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Sound Design: Pads and Pianos

Lesson 9 from: Ableton Tips and Tricks

Andrew Luck

Sound Design: Pads and Pianos

Lesson 9 from: Ableton Tips and Tricks

Andrew Luck

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Lesson Info

9. Sound Design: Pads and Pianos

Lesson Info

Sound Design: Pads and Pianos

Gonna look att analog next, which is basically digital model of of the physical circuits of an analog synthesizer. It's not analog, isn't designed to, uh, emulate a specific, uh, a specific analytics synthesizer. Um, they just wanted to emulate the circuits and sort of designed something new that did exactly what they want, so I will drop analog in there and I'm gonna set up I'm going to go back to my normal scale and the number is going toe, um, had some chords here actually just gonna hold that down can't hear it yet because it's not so load, and I'm just creating an eight bar loop of my sound, so I'm gonna solo that now, it's a little bit low of an active I can fix that. I'm just going to go into the grid and I'll highlight all notes with command a and if I shift and a combination of the op arrow that will bring me up one octave, so what I wanted, I just wanted to sustained cord while I create while I shaped the sound, so I'm just gonna run track and just like operator there's, some...

different routing algorithms, and I'll actually add in some some noise, uh, noise also later well, there's, basically an analog there's two there's two oscillators that create, uh tones like saw shaped square and I believe this one is uh like our random or noise uh yeah that would be a white noise so right now I've got a ah square and a sign and I also have the noise oscillator going thiss noise oscillators really cool though it sounds really good and you can actually change the color for the sort of brightness with it and it's really smooth so if I if you go into the separate oscillators you can actually control here's a little pitch envelope if I wanted to control the volume of of are the amplitude of uh are they are they are the attack decay and sustaining a release on an analog I'll go if you want to go into the amplification section right now that's pretty wonky let's get a lot of pads have really soft beginning this was like the inside is really like smooth and um so I'll go over to my second amp a little bit so has these these pitch envelopes and uh what it's designed to sort of help emulate the analog drift that you get sometimes there's also some some other detaining and the oscillators here sort of find detaining something that way right now the filters are independent in this rotting I'm going to start this to slave so that I can control both of them with one dialogue residents a little bit just you can play with the envelope of the filter go back in that envelope and lengthen their think then that release of these oscillator a little much someone I do on the surge in a minute change it off format filter which gives us that some frequencies and that sort of vocally throaty range murron cosmic dreamscape land we're entering it way not putting into sleep too much yet so um starting to get a pad sound that is comparable and I might even throw another filter on top of this to shape it even more because that's a lot of sound that's like thick soundscape and you can do that quite easily with uh with some of the audio effect the auto felt here just you can use so one of my favorite effects with with pads is this sort of envelope of the opening filter was that the onset of that and just kind of eases and really nice and it it's anticipation building and has this really kind of suspenseful and interesting revealed to it and so that's a really cool way when you're dealing tio play with a ah a pad sound whenever you're bringing it into the mix okay, so we've talked about noise and saw attacking release you can also get sort of like a funk uh vibrato sound meaning sort of wavering pitch um you can also get a tremolo meaning like a wavering volume dynamic with like a filter and you can delay the filter but we're going to take a look there's actually a va broadest setting an analog that we can use so all of this player cord I'm actually going to start over because we've I'm just going to bring in a different analog drop it on top of that other one and then there's of a broader delay s o a lot of like old funk cords will hit and and then the onset of the va bravado will come on after it's been playing for like sort of that ray parker jr ghostbusters thing happening so you can get that waiver pit with pitch you can also do that with uh a pitch lfo and by adjusting the the onset of the attack and a soft scents like operator to uh same kind of thing we talked about the low past filter and then let's let's now that let's say I'm going to go back so command z back to our original pad since that we made and I'm going to try out some of these different rhythms that was you really quiet I might choose that wantinto work with it sort of you somewhere subtracted reduction another shelter or something like that pretty wild sounds there okay so uh another sound the operator does really well and it's one of the new instruments is eyes called electric now uh I've got a ah sequence here with some electric on it and we'll just have a listen to that. The theme of the electric soft senses ah really simple electric piano emulator basically there's melon for damper pickup and a global section for serve volume and the voicing on pitch benanti ten it's there's not much more to it than that um and I mean you can get a lot of different creation of color and but it's so easy and quick to work with that I feel like, uh you know, the loading the presets is almost a waste of time you can pretty much just get get whatever you want like right away with it. So um it's just such a nice down though, and I'm really I'm really happy that operator that labels and added this thing so um really actually let's let's just start from scratch with one and by default it sounds nice it's just it's great coming out of the gate actually, I think that it's pretty much the different sound on the the version I'm using I just had added some filtered elaine reverb tio kind of make it a little more soft and and spacey you know, so I could do that s o this chord progressions basically five cords and it's kind of like a verse chorus thing right now and it pretty much does the trick I mean, you can go in and you can adjust how hard the mallet or the stiffness of the malot the force and, you know, just depending on whatever else is in your mix that's, you know, you come in here. They're like, ok, there's, not a lot of grit in this song. I'll had some noise to this electric piano on make your choices like that. Yes, electroshock is awesome. So, um, you can also put all kinds of distortion on and, uh, you know, obviously reverb and filters like we did here, and it sounds really great what's. So saturate err on it real quick. I'm going to bring down the return effects, those river bs and ah so it's an ala clip, a hard on, almost sounds like wait doesn't really seem like a piano. Get some wild sounds. There are audio filter on that automate the envelope that could be a you could make a baseline with that, no problem, and so you, khun, you know, if you expand it with some effects, you can take it a lot of places fast.

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