[DREW KRAG PLAYING THE NATIVE INSTRUMENTS ABSYNTH 3]

DREW KRAG: Hello. I’m Drew Krag with Gearwire.Com. This is another home studio workshop, and today we’re going to be talking about a way to save a lot of time and a lot of money in the studio by using soft synthesizers.

Now, up until the invention of soft synthesizers, we’ve been just forking out money left and right to pay musicians to play parts, and you know that if they make a mistake, there’s not much we can do other than chop it out or something like that. Soft synthesizers save us a lot of time and money in the studio. We’re able to lay down parts very quickly with it, incredible sound base, and today we’re going to be talking about some of the more popular soft synthesizers I like to use in the my studio, a lot of Native Instruments softsynths, and various other ones that have just saved me a lot of time and money. So, let’s take a look. We’re going to start with looking at Native Instruments Absynth 3.

So, here you have it. Here’s our interface for Absynth 3. Now obviously, the first thing you want to do is to patch through your MIDI signal into the Absynth itself so you get the sound going it. You know it’s patched through when you see the keys kind of light up as you hit them, and here is the first preset on Absynth.

Now, I’m going to show you one of the things that I love about Absynth. It’s really easy to change these presets into kind of a more customized sound. Here is our preset display. You can see there’s just an enormous amount of presets on here. I believe 127 total. So, that’s a lot to choose from, and if you click up here at the top where it says “patch”, you get to be able to see the various oscillators that create the sound. When I start taking these away, it’s going to change the overall sound.

[DREW KRAG PLAYING THE NATIVE INSTRUMENTS ABSYNTH 3]

So, this oscillator here is a little bit more mellow.

[DREW KRAG PLAYING THE NATIVE INSTRUMENTS ABSYNTH 3]

I can add or drop the filter just by clicking on this box.

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The next oscillator sounds very different.

[DREW KRAG PLAYING THE NATIVE INSTRUMENTS ABSYNTH 3]

I can add or drop a filter by just clicking on this lower box or some modulation. Here’s the sound of the third oscillator.

[DREW KRAG PLAYING THE NATIVE INSTRUMENTS ABSYNTH 3]

A little bit more mellow, and at home you’re not going to be able to tell but it is panned more to the right. Now, each one of these oscillator channels, as we’ll call them, has your master volume down here and then this little box that has a little -- basically a pan and distance. You can actually kind of create space using this little box and put that particular oscillator in a specific space. In other words, if I wanted this middle oscillator to be up front, I can move it down like this and it’ll sound more present. If I wanted this oscillator to sound more in the back, I can move it back like this and it will sound less present. It’s very, very simple. And then all the way at the very, very bottom here, if you scroll all the way down to the bottom of Absynth, you’re going to find your master where we have a master filter, and if I get rid of this master filter I have a feeling it might sound a little cheesy but let’s see what happens.

[DREW KRAG PLAYING THE NATIVE INSTRUMENTS ABSYNTH 3]

A lot more high end. You can actually hear these oscillators a lot more clearly. I’m going to leave that filter on because I just like the way that sounds.

[DREW KRAG PLAYING THE NATIVE INSTRUMENTS ABSYNTH 3]

It sounds a lot better. So moving along, that’s the patch window of Absynth, and that’s pretty straightforward. Moving to the wave, this allows you to actually manipulate the wave that you’re working with, which is actually a really cool function. If you really want to get techy about your sound and have absolute control over your wave, you can click wave and alter the window -- or alter the sound that you’re working with.

Effects, it has -- Absynth has some wonderful effects. You can turn these oscillators into just amazing sounds using these various different effects. There’s a pipe effect, a multi comb, multitap echoes and resonators. I’m going to run through them real quick. This particular Absynth -- This particular softsynth has an awful lot of options and ways to customize the sound as with all Native Instruments softsynths, so I’m not going to be able to get to everything today guys but I’ll try my best.

[DREW KRAG PLAYING THE NATIVE INSTRUMENTS ABSYNTH 3]

So, this is the resonator. It just basically adds a lot more depth to the sound.

[DREW KRAG PLAYING THE NATIVE INSTRUMENTS ABSYNTH 3]

It almost kind of gives it kind of a like it’s in a very resonant wood room kind of sound to it.

[DREW KRAG PLAYING THE NATIVE INSTRUMENTS ABSYNTH 3]

Echoes gives it a little delay.

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It’s harder to hear because it’s a pad.

[DREW KRAG PLAYING THE NATIVE INSTRUMENTS ABSYNTH 3]

You can hear the delay. Multitap as well...

[DREW KRAG PLAYING THE NATIVE INSTRUMENTS ABSYNTH 3]

...is a different kind of delay, and you can hear there’s a little bit of modulation there.

[DREW KRAG PLAYING THE NATIVE INSTRUMENTS ABSYNTH 3]

It’s kind of going obviously in a little bit.

[DREW KRAG PLAYING THE NATIVE INSTRUMENTS ABSYNTH 3]

Multi comb is kind of like an auto filter effect, and Pipe is kind of like a modulation effect as well.

[DREW KRAG PLAYING THE NATIVE INSTRUMENTS ABSYNTH 3]

Those are the basic effects and take it from me, you can just do a lot which is customizing those various effects. You have control over your envelope of every single sound of your attack, sustain, release, all that sort of things are completely customizable by your mouse just by clicking and pulling these around.

[DREW KRAG PLAYING THE NATIVE INSTRUMENTS ABSYNTH 3]

I just gave it a lot longer decay just by moving that. There’s a lot of different things you can do using this window as well. LFO, here’s all your LFOs for your oscillators and everything. Again, just a lot of stuff can be controlled through here just by changing the parameters. You can turn them on and off just by clicking on them.

[DREW KRAG PLAYING THE NATIVE INSTRUMENTS ABSYNTH 3]

So, you’re seeing just an absolutely enormous amount of ways to customize your sound, and again this was just came from one of the presets, so let me just try this with one other preset. I’m just going to pick one randomly.

[DREW KRAG PLAYING THE NATIVE INSTRUMENTS ABSYNTH 3]

It’s a little bit louder.

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You can see I’m just turning on, turning filters and modulation effects on and off.

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It can really change the way it sounds quite a bit. Look at the decay on this. We are going to change that a bit. So, just by sliding this over...,

[DREW KRAG PLAYING THE NATIVE INSTRUMENTS ABSYNTH 3]

...the decay goes down. So, it’s a pretty intuitive to start working with. There’s an enormous amounts of sounds in it already. So, feel free to check it out. It’s definitely worth it. It’s one of my favorite softsynths. Thanks for watching.