From the course: Demystifying Audio Synthesis: Beyond The Basics

Defining modern modular synthesis in Alchemy - Logic Pro Tutorial

From the course: Demystifying Audio Synthesis: Beyond The Basics

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Defining modern modular synthesis in Alchemy

- [Instructor] So now that we've had a good refresh on how different synth components or modules can be routed to control and influence each other, I want to take a look at a very powerful modern hybrid synth, Logic's Alchemy synth. Now, when you load up Alchemy's default setting, it's not really a blank slate. It sounds like this. (electronic music) So out of the box, Logic made it have a whole bunch of parameters that are already patched to each other to sound cool so that you don't get uninspired when you open up the instrument. But for demonstration purposes, I've gone and made my own preset called Scott's True Default. We're actually removed all of these connections, and we're left with just the basic oscillators, in this case, the sawtooth wave and a square wave. And it sounds a little bit more plain, like this. (electronic music) So remember, we're on the advanced page of Alchemy. They've made it easy to kind of start simply with just simple parameters. But since we're in the part two of our Demystifying Synth course, we're going to go advanced. All right, so if you remember, on the ARP 2600, we had our voltage control oscillators as our sound source. Now, here in Alchemy, the sources are in the upper left, and you get four of them. Right now, A and B are switched on, and they're set to a sawtooth wave for A and a square wave for B. Now, these are just like the VCOs in the previous movie, but they're way more flexible. We have our basic sine, sawtooth, and square waves here, but we also have a whole library of many more complex waveforms we can choose from. This is a concept called wave table synthesis, by the way, one which we'll explore in a later movie of this course. If you want more control over each source, you can switch to the individual page of these four sources. So I can go to page of A, and I can see the actual shape of the sawtooth wave form and have a whole bunch of more control over it. Or I can switch to B, and I can see the square tooth wave, for example. But we can also go back to the global page and see them all four together. Now, once you decide on a basic source, you can blend it with the other sources. We'll start now with these two sources blended together. Now, as we did on the ARP, we want to attach some sort of filter. So we have our filter section over here to the right. And once I switch that on, right now, it's not on, (electronic music) completely unfiltered. Once I switch it on, we'll now hear this low-pass 24 dD edgy filter. (electronic music) So we're taking out a lot of the high frequencies. Of course, I can change the cutoff (electronic music) and choose how much or how little high frequencies to carve away. Now, just like we did on the ARP, we might want to shape our filter with an envelope. So the envelope section is down here, and it uses ADSR with one addition. There's actually also a hold control, which can, is just one more parameter in your ADSR envelope. So for right now, AHDSR1 is controlling our overall volume. But if we want to attach another AHDSR envelope to this filter section, we can do that by, for example, right-clicking on the cutoff filter. And I can say Add Modulation, and let's choose a envelope. We'll choose number two, since we aren't using that one yet. Now we get a whole brand new envelope down here, and it's set to control the filter, well, almost set. We have to go over here to the modulation page and choose to give it a certain depth. I'll just go 100%. Now, visually, you see an orange, little round orange part of the cutoff filter, and that's telling us how much is being controlled by this envelope. And I can also change that orange part of the filter by moving the cutoff filter, and you can see how much it's being controlled. And you'll see it visually, once I give it some values. So right now, the attack is set very fast. (electronic music) Can hear the filter right away. But if I set the attack to be a little slower, you'll kind of see and hear how it opens up slowly. (electronic music) Let's see here. (electronic music) There it is, okay, see, if I give it a longer attack, (electronic music) can hear how it's opening up slowly, and you can also see, visually, the little ball travels down that orange pathway to show us how long the attack is taking. (electronic music) So now we've attached this envelope to control how quickly the cutoff changes on the filter. Again, just like modular synthesis, but we're doing it here with some slightly different controls and with a bit more control over what we're doing visually. Next, like we did on the ARP, we can add an LFO to control the filter. So let's go ahead and go to our LFO page. And here we can choose the shape of our LFO. In this case, we'll choose a sine wave. And let's go ahead and add this to our filter. So to do that, all I need to do is go in here and choose LFO1, and I'll give it a depth. And now this LFO should be controlling how our filter is coming in and out, or how the cutoff is coming in and out. (electronic music) Can hear it turning on and off according to the frequency here. Right now, it's synced up to our tempo of our song, but I can also change it to just be simple hertz. (electronic music) Faster and slower. You get some really cool effects there. (electronic music) So as you can see, we're using Alchemy to do what we just did with the ARP in the previous movie. But you can see there's a little bit more control and sophistication. Now, speaking of control, I want to show you how you can also use this amazing performance section down at the bottom of Alchemy to control some of your modules. So let's go ahead, and in the Modulation page, I'm going to just turn off the modulation we did. So I'm going to turn off the envelope, and I'll turn off the LFO by switching to None. Now, I'm going to actually map some of these controls to our performance section down here. So for example, I'll right-click on the cutoff, and I'll Add Modulation, except this time, I'll add it to the performance menu. And I'll use this XY pad. This is this area right here. So if I Add Modulation, under Perform, to XYPadX. That means that the x-axis will be controlling the cutoff. And now, as you see, when I move this and play a note, (electronic music) it's actually moving the cutoff with this little controller. Now I can also map another control to the Y value, so what's happening when I move vertically with this dot. And I'll do that with the resonance. So I'll right-click on resonance, I'll Add Modulation, Perform, and this time we'll do XYPadY. So now, whoops, let me try that one more time. Let's see. Add Modulation, Perform, XYPad1Y, there we go. And I'll turn up the depth all the way. Now the Y value controls our resonance. (electronic music) See how that dot is changing as I move the little performance dot up and down. So now, by moving this anywhere in the box, I can have control over both resonance and cutoff with one simple control. (electronic music) Of course, this simple implementation of parameters and mapping is just the very tip of the iceberg for Alchemy. But now that you see how the usual controls, like sources, filters, LFOs, and even performance mapping can be implemented and routed in a more complex synth like Alchemy, you can get started on programming your own custom sounds. And don't forget to save your settings up in the Save menu or the Preset menu if you get a sound you like, 'cause you can always get back to it later in a different song or different project.

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