 Hello, OscillatorSync here. And today, we're back with the Korg Ops 6 and exploring the idea of building a synthesizer architecture within a synthesizer, making use of the user algorithm and the various different operator modes. So in a previous video, we took on the challenge of doing this to try and replicate kind of a Juno-esque architecture, which worked out pretty well. If you haven't watched that video, I would recommend maybe going back and just watching the first third of it, perhaps, just because I sort of explained some of the concepts, talk about the user algorithms in a bit more depth. I'll explain everything as I go in this video, of course, but I probably won't go into depth in terms of how the menus work, et cetera, so that I'm not repeating myself or anything. Building the Juno-style synth inside of the Ops 6 was an interesting challenge. And I think everyone's kind of familiar with sort of a subtractive synth-style architecture, so it's a good sort of place to start. But given all of the various different modes that we have on the Ops 6, it's maybe not the most interesting use of the user algorithm. So for today's exploration, and it will be a sonic exploration, we're going to take on the challenge of trying to build a buckler-esque music easily-style synth inside of the Ops 6. So let's get down to it. So let's start by thinking about the sort of basic architecture of a buckler-y West Coast-style synth. And it's kind of conceptually not that complicated, and a lot of the magic happens in the user interface and the various different modulation aspects to it. We're not going to replicate all of those, but in terms of the signal flow, you've kind of got a two-oscillator kind of architecture, and each of those oscillators are doing a different job. So I guess that the oscillator that the West Coast-style synthesis is most well-known for is kind of the complex oscillator. So this is an oscillator which can have multiple waveforms and the sort of the key part of the complex oscillator is that it then goes through a wave folder which folds the wave in on itself, creating all sorts of new harmonics, sort of octaves and new overtones in there. And it's a really interesting way of creating more harmonics rather than the sort of subtractive way of taking away the harmonics. The other oscillator is a modulator. Oscillator, again, can have multiple waveforms. And of course, multiple waveforms on the Ops 6 is no big thing. That's an easy thing for us to do. But the job of this oscillator is that it will modulate the complex oscillator. And that can either be through FM, which obviously the Ops 6 is going to be fine with, or AM or ring mod as we would have on the Ops 6. You can also hear this modulator oscillator as a separate oscillator as well that you can mix into the architecture as well. So these two signals are mixed together through a low pass gate. Low pass gate is just kind of a VCA coupled with a low pass filter so that the louder sounds are brighter. And as the loudness goes down, so does the sound get darker. So bright sounds when it's loud and dark sounds when it's quiet, which is a lovely thing to have because that's how a lot of acoustic instruments kind of operates. If you think about a guitar string being plucked, it's nice and bright when you first pluck it. And as it dies down, it becomes sort of duller. So with this sort of crazy, electronic, experimental architecture that's up at the front here, having the low pass gate adds a certain acoustic quality, I think, maybe. And finally, I guess a really important part of this is that we go through a spring reverb because you got to go through a spring reverb. We've got an effect section on the Ops 6 so that's not going to be a problem either. In terms of modulation, there are kind of three main sources on the music easel and we can do a good job of two of them and we'll have to sort of fake it with the third one, go backwards here. Five step sequencer, that's a control voltage sequencer. So that could be used for pitch, but it could also be used for any other modulatable parameter on the device. So whether it's the wave folder amount or the FM amount, whatever it happens to be. That's easily done on the Ops 6. We have our sequencer and we have the motion lanes which we can actually just sort of lock as if they were just a step sequencer. That's easy peasy. The random voltages, randomness is a big part of the vibe, I think, on these sorts of synths. Again, this is easy for us to do. The LFO on the Ops 6 is fully featured, has a number of different random settings, both stepped and slewed. So that's easy and we can experiment with different types of random sources as well, which is good. And the final one is the cycling envelope. So this is an attack decay envelope, optionally with a hold, which we can kind of fake up with a standard envelope, but the important thing I guess about the cycling envelope is that it can loop as if it was an LFO. And then a big part of the vibe, especially with the sort of the self-generating patches is that you can then independently modulate the attack and decay. That's gonna be tricky. So we're probably gonna have to fake that and make do with an LFO, I think, rather than have any sort of cycling envelope. But perhaps in the future, Korg in a firmware update, if you wanted to add cycling features to the envelopes on the Opsix, I certainly wouldn't complain. I think it would be a really interesting addition to the whole setup. Right, so let's think about how this relates to the user algorithms and the various different operator modes. So as a little peek behind the curtain, this was my first draft. This is my second time trying to record this video. And this actually started making a video based on this idea. And I'll explain what this idea is because it almost works, but there's a fatal flaw with it, which I'll also explain. So I was getting mode just for operators here. Operator one was going to be the modulator oscillator. Operator two was going to be the complex oscillator, but without the wave folder, operator three was going to be the wave folder itself and then operator four was going to act as a low pass gate. So what we had was our modulator operator up here. This was being sent down into the low pass gate, which was operator four, but then it was also being fed into operator two, which is the complex oscillator. And depending on the mode of the complex oscillator, whether it's set to FM or ring, that would give us FM or amplitude modulation. So that gave us both four options here. That would then be fed down into operator three, which was in wave folder mode, but with its oscillator mix turned all the way down. So it wasn't contributing any sound itself. It was just processing what was coming in from above. And then that wave folder up, it would go into operator four, which should be acting as the low pass gate. Now that almost looks like it works if you think about it in this situation, but the problem is with this layout. If I want to hear the modulator oscillator, I'm going to have to turn it up, obviously. And that's going to send it into operator four, which is great, but it's also going to be sending it into operator two. So if I want to hear the modulator oscillator, I've got to be applying it to the complex oscillator, which is not always going to be what you want to do. You might want to have those two things happening independently of each other. And similarly, if I want to add some FM or AM to the complex oscillator, that means I'm also going to be hearing the output of the modulator because I'm going to turn it up, same thing, same problem, but in reverse. And that removes some of the flexibility of this setup. So this was my first draft. I started making a video on it. I got about 30 minutes into the video and I went, oh no, this doesn't actually work. That's so much for the best laid plans. So what's the rule if something in synthesis isn't working the way you want it to work? The answer to the problem is always add more VCA's. So this is my hopefully final draft of what I'm going to be doing here. And it's mostly the same. Operator one is still the mod oscillator. We've got four here now, being as the complex oscillator, the wave folder and the Laplace gate. That bit there is all the same. What's different now is what is set in between our mod oscillator and the various outputs. So what I've done here instead is that I have added an operator here, operator two, which I'm calling the mod osc output level. And this is just going to be a filter operator with its oscillator mixed in all the way down. And it's going to be in a fixed mode with the filter wide open or actually a better way of doing it. It will be a high pass filter with it. Open the other way, I guess. But that basically allows us to have a level control independent of the level that we set this one at. Essentially, it's acting as a VCA. And similarly here, operator three is going to be doing exactly the same job but it's going to be like the gatekeeper for the FM, sorry, the modulator oscillator going into the complex oscillator. So again, that means I can turn up operator two and here our mod oscillator without having to modulate the complex oscillator. And similarly, I can have this one turned down and operator three turned up. That means I'll get the modulation happening but not here, the oscillator. And then I can do those two things independently so that we can have things favor between each other and all sorts of things. Much more flexible, slightly more complex in terms of it's got more operators but still only two stems essentially. And like I say, the rule is more VCA's is always more better. So here's more VCA's essentially and it's better. So we're on the I'll go home page and if we're going to be building our synthesizer architecture we're going to want to turn it all the way over to the end to user, currently no user architecture setup so no sound because nothing is set as an output. And then we can go into the miscellaneous menu come down to the user algorithm, hit yes and we're at the page for allowing us to build our architecture. Let's just grab the diagram again so we can work from this. So the first thing that we're going to want to do is set our outputs. There's only one output in the design here which is operator six. So we'll come on to page two here and we'll turn operator six as to be a direct out turns red and now we have operator six acting as a direct out. And now we can build the rest of this architecture. It's probably easiest to work backwards so let's go to operator six first. What is feeding into operator six? Well, operator two is so we can turn up two to six and so is operator five. So we'll turn up five to six. There we go. Go back to operator five. The only thing that's going into operator five is operator four. So we can turn up four to five and go up to operator four. The only thing going into that is operator three. So we can turn up three to four. Up again to operator three and the only thing going into that is one. So we can turn up one to three. Operator two. Only one thing feeding into that which is operator one. So we turn up one to two and then there's nothing going into operator one. So that is kind of the layout of the operators but now we need to set up their various different modes. Right, okay. So we'll go over to the mode page one operator one. Operator one is our modulator oscillator. We're just gonna leave this in FM mode. It could be a couple of different modes but FM mode is easy enough. We'll set the waveform maybe to a triangle to begin with but we might play with squares in particular. Sound pretty good I think in this setup. So we might play with that as well. Operator two. Let's go down. Operator two is our output level for the modulator oscillator. So we're gonna set this onto filter mode like that. We're gonna turn the oscillator mix all the way down because we don't want this oscillator operator I should say to make any noise itself. And then the other thing we're going to do is we're going to switch its type to high pass filter and then we're going to come into the pitch. We're gonna set it to fixed and we're going to set the high pass filter as low as it will go which basically it means it's not filtering anything. So anything above 0.01 hertz it's being let through which is basically everything spot on that's just acting as a VCA now. Operator three is doing the same thing, same job but in a different position. So we'll do exactly the same thing there. We will set that to filter. We'll set it to high pass. Oscillator mix all the way down. Come into the pitch page, set it to fixed and bring the cutoff all the way down which just be letting everything through. Next operator is operator four which is going to be our complex oscillator but not the way you fold a part of it. This can be set to FM because we can set it to ring as well. We'll start with FM. We'll set it wave shape to triangle and that should be all that we really need to do with that for now I think. Good, operator five is next which is going to be our wave folder. So operator five into the mode. We want that to be set to wave folder. We have to turn the oscillator mix all the way down because we don't want it to be contributing its own sound. We just want it to be folding the complex oscillator that's coming into it. That's all good. And then finally operator six is going to be our low pass gate. So that's a filter and a VCA at the same time. And so I'm going to change that to the filter mode. We don't want it to be contributing of its own sound again. So we'll turn that all the way down. Low pass filter is right. We might play with the different modes. Do you know what, I just like the sound of the MG ones. So let's set it to MG low pass filter 12 for the moment. And the other thing we're going to want to do is switch its pitch to fixed. So by default, if you haven't explored the filter mode then if you watch my operator modes video I kind of go into depth with this. But by default, the filter will track the keyboard when it's in ratio mode. But if we set it to fixed it will be fixed. And now we have just a control over the cut off with the pitch of this operator. So if this all works just for testing I should be able to turn up operator one. Well, let's turn up our output first. So that's our output. We shouldn't hear anything because that operator isn't contributing anything. If we turn up operator one we still shouldn't hear anything because we haven't opened up our VCA. But if we turn up operator two, we get sound. That is working. Let's just double check the rest of the architecture here. So if I turned on operator two everything goes away. If I turn up operator four I shouldn't hear anything because we need to turn up the wave folder which we do. And if I turn up operator three which is our FM AMR we should hear operator four get modulated more. By Joe I think he's got it. That is sort of the basic setup. We're going to have to do some hacks to make this sort of work more generally. So let's hack shall we? So the big thing when you're trying to build patches like this and we had to do it the same thing on the Juno style patch as well is that we want our oscillators, oscillators to be free running essentially and allow other aspects within our architecture which are acting as VCAs or filters to be adjusting the free running volume of those oscillators. Now we can't have free running oscillators. There's no drone mode on the Ops 6. More's the pity. Again, cork if you're listening in a future firmware update if you wanted to add a drone mode to the level on any of the operators that would be welcomed, I would welcome that. So please do that for me. But basically all of these oscillators operators here need to act like they are always running. Now we can't quite do that but we can approximate it near as damn it by just having a very, very long level envelope. Now we're always going to want operator one and operator four turned up on here anyway because they are our actual operators that are running but the same thing is going to apply to all of them. So if we go into the level here and what we want to do is turn the sustain up to full. We want to turn our release as long as it will go and it goes very, very long, it goes 90 seconds so that's good. And then we want to turn our curve down to linear because that gives us the gentlest descent at the start of the release. So that gives us the most drone-like sound basically. And we want to apply that to all of the different operators apart from operator six which we'll do something slightly different with. So if we just go through all of these you can actually just copy these across using the operator menu but honestly for something that's not very complex like what I'm doing here it's probably just quicker to go through them all and do it manually instead. That's four and this is five, there we go. Cool and linear. And then for operator six on what we're going to want to do is set this as a sort of a gate signal instead because we're going to actually be modulating this with something else. So we just want it to play as long as a note is held down. So for operator six what we'll do is we're going to full sustain. We will have release almost instant but just get to that little click at the end. And that's a very boring sounding book at the moment but we'll get things sounding a little bit crazy very, very soon. But before we do, I think it is important for us to have the spring reverb in place because it's going to make everything sound vibia at all times. So let's do that, shall we? So let's come into our effects here. I'm not going to put it as the last effect because I might want to add like a delay or a reverb on afterwards I think but in the middle effect I'm going to set this to our spring reverb. The controls here of the spring reverb are nice. Length is not the length of the decay of the reverb instead it's the length of the spring. So if you set this longer you've got a much longer spring which means that you kind of get discrete echoes. Or a shorter splash here. A more reverb-y. Something like that we'll do. Everything's very mellow at the moment but it will get less mellow as we start to explore I think. So in terms of the patch that we're going to build with this architecture let's go for something sort of generative like a Krall sort of crazy sci-fi 60s B movie kind of soundtrack thing because it's a cliche thing to do with this kind of architecture but it's fun. And you can create more conventional sounds as well if you like but there are enough conventional sounds in the world. So let's make something a bit weirder shall we? So let's just get a basic sound here which is a little bit more harmonically rich just so that we can start to feel what we're working with here. So let's turn up operator three so we're applying some modulation here and maybe on operator five which is our wave folder we can add a little bit of wave folding as well. And we'll have all these things moving in and out shortly but let's talk about we come back to where I've put it the cycling envelope and we'll have the cycling envelope modulating our low pass gate. So rather than what I've said to a gate type signal on operator six we're gonna have something else modulating it instead and that's going to be our cycling envelope or to put it another way it's gonna be an LFO sadly I think more interesting than that. But we will modulate the speed of the LFO which will make it more interesting. So what we'll do is we'll come into the mod here and we'll use I guess LFO one as our LFO. Let's just speed down a little bit for the moment. We'll stick with a triangle and there's also an exponential triangle which is quite nice we can try other wave shapes but triangle is as good as anything else I think the other thing that we'll do here and we'll do this for all of our LFOs and random sources and all that kind of things we'll set its key sync to voice rather than common which means that it will restart for each voice. That means that each voice is going to be if we play polyphonically which is a benefit of building this architecture on the Ops 6 rather than actually having a monophonic music easel. It means that each of these LFOs are going to be operating independently and if we spoil or alert modulate the time of them with a random LFO that random LFO is also going to be running independently which means that all of these different voices are going to be wamping in and out differently. So we've got a triangle LFO there and we're going to patch it into Ops 6 and we're going to patch it into both Ops 6's level and its pitch because of course on a filter on a fixed filter the pitch is also the cutoff filter and that will allow us to approximate that low pass gate feel where it gets brighter as it gets louder. So we'll come into the V-patch and we'll set our source to be the first LFO and the destination is going to be operator 6 and it's going to be operator 6's level. We'll turn that up almost to full but not all the way to full. And now we have operator 6 wamping in and out with its volume. And then on the next one here we'll do exactly the same thing LFO 1 but this time of the destination is going to be Ops 6's pitch which is going to be the filter cutoff. You can hear that all of those are wamping in and out independently. And we can change the overall brightness of our output just by changing the frequency of Ops 6 essentially adjusting the bias of where the filter's been held open. OK, so that is a start. I think I'm going to make that go a little slower to begin with. But if we're making kind of like a generative corral patch we're going to want to introduce a source of randomness as well. And let's do that right now so that we can start to get our low pass gate our cycling envelope moving at different rates make it a little bit more interesting. So next page we'll go to LFO 2 we'll set the key sync to voice and we've got a couple of different random modes here. So we've got sample and hold which is like a pure noise backed sample and hold so it's kind of jumping to random voltages at a fixed rate that rate is controlled by the speed. And that's probably true to form for the architecture but there's actually a mode that I really like for generative patches even more than that which is the step random level and time. And what this basically gives us is a random voltage source or random LFO which is jumping around randomly, steps like the sample and hold but it's holding itself for different amounts of time which makes it more interesting into play between things. So we're going to go for that one there got it set to voice and the first destination we're going to send it in our V-patch is going to be the speed of our first LFO which is going to start to give us that kind of generative whoops, sources LFO 2 I should say and the destination is LFO 1's speed and we kind of start to get that Krell feel pretty quickly as soon as we start to do that. So I think at this point we want to start applying some of these sources both the random source and the cycling envelope to some of the other places within our architecture so I think probably a good one would be to send one of them to the FM amount so that's if we come back to our map, not that one too many pieces of paper, if we come back to our map here we can apply one of them to our FM AM amount here probably we'll try the stepped random perhaps for that one and then we can also apply another one to the wave folder to get some interesting interplay happening there as well so let's do that, so let's go to the next one along source LFO 2 which is our random source we're going to send it to operator 3 which is this chap here which is the FM amount essentially send that to the level and we'll see how that sounds so immediately start to get these more interesting tweets happening in there, more pure sound for the slower attacks which works really nicely cool and of course changing the ratio or frequency of operator 1 is going to give us different fields in there as well so we'll definitely do something with that in a moment so then we'll also have our cycling envelope which is LFO 1 and we'll send that to op5's wave fold again so in our map again operator 5 is our wave folder so we'll put that into the gain there see how that sounds, let's re-invert it even yeah it's doing some interesting things, quack quack quack quack here each time I play a note it's going to give us a different feel, let's just come around to here just turn that down to zero to begin with let's maybe just also mess with the bias a little bit give us some different feels, cool and if I play two notes they're going to be doing different patterns they're all quacking at different times I'm not sure about that wave folder perhaps I will perhaps I'll modulate that with something else I don't like the way that sounds on the on the slower ones so we'll turn that down for the moment I think and then we'll just turn the actual gain a bit try those some low notes, yeah cool stuff yeah okay so the next modulation, not that one, too many pieces of paper back here, the next modulation source final modulation source that we would need to talk about is the five step sequencer so for this we'll just use the the sequencer on the up six but we'll set up the motion controls to work in a particular way to give it a stepped motion we'll start by coming into the sequencer menu here and we're going to drop the tempo because that's going to be too fast and we'll try 40 but we'll we'll play about with what we've got here a real shame of the v-patch system on this is that there's no way to modulate the speed of the sequencer I think that'd be such a cool location you can change the resolution of the arpeggiator in the in the patch you can have that be modulated by an LFO which is a really really cool effect so it's a real shame you can't do for the sequencer yet in this firmware version cork if you are watching that's feature request number three I think so feel free to add that one for me as well as if I have that kind of power please um I guess the main thing here is if we're going to keep this true to form in terms of the music is all going to want to change our length down to just five and we are going to want to keep keytrig off it might seem that it'd be interesting to have the single start each time you play a note but it functionally makes the patch monophonic or at least fixed pitches because you have to put notes across the sequencer to make that work and let any sound through so we'll leave keytrig off and just have it playing as we are going so if we want to turn this into like a five step cv step sequence so we're going to want to come into not the sequencer note but rather the emotion controls here for each of these five steps now we have six lanes of modulation here so we can root this in quite interesting ways which is a really really nice thing we'll try one or two different destinations and and see how they sound perhaps but the important thing that we're going to want to do in order to get this to work as a step sequence is for every single step we're going to want to turn the curve which this parameter here to step which means that it's not going to slew between the various different notes because otherwise you can have exponential linear and indeed logarithmic slowing between steps which is a really nice feature to have for some patches not for this one so we want that on step and we're going to have to do this for each step and each lane but we'll do each lane as we go across we'll just do it for the first lane now as we start setting things up I think so if we now play the sequencer then nothing's happening because we haven't really done anything with our sequencer yet so what can we do with our sequencer I think the first thing we should try is maybe the wave folder because that didn't feel right to have that on the cycling envelope so perhaps having that stepped rather than jumping about everywhere that might be sort of better so in terms of what we're going to be doing here we're going to be looking at operator five and the wave folder either the wave folder gain or the bias either those will have a harmonic change let's try gain for the moment so our destination we're going to set to operator five I'll just stop the sequence because you can't see the bottom here which is a bit annoying I kind of understand why it's done that way but still and we're going to set that to the somewhere over here where are we folder gain there we are so now we can hear that that folder game has been turned up quite a bit so we're getting that richest kind of sound but for each of these notes now we can set different levels and then we'll have the sequencer running a bit faster or a different resolution perhaps so that's with the let's try it with the bias instead yeah I think I prefer that subtler alternatively we could go back to the game but make everything lower perhaps be less be less extreme for everything yeah let's try that instead so okay so that's one thing we can try there I think another thing that will make this a more interesting patch perhaps would be to look at our modulator here and maybe have the pitch be modulated by that and we can do that either by switching this to fixed mode and actually just kind of sequence it as if it was a pitch sequencer or we can just play with the ratios I think we might just try the ratios for now I might be wrong we can try the things but let's try that so we'll set all these to stuff again and like that now so destination for our modulator is going to be up one and we're going to set that to just do a pitch oh actually let's try trend no let's do it with pitch let's actually let's actually sequence the pitch on it I think so it's all the really low ones sound really good see now I want this to be going slower as well and maybe we can set this to random as well trying to find out as we can hear that operator as well let's slow all of those modulations down a little bit but make the effect of the random on the LFO speed more pronounced yes because I want some of those helicopter sounds there could also change the wave shape perhaps of our modulator oscillator try a square instead or maybe keep that as a triangle but change the complex oscillator to be a sawtooth perhaps let's try that okay cool I told you we're going to be doing sci-fi sounds oh there's a sci-fi fart and let's also on our wave folder let's bring the bias down and gain down a bit so the game's being sequenced isn't it okay so we've got a basic patch going on here that's kept fairly true to the architecture as far as possible and with what we've got to work with but we've got an extra LFO here and we've got some more effects so let's let's do some things with those things I think the first thing to do is I think we want to set up a third LFO here also to be doing the stepped maybe just the slew random so there's the random level in time which is going to give a slew random instead we'll set that to a voice so it's per voice again set it fairly slow and I think what I'd like to do is patch that to the panning because I just love stereo movement in patches like this so I'm going to a spare slot in the v-patch source will be our new random source there our destination will be program pan and remember that the program settings here are per voice if the LFO is per voice so we can get panning per voice and we'll set this fairly wide so now we should have pretty wild or a too wild panning there should we try the sorry to jump around should we try ring mod instead on the complex as well let's try that let's give that a go for a while it's a bit bit more mellow isn't it so let's also add in some more effects because we can I think what I'd like to do is put a tape delay at the end and then what we can actually do know what we must do is let's let's modulate the delay time with one of our random sources let's use LFO 2 this is a requirement by law so we'll send that to FX3 delay and we'll set that to the delay time just a little bit we'll get those sweet tape delay sounds as it slows down and speeds up and if you don't like that sound then it's against the law and you have to darken it a bit do some higher notes I think maybe we want to come into the v-patch and just reduce how much of operator 3 we're getting so reduce the amount of modulation a little bit and maybe while we're here let's have our other random source our new one our extra one turn operator 2 up and down which will give us different amounts of our modulation oscillator in the output and while we're here let's also have LFO 2 modulate the level of our spring reverb so when we go back to FM with this we're far away in space now we do still also of course have another FX leftover what could we do with it I think maybe we could stick some phaser on it or distort it a little bit perhaps that we could yeah sometimes a bit of distortion is nice let's try low notes and mix that in with a high note and mix that in with a middle note and now we are very much in space and I think an interesting thing to do with this patch as well is in the sequencer to change the resolution so that it pings about a bit more so it is absolutely refusing to ping about there we go and depending on what you've put in your sequencer of course this could be doing all sorts of interesting things and then changing the speed of it gives you quite dramatic changes to the patches anyway I'm probably just going to sit here and play with this for another hour because I find this stuff fun and synthesis is fun and it should be fun but in terms of the video I think we'll call it a day there I hope you enjoyed that and found it interesting and weird I hope you found it weird because sometimes that's what we need in synthesis we need some weird sounds if you did enjoy the video found it useful then as always if you could find the time to give the video a thumbs up make sure you subscribe to the channel that's always hugely appreciated hope everyone is doing okay in these times that continue to be very weird and occasionally quite difficult until next time take care of yourselves and I will see you in space very soon