Ceci est une ancienne révision du document !
I hope you have paid attention to the last two issues, as this month we will be steaming ahead. If you did not, I strongly advise that you do. However, to avoid confusion, we are looking into ZynaddsubFX (Zyn from now on) that comes with LMMS. I want you to know that as ugly as Zyn is, (Ugly as Zyn… OK, I’ll see myself out) you can make almost any synth out there on the market with this. Not kidding!
Fire up LMMS and let’s start!
So how do we use what we have learned so far? By doing, of course! Please navigate to the addsynth oscillator editor and lets discuss the base vs harmonics and all the related buttons an knobs, as they are really daunting for someone who has never played with them. I know I had a hard time, so I hope to ease it for the next guy. The base is on your right, but say you have done something with the harmonics side on the left that interests you or sounds really good and you want to build on it, you can then simply click the button below the harmonics marked, ‘use as base’ to add it ot the base side, so you are not limited to the drop down list on the base side. If you are unsure of what you can actually do, then there is a button for that too… :)
The button is ‘wsh’ – short for wave shaper. Right next to the ’use as base’ and to let you mess with it, it has a knob. Oooh more knobs! Well, pass me that spoon Pinky, this is brain surgery, not rocket science. Yes, you will have to remember which knobs you turned in the hundreds that there are if you bungle it, so small changes at a time. What I like about LMMS on Ubuntu is that I get tw icons in my dock when working with Zyn, and it makes it easy to switch back and forth to get to my Zyn GUI so I can tinkle on the piano keys to hear what my changes sound like. BTW, I use Xubuntu with plank, mileage may vary on other docks. However, the point I was getting to, is that you need to play with it to ‘get’ it. I am not referring to you guys with degrees in music, but us regular plebs. The switching back-and-forth will allow you to hear the subtle changes your tweaks make.
Now on top of this, there is a filter to the right of it, that you can apply to your harmonics, with a list of the usual suspects, HP for high pass, LP for low pass and so forth. The filter pre-sets have their own buttons again, allowing you to tweak even more! See, I told you that you can create almost any other synth in Zyn. To the right of that you will see ‘mod’ – it does modify the sound, but it is actually short for modulation. Again, you need to play with these to understand what the sound changes to, but you can think of if as granularity as you move to the right. You are tuning finer an finer as we move right. (Not really 100%, but think of it that way and you wont steer yourself wrong.) The last one in the line is ‘sp. adj.’ which is short for spectrum adjust. No pack away that Sinclair machine, it is not that type of Spectrum.
To the right of all the sliders, you will see an ‘harmonic shift’ block. There is a catch to this one, it used to be inverted. What I man by this is that is if you use an older version, clicking the right arrow would move the harmonics to the right and vice-versa. If you are on version numbers greater than 1.0, then it works the other way around. (Right way?) Anyway, just be aware of this when you have different versions, say a deb and a snap. Should you make a mistake, the ‘R’ button is for reset. Yes, it gets a bit hairy for newcomers, I know, I have been there, or should I say I am still there, as my music degree is probably in still in the mail for life, but this really needs a UI makeover to make it newbie-friendly. (But the where will FCM be bringing you all these lovely informational snippets, if it was simple?) You can probably guess that ‘adpt harm’ below that, is short for adapt harmonics. This is great for creating game sounds, hint-hint, nudge-nudge, wink-wink. The clear button only clears the harmonics settings, so your base and harmonic waves will stay as they were before we started turning knobs. The interesting one, is the the ‘Sine’ button below it. It takes your base function, converts it to a sine wave and applies your changes that you made to said sine wave, regardless if the previous base was square or triangle, etc.
If you are a perfectionist or have OCD and the like, I do not recommend that you come here, as this is a time sink of note. I have spent hours here just fine tuning a saw wave, yes, a saw wave – laugh if you must, but it is very addictive.
I hope this demystifies some of the arb acronyms and button functions for you if you are a total newbie to LMMS and Zyn.
As always, if I made a mistake, please let us know at: misc@fullcirclemagazine.org