[Music] hey what's up everybody my name is Danzig Leonie and thank you very much for tuning in I have some really cool things planned for us today and I want to get started right away and so I figured we'd started day one right the basics the terminology and definitions that you absolutely need to know this is stuff that you can learn online and most audio engineering schools will teach you in the first week or so but you would be surprised and how many people in this industry just don't know the simplest stupidest things and they look like freaking morons alright it annoys the crap out of me but guess what that's not gonna be you you're gonna learn this stuff with me on this channel it's a beautiful thing so thank you very much for tuning in that just means you take your craft seriously and this is gonna be awesome for you so let's go ahead and dive right in the very first thing that you need to learn before anything else of course is what is the definition of the word sound now there's a lot of different definitions but this is the one I want you to memorize it is the brains interpretation of an auditory stimulus so let me explain sound pressure waves are what travel through the air when the sound pressure waves hit your ears go into your eardrum and then your brain receives that information that is sound and it isn't sound until your brain actually receives that information so to answer that lifelong question if a tree falls in the woods and no one is around to hear it does it make a sound and people have been arguing about this for a long time but now you know the answer right so when a tree falls in the woods yes it creates sound pressure waves and those waves will travel through the air and unless there is an ear to take it in and a brain to receive that signal then it isn't technically sound yes it is sound pressure waves but the answer to that is no if a tree falls in the woods and no one's around to hear it therefore there is no brain to perceive it then no it does not make a sound so pretty interesting stuff you can bring that up at your next party and see a few impressed people but chances are you might just sound like a nerd that's just what happens so let's take a look at this diagram right here this is a sine wave and it is a pure simple wave form there's seven characteristics to a wave form that we'll discuss in detail later but the first one I want to touch on is amplitude and amplitude as simple a good as it can be is volume the unit of measurement for amplitude is decibels right there it is important that you know this that it's abbreviated as lowercase D uppercase capital B main reason being is that this is actually named after Alexander Graham Bell back in the 20s when they were making our early telephones and so the B is Bell the deci is actually 1/10 of a bell so just kind of like senti meter is centi is 1/100 of a meter the deci is 1/10 of a bell but regardless all you need to know is decibels lowercase D capital B that is the unit of measurement for amplitude and amplitude is volume sound is just like electricity it's a voltage its own electrical current that travels through a medium our medium is air it's oxygen so the sound pressure waves they travel and it generates a voltage of a positive and a negative compression and rarefaction and when the wave form is above the zero and the positive voltage it is called a compression when it is in the negative it is called a rarefaction those are words that are not going to be used every single day of your life but it is important that you know that that's what they are so now that we know that sound pressure waves are ultimately a voltage and the pressure and the more pressure that you have the louder the more decibels that you get right so let's go ahead and take a look at some sound pressure levels so SPL is a unit of decibels and this is a chart to show you the amount of decibels to give you a feel for what we're talking about when I say that so I've got this chart from pulsar instruments calm and I liked it because it was colorful and had some pictures but it just goes to show reference of what we're talking about so 10 decibels of SPL is about some rustling leaves outside a quiet office you know with some normal conversation is in between 50 to 60 decibels I really like this your toilet flushing when you flush your toilet or your vacuum cleaner about 70 I'd even say can go up to 80 decibels and then up here so notice that live rock band is at 1:30 it could be 120 to 130 a jackhammer is even underneath a live rock band very very loud 130 decibels I even actually thought 120 was the actual threshold of pain where you can have physical pain from the sound pressure being too hard on your eardrums right so that's something to know you do not want to leave your ears exposed to such a high decibel level for long periods of time I actually think they say don't recommend being at 120 for more than 7 minutes otherwise you're causing permanent damage to your hearing I don't know any rock concert that's ever been less than 7 minutes long so it's just something to think about you're gonna have to protect your ears moving forward of course 180 of rocket-launching I know that's on the pad being right next to the rocket you've got your shotgun right at 160 150 is gonna be more of your gun you know fire a jet launch fireworks more explosions things like that so this just gives you a visual you know interpretation of what we're talking about when I mean decibel levels and sound pressure right and so with that being said now that we know that it's pressure and this is volume that is amplitude measured in decibels we can move on so as you can see here that the sound wave completes a 360 cycle it starts out at a neutral voltage it has a positive voltage comes back down to neutral and then back into a negative voltage and then back to the end which completes a cycle which is 360 degrees if I were to go ahead and take this I don't know how many geometry professionals we have here and then just move this second half over and complete it you can see it completes and makes a circle so that's a 360 degree circle and when it does that it completes a full cycle moving forward here once it completes a full cycle that is known as a the wavelength it is the length of the wave right there also when it completes one cycle however many cycles it completes per second is known as cycles per second or more commonly known as whoops frequency right there frequency is the next characteristic of a waveform that we're going to dive deeper into so frequency goes hand-in-hand with cycles per second so how many cycles per second is the frequency and that's measured in hertz also duly noted capital H lowercase Z now the human ears can hear between 20 Hertz and 20,000 Hertz every thousand Hertz is also known as a kilohertz right lowercase K capital H lowercase e so for every 1,000 Hertz that is also one kilohertz so to sum it up the human ears can hear 20 Hertz to 20 kilohertz 2220 very simple to remember but please remember that it's very important so with that being said let's go ahead and listen to some of these frequencies with a sine wave generator so you can see exactly what I'm talking about when we talk about cycles per second so here in ProTools I have a signal generator and it is exactly what the name says it is it generates signal and we're gonna go ahead and listen to these sine waves here it also does have the other simple wave form such as your square sawtooth and triangle waves and it also generates white noise and pink noise which we're not going to deal with right now I can explain them in a different video so let's go ahead and listen to this we'll start out with 1000 Hertz or 1 kilohertz so let's listen and that's exactly what it sounds like and as we go up we get a higher pitch right as we go down we get a lower and as we just learned right there that it is cycles per second so right here we've got 2243 Hertz so what that means is it's completing a whole positive and a negative voltage back to zero 2243 times every second and that's what's giving us this note right here and so let's listen again the faster the higher the perceived pitch the lower we get those nice sub notes right there nice and low yeah so the human ears can hear from 20 to 20 remember this is 20 Hertz chances are you probably don't hear anything a big portion is you know it depends on the speakers that you're using or the headphones that you have on your head sometimes speakers and headphones just don't put out certain frequencies you'd have to check your manual for that so 20 Hertz is the absolute lowest that the human ear can perceive a lot of times you may not audibly hear something but you can sense it and you can feel it it really just depends write 20,000 Hertz it's going on up is the highest also chances are you probably aren't getting much from that either because that's the absolute highest that the human ears can hear dog whistles just a quick fact they're just above the 20,000 marks so they are I want to say twenty one twenty two thousand Hertz so that's why when you blow the dog whistle the human ears we can't hear that whistle but your dogs can hear it because they have a different frequency range that their ears can hear so that's why they go crazy with that whistle so another interesting fact I'll actually say another interesting fact the human ears do hear between 1000 and 4000 the most so this 1,000 Hertz right here that's our emergency tone so when they play it on TV or the radio and they say this is just a test of the national emergency or whatever they say that's because they know that no matter how old or young you are usually when you have permanent hearing loss you lose those really low frequencies or the really high frequencies first and so 1,000 to 4,000 that's typically the range of vocals when people are talking about one to four and so we hear that the easiest out of all of the frequencies so that's our emergency tone so if there's a tornado outside 1000 Hertz is gonna be exactly what tells us what it is so that's why that note just sounds familiar right there and it is a sine wave as well let's see if you remember old-school TVs are at around 18,000 18 kilohertz that's when you know the TV's on but there's no picture but you know even though that the screens black you could tell that the TV's on you know that that real high just annoying you know noise that's in the background if you're really sensitive if you're an artist and you're watching this video chances are you are that sensitive and you can hear it like I said we'll come back I'm going to show you an advanced tip an advanced trick that we can use this Center this generator for excuse me just a little Easter Egg for those of you who have stuck it out this long with me I like to throw things in like that just to make sure people are paying attention but it's really cool so we're going over the basics but I'll show you something more advanced that we can get into a little bit later so let's go ahead and move on now it's important to know that sound pressure waves travel three dimensionally and the lower the frequency the more omnidirectional it is meaning it goes in all directions up down left right front back three dimensions right in the more higher the frequency the more unidirectional it is which means it's it's pointed in one direction right so if you think about your neighbors listening to music or that car that drives by that's bumping their music tend to just hear the low end all the you know what I'm saying the bass stays because it's traveling three more three dimensional than the higher frequencies which are being stopped by the walls or whatever's in the way another way that I can make this make sense is if you listen to my voice you've been listening to it for a while now and I cover it up with this notebook right so all of a sudden you notice that the high end and the sibilants of my voice is being stopped by the book right you still hear the low end you still hear the low mids right but that high end is gone and then as I start to move away the notebook you'll notice that all of the high end and the siblings and that sizzle in my voice come back and the reason being is that lower the lower the frequency the more omnidirectional the higher the frequency the more unidirectional alright so let's see what else do we got now amplitude and frequency are probably the two most simple to grasp out of all the characteristics of a waveform but I'd say they're probably the most important because you're gonna be dealing with them on a day to day basis I mean think about it amplitude which is measured in decibels is volume and frequency which is measured in Hertz is pitch so volume and pitch that's an everyday thing and knowing the little minut details about Quincy being measured in Hertz which is a capital H lowercase Z decibels lowercase D capital B it's just really important it's gonna set you apart from the rest of the people who don't have a clue that that even means a thing because I guarantee you one of these days you'll be in front of a big producer and you don't want to be the guy that messes that up because then they're gonna look at you wrong and you don't want that you always want to impress everyone so let's go ahead and get over to this trick that I was telling you guys about earlier and this is cool so the 808 that kick 808 that we all love nowadays was actually an accident and it was accidentally stumbled across by using a kick drum in a sidechain with a signal generator and a sine wave just like we were messing with earlier right so now the way that this is gonna go is I'm gonna go ahead and add a sidechain to this and I'm gonna show you how this great beloved 808 kick drum was an accident and what's cool is that once you learn how to do this the possibilities are endless with what you can trigger and I'm really excited to see what you come up with after learning this so we've got my sound I'm gonna leave it at one kilohertz just so we can hear what's going on and we'll just take a random send right down this track now I have a kick drum sample right here that I just played in with the MIDI and it's just a simple little kick as you can hear right simple kick it's cool whatever it's a kick it's there we're gonna go ahead and make it even cooler right with this sidechain so I'm gonna go ahead and come over here to our signal generator and what happened was they put a gate on the sine wave now gates were not new at the time I'd say this was late 80s early 90s people have been using side chains a lot you know so this is not new technology it's just what they triggered in the song and the music that they triggered which was a rap album it just changed things it was the that they were looking for right so on my kick track here I'm just gonna send some signal down a random bus we're gonna do bus one right here and on the signal here we've got a gate and the gate is now got we're gonna have this C bus one the signal through this little key right here for the sidechain right I also have to send and she'll tell this gate to accept the key and then we'll go ahead and push play and you can see what happens here even without seeing it I have the center signal generator bypassed right now but you can see how every time the kick drum hits it opens the gate therefore it's basically muting the signal generator until that kick hits then it opens up and it's beautiful so let's go ahead and add it mm-hmm just like that right so now we get that sub tone watch this drop that down all right we can go real low down to 50 I'm just gonna leave it like 80 I have no clue what kind of speakers everyone's using actually you might even be on a phone maybe we'll leave it here for now and then we can tweak with the with the knobs here and the gate and maybe we need a little more sustain a little faster attack right let's see if we pull out the release and it's gonna ring out longer right [Music] yeah if you got some speakers or some headphones on you can definitely tell 50 Hertz is where it's at in my opinion right there for a nice solid 808 beautiful so yeah that's that right there that's how you use the sidechain I'm not gonna go into crazy amounts of detail as to what's happening how it works and all that that's gonna be a completely separate video that's gonna take a long time as we go ahead and trigger all types of stuff we can show you some noise you can trigger whatever you want so you guys get the point like I said I just wanted to throw in a little something fun there because it's all great to learn but if we're not having fun then we're not doing something right so that's all I've got for you for right now thank you very much for choosing to spend some time with me today I really really appreciate it don't forget to click that subscribe button this way you get access to all of my tutorials and then you can learn like I said I am showing you everything I know about audio engineering music business this whole industry is going down I'm exposing everything so click that subscribe button so you can be a part of it thanks again one love [Music]