Lesson Info
2. Getting Started
Lessons
Introduction and What You're Going to Learn
00:43 2Getting Started
07:58 3Voicing
06:12 4Routing - Part 1: Intro
08:52 5Routing - Part 2
05:29 6Routing - Part 3
02:09 7Macros
02:56 8Performer
07:02Lesson Info
Getting Started
Hello and welcome to this lecture where we're going to be looking at a quick overview of the main features in Max. We will look at this in a lot more detail later on, but for now, we're just going to look at the main features so you can start making your own sounds in Max. OK? So let's get started. First of all, we're going to go up to the preset menu up here. We can just click to select this and we're going to go to Quickstart and then choose massive X. If you select massive X blank and you play some notes on your midi keyboard, you won't actually hear any sound. The reason that is is because the routing hasn't been set up yet. We will look at routing later on. But for now just to get started, let's just select this one massive X and we will hear the default sound. So starting from the left, we have pitch and this will affect the global pitch. Obviously here, we can increase and decrease in semitones and scents and we can double click on this for it to go back to zero going down. We h...
ave glide where you can just click to turn this on. So this can be useful if you want to glide between different notes. So now I'm just going to play two legato notes with glide turned off and now let's turn glide on. And obviously there you can hear the pitch gliding between the two notes. We can increase this glide with the glide time or decrease it. OK. Going along, we have the oscillator section. So this is where you start building the sound. By default, we have two oscillators, oscillator one and oscillator two. Let's first have a look at oscillator one here, we have the gain for the oscillator. So if we have this all the way down, we won't actually hear any sound. And if we increase this, we'll be able to hear the first oscillator. We have a drop down menu up here which allows us to actually choose our oscillator. The default one is the basics. So this is sine triangle saw square, but we have a few different ones, we can select as well. But for right now, we're just going to leave it on this basic one and we can actually scroll through those different waves with the slider here. So from here, we can actually cycle through the wave table with this circle dial. But right now, I'm just going to leave this on sine wave. We also have a pitch control for this oscillator. So for each oscillator, we have a separate pitch control. OK. Going down, we have a few different warp modes for the oscillator right now it's on standard. So each of these warp modes just cycle through the wave table in different ways. For example, mirror mode cycles part way through the wave table and then back again, rather than cycling all the way through the wave table. So going along, we have oscillator two which has the same controls as oscillator one. And obviously, we can blend oscillator two with oscillator one with these controls here. So let's just change this to Sawtooth and there you can hear OST two obviously sounds different to OST one. Even though it has the same controls going along, we have the noise oscillator where we can add two different colors of noise into the mix. By default, we have white noise and pink noise and we have these faders here to add the noise into the mix and we can change the pitch of the noise as well. With these pitch styles down here, we can also click on these noises and change them to something else. As you can see, there's a lot of different noise colors available. So I have an experiment with these but some of the ones I like are actually in the environment tab for example, bubbles sounds pretty interesting. And there's another one called ice water which I quite like. But like I said, go through and experiment with these and going along, we have the filter section, we can click on the filter up here to change the different type of filter. For example, let's just choose scanner. We also have different types of filter here. For example, two different low pass a band pass and a peak. And going along, we have resonance which adds a peak just before the cut off point. And then going along, we have keyboard tracking. So if this is turned all the way up, the cut off frequency will move with the notes that I play on my midi keyboard. But if you turn it down, it just has a less of effect on the cut off frequency. But if you turn this all the way down, the cut off frequency is static. I'm just now going to play some high notes on my keyboard and there are some lower notes and you can hear the filter cut off has moved with the pitch. We have some more controls such as gain and frequency modulation down here. So frequency modulation will actually modulate the cut off frequency. We'll have to set this up later. But you compare this with a modulator to actually allow you to modulate the filter cut off. And then going along, we have gain which allows us to affect the intensity of the filter going along. We have insert effects. Here we have three different inserts where we can choose different effects. So let's just click on a and here we have a few different controls. A common one to use might be a distortion here. You can choose a type of distortion and then the mix. So how much of it is blended in with your original signal? And then going down, we have drive which allows us to increase the amount going into the distortion without actually making it louder. And then going down, we have HQ which affects the quality of the processing, but it might use up more CPU but may sound a little better. So remember we have three different inserts here we can use then going along, we have the AMP stage where we can affect the global settings for the level the pan and also the feedback. So feedback just feeds the signal back into the inputs. And there's an option here to also apply a high pass filter to this feedback and going across we have free global effects, XY and Z. So here we have effects like flanger phaser, reverb and these are effects you could use to sweeten the sound. Let's just add some reverb and you can hear there that this synth has more of a sense of space. Now we could add another one, for example, let's choose phaser. So we have a lot more to look at in the synth. I just wanted to make this lecture to give you a quick overview of some of the main settings. So I hope you found this useful. I hope you can jump in now and start making some sounds in Max. And in the next few lectures, we're going to look at the synth in a lot more detail. So, thanks for watching. I hope you found this useful and I'll see you in the next lecture.
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