 Hello oscillators in here and welcome back to the series where we are taking a deep dive look into the operator modes on the Korg Ops 6. So far we've looked at the FM mode, the ring mod mode, and the filter mod mode and in this video we are going to finish up by taking a look at the remaining two modes which are the filter mode and wave folding. So in all of the previous modes that we've taken a look at we've had this carrier and modulator paradigm. In all of these cases you have a carrier which is the operator that you hear and then you have a modulator which feeds into that carrier and modulates some parameter so in frequency modulation it's the frequency of the carrier in the ring mod it's the amplitude and in the filter mod it's the filter cutoff of a built-in filter. These final two modes are different fundamentally because instead of the operator that sits above our carrier or call it a carrier for the moment or that's that naming probably isn't quite right, instead of that modulator altering something about the carrier what's really happening is that our operators which would normally be our carriers are now processing the the sound that's coming from the modulator that's sat above it. So let's take a really quick look at what we mean by that. So if we bring up operator one and we'll take a look at the settings here and we play nothing is happening and the reason that nothing is happening at this point is because it's operator two which is sat directly above it in our algorithm here which is going to be fed through operator one and be processed in some way. So if we bring up the level of operator two we start to hear some signal and then we can process operator two in spoiler alert the filter mode allows us to change the cutoff of a filter that's sat in operator one. In operator three we come across this one again if we bring it up we don't hear any sound because it's operator four which is feeding into it and as we bring that up we will hear some sound. So a fundamental difference in these two modes compared to the other three these modes are essentially additional processors that can be applied to operators within the algorithm that you're using. So these two operator modes in terms of the way that they process the operators that are sat above them they do very different things but they do share one parameter between them which is this osc mix setting here. So in the way that we currently have it set up with this osc mix turned all the way down if I turn up operator one and we don't have operator two turned up we don't hear any sound. What osc mix does is it additionally mixes in the oscillator for this operator pretty easy if we change the ratio to something different. So here we don't hear anything and as we turn up the osc mix we start to hear this operator's sound as well. Now it's important to note that this is not a wet dry mix you are mixing it in so it's not the case that we get to 50% and they're balanced evenly and then we go further we're only hearing one. If you want to get them balanced evenly what you need is to put your osc mix level up to full so they're both sounding at their full volume and this works exactly the same way on the way forward as well there's no difference. Okay let's actually talk about what these two modes do so we'll go back over to operator one which is currently our filter mode operator. I'll leave the oscillator mix down at the moment and what I'll do just because we're talking about a filter here is I'll maybe set operator two to a slightly more interesting. Let's go with the sort wave there we go. So in terms of the parameters that we have in the operator mode for filter it's quite similar to what we had for the filter mode in that we have a type which sets the various different types of filter and it's exactly the same set of types as with the filter mode if you've watched the previous video so that means we have low pass high pass band pass band reject which is always nice to have. We have then some other modelled high pass low pass band passes including the MS-20 high pass and low pass which can get quite nice and gritty. We then have a cutoff and resonance control the resonance does what you would expect. The cutoff is not the absolute cutoff so you can hear that obviously that's opening up the filter or closing up closing down the filter depending on what type of filter choice we have there but what's important to note is that the cutoff of a filter mode operator is intrinsically linked to the pitch that that operator would be playing. So if we set the resonance nice and high and just temporarily we'll set the waveform for operator 2 as white noise so that it doesn't have a pitch. So you can hear there that we've got one certain darkness of the filter there as we turn it down it gets darker and brighter up at the top because as they play across the keyboard as long as this operator is set in ratio mode which it currently is the frequency of this operator is going to be changing and therefore so is the filter cutoff. What that means is that if we set the resonance up nice and high so that we can do that nice sort of self oscillating filter and we can start to put pitch on to pitch sounds for example which is just a nice thing to do. In my previous video where we looked at the filter mode I went through all of the different types of filters so I won't do that in depth here but I will mention that there are as I said different models and they do have kind of different feels to them the MS21s in particular as you start to crank the resonance starts to properly self oscillate and get quite gritty and distorted which is a really really nice option to have especially when you're doing this kind of thing where we are imparting a pitch on a sound through the filter. So if you want to disable this filter tracking behavior I'll just set this back to a sawtooth. If you want to disable this filter tracking behavior that we were hearing what we need to do is go into the pitch menu here and change this from a ratio so it's following the keyboard to fixed and now I've got a nice sawtooth which has a particular darkness to it and if I want to change that flavor then all I need to do is change the frequency for this operator. So the important thing to remember with the filter mode is that for the purposes of the cutoff of the filter cutoff equals pitch basically. So that means if we want to create independent filter envelopes which are independent to the master filter which of course goes across all of the operators the way that we will do that is by playing a pitch envelope or pitch LFO if we want to create some whips. So here we are in the pitch menu and we've got our pitch set to fixed and if we want to create an independent filter movement on just this operator for example Varian LFO if we go up the depth here and that's completely filled independent to the main filter here which means we could also have different speeds on those two filters and get some interesting things happening. So we've got a slow filter movement and a faster one like that for example which is pretty cool and of course if you had multiple filter operator setup we could start to set up different modulations across all of them and you can get very very interesting evolving sounds. Similarly if we come back to the pitch menu for operator one here if I set the envelope generator so this is going to be envelope generator one and if we come into again this can be separate to the master filter as well so you have this ability to create pre-filtering on the way to the main filter. Honestly one of the reasons I think this is a nice one to have is is quite apart from having the movement here being able to shape something like a rich sawtooth wave before it hits the main filter if you want to have darker sounds mixed in with a brighter sawtooth sound. Having that kind of flexibility is really quite a nice thing so you could for example have a lower pitched lower pitched and darker sounding filter alongside a brighter higher pitched sound which wasn't getting filtered so we've got like a dark sawtooth and an unfiltered triangle going on there that's an incredibly flexible way that you can start using your your filtering. I think one of the most interesting things that you can do once you have this ability to have multiple operators all operating as filters is to start thinking about having multiple parallel filters which is always a really really nice thing to have so if we choose an algorithm and there's some towards the end 20 something I think 22 here we go so in algorithm 22 you have we'll turn down operators one and two but you have operator six as a as this upper one here and it's feeding into operators three four and five all at the same time so we can do things like setting up parallel filter banks so if we come across to our mode here we'll ignore one and two we'll set operator three to be filter and maybe set it to be a band pass filter and then we'll do the same on the next ones as well band pass filter and band pass filters now we have three band pass filters which are all being fed by a single operator okay and we will turn down the mix level for each of these so it's just that one feeding in here and then maybe if we come back if we go up to operator six here we'll set it a sawtooth again and maybe tune it down a little bit like that and now if we come into each of our filter operators that are all been fed by this single operator here and maybe give it a little bit of resonance and let's in fact let's set the pitch to be fixed and we'll do that on all of them and pitch to be fixed pitch to be fixed and then give it a bit more resonance give it a bit more resonance and then if we change the cutoffs of each of them which we just do here we can have these this sort of parallel filter bank which gets you all these cool vocal sounds for example you know what FM synth allows you to do the duke formant synthesis for example this does send to work with it with a lower pitched sawtooth wave that tends to be a good place to start for this kind of sound and then we can start modulating these stuff these different filters so we could go into the v-patch and maybe set each of the different cutoff rather the pitches it should be so operator three pitch and we can go to the next one and give it LFO 2 to operator 4 pitch that's really cool sounds that you were certainly not expect to to get from a an FM synth if you can stop your mouth from making shapes while you listen to a patch like this you are a stronger world synthesis than i this is just a lot of fun and another thing if we wanted to make this a bit more vocal we could perhaps on a couple of these just mix a bit of noise just a taste what we've got here essentially is setting up a filter bank and through the user algorithms for example you can set up a five band filter bank and then feed noise into it or whatever you want to do to to create really nice ghostly sounds great stuff so one other cool thing with the filter modes i'd like to highlight i'm just going to initialize the patch and let's come across to algorithm 5 or d the filters on the op 6 whether we're talking on the operators or within the master filter quite character and they do resonate quite nicely so if i bring up operator one and we'll put it into put it into filter mode turn the oscillator mix down and turn up operator two okay so if we take operator two and set it to fixed mode and then drop our ratio right down sorry our frequency right down obviously we're not going to really hear anything now because we're at lfo speed if then if you were looking at this on a scope you probably see some dc get moved around or whatever but we're basically not hearing anything if we set the wave to something which has hard edges however we might just about hear some clicks so let's just try um let's try square yeah there we go we can hear some clicks probably too fast so let's just drop this down a bit more okay um so the interesting thing with these filters and let's go to um let's try one of the band pass filters again because these will work nicely is if we turn up the resonance now you can ping the filters and they will resonate quite nicely and different modes will do different kind of different sort of flavors of resonance so all we're hearing now is the filter with its resonance being um cranked being pinged by an elephant essentially like like someone like hindback would would do perhaps he would enjoy this particular way of working with the synth and of course because by default with the filter if they're not um unfixed everything is going to be tracking the keyboard so we get these lovely sort of faux arpeggios all been driven by these lfos and if we um set the um lfo like if you like shape to uh one of the random so uh do i mean something hold i mean uh actually yeah that'll work noise sample and hold if we have it on sample and hold because it's a random voltage each time we get dynamics worked in there as well which i think is rather cool one thing to note with the cutoff control on the filter mode is that uh it is an offset in terms of semitones so if we want it to go up an octave we can make it go up exactly an octave because it tracks properly and you could do things like um duplicate this uh same idea on the next one along uh we use a different filter mode turn that oscillator mix down send that one down for a second uh again so in operator four we would set it to sample and hold uh in its pitch we would go fixed and turn it very low and come with the other one was set to let's try that and we could set uh set it to a different pitch here i think we've set these at the same speed haven't i two and two yeah set this at like um three instead and we could get poly rhythms and stuff happening in here oh go on let's add some reverb quickly so we can create all these interesting rhythmical organic pingy we could even take our master filter crank its resonance put another resonance set above it lovely stuff um lots of creative ways to use um the filter mode beyond just shaping some some ways by cutting out some frequencies okay let's talk about the wave folder mode then uh so operator three here is in wave folder mode we're not hearing anything at the moment because it's oscillator mix is turned to minimum if we raise the level of operator four we will hear the wave being pushed through it i'm just going to change operator four's wave shape to a triangle because um that's probably the easiest waveform to uh look at and understand what the wave folder is actually doing so what is the wave folder doing well it's going to fold the wave and uh it is thankfully very easy to um show you what that looks like on the uh opposite because we have the analyzer so let's come back down to operator three here this knob here b is going to be the gain of the wave folder and as we push more gain into the wave four folder we're going to see more folding so here is our wave here let's turn on the analyzer so we can see it nice triangle wave there now as we turn up the gain control what you'll see happens quite soon we get this little divot happening inside our wave shape here so where we used to have the peak of our wave that peak has been bent down back on itself and that is generating more harmonic content we can see here that we've got to the point where it's basically doubled the wave because we've pushed it so far up that it's inverted but what we've got there it is a effective doubling in frequency and if we push it harder we get that same thing happening at the other bits and we can hear that as we crank that gain we get that that lovely wave folding sound that lovely doubling of frequency and all of those intermediate points as those things are happening so the other control that's going to affect the wave folder is the bias control this one here that is on e what the bias control is going to do is it's going to push the waveform up or down depending on which way you turn the knob so that the folding is happening more on one end of the wave than the other so again if we come back into the analyze here and just give a little bit of gain so we can see that a little bit of divot happening inside our wave shape if we turn up the bias what you'll notice is that it gets deeper here and shallower here right and by changing this bias control it's going to have a massive change on what it sounds like when we up our gain so for example let's set our bias to zero and we do a quick sweep this kind of sounds like harmonics being added in let's put a bias maybe to about 13 percent if we do the same thing there's a sort of harsh and more metallic sound to it a different edge to the sound and between those two controls we can get different flavors of wave folding it's also worth noting that our gain control is affected by the level of the input as well so if we set our gain control up a little bit but turn our level down we get less folding because we're essentially reducing the overall gain and turning up the level here is what's going to get our folding happening so if we think about that in terms of getting time will change over time if we want to get that sort of classic wave folder sound what we want to do is think about the level envelope of the operator operator four which is feeding into our wave folder here so let's lower that sustain by changing our changing our envelope here we're going to get different time will change over time a filter in reverse because as the level goes up what we're doing is introducing more harmonics so if we think about our oscillator mix here on our wave folder as we turn that up and we're mixing in the oscillator sound from operator three that it's going to push our wave folder harder as well because there's overall more signal when you mix those two things together so by balancing the two different oscillators involved here the bias the gain we can get a range of different sounds great for harsh weird tweaky sounds now it is worth noting that because of the nature of those waves being sort of combined together you will get very interesting results if you detune some of those waves much different than just that sort of chorusing that you would expect there's a frequency interaction that's happening here because of the phase of the two waves whether they're high or low at any particular point it's going to alter how they're being folded so it's not just a case of getting that sort of chorusing that you expect you get this kind of beating that's happening here but that beating isn't just a pitch beating it's affecting the harmonic content of the sound as well there's no lfo going on here but we're getting this real interaction between the tuning of the the two waves that be mixed together here like really interesting harsh sounds it sounds almost like you would expect stuff coming from fm but it's a different kind of flavour and of course the different wave shapes are going to have different phase interactions as well which will again give you different flavours really cool vocal sounds there with the triangles in terms of the wave shapes that you will choose to to make use of with the wave folder rule of thumb basically is you want to choose a wave shape which has a slanted edge um let me uh demonstrate that if we just turn the and let's just refer to this patch for a second so we can just get back to a baseline here okay so if we go to operator four here a sine wave has nice slanted waves so when you um fold it we get those nice divots and troughs being introduced there similarly as we saw a triangle wave works really well for this as well a sawtooth wave has a slanted edge so that works pretty well and can i get to here keep going into the wrong operator there let's try that again so that's a pretty gnarly sound there because it's got something to work with on that slanted edge almost sync like sounds in that situation cool stuff um um uh on the other hand something like a square wave doesn't give you such interesting results generally speaking um because there's less slanted edge to work with this square wave as it happens has a bit of a slant at the top so this should still give us something but it's mostly just repeating the same trick over and over again right so there's some sort of interference points there but it's not really anything dreadfully interesting there because it hasn't got a nice slanted edge to work with triangles um uh sine sawtooth has that one slanted edge to work with as well um any wave shape that has those slanted edges will give you good results square waves not so much so it's worth noting on the wave folder and on the filter um but we'll talk about the wave folder here is is that it is a um operator mode that works quite happily on its own it doesn't need anything to feed it really um so if we just turn up operator three and as long as we have our oscillator mix turned up we can wave fold it without having anything feeding into it um one thing that i've come back to again and again though is pointing out how interesting it can be to apply lfo rate um modulation if you like or the the operator sat above the the carrier here being lfo rate instead so what's really interesting uh in the wave fold mode uh so if we just set uh the pitch of this one again we'll go fixed and go down to like four hertz or something like that um as we um turn up operator four and therefore let's start mixing it into the wave folder or we can hear actually and if we turn up the gain slightly we can hear this movement happening um let's slow that down even more so we can hear it a bit easier so let's look at the analyzer to see what that's doing it's massaging our wave in a really interesting way and slow it down to some more analyzer again see if we can work out what's happening here well it's not just moving the gain around but you can see it's actually changing the shape as we go as well uh so what's interesting here is if we come back into the mode for operator three and we tweak the bias uh we will hear and see actually be in the right place there that's went up a very similar thing going on right so by feeding an lfo rate um operator into the wave folder what you're going to be doing is very slowly adding a bunch of stuff as the wave goes high and then subtracting a load of stuff as the wave goes low so what you're doing essentially is um applying a bias that's all the bias is doing it's pushing the wave up and it's pulling the wave down so by using an lfo rate um operator feeding into the wave folder what you are essentially doing is independently modulating the bias control uh of the operator you're feeling into and of course we can do all sorts of interesting things with um different um different shapes and get different sort of rhythms being pulled out within our sound pretty cool stuff so another thing i think is pretty cool when you are dealing with um pretend the oscillator mix back up here a wave folder operator that's basically doing its own thing providing its own fun if you like here is uh if we go to the operator that's feeding it and maybe use a fixed ratio instead because you don't so much hear the fact that there is a fixed um uh frequency in here instead what you get is all those interactions again and by changing the frequency here we get sort of almost like ring mod type stuff happening in with it but like sort of wave folding ring mod and much like with the ring mod and the filter mod and everything else you can kind of tune this effect so that it works in the key that we're playing in and kind of get these bell tones like i say another flavor of ring mod and changing that bias is going to give us different feels as well which is pretty cool so anyway um i hope that was interesting and useful if it was then as always it would be much appreciated if you could hit that thumbs up button make sure you subscribe to the channel uh because if you are here looking at op 6 stuff there is some more op 6 stuff to come let me tell you um so we've looked at all of the um operator modes here plan for the next video is to go in and talk about the user algorithms because i think this is a really really exciting aspect of the synth um especially as it allows you to think a little bit about creating entire synth architectures inside the op 6 which we'll get to um but i think it is a massively powerful element to this synth from a sound design perspective so i'm really really excited to start exploring that on the channel now that i've discussed all of the different operator modes uh on the op 6 i also feel a little bit more inclined to um do some more patch building videos because i didn't really want to skim over what the different operator modes were doing as i was building the patches i've got some ideas but if there are some particular types or flavors of patches that you'd like to see um featured on the channel then by all means please let me know down in the comments what you would like to see i am more than happy to take suggestions other than that thank you so much for joining me as always take care until next time bye bye