Ceci est une ancienne révision du document !
I hope you have paid attention to the issue, 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!
Now if you really did follow along, this issue’s Zyn tutorial will not be strange. I want you to put what we have covered into practical use. Fire up LMMS and remove all the tracks from the song editor. Drag in Zyn from your instrument plug-in’s. Double click it, to bring up the general settings. Click Show GUI. Edit Instrument and we will be fudging with the Pad Synth this time.
Before we actually do anything, I want to say that we are going to take a clean sound and polymorph it into something we can use as a lead in our own tune. This will teach you the basics of making something your own. This is very cool for remixing… anyway, I think so.
Let’s mosey on over to the harmonic content editor and we can lose ourselves in a saw wave. (If at any point you get lost in this article, you need to go over the previous ones) If I did not mention this, the base function for the saw wave is “power”. Use the sliders to add some teeth. I don’t care how many, it is up to you, but I will add three or four with one or two of my sliders. Hit Apply and Close. Go to the little piano roll on the general settings and you should hear a dance / trance sound. Go to the Pad Synth parameters and open the last/ second tab, EnvelopesLFO’s.
This is my saw wave (below).
I like rearranging my windows as shown on the next page, top right.
This allows you to press the keys with your mouse if you do not have a MIDI keyboard, like me.
Pressing the keys around C1, I already like the sound, but we need to morph the sound into something ‘different’, yet usable in an electronic tune. Back to the harmonic structure tab. At the filter envelope, I will boost the attack value, and up the low pass filter on C freq and Q. On the Amplitude LFO side, I am also going to adjust the depth up. Now you may end up with a sound you don’t like, but here is the secret. Apply some reverb to that sound. To do that, you can switch back to the “Edit Instrument” window and click on effects. Here on mine, you can see the words are semi-hidden, it may be on yours too.
The “NO EFFECT” drop-down is where you want to change it with the arrows to reveal the list. Reverb is the very first one. You can also chain your effects here, a very popular option is to use the EQ to tweak your reverb’d sound. If you are a beginner, like me, you can use some of the presets in the top left of the reverb. Again, you can’t see it until you press the drop down, but the first one is Cathedral 1, there is a Cathedral 2 and 3 also, but I want you to play with those to get the awesome sound you want.
Mine sounds great, just a bit too much echo, but that is something we can deal with easily. How about yours? Have you found something you like yet? This is where I leave you, <insert evil laughter here> as this is where the rabbit hole starts, I cannot tell you how deep it goes, Neo, but good luck with not sinking at least an hour deep. <insert more evil laughter here>
Now take the red pill and enjoy the ride.
As always, any comments to: misc@fullcirclemagazine.org.