 Hello, I'll say to sync here. This is Aikido, a dynamic VCA mixer from Bastel and Casper Electronics. It is at its heart a quad VCA module, which brings in concepts of performance controls, mixing and submixing, and dynamic processing by way of two configurable envelope followers. Leaving aside the true cliche that you can never have too many VCA's in EuroRAC, the combination of features in Aikido and the way that they are combined and can be combined means that it's able to serve a whole different range of roles in a patch. And so in this video, I'm going to attempt to create a video manual of sorts. In the first part of the video, we are going to take a look at the features Aikido has from a sort of technical perspective, look at them in isolation. And in the second part of the video, we'll use Aikido in a bunch of different roles in a bunch of different patches to see what you can do with it. In order to make as comprehensive a video as possible, it's probably not going to be the shortest thing. So take a look at the chapter markers if you need to jump to a particular subject. And in the interests of transparency, this video has been sponsored by Bastel. So thank you to Bastel for supporting the channel. And with that, let's start talking about Aikido. So let's begin by taking a look at the four VCA's which form the core of Aikido. Because if you do just want to use Aikido as for discrete independent VCA's, you can absolutely do that. They each have identical feature sets, and they're all calibrated in exactly the same way. So I'll just start by turning these faders down and we'll just talk through the inputs that we have for the VCA's. So these three rows here are all identical and they're related to the VCA's. We have a CV input, we have a signal input, and then we have an output. So I'll take a triangle oscillator and I'll just poke it into the input there. And I'll just take the output here into my mixer. And if I turn up the level here, indeed we hear a triangle wave as all would expect. So the fader here acts as the VCA's initial level. Now on Aikido, this point around here is sort of 0 dB. So we're at unity at this point, which means we have got quite a range to go, which allows us to boost things above the original signal level. And when we do that, we do actually get some quite nice saturation happening inside the VCA. So as we take this triangle wave up into the upper reaches of the fader here, you can hear we start to get some burn and thickness. The fundamental really starts to pop out. So up until this point on the fader, Aikido is a pretty clean VCA and we've got some character up at the top here if we want to burn things a little bit. Lovely stuff. The knobs below each fader act as an attenuverter for the CV input. But if you don't have anything plugged into the CV input, they are normaled to a voltage source. So we can actually use them as a level control themselves. Because they're center-dedented, one thing that this allows you to do is set like an initial level here, which is kind of your baseline for a sound, especially if you're using Aikido as a mixer at this point. And then you've got this as kind of a boost. And you can easily find your way back to your original level because of the dead end in the middle there. So that's really useful. But of course, probably more likely with the attenuverter, we're going to be plumbing in some CV. So I've just got an LFO here and we'll just plumb that in there. And if we turn up the attenuverter here, we've got our LFO pumping away there. And of course, that's going to be relative to the initial level. So if we wanted to have it droning and then pushing up. And of course, because we get that saturation at the top end, you can actually get toggle changes just by using the VCA. So it's kind of a sort of a basic wave shape happening at the top there, which is actually really cool. The inputs on the VCA are of course DC coupled, so you can use the VCA to control voltage levels as well. So a really core element of Aikido is the idea of mixing. So here what I've got is a drone on channel one, which is coming from Platts. I have a drum loop here on channel two. And rather than coming out of either of the VCA outputs on Aikido instead, I'm coming out of the mix output at the bottom here. Now the mix output is going to give us the combination of the outputs of each of the VCA's in Aikido. And it's going to be an AC coupled output instantly, so you can't use the mix output for CV unfortunately. So if we turn up our drone and also our drum loop, as you have our VCA, we've got a little LFO on the drone. We can hear that we've got those two signals mixed together. And indeed, if we wanted to, we could even overdrive the drums a bit, probably all grit. That's cool. Now if you want to take the output of the VCA's out of the mix output, that's what the mute buttons across the top are for. So if I want to take the drone out, we can just take it by hitting the mute button there, or I should say, un-enabling the channel I guess. And we could do the same here with the drums of course. Now while you're making use of the mix output, you can still be taking signals from the VCA outputs individually as well. And there's actually something that's worth talking about in regards to how they interact with the mute buttons actually. The way that the mute buttons interact with the outputs of the individual VCA's on Aikido is going to depend on a jumper setting or one of four jumper settings, one for each channel on the back of the module. So the sort of default setting as it comes from the factory is what I've got on channel two here. So if I turn up my VCA here and I hit the mute button, nothing is going to happen. Now if I just approve that the mute button is actually doing something in the mix output, if I mute it, then it disappears. So by default, on the default jumper setting, the mute button is only going to interact with the mix output. So this setup has a bunch of uses and basically it boils down to if you're using the individual out to do another thing that you don't want to stop happening when you mute that VCA. So for example, if you are, say you're sending this particular track also into a reverb and you want to be able to trail that thing off naturally rather than have it cut off when it disappears from the main mix output or perhaps you're using the output here to modulate something else, maybe sending it to an envelope follower or a compressor to do sidechain or get to sidechain in a little while because Aikido can do that as well. So essentially that's the default mute button doesn't affect the VCA output. The alternate setting if you change the jump setting on the back is that your mute button does also affect the VCA output as well. And again, it's going to depend on what you're trying to do in your particular setup. So for example, the reason I currently got this setup this way is that I had a patch running where I had the kick drum in channel one. I was using the kick drum to do sort of sidechain pumping and that meant that if I wanted to stop the sidechain pumping I could mute the kick and the sidechain pumping would stop as well as the kick. If I had it set up like channel two was when I muted this channel you still get that pumping happening which depending on what you're trying to do might be what you want. But having that flexibility there is obviously really really useful. The mix output however is not the only place where mixing takes place on Aikido. The whole sort of philosophy of the module seems to be based around mixing and cascading things. So here I've got a patch where I have four different oscillators plugged into each channel of Aikido. And now I'm not coming out of the mix output here, instead I'm coming out of VCA4. And if I turn up this channel we can hear the input of VCA4. However if I now turn up the input of VCA3 we'll also hear that oscillator and on two and on one. So unless otherwise interrupted by patching something each output of Aikido flows into the next output. Now that's not to say that the output of each VCA flows into the next input. If you want to do that you can but you have to patch it manually. But we're actually getting the mixed output of each of here. So this is functionally at this point the same as the output of mix right. Now if we want to create sub mixes here we can take a patch cable and we can take an output of one of the other VCA. So now if I take a patch into VCA channel two here we can now hear that those first two channels have been taken out of this one and perhaps we patch it into the other side of the stereo here. And now we have one and two on the right hand side and three and four coming out of just channel four on the left hand side. So you can very quickly create sub mixes inside Aikido outside of what's going on in the mix output. The other thing which is cascaded here on the VCA is the inputs of the CV. So if I plug a LFO here and I turn up the CV here for channel one and then for channel two you can hear that they're all pulsing together very nice. But if I take a different CV a different LFO here different CV source and plug it in there it's going to break the normalization at this point and now three and four which are on the left hand side slightly confusingly are now pulsing slow from a different LFO. This also means incidentally we'll get into this a little bit more with some of the other patches. If I was to turn up on my VCA's here and invert it we could start getting cross fading things happening and things swimming around our heads like that which is quite cool. But we'll get into that a little bit more in the patches later in the video. Right so we've talked about the VCA side of things and how we can mix things together inside Aikido. So in terms of the dynamic VCA mixer title here we do need to talk about the dynamic bit and to that end Aikido has integrated inside it two different envelope followers which we can use to extract dynamic information from a signal and then apply that dynamic information as a modulation source to something in order to move the signal around. The two envelope followers inside Aikido have different functionality and the first one we'll talk about is a full range envelope follower which has three different selectable response types. The input for the first envelope follower is this sidechain input here however if you don't plug anything into this input the input that's going into the first VCA is normalled to this input so if you don't plug anything here then it's this input here which will be having its envelope followed. The output of this envelope follower is here on this nth output but if you don't plug anything into CV input one it's going to be here so that means that there's a pre-wired CV input for all of our different VCA's here even if you don't plumb anything in here and if you don't plumb anything into the sidechain input it will be the envelope coming from the input on VCA one. So the secret source here is that a envelope follower plus a VCA essentially is the recipe for creating a compressor or an expander so if I turn up my VCA on channel one here this is the signal because I have nothing else patched in here that the envelope follower is listening to and my CV input will be the output of the envelope follower so I have nothing else plugged in to the CV input here and if I turn my level up high and then apply a negative envelope follower here what we get is a compressor and if I turn the level down a little bit and turn the a tenuvert up so that the dynamic peaks are opening the VCA more we get an expander so the sort of attacks and the transients the naturally louder parts get louder and the quiet bits get relatively quieter so we get more of the attack less of the room sound and with a compressor the loud bits get quieter and the quiet bits get relatively louder very nice we have three different sort of time responses here the fastest one here is so fast that in many cases it's going to almost come sort of distort the signal because it's moving the envelope around so much it kind of gets a little bit crunchy there because the sort of dynamics inside each drum hit are being followed really slam it if you use it as a compressor the mid one works well for a lot of things so the mid setting has a slower attack and a slower release and I think the attack and release are the same more or less it's like drum loops that's just a good compressor sound and going the other way for the expander just balanced for the expander nice and then we have the slow setting here where I think the release gets slower than the attack now so we'll get a little bit paddier like things will get a little bit more sort of soft less punchy still nice sounding though and going the other way with the expander again generally a more soft less aggressive sound nice now of course because of the normalization with the cv here if I bring up this drone here and then apply a negative cv here it's going to be pumped by the drum loop so we've instantly without having to patch anything else in really got that kind of pumping thing happening and obviously the balance of the cv against the initial level is going to change things around and also the time response as well it's a great way to have one signal have a rhythmic effect on another with that fast one you can hear it again get crunched up because the transients are being picked up so quickly and alternatively if we wanted this signal instead to emphasize the different parts here we could turn the level down and then turn it ten by two up and now our drone is following the drum beat rather than fitting in between it really cool now of course we don't need to apply the envelope followed signal to the vca we can take that envelope followed signal and apply it to something else so if I take my drum loop and plummet into a filter and then take the output of my filter I take the low pass output here and run that into the vca so we can hear it and so we can get the envelope following of course and now take that envelope follower output and run it into the cv input on my filter and turn up the attendee verte here now we've got a envelope follower filter on that drop scolci cool and again changing the time constants are going to give us different oh that's that one's that's sick cool and again of course we don't actually have to apply that envelope followed signal to the thing that's been followed so instead if we go back to just having our drum loop happening there and instead run our drone into the filter and take a listen to that different approach to what we had before but also really cool I love envelope followers the second envelope follower on a keydo rather than having a variable timing response instead is a spectral envelope follower what that means practically is that the signal going into the envelope follower is pre-filtered to either emphasize the low end the mid range or the top end which means that the envelope is going to be more responsive to those areas of the frequency range in terms of its time and response because it still has a time and response of course it's about the same as the mid setting on the first envelope follower which is probably a good thing because that's probably the most versatile of the lot the spectral envelope follower doesn't have an individual input rather it's going to be following the signal that's appearing on the output of vca4 now because of the way that the outputs in a keydo are cascaded that means that depending on what you've done in terms of breaking the normalization by patching into the individual outputs that could be following the combined output of all of the previous vca4 and because I haven't patched anything into the individual outputs in this case if I turn up my drum loop on channel one you should see the light for the envelope follower starts to blink there's no normalization for the output of the spectral envelope follower so let's just use it as a spectral compressor expander because probably the easiest way to hear it working so let's patch the output here into the cv input of the vca with our drum loop so now if we bring up our drum loop and we can see here that our spectral envelope here is set on bass at the moment and if we just sort of maybe set it slightly more conservatively and then turn up here we should get expansion which is mostly focused around our kick drum because that's what's happening at the bottom end right if we set this to mid you hear that our snares pop out instead and if we go to treble those cymbal hits pop out a bit more instead alternatively if we wanted to make those cymbal hits less prominent turn them out down instead and they get a de-essing instead compress on those snare drums to bring them back in the mix or compress on those kick drums which gives everything else a little more space instead really really interesting tool and of course in the same way as we did with our first envelope follower we could take that envelope out and use it as a modulation source for something else instead there's one final feature that I'll have to show you in one of the future patches because of the way that my case is currently configured but on the back side of Aikido there is a hookup which allows you to cascade multiple Aikido units into each other to make a much bigger overall cascading dynamic VCA mixer we'll take a look at that in one of the patches coming up soon but I think we've covered all of the individual bits and pieces on Aikido so let's use it in some bigger patches so to start off here with the patches I thought we'd ease ourselves in with something a little bit more on the conventional side so this is a basic monosynth patch in terms of the signal flow we have the sawtooth output from the 2hp vco going into the adac filter the output of the filter the lipas output that is is going into channel 4 on Aikido and that's going out into the output of the system there's a single two-stage envelope here which is coming from stages that's running into both the filter and into the vca for the sound here also going to one other place which we'll get to the sequencing is just coming from pams in terms of the pitch and the gate sequence so it's just a sort of basic monosynth set up even in this kind of basic set up here however it's worth noting that because we can overdrive Aikido a little bit at the moment I'm just um touching zero db on the um teni-vert here if i turn the teni-vert up a bit more obviously it gets louder but also we get a little bit of grit on there as well bottom end gets a bit bigger nice so a perfectly conventional way to use a vca as part of a synth voice you know we shouldn't overlook the fact that that is you know and most um non-modular synths that's what vca's are going to be primarily used for the other thing that i've got going on here is i've got a lfo which is running into channel one on Aikido and the outputs of channel one which is um because i'm making use of the output that's removing it from the normalization on the cascading it's just going into the fm input on the vco which means if i turn up this fader it's vibrato which is all very well i'm good we probably don't want vibrato happening all the time like that it's a bit much especially at the front end of the notes so what i have here is i've also got the envelope running into cv channel one here actually we don't really need to do that because we could just have it normalizing across like that can we let's take the one out all together so that's running across channels one two three and four now and and what i can do here because we have an attenuverter here on um the cv input and not just an attenuverter is i could set this where we've got vibrato here and then apply negative envelope to that cv signal so the vibrato fades in rather than being at the front of the note so we get a nice strong front end of the note and then vibrato into the tail so yep we can use a key doing a very very conventional way with our vca is controlling cv and controlling audio in order to make a synth voice but we can still get a bit of grunt on there with the over driving of the vca as well yeah stereo movement and being able to pan things around inside of patches is so important to me it's why i've got x pan as a dedicated panning module here but actually x pan is really just a set of vca's arranged in a particular way and we can replicate that arrangement of vca's using a keydo and turn a keydo into a pan up so um what i've got here at the moment is just some filtered noise coming into channels one and two on a keydo there it is so just coming out of kinks into the filter up into a buffered malt because i'm being fancy i'd usually just use a a stack cable probably and then going into the inputs of channels one and two and then out into the stereo out of my mixer so if we think about what panning is really what we're talking about is the signal being loud on one side and then as it gets quieter on that side it gets louder on the other and that's panning and so when you have two vca's the ability to set an initial level on those vca's and uh attend inverters for their cv you can um create a pan up so we'll use a an elephone just a second but just uh so we can check this is working manually first i'm just going to take an output from quadrat here which is set to bipolar mode so in the middle it's zero volts it goes down to minus five and up to plus five and i will plumb that into the cv input on channel one and because i've plumbed that into the cv input on channel one that signal is also going to appear on um the input of channel two as well because of the cascading that goes on there so to set this up as a panner we're going to um want to set things for our sort of midpoint here so we'll turn those both down a little bit quieter and what we want to happen is that when this goes up one of these turns up and the other one turns down and when it goes down one of them turns down the other one turns up right so that's simply a case of us putting our attend inverters pointing in different directions so now i can pan the signal from side to side one of the modulation source and if i use an elephone instead we can get our noise sweeping around our head so two channels vakido is essentially a panner speaking of panning a very common feature that's found on a lot of dedicated panning modules is the capability to crossfade and that's because if you think about what crossfading is it's basically very very similar to what panning is so with crossfading you're going to start with two vca's when one is high the other's low and as you apply it a cv it will turn one up when it turns the other one down the only difference with a crossfader is that rather than the outputs of those two vca's going to two separate outputs instead you're going to mix them together and listen to them for a single output so here i've just got two different waveforms coming out of my vco triangle coming into the first channel and a sawtooth coming in to the second and then i'm taking a single output i'm just taking the output from vca2 because outputs of vca1 will cascade directly into it in terms of what we do with our cv it's basically the same as we had with our um panning so we'll take another bipolar signal here from quadrat we'll move over to a telephone just a second we'll patch it in here we'll set these two at their midpoint apply a negative and a positive here so the same cv source be moved in two different ways because it's going to be normalized across there and now we have a crossfader between those two signals and we can plug in an LFO and away we go and if we wanted to hear a bit more of both of them at some point we could adjust the modulation amounts and the minimum point so we can have a bit more of a dip in the middle where it goes more towards silence or more of a blend i love little crossfading things because it kind of makes you feel like you might have something more of a complex oscillator input so in this spaghetti of wires patch here what i'm trying to do is make use of all of the dynamic vca and mixer side of akido all at once it's kind of have it form the center performance mixer for this patch we'll break down what's going on in just a second because obviously there's quite a lot of wires here and we'll talk about what akido is doing particularly for each of the different sounds but you may have noticed here that i'm also a very fancy boy and have got two akidos here as i mentioned towards the start of the video it is possible to essentially daisy chain your two or two or more akidos to have them cascade into each other sort of behind the scenes so i'll put a picture up on the screen now from the manual but essentially there are hookups around the back of akido which give you access to essentially the mix output and also the cascaded fourth vca output and then you can bring that into either the first vca cascaded input on the second akido or into the mix output on the second akido so the way i have this configured as it happens is i've actually got because it made sense for this particular patch i've actually got the fourth vca output appearing on the mix output for the second akido so this mix output here on the second one is the only output and it's receiving all of the stuff that's going on in the first one but you can configure it in a couple of different ways for your interest also just so it makes more sense when we talk about later i have all of the mutes here set to be pre vca so they're affecting the vca outputs as well for a particular reason that i will get to in just a moment right let's try and break down what's going on here what akido is doing for each of the different channels it's receiving because it's doing a couple of different jobs here and there so first of all on the kick drum this is just the two hp vco that's been given the sort of classic kick sort of pluck to its pitch that's going through a low pass gate and into a channel on tercy to give it a little bit of grit and then that's just coming straight into akido so here akido's level is just literally asking us a level we're not using anything else on sort of the vca tony butter here i'm just pushing up to the top to give it a bit more volume and a bit more sort of grit up at the top even more than what we're getting from just tercy that's just doing that that's pretty straightforward in this case we're just using akido as a straight mixer next channel we've got a hi hat going on here so this is just some noise from kinks i'm actually using this same noise signal in a couple of different places so it's molded up here that's just going through a filter and then coming into akido and in this case i'm using a envelope to move the level of akido here so it's actually essentially the tony butter which is asking us our volume control here if we turned at the main level you just hear the sort of droning noise if you like so here akido's working both as a mixer and actually doing its sort of normal vca stuff similar thing is going on here on the second channel here for the third channel rather for the snare sound so that's what's going on behind the scenes we've got an envelope coming in here to envelope that and that's coming from pizza actually i'm just doing a bunch of modulation in here to kind of get this sort of eight bit snare drum sound which is quite cool got a bit more thunk to it than you can kind of hear behind the kick drum next along here we have a bass line so this is coming from beehive which is a klutz clone this is running the newest firmware with the third set of modes i'm using the nes mode here so this mode gives you a arpeggiated kind of nintendo eight bit thing going on on the main outputs which i am using in the patch we'll get to that in a second but on the aux output it gives you that same pitch essentially or the same root pitch but as a sort of triangle wave bass line kind of thing so really amazing mode yeah i think overlooked maybe because all of the cool dx7 stuff that comes before it it's really cool anyway we're not talking about that today so that's coming into tersi just for a little bit of grit and also just takes off some of the aliasing top end there which was a little bit much next to everything else and then yeah akido is just doing its usual kind of vca stuff so again it's droning away there if i just turn up and we're just using a tenuverta there so that's receiving an envelope so i've kind of got all my rhythmic stuff on the first one here and then as we move over to the second akido i've kind of got more melodic stuff on the first channel we've got the other side of beehive that arpeggiating line now on this output on beehive there's actually a volume envelope applied to it anyway so she was receiving a trigger and it's doing its own volume envelope so i'm not having to use the vca side of akido to give it that amplitude shape but you should be able to hear that actually there's some pumping going on here so here i'm using the kick drum to pump this channel although i'm actually not using the kick drum so if you listen to the kick drum sounding again here there's actually quite a few incidental hits there's one there so you've got those incidental in between kicks there and if you sidechain with those kind of in the mix there it throws the rhythm off massively so what i'm doing rather than using the kick drum as the input to our envelope follower here what i'm actually using is the straight trigger so i've got two sets of triggers going to the kick drum i'm using the straight kick kick trigger which is just giving the four to the floor that's coming into the envelope follower here and that's then what i'm using to do the pumping so we only get the rhythmic pumping here instead so um here i've just balanced the um the level of the main sound and then i've basically put a negative amount by the attenuverter to pump it down every time we've got that kick drum sound and i've got a similar kind of thing going on on the second one as well just as an alternate sound we can bring in there it's kind of a second part so that's just rings the noise from kinks is going into rings i think that's then just coming straight into yeah let's go just coming straight into a keto so that's just noise into rings into a keto and again i've just sort of balanced the volume here and then i've got the attenuverter going down that's going to be listening to that envelope follower again so we get that lovely sort of classic techno pumping going on there with the sort of noise there and then on the final one here because i haven't got anything on the fourth channel here i've actually got a just a vocal loop but what i've done here rather than pumping it is that i've actually got the volume turned down here and rather than doing a negative amount on the attenuverter to pump it i've actually put a positive amount which means it's going to be rhythmically jumping out with the kick instead so giving you the sort of rhythmic emphasis on the kick so although obviously the words that are spoken are not necessarily in rhythm it's just i think it's a language tape or something to learn german i think that's what this loop is obviously the the vocals aren't in time that's not that's not a timed loop but because we are emphasizing with the kick it kind of sounds like it's intentionally spoken even if you can't really hear the words it's a really really cool way of working so with all of the things on this VCA sorry on this a key to here because i'm not cascading the outputs the VC outputs of this one into the first VC output here this kind of lives on its own so what i've done is i've taken the fourth VCA channel here and put that into my reverb here and because i have all of these ones these mutes here being pre-VCA it means that when i mute them they're not going into the reverb as well which is why i've got them set that way if i had them set the way they come from the factory when i mute these you would still be hearing it on the fourth VCA output here so setting those mute jumpers for a particular use of ikido is kind of something you need to think about to make it do the thing you need it to do so in this patch that's what i needed in other patches in other uses other use cases that might be what i want yeah essentially what we've got now is like a full performance mixer for this particular for this particular patch we've got sub mixing so that the right stuff is going into the reverb we're not having our kick and our bass going in there which we don't really want in there kido is acting as a VCA for some of the sounds shaping the amplitude in other cases it's just working as a kind of a compressor pumper expander based upon the envelope follower which is following the trigger not the sound as a different way of using it and yeah it's kind of just working as the heart of the patch here and uh there was a big delay to me actually recording this part of the video because i was just sort of jamming obviously because you know you gotta that's what it's all about isn't it right i'm going to sit and jam with the software camera for a bit but yeah that's kind of akido used to kind of do all of its different things all at once in a kind of a performance mixer kind of environment so obviously a key component of akido's capabilities is that of a mixer and that's why we have our dedicated mix output which contains the output of each of the four VCA's but if we don't plug anything into the outputs of VCA one two or three because of the way that the outputs cascade together VCA four's output will also contain a mixture of all of the outputs of the VCA's so functionally in that configuration we have two sort of master outputs for akido what that means is that we can take one of those outputs and we have to do with the mix really and plumb it back into the input of VCA one which creates a feedback loop and feedback loops are really really wonderful ways to spice up a sound source so this drum loop is doing what the drum loop is doing it's plugged into VCA four i've taken the output VCA four into my output for my rack and then i've taken the mix output and plumbed it back into VCA one and if we bring up the level of VCA one we start to get some real character happening the prominent resonance is inside the loop become more and more enhanced get some lovely crunch and eventually some tone yes so this is a fantastic way to dirty up a signal or indeed a number of signals because anything we plug into the other inputs will also get put into that feedback loop so i've got one P bass line so that's without the feedback but when we start sort of bringing all of those signals in they will sort of fight with each other and get all crunchy and grungy and the fun thing here is that we do still have our complete module output going into the input of VCA one which means that the envelope follower the first envelope follower will be following that signal so we can also start to compress stuff but based on the feedback loop which is also ace or we can go the other way and expand things so that the loud sounds get thrown into the feedback looping sort of get the resonance yeah that's cool now of course we don't need to feedback directly into the module itself if we don't want to we could take that via something else so for example if i take my mix output and go into the input of the filter and then take the output of the filter back into VCA one we've thrown that filter into the feedback loop now i've taken the band pass output now as it turns out this filter actually inverts the phase so if you feed a inverted band pass filter back into something you actually get a notch filter so we get a phaser sound and if we take the high pass filter output because of the phase relationship we'll get some other interesting emphasis and if we want things to behave as we would maybe expect you could take that signal and invert it kinks will do that for us take that inverted signal come back in here and now we can emphasize that high frequency inside our feedback loop low pass output really cool way to write and spice and grit to an otherwise fairly boring signal really good fun so this one is admittedly a little bit niche but i was playing around with it so i thought i'd just share it with you so at the moment we're just listening to well it's the mix output but i've muted the other channel that's involved here and it's just a loop that's coming out of disting here i'm taking the output of this VCA and running it into the side chain so the first envelope follower here and i'm doing that from the output rather from the input because then they have a level control of how much is going into said envelope follower and then i'm running the output of the envelope follower the end of output into channel two of a keydo so essentially i'm going to be listening to what the envelope follower sounds like so rather than using it as control voltage as a modulation source actually using it as an audio processor i'm actually running the output of that into a high pass filter which is set with the cutoff low that's just because this is full of direct current basically so you get lots of sort of dropouts and stuff and it over drives stuff really easily if you don't take the dc app but what does it sound like so if we turn down our main loop just for a second and turn up the envelope follower now the output's quiet because it's rectified so you're only getting one half of the total swing that it would usually get an audio signal but you can hear that you get this quite delightful sometimes a bit distorted almost a ring moddy kind of sound and the character of it is going to change with the speed that we set this to so this is on fast at the moment if we go down to mid and of course the loop then stops sort of like a broken warbly tape cutout and how much we feed into the envelope follower by adjusting the output of vca one we're going to get different sort of tonal characters now if we mix that in with the original source it's actually quite a nice way to get some sort of lo-fi kind of broken sort of sometimes ring moddy sometimes sort of tape warbly or vinyl crackle into a loop there's a clean loop mix the envelope follower back in if you're after that kind of lo-fi sound and you're not using the envelope follower for anything else or even if you are using for something else then you can molt it quite a nice way to get some dirty character into a sound will be a bit niche one of the things that i appreciate about the vca's on a qdo is that they go beyond unity gain so with the fader about here we're hearing this drum loop more or less as it is but if we push it up to the top here it's going to get louder yes but there's also going to be a change the sound as it starts to clip so we can hear now that there's a bit of grit on those kick drums the snares in particular seem to have more body to them as well more sort of sustain which is good now the outputs on a qdo as we've seen a bunch of times now cascade into each other but it's just the outputs which cascade which means that if i turn up the volume of the second vca there's going to be nothing happening to our original loop which is happening on the first vca but there's nothing stopping us from taking the output of that first vca and plumbing into the input of the second one and taking this one above unity to get more balance the output a little bit there so that's a bit more quit than we had on the first output generally more saturation and crunch going on there but then there's nothing stopping us from taking the output of the second vca and putting that into the third vca and turning this one up above unity for even more distortion quite a lot more going on there compared to the first level of distortion and i mean there's nothing stopping us from taking the output of the third vca and plumbing it into the fourth vca and turning that one up above unity for you've guessed it even more grit and while this might be a slightly extravagant way to create a distortion processor it is quite a good sounding one now you might be thinking at this stage you might be thinking at this stage that there's maybe a little bit too much harshness and sort of a high end clipping happening at the top end there well why don't we do something about that so we could take our spectral envelope here which is listening to this final vca's output make sure it's set to trial which it is and this is going to be listening to the top end where all of that harshness is and if we plummet into the cv input of the fourth one and turn down our tenuverter we can use that to essentially ds the signal i still get all that huge amount of fattening and room sound happening at the low middle range but take out some of that top end crackle so without it that's it and of course we could also mess around with some more by for example compressing the original input just massive or expanding the original input to push it into clipping in that first place yeah so it's a slightly extravagant way to get a distortion processor but it's certainly an effective one and certainly having the dsing at the end as an alternative to just filtering that top end out is a nice option to have as well audio rate amplitude modulation is a wonderful thing so here coming into the input of akido i've just got the triangle output of the 2hp vco and it's just playing a basic little sequence into the cv input of that channel i've got just a straight up drone coming from pizza here and you can hear as i modulate the amplitude of that simple signal we get a lovely set of extra overtones sort of slightly focal glottal throaty sounds it's not quite ring modulation for ring modulation you need a vca which will invert the signal as well but it's definitely got its own vibe one of the cool things um with um sort of single sided amplitude modulation if you like is if i bring down the starting the initial level of our signal we get all these other sounds in here where we're just bumping up the signal just a tiny bit we get all these sort of thinner sounds and there's loads of nuance inside there so for this patch it would be cool if we could take like an LFO and mix it in with the cv control for the actual amplitude modulation the audio amplitude modulation so we could have this kind of range of sounds happening automatically we can do that all inside akido so um what i'll do is i will take my input signal and just move it along uh into channel three here we'll listen to channel three and turn it up so some background noise and then i'll take my modulator which is coming from pizza and just plug it into the input of channel one and i'll take a LFO from stages here and plug it into the input of the second channel here now at this point the output of channel two is going to contain the output of channel one and channel two mixed together so we can use akido to mix together control voltages and audio signals because the outputs are dc coupled so if this is containing the mixture of our LFO which could be used to sweep the level up and down and the audio rate signal if we put this into our cv input on the third channel here turn up that a little bit and if we turn up the level of the first channel we'll get our audio rate and if we turn up the level of our second channel we've got our LFO it's a lovely complex droning signal but it could get better it could get better because what makes everything better well that's uh well reverb is one thing that's not what we're going to do today uh putting things in stereo makes things better we talked earlier about how we can use akido to uh do panning well here we can do audio rate panning mixed in with uh the LFO rate panning and all we need to do for that is take the output of well first we need to mount our input signal into the next channel first let's do that and then if we take the output of that second channel and remember our cv on akido gets um normal to cross so the cv input that we have on the third channel here is also going to be present on the fourth channel if we just invert that signal i hope you're listening in headphones yes i'm just going to push the LFO level up so we just about go to zero if we take out the audio rate we've just got a straight panner super cool sound and then of course changing the shape of our modulating signal other world's sound and of course we could change the tuning or the octave or change the tuning a little bit we just get a bit more beating uh change the octave audio rate panning earlier in the video we talked quite a lot about how we can take uh the envelope followers outputs and use it to control the vca to create either expanders or indeed compressors and we can absolutely mash the signal um more than i just wanted to mention on that that i didn't mention in that section is that because we have the ability to mix outputs together inside a keydo if you molt your compressed signal um into multiple vca's here we can also set up parallel compressor compression situations here so we've got a really mashed signal here but i've molted that same drum loop into the input of the second vca here and we can mix that back in to put some of the transients back but still getting that body so if we take away the compressed smash signal there's our boring drum loop you can hear how the compression is bringing up all of the body and room in the loop if we take our clean or dry signal out here we're back to that absolutely mashed signal that we had before but blending them together gets them pretty interesting in between sounds if we wanted to try and uh bring up the transients even more we could make use of our spectral envelope which obviously is uh taking the outputs of the fourth vca which is going to include uh these vca's here so if i take the spectral envelope and take it to the cv of our second channel here and aim it at uh treble and turn up the cv amount that's now going to be expanding the top end of the sound so all of the rattle of the snare is without the hi hats and the like so put even more of those transients back in you can get really really flexible and surgical and creative with our dynamics processing by doing it in parallel