Takin' It Easy: Celeste

One thing I'd like to say as an addendum to my previous post regarding the look and feel of your setup is that one thing you really can't live without is a trackball. That's the best invention since bottled beer, lemme tell ya. Mine is a Logitec, the one with the big marble in the middle of it. It's one of those that's been made symmetrically so lefties like myself won't be uncomfortable for all those hours of never-ending tweak sessions. It is a beautiful piece of work. I think the only way it could be better is if they made a wireless version.

Seriously, if you spend more time moving virtual knobs and sliders, you need one of these.

OK, I promise no more pimpin' Logitec, but it's a great product.

There was something else I forgot throughout my previous postings. Yes, I do have a small number of go-to patches that save a lot of prep work. I also have a few variations of patches I make along the way. What I forgot was that I was working through my collection of patches alphabetically before my computer died. While I'm on my backup machine, I'm going alphabetically from ROM to ROM. I was pleasantly pleased, considering my goal for today, that more than half of my work was already done! Not wanting to break momentum, of course, I'll push on if I still have the energy and the time.

The title of this post is "Takin' It Easy," and here's I'm going to discuss some of the lazier ideas of the task of making keyboards. Michael Bierylo in his sound design course will tell you to stay away from sine waves. It's not that sine waves are evil, necessarily. It's just that one sine wave here or there won't really do anything. There are some things you CAN do, of course. For example, you can add a sine wave to a saw wave to emphasize certain partials. Or you can add a sine wave to a triangle wave, several partials up, of course, and detune it for some inharmonic effects. But you won't hear a sine wave if it's the fundamental. Using it as a sub oscillator can be nice, but it still doesn't speak as well as other waveforms.

Add a bunch of them together and you can get some interesting sounds. Or use them as FM oscillators as in DX7 and Thor. But one lonely sine wave?

It appears that's what we're working with here.

Let's start with FM8, ops A and B. There's a feedback loop here--no big surprise, right? Hey, if it were easy, everyone would do it! There's only a tiny bit of feedback and FM going on. In fact, just on computer speakers I can barely hear any sound at all from these two. Let's try something different. Instead of going for some recondite frequency-shifting modulation from feeding an FM pair into itself, let's use the shaper to add just a hint of sine wave distortion. Activate osc 1 into filter 1, leave it bypassed, activate the shaper. Add in a little drive, say, 42. Osc 1+2 level should read -3.5 dB. Activate the left arrow pointing towards filter 2, but don't activate it's arrow. You'll see why in a minute. In Osc1, set a 5:1 ratio (remember, modulator first, then carrier, backwards from what is displayed), leave FM amount all the way down.

We shouldn't really hear anything at this point. That's a good thing since what we'll be doing depends on signal routing. In the router, route amp EG to Osc1 FM amt, amount 27. Route the shaper, amount 59, to Amp Input, scaled with mod EG amount 85. Set MG D to 29.7 ms. This will give you a nice, sharp attack that is barely audible. It is a subtle part of the sound, and if I were going for authenticity, it wouldn't be audible at all. For whatever reason, it's there, and I feel like an effect is no good if it can't be heard. Just my opinion! I'm adjusting my amp EG settings: D 1.24s and same for R.

It's the next part one might find difficult to digest. From the default setting for Osc2, turn FM amount to 0. I want to avoid a sharp attack for this timbre, but I don't want to sacrifice the percussive attack of Osc1. In the router, route Osc2, amt. 82, to Amp Input, scale amount 100 with Filter Env. I recommend leaving S all the way up, although you could turn it off and use a long decay.

You're as good as done at this point. I noticed in the original there's some slight chorusing. Just turn on the chorus, delay 0, F.Back 0, rate 1.21 Hz, amt. 22, dry/wet 42.

Sine waves aside, what else is unusual about this? The chorus takes over the role of detuned oscillators, so there's no need to program another oscillator. The DX7 programming on this is for the most part useless. We've freed up Osc. 3, which is perfect if we ever want to come back to this patch and add more complexity, as in a layered type of instrument. And since all we have is a subtle bell percussion sound, the sines in this patch aren't going to get in the way of other timbres. Another possibility is to get rid of Osc. 2 and have 2 hybrid kinds of sounds in this patch for even greater complexity and versatility.

It's good to take it easy every once in a while. Easy patches like this are versatile and good source programs for a variety of different applications.