Make an Airy Progressive House Pluck in Sylenth

In this tutorial, Echo Sound Works will show you how to make an airy Progressive House pluck in Sylenth1. Learn some great mod wheel techniques too!

Sylenth is one of my go to synths for plucks.

The airy pluck sound we’ll be making today can be used for a lot of different genres, but you would probably use it in EDM progressive house.

So I have a new instance of sound pulled up and we are going to jump right into it. So the first thing I did was I turned the Polyphony up to 16 because I was playing chord sounds and oscillator A1 and just as a side note, we are going to be using PART A and PART B for the sound, but PART B is just going to be our noise generator.

So going back to PART A, I’m going to select the h-pulse wave form so it will sound like such. I’m going to turn the voice up to eight and keep RETRIG on. I’m going to give it a little phase, so I’m going to turn this up to around 41.1 degrees.

I’m going to turn down the master volume a little bit so it’s not as loud.

For the DETUNE you are going to keep that where it is at 0 and the stereo at 10 and keep this amp envelop where it is as well.
Then in the second oscillator for PART A, I’m going to keep it on this sine wave form as it mellows out the sound and evens it out.

So if I turn down the volume for the H-Pulse, that’s just the volume for the sine and I’m going to keep the Phase, the DETUNE and the stereo where they are at, but blending those two together it evens out the sound a little bit.

Moving onto PART B, I’m going to use oscillator B, select this noise, and give it eight voices. It doesn’t really matter, it doesn’t have a huge effect on the sound if you give it one voice to eight with noise, and I’m going to select RETRIG and on the volume, just turn down the volume for this because this is how I’m going to blend it and mix A and B.

I’m going to boost the phase as well and we don’t touch the Amp envelope for PART B, but I will go back to PART A and dial in the filter settings. I will do PART A filter and then go back to PART B.

So in PART A you are going to have your input selected on A because we just want it affecting the H-pulse wave form and the sine wave form. I’m going to select low pass filter and for the cutoff I’m going to leave it in the middle and I’m going to give it a little bit of drive just to warm things up. I’m going to boost the drive to .71 or just under 1.

Going back to PART B I’m going to select the band-pass filter type. The reason I noticed the solo in the PART B sound, so if it’s on low pass for the noise it sounds like white noise and if I turn on high noise it’s like a bright noise. Band pass is like in the middle for the noise. It doesn’t have as much as the spectrum for white noise and it doesn’t have much high harmonic content as the bright noise with the high pass.

So I’ll switch this to 12dB to warm up the sound and push the drive to 3.05 and the cutoff down to 38 or 39Hz.

Then bringing in the actual sound.

Going back to PART A going to the master filter control section and I’m going to turn the cutoff down to 22.96 and after I play this, you are going to think I’ve killed the vocal of the sound, which is true. But my thinking with Sylenth every sound I end up making or tweaking, I’ll use this modulation envelope unless I go on a really simple sound or sine wave like a fundamental type sound.

But what you can do with this, instead of just turning up this filter control, instead of just turning it up and down with this modulation envelope, I can actually control both PART A and B equally using one of these destinations like cut off A and B. But I can control it with the attack, the decay, the sustain and the relief. So I have more control over the cut off of what is actually going on with it as if it was more or less of the cut-of frequency.

That is why I usually turn down the cutoff in the filter control, because I’ll bring it back up using the modulation envelopes.
So with that being said, I’m going to turn this little rotary knob up to 5.62. This affects how much is being applied to your ADSR. For the Decay, I’m going to boost that to 3.22 and this will actually be how you hear the effect of the sound unless your ADSR doesn’t want to do anything, so I’m going to push that to 3.22 and then we’ll play it.

I’m going to give it a little more sustain, so I’m going to push this up to 1.26 and I’m also going to add a hair or so more release. So by default that’s at 0 so I’m going to push that to 0.80 or just under 1.

Then I’m going to use this pitch trick and if you are a massive user, you can liken this to using a really sharp envelope that’s modulating the pitch of an oscillator. So in Sylenth you can do this by applying the pitch A B by doing a modulation envelopes, cranking the little rotary knob up to 10, and then just adding a hair and a pinch of decay. So I’m going to go to 40 for the sound and it adds that snappy attack to the beginning of the sound which is awesome.

Now, I’m going to go to the LFO and I’m going to select phase A and B, because I’m trying to make a pseud vibrato effect, so if you select phase A and B it’s not as noticeable as selecting the volume or the cutoff.

Then I’m going to select a pretty musical rate for the EDM. I’m going to select 1/16 so a 1/16 note, and for the gain, I’m going to push up to 6.29 and for this little rotary knob, there won’t be any effect until I start adding, so I’m going to push it up to 0.38.

This adds a subtle movement which helps the sound come to life a little bit.

With the mod wheel I can set up the destination by selecting mod wheel and the source, and then you can select phasing A and B if you like or LFO gain; let’s do that.

So then with the mod wheel you can actually hear more of that LFO vibrato and I can even bring in cutoff A and B.

The sources are actually pretty cool, because you can actually set up some cool parameters that make the sound very playable.
So I can have the cutoff turned down or I can crank it up.

I was just controlling that with my mod wheel on my mini keyboard right near me, so now the only thing to do is turn on and activate some effects.

So I’m going to select the EQ and I’m just going to use this to boost some frequencies. I’m going to turn this treble frequency down to around 700Hz should do. Then I’m going to turn the treble down a little bit and I’m going to boost this base frequency.
So now, let’s go onto the delay, because it’s a little crazy and just too much. So for the delay left, I’m going to select the 1/8 ratio and for the delay I’m going to select ¼

Then I’m going to select around 23Hz for this low-cut and I’m going to roll off a little bit of the high end as well. The I’m going to introduce this smear knob, which is really cool and it helps tame the bounciness of the delay, and do this to about 2.2 should work.

Then for the feedback, I’m going to keep that in the middle and for the width I’m going to turn down a little and the dry/wet, I’m going to keep ping/pong on, because ping/pong will have it bounce back and forth between each speaker or headphone, or whatever you are listening on in stereo.

The I’m going to the reverb finally, which will help round out the sound and for the size. I’m going to keep it where it was at default about 7.50 and just dial it back to about 6.5 and the width I’m going to keep all the way up, and the pre-delay down because it’s a pluck and we don’t want a lot of pre-delay on it.
Then you just boost the dry/wet to your taste and I’m going to turn it up a little.

That is the sound guys.

If you have any questions or comments, let me know below and I’ll get back to you as soon as I can.