 Hello oscillators sync here. Timber from Bastel is a wave shaping module which offers a range of clipping and wave folding functionality. It is easy to hear the words wave folding and immediately think of the classic West Coast synthesis paradigm, imagining the distinctive alien vocalizations of a booklor music easel. And please don't get me wrong, in this video I will absolutely be sending a wave folded triangle wave oscillator into a low pass gate because it is absolutely the pinnacle of bleep bloops. However I think it is unkind to pigeonhole wave shaping into just that particular roll and that's especially true of the timber which like many classic Bastel modules has its functionality arranged into less conventional forms and offers utility which might not be expected in a module of this type. This video I hope will act as a kind of video manual. We'll start by exploring the module top to bottom in a more conventional setting to get a feel for what it can do for us technically and then move on to checking out how it can be used creatively in other roles. There's a lot to explore so the video has extensive chapter markers so please feel free to jump around to find the information and sounds the most interesting. As a point of transparency Bastel sent me the timber for free in order to make this video but I haven't otherwise been paid for it and as always I don't feature stuff on the channel that I don't think is interesting. Okay let's see how timber can chop up our waveforms. So here is timber and we'll get into the sounds in just a second but I just want to quickly introduce its sort of basic architecture because it's a little unusual I think so timber has a single input stage which then splits off and drives two completely independent and different wave shaping circuits. You have the wave driver or one which is mostly focused around sort of clipping although not exclusively and then we have the wave folder or two which is mostly focused around wave folding although again not exclusively. Each of these different circuits as I say are driven by a single input but you can take their outputs separately on the one and two outputs here. There's also ways that we can mix them together within the module which we will get into. Strictly speaking this module has three outputs and two inputs when it comes to signal flow but to begin with we're just going to work with the main inputs which is the jack right in the center here which is labeled well it's labeled inputs which is straightforward enough. So I've just got a triangle wave to begin with which sounds like this so that's just coming from the 2HP VCO and I'm going to plumb that into the input of timber and we'll just take the output first of all from the one side here. Now you might just about be able to hear maybe just in the background with the shape knob turned all the way down but essentially we've got very little signal with the shape knob turned all the way down because what the shape knob is actually doing is amplifying our input signal and pushing it in to our two different wave shapers so it's essentially a VCA. So as we turn up the shape control well first of all here are triangle wave pretty much unmolested but as we turn up you can hear its characteristics change as we change the shape of the wave and of course changing the shape of the wave is going to change its harmonic content and therefore it's timbre and then by moving this shape control around we are getting timbre change and again that's just a straight up boring triangle wave going in there so that's just briefly we'll dive into these in a little bit more detail in just a second that's the one side and if we check out the two side we can hear that it has quite a different characteristic a different set of harmonics being added there and this shape control is of course CV controlable so we have the shape input just here and we can plug an envelope in there in this case and then we have a attenuator for that input and change the envelope shape and hear that timbre change over time kind of like an inverted filter we're adding harmonics adding more top end and twang rather than taking it away the shape control here will set our initial point so if we wanted a joining we can do that and then the shape CV input is going to add to that which is actually a really cool sound cool sort of twang of a string almost we can hear that on the one side as well and get a different kind of movement that we're getting there but let's at just for a moment focus in on what each of these two different sides can actually do and what the wave shaping is doing for each of them so we're going to start on side one the wave driver and I'm just going to set a couple of these controls I'm going to put the fold control here on the left to the no position and I'm just going to move the drive control down to soft so here is our triangle wave again basically un molested so the wave driver side has a clipper which can work either to do soft clipping hard clipping or kind of a combination of both which is quite interesting and then a simple wave folder so at the moment I have the wave folder set to no which means we get no wave folding and we're just going to be clipping the wave here and on the soft mode and you can hear as I turn up the shape control first of all what we get with this triangle wave because we're shearing off the top of that wave form a little bit we actually almost get a duller sound because it moves towards almost like a sine wave for a little bit especially with it on soft mode and then as we push it up we start to reintroduce a bunch of harmonics we actually end up with something that's basically a square wave so this is a really cool place at the low part of the knob here where it actually kind of almost gets duller and comes out the other side quite a fun thing to modulate perhaps we'll try and find that midpoint there and I'll just grab an alofo here pop it into the shape control speed up a bit turn this up a little bit and what we get is this kind of morphing between triangle and square via a sine almost it's pretty cool anyway we'll come back to some modulation in a little bit so yeah this is the soft mode on a triangle this is the hard mode and we should get a slightly harder edge to it should get square a little bit faster you see there was getting brassier earlier there we had a much more gradual thing happening on the soft and in the middle in theory it should be a mixture of the hard and soft but actually I actually think it's softer than the soft at the low end interestingly then it gets very sharp at the other end again we've got that interesting place where we can always get morphing waveforms at the low part of the control there very nice the fold control here let's get that soft for a second the fold control here introduces a single stage wave folder and we have two settings here which is low and high which is basically the threshold at which the wave folding kicks in so with wave folding when you hit a particular threshold the wave rather than going any higher is going to bend back in on itself until it then falls below that threshold and comes back down introducing some interesting new harmonics so what this will do the low and high will basically change where within the shape knob we're getting the folding kicking in here's low and here's high and you also get a different interaction depending on which drive mode you have as well so I think you get most obvious folding when the drive mode is in the middle and now in this short throw of the wave again we have a whole bunch of different wave shapes just love it's just such a nice control to modulate let's check out the wave folder side here so we have only one control here which gives us three different flavors of wave folding probably the default mode I guess here is the okay which gives us a classic five stage wave folder which is something like you'd expect on like a music piece or something similar so we get a far larger range of harmonics being introduced as we turn up the shape and then eventually after the fifth fold we get a clipping stage which then just brings out those bright harmonics right at the top you can hear within the throw of the shape here on this basic waveform at least there are almost some points where you get clean octave ups almost so the fundamentals almost disappeared there and you know you don't have to modulate the shape control we can just use it to find these sort of vocal points here yeah so the next mode here actually we'll go all the way at the top to the k o mode here so this only this still makes use of the five stage folder but there's asymmetry introduced in here which gives you a much different wave shape happening in here so you get that one obvious fold but then it becomes more about the clipping after that and kind of like a what almost sounds like a pulse width thing happening so not as complex as the okay mode but it's kind of something somewhat similar to what's happening tonally on the one side the no mode here in the middle disables all but the last wave folding stage and the clipping stage so I guess technically this is closer to what the wave driver is doing when you have I guess soft and one of the high or low modes on the fold but it does still sound different to the other side and produces a different set of harmonics there's almost like a high pass effect very high up as that fundamental gets sucked out yes very cool so I'm going to pop back into side one here and I'm just going to turn off the wave folding just here and I guess we'll go to soft mode here just turn up the shape a little bit because I want to talk about this next control here which is symmetry this operates the same as the shape mode on the input so it's what's getting driven into our two different wave folding circuits here and what this does is it applies a dc offset to our input what that does sort of conceptually is it pushes one side of the waveform closer to the wave shaping part of the circuit because we're always working within these thresholds and when we cross those thresholds that's when we get the wave shaping so by moving it towards one side more than the other one half of the waveform is going to get in this case clipped more than the other and indeed yes that does sound quite a lot like pulse width modulation in this case and it's that kind of vibe that we get when we modulate it but in terms of just sort of setting it and forgetting it it's a great way to thin out a sound get more of a reedy vocal kind of sound but yes we probably should modulate that and see what it sounds like so we have a control here for symmetry and when we plug something in here then the symmetry control is going to act as an attenuverter for the input so shape you have an initial point and then an attenuator here for the symmetry control this will be acting like an attenuverter when you plug something in so yeah we've got kind of a choracy pulse width modulation e kind of sound now of course when we start to introduce wave folding into this as well then we're going to get something that's again sort of like pulse width modulation but with that fold happening as well but it really does have that kind of choracy almost pitch wobble thing happening there which i think is great and bear in mind again this is just it's just a triangle wave let's check that out on the uh two side with the more complex folding so much different flavors with the different wave folding modes that's hard lower pitch for that sound awesome and we can get to the point where the dc is offsetting it so much that we actually get breaks in the sound more on the modes with the clipping being hit earlier in kind of still here in the background that clean harmonic series really cool and between the uh symmetry and the shape knobs for any basic sound you have that's making me do the mouth uh not that one let's let's take the uh the envelope into the shape there maybe give it some pitch movement we modulate the symmetry just a little bit and again just as a reminder that's our input so we can get such a wide range of different tones for a basic waveform yeah the symmetry here it's giving it a lovely plucky characteristic just modulating it slowly great bass sound almost sounds like a basic two op fm synth and again just a reminder this is our input so just a huge range of timbres from just these two controls and changing the different modes here i say you don't even have to modulate these to find new waveforms from a basic waveform but you can so we're going to dive into some of the other features here in just a moment but i thought we'd take a break here just to hear what different um waveforms different basic waveforms do when we put them through timbrex we've just been listening to a triangle wave so far so let's start with a sawtooth wave here so here we're going into uh just coming out of rather the one side this is what our input sounds like yep just like a a sawtooth wave and we're soft and we'll start with no here we kind of get to this buzzy square kind of thing more buzzy with the high mode on here and if we introduce our wave folder as well okay we get this neat midpoint there where we're going between the two different sounds let's modulate that and if we apply symmetry again we're going to get that so pwm vibe we're that thinning out nice coming out the other side with our wave folding we're starting the okay mode here it almost sounds like that classic kind of sink sound that you do with uh with sawtooth waves symmetry again get that kind of plucky vibe going on and we put that dc there let's try the ko mode you keep coming back to these kind of vocalizations i think they're really really cool wow wow and then in no mode a bit more noticeable fold that harmonic coming out that once modulating with an LFO yes and again just just to be clear that's not being pitch modulated there's no frequency modulation on that input that's all that movement within the symmetry that's doing that sick yeah let's uh also let's have us into a um a sine wave quickly as well so this is a sine wave coming out of pizza there's that deep deep sine so we're back on to uh on no mode here and soft on the clipping notice that with the sine wave we don't get that kind of in-between point that we had with the other two because we're not we haven't got anything to sort of uh we haven't got a spiky edge for us to flatten out first so it just goes sort of big mode instead so our triangle we had that sort of moment where it got duller but we don't get that with the sine wave so that's soft it's in-between nice brassy and it's hard getting that kind of harder faster onset there as we'd expect coming back to soft and giving us a little bit of wave folding again just cool vocalizations wow lovely let's take a look at the other side as well so we'll start on the okay i kind of feel like the sine wave holds on to its fundamental a bit better still got loads of bottom end happening dips out a little bit there i guess but again so vocal give that some modulation and wow wow involuntary mouth movements for sure lovely stuff and just quickly the other modes as well so here's no that one thins out really nicely at the top there almost like it really sounds like the high pass filter in this one and then ko mode kind of has the vibe of the no mode but without the high pass filter thing going on like the harmonics that are getting added are the same vibe but it's not taking away in the same way yeah so much you can get from a single basic waveform by applying just those two controls the shape and symmetry and we haven't even got onto complex inputs either but there's still some more things that we want to talk about even with these simple inputs so far in the video there is a tempting looking control here and an interesting looking output which i have been juicily ignoring but the time has come to talk about crossfade what the crossfade control allows us to do is crossfade between two signals within timber however what those two signals are is probably slightly more um flexible than you might initially imagine so let's just grab our triangle wave input come in there and we'll take an output from the crossfade output and with this in its kind of default mode which is with this switch up and nothing plumbed into the crossfade inputs here this is going to crossfade between the two sides of timber the wave driver and the wave folder so wave driver over here and wave folder over here and you can hear because of the differing phase that's introduced into this waveform there are some really interesting midway points and to me it almost sounds like a wavetable now we can modulate this of course with cv so we have a crossfade input here and this little knob above it is the teni-verta 4 that cv so here's a just a straight LFO in there and it definitely has that kind of almost wave table feel of course depending on how we have the shape set and whether we have the wave holding on on one side we can get quite different sets of sound between them I think this is also pretty interesting if we take a random samplen hold type sourcing here as well again coming reminiscent of that sort of wave table feel and again as always adjusting the symmetry and shape because there's so many different flavors yeah very cool so that's kind of the default mode if you like so what other ways can we use this well first of all is we can set this control down to input and what that does is that now on the left hand side or negative portion of the crossfade we're just hearing the original input signal that's unaffected by the shape so it's taken before the shape vca and we have our wave folder on the other side so this can be interesting because if you don't want to get your additional tarver or sorry harmonic content by adjusting the shape instead you want to find a place in the shape and crossfade to it this can work quite nicely if we plug a envelope in here into the crossfade as an alternative to driving the shape so quite a different feel to doing something like this which is just modulating the shape control so that's going from our input over to the wave driver sorry the wave folder even our other option here is to put something else into the crossfade input so for example i could grab a different oscillator which is just a sine wave from pizza and now we can blend between our wave driver input and that's sort of low rumbling sine wave we have down there so this can be a great way if you're doing more extreme shaping to maybe bring in some more bottom end but of course you can crossfade between anything you want and it should be noted that with this set to inputs you've literally got a straight up crossfading module where you can crossfade between whatever's going into the input and whatever is going into the crossfade input you know there are other um less fully featured options if you just want a crossfader but the nice thing about timber is that you have this utility in here if you're not using it for its wave shaping functionality the final cv input that we have here is the feedback cv and what this does is it's a vca controlling a feedback loop coming from the output of the wave folder back into the input of the unit and this can give us new timbres in particular i think this works better with more complex sounds but let's take a listen to what it's doing to our triangle so we'll just turn things up a little bit here with the shape control just set the symmetry in the middle for the moment and i've just got a slider here off to the side here which allows me to turn up the feedback you can hear that we get some kind of chaotic additional timbres jumps in the sound occasionally it's very reactive to where the shape knob is tends to react better with the shape knob a little bit lower down because always you're just hitting the clip in straight away you can also use it to bottom out the dc a little bit earlier let's maybe try that with a envelope for a second here's an envelope here so you can hear things get pretty chaotic let's try a random supplement hold here as i say we'll take a listen to what this does on some more complex signals because i think that's where it shines in particular but yeah we have that feedback as an additional way to change the timbre so we have such a wide range of ways to modulate the timbre and remember again this is just a straight up triangle wave going input so just before we move away from the basic triangle wave inputs what i wanted to do to close out this section is exerts more extreme modulation to the timbre in particular i'm thinking audio rate modulation some sample and hold maybe some noise just to see what will happen when we hit it with something a bit more vigorous and also to see what happens in combination so what we've got here if we just listen to the output of timbre it's just our triangle wave friend i'm coming out of the crossfade output here so we modulate that and yeah let's start just with a sine wave coming from pizza it's tuned roughly the same way we'll come into this shape input here lovely stuff to a degree with the shape low we're kind of getting just kind of ring mod to begin with change the octave but as we bring the modulation amount up and we're pushing into the wave shapers it becomes a more complex proposition a very cool one as well really cool growly kind of thing going on in there a lot of what wave folding ends up doing is quite vocal let's try that going into the symmetry next a bit more subtle in a way how again at low shape amounts it's kind of just acting like a mixer with a little bit of that ring mod flavor but again as we push more into the wave shaping kind of thinning thing coming in as well try a different octave yeah but i know from experience that my favorite here is the crossfade modulation if you give it some audio rates big sounds yeah so that's some audio rate modulation um noise is not as interesting i don't think honestly um so i've got some filtered noise here so i think it's quite cool into shape because you kind of get that sort of rattling in those other harmonics that might be quite cool into a high pass filter just to get a bit of movement because we're starting to shift around the harmonics a little bit it's kind of similar to when you put a filter a noise source into a filter to modulate it uh into uh symmetry again just kind of acts like a mixer not as interesting yeah and into crossfade again it's bumping into those different harmonics on either side of the crossfade but it's mostly kind of just acting like a mixer kind of but again adding a little bit of noise into something even if you've got nothing else modulating it can just add a little bit of texture yeah so just sitting under there if we low pass that that might really really pretty actually cool uh let's try some sampling hold so into the shape first and this is really cool um because the wave fold was introducing harmonics at different shape levels you kind of get this arpeggiated harmonics thing which obviously really interactive with the symmetry as shape always is kind of that talking vibe in there in the crossfade kind of less extreme but because we've got the two side sets accentuating different harmonics we are sort of shifting between those harmonics not as exciting as the shape but more subtle if that's what you want and the symmetry and we're just moving that wave shape up and down it almost at lower shape levels sounds like we're modulating a high pass filter it's still quite nice but i think the shape one is really the king here but let's maybe combine that with my favorite for the crossfade which is the audio right yeah and then let's put just an LFO in symmetry to get some of that pulse width vibe so and then i happen to have this same output patched into a filter with vca if that isn't premium bleep bleeps i don't know what is isn't this what we all got into modular for pop some spring reverb on that and we are done and just a reminder that's just a triangle wave going in there in the first place all of the variation is happening other than the filter in timber no pitch mod that's just the symmetry we moved around one of the things i really appreciate about timber is that it is dc coupled at its input and what that means in practice is that we can use it to process sub audio rate signals such as LFOs sequences or other cv even static voltages actually so at that end i've got a little sound here from pizza that's been modulated um or rather the filter that's going through has been modulated with a triangle wave and i've also got here a kick drum the reason i've got the kick drum here is because this is a tempo synced LFO and i think this is where this particular use of timber really really shows its strengths so at the moment our crossfade is turned all the way to the left and the wave driver inputs also rather the wave driver side of the crossfade is set to input so we're just hearing our original triangle wave and as we sweep it across to the other side this is going to be the wave folder now at the moment we can barely hear any movement because the shape is turned all the way down so we're not even at unity gain yet if we turn this up we should be able to get more or less our original modulation more or less now as we move that shape up higher we're going to start to fold our LFO which is going to introduce new harmonics now when we do that with audio rate signals we can kind of hear the harmonics as the harmonic series when you're working with something that sub-audio rate harmonics kind of translate the two rhythms instead so as we bring this up we'll start to introduce rhythmic variations into our LFO here now we've kind of folded it in half again almost like a double time but one half of it is not quite as deep as the other okay here it's kind of accenting each side is not the same sort of height kind of asymmetrical rhythm kind of a shuffled thing with a little little extra peek in there that peeks a bit more obvious now almost a triplet feel but like a shuffled triplet feel really cool it's quite a complex one of course we could also add symmetry to this as well to to find other rhythms inside here as well although because this is a unipolar LFO we're mostly just going to be doing the same thing as shape actually I think pretty complex almost like quintuplets or something and then at the top we're basically clipping it again and if we take a slow LFO that's also tempo synced we could put that into the shape control and have it evolve over time probably to be even slower than that but you can see how we're evolving that sound but it's always staying in time because it's being generated from a tempo synced LFO in the first place yeah we can use it to make more complex LFO shapes from relatively boring triangles so just continuing on with this idea that we can wave fold CV what we have in this patch is a two-bar loop coming from pams that's going into timber which at the moment is set to crossfade on the left hand side which is just the inputs we're hearing the original signal that signal is then going out into disting which is a quantizer in this case and that quantized signal is going into pizza which is what we're hearing now on the wave folder side obviously we are going to be wave folding the sequence you can hear how it's a very different sequence most of it's quite a lot lower but some of the elements of the contours are still quite evident as high noise in particular but what gets really really fun here is when you start to find spots in between the crossfade and some of these areas will have vibes which are very much similar to the input but with some shifts around generally things will get a bit more constrained and it's a lot more static quantizers struggling with some of those voltages you can see how this is kind of a riff on the classical idea of taking a sequence and having an attenuator or an offset or both before it in order to find new sequences within that sequence this doesn't do quite the same thing in many ways it's a little bit more interesting because the contours are similar but different so yeah you can absolutely wave fold cv so moving away from simple waveforms and onto something a little bit more complex and what we're going to use is rings being agitated by some noise so we've got a nice rich resonator sound and that's just the dry sound here on I've got a little bit of reverb as well on this fader we've got rings going into timber and that's going into a filter here which is an ms20 style filter at the moment it's wide open but just in case we need to temper things a little bit I have that there and more complex waveforms are going to be affected in more complex and extreme ways so at the moment we're going coming out of the crossfade out but we're just hearing the wave driver and I've got it to no folding and just soft clipping so let's just have a listen to how this more complex waveform is clipped I'll just try and balance the levels a little bit a lovely rich distortion which heads into full-on fuzz just have a listen to the other two modes here so this is the in-between clipping mode soft that's in between living on the mid but then getting harsh towards the top and the hard clipping is angriest right away so now the symmetry is going to give us async asymmetric clipping but we can't push it too far until it starts to choke the sound but it does choke the sound in quite an interesting way quite a rhythmic way depending on what the input is like now we've also of course got the folding here let's set the threshold to high so that when we get to the top we start to fold and introduce additional harmonics we hear it there the sudden onset of folding as well what I've also got plumbed in here actually is the feedback CV because this tends to work a little bit better with more complex sounds let's just see if we can find something interesting some interesting glitch sounds there a bit of symmetry turn the folding off it's an interesting way to add texture there's a lot of different flavours let's go across to the wave folder and in particular let's go to the okay multi-stage folder bring that shape up pretty extreme probably too extreme for this complex input the nice thing about the wave folder is though we can push the symmetry a bit more sort of wavetable vibes let's just modulate that slowly with feedback a little bit of movement when the shape as well perhaps this is our input texture movement beautiful destruction snarling and growling let's try one of the other fold modes yes symmetry is choking that out to push that symmetry definitely have to use the multi-stage moving into the resonance a bit just such a great way to get drones that are very mobile and textured again that's our input granted with our filter a little bit now just as I say beautiful destruction now you've got to believe that I can have a live with myself if I didn't run the drum loop through timber so to that end here here's a drum loop that's just the dry drum loop coming straight up distinct here there's a little bit of ambience around it but for the most part it's a fairly punchy dry signal this is timber so at the moment we're just on the wave driver side soft drive no folding and around unity we can already hear a bit of fattening a little bit of compression it's very pleasant actually as we bring the shape knob up obviously we'll introduce more gain and more drive things will start to get gritty especially on the more high-energy parts of the beat like the kick drum luckily and then we can get into full distortion now pretty much every hit of the drum is distorted the kick the snare the toms and as we push it further it will start to choke out altogether and just sit up basically generating dc and choke out really gait let's hear the other two modes so this is the in between mode feels like the bottom end blooms a bit more and then same deal as we get higher up we'll start to choke and gait and here's the hard clipper immediately you can hear that clipping on set a lot stronger we start to get that spittiness even down here a lot spittier let's go back to the soft mode just for a second the symmetry is going to again choke things out pretty quickly but a little bit of we can just go a little bit of asymmetrical clipping which can be nice that's literally just off center as we go further we'll start to clip off one half and start to rectify things and get spitty again let's turn on the waveform here you can hear there that that upper harmonic is being introduced into the kick that sort of squash that's not choking so much in that reverb is now just come right up to the front now we get to gait right at the end but if we mix that in with the original one fun yeah let's get extreme and go across to the uh the wave folder yes this is how squelchy that kick drum gets that is so we get things done now the um something i've been playing with actually is the idea of using this as kind of like a dirty wave folding wave driving compressor so i've got the envelope output from um akido here which has got that original dry signal in here and i've run it through kinks to invert it so if we bring that into the uh shape knob here now as i turn the shape knob up because it's inverted it's going to be turning the shape down instead so we can get to point where we're getting all that squelch and if we want to make the kick drum a little scrunchy but still have the other stuff called crunchy we can use the envelope follower inverted into the shaping but to do that also we can do that on the other side as well we can mix that in with the dry signal dry signal with that sort of compressed wave driver obviously there's some strange stuff going on there as well the thing we could try here is introducing some of that feedback to get things going really weird what let's try different wave folder that's just killing it giving that shake moving is how we get the feedback to do interesting stuff it's like there's a triplet bass line in there now i can't explain that and maybe i don't need to yeah so i mean you can get to really destroy stuff is what i'm saying yeah