 Hello, Oscillator Sync here. This friend towards the center of my case is the pizza from Bastel. It's Bastel's first digital VCO for Eurorack, and I guess you probably characterize it as a complex oscillator because it combines FM and ring modulation and wave folding and variable wave shapes to give you access to a really wide range of tones and timers. It is a surprisingly flexible VCO, considering its size it packs a lot into the small number of HP that it takes up. And the functionality that provides has actually just grown because Bastel have just released version 1.1 of pizzas firmware, which has added some new features and improved stability and the sound of the module. So Bastel contacted me and asked whether I would like to do a video on the new firmware for pizza and if you've watched my channel for any period of time, you may well be aware. FM is kind of one of my favorite things in the world ever, so I was really excited to do that. My goal for this video is to provide a comprehensive kind of video manual for all of the features because as I say it packs a lot into a small HP. And then to conclude the video with a bunch of example patches with pizza kind of in a wider context. To give you a flavor for what might be coming up, here are some of the sounds in those demos. I hope that's whetted your appetite in the interest of transparency before we get going with the video proper. Bastel sent this module to me for free. They have not asked for and neither have they been given any editorial oversight into the content of this video and I haven't received any payment otherwise for making this video. Right, let's talk about pizza. The difficulty with making a video about a module like pizza, which can be approached in so many different ways, is working out even where to start because depending on what you're trying to achieve, that's going to change where you're going to start with your patching. But I think probably it's safe to say that the kind of headline feature of pizza is the fact that it's based around an FM synthesis course. Let's start by talking about all of the FM stuff. The FM synthesis core or actually phase modulation synthesis, but that's what the DX7 uses. So that's probably what you're thinking when you're thinking of FM of pizza is essentially a two operator affair. You have a carrier, the thing that you hear, and a modulator, which wiggles the carrier around at audio rate to generate all of those additional harmonics and sidebands that we know and love in FM synthesis. But pizza actually is a slightly more versatile architecture because there are actually two modulators which have different capabilities and can be set up in different ways. And which one of those is modulating our carrier depends on the FM index control. So essentially in the centre point, neither of them are doing any modulation. The ratio oscillator is doing the modulation if we go negative and the octave oscillator is doing the modulation if you go positive. We can control this using the slider. We can also see via using the index input here and then we have an attenuverter for that input, which is going to apply the CV to where the slide currently is. So that starts an offset and then we'll be modulating from that offset point. Hello, oscillator sync from the editing bay here, just a quick addendum on what I just said. Pizza is a two op FM synth under normal operation. However, in version 1.1 of the firmware that's just been released, there is a feature that allows you to turn it essentially into a three op FM synth, running both modulators in parallel into the single carrier. We will get to that when we talk about the assignable controllers. So here I have the main output plugged into Quadrat, which I'm just using as a mix and if we turn up without any FM applied, anyone familiar with FM will be probably unsurprised to hear that we have a sine wave. And it is a rather nice sine wave. And those sine waves should be mathematically pure, strictly speaking, should be boring. But actually if we turn up the octaves and we'll come back to this knob because it does a bunch of different things depending on how you're currently set. In kind of here in these higher ranges, there's a slight digital sort of fluff and rustle and character to the waveform, which is quite a human sounding sine wave. And I have to admit that a couple of nights ago I spent quite a long time with just the pure sine wave, pure sine wave going into a reverb being sequenced. And it was a lovely time. It's a nice sounding sine wave. But if we want to hear some FM, we'll have to apply some of the index. And as I say, depending on whether we go negative or positive from the center point, it's the one of the two different modulators that we're hearing. So one of the modulators going this way. That lovely FM twang. And then going the other way we're going to be hearing the, in this case, the octave oscillator. Good stuff. So let's talk about what these two oscillators can do because they can be set up to do sort of different jobs, if you like. Let's start by talking about the octave oscillator first because it's the easier one to kind of talk about. And in FM, it's all about the relationship between our carrier and our modulator. That's how we define what sort of timbre we're going to be hearing. And the octave oscillator always has one of the most simple relationships between the carrier and the modulator, which is going to be set either at the same frequency or a number of octaves above or below. So here we have just one light turned on and that tells us that we are at the same frequency as our carrier. Press it again. Both lights come up. Now we are one octave above, essentially a 2 to 1 ratio in FM sort. And that's one of the places that we can hear that sort of pseudo square wave kind of hollow sound. Great one for basses. Press it again. We're now going to be two octaves above. A little bit more on the top end there. But lower indexes are still nice and easy to kind of understand. A little less integrated because we've moved a little bit further away. And if we press it one more time and all the lights off, now we are at one octave below the carrier. So a 1 to 2 relationship or a 0.5 to 1 relationship. We get one of those nice growly lower harmonics coming in. Again, really good for basses. Quite vocal at places as well. So in FM it's all about the relationship between the carrier and the modulator. And because we're only dealing with octaves here, which are the most basic, easy to understand relationships, these settings are pretty much always going to be easy for the ear to understand and make sense harmonically. There's not going to get too much sort of clangy, glassy, metallic overtones unless you push the index really high and you start to get some of those digital sidebands making their way in there. It's probably worth at this point just talking about one of the functionalities on the pitch knob, which is if we touch that button there, we have a detune. Now if I don't have any FM happening, so I have that in the middle, and I turn the detune knob, you will hear nothing happening. And that's because the detune knob is not going to be detuning the carrier. It's going to be detuning our two modulators. What that will do is as we move away from that really simple relationship, just sorry, I should be able to hear it. Let's go to one to one. As we move away from that really simple relationship, the tones are going to animate as the frequencies don't quite line up anymore and you get sort of a chorusing and a beating. It starts to get complex. We start to get some of those belly over. So the interesting thing about the detune knob here is that depending on whether you go positive or negative, it does actually do something slightly different. Obviously you can hear if we go positive, it detunes up and if we go negative, it detunes down. But the detuning relate and the modulator actually is different depending on which we write first. We're getting exponential detuning. What I want you to pay attention to in the frequencies here is wobbling. So with exponential detuning, as we move away from the current pitch, can you hear that the beating between the frequencies is essentially the frequency of that beating is halving as we go down the octaves. Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. Much faster. So fast that you can't really determine that movement anymore. Now you start to get side bands at the top there. If we detune the other way in that beating, this is linear detuning and now if we move around the octaves, the relationship with the beating should stay the same. So as we move across the different octaves, that movement stays the same. And that's a really useful thing to know because depending on the type of patch that you're creating, that sort of movement that's happening in the beating there, you're probably going to want to stay fairly stable if, for example, you're making like a big droney bass. You kind of want that sound to keep going, that movement to be consistent. Whereas if you're trying to create like a bell sound or something like that, you probably want it to move around and create interest as you move across the different notes. So that's a really nice little feature that we have there to have that different option. It's a nicely thought out idea. Okay, so let's go the other way and talk about the ratio oscillator. So if we bring this negative, we'll be hearing the ratio oscillator instead. And what we have here rather than just octaves are preset for preset ratios, relationships between the carrier and the modulator. Now if you want, these can be octaves, but we can set them to different things. So at the moment, we can cycle through them by pressing this button and we can hear that... Okay. Different sounds. These are generally more complex, although I think that one is the same as... Yeah, that's just a one-to-one relationship there. So we have access to four different sounds that can be set to different kinds of relationships. Now, these are preset ones. Actually, I might have messed with one of them, but we can set each of these four slots to whatever we want. And that gives you a whole range of tones that you can have at your fingertips. And spoiler alert, you can modulate which one is currently active, which is pretty cool as well. Hello, I'll say to sync from the future and I apologize for what I've seen was a sudden jump cut. When I came to editing this part of the video, I realized that I didn't explain it as clearly as I would have liked. So if you don't mind, I'm going to give it another go now and I'm going to start with a paper exercise. When we're considering the parameters which are going to affect the tone of an FM synth, there are kind of three main things that we can think about. The first is how much FM we're doing, the depth of the FM, the amplitude of the modulator. And on the pizza, we call this the FM index, the FM index, which is kind of the depth or amplitude of the modulator. The more FM index you're going to apply, particularly the brighter, more modulator the sound is going to be. The next thing that is going to affect the tone of our FM is the harmonic content or complexity of the wave shape that our modulator has. And also our carrier, to be fair. But on the pizza, we can modulate or alter, spoilers, the shape of our two modulators via the shape control we will be getting to shortly. The final thing that is going to affect the tone of our FM synth is the frequency relationship between the carrier and the modulator. And that's what we refer to as the ratio. Now we've actually already talked about the relationship between the frequencies of the modulator and the carrier when we talked about our octave oscillator. In our octave oscillator we had four different octaves with respect to the carrier that we could select. The first one was where the octave oscillator was in the same octave as the carrier. Essentially the frequency of the modulator and the frequency of the carrier are the same. And we would call that a one to one ratio. So if you raise the frequency of the modulator by some number of hertz, you're going to do the same with the carrier. The next one that we had was an octave above the carrier. When we raise the pitch of a tone by one octave, what we're actually doing is we're doubling the frequency. So if you have 440 being A, if you want to get the octave above that you would go to 880, you would double the frequency. So in terms of the frequency ratios, we would call that a two to one ratio where the modulator is going to have a frequency of twice of what the carrier has. The next octave that we had then was two octaves above. And if we think about two octaves above, that's going to be an octave above one octave above, right? So to get a ratio for two octaves above, we need to take our one octave above and double that. So what we see with two octaves above is a frequency ratio of four to one. Now we've skipped over three to one here, but obviously that is a relationship that you could have. And actually three to one, as it happens, will be an octave plus a fifth above the carrier in that case. So you can see that we actually have some sort of meaningful musical intervals here, not just our octaves when we're thinking about these ratios. And indeed we can go up from here to five to one, which will be a major third above that. So two octaves plus a third, which is not quite a third, it's just flat I think, but it's more or less a third. If we go to six to one, we don't really need to think about this too much. It's going to be an octave above this one because it's doubling this value here. So whenever we double the ratio, we're going to go up by an octave, so this is going to be two octaves plus a fifth. As it happens, seven to one is going to be, it's kind of a minor seventh, but it's actually quite flat I think, plus two octaves. And when we get to eight to one, as you can probably imagine, not that we have this as an option on our octave oscillator, eight is twice four, so if that's two octaves, this is going to be three octaves because we've doubled it. Again, that's one octave, and that's the same. Now these whole number ratios, our frequencies have a name, and what we have formed here is the harmonic series. And generally speaking in FM, especially for lower numbers, lower whole numbers, when you have frequency ratio sets up this way, the sounds are going to be pretty consonant, they're going to be fairly harmonious, they're going to feel quite sort of together and stable. So whenever you're doing FM and you want to have something that sort of works well, depending on what you mean by well, generally speaking these whole numbers are going to be pretty useful to you. So we have these nice pleasant sounding ratios. When we detune our modulators, what we're actually doing is creating a really, really complex ratio, like it might be 1.001 to 1 if we detune the same octave just out by a little bit. And actually when you are creating these more complex ratios, that's where the sort of A tonalities start to come into FM. When we detune it a little bit, we tend to just hear it exhibited as that kind of chorusing and beating and movement within the FM that's really, really gorgeous. But if we move to, say, 2.3 to 1, that's a pretty complex relationship. And that's where we're going to get some pretty wild, atonal, clangy kind of sounds with our FM. So how does this all tie into the custom ratios on pizza? Well, what that allows us to do is express this left-hand side of our ratio as a fraction, essentially. Now these ones here are already straightforward. We can think of that as 1 over 1 to 1. This is going to be 2 over 1 to 1, 3 over 1 to 1 and 4 over 1 to 1. But say we wanted to get a ratio in our operators, which rather than being one octave and a fifth up, was just a fifth up. So what would we do? Well, to go up an octave, we would double it. So it would be 3 to 1. If we want to come down an octave, we need to half it. We're just going the other direction. How do we express half of this? Well, we just stick a 2 at the bottom of our fraction instead. So if we did 3 over 2 to 1, that's just a fifth above instead. If we wanted to do an octave down, so that's the final thing on the octave oscillator I didn't mention, well, an octave down is going to be half what this is, so that'll be 1 over 2 would be 2 to 1. It's going to be an octave down. And if we wanted to do 2.3 to 1 as a ratio, we'd have to find a nice way to express that. So what's the common denominator there? Quickly, let's do some maths. To do this as 23 over 10 is probably the simplest way of doing it, but the piece doesn't go up to 23, so you'll probably do it as 11 over 5 plus some detune in this case. But a lot of other ratios could be expressed more accurately without having to do the detune. Right, let's move over to the module then. To set our custom ratios, what we need to do is press and hold the ratio oscillator button until it starts flashing. Now, depending on the combination of lights that are flashing, we can be setting one of the four different ratios here. So at the moment you can see that it's flashing, but the flash is very brief and it's off for most of the time. And that is the setting where the ratio oscillator lights are off, so that's your first setting. If we press it again, the bottom light is flashing, so we're going to be setting the bottom one. If we press it again, both are flashing again, but it's on more than it's off. So the off is very brief, so that's the setting where both of them are on. And then obviously that one at the top is where just the top light is on. So we'll just go to the one where they are both off to begin with. So as I said previously, the way that we set our ratios on pizza is by thinking about the left part of our ratio and expressing it as a fraction. So we're going to use the pitch knob to do that, the most used knob on pizza. And we need to pay attention to which light is flashing here when we press the pitch button. And basically when the top light, the octave light is flashing, we're going to be adjusting the top part of the fraction and the numerator. And then when the bottom light is flashing, the detune light, we're going to be doing the bottom part of the fraction, the denominator. So let's turn up this here, which will allow us to hear our ratio oscillator. There it is. And I'm going to start by setting everything to a standard one to one ratio. So if we listen to our main output, we can hear that that's not the same frequency. So to do that, we'll just take the pitch knob on each of the numerates in the denominator, top half and bottom half of our fraction and just turn it down and now we should hear the same frequency and stuff. So if I wanted to take this to a two to one or two over one ratio, we'll just need to turn up the pitch knob. And what you'll notice is as I turn the knob, the tune light will flash. And each time the tune knob flashes, we've gone up by a number. So if I want to go two to one at the moment, we're on one to one, we've got one at the bottom. If I want to go to two to one, I want to turn up the pitch knob and watch for the first flash. There we go. That's our two to one relationship. If I go up again and watch for another flash, that's going to be three, so that's going to be a fifth above. So we can get chord tones there. So we'll just listen to the main output. Up again, that's going to be four to one. So that's our two octaves above. There's our major third, or just intonated major third. A quarter of a fifth, so that's our six to one. There's our seven to one, which is kind of a flat minor seventh. There's our eight to one, which is going to be our three octaves above. So if you set the bottom half of our fraction to one and you just turn up the top half, what we get is that harmonic series. It's quite a nice sound anyway. And if we hear that actually modulating our carrier, we get that classic FM ratio selector sound. And as I mentioned, all of these pretty much sound fine, like none of them are particularly angry sounding. Now, of course, we could go down and have subharmonics as well. So the way that we could do this is instead of turning up the top half of the fraction, if we turn up the bottom half, we're going to be halving the frequency first. Then we go down by an octave. Hang on, let's turn up the octave of the actual oscillator for you to do that. Yes, an octave below, two octaves below, three octaves below. So those are our subharmonics, which also sound pretty good if we give it a bit of modulation. But we do hear a lot more of the frequency that we're going to set to in there. It's a nice sort of glottal, almost formant sounds that you get with your subharmonics. So to do more complex things, for example, if we wanted to get our fifth above, set that to one to begin with, there's our octave and a fifth above. And if we watch for one light here, that's going to be three over two. Taking it down an octave there. And if we want to create more complex things, I think I mentioned eleven over five or something like that, we can do that as well, so start at one to one, generally speaking is easier. And we want to go one, two, three, four, set it down. Five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven. And then on the bottom, two, three, four, five. And we should have a pretty interesting ringing metallic kind of sound there. Because that's a more complex relationship called glassy sounds. If you're just looking for interesting consonant sounds and you want the best sort of range on here, my advice, actually, if you're looking to go up and down is to start at eight to eight, which is still eight over eight, which is still one. And then you've got a good range either way. So if we go two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight. Two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight. It's pretty interesting sounds on the way over there. And now going either way on the top half, we've got a good range up and down of nice consonant sounds on that sound there. And then we can save that, go to the next one, and set something else up. A bunch of interesting ratios set up there that we can make use of. Now you can get pretty much more or less every chromatic note out of this way of dealing with your ratios. And in the manual, they are all listed for you for your convenience. It's worth noting that these notes won't be exactly even-tempered notes. You'll get kind of a just intonation instead, which means that the relationship between them will work really well for the root note of everything. But will sound kind of a bit weird if you move away from that root note. As a spoiler alert, this can be modulated so we can create some interesting sort of arpeggiated kind of things. If you do set it up as a sequence of notes that you're interested in, you can then use that as a four-step sequencer essentially on top of what's going on in the main sequence. But bear in mind, these will still be related to whatever the Evox Procter is going to be, coming in to tune the oscillator itself. So if you choose octaves and fifths on here, you can get really sort of consonant sounds for most sort of sequences that you're going to put in. It's a pretty flexible way of working with the different ratios. And remember, you can still detune to get other sort of in-between places. And spoiler alert, we can also sort of independently tune both of these modulator oscillators by making use of the assignable control, which we'll get to. We should probably talk about the pitch knob a little bit soon as we've used it a fair bit. It's probably the most multifunction knob on the whole of the module. But before we do talk about pitch, we should probably just mention, in terms of tuning, pizza is self-calibrating. If you want it to be perfectly in tune every time, there's a calibration routine that you need to run once, or possibly not even once, if you've got a fairly standard power supply. And once that calibration routine is run, as long as the power supply situation in your case doesn't change massively, it should stay in tune forever essentially. If the power supply situation in your case does change, there'll be a sequence of lights which will be shown on pizza when you turn it on, basically saying it's lost calibration. And to run the calibration routine again, that's all explained in the manual. It takes literally seconds to do. So that's all really good news. So what can we do with the pitch knob? So let's hear what we're hearing again. So the mode of the pitch knob is determined by presses on this button to the right of it. So at the moment I am in octave mode, and if I turn the pitch knob, it's going to move the pitch off the whole module by octaves. If we press it again and go into detune mode, if we're hearing no FM, we hear nothing, but if we're hearing a little bit of FM, we can detune both of our modulators. We've also seen how when we are setting up the ratios for our ratio oscillator, we use the pitch knob again in conjunction with these two lights here for the numerator and the denominator. So there are a couple of other things that we can do with this knob. So the first thing is if we long press for two seconds, our tuning light is going to show up here. And you can see that the octave light is now pulsing, and when the octave light is pulsing, we are now able to change the tuning in semitones. Like so, and down of course. So if you just need to offset this particular oscillator by a number of semitones compared to another oscillator, perhaps you're doing a multiosynth voice. That's pretty easy to do, and it's nice and stepped, so you don't have to do it exactly right. But if you do want to do fine tuning, if we press it one more time and the detune pulses, now we are fine tuning the whole oscillator and that goes up and down by a semitone smoothly. So if you have a situation where you are running two oscillators and you want to detune one from the other slightly, you can still achieve that. Notice that's different to the detuning. This is now fine tuning the entire module, so the carrier and the modulators, not just the modulators, so even if I turn off our FM, you'll still hear that tuning difference. Like so. The final mode that you have on the pitch knob, which is new in version 1.1, is if you long hold for seven seconds and everything is now lit, now we have the ability to tune across a very wide range of semitones. So it's still stepped, so it's still going to be in tune every time, but a much wider range than you have access to. Hello, oscillator sync from the future here, just a quick errata and addendum here. What I just said about the coarse tuning mode being quantized is not true in the release version of the firmware. I'm running a slightly older version of the firmware, so there's a little bit of stepping here, but in the release version that is now available, it is completely smooth, free tuning, not quantized and not stepped. Back to the video. So this kind of combines the semitone transposition and the octave. You've got a similar sort of range there. To leave this again, you just press it and hold and now we're back to normal. And when we come out of that mode, it doesn't maintain that tuning that we just had. So if we go back in here, what we lose is access to the detune. So if you want to use this mode, you'll need to set your detune first. Like so. Okay, let's talk outputs. So far we've only been listening to the main output, but I've just patched in the other two outputs to my mixer. So on channel one, I have the main output, which is what we've been listening to so far. Channel two, I have plugged in the octave oscillator output. So this will be what the octave oscillator sounds like. So it's not going to be affected by any of RFM because it's just the oscillator itself, but it will be affected by detune because the detune detunes the modulators and of course the octave as well. And we can choose what octave we're dealing with here on our button here. So a really obvious use for this would be if we were choosing one of our more aggressive ratio oscillators here. Which is going to rob us of our bottom end. We can mix that octave oscillator back in as a sub oscillator. The final output here is the pulse output. And the pulse output is going to be a pulse wave, a square wave, which is based on the carrier unaffected by the FM. So if you don't hear any FM on the pulse output, what you get instead with the FM index is pulse width modulation. With that, you are welcome. Now since version 1.1, we can actually set the pulse output to do something else. And that is rather than being this pulse wave, instead we can hear the ratio oscillator instead. And personally, this is how I like to have it set up. So to do this is really straightforward, but it is a button combination on power-up. So I'm just going to have to power off my case for a second. And if I hold down the ratio and octave buttons on power-up, it will switch it to the other mode. And if you want to switch it back, exactly the same thing. So hold these down, power it on. And now if we turn up the pulse output, we no longer hear in that square wave, but if we change our ratio oscillator ratio, you can hear that we're hearing that instead. And again, in the same way as we have with the octave oscillator, that's going to be affected by detune. So that means that we can kind of build up chords. And if you choose your ratios carefully, you could have it essentially arpeggiate. As I mentioned, this can be modulated, which we'll get to shortly. So if you're anything like me, this entire time where we've been looking at the functionality so far, this inviting looking slider here would have been incredibly tempting to you. So this again is a multifunction slider and its functionality depends on the setting of this button just here. Let's start with wave. And wave allows us to apply different wave shapes to our modulators. So if I turn up the main output here and turn off all of my FM, if I move this slider when it's in wave mode will hear nothing happening because unless we are applying the modulators to the carrier in some way, we're not going to hear any difference here because it's only the modulators which are changing shape. If we give ourselves a little bit of FM here, we'll be able to hear what's going on. And the easier way to hear what's going on however is to grab our oscillator output here. So there's our oscillator output and going to the left from the centre point, so negative, we're going to move from a sine wave into a square wave and going the other way to a sawtooth wave. And that's also going to be happening on the ratio. So I've got my ratio output there as well. As I mentioned, if you chose your tunings carefully here, so maybe let's do, with above, two outputs with the ratio or the pulse output set to be the ratio, we've kind of got like a two oscillator virtual analog voice with various different wave shapes. So if you wanted to get kind of conventional subtractive sounds, we could take that output and go into a filter instead, but I want to turn it down a bit so it doesn't overdrive it. Let me come out of the low pass, go into my output here. And you can, of course, modulate that wave shape as well. You can modulate whichever one you currently have selected, in fact, by modulating the shape input here. So if I just create an LFO here, bipolar, and plumb that fire attenuator perhaps into the shape CV input. Unfortunately, as it currently stands, anything that comes in here is going to be applied to the offset of shape. So if you want to go from sine to sawtooth, you're going to need to bring it up into the middle and just adjust your attenuator appropriately. If you want to go down into the square wave again, you're going to have to probably set it in the middle. If you go too high, you're probably going to end up in sawtooth. Now you can also set it up to control this with the external control, which is bipolar, which gives you a little bit more control, maybe. Nevertheless, cool sounds. Now, of course, having different wave shapes in FM is going to massively change the sound of your FM as well. So if I come back to my main output here, and we're just with the octave oscillator here, and I change the shape of that oscillator, we get very different timbres in there, very different timbres in there as well. And because this is incremental and able to be CV'd, this kind of sounds a bit like having an operator set above this operator, because with a simple relationship, at least, that's a bit like a one-to-one set above it, and that's a bit like a two-to-one set above it. So that's a nice way of approximating a three-operator stack for basic things at least. You can get much harsher tones like that. Right, on to the next two modes for the shape fader. Unlike with the wave shaping which is applied to our modulators, these next two are applied to our carrier only. So you're only going to hear the impact of them on the main output. So let's just turn that back up. There's our sine wave. Got no FM going on for the moment. And we'll move on to the second mode here, which is wave folding. I love a wave folder. In the middle, we're hearing no wave folding, as you would probably expect. Going negative and positive will give us two different flavors of wave folding. So if we go negative to the left, we're going to hear something which is inspired by the Wookler way of doing wave folding. Lovely. So harsh overtones that would love to be dampened down with a low pass gate. Perhaps we'll have a look at that in a little while. In some of the patch examples, going to the right or positive on CV, we're going to get a digital wave folder instead, which has a really quite different feel to it. You can hear there that's a digital multi-stage folder and what we're getting is a much cleaner walk through the harmonics. So a very different kind of feel there. And of course, if we are FM-ing our carrier first, we're going to be FM-ing it and then wave folding it, which gives us, again, more intense results. So like the Wookler version to the left gives you more of a kind of a vocal sound once you've started to get a bit more complexity, talking computer kind of things, where the digital wave folder, although obviously it's a little bit harsher, still kind of feels controlled in terms of its harshness. It's still doing what it was doing before just with more harmonics there in the first place, really. The final mode that we have on the shape control here is a ring modulator. And I just said I love me a wave folder, I love me a ring modulator as well. So turning our main output back up. In ring modulator mode, the shape control basically works the same way as the FM index, in that if we go to the right, we're going to be ring modulating our carrier with our octave oscillator. So ring mod gets you those additional harmonics but in a less of a harsh kind of way. And going to the left is going to give us our ratio oscillator instead. So again, these are going to be changed by what we have set in terms of the ratio that we're using. Again, ring modulator is a kind of a kind of more gentle modulation. That's FM happening to that. Ring modulator, at least on this slider, never really gets really out of control. So if you want to get these sort of ringing overtones, it'd be a nice way of doing it. And of course, the nice thing about having the ring modulator here is that we are now able to ring modulate using one signal and then FM it using another. It just begins to give us that parallel modulation, that kind of two modulators into one carrier kind of sound which is kind of the key to getting more sort of complex bell-like tones. And you can do a little bit of both and let's do it. Let's gently modulate those two things. A little bit of FM happening. Anyway, we're not going to be doing patches until we've got through all the features. Let's un-patch that for now. As much as I would like to. The mode that we have set here is only one of these things at a time. However, you can externally control one mode using the control input while still modulating the shape separately. So you can have two of these different modes under control at the same time. So if you want folding and ring modulator to get kind of a bootcliff feel going on, that is possible by making sure that you're using the control into the shape. And I guess that's probably a pretty good segue to talk about the control. The assignable control feature on pizza allows us CV control over any control that we have access to on the surface of the module and some other things that we can't otherwise get at via the knobs and sliders under normal operation. In order to choose which parameters being controlled by control, what we do is we press and hold this button here until things start flashing and then by pressing the buttons or combinations of buttons on the control surface we can assign one of a bunch of different destinations for the modulation. Once we've assigned that, we can long press to come back out of the assign mode and now what we have is a situation where this control knob acts as an attenuverter to the incoming CV on the control input. However, what's quite useful is that when you don't have anything plugged into the control input, there is a voltage that's normal to that input so as it happens, I've just assigned control to the, essentially the pitch of the oscillator. So without anything plugged in, you get hands-on control of whatever you have assigned. So we're going to go through every single destination here, explain what they do and we'll try them with manual control or CV control depending on what kind of makes most sense to demo them. Okay, there's a few of them so strap in. Let's go. Right, press and hold to assign and we'll start up at the top with the first item here which is octave. So this gives us control over the octave selector down here but obviously more interestingly, it does allow us to do CV control so if I just give Peter a little sequence, use the right output, good. So we've got a little sequence going on there and if I now take a synced LFO and bring that into the control input and turn up our attenuverter, we'll get tempo synced shifting octaves to bring some other interest into our sequence which is certainly one way that you can approach using it to create variations of sequences. I quite like that. So the next one here is going to be detunes. This is going to give a CV control of the detune parameter which obviously is going to sound pretty nice under CV control to get some additional movement into a patch potentially. So that's detune. Press it again and we are over here on tune but I'm just going to skip this one first. Let's come to this one first with both of the lights flashing. So this is going to give us exponential FM which essentially allows us to tune the whole oscillator using the control. This is also where if you want to vibrato probably the place to do it. So if we want to get a first vibrato there. Very nice. So that's exponential FM. The reason I skipped over tune is that this is another bit of FM so this is the linear FM. Now when we think of linear FM in synthesis usually we kind of think of it as the more stable FM if we want to try and do FM synthesis on an analog synth we usually hope that it's got linear FM for that because it tends to be a little bit more stable. So that's certainly one thing we can do if we take an audio rate input here from the 2HP here and we can get some interesting FM tones there and if we sequence these two together things will stay sort of fairly together so if I take my pitch sequence here I can sort of malt it and if we send that pitch sequence to both the pizza and the VCO things kind of sound like they're staying more or less together The key thing to note here is that I'm not doing any FM inside the synth we're just hearing the pure sound coming out of the main output without any but the interesting thing with the linear FM is the way that it affects the relationship between the different operators because with the exponential FM if I send a signal where I expect the octave to jump by one I'm going to be doubling the frequency and if my modulators are set to a different frequency they also need to be doubled with linear if I send in a signal which is going to raise the frequency of the oscillator by another frequency so I'm going to raise it by 20Hz that's going to be applied no matter what the different oscillators are set at which means that they're actually going to deviate from their musical pitch let me show you if I bring up the octave oscillator here as well and these two are set at different octaves if I now give it some linear FM immediately we've deviated from the same musical pitch the same octave which can be quite an interesting musical tool but if we apply FM here within pizza, not the linear FM that we have on the control as I turn up the control that deviation is going to lead to us losing our nice consonant sound like instantly so if we try and use the linear FM to do vibrato we don't really get vibrato a very different feel that's linear FM there's exponential FM that's vibrato that's not vibrato it's kind of acting like an alternate detune but if we start to sequence that because the frequency relationships are changing in unpredictable ways now don't sound so good so use the right pitch FM for the right thing is what I'm saying here so moving down to the next button we have the ratio oscillator and when this top light is flashing what we are going to be affecting is which of the ratios are currently selected so if I just turn on my ratio oscillator there and I turn my control knob that's going to be sequencing through those different selected ratios of course that can be pretty interesting if we apply an LFO to it so if I again give this pitch sequence and take a tempo synced LFO and give it some ratio oscillator it's a pretty fun bloops and bloops to be had there now of course whether this is going to be effective for a particular sequence is going to depend on the ratios that you've selected across here so use it with some thought potentially the second thing that we get access to if we press it a second time is going to be exponential FM for the ratio oscillator so this is kind of an alternate way that we can retune our ratio oscillator so if we want to offset the current ratio by some amount we can now do that manually on here and again we could sequence this as well if we wanted to so if we take our pitch sequence that we had and instead plug it into our control we can kind of get it doing a straight up pitch sequence as well which is an interesting way to approach things by trying to pitch sequence the modulator rather than the carrier fun so let's move on to the octave basically this is doing exactly the same thing as we had with our ratio with one light flashing we are going to have control over the octave select for the octave oscillator not for the whole module in this case and again just give it a few tempo synced we can get some fun variations on sequences that way and then if we set this to two light flashing that's going to give us exponential FM control over the octave oscillator which means that we don't have to have the octave oscillator set at an octave anymore we can get all of those other FM relationships in there also for whatever reason when you set this up it naturally detues the octave oscillator just a tiny bit and just makes it sound really rich and lovely so the next control setting we don't actually need to move away from these buttons because there are two other settings that we get both of them together so here with both top lights flashing what we get on the control knob then is basically this slider again so it gives us a second control for this slider so we can offset where that slider is we can add to it and so on so that means that if you want to send two different kind of LFO patterns into your FM index to get kind of more complex LFO shapes happening we can send that one into the FM index and then send this one into the control LFO shapes happening there or you can send an LFO to one and a so if you want to do LFO modulation and an envelope kind of modulation and you don't have a mixer in your rack or mixer spare in your rack you can do it that way more exciting than this is a feature that's been added in the 1.1 firmware so if we press these both together again and the bottom two are now flashing what we have rather than this control twice in series where one is offsetting the other we now have them in parallel and this is where we can actually make use of pizza as a three operator synth now if I just take away the modulation because it's going to be straightforward to hear it this way so if I turn this one up into the octave range and I turn this one up into the octave range combined still but if I turn this one down towards the ratio both modulators which allows us to get even more complex tones we'd be doing things like sending two different envelopes going different ways and sometimes they'll interact with each other in interesting ways it's the octave and if I send this one towards the ratio they're interacting with each other sometimes they're really interesting so that's a really big plus for this version of the firmware the fact that we now actually have in pizza a three operator FM synth essentially rather than just a two so coming down to the final button here when the wave light is flashing that's going to give us access to the wave control but on the control knob and similarly if we have fold flashing we've got access to the fold control and if ring is flashing we've got access to ring so what this allows us to do essentially is control two different shape parameters at once so if I want to have control over say fold and ring at the same time I can select fold to be controlled on the control knob come out of control mode and have ring selected so that's doing ring and now I have to both of those modulation sources at once and I can modulate them together with LFOs so we're not actually done with this button here if we scroll through past ring the two bottom lights light up and the observant among you would have noticed that indeed the module has gone silent so why is that so with these two bottom lights selected what we have on the control now is a VCA it's a inverting VCA actually so you do ring modulation externally with it but this means that we can use pizza as a complete voice without having to use a downstream VCA to give it an envelope or anything so for example if I take a trigger coming here out of PAM as I go into the gate input on a strip on stages take that output bring it into the control input we can now have a full voice without having to use a downstream VCA which is really useful and also as mentioned because this is inverting we can do real ring modulation with it as well using an external source as well now if I press this a final time all of the lights are going to light up and we're still not going to hear anything so this final mode here with all of the lights lit up is kind of special because it's going to make use of the sync input so what we have in this mode is it's still kind of using its internal VCA but it's going to provide us with its own internal envelope as well and this is new in version 1.1 so if I take my gate output of PAM and bring it into sync here we're here it starts to click a little bit and what the control knob is going to do in this case is effect our envelope shape so as we turn it up we get a longer attack to K envelope and going past the middle we get a longer attack on an attack to K envelope if we just slow down what PAM is doing here so this way both the attack and the decay gets longer and this way you just get kind of like a straight attack to K sound and we can modulate the shape of our envelope by modulating the control knob you may well want to make use of an offset to do this so you don't go down to zero each time but you get the idea that we can now get a full voice out of pizza without needing a downstream VCA or for simple sounds at any rate an envelope either what's even more exciting about this mode is that the envelope is also sent to the FM index which means as long as you don't have anything patched into the FM index the envelope is also being sent to that point so you don't even need to have an envelope to do your FM sound either obviously this works to invert it as well that's cool so for like getting a basic FM base out of pizza you literally don't need to send anything but a sequence and a gate into the sync which is very good news if you are dealing with a smaller setup and you don't always have envelopes and VCAs to spare you can never have too many VCAs and luckily as it turns out there's one inside pizza great news and that I believe is all of the current control destinations in version 1.1 given as we just used the sync input for a non-standard use let's talk about its standard use quickly if you're familiar with since you may be able to guess but the sync input allows us to reset the phase of the oscillators based upon another signal so maybe a common use for this might be to get that classic sync sound so if I maybe plug in the triangle output from this VCO here let's hear that and if we turn up let's just start with the octave output on pizza you can hear that I've tuned them pretty close to one another but not quite totally snapped in tune if I take another output from this VCO and plug it into the sync input on pizza then indeed they will snap exactly in tune and what that means now is we can do that classic sync trick of modulating the pitch of pizza the synchronized oscillator in this case to get those classic sync sounds so if we assign our control to the exponential FM that's probably the best one to do and now if we modulate the the pitch of pizza which I'll just use the knob for that we'll hear that classic sync sound and of course different wave shapes are going to give us different kind of sounds sawtooth and the wave is always good for sync sounds as I say square wave and that's on the octave oscillator where we've got those wave shapes we can also get really interesting sounds with FM sync really aggressive stuff aggressive vocal classic kind of sync sounds there there is also a nice sort of extra case for the sync control and that's more to do with when you're building certain types of patches where you need a nice clean attack so I'll just patch something off camera and show you what I mean so here I've just set up a really simple FM base patch so I'm triggering a gate from Pam's going into an envelope on stages I'm using the internal VCR on pizza and I've just got some FM going on in there so if I just start the clock going what I want you to listen to is the very attack of the note now it's subtle but you can probably hear the very attack of that note there seems to be a click at the start that's fading in and out it's inconsistent in terms of the attack of the note just have another listen and the reason for this is that the phase of the oscillators at the start of each note is not in the same place each time sometimes it's going to be high you're going to get a click at the start sometimes it's going to be in the middle where you're going to get a clean start or it's going to be negative and you're going to get a click with the opposite polarity so for base sounds in particular or plucky sounds in general this sort of relationship between the phase of the oscillator and the start of the note especially on a digital synth is going to be pretty interesting now if I take my gate signal from pams and take it up into a molt and I will just patch it back into stages for our envelope back down into here still got the click now listen to the start of the note if I take that same gate signal and patch it into our sync input that fading in and out click has disappeared it's really consistent every single note now so if you are interested in making sure that the start of your note, especially with a plucky sound is absolutely dead on every single time then the sync input just receiving the same trigger as your envelope is a really really nice technique if you're not using it to do sort of sync sounds obviously very nice the penultimate input that we need to talk about here is the external input what this allows us to do is override the octave oscillator going into the positive side of our FM index so for example if I take the trinal output of the 2HP here and plummet in here now it's this oscillator doing the FM on this side of the slider and that gives us some interesting possibilities to for example find other relationships between oscillators without going through setting up ratios but it also means that we could be sequencing the VCO separately to pizza which could get us all sorts of interesting harmonic and timeral options going sounds good another thing that you can do of course is plum well whatever you want into that external input and it allows you to kind of process it through FM and the other parts of pizza for example the wave folder so here I've got and I'll just grab a longer patch let me just hear it on Beehive which is Plats and we've just got this sort of particle noise kind of like a reverbing kind of little pops and crackles of a vinyl record and if we plum this into pizza on the external side output back up it becomes these little sort of like little drum hits almost because obviously modulating is going on in there you can hear that sort of throwing the the pitch around a little bit and then we can take that and then use the wave folder to get other sounds happening in there as well so a whole range of interesting additional things we could do in there we can even do things like plumbing samples in here so this is just a sample of a simple quick listen just a reverby piano sample one of my stand-by's and we can plumb that into the external input here and that with a little extra reverb it's real cool and of course we still have access to other ways of processing this so an important thing to note here is that this only replaces the octave oscillator at this point if we want to do ring modulation the octave oscillator is still there as it is also on the output as well so if we wave shape you'll be able to hear it change so you still got that octave oscillator output functioning as it was before it's just literally at this point on the FM index that we are replacing it that's so cool with the FMing it with with a sample what I'm going to do now that's what we'll do that in one of the demos ah yeah super cool so the final input we need to talk about here is the volts proctave which is what you use to set the tuning of the oscillators what we would use to sequence the pitch but it does actually have one extra little trick up its sleeve let me grab an elephone I'll go for an attenuator so it's not totally mad and plumb that into the volts proctave as you would expect maybe you should now be hearing a big ol vibrato as you would probably expect however one thing that we can do here is if we put pizza into pitch calibration mode so this is the mode you use to calibrate the volts proctave that's not what we're going to do here I'll just plug that for a second so if we press and hold this goes into calibration mode you can see here at the moment that our shape lights are pulsing if I tap this they're going to go to a stepped animation instead so if we come out of pitch calibration mode and we plumb our volts proctave back in what we have now is a quantized input on our volts proctave and it'll just quantize to a chromatic scale so if you want to use a random input into pizza but you don't have a quantizer spare we can set it into quantized mode and we can just send random in there and you've got pitches that are even tempered so I think now that is everything on pizza covered let's actually apply that and build a few patches so for this first patch we've got pizza being set up to just do a FM bass voice with a lot of variation going on all on its own we're not using any downstream VCA's I'm not even using any envelopes mostly random information into the inputs to build this patch out so let's break this patch down and talk about what's going on here so turn down the kick drum here and we'll just listen to the main output here and I'll just un-patch this cable and I'll just un-patch this one as well so what we have here is just a pitch sequence going in to false proactive and then I have a gate pattern going into the sync input and I have the control mode in the new envelope mode from version 1.1 and that's given us an envelope of the VCA and also of the index if I don't patch anything into the FM index then the internal envelope goes there as well so then I patched in another random sequence into the control input and that's going to then modulate the control amount and in the envelope mode it's going to modulate the envelope shape and that's why we're getting some more muted notes some more long held out notes it might be interesting actually to mult the pitch or an inverted version of the pitch sequence into here so that the high notes are sort of plucky that might be an interesting thing to do and then I've got my shape mode set to ring mod I've also got a slower slewed random source going in here which is pulling up the ring mod on some sections which is giving me that sort of grit and distortion then I have my octave output my octave oscillator is set to an octave down so I can use that as a sub which makes sure that the bottom end holds together even when we have those sort of more modulated things going on there and we combine that with kick and it's pretty cool I've also got my ratio set up here and I haven't got my ratio going into the FM instrument so it sounds like it goes that way also cool even cooler maps so I've got my ratio set quite a bit higher I think it's like two octaves and a fifth up so we've got that variation there as well and if we wanted to we could also turn up the what's the pulse output here but I've got it set to be my ratio oscillator we can set that over on the top there as well which is quite that cool FM vibe as well so no VCA's no filters, nothing downstream of pizza rather than my mixer making use of the internal envelope and VCA I'm not even having to use an envelope here so you can set pizza up in this way in the same way that you can with say, plates or rings where you don't really need to use any external envelopes in order to get those envelope shapes and it's quite neat we can turn our envelope inside out as well when we turn the control negative this might be cool if you actually malted the octave output that into a more sort of plucky envelope separately yeah, really cool what we have here is pizza being set up basically to act like a virtual analog VCO and the signal flow that I've got set up here is kind of the standard subtractive synth setup you've got VCO going into filter going into VCA we've got an envelope from stages to control both the filter and the VCO at the same time and that's just going through a tiny bit of reverb and then it out into the output then it's been sequenced by the SQ1 of course in terms of what's going on with pizza so we have the oscillator octave oscillator I should say output and the pulse output going into quadrat just to act as a mix up and the pulse here I've put pizza back into the mode the pulse output is actually a square wave output rather than the alternate mode where it's giving us the ratio oscillator and then what I've got going on then is I've got my control input assigned to the exponential FM of the octave oscillator which allows me to tune that oscillator so I've just got it assigned on stages here and I can tune that oscillator this is the octave oscillator that I'm tuning freely and then obviously I can change its octave range to about like that and that allows me to get detune between the two of them which is really really nice so you can hear that everything's just slightly detuned in case that nice rich, dare I say analog style sound if we just open up the filter a bit more the pulse wave output is only going to give us the pulse output which will sound like that's the pulse output there but you'll hear that I've got pulse width modulation going on there and that's because on the pulse output the FM index is going to do the pulse width and I've got a little bit of an LFO coming in here if I turn down the index mod here just got a nice steady square wave there but I can give it a little bit of LFO we get a movement where we can go with a faster movement like that which will be very nice and as I say on the other output we've got the octave output and we can tune its octave there and I've got a tunable on that slider there and of course on the octave output we also have the shape control which allows us to go between saw at one end through saw, through sine rather across to square wave if we want that as an alternate we could also obviously modulate that if we wanted to and then we can blend together and it sounds dare I say quite fat lovely low end in it and obviously you've always got to bear in mind that the total signal chain is going to be imparting things so the filter here is definitely overdrive it in a little bit and give us a little bit of roundness and dirt that way the VCA is pretty clean a tiny bit of reverb just for a bit of space but it's just there sort of subliminally but if you need a sort of VA kind of setup in a particular patch, pizza does you know, honestly a really quite good job some of that sort of unsteadyness that the humanness that we had in the sort of basic setup with the sine waves coming through here the detuning sounds natural as it beats against yourself so yeah, I mean in a pinch why not so my intention with this slightly less conventional patch here is to is to show off pizza in a slightly different light and I've tried to create a kind of excuse me now digital kind of environment here and the interesting thing to note here is that none of the sounds that you're hearing here involve any FM at all we're making use of the wave the wave folding and the ring modulation to get on with these different timbres there's no FM going on in here at all so really what I was trying to show is what we can get done without making use of excuse me now any FM at all so there's a lot of random stuff happening over here literally random not so like just stuff that I've plugged in randomly but there's lots of random generators going on here both in terms of time and envelope length and all that kind of thing so that's what's doing all the sort of sequencing inside of things in terms of what we're actually hearing we're just listening to the main output of pizza which I'm running into two low pass gates which are panned left and right and they're being triggered by envelopes over here those same envelopes are being used to modulate the wave folding which I've routed to the control input in this case so that I could do ring modulation as well on the shape input what I actually found in this case is that I thought although I was trying to make a digital Buchler kind of patch that actually the digital wave folding just sounded a bit better in this patch for whatever reason so that's what I went with again and then those are panned left and right in X-Pan and I've malted those out into MFX which is just running a reverb which I've brought up a little bit of over here now of course there's nothing to stop us from involving some FM as well that's pretty intense when we start to do that almost too intense kind of a bit noisy and digital really cool though and of course we could be a electrical storm going on there and of course we could also be sequencing the FM index as well to add even more time probably wouldn't need too much of it I think my ratio oscillates very slow so it's almost bringing in a very fast vibrato just off down that side that's pretty cool so until just then we would do no FM all wave folding, written modulation and obviously a fairly unconventional use of the oscillator but I'll just show it in a slightly less conventional light much quite a lot going on but the only thing that you're hearing is pizza although I am running some filtered noise into the external input on it actually let's try and break down what we're hearing so if I just turn that down for a second so what we're hearing now is just the octave oscillator output the pitch sequencing is coming from PAMS but I'm mixing that sequence in with a little envelope here so we're getting that sort of kick drum sound so if I turn that envelope down that's just the octave output on its own the kick attack there yeah I'm just mixing them together here and the octave output is being wave shaped slightly so it's slightly towards being a square wave push it further if you want that and that's basically what's going on with that then got that going through one of my channels on XPAN I'm just using that as a VCA as well as a paner and the envelope there groovy this other one so this is the main output on pizza and there's a bunch of stuff going on here probably guess so what's going on let's start with the FM bit here so the FM here is brought all the way across to the external side here and I'm negatively modulating the index here if I adjust my this one here I think yeah there we go so if I make that envelope that's modulating this a lot snappier then we're hearing that noise modulated FM there and we can kind of balance it so the start of the sound has a bit of noise and then we have a sort of a bit of a twine on the FM side there as it swoops across into the ratio oscillator the ratio oscillator its frequency has been modulated directly via the control input on the exponential FM there so I'm just sending a random sequence into there which is giving us all of these different FM tones there I've started with one that's quite low tuned so we're getting all sorts of things going on there unpredictable but we've got that envelope that's kind of ground what's going on anything else to talk about on that one next so the output there again is going into a channel of expan which I'm using both as a VCA and I'm also panning it around with random voltage so if we put this back into here get our kick back and then all of this is going into MFX which is just running a compressor module just to get a little more thwack out of the kick drum but not affecting at all that much yeah so quite a lot of modulation but we're getting what sounds like two different voices out there the bass sound and kick drum and the on top straight out of pizza so in this patch I'm using pizza as a distortion processor so we've got this break here and I'm molting that up here so we can hear it dry and then it's going into pizza on the external input so it means that it's going to be phase modulating pizza but rather than a tonal thing it's a drum so let's turn it up so obviously this is under quite heavy modulation let's take all of that away and actually hear what we have got so if we put the FM index in the middle we're just hearing pizza being pizza it's tuned down really low but because we have the break coming into the external input as I turn up the FM index we start phase modulating pizza with the drum loop which has a really gnarly sound really cool what I've also got here on the index mod is I've just got a rhythmic envelope coming in so we can use that as kind of like a VCA into our FM distortion kind of thing going on so I'm using it to kind of get this threes against two kind of feel but once we've got anything happening at this end any of the later processing to the shape in particular it's going to turn up the drum loop as well so I've got my shape slider set to waveform to turn it up there's some really cool timers on there to be had just down there at the bottom which sort of brings up that second harmonic on the snaz really cool looks like back in the bootcliff style folding and then on the control knob I've got that set to the ring modulator so I've got ring modulating and folding on I just unplug the oscillation there we can absolutely mangle it with the octave ring mod and obviously tuning pizza to kind of match the fundamental of the kick drum lobby really cool just to fine tune it it's not far off now I don't think and then if I go the other way I've got the ratio oscillator which is quite a lot higher and then what I've got here in terms of my modulation is I've got a stepped random for the ring mod so it's going to ping back with the force between the two different it's almost like an octave kind of melody line there here I've got the stepped random for the shape so I get some of that that way folding and she's again going to give us those octaves as it does the digital distort folding and then I've got that rhythmic thing happening here mix that back in with the dry sound and then just for funsies I've also got the octave output just on the mixer as well if you want to add in that such a cool way to use a really filthy, filthy sound everything's on rhythmically integrated so in this patch you're not actually hearing pizza, what you're hearing right now is the 2HB VCO going into one side of the ADUK virtual filter a little bit of stereo slapback and out into the output what pizza's doing in this patch is acting as an LFO which is what's rubbing around our filter and you can hear that we're getting quite a complex interesting LFO shape, it's periodic but it's certainly not just a triangle wave right so the way I'm doing this is in my Volta Pro Octave I've got some negative CV and that's allowing me to bring the frequency of pizza down below audio rate it will be below audio rate if you turn the octave all the way down in a lot of cases but not probably low enough for most LFO users so I've got some negative CV going in there to bring it right the way down normally when we apply the FM index to an audio rate version of pizza we introduce those harmonics, those side bends what we're ultimately doing is making the wave shape more complex and that's exactly what's happening when we're using it as an LFO by applying FM index we are changing the shape of our LFO and introducing these interesting new shapes and of course it's going to matter like it does with audio and direct stuff and watch the ratio between our carrier and our modulator is, so if I bring my FM index into the centre we'll get something that's more just being a sine wave and if I bring it across to the octave oscillator we're going to get a different shape again more predictable than what we had with our more complex ratio oscillator but certainly an interesting sound if we come back over to the ratio oscillator and choosing different ratios that I've got set up here are going to give us different shapes as well that's really cool that one awesome oh yeah that one's much faster so we're actually starting to audio rate modulate our carrier that one now on top of this of course if we change the wave shape of our modulators by moving the shape around we'll get again really different sounds awesome trills in there okay the other way and on the control knob here I've got it set up to do the wave folding so again this is going to change our shape drastically as well make it faster generally as we fold the LFO in on itself the interesting thing here though is that on top of our main output of course we do also have our octave oscillator output and I've got my pulse here and the ratio oscillator so we can bring these in as well so this should be the ratio one and because the ratio oscillator is what is responsible for changing the frequency of my main output it's going to be related in terms of its tempo if you like to what's going on on the other side and I've also got my my octave oscillator here on this one here which again is going to be somewhat related because it's going to be a division of what's going on on the carrier so we've got these complex interactions but because the ratio and the octave oscillator are related in terms of their frequency to the carrier they're all going to kind of interact with each other in interesting ways so I'm going to put a pitch sequence into the VCO here and obviously because we've got this sort of complex LFO movement going on here things are going to sort of walk over it but we shouldn't forget that Peter has a sync input and the sync input usually is used to bring the start of our notes together or to do those kind of sync sounds but when we think about it LFO rates we can also apply an LFO rate sync signal on this output here I have a clock which is going every 16 beats and if we plug this in here it's going to phase reset our LFOs every 16 beats which is going to give us some consistency in the way that our LFOs are moving so and as I say repetition legitimizes and as you hear that same shape going back around again and again we start to get used to that complex shape and even if we start applying we can hear how it's always putting kind of back in time or although that timing is kind of poly-rhythmic because it's resetting every 16 beats we're still sort of feeling the rhythm in there and of course we can change the division if we want it to happen more often so we can create these really complex really complex wave shapes with our LFOs here but still have them musically work as we bring them back into sync by throwing a signal into the sync there and actually Peter makes for a really really interesting modulation source because of this kind of musically related but complex wave shape and it's not what you'd maybe buy for for its main job but if you've got quite a few voices going on inside your rack you can make for a really interesting modulation source I'll certainly be giving it a go in this guys because I don't really have anything else that could create these source patterns it's an awesome kind of offbeat skank to that one here we go, Peter turns out a really cool LFO this whims a cool bleepie-bleepie patch that we've got here what you're hearing is a combination of the main output and the octave output of Peter being mixed together going through a low pass gate and into some delay for the little hysteric movement in terms of what the octave oscillator sounds like well it's just set as a sub octave so it's at the minus one position here on the switch and I've come onto the wave shape here and I've just put it not quite all the way to square wave but just give it a little bit of hair just sounds like a nice oscillator sound going through a low pass gate which is always a wonderful thing so that's basically giving us some sort of weight and see what's meant if we listen to the main output that's where all of the movement is happening and there's kind of two things that I'm taking advantage of here I guess the main thing if I just turn this down for a second that will disappear so the main thing that's going on here really is that the external input here which is replacing the octave oscillator on the FM side of things is coming from the 2HP BCO here just the triangle output and what I'm doing is I'm sequencing the pitch of the 2HP separately to the pizza but they are tuned together to begin with and the sequence that I've picked for them are both sort of within the same scale and I'm sticking with like really simple scales I think it's just pentatonic or maybe even just octaves and fifths coming into the BCO and what that means is that although the relationship between the two oscillators keeps moving we are still getting stuff that mostly makes sense so we're not into any sort of really really atonal places there are a couple of places where it's a little more atonal than others but nothing too offensive the second thing that I'm taking advantage of and maybe if I just turn down this for a second and turn this back to where it was is that I have set up the control inputs which are just being controlled with an envelope coming from stages here to be in the FM index mixer mode which means that I have access to both the ratio oscillator when I turn it this way and my external input when I turn this up this way so sometimes we're getting just the 2HP sometimes we're getting just the ratio oscillator built into pizza and sometimes we're getting both which is where we get that sort of noisy block of sound almost a percussive noise going on in there so we get a whole range of different timbres going in there, a lot of different interests happening and pizzas do most of the work except for obviously I am ascending in an oscillator in there and just adding that low end back in just holds everything together and just balancing the index mods here so I get something that envelope shapes the movement in there but it never gets truly out of control earlier in the video I waxed lyrical about the quality of the sine wave on pizza and it is maybe a little weird to get all misty eyed about the quality of a sine wave sound but I do really like the sine wave that comes out of pizza so I wanted to make sure that I had represented that in a patch just what this is aiming to do so I'll just strip away everything that isn't very different pizza so I'll just go into the reverb and the drone which is coming from rings there and what we're left with is just pizza being sequenced and it's output the octave output going to a bunch of 4 low pass gates which have just been pinged open by pams over here so although the sound is sort of pinging left and right we are only hearing one output from pizza here and that's just the octave output so we're just hearing the sine wave output because the shape knob is currently set in the middle and it's lovely and weighty at the bottom end at the top it's just got a little humanity to it there's a little bit of crackle and inside there it's not a perfect sign but that's what makes it sound lovely and when we give it a little bit of reverb and get some of the outer low pass gates to open up a few more times to create a kind of fake delay this is just done incidentally by using the logic on pams there's a sort of master clock and then all of the things which are opening up the low pass gates are set as a logic and with the master clock and then I've got various either Euclidean or random rhythms in there and this is increasing the width of the gate pattern on the master clock which means that more of the pulses get that through because of the end logic it's a nice way of getting variations that sort of fill things out quite naturally and I have actually got the control input plugged in here and it's set to control the wave shape just on a long LFO from stages so if you did want to move away from those sine waves and get a little bit more toggle movement going on inside so we can just open this up a little bit and then as the LFO sweeps across we'll get some sort of partial sores where the sine wave has just been slanted and some partial square waves where the tops of the sine wave have been sort of shaved off so more brightness in the sound at times and then to complete the patch I've just added a drain from rings because you've got to sometimes if only I had clouds in this row to really complete things just opening up that shape a little bit more so again a few more obvious sort of soft saw waves FM is one of my favourite places to do drones so in this patch we've got pizza just droning away while I modulate a bunch of stuff so what's been modulated just slow random modulation mostly through stages we have the D tune is coming in on the control input which means that that sort of movement and beating in the patch is constantly moving around sort of revealing almost rhythms within the sound we've also got the FM index being modulated and that's been pushed towards just the ratio oscillator which is tuned a fifth above so it's kind of fairly consonant but a little bit more movement than we would get with an octave and of course it's being D tuned as well which gives you some other things going on in there as well I'm also modulating the shape which is set to ring mod in this case and for the ring mod I'm pushing it only towards the octave oscillator which is set to the octave below and that's bringing in that sort of distortion in places I'm actually using all of the outputs coming out of Peter the pulse output is set to the ratio oscillator rather than the pulse wave because I'm not doing any wave shaping I'm actually taking the ratio and the octave and bringing them into tertiary now just to give them a little bit of grit and sort of take the top off the waveform just to give it a little bit more harmonic content the main output is just coming straight out that's all bringing what together inside X-Pen and I'm just gently panning the octave output around a little bit as well to give it a little bit of extra stereo movement that's all then being brought into dual filter here from ADAC which is taking some of the top end off but I am modulating that filter cutoff as well just to give it a bit more movement there which allows us to have some darker moments and then some more aggressive brighter moments the output of X-Pen is also being molted into MFX here which is giving us some reverb because you got it, right? and that's all just being mixed together we get this sort of quite ominous evolving drone sometimes you can kind of hear that fifth above or obviously you can kind of get a cool one happening in there and other times it's just