 Hello OscillatorSync here and today we're back with the Korg Mod Wave. This is the second video in the series where we are taking a deep dive into the Mod Wave's sequencer. In the first video we introduced the sequencer, discussed what it actually is and what it is not and why it is maybe a little bit strange on a polyphonic synth but also wonderful. We also introduced some of the common concepts across the whole of the sequencer and then sort of dove into the pitch sequencing track. If you haven't seen that video yet and you're not familiar with the sequencer it might be worth at least going back and watching the first half of that video perhaps because I will skim over some of the concepts I've already covered but I'll try not to leave anyone behind if you haven't seen that video I'll do my very best. So in this video the plan is to take a look at two more aspects of the sequencer. We're going to be looking at these Assign All A, B, C, D motion sequencing lanes and we'll also towards the end of the video take a look at the shape lane which is also pretty interesting and unusual like many things about the sequencer on this synth. So I guess without further ado let's dive into that shall we? So we took a look at the pitch lane which can only be used to modulate the pitch. The A, B, C and D lanes are freely assignable to modulate any parameter which is accessible in the mod matrix which is basically any parameter on the synth including aspects of the sequence that it's actually running we could use the sequence to modify itself which is kind of wild. On the face of it if you use them in a basic way they're somewhat like the motion sequencing that you found on say the Minilog and the Monologue and a number of other Caucasians the Vulcans for example where you can essentially record a knob movement into the sequence and that's one way that we can actually program sequences on the sequencer lane so let's just take a look at that. So we're on the sequencer lane A here we need to choose the length of the loop to begin with if we're going to record something in so I've just gone with 16 beats so A1 to A16 that won't do me and let's record say a filter sweep in. So if I hit record here it's going to ask me which lane I want to record to we can also record to the pitch this works slightly differently playing notes in obviously but we're going to record to A it says ready to record play a note to start hold the note down until you're done recording if you hold a note down past the length of the loop it will stop recording anyway so we're going to record 16 steps here no matter how long I continue to hold down the note so I'm going to play a note grab the cutoff knob and give it a wiggle and now it's finished recording we can hear it playing back right so that is basically emulating what we normally do on the old more basic motion sequencing that we found on previous corg synths so if we look now at the sequencer lane settings we can see that it says rec knob filter cutoff so it's telling us that the shape of this particular sequence was created by me playing with the cutoff knob and if we go into each step we can see that we have values set on each of the steps now the values will range from 100 positive to 100 negative so this means that the sequencer lanes are bipolar we can use it to modulate down as well as up we heard when we played a note that we were getting that shape that I recorded in and if we now look in the mod matrix we should be able to see here yes indeed we have a mapping going from filter cutoff or rather from step sequencer A to the filter cutoff it set the intensity at maximum and that's what's currently being modulated the important thing to note here is that the fact that it is being sent to the filter cutoff and the fact that it says that the filter cutoff was what was used to record this motion that's all optional it's advisory we don't have to now have this going to the filter cutoff in fact if we come into the mod matrix here we can go ahead to shift and mod don't want to delete that mapping yes we're now not hearing anything being modulated if we look at our steps all the values are still there it should also still say that we used okay so once we've removed the last mapping it removes the recording knob there but we can now go into our mod matrix and assign that to something else so maybe the position of the wave table so we can wiggle that and our source can be step sequence A and if we turn up the intensity we can hear that same movement now being applied to our wave table position what if we wanted to send that to somewhere else as well maybe we want that to also do the morph control we can do that again so morph and we'll come from step sequence A and continue to turn up the intensity and now that motion sequence is modulating both of those parameters we don't need to be modulating by the same amount or we could even invert it she's going to sound the same for this actually but so although we used cutoff to record this motion sequence it is completely separated from that fact it assigned it to the mod matrix by default because that's presumably what you would want but we don't have to then apply this to the cutoff we can remove that mapping and we can also apply it to multiple different locations at the same time as well so I've just cleared everything out and I'm just going to rerecord that cutoff movement because it's a nice easy one to hear and I'm just going to do slightly more dramatic moves just so that going forward we can hear it more clearly so there we go that's a sequence back on here so one thing I want to note at this point is that what I just recorded in terms of the knob movements that I did and what is playing back is not quite the same thing and the reason for that is that even though we were moving the knob and we were doing it with continuous movement obviously as we can see that each one of the steps still has a value assigned to it which is based upon the movement of that knob and we can come in here and edit that of course if we wanted that first one to be less obvious and the reason this isn't quite the same is because the movements are still quantized to the knobs and what's happening by default is if we come into the setup for this sequencer the transition is set to linear and that's going to create smooth transitions between the steps and because the sequence is moving pretty fast it's going to sound more or less the same if this was a slower sequence less so but we can change the transitions so if we wanted to get subtle variations on this move to exponential or logarithmic which makes all the movements slightly more fast and then of course we could turn the transitions off altogether and we get a more rhythmic thing kind of like a sampland hold so recording the knob movements in and then deciding whether or not you want to have transitions is going to give you different kind of vibes and of course we should not um sorry that's transition off this is individual transitions and the transition for each step is currently off but if i came into this one i may have made that one linear you can hear that we've got smooth one there and we can start putting smoother slides and so on the same way that we did with our pitch so we can take these sort of random knob movements and by switching it to individual and putting in transitions on particular steps we can get these really interesting rhythmic things going on which are part sampland hold part sled but it's a really great way to start finding these sort of rhythmic ideas so i'm just going to set that back to transitions being turned off so we get these steppy friends again and i want to take a look at one of the other parameters that we have on a per step basis so let's just come into one of our steps here and here we have the type setting and this is this is pretty interesting because this allows us to modify modify the value of the step and also modify how the value of the step is being modified maybe to make this a little bit clearer let's make a shorter sequence maybe a slower sequence just so we can hear what's going on so now i will just set this just like a four step sequence instead or just drop the tempo down to say 80 33 minus 17 maybe make this one so we can hear a nice obvious pattern going on there so i'm actually going to ignore the first setting to begin with on this type parameter and we'll come back to that and i'll just start with these other two here which is value times random plus or minus and value times random plus so what these will do is apply a random scalar to the value that we have on the step and i'm just going to use it on a slightly different step actually because it's going to make more sense make it easier to hear maybe on this one so what this is going to do is scale the the value randomly so this third step is going to change each time whereas the other three are going to be the same and the difference between these values is going to be that the times random plus minus is going to also send it negative whereas if we have to this one it's always going to be positive it just might not be as positive as it was and remember this has been set per step so we're able to have a mostly consistent sequence but then have one or two steps potentially which are throwing in an amount of randomness as well and that's really cool might be cool if we also change the transition to the transition set to so now we've got this step here being randomly scaled and we also get a transition on it whereas all the other ones are steppy so there's a lot we can do with that to again to me it always feels about creating these interesting or rhythmic ideas that can be modified as they go so those are the two random things here so let's have a look at the other two which are value and continuous mod and value and sample and hold mod so to make these two really really clear i'm just going to reassign where this modulation is going and send it to pitch instead so we will just delete that modulation and we will add a modulation shall we just turn down one of these perhaps we'll just send it to the tuning of this oscillator that will do so add tuning of this oscillator and the source can be step sequence a and we'll do it sorry this is going to be a slightly annoying sequence to listen to i apologize but it will make what i'm trying to show you hopefully really really clear so um what are we looking at here so value and continuous mod what this is going to relate to is if we are going to be modulating the value of this step so remember that the value for each step in each sequencer is a modulation destination so we're not modulating every value in the sequencer we are modulating just the value of this step which as i mentioned before is bonkers so let's assign a modulation to the value here so we'll add a modulation here we're going to use the current step sequence a a three value so that's that step and i'll just send it uh let's say this is the pitch LFO probably work and we'll give it a fair whack of intensity and what we should hear now it's just on step c it's being modulated by the pitch LFO and if we change the frequency of this we can hear that it's being modulated on that step i don't know why i find that funny but apparently i do so that's that so coming back to this type setting here value plus continuous mod means that when we get to this step we are going to have the value and it's going to apply any modulation that's coming into the value in real time and we will hear it change continuously over the course of that step happening which might be what you want the other option is this value plus samplen whole mod and what this is going to do is slightly different when we get to the step it's going to look at what the incoming modulation looks like and it's going to lock it at the start of the step and then it's not going to change it for the duration of the step next time it comes around it's going to look at where it is that time and it's going to lock it at the start of the step again so we'll hear something that sounds a bit like the random thing that we had before but it will be periodic based on the LFO in this case so you can hear we've not got that constant movement happening on the step now instead it's basically looking where the LFO is at that particular point and adding it to the value there so the difference between this and our friend there with the bendy notes instead this feature the value plus samplen hold mod is missing from the pitch track which is a bummer because it means that whenever we want to modulate an individual step on the pitch sequencer we're always going to hear that movement if movement is happening we can kind of get around that by using one of the stepped random LFO shapes instead but corg please i'm asking nicely can we please have the samplen hold mod as an option on the pitch sequence please pretty please please please so one trick that we can now do knowing that we have this samplen hold mod in the sequencer lane is that we can use one of our sequencer lanes or as many as we want actually as a clocked samplen hold essentially so if i come back here and i set the length of my sequence to just one step just this step here and if i set this value to zero this is essentially doing nothing to the pitch now right if i come into here and set that to value plus samplen hold mod and we add the LFO as a modulation source for that this time we'll just use the same one i'll do give it some amount and now what we have is a samplen hold of the LFO which is clocked to the sequencer so if i turn the frequency for this down we can hear that LFO being sampled each time we get a step in the sequencer as opposed to the continuous movement and by changing the the frequency of the LFO we can get different patterns and obviously also the shape of the LFO is going to make a big difference as well and obviously you might not want to apply this to pitch necessarily but you can see perhaps how this would apply to other things this incidentally is how a lot of a lot of like computer game sounds are made by just sample holding LFOs if we speed up the tempo there you can definitely get that computer game vibe right yeah so so we can also hack one of our sequencer lanes into being a samplen hold based upon an LFO which is potentially a really neat trick depending on the patch that you're making so i'll just clean out the patch again just back to a standard patch and a couple of other things i want to mention before we get on to the shape track the first is thinking about your amounts inside your sequencer lanes and how that applies to your mod matrix settings so to put some context around this let's think again about pitches but in a slightly more controlled way this time so one of the limitations we identified in the previous video on the pitch sequence is that we were not able to decouple the pitch of the two oscillators the pitch sequence is always going to move the oscillators together in the sync but of course we do have access to the tuning of the oscillators in the mod matrix which means we can also apply a tuning to them based upon our sequencer lanes and because the tuning parameter of each oscillator is separate that means that we could also decouple the tuning of the two oscillators and have different pitch sequences running in time so let's just take a look at how we would do that and think about how we would set up our sequencer tracks and mod matrix settings to do that so i'll come on to sequence lane a here and i'll choose a step actually before i do that let's just make the the sequence a little bit shorter just so we don't have to do quite as much five steps will do so um what we have here in our sequence lane is this value amount and this value amount is going to run from zero up to 100 so this is not talking in terms of semitones like we had in our in our pitch sequence so we have to think about this in a slightly different way so what can we do if we want to make sure that our sequencer lane can be used to approximate or in fact not even approximate actually act in semitones so let's create a link in the mod matrix between this sequencer lane and the tuning of oscillator one first so come into the mod matrix add a new destination we're going to adjust the tuning of oscillator one and the source is going to be sequence lane a uh lovely stuff so enter here we go and what we now get to do is set the intensity of this track now generally speaking you might be tempted just to whack this up to full up to 144 semitones which is a lot of semitones but that's not going to make it easy for us to actually write stuff that works in tune instead seeing as our sequencer runs from zero to a hundred if we set this intensity to be a hundred semitones that gives us a mapping of one percent in our sequencer lane to one semitone so we can come out of here and we can go into one of our steps maybe the second one and maybe want to go a fifth above so semi-semi seven semitones and now we should hear something slightly weird so why is it weird two reasons the first is that we're still hearing oscillator two as well and the next reason is we're hearing a linear movement from the root note to semi-semi seven semitones above let's try to say that when you're drunk so what do we want to do we want to come into the setting for sequence lane a and we want to turn our transitions to either off or individual i'll put on individual in case you want to put slides in and now we should hear and we will put an octave up here and maybe a octave and a fifth there and now we've created a pitch sequence which is controllable thinking in terms of semitones on this step sequencer here and our original uh sorry our other oscillator is still held at the same pitch because we are not modulating uh it's tuning and we're not using the pitch sequencer to change its pitch either so if we wanted to we could then come into our second sequencer lane here and because i like poly rhythms let's set it to a different length there eight perhaps we'll do fine make sure its transition is set to individual or off if we want that stepping and we'll create a mapping between this sequencer and oscillator b's tuning so a new mod tuning of oscillator 2 and the source is step sequencer b enter again if we want to have a percent map to one semitone we want to set this to a hundred yes i know i could be holding down enter to make this go faster um gambler's remorse i've gone too far by that point there we go and we can put in a different sequence in here that's also a different length i don't know i'm just i'm just picking numbers here honestly uh 12 maybe we can go down an octave or two octaves down an octave that can be the root that can be that and that can be the root as well and now what we should hear is we have our two oscillators playing different melodies which are of different lengths and because we've been careful about which notes we've chosen here it sounds pretty good and if we wanted to do the trick where we have our filter envelope maybe trigger based upon the sequencer stepping so we get some movement there that might be nice uh where are we step pulse there we go lovely and we've got that sort of duophonic sequence vibe going on here some reverb or not so um obviously this is being applied to pitch and thinking about how we can set the intensities to get the most out of our sequence or the most meaningful things out of our sequence but this applies to to most parameters and sometimes yet you're just going to want to swing it the full intensity so that you've got um just the control over the full range uh but things um for example like um envelope times anything related to time you probably want to think carefully about what your upper range is going to be for those things rather than just slamming it on at um the maximum amount so anyone else just like bloops and bloops i can listen to sort of stuff forever i don't know whether it's just me and of course we could then start throwing in things like um probability so that the length of the one of them keeps changing slip stick a slide on one of them yeah so we can create two interrelated okay sorry this is meant to be a tutorial about more than just that sound over and over again but you can see what you can start to do when you think carefully about the amounts that you're actually working with and you could incidentally now also put the pitch sequence over the top of that and if you are careful with the um semitone amounts that you work with and how you lock it to the scale you can create like really really amazing evolving melodic ideas yeah so that's a lot of fun so again i've just torn down the patch to just look at one last thing before we move on to the shape track and this is kind of related actually to the shape tracking in some ways um so i'm just going to come back into seems to lay in a and i'm going to go ahead and just record a uh cut off wobble again perhaps okay so um so far we've been listening to the sequences as they loop but one thing um that i think should not be overlooked on the sequencer tracks is the way that you can use them as very complex envelopes now i've recorded this just by winging a knob to uh get to this point nice and easily but um if we come into the setup for sequencer a um do remember that one of the options here is to set our repeats down to off and what this will do is play that sequence once and then stop essentially giving us an envelope so what we've created there is a complex sequence a complex envelope made up of a sequence and at the moment that's all using linear transition but it doesn't have to and we can get different flavors by changing the transition either uh overall generally the log and exponential make it more choppy so either changing the transition across the entire lane or by setting it to individual and setting it on a per step basis we can also have stepped envelopes if that happens to be your thing yeah so don't overlook the possibility of creating much more complex envelope patterns using the sequencers a b c and d if you're not using them for other things but just to emphasize this it will run at the rate of the sequencer which is either going to be tempo synced or not but you're not going to be able to decouple the speed at which the sequencer lanes run from the actual sequencer so to finish off this video we're going to move over to the shape lane before we do that I'm just going to get this back to repeating okay so what is the shape lane uh so the shape lane is a sequenceable set of envelopes it allows you to have a different envelope shape on each step and then that envelope shape can be applied to any of the a b c d motion sequencing tracks or indeed the pitch lane as well so the first thing I'm going to do here is I'm going to take that uh cutoff pattern there I'm just going to turn u shape on now to begin with we're not going to hear any difference and that's because by default this shape lane is going to basically have an envelope on every single step which is just going to run the um the target step at its full amount to make this easier to hear the first thing I'm going to do is I'm just going to set the length of our shape lane just to one and come into step one so at the moment it just sounds like our original sequence if we come down to uh sorry this um option here this allows us to change what envelope shape is on this step so now we can hear we've got a triangle shape being applied to each of our steps in our sequence a sign or two two halves of the sign a saw down so essentially we've got like a simple envelope on each of our steps now a saw up similar and we've got lots of these different shapes here some of which take up the whole of the step some of which aim to be a little bit shorter some of which emulate ADSRs or AR envelopes and so on and when it gets really interesting if we go through some of these like this one as well that sort of swoops back up we get to the point where we've got two envelopes per step happening essentially so let's uh just slow this down a little bit so it's a little easier to hear because this was called chug chug where I like so that's two sort of shapes per step or even three and then at the end we get to four and then eventually all off so you can see here that we've got a really interesting way that we can start to modify what's going on in a pattern so let's talk about these other settings here so offset is going to move the overall shape up or down so it's going to have the effect of essentially increasing the overall value of the target which in this case is the cutoff so if I turn this up you can hear that it's more just kind of on the whole time and it's going to clip off the top so we don't get quite so much of that pluckiness but it's only on the very very low ones possibly the negative ones where we're really hearing anything at all similarly we can take the whole thing down as well and that's going to move the value down before replying the shape the level is kind of the same thing except it's not going to move the value down it's going to reduce by how much it's been moved up so if we set this to 25 for example you can still hear it going but essentially it's a quieter envelope we can go to double the amount as well but the important thing with the level I guess is that we can also go negative so we can invert our envelope shape as well which is pretty cool phase is going to offset the start of this particular shape so if we um yeah if we go by like 25 degrees you can kind of hear that we're getting the start of the next sorry the start of our step happening at the end of the step as well so we kind of get likes like a three thing happening like a triplet feel and that's because this rise but here is now happening at the end as well we go to 180 it should more or less sound like it did before because we've shifted it half out face we're getting this part of the chug first and then that one instead so reverse the pattern if you like and that can be an interesting way to get different variations it's probably a little bit more interesting as if we go to one of the more simple shapes you're going to get that flutter at the end because this ramp up is happening partially at the end now as well so so this can get really really interesting if we now expand the length of our sequence and put different envelopes on each step so we'll come back into the setup for this and maybe like do five or something that we'll do so we can have like a chug on the first one we could have a just a simple saw down on the next one maybe a sweep up like that on that one and then another or maybe like that one's quite fun and then the last one let's have like a really fast four type thing so now we should get quite an interesting rhythmic pattern and of course we could set the probability of this one to be lower so we can create these really complex rhythmic envelope patterns which are sequenceable which can have probability applied to them and of course a lot of these parameters can also be modulated as well which you certainly couldn't do with the standard sequencer that you would find on most powerful accents one small last thing to mention about this just before we finish is that the transition setting of the target sequence does make a difference so if you want to hear the envelopes as they should be as it were make sure that your transitions are turned to off so either off on the actual transition here or all your steps are set too often you can have it on individual the differences between them are subtle so as it should be if we go to linear everything just sounds a bit softer right if you listen to those attacks it just softens the attacks a bit and similarly with the exponential and logging here that the attacks especially there are quite quite softened it's subtle but it's worth noting that if you want to get the full punch of what you're what you've programmed on your shape you want to be having the transition set off anyway I hope that was interesting and useful if you enjoy the video as always it's massively appreciated if you could give the video a little thumbs up and make sure you subscribe to the channel because we've got lots of synth stuff coming up especially if you're interested in digging into the sequencer on the mod wave there's at least one more video coming up possibly two which will cover the rest of the tracks and look at some more interesting applications of the sequencer other than that as always thank you so much for joining me and until next time take care bye