 Hello, Oslo here to sync it and welcome back to another video where we're exploring sound design on the wonderful Korg Volcker FM. So today we're going to talk about velocity and let's start by defining what we mean by velocity in terms of musical instruments in a particular sense. So I guess in many ways velocity on a keyboard instrument starts with the piano, the piano or to give it its full name the piano forte which means loud and soft was pretty much the first keyboard instrument where you could alter how loud or quiet the sound coming out of the instrument was simply by how hard or fast you struck the keys. Now it's not just about things getting louder of course, the harder you hit a key on a piano the more harmonic content the brighter the sound gets. So we're talking about how hard you're hitting the key governing how loud or quiet and also how harmonically rich a sound is. Now of course these sorts of concepts apply to most musical instruments you know if you blow into a saxophone harder you get a different sound it's louder and it's brighter. If you pluck a string on guitar harder again louder and brighter. Now the way that we deal with this in FM sense is that we're going to make our carriers react to velocity, how hard you're hitting a key and that's going to change the loudness and softness of the sound and then we can make our modulators react to how hard we hit the key or the velocity of the key and that's going to govern the harmonic content. Now before we go in to talk about how we actually do this inside the patches it won't escape to your notice that of course the Volcker FM doesn't have a real keyboard but say it has these contact points here for the keyboard and I can tell you now it doesn't matter how hard you slam your hand down on these contact points that doesn't change the velocity of the notes. The way that the velocity is governed on the Volcker FM is when you're outside of edit mode, so in your performance mode if you like, this slider here basically sets the velocity of the notes that are playing and that's kind of genius when you think about the Volcker FM as a groove box where you've got a sequence playing back it means that while the sequence is playing back you can be altering that velocity in and therefore as long as the patch allows for it altering the loudness and harmonic content of the sound. Now there are some downsides with the way that velocity is currently implemented in the Volcker FM but I'll discuss those briefly at the end of the video let's get into the sounds. So let's head into our edit menu. So at the moment I'm running a patch in algorithm 12 which I'll just flash up on the screen so that you can remember what that looks like but at the moment only operators 1 and 2 are turned on so at the moment operator 1 is acting as the sol carrier and operator 2 is acting as the sol modulator. So dealing with the velocity sensitivity of a operator is really really straightforward we're just going to scroll through our presets over near the end here we go yes this KVS or keyboard velocity sensitivity now by default in my initialised patches they that's usually set to zero and it goes from zero up to seven seven being very sensitive and zero being not sensitive at all so at the moment if we play a note if we come out of edit mode it's absolutely no difference where we have that velocity set so if we come into here and we turn the velocity up on our carrier now you'll be able to hear that velocity is essentially acting as a volume control for that carrier so maybe a bit too sensitive so we'll just drop that down a little bit around there yeah that's cool okay so that's how we apply velocity sensitivity to a carrier that gives us our volume control essentially I'm just going to turn that off for a second so let's move over to operator 2 which is currently our sol modulator and we'll turn the velocity sensitivity up on this and we'll hear now then instead the velocity slider is going to govern the harmonic content so that's kind of more or less a sine wave like that and of course you could combine those two ideas so maybe we'll just make this one slightly sensitive so that's a really basic way of dealing with it and this kind of works if you want to have your baselines that do that sort of kind of thing that's that's a really new way of doing that so let's just take a look at some of the other operators in in this algorithm algorithm 12 so I'm just going to turn off one and two and I'm going to turn on three four five and six we've got this kind of bell thing going on if you remember from the algorithm video and we were discussing this particular algorithm what we've got here are several modulators all hitting one carrier and those modulators are all detuned so that we're getting this awesome bell sound now what's quite interesting here is that if we head over to our keyboard velocity can't find it compassed it keyboard velocity sensitivity we've got these three modulators now and they're all kind of detuned so what we can do here is set them all at different levels of sensitivity and they're all going to kind of fade in at different times and we're going to get a much richer idea as we turn up our velocity check this out quite nice bell sound as we turn it up it's not just that we're getting more harmonics we're also getting more here they would get more atonal frequencies coming in one thing that is worth noting with the keyboard velocity sensitivity control is that it can send the operator level higher than the maximum operator level which is why here we're getting more sort of distortion than we would have had if we had turned these all off because actually our operators actually getting louder get in a higher level than they would have done without the sensitivity turn on so if you want to push a patch even further over the top then you can actually do that and of course this is as I mentioned really cool if you're doing a so I mentioned that I wanted to talk about a downside of the way that this particular feature is implemented on the Volcker FM because I think it's worth addressing so because they're using this slide of a velocity what they've essentially done in the engine is they've turned off the fact that this will actually react to genuine keyboard velocity so if you plug a midi cable in you want to play the Volcker FM with a proper keyboard you don't get any velocity sensitivity which I think it's a shame that it was worked out that way I understand why they did it that way but I think it's possibly an opportunity missed so I just wanted to mention that there is a special midi cable available from a company I think are called retro kits I'll put a link in the description of the video that when you plug a keyboard into the Volcker FM using the special midi cable it's an active midi cable and it does some magic along the wire and it basically puts the right signals in for the Volcker FM to react to it so if you want to play your Volcker FM with a proper keyboard with proper velocity sensitivity you can do that you do have to buy this cable or one similar I don't own one yet I do intend to pick one up so I can't voucher it personally but I've seen plenty people talk about them they seem very happy with them so that's it for velocity it's it's very straightforward but it can add a whole extra dimension to your patches so it's definitely worth experimenting with that feature I hope that was interesting and useful if it was make sure you hit the thumbs and subscribe if you don't already in the next video I am against my better judgment I think in some ways going to tackle probably one of the least understood elements of programming patches on the Volcker FM and that's the oscillator scaling if you guys have got the little card at home you've probably seen this terrifying looking graph thing over here we're going to make sense of that it really isn't as terrifying as it looks and it can like velocity really open up what is possible when your program patches so check back in a few days for that video until then thanks so much for watching guys and I will see you again soon take care