ES2 sound design from scratch in MainStage
The Create ES2 sounds from scratch tutorials guide you—from the ground up (from scratch)—through the creation of commonly used sounds. The ES2 sound design with templates tutorials also guide you through the sound creation process, but you use a number of templates as your starting point.
To see the settings for these tutorials in the ES2 window, choose Tutorial Settings from the Settings pop-up menu.
The Analog Saw Init tutorial setting is designed to be used as a starting point when you are programming new sounds from scratch. When programming entirely new sounds, professional sound designers like to use this type of setting, which has an unfiltered sawtooth wave sound without envelopes, modulations, or any gimmicks. This type of setting is also useful when you are getting to know a new synthesizer. It allows you to access all parameters without having to consider any preset values.
Start with the filters, the heart of any subtractive synthesizer. Check out the four lowpass filter types—12 dB, 18 dB, 24 dB, and fat (Filter 2)—with different values for Cut (Cutoff Frequency) and Res (Resonance). Define Env 2 as the filter envelope. This modulation wiring is preset in the Router.
Set Filter Blend to its leftmost position, which allows you to listen to Filter 1 in isolation. In many circumstances, you’ll probably prefer Filter 1, but Filter 2 has its advantages. In addition to the lowpass filter with 12 dB/octave slope (Lo), Filter 1 also offers a highpass, peak, bandpass (BP), and band rejection (BR) mode. Filter 2 lowpass sounds “softer” when compared with Filter 1. It is best-suited to sounds where the filter effect is or should be less audible, such as with Strings and FM sounds. Distorted TB-303-style sounds are more easily achieved with Filter 2.
This setting is also ideal for experimenting with different oscillator waveforms.