Where to Begin - Timbre

Hi, it's Chris with Implied Music. Where to begin? That's the question we've been asking ourselves. We've talked about rhythm, harmony, chords, melody, naming notes. Today I want to talk about a fourth category that, you know, often gets ignored. Tone color. Today I want to talk about timbre. Timbre. It's the the shape of the sound, the physical components of all the sort of elements, the fundamental, the overtones, noise. It all goes into musical sound and it's an enormous part of our experience of music and instruments. By the end of today hopefully you'll have a better understanding of how timbre shapes our appreciation of melody and harmony chords and instrument sounds. I'll show you at least one of my favorite tricks about harmony and timbre because they really are very closely related. But before we go on, just a little housekeeping. If this is the second or third video of mine you've seen and it's useful for you to watch and think about this stuff, it would help me a lot if you would subscribe to the channel. Leave me a comment. Tell me what's up with you. I want to know how this stuff is valuable for you. I'm approaching 10,000 subscribers and I'm trying to figure out like exactly where to go from here. Not just where to begin, but where to go. Okay, listen. Let's get into timbre. So listen to this and take a look at the screen. Timbre has everything to do with the harmonic series and overtones. And I'll show you a picture of the harmonic series in a second, but listen to me singing poorly a B-flat and look at the screen. The fundamental pitch is on the left and it's the strongest highest peak. There are also secondary peaks. As I change the vowel sound on the far right, more and more overtones appear. Overtones are what shape vowels. And because of the way the human ear and our need to communicate vowels and the overtone series is a very, very important part of our hearing and understanding. And so it impacts us in music. It's not hard to imagine that it would become very crucial, right? Listen, I want to talk a little bit about what the overtone series look looks like. So I've got here a jazz organ tone and it's just a single note. I'm playing a C now. It's really just a fundamental tone and its octave appears here. That's the first harmonic. The second harmonic is the fifth and then there's another harmonic over that and over that and over that and over that. All of those harmonics are really louder than they would be in the ordinary world. As it happens, the organ, the instrument, the organ itself is brilliantly constructed around exactly that overtone series. Look at the drawbars here. I have drawbar one all the way out 16 feet, a low note. Now the eight foot is an octave. Watch what happens when I bring it in. You see the octave appearing there? And then this is the fifth above that. And then there's another octave. And then what's this? Here comes the major third. By holding down one key, and you can see on the screen, I've just got that C down, I'm playing a full series of overtones. And if I was soloing, I'd be playing single notes and even chords whose overtone series are creating themselves chords. It's kind of mind-blowing. Well, every instrument does this to some degree. Let's go into the classical orchestra. So in the classical orchestra, we've got a bunch of different instruments whose overtone spectrums, whose profiles, have different components. So let's play, for instance, a low D on a flute. You can see a very clear and pure set of overtones. There's a considerable amount of noise. See the rough bit up here? Because this is the blowing sound. But the evenness of the harmonic spectrum and the sort of representation, especially of the fundamental and its octave and the octave above that, is very clean and clear. Now compare that, if you would, to a clarinet. Here the fundamental is strong, but there's a dip, and that those secondary harmonics that are so loud on the top, the resonant peaks, make a very strong case for it being a very different instrument from the flute. Okay, we're going to go on, and when we go on, we'll go to the trumpet. Again, similar fundamental overtones that are different. Do you notice all this stuff up at the top? The brass sounds have a lot of noise on top. Very clear harmonics. A well-made instrument is going to have very clear upper harmonics, and it's going to contribute. The individual sounds of those harmonics contribute to the profile of the instrument. Poorly made instruments or trash instruments will have out-of-tune harmonics, and they'll sound less musical to us. Not that they're not useful in their own right. So violins are going to have a lot of upper harmonics and a lot of noise. Terrific, isn't it? Now, if I play a chord, all of those harmonics will be present for both notes. So there's a D, there's an A, and now at the top an F sharp. Each of the notes that I'm playing has its own set of upper harmonics, upper partials, whatever you want to call it. We hear the fundamental, we hear the the D major chord, but those upper harmonics are also present. And look at the complexity of that waveform. Very powerful stuff which we take in. We say that's a violin. How do we know? Because you're hearing these tiny little differences in the volumes of the upper partials and harmonics. Timbre is about that. Well, if timbre is about that, that means I can do something way fun, which is this trick here I want to show you. Let's go back to my original organ sound. Very simple. Just have sort of a pure sine wave. And you know, you can play chords on that. So here's a C, a G, a D, an A, and then how about an E on the top? That's kind of pure, and you know, solidly in the sort of world of the partials. But what if I use the chord trigger that comes built into Logic, and there are plenty of, you know, things like this that will do it, to create a new stack of harmonics. In other words, to jiggle the handle of the harmonic series to create a brand new sound. So I just created a, I don't know what to call this exactly, some sort of strange C major chord, C major 11, I don't know. Every time I play a note, I'll get that same structure. It's called coupling, or sometimes people just call it planing these days. But it's a sound, and it's not just a chord, it's also a timbre. Let's do another one, maybe a stack of fourths. All right, click learn, there's my C. I'm going to start with an A, a D, a G, and then another C on top. All right, this will be actually a little even easier to hear. Orchestrators use this trick all the time, asking the higher instruments to play quieter. A conductor balances the sound of the orchestra to create a kind of a holistic instrument out of the entire sound. I can't resist doing one more. So it's a kind of a coupling, it's a kind of a planing, it's a chord, it's a timbre. Timbre and harmony are like this. Your ear perceives timbre as if it's a vowel sound. Vowel sounds are crucial to us in cognition and understanding the world, and your brain is built for it. Your brain is built to understand timbre. You stomp on the guitar pedal, you get more harmonics. Those harmonics are out of tune, that's why power chords you have to stay with simple chords. But you can use it in your orchestration. You can create new timbres by creating new chords. It's a powerful tool. I love it. It's the fourth estate, so to speak, in music. You know, we talk about the various areas of music theory, and generally we talk about melody, harmony, and rhythm. But I think we've got to talk about timbre as well, because timbre starts to pull it all together, and it makes things meaningful and interesting. A big part of sound design, we've just started to scratch the surface with this discussion, but it's something to think about in your own work as you go forward. I hope this has been useful. Like and subscribe, ding the bell, you'll be notified when I do my videos. I'll see you next time.