 Hello OscillatorSync here and welcome back to another video in the series where we're building patches from scratch on the wonderful Arturia Microfreak. So in the last video I made a lead sound, so maybe the natural progression would have been to now move on and make a bass sound, but this synth has a SEM style filter and it's my understanding that if you have a synth with a SEM style filter and you don't make a pad, then the synth police will come after you, so today let's make a pad. So as to what kind of pad we're going to make today, now I don't want to make a super ambient weird pad, although I will do one of those in a few videos time I think, but at the same time I don't want to make something where I'm just trying to pretend that I have a Juno or an OB6. So we're going to make something that isn't exactly totally conventional, but also isn't totally weird and wacky, so kind of like what would be a normal pad I think for the Microfreak. So here we are on the initialised patch and if we're making a pad then the first thing we're going to want to do is make sure we can play chords, so we can hit the paraphonic button and now we can play chords. Now as to whether or not this really should say paraphonic, I'll link to a Mark Doty video where he quite rightly explains that we shouldn't really call this paraphony. The reason being that although right at the end of the chain it's going through a single filter, so there's a single sort of articulation right at the end. If this was a true paraphonic synth and I had the envelope here, I wouldn't be able to start playing this note and have it fade in and then start playing another note and have it fade in as well. So what I'd maybe call this, if it were up to me, although it's not very snappy, is this is limited polyphony and partial articulation. But that's made me for another video to go into that in depth. So whenever we're making a patch on the Microfreak, a good place to start is over in the digital oscillator section and kind of choose what kind of sound we're going to start with before we start shaping it. So my gut originally when I was thinking about making a pad was that I was going to use the super wave sound here and what this is is kind of the super saw idea except we've got different sounds. So basically you've got a single oscillator and then you can kind of fade in the superness here and then how detuned the superness is. So not very super, really quite super, probably a little bit too super. And you don't just have super saws, you have super, actually we like the super square. I think that's a rather cool sound. But having demoed that, that's not actually the oscillator I'm going to go with. Instead we're going to go up a couple more and go with the harmonics. So the way this works, it's kind of like a draw buzz on an organ. You've got kind of a basic sound and then you bring in more oscillators in the harmonic series. So we've got control over the harmonic content. And then we've got this sculpting which changes the kind of the timbre of the harmonic oscillators. And then at the end here we've actually got this chorus. So that's without the chorus. We can get quite rich sounds. And I reckon that these two knobs here would very much suit being modulated. So let's just pick ourselves a starting point. We've got the chorus quite high so we've got some harmonic content to work with and some richness as well. So let's see what the filter is going to do to a sound like this. I'm going to play Cm7 a lot. I make no excuses and I also make no apologies. I'll try some other chords later on. I might try one of those as well. Who knows. Bit of resonance. Yeah I think that's going to work for us. So let's get a bit more of a paddy kind of attack to the sound. So we'll turn the attack up a little bit. That's nice. Okay so we've got that happening there. Bit of a fade in. We want to get a bit more of a fade out. And we will drop the sustain just a little bit so that we do have a dip. Right nice. And then let's make sure that filter opens up a little bit as we move our sound. So let's maybe drop or cut off a bit more. I think we probably want to attack a bit longer. You can hear here this is where the sort of periphery happens. As I play another note and get the envelope moving you'll hear that these two lower notes are also getting brighter as well. So that's kind of the paraphonic nature. It's not a problem, it's just something to be aware of. Okay that's given me a good feel. Okay so let's start modulating these wave and timbre controls. Because I think that's going to be where we get a lot of richness from our sound. So I'm going to just click the rate knob here on the LFO so that it's not running sync. So I have full control over the rate. And head in to the matrix. And we're going to go to the LFO line here. We're going to go to the wave and we're going to click that so that they're coupled together. And then let's have a play with the amount. That's pretty slow at the moment. Just one. Do you know what? I reckon slow is good. Let's go slow but more. Okay that's cool. So the timbre control, the sculpt control here. So that kind of brought in more harmonics, sort of sharper sounds. So I think maybe we can open that up with the envelope so that we really emphasize at the top of the filter. So again we'll just move this along so that we've got the envelope talking to the timbre like that. Let's crank that a little bit and see how it sounds. That's doing something cool, liking that. So maybe crank it a bit more so how that feels. That's introducing something interesting, isn't it? So let that die down. Let's try that again. Let's try a different chord. Let's try something like... I think that release can be longer. I want to get this wobbling a little bit. So let's take that and we'll go to... Let's use the LFO again and set that to pitch. LFO to pitch in just a tiny bit. Maybe half a cent probably too much. That's on the edge of being too much. But I think that's just enough to keep things spooky. I love how those harmonics sort of fade in and out. Cool, we're getting somewhere. I wonder whether actually we need to open that filter up just a little bit more than we are at the moment. So it's brighter at the top end and then just drop our sustain. So it's a little bit darker once it's held. That feels good. I want to get that filter moving so we've got another set of timbre movements. But I don't want it being in sync with what's happening on the LFO. And in fact I think maybe something a little bit more pronounced for the movement of the filter. Something maybe a bit pingy. So we're going to use the cycling envelope for this. So we're going to start by choosing our mod destination. So I'm going to go cycling envelope and that's going to be going to cut off here. And make sure the amount on there is on full at the moment. And we'll just crank that up a little bit and see what's happening. Again that movement that's a bit fast. A bit more. Okay here's an idea. What if we had that full knob be modulated the way I'm doing here. So a speed of which that's going changes over time as well. That's a cool idea. So what we want to do if we're going to do that is we want to find the midpoint. If we're going up to about 400. So we'll set the midpoint to about 200. And then probably use the LFO again for that. So what we need to do is actually choose that we want to adjust the full here. So if we hold down a sign and just move that. Sorry everyone. The full time there. So that means that a sign three is now going to be adjusting that knob. And we want to move it so that our LFO is going to assign three like so. And then let's make sure that's back where it was more or less. And turn this up. Okay how's this for a weird idea? I wonder what would happen if when this envelope got darker the resonance turned up. My thinking being that once it's darker I want those pings to be all the more obvious. So one approach we could take for that I suppose is to link our resonance to our envelope but negative. So that when the envelope goes down the resonance goes up. So let's take a sign two and let's assign that to resonance here. And in our mod matrix you want to take our envelope to go to assign to there. We want to go negative because as the envelope goes down as it gets darker on the filter we want the resonance to go higher. So let's try something. Yeah that's cool. Nice nice nice nice nice. Okay so I guess the main thing we haven't done here is we haven't taken advantage of the awesome keyboard here on the microfreak because we have our pressure sensitivity. Now this can be set to be pressure or velocity I think in this case because we've got that sort of slow fading in. I think we probably want to go with it being a pressure or after touch which is the default. So that's fine we don't have to do anything with that. Now the question is what do we want it to do? Now I've got kind of two ideas perhaps we'll try them both and see which one we want. The first one is it's kind of straightforward so that's to basically link it to the timbre control again. Actually no not timbre. Or actually maybe timbre. Maybe timbre and wave so that's both the sculpt and the harmonics. See what that sounds like with the chord. So you can do this with different notes. Yeah okay my other idea was to have it affect the rise of the cycling envelope. I don't think that's going to be as good as that. So I'm going to stick with what I've got there. So as we're starting to refine the patch a couple of things I think are coming to light. One I think the resonance is not a little bit too high when it gets off the top there. The other thing is I think the overall sound could be a bit darker. You know we've got this kind of pinging thing happening. And a way to introduce further harmonics. Let's try a little bit higher. Okay again resonance a little bit high because it's a bit harsh at the top there. A little bit darker still. Yeah darker still. Got to embrace the darkness sometimes. So I wonder what it would sound like with a little bit of glide. Barely hear the glide at the front of the notes so that sort of fade in. I heard it there and it's too fast. I'm going to take its time since we've got that long attack. A really long glide. It's a bit cheesy isn't it? I kind of like it. I think darker still maybe we don't need to push the filter up so much on the envelope. We're going to make a little bit more mellow. Sometimes we need to open up the sustain a little bit. That slightly shorter glide is working. It's not like short shot. Harmonic movement, soften that. I think we're pretty much there. In one way to tell for certain though let's turn on some reverb. Reverb makes everything better. Let's try it up in the high registers. Anyway I hope you enjoyed that. That was one of those patches which the basic ideas came together quite quickly and then that sort of last stage sort of the last 10% of refining it and just getting it to sit just right. Just took a little bit longer and sometimes that's how it is with patches. Like you have this sort of basic idea, this vision and then most of what you're doing is just refining that so that it kind of works and so that it's sort of very playable and performable. If you did enjoy it make sure you leave this video a thumbs up and make sure you subscribe to the channel because there's lots more microfeets to come and of course lots of other synth stuff on the way as well. Anyway guys, thanks for joining me as always. See you soon. Take care. Bye bye.