Sound in ten ideas
You can play or sing without ever thinking about what sound is: the instrument and the room take care of it. In a studio you are the instrument, the room and the engineer at once, so a few decisions that used to be made for you become yours. These ten ideas are all you need to make them. None of them is physics, and each comes with something to hear.
Read them in order once. After that, every control in Flesance that touches one of these ideas links back to it.
Pitch is frequency
A sound is air moving back and forth. How many times a second it does so is its frequency, counted in hertz (Hz), and we hear frequency as pitch: slow is low, fast is high. Going up an octave doubles the number, so the A below middle C is 220 Hz, the one above it 440 Hz, and the next 880 Hz. Hearing runs from about 20 Hz, a rumble you feel more than hear, to about 20,000 Hz (20 kHz), the faintest hiss.
Where you meet this in Flesance: the piano keys of the note editor are pitches, and every control marked in Hz, such as the frequency of an EQ band, is a place on this same scale.
Loudness has a ceiling
Loudness is measured in decibels (dB). In a computer the scale is upside down from what you might expect: 0 dB is the loudest a file can hold, and everything else is a negative number below it. Anything pushed past 0 dB has its top cut off flat, which is called clipping and sounds like crackle. The space you leave between your loudest moment and 0 dB is headroom, and leaving some costs nothing.
Where you meet this in Flesance: the master meter turns red when the song clips, the volume faders are marked in dB, and the Limiter is the device that makes a song louder without clipping.
Timbre is the shape of the wave
Two instruments playing the same note at the same loudness still sound different. That difference is timbre, the colour of a sound, and it comes from the shape of the back-and-forth movement. A smooth, round wave sounds pure and soft; a wave with sharp corners sounds bright and buzzy.
Where you meet this in Flesance: the waveform of the synth chooses the shape, and Drive bends a wave to make it brighter and rougher.
A note is many notes
Almost every sound is a stack of pure tones: the pitch you name, called the fundamental, and quieter ones above it at two, three, four times its frequency, called harmonics or overtones. A flute has few, a saw wave has all of them, and that mixture is what timbre is made of. This is why turning up “the highs” of a bass makes it brighter without making it higher: you are turning up its harmonics, not its pitch.
Where you meet this in Flesance: the synth’s cutoff removes harmonics from the top down, and an EQ turns groups of them up or down.
A sound has a shape in time
How a sound begins and ends matters as much as its colour. A drum starts at once and dies quickly; a bowed string swells in and lingers. The beginning is the attack, the dying away is the decay or release. A fast attack sounds percussive and close; a slow one sounds soft and distant.
Where you meet this in Flesance: the synth’s attack and release set this shape for an instrument, and the attack and release of a Compressor or a Gate decide how quickly those devices react to it.
Two speakers make a stage
With two speakers or headphones, a sound that is equally loud in both seems to come from the middle, and one that is louder on one side seems to come from that side. This placement is pan. A sound that differs a little between left and right seems wide; one that is identical in both is mono, a point in the centre. Use headphones for these.
Where you meet this in Flesance: the pan knob of every track, and Width in Utility.
Echo and reverberation are the room
A sound in a room reaches you several times: directly, and then bounced off the walls. A single clear repeat is an echo. Thousands of repeats too close together to tell apart are reverberation, the sound of the room itself. A recording made without either is called dry, and it sounds as if it were inside your head; adding a little space puts it somewhere.
Where you meet this in Flesance: Delay makes echoes in time with the song, and Reverb makes rooms.
Dynamics: the distance between quiet and loud
The difference between the quietest and loudest moments of a part is its dynamics. Too much of it and the quiet notes vanish behind the other instruments while the loud ones jump out. A compressor turns down the loud moments automatically, after which the whole part can be turned up: the quiet notes come forward and nothing jumps.
Where you meet this in Flesance: velocity is how hard each note is played, and the Compressor evens a part out.
Two sounds can fight for the same place
When two instruments are busy in the same range of frequencies, the ear cannot separate them: each hides the other, and the mix sounds muddy even though neither is too loud. The cure is rarely the volume fader. It is giving each its own range, usually by removing from one what the other needs.
Where you meet this in Flesance: the EQ is the tool for this, the Ducker solves the same fight in time instead of in frequency, and pan separates parts by position.
Loudness for streaming
Streaming services measure how loud a whole song is, in a unit called LUFS, and turn loud songs down so that everything plays at about the same level, around −14 LUFS. So pushing a song as loud as it will go no longer makes it louder for the listener. It only flattens it: the drums lose their punch, and then the service turns the result down anyway.
Compare the second and the third: they are equally loud, and the one that was not pushed has more life in it.
Where you meet this in Flesance: Meters and loudness shows the number, and the Limiter is where a song’s final loudness is set.