, right, steve that made this and you have Matt that makes Vital and it's cool to support that right, and it's a huge undertake to build a synthesizer, right, I've done a little bit of coding and a little bit of trying to get a plug-in out the ground and, man, it is a lot, it's a lot of work and that's just like a game plug-in for me to make an entire synthesizer with different oscillators, the math behind that, the filters how do you have the math for the filters?
39:54
Speaker 1: I have, like, filter books and books and books and it gets crazy.
39:57
Speaker 1: It looks like I don't know inscriptions with math and it looks crazy.
40:01
Speaker 1: Man, it's hard to make sense or heads and tails of that.
40:03
Speaker 1: So if someone makes that on themselves, man, that's impressive.
40:08
Speaker 2: So that's right.
40:09
Speaker 2: Yeah, I'm going to let them do that.
40:10
Speaker 2: That is not mine to do, absolutely.
40:12
Speaker 1: And the interface is great.
40:13
Speaker 1: One thing that I think is really cool about that is the high FPS right.
40:16
Speaker 1: The frames move so quickly in Vital that it's kind of almost pleasing to look at and it's similar to the structure like how a serum looks right.
40:26
Speaker 1: You have like the similar tabs at the top, the oscillators right, and then they go into the filter, which is kind of just basic synthesis in general.
40:31
Speaker 1: But it's an interface that I think is approachable for beginners.
40:34
Speaker 1: So if someone's like I want to try out sound design, I kind of want to dabble in my feet.
40:37
Speaker 1: I don't really want to spend money at the moment.
40:38
Speaker 1: A lot of people will kind of gravitate towards that right, so you don't have to pay for it.
40:42
Speaker 1: But even now there's a lot of free stuff out there.
40:44
Speaker 1: But there's a lot of support for Vital too.
40:46
Speaker 1: It took on a huge user base for a while.
40:49
Speaker 1: So I mean there's a lot of presets, a lot of content, a lot of people teaching it, a lot of people showing how to use it.
40:55
Speaker 2: Yeah, and I think that's really important.
40:56
Speaker 2: I think if you're trying to decide kind of what is going to be my synth, or at least where is my yard of synths that I want to use Like, for me it's Omnisphere, it's Zebra and it's a little bit of serum, just because I didn't want to go too far and I really wanted to kind of pour into a handful of synths.
41:20
Speaker 2: But one of the determining factors for me was obviously ease of use, stability of the company.
41:28
Speaker 1: Absolutely.
41:31
Speaker 2: And how supported is it?
41:32
Speaker 2: I mean, you go type into YouTube like make a pad in Omnisphere, you're going to get a ton of things.
41:39
Speaker 2: You make a wobble base in serum, you're going to get tons of support.
41:45
Speaker 2: Oh my god, yes, yeah, oh my gosh.
41:47
Speaker 2: Go back 10 years and massive and that kind of thing.
41:50
Speaker 2: But the third party support, whether it's YouTube channels or whether it's presets and I want to change gears a little bit and talk about presets, because I know that you make your own presets and we'll have links to your store and everything.
42:08
Speaker 2: And again, your YouTube channel is fantastic.
42:10
Speaker 2: You're kind of giving it all away out there on YouTube.
42:13
Speaker 1: Yeah, I try to do a half and half.
42:14
Speaker 1: I don't hold everything behind a paywall.
42:17
Speaker 1: So every week it's like people will say, ok, what synth do we want to use?
42:20
Speaker 1: And all these patches are free, absolutely, you can use them if you want.
42:24
Speaker 1: You could do whatever you want with them, but you can also learn from them.
42:27
Speaker 1: That's kind of the goal.
42:28
Speaker 1: So if someone's following along and this happens quite often, actually they're like I followed along and it doesn't sound the same.
42:34
Speaker 1: So there's the link to the actual presets so they can look at those side by side and like, oh OK, maybe this knob was 0.2 off or something which could change everything.
42:41
Speaker 1: So that's another reason to be out there.
42:44
Speaker 1: And then the preset packs.
42:45
Speaker 1: The thing that my argument for the whole thing is that what bothered me is when I would be searching for different packs of different stuff that I would like, because I've done that as well right Before.
42:55
Speaker 1: I was like, ok, I can make what I want to make.
42:56
Speaker 1: I would go search out for different things and that's fine.
42:58
Speaker 1: But the problem I ran into was here's this pack, the whatever genre, whatever style it is.
43:04
Speaker 1: Here's like 300, 200, whatever is presets.
43:06
Speaker 1: I'm like, oh wow, this is almost all I need.
43:08
Speaker 1: And then you go through them once you buy it and you're like, ok, this sucks, this sucks, this sucks.
43:12
Speaker 1: Oh, that one's cool, I'll favorite that one.
43:13
Speaker 1: And at the end of the day it's like I have five or six, maybe, presets that I like.
43:17
Speaker 1: And how many times can you use the same preset in a song or an album or something like that?
43:22
Speaker 1: Right, right.
43:24
Speaker 2: So that was the argument.
43:25
Speaker 2: For me, it was the preset pack and if you're watching or listening, you know what I'm about to say.
43:32
Speaker 2: I had Omnisphere because I know that that's like an industry standard Everybody should have it, and so it is great, but it didn't click for me and I'm like, ah, a little bit, of buyers are more Something like that.
43:44
Speaker 1: That's a thing that happens 500 bucks.
43:47
Speaker 2: But it wasn't until I got Matt Boudler's presets for Omnisphere that I realized, oh, this is what can be done with this, because Matt's one of the synth programmers that has worked with Hans Zimmer, like creating some of those zebra patches for Mr Zimmer.
44:07
Speaker 2: And so not only were they good packs, but I used the packs because with all these presets you can just kind of flip around the back and look at the parameters and see, oh, here's how he routed his modulation, here's how he routed his effects and here's how he used delays and all of that, and kind of used it as a master class to learn how to do this on my own.
44:32
Speaker 1: That's the best way to learn, I think sometimes, man, Because you see in real life that that's on the job learning right there.
44:38
Speaker 2: Yeah, and it's a little bit of reverse engineering and I don't really have it in me to release 400 Omnisphere patches I get tired just thinking about it.
44:48
Speaker 2: But using these presets not only to inspire you and to use in your own cues, but to kind of learn what can really be done by an expert like you who knows the synth inside and out.
45:04
Speaker 1: And that's kind of why I love pigments so much.
45:06
Speaker 1: Right, there's so many presets and supports for it.
45:09
Speaker 1: And then you find something you like and it's so easy to see what's going on.
45:12
Speaker 1: Right, if you're looking at a modular synth, good luck trying to deconstruct that.
45:16
Speaker 1: Right, you're like, ok, this cable.
45:17
Speaker 1: You're like oh, my god.
45:18
Speaker 1: And then halfway through it you're like I was looking at the wrong cable.
45:20
Speaker 1: You have to start all over again.
45:21
Speaker 1: So it's kind of discouraging.
45:24
Speaker 2: Or they bring in their own samples.
45:25
Speaker 2: You know what I mean.
45:26
Speaker 2: I sample this crane that was outside of my office building in downtown New York.
45:32
Speaker 2: You're like, OK, that's great.
45:34
Speaker 1: But I don't have it, which is one of the reasons.
45:36
Speaker 2: Yeah, one of the things I love about Matt's presets is it's all stock Omnosphere, which means the installs are super light.
45:43
Speaker 2: But yeah, using presets to inspire and to kind of reverse engineer and learn.
45:51
Speaker 2: And for your preset packs and again we're going to have a link to that it is johnaudiojonaudiogumrocom.
45:57
Speaker 2: So if you want to help support John and obviously go and subscribe to his channel, what are you doing?
46:02
Speaker 2: Come?
46:03
Speaker 1: on down.
46:06
Speaker 2: But did your preset packs come out of your daily make three sets presets every single day and at the end of a month you're like, hey, I've got some presets I can sell.
46:17
Speaker 1: I haven't really done that for a while now.
46:19
Speaker 1: That's when I really started to learn different synthesizers, that I just really wanted to get to know every little feature about what I try to do and if anybody's made preset packs out there, you'll kind of know the struggle.
46:29
Speaker 1: Right, what do you make it about?
46:31
Speaker 1: What's the theme?
46:32
Speaker 1: Right, because you don't want to have just like here's cool 10 sounds I made in my basement at two in the morning, like that'll be $3.
46:37
Speaker 1: Yeah, like in, how do you like tell people what it is right, so you have to have some kind of Some kind of theme to a right.
46:43
Speaker 1: Like when the ones I did, I watched silent hill, I'm like, oh man, I like this movie, I like the soundtrack.
46:47
Speaker 1: So I created most, recreated most of the sounds that are in that movie and silent chills, by the way, you know.
46:54
Speaker 2: No, I have to be a little bit of a bit but yeah, it was inspired from that movie.
46:58
Speaker 1: And then, yeah, you can have to have this theme.
47:01
Speaker 1: And that's the hard part is sticking to this Idea of what this is supposed to be like.
47:05
Speaker 1: They have to all be good, right?
47:06
Speaker 1: You can't I can't, with a good conscience, sleep at night knowing here's like 500 presets that like I just made 20 from one and just change a few knobs and resaved as another one because I've caught people doing that and that's dishonest right now like one One sound and like okay, this is, I don't know, crazy pad one.
47:22
Speaker 1: And then they like change the filter a little bit, maybe change the envelope of the amplitude, save as number two.
47:27
Speaker 1: I'm like that.
47:28
Speaker 1: You can't do that, that's yeah come on.
47:31
Speaker 2: Well, yeah, you get.
47:31
Speaker 2: You'll.
47:32
Speaker 2: Only you'll get the sale once you won't get the sale right that's.
47:35
Speaker 1: That's the thing.
47:35
Speaker 1: And all the macros have to actually work that to have a purpose behind them.
47:39
Speaker 1: Right can't have empty macros.
47:41
Speaker 2: Yeah, now macros, just again.
47:42
Speaker 2: I'm just calling out terminology.
47:45
Speaker 2: Macros would be using one knob or one interface option or a element to control multiple things at once.
47:55
Speaker 1: Yeah, so if you have, for example, like four or five different effects on something and you're like I want to not just to kind of have a wet and dry of everything, right, so no effects, all effects, you can easily do that and that's generally what I do for my patches, right?
48:06
Speaker 1: If someone Like I like the sound, but I don't like the delays, the effects of something, I just want to like use my own stuff, you can just turn them off and use your own effects, which makes it so much easier instead of like going through, okay, I have to do, turn that off.
48:15
Speaker 1: Some people might not know where to look.
48:17
Speaker 1: So that's why the knobs right on the front of the interface.
48:20
Speaker 1: You can just turn them off or just have all these different parameters moving at once.
48:24
Speaker 1: Have to filter, cut off some, move that also like pushes FM at the same time, and that's on one knob.
48:28
Speaker 1: So I mean, got you.
48:29
Speaker 1: That's kind of where those come from.
48:30
Speaker 1: There should be a purpose and intention behind those.
48:32
Speaker 2: Yeah, and I know that was something that massive did early.
48:36
Speaker 2: I mean, that was kind of one of its early claim to fame.
48:38
Speaker 2: Claims to fame was you know, hey, we have macros and we have these macro buttons and you can control multiple parameters at once.
48:44
Speaker 2: But but then it got kind of lapped by a bunch of other sense that came out afterwards.
48:50
Speaker 1: Yes, it did yeah, and yeah, those macros use them.
48:52
Speaker 1: They're there for a reason.
48:52
Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean that's.
48:54
Speaker 1: I just wish there's more in pigments.
48:55
Speaker 1: That's my only kind of like downside, like I wish I wish there was like eight or 16 or something like that.
49:01
Speaker 2: Pigments what version are they on for for right now?
49:03
Speaker 2: Yeah, pigments five it's gonna.
49:05
Speaker 2: I wait, I'm speaking it into existence.
49:07
Speaker 2: I hope so.
49:07
Speaker 2: Well, like I mentioned, john has a stellar YouTube channel and if you're, if you're watching this right now and you also subscribe to John, you probably Didn't know what he looked like.
49:21
Speaker 2: I know I didn't surprise.
49:22
Speaker 2: I just want, I just want to clarify you.
49:25
Speaker 2: You don't not show your face on the, on your YouTube channel, because you're you're not in the witness protection program or thing like that.
49:33
Speaker 2: You have a.
49:33
Speaker 2: You have a reason for, for not showing your face, right yeah, there's a couple reasons there's.
49:37
Speaker 1: Also, I don't find a reason to have my face covering a certain parameter, that the parameters more important than my face at the end of the day.
49:43
Speaker 1: Right, we're not going to look, hey, we're gonna watch how to do this I guess baseball, for example.
49:47
Speaker 1: Right, and see what John looks like, that's kind of right.
49:51
Speaker 1: I mean, here you go.
49:52
Speaker 1: But I mean that at the end of the day, when I would watch different videos and tutorials, when I was learning a certain thing, there's a lot of times when this guy's like, yeah, maybe put your mouse over here and go to this menu, and the mouse goes right underneath his face.
50:03
Speaker 1: My god, dang it, dude.
50:05
Speaker 1: Not helping yeah, and like I'm now like okay, and I'm looking at the comments and people like I can't see because of his face, like God, that's why is your face there?
50:11
Speaker 1: Sometimes people do it good and that's fine, but it's just I don't.
50:15
Speaker 1: To me it's distracting.
50:16
Speaker 1: It's another thing to think about.
50:17
Speaker 1: Is my hair good?
50:18
Speaker 1: Is the lighting good?
50:19
Speaker 1: Like it sounds?
50:19
Speaker 2: about sound, it's about audio, it's about since, right, it's not about John's face, face no, I'm with you when I do all my live streams and everything, especially because I do more long form teaching.
50:30
Speaker 2: You know being able to be on camera is pretty important and you know I've spent enough money on cameras and lights.
50:35
Speaker 2: But I have set up my logic template so that the camera fits in in a spot in the UI.
50:44
Speaker 2: I don't cover up anything and even if I do need to.
50:49
Speaker 2: I have a stream deck and I can take my camera away and I've done that like if I have to go to our left corner, like go to file preferences, and I'll actually turn my camera off, but I think, I think, I think I got conscious about that, though.
51:00
Speaker 1: I mean, a lot of people aren't just like what are we doing, right?
51:03
Speaker 2: well, I've just, like you, have watched those videos.
51:05
Speaker 2: I'm like dude, your face is in the way, especially if it's like lower right hand corner, like you are covering up the thing that I'm here to see and delete or unsubscribe or that's the hardest part.
51:16
Speaker 1: yeah, I'm like I can't and this is another thing to put in the video after edit the video and do this, and it's like I just yeah, but what I'm not going to do is unsubscribe from your channel again if you are watching this or listening to you, you owe it to yourself.
51:30
Speaker 2: If you're even remotely interested in this guy one of the best in the business I strongly encourage you To check out John audio and we'll have the links in in our show notes and in the description.
51:41
Speaker 2: John, thank you so much for letting me just kind of pick your brain about all same things Pick away, missus yeah, it's not as big and scary as maybe you think it is.
51:51
Speaker 2: And if you want to learn more, than go subscribe to John and get some of us, get some of us sample packs.
51:57
Speaker 2: He's just, you know, a working Schmo, just like me and just like You're getting tonight right, so toss a coin to your synth programmer.
52:06
Speaker 1: Yeah, and you know it's.
52:07
Speaker 1: It's a.
52:08
Speaker 1: I get this quite often when we go through courses.
52:11
Speaker 1: I know it's like hey, I'm John, we just technical stuff.
52:13
Speaker 1: It's like you can slow the video down.
52:15
Speaker 1: I know I talk fast, I've gotten that a lot, so I'm sure everyone's thinking that just got it just for your ramble.
52:19
Speaker 1: Like I know I try to slow down and also back it up.
52:22
Speaker 2: Back it up.
52:22
Speaker 2: You can pause it there you go back.
52:26
Speaker 2: Thank you.
52:26
Speaker 2: Thank you so much for joining me.
52:28
Speaker 2: Thanks for having me, man.
52:29
Speaker 2: This is really awesome.
52:29
Speaker 2: Once again, a huge word of thanks to John for joining me on the podcast today and of course, we're going to have his links in the description, so please be sure to check those out.
52:38
Speaker 2: And also On February 26 at 4pm Eastern for our family and friends subscribers, john's going to be joining us for a live workshop where he's going to be showing us how to create tension patches from scratch using the free vital software since.
52:56
Speaker 2: So you definitely want to join us again for our friends and family subscribers, february 26 at 4pm Eastern, john's going to be joining us and we would love to have you.
53:06
Speaker 2: Why don't you join us?
53:07
Speaker 2: But that is going to do it for me today.
53:09
Speaker 2: Again, a huge word of thanks to the family, friends and neighbor subscribers of 52 queues who Pay their actual real life money to keep all of this happening.
53:18
Speaker 2: You'll notice we didn't have any embedded ads for meal plans or plugins or earbuds or anything like that, and the reason that is is because we are supported by you.
53:27
Speaker 2: So if that's something that you want to help out with, subscribe.
53:31
Speaker 2: Subscription start at around four bucks a month and plus you get all of the perks I mentioned earlier than head over to 52 queues dot com and join us and you definitely want to join us next week where we are having our first Ready for sync live.
53:46
Speaker 2: That is going to be next Thursday at 4pm Eastern live right here on YouTube.
53:50
Speaker 2: I will be reviewing your queues live.
53:53
Speaker 2: So if you want to have your queue review, then head over to 52 queues dot com and submit your queue in the ready for sync live event there.
54:02
Speaker 2: But that is going to do it for me.
54:03
Speaker 2: Again, thank you for joining me.
54:05
Speaker 2: I hope you had a good week six and it is week six.
54:08
Speaker 2: I got confused at the beginning.
54:08
Speaker 2: I hope you had a good week six and I know that you're going to have an amazing week seven of two thousand and twenty four.
54:16
Speaker 2: How do I know that, friends?
54:17
Speaker 2: Because I know, trust and believe that the universe has amazing plans just for you.
54:23
Speaker 2: Until next time, peace.
54:25
Speaker 2: The fifty two queues podcast.
54:28
Speaker 2: Copyright.
54:29
Speaker 2: Two thousand twenty four eighty eight studios.
54:32
Speaker 2: The music played on the podcast is copyright of their respective owners and is used with permission and for educational purposes only.
54:38
Speaker 2: For more information, including joining the community or becoming a member.
54:41
Speaker 2: Subscriber of fifty two queues.
54:43
Speaker 2: Head over to fifty two queues dot com.