In this lesson we looked at Controllerism, mapping and how to make the most out of MIDI within Ableton live. MIDI keyboards are something that usually get overlooked as basic tools for making music digitally, however when working in Ableton they are incredibly useful and powerful, especially if you were looking at performing live with Ableton. In order to get the most out…

Wavetable synthesis is one of my personal favourite methods of synthesis. A Wavetable usually refers to a collection of pre recorded waveforms that use a Digital Interpolation Algorithm. A Digital Interpolation Algorithm is a way of accurately estimating unknown data values in gaps between recorded data, in the case of waveforms, this means working out the missing frequencies allowing them to flow as…

As part of our session on sampling, we briefly touched on the history of sampling. Sampling is a huge area of technical skills, with people developing new sampling techniques and equipment everyday, but at times even an area of legal and philosophical argument. I would personally be inclined to say that out of all the techniques we’ve covered during the Designing Sound Unit, this…

In this weeks session we looked at sampling within Ableton. Ableton has a number of tools for sampling, we mainly looked at Simpler, which is Ableton’s primary sampling tool. Simpler is a sampler, and a very useful one at that. To use Simpler, you drag a sample in the form of a WAV file into Simpler, you’re then able to manipulate your sample, play it across a keyboard either whole…

After focusing on digital synthesisers within Ableton and Logic and looking at the real world synthesisers they were based on, you come to find that the original synthesisers are worth thousands, sometimes even tens of thousands of pounds and the manufactures are still making reproductions of these classic synthesisers today. This begs the question, if your computer can…

In our second session we looked at FM Synthesis. FM Synthesis stands for Frequency Modulation Synthesis, the name is fairly self explanatory, FM Synthesis is a process of creating sound by using different frequencies to modulate signal. Waveforms are produced by all different frequencies, after all that is how sound works, when you have two waveforms playing at once…

 In our first session we looked at subtractive synthesis. Subtractive synthesis involves shaping sound using the overtones of a waveform, these waveforms are usually generated using an oscillator on a synthesiser. The standard kinds of waveforms are; sine waves, saw waves, square waves and triangle waves. Each of these waveforms have their own unique qualities that can…