Lessons

Lesson Info

Sound Design Techniques Part 2

So essentially what the point of what I'm doing this for is maybe you are searching around for sounds and as great as the tagging system inside of machine is maybe you're just not finding what you need exactly there or maybe you do wanna have a little bit of your own stamp on the song you can take very mano centered sounds and very thin sounds and make them organically huge very fast and at the same time by using similar effects to what you're affecting when your drones you can make it all kind of meshed together like if you were using a bit of rez accord to kind of beef this baseline underneath of this this thiss drum set and you use it in the similar way on the pad sound then they kind of sound like they're from the same world, you know, it doesn't sound like you're taking this african bongo and then putting it in the city, you know, next to these other you know, guitars or what iran and you're like, wait a second doesn't quite match, but if you keep it all together it sounds like it...

's from the same world, you know what I mean is it sounds cohesive yeah, so what we can do from here is I'm going tio start affecting these things in a little bit of a different coming from a different angle uh this is this is kind of interesting so let me let me actually let this run for a second while I'm grabbing the sound so that I know what I want okay, so what I'm about to do is let me turn this off for a second is I'm setting up a kind of a performance group and but what I'm the reason why I'm doing it is because maybe you don't have access to turntables maybe didn't have access tio you know, all kinds of extra gear but you want to start adding some of those kind of more performance based ideas so so what I can do is I have inside of machine these air factory sounds these aren't anything you know that you have to buy separately so I have this sound I'm going to duplicate this to a bunch of different pads, okay, so now I have all the same sound all right, I'm going tio adjust these up in a slightly different way from each other so one in five are going to be opposites, so pad five, I'm reversing, okay? Pad thirteen I'm reversing had to I'm reversing and we're had ten I'm reversing, ok? So I'm going to put these all on the same joke group and actually a very fast way of doing this is what we would all want select all okay and now when I go to pad mood right I'm going to get a choker one, so now they all cut, they will cut each other off, okay? Also because I have them set to select all I can adjust all their prolife knee at once I can adjust the eighty s are all at once, so now the longer I hold it down, the more of the sample I'm going to get and because I have select all said, I can also adjust my tune altogether, so so I'm going to just bring this group down a little bit, so mixes in I thought, so this this is essentially going to let me scratch over my beat, you know, without using turntables, so and you could still make that u s oh, yeah, I'll do that now, one of the things that we really didn't show with automation is had a lock and automation, right? So that shift and auto locks your automation so you don't have to hold him down while you're twisting because a lot of us have to heat ok, nobody else but how long we got to go if you want to do, like especially when you try to do a performance or like knock, he likes to turn to two knobs on his filter at the same time, so you know, having that so you know, it was with this beat running I can hit record and actually it's really important when you're doing this this little performance trick turn your great off ok set the pattern tio four bars and I'm just going I have auto right you know that it's locked because the pad will stay lit on it and I'm just going to play around with it the reason why I said it so a whole bunch of different pads like this is because if you were familiar with how a turntable ist scratch aa lot of times we'll do different techniques so there is scratching with twit als on dh flares and chirps and crab scratches you can do this because the pads are so sensitive on machine you can do the same techniques you can just kind of sugar it away like this and you'll get those effects how long you have your radius are is going toe decide it's good so I normally I would not keep a keyboard directly in front of you when you're doing because you might hit some stuff so hopefully I don't do that but let's check it out way have all kind of replacements returned tables I'm sorry djs but you know I pads we got pads would reverse samples you know I don't want to say we don't have a turntable you know I don't want to say that I'm sorry it's it's it's my friends back on the east case to create kickers crew and all these guys but yeah when you're stuck in a hotel room and you really want to scratch and you don't have turntables this is a great way to get around it now again getting back to making sure that everything sounds like it's together in the same world you can use similar effects that d j would use to make things kind of blend together so I had these sounds but they're very really pretty sharp on dh you know they don't sound perfect to scratching you can do you can go for deeper than just this you can of course get into velocity layering those samples s o you could have one sample that is like a long ah sound and then you know when you hit it lightly you know and so you khun experiment with it the whole point of this is that you can easily grab hold of these things and and go deep so flux somebody had a question colonel had a question online any finger finger drumming techniques and in this case I guess finger scratching techniques because it's a completely different like kinesthetic move toe like sure turning a knob and doing that at the right pace the same basic moving final so that gets how long did it take you to get that down and do you have any tips for well, let me just let me just say first okay? I have turned tables at home I do scratch terrible beat matching uh but you know, I yield to those better than may I have a lot of friends that are extremely good djs and I watch what they do and if you go online you can there's a bunch of really great youtube videos out there of famous guys you know, you know, d j shifty and you know if you check out d j q burt's videos you can watch how those guys use cross vader's and how they use the turntable watch their technique and kind of learn from that so nowadays there's a lot of taking a lot of techniques out there that you can learn from other people but when I'm doing it the main thing that I'm literally I came up with this technique last night in my room because I wanted to scratch and I couldn't scratch uh this this has been kind of around for a while on on order older beat machines like the npc actually a guy by the name I am I see kind of popularized it and shut off the delaware but you were limited by how you could control the the sound's cutting themselves off the way that when an npc would hit it and you would turn the two knob it would be either it would be in between the hits okay, so as I turned the knob I can I can actually affect it well like that which you couldn't really do when the npc this is kind of taking it to the next level by having so one sample is forward the other sample is reversed so it's just like on a record when you go forward with the record you have to pull it back eventually right? So you want to have your your opposite pads are going to be reversing and with that I find the best technique that I found in my few hours of playing with this is when you're hitting your end notes tweet your to knock down toe end because that's very similar to if on deejaying and I'm scratching my my last hits oftentimes will rub you know look, I'll slow it down a bit and it's very important to just kind of think musically how this person would play an instrument same with if you're playing your piano and you're playing a guitar a patch on piano you don't want to hit all the notes all at once on a keyboard. What you want to do is if it's a guitar a patch you want to kind of slowly hit the notes together you know to make a slightly rolling sound because when it gets horace plays guitar you don't hit all the strings at once you know, unless you're plucking it doesn't work that way it's it's a strumming motion which means the notes cascade it's the same idea here you know um and we can we can get into some more features on that later but I want to make the sound blend together a little bit so uh let's just go ahead and we're just going to load up a very simple um very simple river really and this is just going to kind of let things, uh, trail together a little bit and I'm using presets in here there's nothing wrong with using presets tweaking from there just a little bit so now we have like, a space that we're in and if you want to get more variation from that because the automation is again it's in relation to where your knob is, you can adjust your two knob without the automation knob on and you'll you'll be getting even more um more variety so just a very simple way to kind of use use your sounds in nontraditional ways machine is all about hands on and you are not going to be able to do this inside of, you know, adult without a controller without a lot of tedious mapping of automation is like it's so much more fun to do with this way that's what it boils down to yeah, I mean you're not having fun making music than you're doing it wrong, right? You know, that's the bottom line here much so again diving a little bit deeper into sounds so we've taken drums and turn them into singing drums. We have taken a single sound and made it spread out. Now we can take sounds and make them more percussive or less percussive. Eso let's, just load up and are we doing okay in the chat rooms? Okay, so what I'll do here is I'm just going to look for actually going to go back to the instruments inside of machine on let's take a mallet sound, and we'll just dragged that over here and again, there's multiple ways of working. Some people don't want to use the mouse to browse some people dio, too. May I used both equally? It really just depends on where my hand happens to fall down it. You know, when you get familiar with machine, you'll find that it was me. You'll find it all becomes second nature. There are also hot key key strokes that you can use on the keyboard. I tend to not use those attend to more use the keystrokes on the controller itself. So so very pretty sound, making everyone happy. Let's go and again, you're gonna destroy it? Yeah, I'm going to make it ugly because that's how I like that sound, just like you did what you said, yeah, and that's that that's the beautiful thing about this is now I'm airing more towards darker sounds but you can make sounds brighter you can mix sounds you know warm and fuzzy you can do whatever you want with them just if they're there bright and happy you know they probably won't be mine they'll probably be jews is shot out to richard london so uh transient master again and sustain is all the way down no there is a there's a green delight and met a verb before transient master ok so this is like this this drawn out sound because of those effects also but using the transit master and you can get this really like interesting sculpting of it and make it fit inside of your beat just right so I'm just going toe see I don't play piano that great but I wish I had a cool ipad app set up man I got one for you that's a zone today so I'm just going to lay down some some simple stuff let me ah let's set the pattern here and um and what was knox little shortcut for that shit hold was a shift in grid no, I don't I just do a quick planet just hold record uh that's that's so nice is just hold recorded I don't ever do that now and I like it I like it a lot so let's go ahead and just leave something like that we have this little sound and I can really make it fit exactly where I want to fit in my with that you can also adjust how how it comes in so it's a very percussive sound and it had a trail. Now I'm going to go the opposite route, ok? So now if I do it now in the street, so if you have delays and you've got re verbs and you've got all these different things on instead of having to go into each individual plug in and sculpt each individual plug ins tales to try to get where you want to pay, you can just ordered translate master on the end and affected from there and it's ten times faster that way, you know you don't have to worry about well, you know, is my beat delay going to ring out for too long? You know those kinds of things, so it is very powerful way of handling it. Also along with that, you can just start throwing your your filters that will duck um, let's actually do do it just like this, we'll go to effects and scared to a filter. So we have these different types of followers on dh just like j k showed earlier, when he was using one of the many controllers to make a step filter, you could do step filtering and you also did it with it with the step at it but you can also do that with enveloping inside of machine with its own with its own filter so I'm going to scroll through these precepts you can hear how the effect now I'm gonna I'm gonna let this sound ring out a little bit and I'm going to get it off okay with a filter so let's go ahead bring sustain up drop the attack down just a bit yeah and so we have the filter is actually chopping the end ofthe all right now we can affect that as well so now I'm making it more like a signed eat instead so if I take it back they're a sharp okay wait longer way could drop the filters you know so you could hear it coming now let's go ahead and die e actually make it go reversed so now is bringing it up waken dio sonia was stalking can you start train that? Can you do? You can have some society saying that. So if you press over on the controller you're going to go to your input sources when it sets a nun it's using the envelope off just the sound input and if you change that we can set that let's say we want to set that toe a one sound one which is the kick we can set it here another interesting thing about that is you can actually set it to a group up and then turned the filter on on the side chain and decide what frequency you want to make it side jean okay this is extremely powerful if you want to say set up compressors that air pumping one an entire group you can just say all right, well I knew that I want when that so it's not the first sub not not so I have sound one might be the same subwoofer right? But it might be pitched to all right so if it drops real low that's when I went my compressor to duck it and let that kick come through because it's such a low frequency I need it to vibrate the speakers and not people offer their booties right that's what you want to do, you want to use your your frequency and said it like, you know, eighty hurts or something you know something nice and low seventy hertz and then when when that frequency comes through that's when it's going to do it but anything else and if you're on the entire group and you're doing that you're you're picking out which frequency is actually triggering it so you could have you could trigger it from the snare sure from the high hat you could trigger by different because different sounds exist in different frequencies when they're overlapping you're going to get it triggering from different sounds anyway so if you got frequencies that are kind of overlapping exactly get really crazy stuff so another another really powerful toll inside of machine thiss kind of gets back tio what he was saying about finger drumming and how you're you're sculpting sounds with finger drumming so knock was showing snare rolls by using no trippin you can also use note repeat as a synthesis technique ok, this is kind of similar to how let's actually bring this over into its own group it's kind of similar to how um how green synth works ok, so now we have this snare right and we're gonna bring this group level down on if you pitch it me I'm not setting up right? Oh that's where I'm sorry I have to do it from here now because they changed it you know you concern what was a snare into a synthesizer just using note repeat look, I'm not even editing the sample at this point um thief and then of course you can play that out. You can adjust your timing on that, teo now before what we would use to do is we would go into sampling at it and you could adjust how small the sample wass and this is the same ideas as green synthesis at this point or even sculpting out a synthesizer so this wave right here if I loop this and let me actually uh where we had to get out of here and okay, so now I'm not in note repeat all right but I'm going to go into here and, uh that's good too soon we're going to turn loop on ah stern is the eighty s r e sample what that's why did you do it when you're in a bad mood and it just did the effective you know, this is a multi sample hit so it s o so when you're doing this the problem that I came into right now is that because it's a multi sample hit you can adjust loop links of each individual layer of a sample that particular snare hit depending on how hard you hit it will be different different samples okay, so I only did one I don't want to do that I want to just use one snare so let's just grab this near here and, uh that's perfect so now and I'm doing the same thing turn loop on and as I bring this forward now we're diving into the matrix so ah very useful technique with this and you can do this either with an ipad app or you can get any cheap guitar tuner you can use guitar rig there's lots of plug ins that will do is anything that combined pitch you can tune your sample your individual root note by just taking a guitar tuner and tune it all I don't have one in front of me right now. I'm not worried about it because I'm not going for a specific pitch, but watch what happens when we owe it's pretty close. So now I've turned a snare into what sounds kind of like a world, sir, on how you can take it in start and fixing it and that's exactly where I was heading with that. So we got that mind mill all right, so, uh, because I'm a big fan of knox squared, I'm gonna put ice on this, and I kind of like to tune my effects to the sounds that I'm that I'm sculpting says, sometimes you hold down the sound and you'll listen for when the harmonics kind of match up and play with it in that way. So now let's use, we're going to actually use some of the plug ins that come with machine because we haven't really touched on that a whole lot s o if I go into my browser here and I go to effects, I can drop. Drop this down, and now you can see that this is where the native instruments effects will lie. If you're using third party effects, you would click this and you would see a list of whatever other plug ins you have. So if you're using something like isa tobe alloy or you know something else, it would it would show up inside of this list if you believe the pri says, if you save the presets that's, right, but always save some presets. If you're working on something and you really like it, save your presets it it just makes it so much easier later on. So what I'm gonna do is let's grab a pit shift and kind of three d now, theo so there's that let's go back and use one of these external effects. So the other day, joe was using ambien pell, and I thought it sounded awesome bills today wasn't because before the road food gets me way so we could start getting these these really interesting characteristics it's a little bit too much for me. Oh, you know what? This is actually excellent example to show why we would put an effect on a different pad prison allows you to play it so let's do that, um what I'm going to do is go to a new pad and actually you can keep it inside of the same group so I'm going to go to a new pad inside of the same group all right and wait no, I can't do it for what I want to be oh that's right it's definitely with yes so where it says play uh some of these are already set up to be a middie playable effects and what I'm going to do now is just send uh the output of this pad output we're gonna go to h s one and now what I can do is I'm going to lay a quick pattern and then I'm going to go to each one, okay, so it's actually I'm gonna keep it on master first because I haven't set that up just yet so okay, so we have the pattern in there so that's going to be able to play now when I set up my routing output is going to h s one, okay? And when I hit play we're not hearing anything yet because I'm not triggering anything so let's bring up the plug and this is what the plug and looks like inside of machine so what I did there was I just double clicked on the plug in so that I can see it here and we could do that from the hardware as well uh but right now what I want to show is that if I hold this down basically the model bank is going to let me select different harmonics and we think that's how that's working but so obviously that's that's pretty a tunnel but but the president made the point of that is that what I'm doing is a mini controlled effect you want it on its own pad so that you can control is now when I record the middie of that so you get that movement of what you're controlling on that effect just by you know, mapping it out to your keys you know or by loading enough it's already going to be map to your keys and of course you can go inside of here if you click this this little edit symbol here it will allow you to get into the full version of your plug and this is something that's more specific to native instruments plug ins inside of machine but when you do this it was basically from really clean and nice to okay let's get under the hood and see what we can mess up and then of course you can so again with that you can you can kind of scroll through your presets you can start trying things out and you can have these patterns in here some plug ins will let you do cords you know, in them some plug ins armando based it really all depends on what you're using I mean, putting that on after the instrument and just putting on its own pad, uh, the effect the prison, because if it's on its own pad, you can control the middle like you can record the middie data off the actual keys like the keyboard, many data, if it's if it's as an insert after the sample or whatever that you're playing there's nothing to tell it what key you were pressing on the plug in itself. When you get that many more passion, many won't pass past that first that first slot, so if you want to, if you want to many control your your effects were, you know, like some effects like this, that can receive many and actually that's part of how the effects work, you want to put that on its own pad so that you could actually play it. Otherwise you could just you could just use it as a rebel regular effect, which you wouldn't be able to actually trigger. It wouldn't respond to any midi because it has to be on the first lot exactly so so, and it just makes it you're not always going to want to be playing the same newt's on the effect as what you are. Going to want to play on the instrument itself. So, for instance, in the case of something like the finger, where each key is essentially a chain of effects. It's not it's, not melodic. It's. You know, it's glitches and things. So you're triggering different functions off that effect just by pressing a key. So you might not want that to be the same keys that you're playing. One an instrument.