 Hello OscillatorSync here. If you were to ask me what my top three favorite instruments were at the moment, it would probably go in number three, it would be the OPZ, number two would be the dig attack, and in the number one spot it'd be these. Okay so that's a slightly tongue in cheek answer, but actually there's some truth to it. In my alter ego as a long-haired rocker who works in the studio quite a lot, I've recorded and played with a lot of different bands and ensembles, and if you were to ask the musicians that I played with what the one constant was in all of their sessions, it's probably that I tried to get an egg shaker into their recordings somewhere, whether that's a folk duo or my own heavy, shouty rock band. I think what really appeals to me about shake and percussion is that when played well there's a real nuance to it. Every shake is slightly different, there's this movement that's constantly happening, this ebb and flow that I think can really really enhance a groove. I've come to realize that this sort of obsession with shake and percussion has sort of come through to my electronic music as well, and if you listen to my recent dig attack set there's so many of the patterns where the thing that's holding down the groove a lot of the time is this kind of shaker sound. Now I've got nothing against making use of loops or indeed literally recording acoustic instruments over the top of electronic music, but say we were working all within the box, the box in this case being the dig attacked, and we had a groove here, and we chose to put 16th notes with a shake over the top. Well, it doesn't sound great, and it's not even the what is being played, it's the how. That nuance and the ebb and flow is entirely missing from this electronic performance. To paraphrase Frank Zappa, what's missing is the eyebrows. So the shaker sound that we've got here is just kind of cha-cha-cha-cha-cha-cha-cha-cha-cha-cha-cha-cha, and that's not what the acoustic egg shaker sounded like. That was all sh-ka, and sometimes sh-ka-ta, and sometimes it's sh-ka with a longer attack, and sometimes sh-ka with more of a slappy attack to it, and we're not getting any of that in this current sequence. Now we could go through each of these steps and maybe alter the envelope or even put a different sample on each step, and while I kind of applaud that level of detail, those are the sorts of operations that get in the way of actually making the music for me. And even if we were to do that, we'd still end up with this kind of static 16-beat loop, so we still aren't getting that sort of ebb and flow so much. So what I want to share with you is a technique that I've used when I'm working with these kind of shaker sounds to get that kind of ebb and flow and that nuance to the performance, and there are kind of two bits to it, I think, and we'll address each of them in turn, and after that hopefully this lame-sounding shaker is going to sound a lot more alive and real and human. So the first thing that we're going to do is we're going to change this cha-cha-cha-cha-cha-cha into a sh-ka-sh-ka-cha-cha-cha kind of thing with a lot more movement, and it's really wonderfully straightforward to do on the dig attacks because of the super super flexible LFO. So we're heading over to the LFO for our shake track, and what we're going to do is set the destination down here to the amp attack time, and then we are going to turn our wave to our random and boost the BPM, but crucially the most important thing here is that we are going to change our LFO mode to hold, which means that with these settings with a fast random wave per step we're going to choose a new attack. So let's just get that groove going again. So as we turn up the depth here, just there, suddenly there's this aliveness to it, and although it's random because it's kind of on the beat, it always sounds musical. It sounds like there's a player there making an informed decision about our groove. Now we've got this movement happening, we can go back into our amp page and kind of take a look at the bass line to everything. So perhaps we want to, just a little bit, we want to err on some more smacky kind of things, maybe longer attack, much better. So now we've got away from a cha-cha-cha-cha-cha sound into a sh-ka-sh-ka-sh-ka-sh-ka-sh-ka kind of sound, which has made a massive difference to the groove. But when we were actually playing it acoustically, one of the cool things is that we weren't just a sh-ka-sh-ka-sh-ka, sometimes it was a sh-ka-ta with like a little trill on there. That's a really, really neat sound with a shake and bit of percussion. Let's try and get that into here as well. And with the dig attack, because it's wonderful and it's flexible, flexible sequencer, it's pretty straightforward to do. So let's say we want to have a sh-ka-ta trill on step 11. So we'll get that trill sound happening by holding down the step and going into the retrick menu by hitting the up arrow, turning the retriggers on. We only want it to be re-triggering just on this step. So we'll take the length down to just a sixteenth or one step. And the rate we're going to turn up to 32 or 1 over 32, a 30 second note as it were. And if we play now, we've got this cool little trill. And with the different attacks, kind of as different feels each time as well, which is really cool. But we don't necessarily want this happening every time we go around. So perhaps we want to say, well, this is something that the musician is going to make a choice about each time we go around. So we can put a probability on that with using our conditional trigger. So we'll hold down the step 11, we'll go into the trick page and change our condition to, shall we say, 41% sounds good. So if we play now, having that time, not that time. And I'm sure you can see an issue here is that we now have a gap, 41% of the time we've got something playing. But the rest of the time, there's actually a gap. And that doesn't sound quite right. So what can we do to fill the gap? Well, this is something that actually comes back around from some of the stuff I was talking about in my dig attacks, randomized arpeggiator video. There'll probably be a thing appearing up here. Or maybe not, if I forget to do it. And that is that because this is a monophonic sampler sequence, if we have another trick repeating, and then this one comes in anyway, it will override what was happening before. So on the previous step here, step 10, we can turn on a retrigger here as well, just for two beats or an eighth note. And here we can have our rate set as 16ths, which is the normal step length anyway. And what will happen is that if this one doesn't fire, this one will do a second beat, whereas if this one does fire on the 41% of the time it does, it will override the repeating beat here. So it didn't do that time. Got a trail, trail, another trail. There's a trail sitting up in here, no trail that time. And we could take these two steps, copy them, and we could stick them in a couple of other places so that we also have some additional trails happening. And of course we could experiment with different types of retriggers, which mainly don't work with this particular groove, it's a much more sort of groovy, real feeling. Now these kind of techniques work well with other shaken percussion sounds, so tambourines for example, I work quite nicely with this. The other place where I found this kind of idea pretty useful is with hi-hat patterns, except rather than automating the attack time, that tends to work better with automating the decay time, so you get sort of like harder and opened hi-hats, or semi-opened hi-hats versus closed hi-hats. That can be really, really cool to add a bit of movement, ebb and flow to a hi-hat groove as well. Anyway, I hope that was interesting and useful. If you did enjoy it then please do hit the thumbs up button, and also make sure you subscribe to the channel, because there's always more videos on synths, and samplers, and sequences, and all manner of things coming up soon. As always, thank you so much for joining me, and I will see you again soon. Take care, bye-bye.