Express Yourself!
By Marty Cutler

Your synth is much more than a keyboard. Each time you call up a new patch, there’s a new way to play the instrument; each patch presents its own set of rules to make it “speak.” That’s one of the beauties of playing synthesizer. Envelope generators, LFOs, filters, velocity sensitivity, aftertouch and the like are a part of a synthesizer’s toolbox to help emulate the three main characteristics of sound: loudness, pitch, and timbre. That’s true whether you’re playing a synthesized trumpet, a string ensemble, or soloing over filter-swept pads with a Martian Thermonuclear banjo. Some of the tips I’ll lay out here are great for emulating acoustic and mainstream electronic instruments, but don’t let that keep you from applying them to purely synthetic pads and other sounds; it’s all about expression and making your sounds live and breathe.

A Mighty Wind
One of the great expressive characteristics of woodwind and brass instruments is the ability to change the loudness of a note even as it’s being held; try that on a piano. It’s easily done on synthesizers—even without a volume or expression pedal. So many synthesizer programs use the Modulation wheel that controls a Low-Frequency Oscillator (LFO) to create vibrato, that it’s easy to forget that modulation is really a general-purpose controller. Why not directly assign your controller’s Mod wheel to control your synthesizer’s oscillator level? I find it much easier to use than an Expression pedal. You don’t need to go to extremes; a little bit goes a long way.

Another way to control volume in a realistic fashion is to emulate tremolo, which is a varying of the volume that occurs when you don’t keep the wind stream constant. Try leaving your MOD wheel in control of your LFO level, but instead of routing the LFO to pitch (vibrato), use it to control oscillator level (tremolo). It’s also very nice to do both at the same time – when a wind player adds vibrato they naturally also bring in some tremolo.

A real woodwind changes volume with increases or decreases in air pressure; another byproduct of those changes is a variation in tone color. You can route the wheel to simultaneously control filter frequency – again, a little goes a long way in increasing realism. Better still, if you have a joystick controller, you can send modulation on one axis and assign another MIDI Control Change to open and close the filter; that gives you a bit more independent control over volume and timbre. My Korg microKontrol does this easily. Controlling volume or filter cutoff with aftertouch is a very tactile approach, as you are literally using changes in pressure on the key bed as a control source. However, even the slightest variations in pressure can send data, so this may be difficult to control.

One of the best things you can do for a solo horn patch is to set it up as a mono mode, legato instrument. How many trumpet solos play chords? Legato mode simply treats connected notes in a line as if they issued from a single breath: without retriggering the attack portion of the instrument on every note. While we’re on the subject of breath, leave some space in your solos; if you breathe and exhale as you play your parts that will give you some solid musical cues when to play and when to rest.

Our Plucky Friends
Stringed instruments have their own set of responses to dynamics. For example, they get brighter as well as louder when they are struck harder. That’s not all that different a result from blowing into a trumpet or saxophone, so it’s common to find patches of both instrument families with amplitude and filter cutoff frequencies controlled by velocity. However, the pitch of a plucked string will often take a small fraction of time to settle into a stable pitch, and that’s something you can emulate in at least a couple of different ways. If your synth has an envelope dedicated to pitch, chances are it can go positive and negative (which translates as sharp and flat) before settling into pitch. With just a slight amount of rapid positive and negative motion, you can add an extra dimension of realism to guitars and other picked instruments. Better yet, try adding a bit of velocity control to the envelope level; now your instrument will stray farther from the center pitch the harder you strike it, or less so with a softer touch. If you’re using a two-oscillator patch, try inverting one pitch envelope relative to the other for some nice chorus-type animation.

Speaking of pitch envelopes, another great trick adds a distinct thump or pick attack when there wasn’t any to begin with. For this one, you simply add an extremely rapid attack above the oscillator’s starting frequency with an equally rapid decay to the starting frequency. This rapid spike in pitch goes by so quickly that your ear easily mistakes it for an attack transient. If possible, set that envelope’s key follow rate to zero so you can maintain a consistent “thunk” across the keyboard. Again, routing velocity to envelope generator intensity lets you bring out more “thunk” with harder keystrokes.

There are tons of expressive features lurking under the hood of your synthesizer; I have only scratched a tiny spot on a huge surface, but hopefully, I have given you a few locations you can poke at under the hood of your synthesizer so you can breathe a little extra life into your music. Try these out and I’ll be back in a few issues to provide some more. Have fun!