Using Aftertouch To Create Big Bass Sounds in Zebra

This week we are going to check out how to use aftertouch to create big bass sounds in Zebra, for those of you that never used this, now is the right time!

Having a MIDI keyboard with aftertouch gives you some great extra possibilities when you are working inside Zebra.

For those of you that don’t know how it works, aftertouch is basically a modulation source, just like velocity.

You can assign velocity to a lot of parameters in Zebra and this means that when you hit the key harder it will send a bigger amount of modulation, when you hit the key softly it will send a smaller amount of modulation.

You can use this to get a more playable sound, for example when you use it on the volume of the patch, it will give you more expression and it acts more closely to what, for example, an acoustic piano would do.

Aftertouch is a bit different, it doesn’t listen to how hard you hit the key on the initial strike, but it checks out how hard you press the key down AFTER you’ve hit the key, hence the name.

So to use it you hold the key down and then press harder, or with less pressure, to send out different amounts of modulation.

Not all keyboard have aftertouch available though, so you have to check they manual of your controller to find out if it has this function available.

If it has nothing of the kind I strongly recommend getting a keyboard with aftertouch, because the uses are endless.

In this video I will quickly show you how to create a looping bass patch, after that we’ll look into the uses of aftertouch and how we can modulate stuff with it.
I also wanted to talk about velocity and the modwheel for a bit, but that’ll have to wait for another video.

At the end of the video I show you how to get a lot of variations into your sound using the aftertouch source, and how to make some nice bass sounds.

The technique I often use is to bounce down a fairly complex sound with a lot of modulation.

After it has been bounced to audio I search for the good parts in the sound and make new sounds out of that.

This re-sampling technique can be really useful and quick for those of you who want to create big bass drops or anything like that.

So there is a lot to learn this week, check out the video and enjoy some of these ideas.

If you have questions or request for new videos let me know!

Jorgalad