In my previous tutorials I gave information on how to set up a basic home studio, creating beats and simple song structures on FL studio. Now lets dig a little bit deeper into one of FL studios most powerful weapons, the Styrus Synth.
Overview of the Styrus
Styrus is an hybrid synth which is able to FM, RM and subtractive synthesis. FM is frequency modulation, RM is ring modulation. I will not delve deeply on the concepts since they are time consuming and there is enough material out there in Google which you can find to explain the concepts.
Image-lines website has a wealth on information on Styrus and its features. You can access most of this information directly from the site above in the help section.
Background on Synthesis
Synthesis as process is taking ingredients and tweaking them so that you get something very new in the process. However it is not always easy, for example in the field of chemistry synthesis is very complicated, time consuming and sometimes not reproducible. Well that is chemistry and this is FL studio. the concept remains the same and good thing here is you can save your synthesized sound as a preset and with just one click get the same sound again for reuse or even more tweaking.
So what are the ingredients used in synthesizing a new sound. first you need a source, some kind of a sound wave to start. It can be a sine, triangle, sawtooth or square. We will concentrate on sine waves. And to know how a sine wave acts read through the following for a refresher in how sound works. If you know what a sine wave is proceed straight into the synthesis part of the article.
Simple concept of how sound works.
Before we head into our example for reshaping sound where we will be manipulating a sine wave, a little background on what a sine wave is. The sine wave is the most basic wave. The most common shape that sound generally travels through air is the sine wave. The higher the frequency the shorter the wave, example of sounds in this category will be bells, cymbals, shrill voices etc, they tend to die down quicker. The lower the frequency the longer the wavelength. Example of these sounds will be drums, bass and the low strings in the string instruments, they tend to have a longer duration.
Example would be walking to a door of a dance club or a hall where loud music is playing, you will generally hear muffled drum or bass tones outside the door. This is because those waves are so huge (wavelength) and carry a lot of energy that they can reach outside the realm of the club. Once you open the door and walk towards a speaker, the bass might get more defined, but perceived loudness will remain the same or increase a little more, but the highs will start to get progressively louder closer to the speaker until they are almost near ear tearing levels close to the speaker where they are the most apparent.
Synthesizing an Ambient Beach Wave Sound using Styrus
I have used this sound in many of my compositions to add atmospheric effects. Its pretty cool if you get it right, and when you play with it after getting a decent sound, you can make even better effects.
To keep this example easy. Let us use a Sine wave as the original wave and start modulating it to get the sound we desire. There are bunch of modules in Styrus that you need to be aware of. the main module shown below in the figure is where you change the shape, modulation, volume etc of the wave very easily and get a cool sounding patch. The areas where you would spend a lot of time tweaking the sound are highlighted in the picture below.
In the main module there is a separate module called unison. this is where you can add texture and depth to simple sounds. This is where i spend a lot of time starting with a sound, since the texture from some of the presets are amazing. The options for this module along with the unison effects can be accessed from the options menu on the Styrus main panel, the downward pointing triangle symbol just above the 6th operator in the operator window shown below.
Lets load the default patch on Styrus. When you open up Styrus it should automatically load a Styrus patch. It will sound somthing like a String synth. Just navigate to presets and choose Default patch.
Now click on OP1 and go and change the wave shape of the signal from a sine wave to the following wave shape. You can see that I have chosen the half wave and then changed the shape using the sliders to the right.
The next steps is to create Filters that are going to provide you the nice wind and sea sounds. Go to filter one and use a LP3 filter with the settings as shown below. Also the Envelope needs to be changed to something that has a slow attack and lot of sustain. Why is this, a sea wave coming towards you normally starts out slow and then begins to gain volume and finally dies down. The closest would be a string section. To get a similar envelope to a string section is easy since there is a preset built in FL for this. See the image below, it will show you how to get to the presets, clicking on the triangle button shown in the box will pop you a menu and the state file preset used in this example is Strings.fnv. I have not highlighted it below, but the knobs for the cut off, res, env and drive are left up to you. You can play with these to get the sound you want.
The final step is to get a little bit of wind noise and this is done using the OP1 output. Just increase/decrease the output of OP1 into the filter. This should generate the needed wind noise. The final patch should look something like this. Once you are done, go to the triangle next to Styrus and save your creation as a new preset for use later!
Whew!...and the final sound should be like the audio in this link.
Hope you had fun creating the sounds. More complex sounds are possible once you include all the operators and the filters. Styrus is a beast of a synthmaker!
Overview of the Styrus
Styrus is an hybrid synth which is able to FM, RM and subtractive synthesis. FM is frequency modulation, RM is ring modulation. I will not delve deeply on the concepts since they are time consuming and there is enough material out there in Google which you can find to explain the concepts.
Image-lines website has a wealth on information on Styrus and its features. You can access most of this information directly from the site above in the help section.
Background on Synthesis
Synthesis as process is taking ingredients and tweaking them so that you get something very new in the process. However it is not always easy, for example in the field of chemistry synthesis is very complicated, time consuming and sometimes not reproducible. Well that is chemistry and this is FL studio. the concept remains the same and good thing here is you can save your synthesized sound as a preset and with just one click get the same sound again for reuse or even more tweaking.
So what are the ingredients used in synthesizing a new sound. first you need a source, some kind of a sound wave to start. It can be a sine, triangle, sawtooth or square. We will concentrate on sine waves. And to know how a sine wave acts read through the following for a refresher in how sound works. If you know what a sine wave is proceed straight into the synthesis part of the article.
Simple concept of how sound works.
Before we head into our example for reshaping sound where we will be manipulating a sine wave, a little background on what a sine wave is. The sine wave is the most basic wave. The most common shape that sound generally travels through air is the sine wave. The higher the frequency the shorter the wave, example of sounds in this category will be bells, cymbals, shrill voices etc, they tend to die down quicker. The lower the frequency the longer the wavelength. Example of these sounds will be drums, bass and the low strings in the string instruments, they tend to have a longer duration.
Example would be walking to a door of a dance club or a hall where loud music is playing, you will generally hear muffled drum or bass tones outside the door. This is because those waves are so huge (wavelength) and carry a lot of energy that they can reach outside the realm of the club. Once you open the door and walk towards a speaker, the bass might get more defined, but perceived loudness will remain the same or increase a little more, but the highs will start to get progressively louder closer to the speaker until they are almost near ear tearing levels close to the speaker where they are the most apparent.
Synthesizing an Ambient Beach Wave Sound using Styrus
I have used this sound in many of my compositions to add atmospheric effects. Its pretty cool if you get it right, and when you play with it after getting a decent sound, you can make even better effects.
To keep this example easy. Let us use a Sine wave as the original wave and start modulating it to get the sound we desire. There are bunch of modules in Styrus that you need to be aware of. the main module shown below in the figure is where you change the shape, modulation, volume etc of the wave very easily and get a cool sounding patch. The areas where you would spend a lot of time tweaking the sound are highlighted in the picture below.
In the main module there is a separate module called unison. this is where you can add texture and depth to simple sounds. This is where i spend a lot of time starting with a sound, since the texture from some of the presets are amazing. The options for this module along with the unison effects can be accessed from the options menu on the Styrus main panel, the downward pointing triangle symbol just above the 6th operator in the operator window shown below.
Lets load the default patch on Styrus. When you open up Styrus it should automatically load a Styrus patch. It will sound somthing like a String synth. Just navigate to presets and choose Default patch.
Now click on OP1 and go and change the wave shape of the signal from a sine wave to the following wave shape. You can see that I have chosen the half wave and then changed the shape using the sliders to the right.
The next steps is to create Filters that are going to provide you the nice wind and sea sounds. Go to filter one and use a LP3 filter with the settings as shown below. Also the Envelope needs to be changed to something that has a slow attack and lot of sustain. Why is this, a sea wave coming towards you normally starts out slow and then begins to gain volume and finally dies down. The closest would be a string section. To get a similar envelope to a string section is easy since there is a preset built in FL for this. See the image below, it will show you how to get to the presets, clicking on the triangle button shown in the box will pop you a menu and the state file preset used in this example is Strings.fnv. I have not highlighted it below, but the knobs for the cut off, res, env and drive are left up to you. You can play with these to get the sound you want.
The final step is to get a little bit of wind noise and this is done using the OP1 output. Just increase/decrease the output of OP1 into the filter. This should generate the needed wind noise. The final patch should look something like this. Once you are done, go to the triangle next to Styrus and save your creation as a new preset for use later!
Whew!...and the final sound should be like the audio in this link.
Hope you had fun creating the sounds. More complex sounds are possible once you include all the operators and the filters. Styrus is a beast of a synthmaker!
