What is timbre and why does it dominate popular music?

0:02 What's good? It's Scoobert Doobert. Today, I want to talk about timbre. If you just read

0:24 it and don't know how to pronounce it like when I was little, timbre. So, timbre. I'vetalked a lot about vibe, and why vibe is my most important goal as a musician. Trying to trackdown that ever-illusive thing that puts you in a state of mind, a mood, a phase, an emotion.

0:47 To achieve vibe, we reach for all the different tools of music. You have the frequency,which gives you the notes, the rhythm, which gives you the timing, and also delays and reverbs,kind of fall in between these things, the ways that frequencies hit a wall and reflect back at you

1:10 and change their frequencies slightly as a combination. But then there's this other element oftimbre, which is the unique sense of one instrument playing the same note. So, just picture like atrumpet, a guitar, a piano, a vocalist.

1:29 All of those can play the exact same note, but your brain is like that's a trumpet. That's not a guitar, that's not a singer. And when you like super,super train, I'm not like this, but like conductors. They can hear a bunch of different trumpets,all playing at the same time, all pointed at them and know exactly which one is off.

1:53 And then if you're like a super connoisseur of strings, you can hear a bunch of violin players maybe all atthe same time and know which one is the Stradivarius, the like primo, primo top shelf violin just byhearing it. That's because there's a unique like fingerprint.

2:12 It's like a snowflake that every single instrument category, as well as every instrument within that category. So like an individual fenderguitar versus a Gibson guitar, they sound different. They'll play the same note.

2:28 They can even havethe same musician playing them, but there's a fundamental set of a bundle of frequencies that are enhanced or muted by whatever instrument.

2:42 That creates a phenomenon that we call timbre. It's like how it's spelled, t-i-m-b-r-e. So timbre is a way that our brain identifiesthings. That's snowflake, that fingerprint. But that's, it's like kind of the most important thingin popular music is not just the notes that are being played.

3:06 It's not just the timing in which they're being played. It's the overall timbre that's being created by the combination ofinstruments. So the sound that a bass guitar and an electric guitar playing at the exact same timecreate is additive. It's greater than the sum of its parts.

3:25 In the same way that an orchestralsection like all of the horns together create this sense of horns and they smack you in the face with this broader, temporal structure that you can both identify the individual parts, but alsoit becomes this massive group. And that's one of the phenomena that we try to play with with,like, as mixing engineers, it's taking the entire bubble of sound and turning it into one bubble.

3:52 So it doesn't feel like a bunch of different instruments. It feels like one instrument,

3:57 which is an interesting give and take in between some mixing engineers and others.Some mixing engineers are very much of the mind of I want to know exactly where the guitar is.I want everything segmented as though I'm standing on stage. And that's kind of the pitch of Dolby Atmosor Spatial Audio or whatever. You can look around the room and see the different instruments.

4:18 That's cool. That's like one way of doing things. Then there's the other way of doing things whereyou turn everything up into a bundle of sound. And that's more the camp that I like to live in.

4:28 I don't really care if you know that it's a guitar or a synthesizer. I just want you to know thatit sounds cool. I just want to move you. It's immaterial in what's doing the thing. And I also likeI like transforming instruments. One of the most powerful tools that we have in the digital worldis changing pitch, changing frequency through the computer.

4:50 And we can do more than just frequency now. We can also do things called formant shifting or attacks and sustains and chopping up thingsand shifting things around. What that allows us to do is alter the perception in a way that

5:10 you know you can't actually do in real life, which is really fun. That's one of my favoritethings about like digital stuff is it pushes you into the realm of the unexperienced. You can'tcreate a digital reverb in the real world.

5:25 You can't have it be where something is perfectly dryas in you know sterile, no room, and then all of a sudden it pops into a cave and then the cave is gone in an instant. You know these these things that they play with like our fundamental natureas animals of we are very much aware of our surroundings.

5:43 And as you're having a conversation and you walk from a hallway into an elevator, you know the the room change is perceived.By being able to manipulate that, we canprovide experiences that you cannot possibly have in the real world. And that's one of the thingsI like like say take a guitar for example.

6:02 If I play a guitar and I run it through some effects and then maybe I take the pitch of it and I change it in the computer rather than playing it on theguitar.

6:12 Now I'm creating a synthesis between myself as a producer as you know a computer-basedprocessor of sound, a computer musician, and my ability on the guitar, marrying them so that I'm able to you know kind of transcend both. That's that's the sweet spot for me. And so you're takingthis timbrel element that's expected. This everybody knows what guitar sounds like at this point.

6:35 And then you're changing it in some fundamental way. Let's talk about formant because I was talkingabout pitch just you know changing the notes, but there's something else that we can do called formantand formant is based on vowel sounds in our mouths. So there's like a A-E-I-O-U-U-R-O-E-O-U-U-U-U-U-U-R-U-U-U-U-U-U-U-U-U-U-U-U-U-U-U-U-U-U-U-U.

6:56 They kind of like just do that you know if you're like in a relatively normal place or if you're alone.Try, try feeling the way that your mouth changesas you go through those different vowels.A, especially A to E, A, A, I know,it sounds like a crazy person,but like actually feel the way that your mouthis changing as a resonance chamber.It's like the sound hole on acoustic guitar.

7:26 The beauty of our mouth is that we are,we're using so many different parts.We're resonating in our heads, our chest,our throat, our mouth, our nose.When we speak, when we sing, when we do whatever.And by changing our vowel sounds,we're able to manipulate the frequenciesthat are coming out of the rest of our system,like picture like you're a wind instrument,you're blowing out the wind instrument,

7:51 but then the front of the clarinet is changinglike a mouth.Those are formant shifts.Shifts by which the fundamental frequencyis going into a thing, a mouth, a resonating chamber,and it's changing as though the sound holeof the acoustic guitar was talking like a creepy mouth.It sounds like an anemia or something.We can do that now virtually, digitally.I can apply mouth shapes to anything.

8:21 And I love it to illustrate that.Let me just kind of go through a bunch of different ones.So here it is, this is just me normal.This is me up a thousand.Sense.A thousand, two thousand.Get the idea.Kind of crazy sounding.Let me go the other direction.So you can hear what it sounds like to go loose.Like basically the formant shifting,going off as getting more like this,and then go, no, no.

9:02 It's great to get more like that.So let me go down so you can seethe different shift in perspective.I'm talking sense in, it's just like an easier unitof measurement, it's not really important what it is,but it's basically, you know,the same way that we denote pitch.12, 1200 cents is an octave.And yeah, thousand is just a nice round numberfor you to hear abrupt changes.One of my favorite things to do with formants

9:28 is very, very slight, but it's, you know,this is better to illustrate the example by going for it.So here we go, let's go down.This is me normal.Down one thousand.No confusion.I'm pretty sweet, right?Now do that to any instrument you want,and you're going to have some crazy results.Again, something that could not possibly existcan be existing, can be dropped into your earholes.

10:11 So that's one of my, you know, most exciting thingsis about manipulating the timbre of familiar objectsand turning them into new musical instruments,new musical moments that have never before been heard.How cool is that that there's actually somethingwe can still do that no one's ever heard before?It might not always be pleasant because it's new,but that's the exciting part about it.

10:38 And finding the right moments, the right little timesto grab for that spice.It's probably not the entire song, sometimes it might be.Sometimes you can get really crazy soundsif you take an entire song, an entire mix,and change the formant of the entire ball of sound.It gets very lumpy, very weird,but that's what these tools are here for to get weird.And so just to kind of recap the whole thing,

11:05 timbre is the fundamental nature of an instrument.You play a C on any instrument,it's going to be slightly differentbecause on a natural instrument, synthesizers notwithstanding,there are lots of different frequencies, harmonic series.I talk about that in some other podcast, check those out.But basically there's no pure notes in nature.There's always some other stuff going on.Even like when I'm talking right now,

11:30 when I just pulled this audio into Melodyne to shift the formant,it grabbed polyphonic, which means more than one notesbeing happening at once, being played at oncebecause it's hearing my pitch of my voiceand seeing, oh, there's more notesbecause there's harmonic things going on.Just even as I speak, it's what makes me sound like meversus you.And it's also funny, we're talking formants,which is the mouth shape.

11:59 When I speak different languages,my fundamental frequencies changebecause it's being shifted into a different resonating center.So like, that's the way I'm speaking Japanese.When I speak Japanese,I think that when I speak in Japanese,I can hear my voice from the bottom of my nose.But anyway, you don't speak Japanese probably.And if you do, you're probably like,this guy's fumbling for words, but I am,

12:29 because I don't exactly know what I'm trying to say.But what I'm trying to say, I think is like,when I'm speaking Japanese behind it,the sound is coming from behind my nose.So when I'm speaking English, it falls down lower.It's more in my chest versus when I'm speaking Japanese,I'm a little bit more in here sort of, sort of.It just changes things, you know?It's probably the reason why I like to sing

12:54 in different languages is it outcomes a different voice,you know, because you're putting it in a different spot.That's the nature of timbre.And there's like a cultural component to timbre,which I find very fascinating.And then you can manipulate it after the fact in the computer.And so you got all these different places.You have the input and the output that you can change.You can tweak.

13:16 And timbre, in many ways, is what makes pop music pop music.It's what makes genre genre, I should say.The timbre of old school rock and roll,versus the timbre of old school rock and roll,the timbre of old school rock and roll,versus the timbre of doom metal.Very different.They might be playing the exact same notes.Like I've heard Abba covers by, you know,like death metal, you know, kind of bands.

13:45 And they're playing the same notes that Abba did.Or they're singing the same melody,but the timbre is so different.You know, they got the whole thing going on.That it just brings out a completely different emotion,even though it's the same notes.It's all of the other harmonics and frequenciesand context and distortion and effectsand all of these things create a camber

14:05 that makes you feel dark and, you know, moody and whatever,versus Abba, which is like,like, let's go to the disco and dance.Same notes.But the thing that I'm most excited aboutis that we can now use the computer to do that too.It's not just distortion pedals, it's not just amps.It's, you know, getting to the ones and zerosand manipulate this thing from its DNA up.That's pretty cool.

14:30 So hopefully, when you listen to some music,you have a new, you know, vocabulary.If you're a musician, you probably are a new, most of this,but a new vocabulary, a new thing to listen for.Listen to the timbre of things.It's not just a snare drum.There's a bunch of different types of snare drums.And each of those snare drums gives you one pointin the direction of a different genre.

14:53 And genre is the accumulation of these points.If you have enough things, the vocal, the guitar,the bass, the drums that all sound like a certain genre.Now it's that genre.If you spread things out,you have drums that sound like death metal,guitars that sound like disco, vocals that sound like, you know,traditional Arabic music,and keyboards that sound like Duran Duran.You're going to be like, what genre is this?

15:19 Because it doesn't have any accumulationof temporal points in any direction.And that's part of the beauty of music today,is that stuff like that is happening, like,boy band metal that my buddy Cary Singer is making.You know?You're able to pick these different temporal thingsand be very intentional to confuse your audience.And maybe they like it, but usually they'll just be confused.

15:44 But still, fun things to do both on the extreme and also.In little tiny doses,to shake things upand make people expect the unexpected.And surprise them,because that's one of the most fun things about timbre.So you can set an expectation.It sounds like a guitar.It's a guitar,and then all of a sudden the guitar transforms,like a phoenix into a synth.You know, or you know,you have an expectation of the vocal,

16:10 and all of a sudden it's a down 700 cents form and twice.And now I'm talking like this.I'm like a different person.And they're like, oh, is this a collab?Is this a new person?No.I just manipulated my voice.Anyway,this is a subject that I'm very excited about if you can't tell.I hope that this helps when you listen to other music,when you listen to genre.Try and think of it in this framework

16:34 and see if any new insights come out of it.If you want to hit me up,scoobertdoobert.pizza is my actual website.All of my links are up there.DM me, email me, whatever.Talk to you later.Talk to you guys later.What was that?Tamber.Talk to you guys later.