J. Anthony Allen teaches sound design from first principles, starting with oscillators and envelopes, then covering subtractive, additive, wavetable, and physical modeling synthesis. You'll learn the physics behind the techniques so you can apply them in any software, from FM8 to Serum to Ableton, and build recipes for bass, leads, pads, and drums.
Hey everyone. Welcome to my sound design class, my huge sound design class. This is the biggest class I think I've ever made. I know I say that every time, but they keep getting bigger. In this class we're going to start by going over all the key elements of sound design, all the basic building blocks. And then from there we're going to build and learn how to make more and more different types of sounds using different techniques. We're going to start off just looking at subtractive synthesis. We're going to go on to additive synthesis, and then we're going to really dive in and go into wave table synthesis, physical modeling and more. So this will be a lot of material in this class. You're going to really go through the ringer and by the end you'll be able to follow along and watch as I make sounds from scratch that are, you know, big bass sounds, lead sounds, pad sounds, drum sounds, all of it. And we kind of close the class with this big series of what I call recipes. So just tons of different videos saying, here's how you make this sound. Bam, bam, bam, bam, bam. Here's how you make this sound. Bam, bam, bam. And we just rock through it. We'll be using a lot of different software in this class. You can use whatever you want. But the tools that I'm going to be focusing on to show you the different techniques of sound design are Native Instruments, FM8. We'll be looking at X First Serum. We'll be using some of the built in stuff in Ableton. We'll talk a little bit about some of the the reason synthesizers and a whole bunch more. We're going to bounce around because the goal here is not for you to learn different software applications, but to learn sound design and the physics of sound and how to manipulate any software or analog gear, which we're also going to look at to do exactly what you need to do in order to make the sounds in your head. That's the goal of the class. I'm really happy with how the class turned out. I'm really excited for you to take it. So let's dive in. Okay, so for the next four, maybe five videos, we're going to be focusing just on this. Okay? Just on oscillator A. Now the amplitude level is also the modulation level. Okay, not so much here because this is going to the output. If someone walked up to you on the street and said, draw me the shape of an envelope, this is what you would draw. This is what it looks like. Okay? You can ignore the kind of. Okay. The fourth element that I think about is motion or stillness. Okay? So when I'm talking about motion in that sound. Like, right now, we have none here. I just have one filter. And when we talk about gain, what we're really talking about is this function called decibels per octave. Okay, so this sounds confusing, and it is a little bit. So I want to spend a little extra time on it. Okay, so we really like the mother 32 for bass lines, right? Because it is a monophonic synth, we can only play one note at a time. And it's got some nice big, fat low tones, so I can adjust the frequency a little bit here. This is a monstrously huge class, the biggest class I have ever made by far. So there's not a moment to lose. Let's dive in and get started. Sam.
