So we've made it to week six, the final week in this course. We've covered a ton of material. And to tell you the truth, I've kind of struggled with how to end this course. It, the inclination, my natural tendency, would be to end with the topic of mastering, and mastering is what you do to the final two track process. So you mix your entire track down, you export it as a single uncompressed WAV file. And then you master it, which is giving it one kind of, once, once over with digital signal processing, fine tuning the beginning and the end, before you release it. as a CD or as some kind of downloadable medium. But, I don't think we're quite there yet. I'd like to talk more about the fundamentals of sound and talk about something that really helped me in my growth as an artist, and that's synthesis. And once I started learning about synthesis, I started getting a language for tambor and a language for sound and I started hearing things a little differently. Cause we don't really have a natural language for how to describe how kind of a note evolved, or how it starts and ends. or how the tambor sounds different between an oboe and a violin. It's hard, we don't have words for it, and the idea is synthesis and learning how to create sounds from scratch there gives a language for sound, and a way to kind of describe it, and a way to kind of memorize it and remember. So I think it's very valuable and besides that, a synthesizer's usually an important tool in the contemporary productions. I mean we hear synthesizer sounds on everything, and even when you're hearing real instruments, very often, it's a sampled instrument. You hear a violin, very often, that's a sampled violin and when you're working with a sampler using the same modules, the same components that you learned when working with a synthesizer. When you're dealing with MIDI data, very often you want to manipulate that sound. You get to the point where you'll find a patch in a synthesizer and a sample that's really close to what you want but not perfect. Well knowing just the, the fundamentals of synthesis will help you to make it to be that perfect sound. So if it's just right in your production. So in this week, we're going to cover the fundamentals of synthesis. And it's going to be five modules. And really, most of synthesis breaks down to these five modules and just various ways of connecting them. In fact, one of the, one of the versions or names for synthesis is modular synthesis, just because there's these simple building blocks that connect together. And these five modules are the oscillator, the filter, the amplifier, the LFO, and the envelope. And we'll look at each one of those in turn this week. But as a broad overview, the oscillator is what creates the sound. And very often, it's a bright, buzzy, kind of, aggressive sound, based on a square wave, or, like a saw tooth wave form or some other, geometric wave form. The next object or module is your filter, and its general design is to remove the unwanted frequencies. And the low pass filter ends up being the most important of the filters. Because, as we saw earlier, the low pass filter lets the lows through and cuts the highs, and because the oscillator's so bright, the, the filter removes the excess high end, making the oscillator sound a little more like a real-world sound. The last module we have, after the filter, is going to be the amplifier, which is going to control the volume of that sound over time and control how it develops over time. And the time factor is really important, because synthesizers are not static things. Though the filter is similar to the EQ, the difference is a synthesizer filter is meant to move over time. Though the amplifier is similar to a gain knob or a volume fader, the synthesizer amplifier is designed to move very quickly, over time. And that developing over time, that change over time, in synthesizer land, it's call modulation. And really we have three, kind of, main modulators. The first is you as a user, you can turn knobs and maniupulate the sound over time. But there are two really important kind of algorithmic modulators. Ways that you can kind of give instructions so that the synthesizer itself can control other parameters within this set. And those two devices are going to be your LFO which creates cyclic variations in any other parameter. Or the envelope, which creates kind of a, a shape that runs every time a key is pressed. Very often the LFO is controlling the pitch of the oscillator, so we get kind of a vibrato a pitch wavering like, a natural singer has. And the envelope is almost always controlling the main amplifier, which is how we can make the amplitude change over time, to give it a percussive shape or a sustaining shape. Now, though I've talked about an LFO controlling pitch, we can have an LFO controlling many things. I can have an LFO controlling a filter, or one controlling an amplifier or a variety of other parameters. The envelope, too, I can have an envelope controlling pitch, or an envelope controlling a filter. In fact, I can have more and more envelopes and more and more LFOs, LFOs controlling LFOs. It kind of builds up, it's kind of a big formula when as you start connecting these modules in various ways. We're going to focus on the fundamentals though, and we'll look at those five objects and a really basic way they can be connected. And I think you'll find once you understand that, synthesizers and samplers in general will make much more sense.
