Keyfax has released Sound Advice – a DVD almost 9 hours in length providing ‘no parameter left behind’ information and expertise on analog-style synth programming and digital effects.

Sound Advice’s 3 DVDs encompass:

• Synth programming techniques
• An exhaustive parameter-by-parameter guide
• Digital effects

The DVD’s navigation system allows you to use Sound Advice in many different ways: As a complete master class tutorial, as a work of reference (you can search individual sound parameters), or as an encyclopedia of techniques and sound types (creating pads, modifying sound FX etc).

“All you need to know about oscillators, filters, envelopes, dynamics and effects that will enable you to produce the sound that you are looking for on your synth – totally from scratch,” says legendary producer and 2007 GRAMMY nominee Alan Parsons.

DVD Contents

Using the Yamaha Motif ES as its demonstration platform, Disc 1 starts with how to create simple sounds; breaking down examples into three main categories: decaying sounds, sustaining sounds, and non-pitched sounds. The next section shows you how to tweak a series of classic sound types: brightening up a piano, changing the tone of an electric guitar, modifying the envelope of a brass patch, and many others.

Disc 2 comprises an exhaustive look at all the major analog-style synth parameters from Amplitude Scaling to Velocity Curves. Perfectly watchable from start to finish, with diagrams, text boxes, and plenty of real-world musical examples, Disc 2 is primarily designed as a reference guide.

Disc 3 is entirely devoted to digital effects – now an integral part of the sound design landscape. All major DSP effects – from reverbs and delays, to chorus, flanger, and phaser, to EQ and compression – are examined in minute, parameter-by-parameter detail.

Who Needs It

Talking ‘in plain English,’ Sound Advice is aimed at the novice to intermediate user who has a keen potential interest in sound, but who doesn’t exactly want to study the subject at college. Applications include computer-using musicians of all persuasions, technology-enabled DJs, to students and teachers in music education.

“There’s so much scope for creating new sounds today between powerful workstations like Motif, software applications, and plug-ins,” says KEYFAX founder Julian Colbeck. “But programming has become a dark – or at least lost – art for most people. We hope that Sound Advice will inspire a whole new generation to experiment with sound and unleash the full creative potential of the tools now at their disposal.”