Ultrabeat sound programming in MainStage
The Ultrabeat tutorials presented in these sections cover a number of specific sound creation tips. These tutorials will help you explore the possibilities available to you in Ultrabeat. You will discover that there is hardly a category of electronic drum sound that Ultrabeat can’t create easily.
As you become familiar with drum sound programming, you may begin thinking in building blocks, realizing that drum sounds usually consist of different components.
After you mentally—or physically—write down your list of components, try to emulate each component that contributes to the sound character, making use of the different sound generators available in Ultrabeat. Assigning dedicated amplitude envelopes to the different components allows you to control their temporal behavior individually. For example, you can emulate the body of a drum with oscillator 1 and the sound of the stick hitting the skin (or first transient) with the noise generator. Additional overtones and harmonics can be provided by oscillator 2 or the ring modulator.
When you begin thinking that drum sounds consist of several building blocks or layers, the design of the Volume controls in the individual sound generators might make more sense to you—this is the place where the blocks are combined, balanced, and controlled.
Note: In the plug-in Settings menu, choose Tutorial Kit from the Tutorial Settings subfolder. This kit contains all drum sounds discussed in the tutorials. The Tutorial Kit also includes the Standard Tut(orial) drum sound, which is a default set of neutral parameters that provide an excellent starting point for many of the examples.
All Ultrabeat tutorial sections are listed below: