 Hey, it's me, Anfa from Anfamuse.com, and today I'm starting a new video series that's going to be called Anfa Vlog, probably, or something, and I have a really harsh gate to release longer, and Today I want to talk about ZNTSBFX modulation and why it's freaking awesome. I've worked with FM8 for a while from Native Instruments, and I got the impression that it's really nice. But what I saw today about ZNTSBFX is way beyond what FM8 can do. As far as I know, I didn't work for years with it. I just worked for three months with it, and not all the time with it. So I don't know everything about FM8. I for sure know much more about ZNTSBFX, but I didn't know everything, and I found out something amazingly awesome that I want to show you right now. I'm running ZNTSBFX that is a pretty new version. It's from Cake Studio Repositories. It's the GitHub version, so it has all the newest features. It's not the 3.0, it's 2.5. And also I'm running Bodline, this little program here. That is an audio analyzer, open source one, www.bodline.com. And it's pretty nice for spectrum analyzers, but you can also use it for waveform view. Here it goes, it's our waveform analyzer and our spectrum analyzer at the same time today. So here we have the main ZNTSBFX window. And I have my MIDI keyboard plugged in, so you can play notes. Okay, so let's open up the instrument settings. Here we had AdSynth, SubSynth and PatSynth. Actually, yeah, AdSynth is by default on. We open up the voice, and as you might probably know, AdSynth has 8 voices. Like FM8 also has 8 voices, like they're called operators. Here they're called voices, because most of the time what you do is you enable different voices and you mix the output of all of them to create your sound. Right now we have a sine wave. Now we can hear that it is actually a sine wave. I've actually got to change the octave on the keyboard. I can play lower notes, so I can play lower notes easier. I can reach out for the lower notes, but I need them, but I need also some higher. Okay, so now let's open up the voice parameters. And what we have here is our sine wave. Now, what you might know is that there is a panel called Modulator, and we have various modulation options here. For example, FM and PM. Like they are very different, and I'm not going to talk about all of the different types of modulation that are present here. Because it's a very vague and difficult topic. And, oh yeah, actually you can hear me better now. It's a very vague and difficult topic. And there are some major differences between what PM and FM does in Zenit SubFX and in different synths, because it varies from synth to synth. Like what Zenit SubFX does with PM is actually what FM8 or Massive or Citrus do, and they call it FM, which is Frequency Modulation. PM is Face Modulation. So the names, I think, are a bit mixed up in the industry, and it's hard to recognize what is what, and you just have to listen and experiment. Okay, so now we have a simple sine wave modulated by another sine wave. Actually, how PM is different from FM? Like, you can't really see it very easily with sine waves, but if you switch to Triangle Waves, like Triangle Wave for the Modulation or the Modulator, when we slow down the Modulator and like kick up the power of the Modulation, the Modulation Index, you can see that we don't get a tone that it's changing in pitch constantly. Like if I change the FM, we get more what we expected. We get this actually the Triangle Wave imprint in our spectrum. This is what we expect, right? But when we use PM, we actually get like a tone that alternates between two different pitches, and why? Well, because PM actually doesn't care about the amplitude of the envelope or PM actually cares only about the slope. So when the waveform, when the Triangle Wave from is sloping up, the pitch is offset up. When it's sloping down, it's offset down, and it immediately changes between slope that is downwards to a slope that is upwards. So there is an immediate change in the pitch. With sine wave, the slope is also changing in a sinusoidal way, like it doesn't... This is why I said that it's hard to distinguish FM and PM when you use sine waves because they behave very similarly sometimes. So this is very weird, but if you pitch the Modulator up, you actually get a very nice interesting effect. And this is what Seamless was talking about, that Triangle Waves or FM are great for talking bass lines. Actually, if you... There is kind of a formant quality to this. There is a formant-like sound to this result of the modulation. If we change to FM... It sounds kind of a similarly, but not quite entirely like what we heard before. Okay, but this is not what this video was going to be about. I wanted to talk about the amazing thing that you can do with Synapse of FX. And this is about cascading the modulation. It's like we have the eight voices, and actually we can modulate one voice with another. Let's turn off the modulation here, switch this source to sine wave again, and I'm going to change the volume to zero. So when we actually play this, it makes a sound, but it's very, very quiet. This is something that I would like to actually change because I would want this to be complete zero. I think I need to report this as a bug because it should be zero. But it doesn't very matter about what we want to do next. Next, I switch to the next voice, the voice number two. I enable it. Now this is the voice that is playing. You can see here in the spectrum that our first voice is also sounding one octave higher. But it's so quiet that we can't really hear it. We can see it on the scope. Can you hear the difference? I hardly can. The second sine wave is about negative 50 decibels. The first one is about negative six, so it's like 45 decibels of the difference. That's a huge difference. So the first voice is kind of underneath the hearing level. It's just masked by everything else that is happening. But that's a bug that I'm going to report nonetheless. Okay, so we have the voice two that is playing usable sound. And now what we can do is enable modulation. And we're using the internal modulator's oscillator, which is another sine wave. What we can do is use an external modulator. And this is our voice one. Every next voice will have more of these available. Like you see, the eighth voice has seven external modulators available. So all the voices before it in the chain, kind of. I don't know how does it work internally, but this is how it's presented. But I'm not going to use the eighth voice. I'm going back to the second one. And now we're using phase modulation. But the modulation is the modulating waveform is generated by voice one. You can see that when I change the octave here, the resulting sound changes. And if I disable this voice, the modulation doesn't occur at all. It's the same as if I just disabled modulation. Actually, it's not the same because then we can hear this actually being actually existing. Yeah, this needs to be fixed. Okay. So, well, the most amazing thing that you can do with this is that, well, with internal modulation, we have an envelope for amplitude and envelope for frequency. And kind of that's it. But we're using external modulation first. You can have everything you want. This is amplitude envelope. The volume, it doesn't affect the amount of modulation that the voice produces. It affects only how much of the voice is being fed into the audio output. We can use this as a modulator and listen to it at the same time. Just like in FM8. Well, that's really loud. Sorry. Okay, but that's like envelopes. We already have this. What we have that we don't have is like amplitude, LFO, pitch LFO. That can have randomness. Kick up the frequency. Like, dude. This is amazing. Also, what we hear is attenuated by a filter. Because up in the global at-synth window, we have a lopus filter that is enabled and it's turned down a bit. We turn it up. We can change it to a hapus filter and turn that frequency down. It's funny, you can see how much noise we get actually from this. And the lopus filter kind of protected us from hearing that. And that sounds much like Yamaha DX7. But Yamaha DX7 only had sine waves as operators and we don't. You can have any freaking thing you want. You can then filter this with a bandpass. And yes, it's badly harsh. Okay, that's like... You know, we're just messing up with two operators and we actually have eight of them. Like I said, operators because in FM synthesis, you call these things operators. But, okay, but they are voices in that sense. Okay, like this is very harsh and not pleasant because we have so much high frequency in the modulating waveform. But what we can actually do is then enable the filter. Check this out. Yes, you can actually filter the modulating waveform. Here we're using a bandpass filter. Let's listen to what the modulating waveform is actually doing. How does it sound like on its own? We can notch up the stages to get a sharper filter. So this juggling is coming from the frequency LFO. That is very random and it has a high frequency. So this is how our modulator is sounding. I need to have it enabled, but I will turn the volume to zero. We can kind of counteract the fact that our voice one is also making sounds by bumping up the volume of our second voice and turning down the hall. So in the global, I compensated for the gain that I put here, but there was no gain for voice one. So actually it's quieter now. So we can hear less of it. Okay, but this is a simple sound wave. Let's try a saw wave. Oh, this is very, very harsh. Yeah, but maybe saw wave is a little bit too much because... But if we filter it down with a Lopez filter like this... Yeah, this is much more pleasant. We have a very long attack. You can also have a fiddler LFO. This is crazy. Guess what? We can actually modulate our modulating waveform. Yes. It can be modulated too. I can't really hear this because we are using the filter. But if I widen it... Okay, let's get a simpler example. I'm going to disable this one for now. Disable this also and let's move to voice three. It's going to be our new modulator. We can hear it now. Activate voice four, which is going to be the carrier. That means the operator that is actually heard but is affected by another operator speaking in FM synthesis terminology. We will use PM using the external modulator three, which is the voice three. Now let's turn this down. Turn this up. You can see we get a lot of noise. Maybe this is something that could be approved upon. What I wanted to show you is that you can modulate a modulator. Let's modulate this with a different way. Now we are using phase modulation and for our modulator we use frequency modulation. Guess what? We can use an external modulator. Which is, right now, disabled. That's why we didn't hear any change or almost any. The thing is also that we have a volume sensitivity for the modulation velocity sensing function. If we turn this all the way up, it's disabled. The amount of modulation isn't affected by the loudness of the notes we play, the volume velocity. This generally means that the modulation is much, much harsher. Now, why is it so interesting to use several cascading modulators? Because every single one of them has its own envelopes, LFOs, filter, and can get really crazy with the modulating network. I can't even imagine how incredibly complex sounds you can get using eight voices. Everyone has pitch, amplitude and filter and envelopes and LFOs. Each one can be modulated. You can't modulate it with more than one operator at the same time, which is something that, for example, FM8 or Yamaha DX7, I think we're doing. But actually, the amount of stuff you can do, like adding the amazing potential of ZenitsuBFX oscillators that are literally crazy. Okay, this is voice 4. I'm going to clear this and keep it sound like. So we have the voice 4, which is sounding. We have the voice 3, which is just modulating. Let's turn the amplitude LFO. But we need to decrease the delay because it's on by default. And the delay introduces the LFO after some time. This is sometimes useful for vibrato on notes when you use slow instruments. So you hold the long note longer and it starts playing vibrato. Now the voice 3 is modulated by voice 2. Let's go to voice 2 and see what happens there. Let's make it a little bit more noisy by using the quantize, maybe notching up the LOPUS filter. And actually we could get rid of the LOPUS filter altogether because we can use this LOPUS filter that we have here, or even bandpass. Guess what? We can use another LFO. I mean another LOP. Wow, this sounds very cold and digital, but it's something that I really like. We have our first voice that is also used for modulation, which is actually disabled because we have disabled this voice. But if we get back, we can do clear. Let's do this. Convert to sign and then clear. This applies almost everything and transforms it into the harmonic series. Then we can clear the harmonic series so we get the sine wave. Actually you get more than 8 operators because you can also use the internal modulating oscillators. They have less options because they don't have the LFOs in the filter and the unison, which is also a thing. But you have it. You can use them. You see how our modulation gets noisy with more unison voices? This is what we had. If we bum this to 6, we have a big detune because 130 cents is a lot. I think it was softer with... Maybe we need to enable this in another voice. And bump the frequencies back. Well, we actually got some stereo effects. I didn't expect that to be... Bump the stereo down. Okay, it's cast by the unison. Well, actually this is a discovery because I thought that the modulation is performed with a mono signal and this proves that it actually is performed with a stereo signal because we use the stereo spread and have it at least in the center, which means roughly uniform distribution of the voices. If you bump it to maximum, it's very wide. Bump, bump, bump, bump, bump, bump, bump, bump, bump, bump, bump, bump, bump... Dude, this is crazy. Okay, we have this voice. We can do something else with it. Much later, see even further. Let's get crazy and enable LFO on this filter. And make it a bit random. Also, why shouldn't we enable frequency LFO on this one? Let's see what it will do. Maybe one thing at a time, so we can keep track. Good, this is getting very crazy. And okay, let's enable frequency LFO on the voice free. Well, I'm afraid it's going to be very, very, well, it might be disastrous, but let's try it anyway. Cool, okay, I think this is for now, we'll half an hour in. Well, this is just the beginning, like, I've just discovered this feature and we've used just four voices and made something that's pretty impressive, I'd say, you know, like, yeah, well, isn't it some effects is, is really like, it doesn't step to amaze me. I thought that I know everything about it, almost everything by using it for 10 years and releasing like three full length albums, dozens of tracks made entirely with it, and I still don't know everything about it. And I think this feature is very unnoticed and like, nobody knows that Synapse of Effects can do this amazing stuff, like with this cross modulation with different voices. Dude, I don't, this totally blown blew my mind and I want to experiment more with it and you will probably see some more videos about me having fun with this. And let's try some very, very low notes. Well, that wasn't expected. Let's hit them very, very, very subtly. Let's see, that sounds like something's broken. We're just very angry. I don't know what we can do using the middle learn. But that's, I feel that middle learn is quite experimental in Synapse of Effects. Oh, like, let's save it for another video, like, there's a lot of stuff I want to cover. Okay, thanks for watching. It was Anfa. If you have any questions, any requests for what I should talk about, what you would like to see and hear and have me explain, let me know. Write in the comments, subscribe if you want more, give me a like if you think this is worth it. Thanks, bye.