 Hello, Oscillator Sink here. One of the things I really appreciate about Electrum Boxes and I guess the Digitone in particular is that it provides you with a very strict, well-defined set of tools and concepts to work within and although you're kind of boxed in to these ideas, what you can do with them is only really limited by your imagination. It's kind of like having a children's play area, it's fenced in, you've got a set of play equipment to ensure you can slide down the slide and you could go on the seesaw and you could swing on the swings but there's nothing stopping you using those swings as a bridge or hiding under the slide as a dent. What you actually do is only really limited by your imagination and that's kind of how I feel about the Digitone. That being said, that level of freedom and control does allow you to do things which lead to undesirable results and one such undesirable result that I see people talk about is the fact that they are getting undesirable clicks in their sound while they are working with especially more complex arrangements on the Digitone. So I thought in this video it's a good opportunity to talk about the Venn diagram of sound design and voice management. There's quite a big crossover in the middle of that Venn diagram which is or could be responsible for causing those clicks and by understanding how these concepts within the box actually work and understanding what causes these unpleasant clicks we can learn how to mitigate against them as well. So I thought I'd begin with the simplest concept in terms of going hunting for clicks and it's also the concept which lives purely within the sound design aspects of the Digitone. We don't need to worry about voice management at all here and that is simply that on the amp envelope the amp envelope when you turn your attack or release or indeed decay down to zero it is incredibly incredibly fast so fast that it will shear off waveforms which will then cause a click. So if we have our attack and release down to zero which is a perfectly reasonable thing to do on a lot of synths to get an organ style attack sort of gated on and off. If you do that on Digitone you can hear that there's quite a harsh click especially at the end there and it gets worse on lower notes typically as well. So the easy fix for this is just to not have your attack and release set at zero unless you particularly want that instant onset with that click which can be useful for percussive sounds and actually on the Digitone anything up to about 10 on the attack and release will still sound pretty much instant but just dropping it down to say about four still a tiny bit of a click there but less of an offensive one more of an attack to it you'll get rid of that that nasty click there. So that's the straightforward one and if you're getting clicks in your sounds then definitely check that no part of your amp envelope is set to zero. So for all the other concepts we'll be discussing today we are going to be thinking a little bit about the voice management the voice allocation on the Digitone which is to say how the eight voices that are available are being allocated to the notes that are being played. So to that end we'll just be spending a little bit time in the voice menu here and we'll talk a bit about what all of these various parameters are doing but just to begin with I just want to draw your attention to the eight boxes up at the top there. The eight boxes at the top there represent the eight voices on the Digitone so as I play a note one of those boxes gets filled in and as I continue to hold down more notes and play more notes they're going to fill up to the point where we have eight notes playing and all of our voices are being allocated. Now if we play those eight notes and then play a ninth note just keep an eye on on those that row of boxes and as I play this extra note you'll notice that there is a there are a rectangle that got placed around let's try again playing another note around the voices there and what that tells you is that at that point a voice has been stolen and in the settings that we currently have here that means that a newer note has replaced an older note and you would hear that some of the original notes have dropped out. Now this is not always totally truthful in what you see here and I'll give you an example if I put on a very very long or infinite in fact envelope here so these notes will now sustain forever without me having to hold down. You'll notice that I'm playing in all these notes but the boxes aren't staying filled because those notes are not currently being held down. So this isn't a representation of the voices that are being played it's a representation of the voices that are currently being held down and if I play another note now a voice has definitely been stolen but we don't get that visual feedback on here and I think maybe it would be useful if you did but that is what it is in this case. As I say we'll come back to this a little bit and talk about what we're seeing here as we explore some of the other concepts. So I'd like to move on and talk about probably one of the most jarring times where you get a nasty click which is on nice lovely luxurious pad sounds. So I'll give you an example here if I play down this note here fades in and it's got a very long release on it. Lovely. Now if I go to play that note again you might have heard that there was a click there. That is a bad click on a lovely pad sound especially as that click also gets echoed through your reverb and delay meaning that your error is held out even longer than it would have been otherwise. So the reason that this click is happening on this initialised patch is actually down to two different settings. So if we go first over to the voice management here and I play in this C note here. Now when I play it again you'll notice that it's the same square that's getting lit up which means it's the same voice which is playing this note over and over again. The reason that's important if we go over to our amp envelope that's where our amp page two is this setting here which is the amp envelope restart. A reset rather. While this is on whenever this voice which as we know is the same voice over and over again gets re-triggered it's going to hard reset this amp envelope which means that we could be in the middle of this sustain here and it will immediately drop to zero which is going to cause a click because again you have that hard cut off of your sound. So there are two ways we can look at to reduce this click. The first lives purely within the voice management here. So the reason that the same voice is being used over and over again for the same note is because this parameter here this re-use parameter is turned on and actually if we turn it off play that note in play it again we're not getting a click because actually that note is now being played three times but on different voices. Now that's not to say that we can't get a click this way and actually if we play in eight of these notes in quick succession or stuck in clicks afterwards they're not quite as obvious because you've got all the other voices going on at the same time. The downside of turning off re-use is that it's kind of what you're seeing right here is that when you have the same note being played multiple times it's going to move to another voice which actually means you're going to be stealing voices more quickly. With it turned on if I play that C chord there and then play another chord and then another chord we're not getting so much voice stealing happening whereas here if I play it we'll be hitting that hard cut-off a lot sooner but for some arrangements that's going to be a perfectly fine way of dealing with this voice stealing clicking. The other way of dealing with it lives more within the sound design side of things so as I noted the fact that this reset is turned on. So the fact that this reset is back on is what's causing our envelope to jump back to the start so you might well think well if I turn that off all of my problems will go away however if anything they've got worse which is surprising because what's happening now is that our amp envelope is starting it's playing and if we hit it again sort of somewhere in sustain it's just going to start from that sustain level attack a little bit and then carry on along its merry way but for some reason our click is now much much worse which is the opposite of what we wanted. Now the reason that is happening is actually over here in page two of synth two and it's this parameter here which is our phase reset. Now at the moment and on the default initialised patch it's going to be set to all. What this means is that every single operator that we have in our algorithm whenever a new note is played it will hard reset the phase so it will start back at the the center of the graph of your sine wave if you like. This is even worse than our envelope resetting quickly because this is almost always going to create a very very hard pop as the operator jumps from wherever it is in its cycle back to the zero point so it it's as bad if not worse as what we already had with our amp envelope. So to fix this problem we have to turn off the phase reset and you have different types of phase reset on here and depending on how your sound is working anything other than all or C is probably fine A plus B will be a problem if you have got your mix turned up in this algorithm because you've got B1 coming through here. A plus B2 will usually be safe again depending on the algorithm. Basically you don't want to be phase resetting any of the operators that you're hearing directly. The easiest way to do that is to go to off. So now if we play those notes multiple times we're not getting a click because our amp is not resetting and neither is our operator. So we can happily play chords which involve the same notes and we're not going to get that click and we're also not going to be using up our voices so quickly because we're still going to be using the same voices for the same notes. So that's my usual chosen way of getting rid of clicks on pad sounds. Okay so let's dive back into the voice allocation and talk about some other settings in here that if you're not careful can lead to some undesirable results. So this set up here is what you will have on an initialised patch. So the voice steam will be set to cycle, the reuse will be turned on for all of the different parts by default and the locked voices will be set to dynamic for every track as well which means that currently as set up each of the four different tracks are all sharing the common pool of eight voices that are available. So I'm going to set up something that's slightly contrived to prove a point but hopefully I'll be able to sort of abstract this contrived idea and see how it applies to a more realistic arrangement. So on track one here I've got this bass sound, it's got a big long decay at the moment that's not going to matter because what we're going to do is on step one we're going to stick a nice long sort of full bar trick there. So we've basically just got a bass note there that's pulsing away. Okay cool. So over on sound four I've kind of got this reedy paddy sound. So again I'm going to be slightly contrived here for the sake of proving the point. So I'll set all of the step tricks to be fairly long, 12 steps or something like that will be fine and I'll just on each of these steps just put a long note and we'll just build up a big chord, something like that will be fine. So if we just meet track one some of some to the cacophony we've created here. What that actually is doesn't really matter but what you will notice is that we have eight steps here and by the time we get to step nine and because of the length of each of these being 12 all eight of these steps are playing. So without track four in there we've got our bass note here which is what's grounding our arrangement and on track four we've got that sort of paddy sound up at the top. So if we bring track four in do you hear what happened on step eight? So the reason that's happening is that by the time we get to step eight we have all of our steps playing and because we're using the dynamic allocation our bass note is being stolen which is not what we want from an arrangement point of view. Obviously you probably wouldn't have an arrangement that sounds like that but you can probably see how across the four tracks and a more sort of realistic arrangement it's quite likely that you would get to the point where you would hit that eighth note. Now the reason that our bass note is being killed off here is because of our voice stealing mode here and by default it's set to cycle and what cycle means is that the oldest note that's currently playing is the one that will be stolen when another note is required. Because our bass note is on step one it's that note which is being stolen. So let's see what happens when we use some of the other modes here. So if we move over to track our bass note is no longer being stolen. So the reason that our bass note is no longer being stolen when we have this voice stealing set to track is because in track mode and this is a global setting this isn't something that's different per track it's a global setting within the voice allocation here. When voice stealing is set to track then track one always has preference over track two and track three. Track two has preference over track three and track three has preference over track four. So track four is the lowest priority for voice stealing so if any of the lower tracks require a voice or let's put it another way if track four needs another voice it can only steal from itself. Track three can steal from itself or track four. Track two can steal from itself. Track two or track four and track one can steal from any of them. So from an arrangement perspective if you've got an element that needs to always be playing and never be stolen by any of the other parts then having track voice stealing turned on and having your most important elements on track one and your least important elements on track four you can be assured that you're not going to lose the important elements to voice stealing when you're using dynamic voice stealing uh dynamic voice allocation. As it happens if we set our voice stealing to low we should also be safe apparently not sorry i've gotten the wrong way around um yeah wrong way around i always get this wrong way around on low mode then low notes will always be stolen first which is why our bass note which was lower than any of our pad notes got stolen um and on high mode the higher notes will be stolen first which will always leave your bass intact so if you're working with a complex arrangement across multiple tracks where that low end is really really important to you for example you probably want to have your voice stealing set to high to make sure that your low notes um don't get eaten up i think what will be happening here in our chord it's not actually that first C that's getting stolen i think it's the note that played just before but yeah we're using the correct voice stealing mode um and thinking about what elements you put on which tracks um can save you from some clicks and worse still some embarrassing gaps in your arrangement okay let's try something subtly different that allows me to demonstrate a slightly different concept so i've set the voice allocation back to the default and um my bass sound actually has a very long decay so i don't really need to hold it out for that entire time i can just play it at the start of the the bar there and let it decay naturally which is a nice sound i always think that the natural decay on a nice low sign on the digitized kind of sounds like a low bass scale anyway i don't digress so again we've got this nice pulse it's a little gentler now because we're not holding out that entire time because we don't need to because of the the sound design that we've done here so i'll come over to our pad sound on track form we'll do something slightly different and that is i'll put a couple of chords down instead so um let's put a c mage seven there and a f mage seven there and maybe a d mark on a seven or something there i'm not trying to create revolutionary music here just uh just prove a point a little bit um these will still be really really long i don't need to be as long now it's got a long tail on it anyway so just it's a three-ish that'll be fine okay so without traffic again we've got a nice pulsing bass here it's gentle decay very nice so let's bring this in you can hear again that our bass note is being killed off in terms of the way that it's being dynamically assigned so you may be thinking well we've discussed this already um we're not set our voice stealing to track or high to solve this problem so let's give that a go sadly that doesn't work and the reason that doesn't work is that these voice stealing modes only apply to notes that are being held down and played so because our bass note here um is being played on step one but then is actually not being held down anymore uh it's just decaying naturally just because of its amp envelope it's no longer given been given preferential treatment depending on how we set up our voice it doesn't matter how we set it up that note is always going to be killed off because there are so many notes in the chords that have been played on track four so what can we do in this case to make sure that our bass note doesn't get stolen well that's where the locked voices come in so um as i said before by default everything is set to dynamic which means that everything is sharing that common pool of voices but you can say on a per track basis and again so it's a unlike the um the other stuff on here which is kind of global with the voice stealing with a lot voices it's a per um per track thing so on track one which the bass note now says one which means i have said that there is one voice within this pool of um of voices that is reserved exclusively for this track so that means two things one this track can never steal from any of the other tracks which is good and two and none of the other tracks can steal from this one so now if we hit play you can hear that our bass notes has been sustained or rather has continued to decay naturally despite the busyness on our chords here and i think for me usually using locked voices is the more um natural way of working um and you can think about what you're trying to achieve on a sort of per track basis to make sure that um you lock things in a sensible way so we might say that okay well this we're going to treat as a monophonic bass part so we can lock it to just one um this one we happen to know is playing um four note chords now if we set this one to four they're going to cut off every single time because they reach four note chords but you can do stuff with the rest of your synthesis to make that smoother situation perhaps depending what you're trying to achieve of course um and of course uh this sort of setup and locking voices in appropriate ways across your tracks um and working with those constraints in a more sort of tightly focused way is a really good way of um uh are you getting the sort of sonic result you're looking for but i think also it does focus the mind a little bit um and you think a little bit more about um your arrangement in terms of the technical constraints of the digitone as well which i think is a good thing often you can also use these locked voices um as a as a sound design tool as well so for example um if i wanted to create like a glitchy drum track and i had lots of different drum sounds uh for sure i would lock that drum track to being just one voice so that each new drum hit completely cut off that last one giving you that sort of glitchy break um sound um without having to do any additional work uh because by default if you had that on dynamic and you wanted to pitch the different drums different ways they would get assigned different voices which means that one no one drum hit was sustained across the other whereas locking it exclusively is going to get you into a much more glitchy um situation if that's what you're looking for of course so the last little area i want to explore um when it comes to the voice allocation side of things is is kind of a side note because it's not going to necessarily help with clicks and the like but it is worth um exploring especially for certain types of patches so um i'm back on uh my bass sound here um and i'll just unlock it quickly uh so it's back to dynamic voice allocation so this is a bass sound and it's kind of a classic sort of mono kind of sound so you would expect to be able to play it like a mono synth obviously if we don't um constrain the number of voices it's going to use then it's um gonna play polyphonically so if we want to make this a bit more like a mono synth obviously the the easy thing to do would be to lock it to one voice so and we kind of get that kind of mono vibe from it now but it doesn't really play like a mono synth because um it doesn't exhibit any note priority which is to say if i play a note and then play another note my expectation generally speaking on a mono synth depends on what type of synth it is my expectation would be that i'd be able to release this high note and my low note would then continue playing but it doesn't um because what we really have here is a poly synth that only has one voice and that's how it's acting so um one i think maybe overlooked aspect of um the setup menu so shift and trick um is down here on the play mode so by default this will be set to poly which gives us the behavior we were seeing there uh we have poly with mono lfo which um is really useful for um perhaps i'll show you in a second actually um for for cheesy organ patches that's where i would use it um but um importantly we have mono and mono legato and we have then access to different note priorities so now if i i get that mono synth behavior that i would expect to get um at the moment you're here as i play each note it's kind of starting again from the start of the envelope we're getting that attack if we lower that bit more you'll hear a bit more too much i'm gonna click there we go you can hear that we're getting that um definite attack at the start of each note there um we also have mono legato which um doesn't re-trigger the envelope the amp or the filter envelope on each hit so get our attack on the first note but the sustain notes are not um giving us any click only when we release are we going to get a click and we can set the um note priority two different things so we can have it to low note priority that means that um the lowest note we're playing is always going to be the one that we're hearing and i'd have to play a lower note to hear something else uh high means the high one is always going to be the priority they also have uh last that middle note there because it's the one i most recently played is the one that has priority and then that one and then that one back down at the bottom last is usually why i have it set to this is especially cool um when we are using portamento as well sounds a lot more natural uh yeah i was just saying i quickly show the uh the difference with the lfo here so if i just put on some pitch just when past it didn't i pitch all there we go a little pitch modulation you can hear there maybe that the um pitch wall there is kind of playing off against itself and it's creating this nice chorus anything which may be exactly what you're looking for in a lot of cases if we set the play mode to poly with mono lfo it basically means that there's one lfo shared across this entire track rather than one per voice and that should mean that we always get a very well defined vibrato across these notes rather than mess them up by doing this it's subtle but for certain patches it's definitely going to be useful i think so anyway i hope you enjoyed the video and that you found it useful maybe it introduced some some concepts that were new to you that will help you finesse some of the arrangements on your digitone this sort of voice management stuff it really is kind of the the fine tune that certainly more involved arrangements often need just to make them work in exactly the way that you expect them to work so certainly learning about the voice allocation has been really useful to me in sort of more densely packed arrangements if you enjoyed the video it would be truly wonderful if you could leave it a like and also if you're not already make sure you subscribe to the channel for more synthesis stuff and obviously more digitone and digitap because i can't quit them because they are wonderful wonderful instruments but there'll also be some videos around the modular coming up probably an apz video as well and i'm hoping to get my hands on at least one new synth in the next few weeks that i'm very excited to start digging into on the channel as well so keep your eye out for that as always thank you so much for joining me until next time take care bye