 Hello, Oslo to sync here. They say that jealousy is a sin and that being the case consider this a confessional. There is a way that I see people perform with electron boxes that makes me very very jealous because I just can't pull it off myself and it's those kind of performances where people are constantly tweaking the knobs to make variations of the sound and switching pages and tweaking knobs and switching tracks and tweaking knobs and making use of the save states constantly to create variations on their patterns and I just can't do it. My brain isn't wired that way. I take too long to make choices and when I do make those wild changes, I end up messing up the pattern or not saving the state or reloading the state when I meant to carry on or saving the wrong state and recording over my sort of baseline state. It's a mess. I can't do it and I'm incredibly jealous of people who can. But if I may just for a moment try to justify my ineptitude, from my perspective there is kind of a shortcoming from working that way. That's introduced by the way that the user interface works on the electrons and this is not a slight on the electron boxes. They are absolute bay as far as I'm concerned. But if you're constantly tweaking these controls, you do have to constantly move between pages and sometimes you're going to need to double tap to get to the right page you want and it means that you can't do things like darken a sound in the filter page while simultaneously increasing the reverb send or I don't know coming into the syn page here on the syntax and reducing the decay while simultaneously introducing more delay while simultaneously cutting the bottom end with the base with filter. It's kind of one page at a time and you know two knobs at most for a few particular depths I guess and that's somewhat limiting. What we really need, what I really need is a macro control to control multiple parameters on a once and guess what? It's already included. The techniques that I'm going to show in this video work in exactly the same way on the syntax and on the digitone. They don't work on the digitact the functionality just isn't in there currently and I say currently because you know fingers crossed electron have been adding lots of features to the small box electrons over the last number of years and in particular they've been cross porting features between them so this isn't like adding a new sound engine to the digitact or anything so fingers crossed this might be something that makes this way to the digitact at some point but for now we're just talking about the syntax and the digitone. In terms of the way that the features actually operate on those two they operate in exactly the same way but the way that you get to them is slightly different so on the digitone the way that you'll access the menu that we're after here the easiest way to do it would just be hold funk and hit trigger which will take you to the setup menu or you can go into the settings into sounds and then into setup from there for the syntax what we're going to want to do is hold down funk and hit what was the kind of sound set up menu now is the song mode settings so funk and hit sound there it'll take us into this menu and then we want to go into setup so what we're looking for in this menu are pitch bend velocity mod modulation wheel breath controller and after touch each of these five entries here allow us to create a macro control over four different parameters in different directions with different amounts this is kind of massive and i think it's often overlooked because a it's buried away in a menu for one but b pitch bend velocity modulation wheel breath controller after touch these are all things that are sort of associated with keyboard controllers and in the case of press controllers wind controllers and i don't think a lot of people actually make use of external keyboards with the syntax well the syntax even less than the digitone i think but these give you an incredible amount of power especially when you combine them with an external controller because every external controller that has knobs on it that you can assign to cc numbers can send mod wheel information because mod wheel is just cc number one breath controllers it sounds like something to do with with wind controllers it's just cc number two after touch is a little bit rarer on a knobby kind of controller but for example what i'll show later is the beats that pro can do it at pitch bend if you've got a keyboard controller certainly a velocity mod probably not as applicable to the macro side of things but we shouldn't forget that we do have velocity recorded inside the sequence and you can have control over four different parameters based on the velocity as well which when it comes to programming stuff can be a real real lifesaver so let's take a look how this works not just to use the module one just as an example so at the moment i'm on my kick drum sound here and i've now got control over four different parameters the way this menu works is that your top row of knobs allows you to choose a parameter that you're going to modulate the bottom row of knobs give you positive or negative control over that kind of like the depth control on the LFO i guess and then what's really useful when you're setting these sounds up is that you have this control on the level data which essentially pretends to be the mod wheel or pretends to be after touch or pretends to be the breath controller as you're setting things up just makes it really easy to work out what you're doing basically so we've got this sound here let's say um when i want to turn the module up i want to get a longer sound first so i can come into matter here and this will look very familiar to people who've played around with the LFOs and i'm going to look for my decay and then if i want to set the maximum that it's going to be pushed up by i can turn my level knob up to full and choose my new decay so maybe something like that and maybe when i want the decay to go longer perhaps i want it to be more over driven so i can come through here and find my overdrive filthy but maybe when that's happening i also want it to get a little darker so i can come into my filter here and we can turn it down instead and now we've got currently just on this knob here a range of sounds that's quite sort of transformative of the sound all at once on a single control and of course we could assign this to a MIDI controller to do that kind of thing as well and we can layer these up potentially so perhaps on the breath controller we wanted to set up a different set of parameters so perhaps instead of it getting more distorted perhaps we want to take some of the sweep out of it so we can we can turn it out so we can hear what we're doing so it becomes thunkier when we get there and perhaps we want to i don't know send it into the reverb we could do that and those two things could be happening at once so if we had a controller that could send mod and breath control and spoil it we do we could be combining those two different sounds as well that's basically all of the theory that we need in order to get this set up and working so let's maybe think about how you might set up a MIDI controller to do that and i'm going to use the beat step pro as an example but any controller that has assignable knobs or faders or even buttons could be used to create this kind of macro control right we're back with old faithful beat step pro here this is the controller that i'm using but any controller which can send out midi cc and various other messages and with knobs or faders so something like the original beat step or the sq 64 from corg one of the fade foxes you know there's lots of them out there anything where you can configure what you are sending on the knobs is going to work really great in this environment the way i have the beat step pro setup in this case is that my first row of knobs are set to act as mod wheels and remember mod wheel is just cc number one uh on channels 1234567 and eight the next row of knobs i have set up to send after touch information actually which is not as common maybe as the cc numbers but the beats that pro can do it so great uh two channels one two three four five six seven and eight uh these buttons don't do anything or they maybe do but i haven't set them up to do anything specific um these buttons are set up to be toggles um where um when it's on it sends um breath control which is just midi cc two at its maximum value which is 127 and when you turn off it sends it zero so what that allows me to do in the context of the syntax is basically have two states that i can kind of toggle between uh within the patch and this is going to be potentially for each sound and then i've just got this one to send out some some sounds basically they just send out uh node numbers so um in terms of how things are set up on the syntax what you want to look at is how your midi channels are assigned to the tracks and for that you want to come into your setup menu and go to midi config and into channels and here you'll have uh the list of your channels obviously on uh the digitone you only have four but here we have 12 and this tells you which channel each of the tracks is going to receive midi on and by default and it's the way it's set up here it's just going to be uh track one getting channel one track two getting channel two and so on it is worth um bearing in mind of course you can assign these to whatever you want and um you can in fact assign assign two channels to tracks to a single channel i should say so if you wanted to have a setup where you have similar sorts of things happening on the controls for two different sounds at once you can do that or maybe a more creative way of thinking about that even then is having it so that you have two channels which kind of cross over so that when uh you turn up one knob uh one channel gets brighter there one gets darker or gets louder and quieter one gets shorter and longer you know there are lots of ways that you can think about it depending on what you're trying to achieve for simplicity sake i'm just going to have my digital tracks here on the syntax just receiving the channel number that they are labeled with just make life a little bit easier right midi out of the beat set pro to midi in on the syntax and if we start the pattern because we've already got two of those things set up i should be able to turn the odd wheel knob and get the boomier sound and then the other thing with the reverb was on the breath controller so i've got that as a toggle there and we can combine them if we want to and if i wanted a final one there on this row maybe something which thins things out might be nice so i can come in to the sound here and to set up make sure on the right track uh this row is up touch the way i have this set up come in to here turn this up so i can hear the changes uh so probably just use something like the uh bass of the bass width filter to press the wrong button should it press yes always do that try again let's use the bass of the bass width filter turn it up to get a thinner sound maybe we want to distort a bit more when you do that so we can come into sin and overdrive and we just take a little bit of the decay off sin and decay turn that one down so we kind of have a thin version there as well on that knob move up there and we can combine them in different amounts if we want to uh so let's take a look at that snare um for a second so um one thing i think we're really cool for this kind of sound is to have a setting where um you could do kind of the dub thing when you send it to the uh delay just for one hit and we could toggle it with this i think that'd be pretty cool uh so let's do that uh so we're on my snare uh this is breath control uh so come into breath control uh turn it up so we can hear it my meta here is going to be my um delay send lovely uh probably when we do that we also want to make it a time with darker perhaps so i could maybe use the uh filter width this time to bring that in on the bass width filter so now i can just trigger that for one hit if i want to which is quite cool maybe put something on this one as well so that's my mod wheel maybe a longer sound so we can come in here and do the modulation envelope turn that up a bit to keep it more noisiness in it and then also the uh decay turn that one up make sure we're listening to it of course so we have those controls there um let's move on to the hi-hats uh which i've just got going doing a 16th kind of thing one thing that you shouldn't overlook in the um macro controls if you like is that you can use them to control the depth of LFO so we can maybe set up a panning thing on here but not get the panning going and have that controllable on a knob so uh LFO uh i wonder why i was playing with this earlier so i've already got the panning set up on here so if we turn up the depth here yeah we've got a nice bit of panning going on there but we don't want to be turning it up on here we want to be turning it up on here instead so go to sound and set up mod wheel uh set this as the LFO one depth turn it up so i can hear it get the maximum amount probably just about as much as we want maybe it needs to be slightly shorter when you do that as well so we can come in here and choose decay and turn that down a bit and maybe on this knob we could just have a different kind of sound variation where we mess with the like the shimmer and the modulation amount so that's my after touch row turn it up and we can change the shimmer at the ratio around the modulation envelope kind of sound add the shaker back into a hi-hat do a little bit so it's not too shaker it's just a different sound you know quite a lot of control over stuff a little chord thing there on that track i think really an obvious thing for that one is to just use the mod wheel like you would normally which is to give it some pitch wobble so let's go into the LFO here and select tuning speed up a bit nice one to have probably need to do anything but that really so we can come into our sound for this track go into mod wheel it's LFO 1 depth and maybe on this knob we can do quite a different kind of variation like maybe give it a more of a paddy kind of sound perhaps so we could aim for something where maybe we give it kind of that kind of feel some rock on the envelope amount at the moment so i can probably just set this as what i wanted so we're going to turn up the envelope amount there and then probably also turn up the attack on the amp at the same time and you couldn't do that with knobs normally because it's on two different pages so on the after touch what are we going to do so we'll go into the filter and just darken it a bit to begin with into the filter again and turn up the amount the envelope depth maybe give it a bit more resonance on the filter and then also on the amp page up the attack time we now have a couple of different variations along the way here so that's some things on there on this last track we've got like a bass thing going on at the moment it's kind of really basic intended but we could really liven up with some filter automation or maybe not filter automation maybe like a held LFO random LFO to the filter amount or something let's try that so if we send an LFO to the envelope depth we set it to and set it to hold immediately a lot more interesting so that's one thing we can do when we do that we probably also want to give it some more resonance as well don't we so again that's on two different pages that we can do that normally come into sound we'll do on the mod wheel perhaps so we've got the mod wheel here for that channel so we've set up our LFO we just need to increase its depth it was LFO 2 not LFO 1 and also the resonance that makes it quite a lot louder as well so we could also compensate the volume on that as well we come into the amp volume and just bounce it and let's just try a bit of overdrive as well compensate the volume some more cool yeah and again we can set up like a variation of it on my on off switch here for the breath controller so perhaps we can make it like a wobby kind of increase the attack of the filter kind of thing that kind of thing and throw it into the delay or the reverb try something like that anyway so set up my new breath controller it's going to be on there and filter attack time although it's not the most inspired pattern ever that does give us a bunch of controls over these sounds otherwise get to and that's how you can set up macro controls on the syntax and digitone I hope that maybe shed some light on what I suspect is a slightly underutilized corner of the syntax and the digitone if you did find it useful if you did enjoy the video then as always if you could leave a like on the video that's massively appreciated and if you're not already make sure you subscribe to the channel for more synth fun including lots of things to do with electron because I've come up with a few more things than I want to talk about in the coming weeks and months other than that as always take care and until next time bye bye