 Hello OscillatorSync here and welcome back to another video in our series where we're exploring sound design on the Korg Volca FM. Now the time has come that we're going to have to talk about this scary looking graph right here but I'm going to put the graph away for a minute because the graph is useless to you until you understand actually what it represents. So what we're talking about today is operator level scaling. Even the name is kind of scary and I think it's probably one of the least well understood elements to programming sounds on the Volca FM and probably the DX7 that came before it, which is a shame because it's a really powerful and ultimately quite a simple idea that when you subtly can refine your patches so that they sound great across the whole spread of the keyboard whether you're playing low notes or high notes or used more creatively it can be used to completely morph sounds depending on whether you're playing at the bottom of the keyboard or at the top. But let's start by defining actually what it does. So but really simply the operator level scaling all it really does is it allows you to alter the level of a particular operator depending on how high or low a note you are playing. That's essentially it. So if you're familiar with the traditional subtractive analog synths it's somewhat related to the filter cutoff key tracking functionality that some synths have whereby as you move up the keyboard the filter typically a low pass filter opens up so that the sound gets inherently brighter the higher up the note you're playing. It's kind of there to emulate something that happens in acoustic instruments but actually the operator level scaling in the FM world is more powerful than that. Now as we know when it comes to operators they can do one of two jobs they can be a carrier the thing that we hear in which case if we're going to apply operator level scaling that's going to alter how loud that particular carrier is or they can be acting as a modulator which is going to govern the harmonic richness so if we apply operator level scaling to a modulator then we're going to be able to change the harmonic content depending on how high or low we are playing on the keyboard. Now I think the reason that that graph is so scary is because it's trying to show every possible combination or anyone graph so let's throw up on screen a much more simplified version of that graph basically with no information at all. So the best way to think about this graph is to essentially in your mind draw a keyboard along the bottom of it. Once you've drawn that keyboard in your mind along the bottom of the graph the first thing we need to determine for each operator is what we are counting as low notes and what we are counting as high notes. Now in the Volcker FM that's known as the breakpoint. We can essentially move the breakpoint to anywhere that we like on the keyboard so we can have only the last couple of notes on the keyboard down at the bottom count as low notes or we can have a gentle slope essentially right from the top of the keyboard down and say well pretty much everything is low note we just want to apply one particular curve and that's the next thing that we need to define either side of that breakpoint we can say that either an operator is going to get louder so a positive curve or it's going to get quieter a negative curve and then once we've decided whether we want to be negative or positive either side of the breakpoint we can then decide whether or not we want that to be a sort of linear straight line transition or whether we want it to start more gently and ramp up as we get further away from the breakpoint an exponential transition. Finally once we've chosen our breakpoint and we've chosen whether we want a positive or a negative transition either side of the breakpoint we can decide how deep we want that transition to be so if we only want the operator level to change ever so slightly we can do that or we can have a very extreme curve indeed but as the old adage goes talking about music is like dancing about architecture so let's actually have a listen to what operator level scaling can do for us. So here we've got a patch that I pretty much demonstrated in the algorithms video it's using algorithm 12 the moment it sounds like this. If we go into the edit menu essentially it's made up of two sounds layered together so the first is the combination of operators one and two operator one being a carrier and operator two being it's modulating it's kind of just doing a kind of basic bass sound like that very FM-y and if we turn that operator off and turn operator three which is our other carrier back on we'll hear that the other part of our sound it's kind of a bell sound and that's done by having all of those three modulators running into operator three all kind of detuned from one another. Okay let's put everything back together okay so let's have a look at a couple of things that operator scaling could do for us. For the moment let's just turn off the bell part of the sound again just get the bass cool okay so one of the things that happens with FM sometimes is as you go higher up we can kind of get this sort of slight ugly aliasing it gets kind of a bit harsh and sharp so one thing that we might want to do in our patches where we're getting that sort of sharpness up at the top end is we might want to say okay well that sharpness is coming from the modulator so maybe what we could do is we could make it so that that modulator is less prominent so the level of that modulator is lower when we get higher up the keyboard. So let's head into the edit function here okay so the modulator here is operator two it's running into operator one so we want to head over there and let's head over to the operator scaling functionality. So it starts here with LSBP so that's your level scaling breakpoint that runs from 0 to 9950 being in the middle of the keyboard. I tend to find it's easier to come back to this parameter kind of last unless you're trying to do something very extreme like treat everything as being high notes or everything as being low notes. So let's come back to that one in just a second. I'm just going to skip over these two for a second and move on to these two here so this is level scale left curve so this is everything that is applied to the left hand part of the graph or the low notes as I like to think of it and we're not talking about the low notes at the moment are we we're talking about the high notes so this is the level scale right curve. So if you look at the handy dandy cheat sheet that comes with the Valkyrie FM there is a little bit here where it's talking about these curves here where it says that we have four different values that we can set here 0 1 2 and 3 0 is negative linear so that's your sort of straight line you've got negative exponential which is your gentle at first then steeper you've got your positive exponential which is the same but getting higher don't want that in this case because you want to make the operator quieter and then we've got our linear positive as well so let's start and probably end up to be honest at the negative linear which is actually what we currently have anyway okay so at the moment nothing's happening with our scaling and that's because at the moment we haven't set the depth so we've got the level scale left depth so that's everything that's happening to our low notes how much of that curve we want to apply so we're not interested in that one today but what we are interested in is our level scale right depth so this is how much of that curve is applied to the higher notes so let's just start the top edge here to going so immediately you can hear that things are getting nicer and smoother I guess now if we go out of edit menu for a second just head back down our octaves will hear that we're still getting that nice thickness there but arguably arguably we're probably rolling off that top end a little bit too early so if we head back into the edit menu this is where adjusting our breakpoint is going to be useful so at the moment we're treating our high notes as being too far down so if we turn this up so that our high notes are a bit higher up can you hear there that that lower note is now still getting all of the nice pinginess but it's only those top notes now that have been rounded off that's exactly what we're after and again if we head back down our octaves still got a nice harmonic rich just down there it's just that when we head higher up we're no longer getting that harshness so let's just hear that to compare so easiest way to compare would be to turn our depth all the way down so this is without the scaling harsh that's with the scaling nice okay so that's kind of a way that you can use your level scaling to to really make your patches more playable across the whole keyboard let's come back in to talk about our other part of our sound that sort of Bell sound so let's say that what we wanted to do can you hear there that the Bell part of the sound is kind of getting in the way on those low notes it's kind of weird and cloudy so that's what we'd like to do is actually make it so that Bell sound isn't really present on our bottom notes at all so another way what we want to do is operator 3 is the carrier which is basically representing that that layer of our sound so if we apply level scaling to operator 3 so that we have a negative curve on the left-hand side the low side of our sound we can kind of take that Bell sound down we don't have to remove it in tie just maybe push it into the background a bit so let's take a look at that so heading back into the edit menu we want to be dealing with operator 3 which we are let's head over to our operator scaling stuff so we'll start with a breakpoint at 50 angst as I say that's that's usually easier to edit this near at the end our left curve is what we want to talk about this time because it's the low part of the sound again tell you what let's let's try the exponential one this time so this is a gentler transition which might work better in our case so at the moment there's no change because we haven't yet applied our depth so let's see if we can clear up the bottom end of it can you hear that that very bottom notice no longer kind of clangy maybe actually using that curve that's gentle it was a mistake so let's try the linear instead see right here we go so now it's gone almost entirely from that part of the sounds that's probably the depth too probably we want it to start to come in a little bit earlier than it is so again the breakpoint here we can say that the low notes start lower it's really only on that bottom octave that we're not getting that bell sound higher we've got that cool bell sound because you know who doesn't want bell sounds on a DX since now of course we could tie this patch up a little bit further a couple of things that I might consider doing would be first of all I'd probably want to maybe lower the belliness on the higher octave so that we don't get again that harshness right by the top as there are three operators all feeding into that one carry operator three perhaps we more or less take one of those modulators out all together just to tide it up I may also say that you know what as I get higher up perhaps I don't want that bass part of the sound so much at all so I might apply again a negative curve to do operator one to take out that basic part of the sound higher up in the registers so I hope that's giving you some useful insight on how you can use level scaling to fine-tune your patches so that they work really well over the whole range of the keyboard and also how you can use it to essentially we can kind of do faux splits you can bring in entirely different sounds further up or further down on the keyboard that can get really really interesting when you're using three carriers or four carriers all at once and you want to kind of completely morph the sound into something different depending on whether you're playing high or low country on the pseudo at keyboard split kind of operation very very cool if you enjoyed the video and that was useful to you please do give it the old thumbs and make sure you're subscribing so you don't miss out on any more videos on the vulgra of M and synthesis in general I am nearly finished with building my first patchback for the vulgra FM which I've been using my synth matter page to do so keep your eyes peeled on the channel because I'll be announcing it's released there it'll be free of course for everyone to use and enjoy and check out the neat thing about it being all generated on synth matter is that you'll be able to check out exactly how I've built patches if you're interested in that so thank you again for joining me as we explore and hopefully demystify one of the less understood elements to the vulgra FM and I'll see you again soon for more synthesis fun take care guys