The second part in a two part tutorial giving an overview of different synthesis techniques for designing kick drums on the DSI Tempest. This video focuses on self-oscillating filter and feedback techniques. www.adamschneidermusic.com
This is great. Your drum synth design is so sophisticated. Love how much you get out of this thing. Especially how you're using the aux envelope to control the feedback. The Tempest is such a deep machine.
Amazing tutorials thanks a lot! Would really appreciate if you continue with more Tempest tutorials like this ( more 909 sounds / CR sounds / etc... ). Your approach is really unique and it works!
Thanks Matt! I'm a big Jamiroquai fan so that means a lot. All the synth videos and tutorials you've been releasing this past year have been great and really informative!
Love your tutorials. Would love to see and hear you do some pads and bass sounds as well, as it’s obvious that you’ve got a pretty damn deep understanding of what each parameter does to the sound.
Hi Adam, thank you for the awesome content on the tempest. I am just starting in music and wanted to know if you think the tempest is worth the investment as an instrument for sound design and composition. I’ve read some mixed reviews, but wanted to get your input since you seem to have a good understanding of instrument. I just got a poly Evolver and am looking for a companion, especially for percussion. Thank you for your insight.
Hey! If you're just starting in music and sound design, I might be hesitant to recommend the Tempest. It's a great instrument, but it's probably not the easiest learning curve if you're new to synthesis and to get the most out of it you have to have a really solid understanding of synthesis techniques and also enjoy the patch creation process as much as sequencing the sounds. That said, if you feel comfortable designing your own percussion sounds on the Poly Evolver, that might give you a good idea on how much you'd jive with the Tempest.
@@AdamSchneiderMusic Thanks Adam. I really appreciate your input. Any recommendations or advice on the best way to learn the fundamentals on patch creation and synthesis, or do you recommend just playing and practicing? Books, resources, etc?
Great sounding kicks! For some reason, I don't seem to utilize the feedback with the envelopes like that. I guess it's not too late to start! Thanks :)
I LOVE these videos! I'm a total newbie to synthesis. I've watched the New York School of Synthesis videos here on RU-vid and taken notes. Haven't made it through 'The Secrets of Analgog and Digital Synthesis' video yet....I've also began reading the MASSIVE soundonsound collection Synthesis articles. Your videos are making more and more sense. A grey area is the mod matrix. Does this function allow you to bend for example, the decay slope, just as you would pull the shape of an audio fade in or out....is this the same kind of function? So, not just making it longer or shorter with the 'amount' function, but changing the shape of the slope...if so could the same be done for the attack and/or the release on the pitch envelope, for example?
Glad you like them! Yeah when you go to the Mod Matrix and assign Filter Envelope to Filter Envelope Decay for example, you are bending the shape of the envelope itself and not just making it shorter or longer. If you look in the Tempest manual there's a page dedicated to explaining this with some pictures which is helpful. You're correct, you can also do it for the attack/release in addition to the decay!
Adam, these videos are great. So fun! Would you happen to have a recommendation for a text or some other thing to read or study on drum synthesis? Many thanks.
Thanks! I personally learned by just experimenting and studying drum synthesis through old Sound on Sound articles and studies on the 808/909 synthesis through the years. I know for the Tempest a lot of people have used this website and it goes into a lot of nice detail. stimresp.wordpress.com/tempest-recipes/ Also this drum synthesis video series by Matt Urmenyi for the MS-20 is fantastic. ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-d_sUFHVnsUE.html
Hi! I don’t know how to thank you enough for this tutorial series on the Tempest. It’s pure gold for me. I have a question that maybe you can answer it; do you think that these kick sounds would benefit from an external compressor? I mean for fattening them and make them punchier? (I’ve read a lot of forums and opinions in this matter and for electronic kicks opinions are kind of divided. Some say that you should compress and others that it is useless and that it is just a matter of tweeking when sound designing.)
They definitely will. Almost all the drum sounds I get out of my Tempest end up going through some kind of compression or saturation. I've never actually heard someone say it's useless to compress electronic kicks, but I think that's 100% untrue. Sound designing a punchy sounding kick is a big part of the equation, but external processing really can help shape the sounds in ways that you just can't do with most drum machines. Having said all that, not every sound does need compression and a lot of drum samples in sample packs already have compression. So maybe that's what they were referring to with regards to compression being not needed?
AdamSchneiderMusic In fact, some of the coments in GZ and other forums pointed to using already processed samples, but the ones that made me wonder about this, talked about sound design as being enough for sculpting a kick....anyway, I asked you in the first place because I have a Tempest, and I ended in your tutorials seeking a way to get a really fat kick. At this point I have realized that getting a prominent kick is kind of a challenge in any synth or drum machine that uses analog or substractive sintesis.....so making this story short, I ended grabing a Dbx 160A compressor, stick it as an insert in the a channel of a Mackie 1604 VLZ Pro mixer, where the kick of the Tempest is connected and assigned to one of its individual voices in mono out.....and man you are so right! This is a game changer for me! The kick finally cuts through the mix and hits me in the face :)......(I applied some eq in the mixer channel too. Some low boost, cutted down the mids and a pinch of highs....I hope this story will help others too) Thanks again for sharing with us your knowledge.
The best thing that I've found for it is using really high LFO speeds to modulate various parameters like 1/2 Mix, VCA Level, Pitch, etc. Basically anything and everything I can modulate at an audio rate levels to get clangy metallic sounds. Even though this video is for the Korg MS-20, I highly recommend watching it as it's probably my favorite demonstration of analog cymbal synthesis on RU-vid, and similar ideas can be applied to the Tempest: ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-4T2Y6xms52Y.html