Music Production Day 1: Synth/Lead's done!

     Music production is going well so far! Today, I have made the main synth/lead. I'm not sure really what to call it. For creating them, I used a plugin on Ableton called Vital. It uses different shaped sound waves like sine, square, and triangle waves and modifies them to create new, original sounds. On Vital, I found a really interesting preset. The effects applied like compression and distortion make the synth sound almost like a distorted guitar in a grunge rock song. It gave some very interesting texture to it. There was some reverb and delay on it, which made it sound too echo-y and the phase shifter almost was like a wah-wah pedal. I changed the distortion settings to be a hard clip, which increased the "harshness" of the distortion and decreased the dry/wet percent, which reduces the overall volume of the distortion effect compared to the original sound. I didn't change the compression effects much, just decreased the amount of low frequencies. I added an equalizer filter that removes some high frequencies. I added a little touch of glide to make the notes almost glide into each other. Below are some screenshots of what I did. 

I want to automate the decay, where I start the song with the decay being very short, making the synth sound more like plucks. Over 8 measures, I increase the sustain time, which makes them fade out less and sound more like synths compared to plucks. The effects will be more noticeable with more decay time.

In my next post I will work on the drums