 Hello, Oscillator Sync here. We are back with my old friend the Ops 6 and today what I want to talk about is a particular feature of the Ops 6 that I think is maybe sometimes overlooked a little bit even though it's an incredibly powerful sound design tool and that is the operator level key track. So the operator level key track is a per operator feature and we can get to it by coming over to our level screen here. First click we get the the general level and the envelope generator and if we hit it a second time we get to this operator level key track page here. This is a feature which is lifted directly from the DX7 so like a lot of things on the DX7 can come across as a little bit esoteric and arcane but it's really not too complicated. All this is is a way for us to modulate the level of our operators whether they are working as modulators or carriers based upon what key we're pressing at any particular time. There are three controls across the top that are the ones we really kind of need to be most concerned with and the first one we'll talk about is center. So center allows us to put the center point for our modulation. Basically what that means is whatever note we set this to so I'll set it to maybe C5 here. C5 will be the level that we have our slider set to basically for that operator. Anything below C5 is going to be modulated either positively or negatively as we move further away from C5. So if we set this to maybe like minus 20% here I'll just show you here so this is doing it on the carrier here so it'll be affecting the level of our sound. So C5 here and as I move my way down you can hear that it's literally getting quieter. If I make this percentage higher maybe go to 50% you can hear that it gets quieter much quicker and it's basically silent by the time we get to the bottom there and similarly with high if we turn this up maybe turn this down and see here C5 it is as it is and as we go further away from C5 it's going to get quieter and of course if we do that with our modulators that's going to be affecting the timbre as we move across the keyboard as well. Just quickly the final two controls here allow us to change the curve from being a linear curve which means that it's going to be reducing linearly as we go down the keyboard to an exponential curve which means it's going to drop off very quickly and then once it's got to a particular point it's going to not really drop off much much more after that. So we can play with those a little bit to find exactly the right response that we want but that's all very well and good but what can we use this for what creative purpose does it have? Well there are kind of two main ways that I tend to use it. The first is to do with finessing the response of a patch to make sure that it works well across the whole of the keyboard so it sounds good no matter where you play it. The second one which is maybe a little more exciting is that it is a way to essentially create multi timbre patches on the up six and we're going to take a brief look at how we can do both of those things now. So let's start with this little patch here it's a really really simple two operator straight one-to-one FM sound pretty much just the initialized patch actually. If we go down to the bottom of the keyboard we've got that cool classic FM bass sound. Sounds like a mega drive perfect. As we go further up the keyboard this octave it's kind of working okay maybe sounds a little bit cheesy or more cheesy as we go further up and as we hit towards especially up here with the very top octave we're kind of getting to that place where people would complain about FM synths sounding glassy harsh artificial cold all of those kind of bad adjectives that FM gets lumbered with unfairly. So what can we do to make sure this patch actually works across the keyboard well I guess we could just say just play it in the lower octaves that's cheating. So this is where we can use our operator level key tracking to bring down the amount of FM being imparted on the sound by our modulator as we go higher up. So we're going to want to come across to our modulator in this patch which is operator 2 and we're here in the level eg page already. And really what we want to decide is at what point does this patch become less than great basically. I think it's probably as we sort of hit along C4 here which is the default luckily for us. So to make this patch work a little bit more sensibly in the upper octaves it really is as simple as finding that break point here and just lowering the high amount here so that as we go further up the amount of modulation is going to lessen. We probably want to come all the way up to the top here and we can literally just drop this down until we get to a sound that's more partable. Much nicer. And as we come down we find our FM bass still waiting for us down here. You can actually use your level tracking here to push the operator level beyond 100% as well. So we might decide that we want more of that FM funk happening here in the lower registers. Back to normal up here and then up here we have much less modulation and now we have a patch which does what we want across the whole range of the keyboard. Right so I have a patch set up here with a user algorithm but it's a really really basic one. Operator 1 is a sawtooth wave it's just a carrier it doesn't have a modulator it's just essentially acting like a sawtooth oscillator. Operator 2 similarly is a carrier with no modulator and it's a triangle wave so it's just basically again acting like a triangle oscillator. Operators 3 and 4 I will come back around to in due course to explain how they're set up and why it's important to have them set up that particular way and my goal here is to create two different multi-tambour patches. The first one will be a bi-tambour patch using splits with maybe a little fade between the two layers so we have different sounds on different parts of the keyboard and then we'll also make a tri-tambour patch where we have three different sounds spread across the keyboard. Now these are obviously very basic examples but hopefully you'll see how these concepts can be applied more or widely and more powerfully in other patches as well. I should also say that I am showing you this to kind of set some groundwork for another video I want to do soon which is finally getting around to talking about turning the Opsix into a drum machine and for a drum machine we're going to need different sounds across the keyboard. We'll be making use of some of these techniques. So to start with let's set up the patch so that the sawtooth wave is on the low notes and the triangle wave is on the high notes and obviously if I turn both of these up at the moment we're just going to get them blended together across the keyboard. So what we can do and this is a really simple idea is if we come over to operator one which is the one we want to have just on the low part of the keyboard and we come into the operator key trap here. I'll leave the center set to C4 at the moment and we'll turn our sawtooth up and what I want to do first of all is just create an absolute keyboard split so that everything this point down is going to be a sawtooth wave and everything this point up is going to be our triangle wave and it's a really really simple thing to do. All you need to do is choose your split point as your center and turn the high slope to 100 negative. Now when I go above that point nothing plays anymore but below here we get our sawtooth wave. Now if I turn my triangle wave up here across we're going to hear it in this higher area of the keyboard but it's also going to be playing down in the low bit as well. We want to stop that from happening. Basically play exactly the same idea we'll come on to operator two. We're going to want to set our center as being one note higher than our low note split and then just set the low to minus 100% and now triangle stops here and the sawtooth takes over. Now obviously this is a really really basic patch but you could certainly set this up with three operators on each side of the split and because of course the opposite is not just an FM synth the amount of work that you can get done with three operators is pretty immense so that's really not a restriction. You can create very very interesting bi-tambour patches that are very very powerful. Now in this case I've made it an absolute keyboard split where the sound's cut off either side but we don't have to do that. If we reduce the or rather increase the low slope on operator two to maybe like 80% and the high slope operator one similarly we get kind of a fading crossover. So we've still got a bit of sawtooth perhaps 8% that's a bit extreme that's what we'll try 70 on both like that. So we have a point here where the two are kind of fading into each other still some nice hollow triangle there and by there it's basically gone. So we can create those sort of crossovers in our keyboard split so we can have them set absolute as well. I'll leave it that way just for a moment. So bi-tambour that's really easy it gets a little bit more complicated if we want to try try a tambour but we can do it. Right so it's time to talk about these last two operators here. So operator three is a modulator and operator four is the carrier the thing that we hear but the way they are set up is that operator three is just a noise generator and operator four here is just a peaking EQ so I've just got the effect mode here I've turned this oscillator mix down so we're not hearing any of operator four's oscillator itself we're just using it as an EQ and something else which we'll get to in a moment. You can do this with the number of the effects here so the PQQ the shell VQ work fine the wave shape with stuff turned down sometimes works okay the only the other thing you can use is if you come into the filter and use a high-pass filter and set its pitch to be fixed and turned all the way down that works as well that's the way you had to do it before version two of the firmware but it's probably easier honestly if we just use a peaking EQ these days. So my goal here and it's practically a silly goal but it's an easy one to hear and it is just an example is to um sorry come back to our original patch here have our saw tooth in the bottom octave have our triangle up at the top here but for an octave in the middle around here I want to just have noise so saw at the bottom triangle at the top and then an octave in the middle with noise so the first thing we're going to do and I'll leave the noise turned down is make space for that octave in the middle so all we need to do here is come into our upper operator which is operator two and just move our center up by an octave so I'll move up to C sharp five so now we should have saw tooth silence which is where our noise is going to go and the triangle comes back in here so we're going to slip the noise in this gap here right so I'll turn up my two operators dealing in noise and indeed now we have noise in the gap here but of course we also have it everywhere else so we want to try and fix that now one way you can kind of do this if we come down to operator four which is the carrier the thing that we are hearing if we set our centre point I guess f sharp is probably where we want to set it maybe G or try G set it here and then come down to where we want the split to happen and just lower this to where we kind of can't hear it and similarly if we come up to the top here just lower it until we can't quite hear it then we have kind of created a split where we have our noise in the middle here but fortunately it drops off pretty rapidly from that centre point so it isn't really a split it's more sort of it's one note that works really and the rest of them are almost unusually quiet changing the curve could help us so the curve is a little bit more useful there but it's not perfect so obviously this is not going to create a proper split if you like where the levels of things are consistent within the area of the keyboard so let's set these back up to zero we'll just set that back to C4 now obviously it's easy enough for us to take it out of one of the sounds so if I set that to C sharp 4 as the triangle used to be and set that to 100 we've taken the noise out of the saw noise kicks in here but it's going to interrupt the triangle wave as well so this is why you have to kind of use two operators to do this so because we are essentially using operator 4 as a transparent VCA it's not affecting the sound of the incoming operator at all what that means is that we can use the modulators level scaling to deal with one half of the split and operator 4 is level scaling to deal with the other half of the split so you kind of have to waste in inverted commas an operator in order to get this three-way split but again the opposite is incredibly powerful in terms of what you can do with each operator so actually to be honest in a lot of patches you might just have an operator left over anyway that you can just use as one of these transparent VCA's so operator 4 we've set up the level scaling to deal with the top part of the split if we come to operator 3 we can now use it to deal with the top end of the split so we need to set the center to be the end of our split here so back up at C5 we leave the low set as it is but we set the high to minus 100 and now we should have sawtooth into noise into triangle a three-way multi-term brawl patch with splits obviously a pretty dumb example of one but hopefully you can see how this can be applied to your patches to get that multi-term brawlity that the Opsix apparently doesn't have anyway I hope that was useful and interesting and you can see how you might be able to apply it in your own patches if you did enjoy the video then a thumbs up like is always massively appreciated and as I mentioned I am going to take this concept and use it to turn the Opsix into a drum machine in a future video hopefully not too long from now so if that's interesting to you make sure you're subscribed to the channel as well so that you don't miss that and you know if you're feeling particularly Opsixy then maybe even click the bell so that you get the notification so you don't miss it other than that I hope you are enjoying your Opsix especially if you managed to snag one recently in the great reverb fire sale of 2022 and until next time take care bye