Interface overview - Sylenth Tutorial

- One of the things that I like most working with Sylenth is that it is tremendously powerful and can be used to create a wide variety of sound. From leads, evolving pads, organs, EDM plucks to drum sounds and everything in between. The other thing I really like is its workflow to design your own sound. With Sylenth, there aren't really any hidden menus. Everything is right in front of you and, before we dive into what all of the parameters do, let's take a look at the interface so you can understand general workflow. Our middle display is where we are going to see all of the values for our parameter changes. As we move knobs up and down or turn buttons on and off, you can see everything changing here. You can navigate other parameters such as choosing the wave form on an oscillator, by hitting this drop down and while you are moving the knob, if you hold command, it will reset the knob to the middle position. Additionally, you can hold down shift while you are moving the knob to move it in smaller increments for more precise control. In the middle area you can also access global effects, which include an arpeggiator, a distortion, a phaser, a chorus, an EQ, a delay, a reverb and a compressor. We'll cover these effects in detail a little bit later in this course. For now I will say that to enable them and disable them, you just hit the check mark next to the effect. Additionally, you can access Sylenth's four main banks from this middle display which each contain a number of presets. You can go right into the presets here and you can see presets are organized with different categories like ARP for arpeggiator, KEY for keys, LD for leads, BS for bass, ER for drums, SFX, you got the idea. To just cycle through presets, if I were in a bank, if I am in bank 2, for example, I can also hit the arrows to move forward (electronic noises) to a different preset. There's also a drop down menu which gives you control of some other parameters. We are going to cover the menu in the next movie. Now, let's take a look at the components of Sylenth for a moment. So, essentially Sylenth is divided into two main parts. We have a Part A and a Part B. And you can cycle through them here and you see that the background also changes. We have our oscillator A1, oscillator A2, AMP envelope A, Filter A and then, if we go to Part B, we have the same thing for B. So, essentially, two oscillators, an amp envelope and a filter per parts. And then, we have our modulation envelopes below. Our LFO's and then there are some miscellaneous modulation and routing that we can do which we will also cover later in the course. Then, we have a mix control to mix the output signal (mixed signal outputs) for parts A and B. The last thing I want to show you for now is there is a cool little feature that was included with many of the parameters in Sylenth and that's copy and paste. So, if I go to an oscillator, I can hit copy and copy the settings from this oscillator right to the settings on this other oscillator on A2. Additionally, I can go to Part B and copy that over to Part B. This applies to a filter as well. Or, if I were working with presets, let's say, (preset plays) I really like this arpeggiator, and the way it's moving. I can go here, copy that, go right to the next preset (second preset plays) and paste it in. (combined presets play) So, that's a nice little feature that makes things really easy and especially in presets it's really easy to grab some of the things you like and paste them in other parts and experiment. So, now that you have a basic understanding for just navigating this interface, we are going to move on to check out Sylenth's menu in the next movie and then we are going to really look at how all of these parts work together in the subtractive synthesizer.