hey there and welcome to this beginner's guide to sound design on the sonicware liveen ambient zero I'll be showing you how to go from something that sounds like this to something that sounds like [Music] this along the way we'll be looking at wave tables initial parameter values voice mode options lfos the six structures of the ambient Zero's drone pad and Atmos layers and the noise player so there's quite a bit to cover which is why this video is so long especially because I've tried to break things down in as much of a non-technical and accessible way as I could okay let's get started so like most synthesizers the ambient zero comes with some nice sounding presets but when you go to an empty pattern pallet the default sound you get is pretty raw sounding in comparison and that's because the default sound is not meant to be something you play music with right out of the box it's meant to be raw Sonic material that you mold and refine into what you want it to be thus allowing you to design your own sounds from scratch so this sound is just a starting point and I say a starting point because we have many other possible starting points on the ambient Zero by default each of our synth layers is set to something called a Sawtooth waveform which we can see if we come up to this red knob labeled wave now what the screen is actually telling us right now is that we are currently inside the Sawtooth wave table what's that well it's a table like a table in a spreadsheet or a table of contents in a book it's a series of items and in this case the items are wave forms or different shapes of sound waves this particular table is based around a Sal tooth wave form which is named that way because when you graph it it looks like the tooth of a saw it has a jagged shape which gives it a rough raw gritty Buzzy sound as we hear in our default sound now within this Sawtooth wave table we have what you could think of as 128 variations of that Sawtooth wave form which we can choose between using this next knob the one labeled harmonic and the waveforms are numbered 0 to 127 so this is one variation the default one we've been hearing this is another one this is another one and this is yet another one each of these is a different but related waveform and that's just one table if we go back over to our wave parameter knob we have 32 wave tables to choose from and each of these tables like this one which is based around A square waveform has another 128 variations inside of it now some waveforms are harmonically simpler and gentler sounding than others like a triangle wave or a sign wave which is the simplest and gentlest wave form of all and each of our synth layers are drone pad and Atmos layers has its own wave and harmonic parameters and so each of them could be something completely different we could have this pad layer be a sine wave the Drone layer a square wave and the atmos layer a triangle wave or whatever we want but no matter which wave table or waveforms we choose they're all just rudimentary forms of sound that we're meant to shape into something else so those are some of our most basic options for the the synth layers as for the noise layer well this one is sample [Applause] based and it works in a different way than the other three layers so we're going to put it aside and come back to it at the end of the video all right I'm going to put each of these layers back into the default Sawtooth waveform because it's going to make some things easier for us to hear and we're going to come back to the four red knobs and all of these parameters later in the video but I wanted to point out this stuff about the wave tables and wave forms that the beginning so that you know what you're hearing and so that you know that you have many other options to work with Okay so now we've got this raw Sawtooth sound again and let's start by seeing what we can do to get it a little bit less raw sounding now in order to get somewhere with something it helps to know where you are right now and to help us out with that I'm going to make sure I have a function on called Latch by holding down the function button and checking whether or not the light of this button is red if it is red that means latch is on if the light's off that means latch is off and then we can toggle it on and off like so and with the latch function on if I come over to one of the knobs and I touch it and start to turn it the value of the parameter isn't going to change until I turn the knob to the position corresponding to the value it's currently set at and this can be very useful because it allows us to see what our current parameter values are so with that latch function on I can see that although we have a low pass filter that's being applied to each of the layers the filter cutof value is set to 127 the maximum value which means we're barely filtering any of the frequencies of the sound at all and since a Sawtooth waveform we have a lot of frequencies and we usually want to filter at least some of them often a lot of them so I'm going to start off here by bringing down our filter cuto value and I'll do that in each of our [Music] layers we don't need to worry about getting things perfect right now we can always make fine tunings to this later this is just to start us off with getting our sound a bit softer and another thing we might want to consider doing is lowering our filter resonance [Music] values okay so this sounds easier on the ears now but it also sounds pretty flat and that's because although we have a small type of Reverb set on by default and although our Reverb mix value is set pretty high we're not actually sending any of that Reverb to any of these layers and as a result we don't have any sense of spatial depth to our sound since that's what Reverb is all about the word Reverb being short for reverberation which is what sound does when it moves around a space so I'm going to fix that by sending a little bit of Reverb to each of the [Music] layers and now things will sound less flat okay we still have a ways to go but we're making progress now going back over to our pad layer another adjustment that we might want to make here is with our attack which is set to zero on all of the layers by default and for a pad we'd usually want a longer attack so that our sound fades in so I'm going to bring this value up and then we'd also usually want to have a long release on a pad as well so the sound Fades out but our release value is set fairly High by default and so now our pad sounds like this and I think I actually want a longer attack on this so I'm going to bring that value up okay now a long release might be great on a pad layer but over on our Atmos layer depending on how we want to use this it could become a problem let's say I want to play some fast melodic lines or arpeggios because of that long release the notes are staying around too long and so if I'm playing them [Music] fast they start to pile up on each other and our sound gets muddy so here we might want to bring down that release and now I can play pretty much as fast as I want or make the arpeggiator go as fast as we want but we have some alternative options which brings us to the other voice mode options that we only looked at in passing in the previous video monophonic Legato and Unison so I'm going to start with monophonic and I'm going to bring our release back up to where it was before okay so now just like before if I play a note and then release the [Music] key the note is going to keep bringing out after I release it but if I play a series of notes in a row now there's no problem because as I go through my series of notes the next one I play cuts off the sound of the previous one and it's only the last note in the series that continues to ring out thus providing us with the best of both worlds and the same thing is true of Legato mode and Unison mode and notice how much stronger Unison mode sounds than the other ones and that's because in unison mode just just like monophonic and Legato mode we can only play one note at a time but Unison mode plays not just one but four instances or voices of that note resulting in a stronger sound that can be very useful if we want a melodic part to stand out from a bed of sound coming from the other [Music] layers but it can also be very useful if we want to strengthen a drone in our drone layer all of the layers are set to polyphonic by default and so if I change a drone layer from polyphonic to Unison we start to get a stronger drone and we can strengthen it even further by tapping into Unison Mode's secondary parameter which controls the amount of duning we have between the different voices of Unison mode by default this is set to zero and the more we bring up the value the more detuning we get [Music] the slight differences between the pitches of the different voices create a thicker sound it also adds a sense of movement to our sound because pitch equals frequency or the speed of our sound waves and so if we have slightly different pitches we also have sound waves going at slightly different speeds and those differences create moving patterns that round R sound you [Music] hear this can be great for building powerful drones but it can also be great for things like baselines and Lead Melodies and how you play the keys in unison mode changes how it sounds if you lift up on each key before you play the next one each note will pack its own punch whereas if you hold down your fingers as you play across the notes flow together and you can switch back and forth between these plain styles for stylistic effect okay so for now I'm going to leave our drone layer in unison mode and I'm going to take the duning off and also bring our filter cut off back down and now let's go back to the atmos layer and look at the differences between monophonic and Legato for this I'm going to bring our attack value up so now if I play a little Melody notice how the attack gets retriggered every time I press a new key whereas in Legato mode if I play the same thing the attack doesn't get re-trigger and the notes flow together and then finally in both monophonic and Legato mode we have a secondary parameter which is the amount of Glide between our notes so so this would be a little bit of [Music] Glide and this would [Music] be well a whole lot of Glide so we have a very wide range to work with here and then we also have Glide as a secondary parameter in monophonic [Music] mode but it's sounding different because of that re-trigger attack and now you've learned all of the secondary parameters of the different voice modes polyphonic mode doesn't have any and I'm going to leave the atmos layer in monophonic mode for now with no glide on just to leave things neutral and I'll also bring the attack value down Okay so we're starting to get [Music] somewhere these sounds are sort of working but if we're being honest they're also kind of boring and that's because we've chosen some initial parameter values in each of our layers and they're perfectly fine initial parameter values but we're setting them and then just leaving them there and as a result our sound is pretty static to make it more interesting we're going to have to introduce some movement movement is what brings our sound to life and one of the main ways that we can create movement on the ambient zero and in synthesis in general is with something called an LFO which is short for lowf frequency oscillator and what's that well it's something that produces a a low frequency oscillation which is just a fancy technical term for taking one of our parameter values like our volume level and moving it back and [Music] forth and that's it it's just that movement back and forth and we call that movement an oscillation and since it's happening at a relatively slow speed or frequency or number of times per second we call it a low frequency oscillation and the the effect of applying that motion or LFO to a parameter is what we call a modulation effect so right now we could say that I am pretending to be an LFO and the LFO is modulating the volume level [Music] parameter and some modulation effects have names this one I'm doing with our volume level is called a tremolo effect but that is just one modulation effect or one application of an LFO we can apply an LFO to just about any parameter we want like our filter cut [Music] off or filter [Music] resonance or whatever we want so an LFO is just a way of automating these sort of movements I've been doing manually with my fingers now with the ambient zero we get not just one but two lfos and not just for the whole synthesizer but for each layer so our drone phone layer has two lfos our pad layer has two lfos our Atmos layer has two lfos and our noise layer has two lfos and within each layer the lfos are controlled with these knobs here and then these buttons down here these three for LFO 1 and these three for LFO 2 and what are these all about well in order for an LFO to know what we want it to do we need to give it some instructions first of all which parameter do we want it to modulate We Tell the LFO that by using the lfo's assign button here's the one for lfo1 and here's the one for LFO 2 so I'm going to start with LFO 1 and press that button and on the screen we see the current parameter that the LFO is assigned to and then we can scroll through our other options now many of these are parameters pertaining to these red knobs up here which we haven't gone through yet but others are parameters that we've already covered filter cut off resonance panning level and the amount of Shimmer and Reverb we're sending to the layer and for this example I am going to select level okay so now the LFO knows we wanted to move this parameter value up and down but how fast do we want it to move and how much do we want it to move we answer that question by setting the rate and the depth of the LFO with these knobs over here which have a primary control over lfo1 so if I just move the knobs around I'm controlling lfo1 and if I hold down shift or put on a shift hold I'm controlling lfo2 and either way rate controls the speed of the move movement and depth controls the amount of movement for the LFO okay so I'm going to set LFO 1's rate and depth to values right in the middle and let's hear what that sounds like all right now that's already a pretty pronounced modulation effect but we can make it even more pronounced by raising the lfo's rate or keeping the rate the same as before we could bring up the depth or we could increase both of them alternatively we could make the effect much more subtle by bringing both the rate and the depth way [Music] down or we could put the rate low and the depth high or the other way around rate high and depth low and all sorts of gradations in between but for now I'm just going to go back to setting the rate and depth at middle values now another question we need to answer is where do we want the movement to take place within the range of values of the parameter we're modulating we told at the rate and depth we wanted to move at let's say that rate and depth is like this but we could do that same exact motion up here in this part of the range or down here in this part of the range range where do we want it to do the motion and we're already implicitly answering that question by setting the value of the parameter we're modulating if we set the level parameter here for example it's as if we're telling the LFO that we want it to modulate the level at this rate and depth and we wanted to do the modulation in relation to this value here 48 in this case and you can think of this level as being like the center of gravity around which the LFO is oscillating and where you set the center of gravity can really change how the LFO sounds listen to what happens if I move it from 48 down to zero somewhat counterintuitively the effect actually feels more pronounced when we set the center of gravity at zero and that's because we're now oscillating between silence and having some volume which is more of a contrast than oscillating between relative degrees of quiet and loudness as we're doing when we set our center of gravity up here and when you're setting up an LFO a lot of what you're doing is triangulating between your lfo's rate depth and center of gravity and experimenting with various configurations until you find one that you [Music] like and there's no rule about what you have to do here it all just depends on what kind of sound you want to make within the context of the music you're trying to create that being said for ambient music we usually want more subtle modulation effects and to get those effects we usually want to set either our rate or our depth at relatively low levels or both of them at low levels and I'm going to do that with our tremolo modulation [Music] effect so that we just get this very gradual and subtle EB and flow to our sound which might sound like almost nothing in and of itself but it's going to add up when we layer other effects on top of this all right now that was just one LFO inside of this layer we have a second LFO to work with and we can assign it to a completely different parameter like our panning for example putting on a shift hold I'm going to set our lfo2 rate and depth at middle values to begin with and as for our center of gravity I'm going to leave that in the center let's hear what that sounds like and if I increase the depth and decrease the rate well now you can really hear that panning effect as long as you're wearing headphones or listening to this on stereo speakers but I want a more subtle modulation effect so I'm going to bring down both the rate and the [Music] depth okay now let's move over to our pad layer now if I play something in this layer notice how we're not hearing either of the lfos we just set up and that's because the lfos on one layer are completely independent of the lfos on another layer so we have two brand new lfos to work with here and this time I'm going to assign the first one to a parameter called tune now this one is a bit of an exception to the rule because there is no tune parameter or Knob that we can manually control inside of the layer but there is a tune all parameter which is the second parameter of this knob here and the way this works is if I have some music going in multiple layers at the same time I can use the tune all knob to tune everything down or tune everything up an [Music] octave now that's a very cool and useful parameter in itself because it allows us to easily change the key of our music but it's affecting the tuning of all of the layers whereas when we assign an LFO to the tune parameter it's only going to affect the tuning of the layer that the LFO belongs to so I'm going to assign this first LFO in the pad layer to the tune parameter set the rate to the middle and then I'm going to raise the depth just a tiny bit just to the number two so we're just going to have a little bit of modulation of the pad layer's tune parameter but check out the result [Music] we get a beautiful modulation Effect called FBR and this effect is also a case in point of a more General principle which is that a little can really go a long way with an LFO even if I bring the depth all the way down to one we still get a nice effect and I can also bring the rate [Music] down and we get a nice subtle warping to our sound we can even bring the right way up and we can get a nice kind of futuristic sound however if we bring the depth up even just a little bit it starts to get pretty exaggerated and if I really bring the depth up the effect starts to get pretty crazy and unless you're making sound effects for a science fiction video game this probably isn't a desirable sound but it is going to going to help me to illustrate the next few LFO settings the first one is our LFO shape setting which is this button here for lfo1 and this button here for LFO 2 so another way of thinking about the rate and depth of our LFO is that we're basically telling the LFO okay I want you to move back and forth between point a and point B point a being some minimum value and point B being some Maximum value the range or depth of our movement shape in turn is answer answering the question how does the LFO move back and forth if you were to graph its motion would the shape of that motion be a nice curvy sine wave which is what shape is set to by default or would the shape be like a triangle the LFO going back and forth at a steady speed instead of gently accelerating and de accelerating or do we go between point a and point B in a series of three steps skipping all of the values in between or four steps and so forth and so on or do we go in a square teleporting straight from point A to point B and skipping everything in [Music] between and that could actually be musically usable [Music] the notes are now jumping between octaves in a way that sounds nice so shape can have a major impact on the way an LFO sounds it can make the difference between this which could work for ambient music versus [Music] this which sounds like some Looney Tunes music and those were just just a few examples we have many other options to choose from here and these are definitely worth exploring especially if you're working with a more extreme LFO setting like this one where we have the depth set really high but if you're going for a more subtle LFO with a low rate and depth setting like this one there's absolutely nothing wrong with a good old-fashioned sine wave shape and in fact personally this is the shape I would usually go [Music] for in this context it sounds beautiful whereas the square shape actually doesn't sound that good at all there's no inherently good or bad shape it all just depends on the context okay so for the lfos we've now answered the questions what do we want to modulate how fast and how much do we want to modulate it what shape or pattern do we want to use when we modulate it and now there's one final question to answer when and how many times do we want to modulate it and we answer that two-part question with the trigger setting which is controlled with this button here for lfo1 and this button here for LFO 2 Now by default this is set to off which means that the LFO is not being triggered which means that it's just running continuously in the background but if we turn triggering on which we do by simply turning it to one of the other options which are the numbers 1 2 3 4 all the way up to8 and then Infinity if we set it to one of these options like the number one what we're now telling the LFO is instead of just running continuously I want you to be triggered or in other words initiated only when I press one of the keys and then instead of oscillating over and over and over again I want you to oscillate only one time or in other words I want you to take the shape of motion that I've told you to do and I want you to do that motion only once so just one sine wave for example not a bunch of sine waves in a row and then I don't want you doing that sine wave again till I re-trigger You by pressing another key and if we change the trigger setting to two we will get two sine waves and then the LFO will stop until we trigger it again and same thing for three four and so forth and so on and this can be a great way of taming an LFO that's otherwise too wild for example if I turn triggering off this exaggerated ver gets pretty annoying after a couple of seconds but if I turn triggering to one I start to get something much more usable and now I can play around with this for example I could try adjusting the rate so that we just get this little squiggle at the beginning of the note and then it settles into a normal sound another very very useful thing that we can do with the trigger setting is to combine it with two other shapes we haven't looked at yet which are ramp up and ramp down so the way ramp up works is we're going to go from point A our lowest value to point B our highest value in a single ramping motion and then when we get to point B with triggering on we're just going to stay there we're not going to go back down and the result of that is going to sound like this and we'll get a shorter or longer ramp depending on where we set the rate and so we're just swooping up into our note now that's kind of a cool effect in and of itself but what's really cool and useful about this is that we can take the same concept and apply it to any other parameter we want for example we could reassign this LFO to our filter cut off and then bring our initial filter cuto value down to zero and so now every time I press the keys our filter is going to go back down to zero and then it's going to gradually ramp up to a higher value so we're going to cut off almost all of the frequencies and then gradually bring more and more [Music] in and so this is working like the attack portion of our amplitude envelope only instead of gradually bringing up the volume of our sound from zero we're bringing up the filter cut off or to put it the other way around the attack of our amplitude envelope is basically the same thing as a triggered ramping LFO and what this means is we can use our lfos to create the attack portion of an envelope for any parameter that we want doing this with the filter cut off is just one example but it's one that works especially nice with pads especially if we bring down the rate of our LFO to make our filter attack more gradual and then maybe bring up the resonance to emphasize the filter changing even more [Music] and you may have noticed that little snapping sound that you hear when I first play the keys personally I kind of like it but if you want to hide it you can just bring up the amplitude envelopes [Music] attack and remember we have a second LFO so if we wanted to we could create another attack portion of an envelope for another parameter like our Reverb for example by setting it up as another triggered ramping LFO now both our sense of space and the number of frequencies we hear will expand over time whenever I press the [Music] keys or we could just make our second LFO a normal continuous untriggered LFO doing a vbr effect for example just like we did before only now we're combining that vibr with the ramping triggered attack style filter cuto LFO of [Music] lfo1 okay and now there's just one last option to look at with lfos and to show you this I'm going to go back over to the Drone layer where remember we have lfo1 assigned to our level parameter and lfo2 assigned to our panning parameter and I'm going to reassign LFO to because what I want to show you here is that we have all of the same assignment options for lfo2 as we do for lfo1 except we have two additional options which are the rate of lfo1 and the depth of lfo1 and this can seem like a bit of a brain twister the first time you encounter it because because now we are applying an LFO to another LFO but it's really not that complicated because remember with an LFO it's just like we're taking a knob and wiggling it back and forth and just like we can do that with our level parameter knob well we can also do that with our LFO 1's rate and depth knobs making LFO 1's rate faster and slower or its depth deeper and shallower and that's all we're doing when we assign lfo2 to one of LFO 1's parameters so for example I'm going to assign it to LFO 1's rate and then I'm going to set LFO 2's rate and da to low levels just to add a subtle amount of movement to the movement that lfo1 is creating by modulating the level parameter all right that does it for lfos they play a really Central role in sound design and they also play a big role in these red knobs and parameters up here so that's why I wanted to go over them first in so much depth but let's go up to the red knobs now so we've already seen the primary functions of these first two knobs remember they're for selecting our wave table and wave form within that wave table and then the secondary parameter of this knob here is for selecting our structure and we have six structures to choose from from drone 1 Drone 2 pad 1 Pad 2 atmos one and Atmos 2 by default the Drone layer is set to drone one the pad layer to pad one and the atmos layer to Atmos one but you can change any layer to any structure you want and so these labels are more like suggestions and default settings than things that are set in stone okay but what is a structure in the first place and what is the difference between all of these well a structure is just a way of organizing or structure meing the underlying components of the synth engine the thing that's actually making our sound and these six structures are just six different ways of organizing those components but what are those components and what are we actually organizing here in the first place well that brings us to our next parameter which is the secondary parameter of this knob here which is controlling a parameter called our balance to illustrate this let's go over to our drone layer and take a look at our drone one structure so in the structure we have two oscillators oscillators being the things that actually generate sound in a synthesizer we've talked about low frequency oscillators and in synthesizer language when we just say oscillator without any adjective what we mean is an oscillator that's oscillating at such a high frequency that we can actually hear those oscillations okay now with our balance parameter when this is set to the center we're going to hear a 50/50 blend of both oscillators at the same time whereas if we go all the way to the left with the balance we're only going to hear one of the oscillators if we go all the way to the right we only hear the other oscillator and so the sound becomes stronger or weaker depending on how close we are to the center of the [Music] balance it's the difference between hearing one oscillator versus two oscillators at the same time now where this starts to get interesting is over here with our next two knobs starting with this first one which has a primary parameter called pitch now as you might expect this controls the pitch of our sound but because of how this structure is organized it's only going to affect the pitch of the oscillator on the right side of our balance as I'll demonstrate [Music] now so with our pitch parameter we can increase or decrease the pitch of the oscillator on the right side of our balance by two octaves up or down but if we go over to the oscillator on the left side of the balance well that one isn't affected by the pitch parameter at all in this structure they are totally disconnected from each other as a result if we set the balance parameter to the center so that we hear both oscillators at the same time and we start changing the pitch parameter we're going to end up hearing two pitches at the same [Music] time and then the secondary parameter of this knob is D- tuning which works in a similar way it's going to slightly dtune the pitch of only the oscillator on the right side of the balance D- tuning it slightly up or slightly [Music] down but it doesn't affect the duning of the oscillator on the [Music] left and so if we blend the two oscillators together we'll get a blend of two slightly different [Music] pitches and notice how I'm manually modulating the amount of duning with my fingers [Music] here and that's exactly what the next and final knob is about which controls the modulator within our structure a modulator is basically yet another LFO that is built inside of the structure and within that structure it is permanently connected to a specific parameter of that structure and in different structures it's connected to different parameters in the Drone one structure it's connected to the duning parameter and so its job is to modulate that parameter adding movement to the movement that's already being created by the duning effect and the way this knob works is exactly the same as our two LFO knobs only it's as if we took those two knobs and combined them into a single knob where the primary parameter is the rate of our modulation and then the secondary parameter is the depth which is set to 63 by default so I'm just going to leave it there and let's hear what that sounds [Music] like and now listen to what happens if I increase the [Music] rate and if we want a nice and subtle effect we can bring this down to a low [Music] value and then finally just like with our lfos we also have a shape option for our modulator and this works exactly the same way and we have exactly the same options as we do with our lfos however we don't have an assign button and we also don't have a trigger option because the modulator is always assigned to the same parameter within a structure and we also don't have a trigger button because the modulator is always triggered every time we press a key that's just how it works okay so that's our drone one structure and our Drone 2 structure works in a very similar way it also has two oscillators one on the left side of the balance one on the right side so we get a stronger sound in the [Music] center the pitch and D- tuning parameters are also only connected to the oscillator on the right side of the [Music] balance they're not connected to the one on the left but this time our modulator is connected to our harmonic parameter the one that controls our position within the wave table so remember right now we're inside of the Sawtooth wave table and we have 128 wave forms inside of that table and if we jump around the table you can hear a lot of differences between the waveforms but if I play a bunch of waveforms that are right next next to each other in the table the differences are so small that they're practically imperceptible they only add up over [Music] time as a result if we take this knob and parameter and modulate [Music] it it's going to sound like our waveform is continuously morphing from one form to another and and So within this Drone 2 structure the modulator is simply going to automate the sort of modulation I was just doing with my fingers before but here comes the twist when we modulate something at a certain rate and depth let's say it's this one right here well we can do that movement in one of two ways we can either start off going to the right and then go to the left or start off going to the left and then go to the right which way do we go well the ambient Zero's harmonic modulator answers that question by saying why not both when it's engaged it's going to modulate the oscillator on one side of the balance in One Direction and the other oscillator on the other side of the balance in the opposite direction let me do that for you one more time this time slowing down the rate of the modulation and so now if we blend both of our oscillators together by bringing the balance to the center the two directions start to crisscross with each other and the effect is a bit exaggerated right now but if I bring down the rate of the [Music] modulation we get some more slow and subtle motion to our sound which we can add to by for example also detuning one of the oscillators from the other one thing to keep in mind here is that some of our wave tables work like this one where the differences between adjacent wave forms are very gradual but with other tables like this random one the differences are much more significant and so with this table we're going to get a purposefully glitchy sound if we modulate our harmonic [Music] parameter and you can make it more or less glitchy depending on how you set the rate and depth of the [Music] modulator and then going back to the Sawtooth wave table again keep in mind that where you set the harmonic parameter is going to function as the center of gravity of the modulation just like parameter values do with lfos and so before I had this set in the middle of the table and that's going to result in a different sound than if I set the center of gravity at the bottom of the [Music] table and that is the Drone 2 structure and at this point you might be thinking hm I really liked that harmonic modulation of Drone 2 but I also liked the detuning modulation of drone 1 I wish I didn't have to choose between them and the good news is well you don't have to choose between them because over in our lfos the the assignment options include the harmonic parameter and the detuning parameter sometimes this is also a feedback parameter but we'll come back to that later in the video so you can modulate both parameters at the same time if you want to and by the way you can assign an LFO to any of the six parameters up here including your balance pitch and the rate and depth of the modulator itself and another thing you might be thinking here is how could could I possibly remember all of the details of all of these structures and the answer is you don't need to because there are diagrams of all six structures on the synthesizer itself and now you know everything you need to know to be able to understand these diagrams and refer back to them later so let's take a look at them now so here's the diagram for the structure we just looked at Drone 2 the two hexagons represent our oscillators the arrows show the sound coming out of them the letter b stands for the balance so we have a balance between the two oscillators the pitch and DET tuning parameters are only connected to the oscillator on the right side of the balance the modulator is this hexagon with the letter M in it it's connected to the harmonic parameter and then the ying and yang symbol is meant to convey that the harmonic parameter is getting modulated in opposite directions and that's why one oscillator is connected to one side of the ying and yang symbol and the other oscillator is connected to the other side now the diagram for drone one is a bit simpler since we don't have the harmonic modulation going in opposite directions to worry about so both oscillators are on one side of the ying and yang symbol and we can see that they're on opposite sides of the balance and that the pitch and D- tuning are connected to the one on the right of the balance all right now let's move on to the pad one structure starting with its diagram so this one is pretty similar to Drone 2 except this time we have one oscillator on one side of the balance and two oscillators on the other side and so if I move the balance knob around you can hear how the right side of the balance is stronger than the left side and that's because it's two oscillators versus one and then the pitch and detuning parameters are connected to both of the oscillators on the right side of the balance and they're not connected to the oscillator on the left side put those two facts together and it means that if we put the balance in the center so we're hearing all three oscillators and we raise the pitch parameter we're going to hear the higher pitch more strongly than the lower pitch since again it's two oscillators versus one and then our modulator in this structure is again connected to the harmonic parameter just like in Drone 2 only this time we're going to have the two OS oors on the right side of the balance going in One Direction and then the other oscillator going in the other direction and so the emphasis is going to be more on One Direction than the other since again it's two oscillators versus one [Music] and then once again we could also add some detuning to this to add further interest to our [Music] sound or instead of pitching the stronger side of our balance up we could pitch it down or we could bring them back to the same [Music] pitch so lots of possibilities here okay so that was the pad one structure and then the pad two structure is also kind of similar only this time we have two oscillators on the left side of the balance and one oscillator on the right and this time the pitch parameter is connected to our lonely oscillator on the right side of the balance and so if we blend the two sides of the balance together the altered pitch is going to sound weaker than the original [Music] pitch and then our modulator is connected to to the harmonic parameter once again only this time there's a little twist which is that with our two oscillators on the left side of the balance those are being modulated in opposite directions and so if we activate the [Music] modulator you can hear that crisscrossing effect that we previously only heard when we set our balance to the center only now we're hearing it on the left side of the balance and then if we bring the balance to the center we're going to get even more crisscrossing action going on because now we're going to have the two oscillators being modulated in opposite directions on one side of the balance and then the other oscillator being modulated in one of those directions on the other side of the balance and so we can get some pretty chaotic sounds but I think I'm going to leave the rate of our modulation low so we get a more subtle [Music] effect so going back to the diagrams notice how for the Pad 2 structure the side of the balance with the two oscillators has them on opposite sides of the ying-yang symbol since they're being harmonically modulated in opposite directions this side also has the duning parameter routed to it whereas the other side the one with the one oscillator and therefore the weaker sounding one has the pitch parameter routed to it whereas as we can see in the diagram for pad one the opposite is the case with this structure since here the pitch parameter is routed to the stronger side of the balance the one with the two oscillators which this time is on the right side of the balance okay now before we go on to our final two Atmos structures I want to give you some quick practical tips on using the first four structures because these first four structures work in a way that's broadly similar to each other whereas our two Atmos structures work in a way that's a bit different first of all with our drone layer I want to point out that detuning one of the oscillators is another way of strengthening our [Music] sound and we can combine the duning of our oscillators with the detuning of our voices that we have in unison mode and then we can make what we currently have here sound even stronger by raising our filter cut off back [Music] up and we can bring our level up as [Music] [Applause] well so that's already getting pretty strong but we can strengthen it even further by bringing our pitch parameter up an octave which is the value 120 or down an octave which is - [Music] [Applause] 120 and then remember that we also have a shimmer Reverb which is set to off by default and if we bring that up we're going to get additional octaves above the ones we're already hearing and then over in our pad layer we can do the same thing bringing our pitch parameter up or down an [Music] octave but another Nifty thing to do here is to raise your pitch parameter up either to the number 50 which is going to raise the pitch of either one or two of the oscillators depending on which structure you're in by an interval of a fourth meaning if we're starting with this key here we're going up 1 2 3 4 and so it's going to sound like we're playing both of these keys at the same time but with only one finger or we can raise the pitch parameter value to 70 which is going to give us an interval of a fifth 1 2 3 4 five notes above our original note and that will sound like we're playing both of these keys at the same time either way we end up with a simplified version of a chord or multiple notes played at the same time known as a diad or two notes played at the same time as opposed to a Triad which is three notes played at the same time and so now we can play those simplified chords using just one finger and one key at a [Music] time same thing in the Drone [Music] layer now that's really useful if you don't know how to play chords but it's also useful if you do know how to play chords because you can take a simple try add like this one and because we're also raising each one of these notes by an interval of a fifth we're also going to end up getting intervals of a seventh and a 9th creating a more sophisticated [Music] chord and this can sound especially nice if you spread the Triad out meaning taking one or two of the notes and moving it up or down an octave [Music] okay and then finally when you're doing harmonic modulation don't forget that you also have modulation shapes to work with and that two of those shapes are ramp up and ramp down and you can use those shapes to quickly modulate from one waveform in a table to another and you can create all sorts of really cool sounds by doing this by just going through the different wave tables and experimenting with doing this harmonic ramping modulation [Music] and I'm guessing that some of you didn't know that some of these wave tables could make these sort of sounds and I wouldn't know either if I just listened to them in their original rudimentary form which we can still hear more or less in the atmos layer where we've barely done any sound design work yet this wave table and this wave form inside of it just sounds like this when we haven't done much sound design work yet but if we take the same exact wave table and wave form and play it in our other layers where we have done sound design [Music] work we're going to hear a massive transformation and so at this point where we have done some sound design work on our first two layers this can be a great time to go back and experiment with how those layers will sound different with different wave tables and wave forms [Laughter] [Music] [Music] and then don't forget that within each one of these 32 wave tables you have 128 wave forms to choose from and set as your harmonic starting point which can really change the flavor of your sound as well [Music] okay now let's go look at our Atmos structures and for both of these I would really recommend starting off with a nice and simple sine [Music] wave instead of a more harmonically complicated wave like a Sawtooth and the reason for that is that these structures do some things to your Soundwave that make it more and more complicated and so if you start with a waveform that's already complicated like a Sawtooth the waveform can get so complicated that it can become very noisy very quickly all right now as we can see in the diagram Atmos one only has one oscillator and since there's only one oscillator there is no balance if we try to change that parameter we get a line telling us that the parameter is deactivated we do have control over the [Music] pitch but since there's only one oscillator it's going to completely control the pitch of the sound we also don't have any duning on the structure so if we try to change that parameter we also get that line but the big thing that's different about the structure is the modulator which is set up to do something called ring modulation and what's that well I can actually show it to you better than I can explain it by putting the depth at a high value and then the rate at the lowest value it will go you can hear what sounds like a tremolo effect and ring modul is basically and I am oversimplifying here but basically it's sort of like a tremolo taken to the next level it's like we're starting with a tremolo that's already really fast at this lowest rate value and then if we start making the rate go higher and higher faster and faster the oscillations start to go so fast that they blur together and we get these strange kind of robot electronic sounding [Music] [Music] overtones as we move the modulator knob and then if we leave it somewhere we can get some nice bell-like tones but remember we're using a sine wave right now if we switch over to a Sal tooth wave we're going to get a much crunchier sound but going back over to a sine wave this modulator knob works exactly the same as it does in all of the other structures the primary parameter is the rate of the modulation and remember that frequency and rate and Pitch are all different ways of talking about the same thing and so the faster or slower our rate of modulation the higher and lower the frequencies of the extra harmonics we're going to be [Music] hearing and then depth is going to control how much of this modulation is happening I've had it on the maximum setting but we can make it more moderate and then we can also readjust the rate and therefore the pitch of the extra harmonics we're hearing [Music] and then remember that one of our LFO assignment options is the rate or depth of our modulator and so for example we could assign the LFO to the modulator depth and then bring up the depth and rate of the LFO and make this weird bell-like sound even weirder or we could use the LFO to modulate the rate of the [Music] modulator and we can make it more subtle by making our LFO more subtle so lots to explore with that but I'm going to turn this LFO off for now and that'll do it for the atmos 1 structure now let's look at Atmos 2 and for this one I would really really recommend starting with a simple sinewave because this is maybe the trickiest structure and that's because Atmos 2 makes use of something called frequency modulation or FM synthesis which is a pretty big and complicated topic that I'm not going to be able to do justice to but just like ring module ulation can be simplified to being like a really fast tremolo we can think of FM synthesis as being like a really fast ver only instead of oscillating the pitch of an oscillator with an LFO we oscillate it with another oscillator which is oscillating at a high frequency instead of a low frequency and the oscillation of the pitch or frequency and remember pitch and frequency mean the same thing ends up going so fast that we can hear the oscillations and they sort of take on a life of their own and new harmonic properties emerge so we've got one oscillator that's just making sound and then we're going to be oscillating it with another oscillator and in FM synthesis we call the oscillator that's making sound the carrier because it's carrying the sound wave so to speak we call the other oscillator the one that's oscillating our carrier we call that one the modulator which I know is also the thing we call this component of the ambient zero but the word means a different thing in FM synthesis we call this oscillator the modulator because it is oscillating and thereby modulating the frequency and therefore the pitch of the other oscillator and hence the term frequency modulation and now we have two questions to answer first of all how much do we want to modulate our carrier and we answer that question with the secondary parameter of this knob here and it's set to 10 by default this controls the amount of frequency modulation we're doing and so the higher we set this parameter value the more frequency modulation we're doing so at the default value of 10 we're just doing a tiny bit of frequency modulation so right now it's a very very subtle effect if we bring this value all the way down to zero now we're not doing any frequency modulation at all and we're just going to hear our carrier oscillator making a normal sine wave versus going back to [Laughter] 10 then as I bring this parameter up we're going to hear more and more frequency [Music] modulation okay so that's the first question that we're answering with this parameter how much are we modulating and then with our next parameter this knob here we're going to be answering the question how fast are we modulating and with this parameter the values go from 0.5 all the way up to almost but not quite 16 and these numbers are decimal expressions of the ratio of how fast the modulator is going in relation to the carrier because remember they're both oscillators they're both oscillating at certain speeds and so here we're talking about the ratio of one speed to the other and so at 0.5 we're saying that the modulator is oscillating the carrier at half the speed of the carrier at one they're going the same speed at two the modulator is going twice as fast as the carrier and so forth and so on and each time the ratio doubles the pitch of the new harmonics we're hearing go up an octave so let me do that again starting with 0.5 and then doubling and this time without talking so you can really hear the [Music] differences so we can get some really high frequencies at the maximum value but I'm going to bring this back down to four and then the other parameter the first one we looked at the one that's controlling the amount of modulation as opposed to the speed of modulation the higher this value goes the more we're going to hear the new harmonics and frequencies being introduced by setting the frequency at 4.0 in this case and the lower we set it the less we will hear [Music] them so putting aside all of the complicated details of how f synthesis works you can still think of this knob here as basically controlling the balance and this knob here as basically controlling the pitch but just in kind of a weird sort of way because of how FM synthesis works and then the other practical thing to keep in mind is that if you stay at these intervals of 0 five 1 2 4 and so forth you're going to get some pretty normal sounds and then if you go outside of those intervals you're going to get some weirder sounds [Music] and notice how we can pick up some weird electronic sounds as we move the frequency SL pitch knob around and then we can also get some bell-like tones if we let it stay [Music] [Music] still but I'm going to leave it at four for now and then our modulator in the atmos 2 structure is connected to that frequency SL pitch parameter and so if we take the depth of the modulator and bring it down to two and bring up the rate we will end up getting a weird sort of ver effect which I'm going to tone down a bit by bringing the depth all the way down to one and I'm going to bring the rate down as well [Music] alternatively we could go a bit wild with the modulator and bring the depth way up get a real wild effect going but then change our modulation shape to one of our ramp options and then by adjusting the rate parameter of our modulator we can more or less quickly ramp from one frequency to another we can play around with different depths of modulation here different starting values with our frequency parameter or we could ramp down instead of ramping [Music] up adjust the modulation rate so we ramp down faster adjust the depth so we ramp down [Music] further so lots of possibilities with that finally we have the feedback parameter which is the secondary parameter of this knob here this goes back to that thing I said about one of the assignment options in our LFO being either detuning or feedback and what we're doing with feedback is we're taking the oscillations of an oscillator and we're feeding them back into that oscillator thereby oscillating it with its own oscillations which is a bit difficult to say verbally and mathematically it's even more complicated but in practice it's pretty simple the more feedback we have the more complicated and crunchier our sound is going to become and at a certain point it's going to become so complicated that it turns into white [Music] noise now I know that was a lot to take in but even if you can't remember at all or you don't feel like you understood everything something I would encourage you to do is just go wild with the two knobs on the right don't even think about what you're doing with them just get a really crazy sound going going back to the default sine wave will help with [Music] [Music] this and then use the parameter that sort of functions like a balance and then put it at a really low level so that you just have a little bit of craziness underneath a normal [Music] sound and if it still sounds a little too crazy you might want to bring down the rate of your [Music] modulation then maybe blend back in a little bit more of that and I think that's a perfectly legitimate use of the structure and it's one I use sometimes myself and there you have it those were all of our structures if you've made it this far into to the video it's like you've beaten the final boss of the video game which was the atmos 2 structure and now the noise layer is going to feel like just a fun little bonus level in comparison because it's much much simpler than the stuff we just looked at so for the noise layer we have eight samples that we can choose from using the wave knob and most of the samples that the ambient zero comes pre-loaded with are nature sounds like this but you can put your own samples on here and they can be whatever you want them to be and then the secondary parameter of this knob gives us two choices the first one is Loop and then the second one is one shot in oneshot mode if I hold down one of the keys it'll play the sample once and then it will stop and so now it's stopping even though I'm still holding down the key whereas in Loop mode the sample will loop back to the beginning indefinitely for as long as I hold down the key over here on the next knob the secondary parameter is deactivated but the primary parameter of this knob is functioning as a balance with the sample on one side of the balance white noise on the other side of the balance and so we can use this knob to blend the two things together to one degree or or another okay now the next knob controls both the pitch and the speed of the sample playback pitch and speed being two sides of the same coin when playing a sample and that's only affecting our sample our white noise is going to be unaffected which makes sense because White Noise doesn't really have a pitch and then the modulator is modulating the pitch of the sample playback this is set to 63 by default like always and I'm just going to bring up the rate here a bit and so if you set the rate low and the depth High the sample will very gradually speed up and slow down and that's pretty much it the rest of the knobs work exactly the same as they do in the other layers you can filter your noise pan it add Reverb we've got two lfos to work with something I like to do is assign the LFO to the filter cut off add a little rate and depth and then increase the filter resonance so we hear the filter sweep more and then what this is going to do is on the White Noise side of the blend the filter LFO is going to create this sort of wind like whoosing [Applause] sound and then you can blend in that artificial wind sound with your [Applause] sample and then you can use the attack and release parameters to for example have the sample gradually fade in when you press a key and then either Fade Out or stop immediately when you let go of the keys and you even have a choice of voice modes here with all of the same options as before except that there is no Unison mode in the noise layer that is exclusive to the other three layers and that's pretty much it so that was all four layers now at this point in the sound design process I'd probably want to go back to the sounds that I've created and make some fine adjustments to them for example this drone I might want to make it more gradually come [Music] in and then another thing I would definitely want to do is listen to the layers in relation to each other and see if any of them is overpowering the others and I might want to make adjustments to the filter cut off and the volume level I might also want to try panning different layers in different directions so they're more separated in the mix and then another thing I would do at this stage is I like to keep my Reverb small and fairly low during the sound design process so that I can hear everything really clearly but then once the sounds are in place I'll often experiment with a bigger Reverb I might also try adding some master effects like a little bit of delay and now that's sounding a little too crazy for me I'm going to try changing the modulation shape in the atmos layer to a ramp shape [Music] and I'm going to bring down the depth of the modulator to make it a little less Extreme as [Music] well and I think I can live with that for now okay now let's take a listen to all four of our layers at the same time [Applause] [Music] and there we go so I'm sure there's still a million little fine adjustments that I'd want to make if I was recording an official song but we definitely have some sounds that we can work with now and put together into some sort of ambient music but how do we actually put them together well we can use the hold function like I was just doing a moment ago and as we went over in the previous video in the series but if we really want to take things to the next level we can also make use of the ambient zero sequencer which will be the topic of the next video to wet your appetite a little I'm going to see what I can come up with in a few minutes using the sequencer and I'll play us out with whatever the result of that is at the end of the video if you have any questions comments or requests for the next video please let us know in the comments below thank you for watching and goodbye for now [Music] spe [Music] [Music]