 Hello, Oscillator Sync here and welcome to another video where we take a look at some of the tricks that you might want to try when programming sounds for the wonderful Korg monologue. So this video is concerned with the envelope generator and the LFO sections and what's slightly weird about the trick that I'm going to be showing you is that it's actually documented in the manual, but because of the ergonomics of it and also the slight change in maybe thought process it might be that you've never even tried this So let's take a look at it So let's start by talking about the envelope generator section So the envelope section can be sent to one of three places the overall pitch, the pitch of Oscillator 2 or the cutoff frequency. We'll just go to the overall pitch because it's the easiest to hear So what the envelope generator does by default is it's going to add to whatever the current value is So to put it another way it's going to raise the pitch by whatever we set the int intensity knob to It's going to take attack amount of time to get up to this new value And then it's going to use decay amount of time to fall back down to the original value So if we set intensity to zero then we don't hear any movement in the pitch But if we turn it up We're going to go up to a new pitch and then fall back down to our original pitch So perhaps we want to get there sooner We can turn our attack time down and that means we're going to reach this new pitch quicker Yeah, we jumped up there very very quickly or if we wanted to fall back down To our original pitch faster. We can turn our decay knob down for example Like so but the key thing to notice here is that this is always an additive Function we're always adding to whatever the current value is and falling back down and that goes for pitch to and cut off as well however, if you hold down shift while you move the intensity knob This function becomes a subtractive one instead. So rather than going up to a new pitch and falling back down We fall down to a new pitch and then spring back up to our original pitch instead. So let's have a listen to that I'll do now shift while I change the intensity knob It's sometimes what's referred to as an inverted envelope and It's quite a useful little feature And allows you to do certain sound design tricks that you might not be able to achieve in other ways So let's move over to sending our envelope generator to the cut-off Frequency instead and let's think about a common thing that we find ourselves doing when we're building patches. So one of the things that You almost inevitably do when you're sending the envelope generator to the cut-off is to try and achieve this sort of sound So what we're doing here is we're starting with a very low cut-off. So we're shutting our filter down quite a lot We are jumping up To a much higher point. So opening our filter up very quickly And then we're falling down. However, we really found so we can do it faster if you like And you might not want to jump up quite as quickly if you want a more brassy sound you might open up that attack a little bit And why do we do this? Well, it's because we're approximating what an acoustic instrument would do in many cases If you think about plucking a guitar string that first initial pluck Full of harmonics very very bright sounding But then as the guitar string decays or that top end starts to fall away and you end up moving towards just really having the fundamental frequency ringing out So we do this because of that reason it approximates the behavior of an acoustic instrument But why should we? Why should we be concerned with what an acoustic instrument does? We're using a synthesizer. We can do whatever we want But let's start by thinking how we might approximate that same idea But by using an inverted envelope So we're going to want to start high Because when we set our intensity here, that's going to subtract from our currently high open filter We're going to want to set our attack a little bit longer because this essentially is the amount of time It's going to take to decay To decay down It's kind of analogous to our decay knob before because this is the amount of time It's going to take to get to this a low value. So let's have a listen. Okay, so that sounds Kind of like what we had before but what happens if I hold down the note for a little bit longer? We rub a band back to that more bright and open sound Now acoustic instruments don't do that. I don't care. I think that's a really cool sound especially when you start to introduce a more rich Source so if I bring in second VCO It almost has the effect of guitar feedback the fact that something swells back up after that initial Decay has happened. It's a really great sound And you do similar things with the pitch to if you want to set your second oscillator on to sync That kind of rubber banding that happens It is really really great really really interesting. You're using lots of different ways Now it won't have escaped your notice that the LFO also has an intensity knob as well So the question is can we do something similar there and the answer you'll be happy to hear is yes Just get back to a Just initialize that patch Okay, so We'll do a pitch to begin with as well because that's the easiest one to hear So if we set our intensity a little bit And we'll go with the triangle wave Okay, that's that's great so let's Invert that by holding down shift while we move intensity It sounds pretty much the same and actually we'll find exactly the same thing happens on the square wave as well so this is not inverted and And this is holding down shift and inverting it Solently that's basically the same And the reason for that is that all of the LFO Shapes here are bipolar, which is to say they both go up and Down by the same amount So if we hear The extremes of the square wave are both higher and lower than our original pitch and the same goes for the triangle wave So for intents and purposes Because they are bipolar and symmetrical There's no real point using the inverted Intensity on those two waveforms now that just leaves us with our final LFO waveform the sawtooth wave Now the sawtooth wave When it's running forwards jumps up Very quickly to its highest point and then decays quite slowly Towards its lowest point and jumps up very quickly and so on Which gives us our laser gun sound however This one is not symmetrical So if we invert it We get a UFO sound instead So the inverted LFO is actually really really interesting on the sawtooth wave Now I really like this when it's sent to the cutoff, so I'll just run my cutoff down a bit So if we run it forwards Get our sort of bouncing ball sound Okay, now if we run that backwards by holding down the shift while we change the intensity A very different sound So on your LFOs You can pretty much ignore the inversion on the square wave and the triangle wave But when it gets the sawtooth wave you can completely change the character of a sound Whether the sawtooth wave is going forwards Or backwards And I highly recommend the other play with it Because it can lead some really really cool sounds So I hope that was helpful. Hope you learned something. I hope that spurred you on to try Holding down the shift knob while you move those intensity knobs can lead to some great sounds Please if you enjoy the video hit that like button and also click on that subscribe button So you don't miss out on any upcoming videos on the monologue and various other synthesis stuff that we've been looking at on the channel Thank you so much for watching everyone and I'll see you again real soon