From the course: Learning the Arturia Collection

Sculpting the B3 V organ sound - Pro Tools Tutorial

From the course: Learning the Arturia Collection

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Sculpting the B3 V organ sound

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that weren't available in the original Hammond organ. We have control of multiple MIDI parameters, we have five insert effect slots, a reverb unit on our Leslie speaker, a really cool drawbar modulator section for advanced sound design, and many more. Before we dive in, I want to play this classic example of Green Onions by Booker T., which really gives us Okay, so that's a really great example of the B-3 in action. So now let's dive in and take a closer look at how we can sculpt our sound and how we can achieve some really classic sounds. This is, by the way, one of my favorite go-to plugins when I'm working on kind of more soulful R&B kind of tracks. So we can see that we have our layout in the traditional two-keyboard setup with an upper and lower manual. And then looking on the upper panel, we have a vibrato on and off for our upper and lower. I generally like to leave vibrato on. I think it gives it a lot of flavor and some character. To the right of our vibrato, we have a vibrato and chorus kind of tone control, which will give us several flavors of vibrato and chorus. I'm just going to play that a little bit so you can hear what that's like. (organ chords playing) So you can hear some are a bit more spacey, a little out of phase-y things going on, and some are a bit more kind of classic and straightforward. To the right of that, we have the primary original sound design functionality of our original Hammond, we have our drawbars. And the drawbars on the B-3 V are really interesting because you can MIDI map them, which is something you certainly couldn't do with the original. This is really great if you're using this instrument in a live setup as part of a live performance rig. You might want to map out the drawbars to your favorite MIDI controller so that you can more easily adjust these parameters. A lot of traditional organists would absolutely go for the drawbars during a performance in real time to make the performance more unique. So we can MIDI map them by clicking on the MIDI icon in the upper right. And you can see that the color parameters change to a red and purple here. And I'm just going to click on this first drawbar and I'm going to turn the knob on my MIDI controller here. And you can see, MIDI learned, because it's now moving. And now I'm going to exit out of that. And now you can see, I'm moving the drawbar without using the mouse. So again, really awesome for live performance. So let's talk for a second about what the drawbars do. So the first thing I'm going to talk about is amplitude. When you pull the drawbar out, (organ chord playing) it's going to increase in amplitude. And when you bring it all the way in, (organ chords playing) it's going to turn that particular frequency off. So we have from zero to eight settings. So I'm just going to go in and zero this out, bring these all down. (organ chords playing) So that's just giving us a custom development here. I'm going to bring them all in for a second. (organ chords playing) And when I turn percussion off, we've now completely killed the sound on this B-3. I'll explain percussion in just a moment, but let's talk about the drawbars. So first, we have our sub-fundamental. So as I bring this one out, and maybe I'll just play one note here. (organ tone playing) I'm just playing a C with our sub-fundamental. When we bring the one adjacent to it on the right, we have the sub-third harmonic. (organ tone playing) You can hear harmonic being increased there. The first white one is the fundamental. (organ tone playing) Here we have the second harmonic. Third harmonic. (organ tone playing) So you can hear, as we're going up, it's getting brighter. And that might be really good to cut through a mix. So you might want to introduce some more of the highs if you have a lot going on, or maybe for an organ solo, bringing out some of those higher harmonics, which a lot of organists might do during a solo. (organ tone playing) before going into the drawbars. So that's going to enable a percussive sound when the keys are clicked. (organ notes playing) And then to the right of that, we have control over the sound of that percussion, a softer sound, and also the decay, as well as introducing different harmonics of that percussive sound. (organ notes playing) So these are very subtle things, but it can be an interesting way to really dial in the exact sound you're looking for. Before getting into some of the advanced modulators and the more advanced section, I also want to point out our Leslie cabinet, which we talked about in the earlier video. The thing that makes this one really different is that it has a built-in reverb, which the original cabinet didn't have. And if we click on this name right above the reverb, we can see that we can pull up a number of different reverb flavors to choose from, things like the classic Fender twin to some other more interesting ones that are only available on the B-3 V. One of the other really interesting things is we can adjust, we can A, turn on the cabinet and off, (organ chord playing) and adjust the speed, and this is particularly helpful to dial in, especially in newer production, if you want to match the speed of the cabinet to the tempo of your track, that can be a cool thing to try out. (organ chords playing) And then we also have the separate controls over the horn as well as the drum in the bottom. (organ chord playing) And then a general slow and fast setting, which gave an overall tone control to how the Leslie cabinet responds. (organ chords playing) So fast is maybe more of a Jimmy Smith kind of flavor and slow might be more in the traditional church organ realm. Finally, we have our effects at the bottom. And what's kind of cool about these effects, in all of the Arturia plugins with these kind of stomp box guitar effects, if we click on the effect name, we can reorder these effects. So right now I have the delay first. If I click flanger, I am now putting the flanger first because these effects are running right now in series. So that's just a cool thing, to be able to really sculpt the sound of the B-3 without having to reach for other effect plugins in your dock. Now, the really cool thing about all of the Arturia V collection instruments is they have a lot of interesting things going on under the hood, so to speak. And you can access that by clicking on the two arrows next to our MIDI mapping functions. So this is what pulls up some really advanced settings in terms of sound design, that were certainly not available in the original B-3. We have things like control over the drawbar leakage, which will control signal for adjacent drawbars, kind of mixing into the signal. (organ tones playing) And that can be a really subtle sound, but something like background noise definitely isn't, so when it's all the way down, we're introducing a little bit of noise. I'm going to turn that up to an extreme so you can hear it. (organ tones playing) So this would be emulating the sound of all of those, the noise from the pickups and all the components going on inside, and we most likely wouldn't want that kind of sound, but if you wanted to really precisely get in there and add some background noise on purpose for a more vintage, original flavor, maybe if you wanted to emulate the sound of a really beat-up and out of shape organ, maybe you'd add a lot of background noise. But then we also have things like attack, But then we also have things like attack, tone wheel leakage, key click volume, tone wheel leakage, key click volume, and other tone shaping controls and other tone shaping controls that were not available on the B-3. that were not available on the B-3. Finally, we have some really interesting envelopes. Finally, we have some really interesting envelopes. And we can control those for each of the drawbars. And we can control those for each of the drawbars. We have control over LFO, or low frequency oscillation, We have control over LFO, or low frequency oscillation, and finally, a step sequencer, and finally, a step sequencer, which the original B-3 didn't have. which the original B-3 didn't have. So in general, I tend not to use these with the B-3 plugin So in general, I tend not to use these with the B-3 plugin because when I pull up this plugin, because when I pull up this plugin, I'm usually looking for a more traditional organ sound. I'm usually looking for a more traditional organ sound. However, we are definitely going to cover LFOs However, we are definitely going to cover LFOs and step sequencers and other modulators and step sequencers and other modulators on our Arturia synthesizer emulations, on our Arturia synthesizer emulations, which really make use of these features. which really make use of these features.

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