 Hello OscillatorSync here and welcome back to another video where we are exploring building patches from scratch on the Korg Ops 6. Now in the recent 2.0 firmware update for the Ops 6, we got the new effects operator mode and that introduced really a bunch of different operator types really if you if you look at it that way but probably the one that was most exciting to a lot of people and certainly most exciting to me was the addition of the comb filter. So why is the comb filter interesting? Well the comb filter is interesting because it allows us to do some sorts of physical modelling tricks. Why is that? Well the comb filter although it's called a filter it's really built around a very very short delay architecture. So what happens when you have a delay a very short delay so this is a you know really quite short delay this is the comb filter set going as long as possible and you can hear there that we're hearing those individual delays happening in there I'm just exciting this delay with a little burst of noise but if we turn up the frequency past a certain point much like pushing an LFO into audio rate and starting to hear a pitch when we make a delay very very short what we get instead of hearing the individual delays we hear a pitch and it's a pitch which is somewhat similar to what happens when you plug a string when you excite a string that excitation sort of pings up and down the string and it sets up the resonance and you get the the sound of a string being plugged and that's kind of what we hear with a comb filter was interesting or useful with the comb filter in in the case of the way it's implemented on the effects operator on the op 6 is that it's delay time that tracks the keyboard properly and proportionately so that we can play it not just in a pitched method but following the keyboard as well which is really good and you can even hear with a very very basic burst of noise into a single comb filter that we get pluck string style sounds but we can of course take this idea a little bit further and that is what we are going to be doing today okay so it's always good to start these things with a plan and here is my plan so what I want to do is set up a physical model of an instrument where each note that you play is actually five strings or being excited at the same time so if you think about like a mega mandolin or well I mean if you think about a piano actually a standard piano actually is three strings per note so similar idea here we're just taking it a little bit further than we then we would on a piano what I'm also going to do with these strings rather than on a piano where they're all tuned in unison the slight detunings where you get the the interest in the piano sound I'm going to take that to a bigger extreme here and I'm actually going to tune each of our strings each of our comb filters to different notes mostly probably just within octaves and fifths I think probably work best but we'll see what we're going to achieve there other things that I want to do here I want to make it so that when we are exciting the string we can either pick it or bow it within the same patch and also I'd like to make it so that playing the keyboard differently is going to in the same way if you're a guitarist you can get different sharpness of sounds by how you angle your plectrum if you come down on the edge of the plectrum you get a much more sort of a tacky sound and if you come down flat you get a sort of a more sort of tubby sound I want to be able to build that into the patch probably based around velocity so we can get sort of sort of thinner and and fatter sounds from our patch as well it's anything else we'll probably stick a whole lot of modulation into the strings so the strings can be changed it's subtly changing length which is harder to do in reality of course but I think we'll probably need quite an interesting sound well obviously there'll be effects added in there as well because we can and we'll also have to think about other things we can do in the mod matrix actually as we get further into the patch perhaps so in terms of building this we'll go for a user algorithm again and if you have watched the filter bank video that I did a couple of weeks back this sort of layout here is going to look very familiar we've got a single thing that's being split across the other five operators so operator one will be our exciter which is going to be a shaped burst of noise and we're going to use the filter mode for that so that we can cut out frequencies as we need to to get the right sort of sound from the exciter we can even play with that filter cutoff to get different sounds sort of within the the the playing perhaps within the mod matrix and then our remaining operators operators two through six they're going to be our strings so they're all going to be in comb filter mode for the most part I think they're going to have their oscillator mix turned down so they won't be generating their own oscillator they'll just be taking the excitation signal from operator one and resonating with it but I might play with sort of fading in some maybe they can have their own noise generators as well we can we can play with bring them in to have like drones or constantly boat sounds like sort of hurdy-gurdy type of things perhaps yeah so that there's there's things we can do and will do but we ought to probably get started by building our user algorithm first so as with a lot of these patches we're going to start by coming over to the algorithm page push that over to user and come into the miscellaneous menu and set up our user algorithm really there's not a user algorithm that's defined this way so you know that is what it is so we're coming to page two and we want operators two through six come back to here operators two through six to be what we actually hear so we'll turn on two three four five and six and then in terms of what is rooted into everything one is not going to receive anything from anything and then as we come down we're going to go one into two one into three one into four one into five and indeed one into six it's pretty simple to use algorithm there's probably some something that could be done with pushing each string back into each other so they're resonating against each other perhaps we'll play with that a little bit see what that does whether that works out for us but that will be a good starting point I think so we'll start with just setting up a single string being excited first rather than trying to build the whole patch all at once and then we can do some copying pasting actually probably between the operators to get that working for us so let's start by setting up our first string and the excitation there of so operator one is going to be our excitation signal so it's going to be some noise going through a band pass filter so that we can shape it and we can also shape it across the keyboard if we need to as well because the filter mode will track the keyboard very useful so I'm just going to come into the filter mode oscillator mix will turn up to full we'll just leave cutoff and resonance where they are to begin with but we'll tweak them as we go along and I'm going to start by giving us a little bit of white noise the blue noise works really well in this situation as well but having played with this a little bit for a couple of weeks white noise and a band pass filter gives you a little bit more flexibility because the blue noise cuts out so much of the low end you can't really get it back on the low notes but your mileage may vary that's what I'm going with for this patch though so at the moment we'll get a noisy FM sound because operator two is still set in FM mode that's not what we want so we're going to come across to the effects mode we're going to go to the comb filter we're going to turn down its oscillator mix at the moment but I'm going to just set this up as blue noise because that'll be what I want to put into the comb filter possibly anyway and we'll turn the feedback up fairly high we can kind of hear that sort of bowed sound so let's set up our envelopes a little bit so the first thing on operator two our first string I'm just going to have it instantly attack sustain as hard as it can and I'm just going to set the the decay long so the release long up and to linear because we want the comb filters delay feedback to die down naturally and not necessarily be truncated by the release envelope so at the moment we've got kind of an instant on-bode sound and how we're exciting this string whether it's a pluck whether it's a bow it's all going to be down to the level envelope of operator one so as the starting point I want this to be a fairly short plucked sound and we'll come back to this maybe to fine tune it as we go along so for a pluck sound we will drop the sustain down to zero and we'll drop this decay pretty short it's quite quiet at the moment which is a I've heard worse guitar maybe lute sounds not very loud at the moment you have to be quite careful with the volume on these patches because it does fluctuate quite a lot part of the reason I suspect that it's not very loud at the moment is because of where the filter is currently set so we're going to change this over to a band pass I'm going to use probably the there we go the 12 db per octave band pass there that's all right isn't it me as a starting point that's that's not a bad sound so the reason it was so quiet to begin with is because we're on low pass mode so most of the energy from the noise has been wiped out whereas in bypass mode uh band pass mode sorry it's kind of going to be a bit more focused now if we bring it down if we bring it down an octave because of the way that this filter mode tracks the keyboard probably going to be too dark there so probably want to bring the cutoff up a bit to balance this out so we want our lower octaves to kind of have enough energy in them and if we need to make the upper octaves darker then we can do that with our master filter we probably will play with that as we go along okay I think that's sort of working let's um let's just try bringing in a little bit of resonance to see how that sounds so it's going to change the the shape of the excitation sort of becomes more of a like a banjo right I think we can basically have that turned down as I say the the way that we excite this string is all down to the the level envelope of this first operator here so if we want something really really really tight and plucky we can bring this decay right down you can see that's a very bright precise excitation whereas as we had it longer there's a little tubbier it's probably a good middle round if we go much longer it's kind of like a bow that's being pulled off the string and if we want to have something that bows into the sound we can increase our attack so by balancing those two parts of our envelope we can get different attack characteristics to the way that we're exciting the string and that's something that we're definitely going to play with in the v-patch in the mod matrix I think probably especially around how hard we're playing and maybe we could assign the attack to the modulation or something but we'll come back to that once we've built up some more strings I think so as per the plan what I want to do is replicate this first string across these other operators here but then have them tuned differently so they create a nice thick rich sound and then we can look at detuning them on top of that to make it much richer as well so I could go through and manually build all of these cross but there is actually something in the miscellaneous menu the op utilities here which allows us to copy operators from one to another so what I'm going to do is go from two to three yes two to four yes did five yes and two to six yes good okay easy as that I'm just going to make sure these are all turned down because otherwise it's going to get really loud really quickly so I'm just going to have to keep it on that volume control so that's just the one string there in the second string it's just going to get louder essentially because it's doing exactly the same thing and we're talking about digital delay here so it's very very tightly coupled but if we come across to operator three and we change the frequency here which is intrinsically linked to to pitches you can hear now that we have two different strings resonating at different frequencies cool so let's maybe at your table what we'll do is we will have this one set where it was and we maybe set this first one down an octave so now we have two strings which are um octaves apart just keep an eye on that volume then we can bring up the next string here um which is on operator four and maybe we can we can set this one a fifth above so that we plus seven here so now we have this string we have this string we have this string and you can hear on the higher pitch strings they don't sustain as long because the the feedback naturally dies down because it's proportional to the number of times that it repeats which is also what would happen on on a real string as well so that's good physical modeling for free um so that's a fifth up maybe we'll go an octave up on this one so plus 12 again just keep an eye on that volume and then operator six uh maybe we'll have that one um set to unison with the first one but we will just gently down shift just slightly detune it so it's always off that first one a little bit so not a hole oh too much just a little bit so we could do that okay like two octaves down should we try that instead yeah maybe we'll go two octaves down instead that's that's nice um although I now wish I ordered them differently but I will allow my OCD just to fester instead um so uh good okay that's starting to sound like a big rich instrument but let's introduce some detuning between the notes between the strings and also between the notes actually so we're going to make use of some random air foes to just slightly nudge the frequencies of all of these about on a per voice basis so we get that richness between the notes as well as uh sort of um uh within a note as well so we're not just detuning every string by the same amount on every note each note will be slightly different which is kind of what you would get on piano because you can't tune a piano absolutely perfectly across the entire soundboard so let's come into our mod menu here and we're going to come down to our LFOs and I'll use two different LFOs to do this so I can sense some in one direction some in another direction and that sort of thing and then we'll leave LFO one for other things haven't decided quite what yep maybe just straight up pitch bend you know so we're going to set each of these per voice first of all and then we're going to come down and we'll probably go with the random level and time just so it's like straight up random constantly random level and time on the other one as well we'll slow them down so it's not obviously wandering it's more that um each time we play a note really it's going to start in a different place slow that down cool lovely stuff great um one slight disadvantage of doing it this way with multiple LFOs and not using LFO one it's probably a bit wasteful in the V patch but I don't think we're going to run out of slots I hope not okay I guess we'll find out so what I'm going to do is I'm going to start introducing this change in as you know let's let's not risk it I've changed my mind we'll use LFO one as a random one as well so that we can just assign this in the pitch menu as well um there we go I got paranoid we'll use LFO three as our auxiliary one perhaps okay um yeah so the reason I'm doing this is that LFO one is hardwired to pitch within each of the oscillators that's going to affect the delay time anyway so it just means that I don't have to use a couple of V patch slots to get this going right so let's start introducing a little bit of pitch wobble so you could hear then immediately that you start to get interesting chorusing and phasing so at the moment that's only one of the strings so we'll come down I won't go to the next one we'll go to one of the higher ones and we'll maybe detune it by the same amount as the other ones getting tuned up immediately that richness is coming in here which is a lot more evident than it was with everything being tuned the same way so that's one and sorry two and five that I've put some movement on already so we'll put some on three and four in the V patch so destination will be op three pitch source is going to be LFO two and up by a bit and then we'll do LFO three again sorry LFO two again send me LFO two and tight up good and here this can be op four pitch go down by the same amount short notes aren't holding out so well there we go cool nice bit of richness in there good stuff that's all nice okay so what are we going to do next well I want to get into shaping the sound velocity wise a little bit but I want to give this a little bit more space so we might put a bit of reverb on it but one thing that I think would be quite nice if we come into a spare slot here in the V patch is to have this behave a little bit like a piano if the piano was mic'd in stereo that is the low notes go to one end of the panning and high notes tend towards the other note side of the panning so you have that kind of movement as you play across it sort of like getting inspiration from lots of different instruments here so what we can do to get that is obviously our destination is going to be panning and our source can be the keyboard note and this works by polar as far as I can tell so this means that if I just set the intensity up a bit I might dial it back from this but if you're listening at headphones you can hear that high notes are up here low notes are down here it's probably a little bit extreme but we can have it a little more subtly I just add a nice bit of spatialization to the sound it just gives it a little bit more realism I think makes everything sound a little bit more in an acoustic space without having to add any reverb that being said it is me so let's add a little bit of reverb not much not much he says and we can tweak the reverb and the rest of the effects later but now we sound like we're in a nice space I think everything sounds a little bit more real a little less synthesized so I think at the moment everything's a little bit bright because there's no inherent dampening in the sound of the comb filter there's no filter that's in the feedback loop which is what you ideally want when you're generating these string sounds I think what we'll do is we'll just add a little bit of filter over the whole sound and then we will start to build up a bit more of an expressive way of playing so I'm just going to go always go for the poly 6 one I might try the ones as we go on but I just want to darken the sound a little bit so we'll darken it and then we'll put a bit of resonance on there so that at the cutoff we get a tiny boost so that's without that's weird I'm probably a bit darker I'll just add a little bit of grit as well that particular filter type we didn't like the grit we could always try yeah maybe something like that okay cool right so let's come back around to our exciting signal here and by exciting signal I mean the signal that's exciting yet this is probably the least sonically exciting sound that's in here at the moment and I'm going to just make it a little bit pinguier I think because I can hear the fade out at the moment okay so I'm just going to set the curve to exponential I'm just off exponential so we can get really tight okay so let's start with the most basic form of getting some more expressiveness in here which is just straight up velocity sensitivity I'm not going to apply any velocity sensitivity to the strings instead in the same way that you would pick or play lighter on an acoustic stringed instrument we're just going to change how much are exciting the strings instead so we can come into the third page of the level for that operator operator one and we'll just start to put in some velocity sensitivities somewhere around 40 50 might need to go further than that okay yep I think that's getting somewhere it's not quite as extreme as I would maybe hope so maybe another thing that we can do if we come into the pitch for this remember that this is in filter mode so the pitch is going to be intrinsically linked to our cutoff our oscillator type is a noise type so we don't get any pitch variation in that anyway we can apply some pitch velocity which is going to open up the filter on this operator more at the harder we play so let's doesn't need to be much I don't think we probably want to lower the overall cutoff yeah let's go give us a little bit more to play with there but I think um beyond this we can also get a bit more tonal variation by messing with the decay portion as well so maybe for quieter quieter notes that decay can be really tight and as we hit harder we can make that decay longer and therefore get a bit more of the body of the excitation as well so to do that we're going to want to go into the v-patch menu and we can find a space la la what's going on there why not I just not set that going I don't think I did did I okay um a spare slot yeah it's on the wrong one there we go that was just the detuning I didn't quite set that properly and here we can go on keyboard velocity and the destination can be the decay portion of operator one so we're looking for decay time there we don't want it to quite sound bowed see there now we've got a really expressive way of playing that feels very natural good stuff yeah there we go lovely okay that is some nice playing there I wonder I wonder if we could even for very I wonder if for lighter notes we could have a little bit of raspy attack there as well and then the much stronger attack for harder notes so we could do the same trick but in reverse we could set this just ever so slightly longer there and then in the v-patch do the opposite which is we could take the velocity of the keyboard send it to the attack this time of operator one we want to make it shorter this time yes and now for quieter notes it almost feels like we're raking the string with a pick and then much more obviously plucking it for the harder notes it's about finding the balance between these two parameters a little bit and on top of this let's layer up this expressiveness because that's often where all the magic kind of happens anyway we could also maybe make the overall sound a little darker and then have a velocity effect the filter which doesn't have a default routing weirdly but we can just plum that in in the v-patch anyway so we can again do keyboard velocity goes to filter this time cut off excuse all the white note c major play and then we have terrible keyboardists really expressive to play now yes good stuff I wonder if we can go even darker now out it's darkest great okay good that's all coming together quite nicely what else can we do okay well one of the things I said is I wanted to be able to properly bow this so I was thinking maybe on the modulation wheel if we turn the modulation wheel up we get a sustained bow sound that we can kind of bring in and out as we want to as we're playing so what that would mean in principle is that when we turn the modulation wheel up we're going to want to increase the attack time of our excitation signal quite a lot but I think the other crucial thing there is that we're going to want to give it a sustain as well like that I think that will be pretty nice to have as an option with the with the mod wheel there so what do we want to do in order to set that up so we'll come into the v-patch again and we will come across to a spare slot and our source obviously is going to be our mod wheel and the destination again is going to be an op one the first thing is we will give it an attack time we want to make the attack time longer so we'll just turn this all up and just see what's the longest we want it or something like that I think yeah I think and then we will also do the same thing mod wheel destination op one and this time we're going to turn up the sustain just kind of want to work out where that resting point is it's probably not that high like maybe around there and we should still have a faster bow if we play harder as well that sustain is probably a bit louder for those loud notes you may also want to lengthen the decay time as well maybe just a tiny bit so it's not quite as there we have different versions of that in the mod wheel as well so we can have just a little bit of hurdy-gurdy drone going on in the back there if we have the mod wheel turned up a little bit something like that I think works that's nice and high like that now one of the things I left over while I was just setting this patch up to begin with was that I on each of the individual operators I did also just leave a blue noise source so we do also have the option on a per string basis to bring in a drone just on that one string which is also pretty interesting and this is this isn't a proper drone because it is actually decaying here it's just that the decay is set really long and that gives you a very different vibe on top of what we already had and we can have the plucked this is crying out for some more reverb and delay I think now we could also be modulating these amounts somehow now I kind of feel like this is the obvious thing to have on after touch if we actually had after touch available to us on the keyboard that might be where we would put it but maybe we can make use of our spare LFO somewhere or maybe we just have this as a performance control I don't know I mean ideally as I say I would probably stick this on on after touch but sadly that's not available to us on the op 6 right now so I think we get into the fine tuning part of this so I think there's probably space for a little bit more effects we can maybe look at just fine-tuning the bowing behavior but I think probably I'll just stick on our peggiator and we'll see what we can do we think are those high notes too high I think they're probably okay one thing we could try maybe is in the filter mod just put a bit of keyboard tracking on the high just so this high notes aren't sort of artificially high so here we just as we go higher up the keyboard we're just lowering the filter a little bit just to take out some of that harshness I think that's certainly doing no harm I think it's probably doing a little bit of good so I think we can probably put on some delay let's just save this because it's nice isn't it I think we put on some delay no one's going to be cross with us for adding delay I don't think this should probably be tempo six shouldn't it yeah I think so I mean the world is our oyster for the rest of it chorus would be nice you know any number of things would be nice I think probably but I do wonder whether if we just approach this from a purely utilitarian perspective whether actually just boost through the low end might be beneficial here and maybe just ducking out a little bit of the upper mids so we can use our EQ here maybe lower mids just polishing it up a little bit and then we've got to this quite pleasant point um let's take that out to show or maybe we'll do a just so many chords pro level chords perhaps so what can we do from a performance perspective here well one of the things that we've definitely got available to us is the idea of actually fading the strings out and re-balancing them because remember we've got all these five strings they don't all need to be ringing out the same amount so much like with our filter bank patch we don't have to have all of these going on at once and actually there might be some interesting nuances that are available to us by balancing these differently because we don't always want ultimate richness not all the time it's fun sometimes and I think from a performance perspective we shouldn't overlook that how nice it sounded just to turn on one of the comb filters oscillator mixes and just let that blitz out for a little while to lay this down it just adds just that it's like living by the sea but the sea is a string I mean we really probably should have an LFO doing that shouldn't we let's try that let's just pick two of them probably in the middle so we've got to spare LFO LFO 3 which is on random mode I think so we can come into the v-patch here LFO 3 destination probably operator threes well do we have access to that on the to know what I don't know if we do we don't have the oscillator mix as the destination devastating hello oscillator sync from the future I was wrong it is in there it's at the start of the effects menu though it's not on a per effect basis it's right after the folder oscillator mix there is a slot in the v-patch destinations for the effects oscillator mix so yeah we could have had things fading in and out but I missed that so sorry about that devastating okay those will have to be real hands doing that not invisible hands and of course we can also play with the various different feedback amounts here so for example our higher pitch to one here on five we can maybe push the feedback a little higher because it's going to die off more quickly and it's very low one similarly we can probably oops not actually on the right one don't we this low one here we can probably let that one die a little sooner but I think all in all that's a pretty okay patch with some fairly nice ideas in there these less than what I'm showing here yes nice and expressive optional bow mode and bliss out mode certainly sounds better on the higher pitched ones I think good stuff just a reminder this is marketed as a FM synthesizer well what a surprise this turned out to be a pretty long video wow very unlike me if you have made it to the end of the video then as always thank you for joining me and if you did find the video interesting enjoyable useful then it's always massively appreciated if you could give the video a thumbs up and if you're not already subscribed to the channel then that is a good thing to do as well in my opinion anyway you'll manage may vary but anyway yeah thank you for watching and until next time take care bye