 Hello Oscillates Synch here and welcome back to another video in the series where we're building patches from scratch on the Arturia Microfreak. So far in the series we've made a pad and we've made a lead sound which means that I am now compelled to make a bass sound so that the synth police don't come and arrest me. So the question is what kind of bass sound shall we make? Now I've covered sort of the basic subtractive kind of classic analog bass sounds on the channel before on the monologue and on the deep mind and a lot of the techniques there will translate just as well to the Microfreak so rather than doing that I thought we would dive into one of the other less classic sounding digital oscillators and work with that and also we'll look at a different configuration for the way the keyboard responds than some of the previous patches we've looked at as well. So with that in mind let's build an FM bass. So we're on a initialised patch and the first thing to do if we're going to make an FM sound of course is to change our digital oscillator over to the, there we go, 2 op FM. So 2 op FM, this is a very simple FM setup. If you're interested in learning a bit more about FM synthesis in general the video series I did on the Volcker FM kind of I think acts as quite a good overview of FM synthesis in general but basically a 2 op FM synthesis is basically the simplest FM setup you can have. You have a carrier which is the thing you hear which you can think of like the oscillator that you're hearing. You've got the single operator which is acting as the modulator and that modulator is what affects the timbre based on its relationship to the carrier and then we also have feedback on the modulator which can again change the timbre of the sound again based on the relationships between the two operators. Let's tune down a little bit, go down to octaves, I mean you know even with the initialised patch there's quite a fun sound I think anyway let's make it more fun. So in terms of the controls that we have on our digital oscillator for the 2 op FM we're going to ignore wave and actually just go on to timbre first. So timbre is the modulation amount, basically turn up to make it more harmonically rich complex sound. The shape affects the feedback of the modulating operator which again is going to have an effect on the timbre and generally as you turn it up you're going to get more complex. Also it affects the tuning a little bit. As you turn it up you'll get more complex raspy sounds, harsher and that will also be the character will be affected by the amount here as well. Cool. The final control here is the ratio between the two operators. Generally speaking, generally speaking it's not hard and fast rule depends on the other settings but you'll get sort of more fundamental, more I guess bottom end would be one way of putting it. As you turn it down there will be lots of places where it doesn't work and it feels out of tune. They'll lock in so cool growly sound and although it will be tempting to maybe have the ratio sets low. Your bass sounds weirdly quite a lot of the time especially if I want to be obviously FME I kind of favor a higher ratio so there's more kind of twang and pluck almost like a stringy kind of feel to the sound so let's try tuning it up instead. Now obviously that sounds like this lost quite a lot of the bottom end which it has done to a degree. We can get the bottom end back by bringing down the amount and some really cool bell like bits along there and then when the amount is low we've kind of got back to that sort of fundamental coming through quite strongly but with that kind of upper almost organ tone over the top. So if we're going to want to have both the twang but then we want the fundamental coming back round we want this timbre knob to be moving for us don't we? So let's head into our mod matrix and let's have it affected by our envelope. So on the envelope row let's go to timbre, click it and let's have it affect that amount. It's affect our sorry to make sure our envelope is actually going to be doing something so we'll have a low sustain in fact let's put sustain pretty much down to bottom at the moment. We'll have a shortish decay. Turns out how zappy we want to be. That's very zappy perhaps if we ever. It's probably a sweet spot where we're not just on an edge of that zap. The edge of the zap. Okay, we'll be refining these as time goes on but that's feeling okay to begin with. So let's talk about the standard set of our envelope by default on the initialised patch the amp mod. Light is lit up and what that means is that the envelope is also being sent to the amplifier envelope. Sorry the envelope is also being sent to the amplifier which means if we have an envelope set like this where our sustain is low by the time our timbre is also set low the volume of the synth is also going to be low. Which might not be what we want for a bass sound given that that's when our fundamental comes back in and where we get a bit more of our bottom end. So what we can do is we can turn off the amp mod and what this does is it means that when you press a key the amp opens fully and when you release a key it shuts instantly. So you lose the ability to have like a release to the amp. You can hear there. We compare it. And we have our fundamental. It's really there and it means that actually we can drop our sustain right away to the bottom so we can use our timbre knob to set our sort of bass line, the bottom end of our sound. But now we've got the fundamental coming out there as well. So let's just have a look at the feedback to see what other timbres we can coax out. So we get a bit more raspiness or crunch. Just want that long. Okay we'll refine this as we go along. But that's kind of our sort of starting point. So let's have a think about what we can do in order to make this sound a little bit more performable if you like. So in the previous patches in this series we've made quite a lot of the keyboard's ability on the Microfreak to provide us with this idea of pressure. So in the previous patches we had lots of things where as you put more of your finger down on the key it would affect the pressure which is here in the Mod Matrix and we could root that to various places. So we were having it open up our filter cutoff or we're having it affect the LFO and so on over time. Essentially that mode of pressure approximates the idea of after touch but there is a second mode that you can set the keyboard on a per patch basis to work with where the amount of your finger that strikes the key when you first strike the key is kind of set as the pressure and then it doesn't change over time. So rather than giving you this approximation of after touch you instead get this approximation of velocity. That makes for some interesting playing stuff. So let's make use of that as we haven't done that in any of the previous patches. So we're going to go into the Utility menu here and into Preset. And then from Preset we are going to scroll down to Pressure mode here and at the moment it's set to After Touch we're going to switch that over to Velocity like so. Okay so let's start thinking about how we can apply the velocity to the patch. So the most obvious place to apply it is to the amount or the timbre, so the amount of modulation on this sound. So when I press hard you get a lot of twang when I press lightly you get less twang. So let's think about how we can achieve that. So one way that we can do that is literally by sending the pressure, the velocity as it is now to the timbre knob. So let's give that a go in the Mod Matrix. So if we go down to the pressure row timbre and we'll just turn that up so I'm just making it obvious what's happening. Now if I press lightly as it were, you get the sound we had before, if I press harder more of my finger, we get lots of metallic attack. Now obviously we'll want to fine tune the amount of metallic attack but you can hear the difference there. Now there is however an issue with approaching this this way. So have a listen to the sustain of the note. So bear in mind this is an attempt at a bass sound. When I do it lightly, once that envelope is finished we've got lots of fundamental. We've got that low end. Lovely. Now if I play hard, because we've increased the amount overall, we're not coming back down to that point where the amount is very low and therefore we're getting lots of fundamental. Like we're losing bottom end when we play harder, which is not what we want. So I'm going to turn that down and we're going to try a different approach that hopefully be a little bit more successful. So what we really want in this case is not to change the amount of the timbre based on the velocity. Instead we want to do is change the amount that the envelope is affecting the timbre based on the velocity. Now in the last two videos I did in this series I didn't actually know you could do this because I hadn't read the manual properly but this is something that we can do inside the mod matrix. So we know with our assignable entries in the mod matrix we can hold down the button and we can twiddle a knob and then it's that knob that's going to be affected by this column in the mod matrix. What I didn't realize you can do is you can actually have one of the assignable entries in the mod matrix affect another part of the mod matrix. So what I want to do is I want to say assign1 is going to affect how much the envelope is affecting the timbre. So the way we do that is that we hold down the assign1 button and we move our mod matrix light over the top of the one we want to affect. Okay so now assign1 is going to affect how much the envelope is affecting our timbre. So first things first let's go back to our timbre here. And what I want to do is go back in here and set the amount which will be essentially the minimum amount that I want so when I press the key very lightly. So we'll turn it down. You still want a little bit of movement. Maybe just like that. So there's still just a little bit of twanginess at the top but not a whole much so it's a whole lot rather. So I've set that at 28.5. So if we now go down to our pressure row and onto our assign1 which is now going to affect how much the envelope is affecting the timbre and we'll turn that up. So I had it on 50 something so I put this for about 30. To begin with so if I play lightly as in not much of my finger get that sound if I play harder we get the twang at the front end but we still come back down to that basic sound which is what we want. Okay so I like this idea of the velocity, the pressure affecting other areas of my sound so what else can we do? What else makes sense if I play the key lighter? Well I think one thing that would make sense is if the attack was a little bit longer so it was a little bit of a softer attack when I played lightly and then back to being a strong attack when I play hard. I think that would be pretty neat. So let's think about how we can achieve that in the Mod Matrix. So what we're saying here is when I play lighter I want the attack to be higher. So that's a weird way of approaching things in the Mod Matrix so let me put this a different way. When I play harder I want the attack to be lower. I know I'm saying the same thing but it's a slight semantic difference and this is actually the way around that we would do it in the Mod Matrix so what I want to do actually is I want to send my attack at its longest for my lightest touch which is something like that and then what I'll do is I will assign my assign number 2 to my attack knob like that and then what we want to say is that as the pressure goes up this needs to go down. So what we do in our, let's make sure we're selected what we do in our Mod Matrix is rather than have a positive amount which will make me go longer the harder I press we want it to be a negative amount. So when I do the full pressure we get that nice attack, a softer attack. Let's play it lighter. Okay so I'm quite liking this sort of slow attack almost quite wistful. Let's make it longer at its extreme. Yeah I like that. What I think might be interesting is to make these longer attack ones have a little bit vibrato maybe so it's almost kind of fluty stringy at the top there maybe so let's think about how we can do that. So first thing we want to do if we want to create vibrato is we want to have our LFO affecting our pitch probably just a little bit, we'll just set it 1 to begin with LFOs sync off and tone up but when I play hard I don't want that vibrato I want it to be a big strong impactful tone so let's think about how we can achieve that it's kind of like what we're doing with our attack what we're saying is that when we play harder when the pressure is harder we want the LFO to affect the pitch less so we're going to have to do a similar trick so we want our assigned 3 hold that down and bring that over to the LFO pitch and our assigned 3 is going to affect that so if we want to make sure that our pitch a wobble disappears altogether at the maximum velocity we want to look at what it's set at at the moment which is 1 and then we'll go down to our assigned 3 on our pressure so when we hit it as hard as possible we want to reduce it by the same amount so we set that as minus 1 so now if we play lightly we get that vibrato if we play semi-lightly we get nothing but when we play hard it goes all together okay so we're kind of in the home straight part of the patch so let's look at some of the fine tuning elements and let's revisit some of the choices we made early on and make sure they're still working in the context of the patch as is now so I think the first thing to look at is actually the FM kind of stuff so make sure that our ratio amount and feedback still works for us we'll start with the ratio because I'm willing to be wrong about the ratio we had it set quite high but perhaps now in the context of like the way things are attacking and so on it might not be the right choice anymore so let's in tune ratio that I think is actually better we've still got quite a lot of that twang but it's just a little bit more bassy which I do like okay so let's check the feedback in the amount so bring the feedback up you can get more of that sort of crunch kind of sounds like one of those old sound blaster sound cards people of a certain age and certain gaming preference might recognise that sound that's a little bit much or maybe actually if we turn the amount down perhaps we'll have a maybe change how much that envelope is opening up which is on there turn it down I've kind of made it more cheesy but I kind of like it more feedback less amount trying the lower octave yeah cool yes and I think finally we should aim to be a FM purist here because of course this has an analog sort of output part so let's think about using the filter maybe to round the sound off a little bit maybe have the filter open up a little bit with the envelope resonance yes and now that feedback makes more sense if that would be made and bring in a bit more maybe have the amount open a bit more more let's check our decay time here so that's with it moving slower more plucky making sure I'd go either way with that they both have a place don't they yeah it's one of those patches where that decay kind of works most wherever we have it that filter has completely transformed the sound instantly just have an interest let's see how this sound is on the high registers what if we add some glide we've ended up in kind of a cheesy place but sometimes cheesy is good this makes me think of the high registers this makes me think of the original DOOM on a sound blaster sound card that's not right yeah maybe bring that resonance down so it's not stealing so much top end anyway this is landing in a really fun place I think I think there's lots of things we could experiment with pushing a little bit further I think getting that decay just right I think we could maybe make those long attacks even longer I think that might be a really fun thing to do with the lower as long as we can still get to a point of getting the attack working nicely I don't need to stop there's something to this patch and it's cheesy but in a way that as we're refining it I'm just really enjoying it anyway I think we should leave it there because we get into the point where we could just keep tinkering with this forever and ever so anyway I hope you enjoyed that I hope you found it interesting if you did make sure you leave the video a thumbs up and ensure that you're subscribed to the channel so you don't miss out on any upcoming fun on the channel now that I've covered the bread and butter of lead, pad and base I'm open to suggestions for other types of patches you'd like to see on the micro freak do let me know in the comments if there's something that is particularly interesting to you and I'll see what I can do about it but otherwise thank you for watching and I will see you again soon bye bye take care