 Hello OscillatorSync here and welcome back to the final video in the series where we are taking a deep dive look into the sequencer on the Korg Oddwave. So over the previous videos we have taken a look at the pitch and the shape and the sequencer lanes and we've seen how we can use them to create complex interesting evolving patterns by way of making use of probability and the different lengths of each of those different lanes. But there's been one thing that's been consistent throughout all of that and that is that the length of a step has always been the same. It's always been that sort of 16th feel there. So in this video we're going to take a look at the final lane which is the timing lane and this is a very interesting addition to the sequencer because it allows us to modulate within the sequencer how long each step takes. So let's take a look at that. So let's come into the timing lane here. So if you've watched the other videos in this series this will mostly pretty familiar to you. There's a couple of new things in there obviously that are unique to the timing lane but we have our loop points to start and end our loop off where our timing sequence is running within the sequence. As we have seen previously these start and end points are modulatable so that's something to bear in mind that we can create more complex patterns by modulating the loop start and end points. We have the mode which allows us to change the direction of the sequence for the timing lane including random which is pretty interesting. One thing to note on the timing lane that I've noticed is that if we set it to go in reverse the Pistopid bug where it always goes forwards the first time if you watch the lights here and then it starts going backwards. I think that's just straight up a bug. That being said there's not a whole lot of benefit to be able to go backwards in the timing lane usually I don't think. So it doesn't bother me too much but it's worth bearing in mind. Our repeats here has a slightly different meaning to the repeats on all of the other lanes. So if I come into the pitch lane and I turn my repeats down to off what we get is this. So we go through the sequence and then we get to the end and we stay at the end. Now because the timing lane is actually controlling the steps of the sequence and whether or not they are advancing functionally if we turn the repeats to off on this what we get instead is a situation where the sequencer stops. So it's a slightly different thing going on here. So what we can do in the timing lane is set essentially a way of creating a single hit sequence that happens for each key press and then doesn't repeat. So for example if we set this like pretty fast we can use it to get these sorts of 8-bit arpeggios. So that's actually a really useful thing in the timing lane. It is a way of us controlling the overall progression of the sequence and if we want it to be a one-shot this is how we can do it all. A two-shot or whatever it needs to be. For now I'm just going to set that to infinite however. We also have note advance here which works the same as it does on the other sequences. It just means that for each time we press a note. We're going to start at a different step which of course only really makes any sense if we have something going on inside the sequence but that's there as it is on the other sequence lanes as well. So the timing lane can operate in two different ways or two different domains if you like. The first as I have it set here is that it's set to work with the tempo of the synth, essentially the midi clock that's coming in or the internal clock that's running. And if we're set like this what we have on our speed control here is the ability to change the multiplier for the clock. So that's the normal clock we can go to for example twice as fast or half as fast and some other fractional ones in here as well. Let's get that triplet fill. Of course if you remember the sequencer is a unique thing for each layer so we can use this across multiple layers to get at different kind of timing fields. So for example I've just got on layer B just a hi-hat that's going. And if I change the speed of the timing lane here we can get that kind of triplet fill over the 4-4 that's happening on the other layer so that's pretty neat. So I'll just turn it off just for a moment. When we're in this tempo mode the other thing that we have ability to do in the timing lane is adjust the swing of the overall sequencer. So if you want to add swing into our pattern and we can also change the note value that the swing is working on and this can lead to some really complex swing patterns. Especially when we bring in the other. Get that sort of drunk triplet swung thing which is really cool. Not sort of swing options that you have on a lot of synths actually. So it's nice to have it there as an option for now I'm just going to turn swing back off. So that's the timing lane working with the tempo of the synth but we can also turn off the tempo mode which we can do by holding shift and tapping that button there and now we have a situation where we are just working with time and just as a spoiler alert if we come into each of the steps now we are literally setting the number of seconds or fractions of seconds that each of these steps is going to take. So this takes us out of the domain of something that's tempo synced and into the world of having something which is just taking up a particular length of time so we can do very very fast things here for example he wants to do those sorts of arpeggios that aren't related to the tempo. We can also use this to do very very slow things of course I don't know what the maximum length for a step is we'll find out in a second perhaps. So if we're in this mode instead of having a tempo that time division multiplier we've just got a scalar for the speed which just works linearly and we should not overlook that like most things on the mod wave this parameter is modulatable so if we wanted to we could modulate the speed with let's just use the mod wheel and turn that up nice and high and now we have on the mod wheel a way to modulate the time there now that also works for the for the tempo divisions as well so if I just delete that on there and I come back to my tempo so my timing here and I turn the tempo back on we can also modulate the speed here but that's a different parameter as far as it's considered at the back end so we have to do it separately so we add that and to that speed tempo use the mod wheel again and to continue and this is going to be working with the the division instead it's going to stay in time if you like with so with another thing that's going on the clock so let's just remove that for now as well so I don't accidentally knock the mod wheel and wonder what the hell is going on during the rest of the video cool so that's the the sort of main page the master page for the timing lane let's actually go into the individual steps and see what we can do there so let's just start with the tempo turned off so we can see how drunk we can make things by just changing the the time of each step in seconds so we can come into each of these different steps and we can change the duration of one of those steps so let's make that one a bit longer make this one a bit shorter make this one very short make this one a bit longer and so on and we should be able to create a really really drunk sequence if that's the kind of thing that we after so you can create these really sort of complex grooves but of course this isn't tempo synced to anything so if we put the hi-hat in you can see this just meandering all over that particular pulse there there is a way that we can constrain this a little bit which is by making use of the master page so we can come into the master page here and so the master lane thinks the first time I've actually mentioned it so this is the master lane the master lane allows us to constrain how the whole sequence is repeating so it gives us a overall length of the sequence at which point it will restart so if we turn that on here we've got the loop duration set to three seconds so every three seconds this is now going to restart no matter where it is so you can kind of hear that falling back into it there now unfortunately with the master lane if the timing lane is set to not have a tempo there's no way for us to turn the master lane to have a tempo and have this sort of drunken falling over itself thing repeat across a number of bars so if I turn the tempo on in the master lane it turns it on everywhere which is real shame because I would be really really good to be able to have this sort of drunken lopping kind of sequence that then still always restarts on on like the fourth bar or the one bar or whatever it happens to be so you can still have that really drunk feel but have it synchronized with the tempo somehow you can still kind of get that drunken feel by making use of some of those triplet swings and stuff so yeah we can still create that sort of that sort of lo-fi drunken feel for the sequence but it's a shame we can't lock it on the master lane but if you do work out your BPM you can work out how long a number of bars lasts in seconds and then you can kind of create the loop duration based on that but yeah it's a shame that we can't still lock it to tempo but I digress one thing that is interesting and useful to note on the timing lane is that if you switch between tempo and free timing you still get it still saves what was previously on the steps in those two different modes that kind of stored us two different values so we've got our drunk sequence here if I go and turn tempo back on it's back to being tempo sync but if I turn tempo off we've got a drunk sequence again so that's nice if you're experimenting with different feels I think the reality is though that most people want to use this with the tempo sync thing for more traditional sequencing anyway so let's turn that on and now if we come into our individual steps in our duration rather than having seconds we have a note value and also a multiple of those notes so the simplest thing to hear here maybe would be to make this first step take twice as long as everything else I've got the master turned on still there you can hear it repeating there we go so let's turn that master back off so we can hear it just going freely that first note is always going to be the same note because our timing lane and our pitch lane are the same length if we were to change the length of one of them like let's change the length of the timing lane here what we'll have now is that that longer note is going to happen every seven steps which is going to offset where it sits within our pitch so we've got that kind of evolving falling over itself sequence but it's not the pitch that is changing it's how long the seventh step or the first step of seven is each time so we get this really cool evolution of our sequence it's a really classic sort of techno trick really but we can do other things as well let's go back to eight steps here so we could for example on these last three set these to be triplets like that which is really cool right now this is working for us because of the length of our length of our sequence but if you wanted to make things evolve but still sound right so for example if I come back to the timing here I try and add just a step at the end this is going to sound kind of but you're here it doesn't sound great you kind of lose sort of where everything sits so if you're making use of some of the more complex timing options inside the timing lane and you still want things to sound cohesive and sort of musically easy to understand you do need to do a little bit of maths and work out how many steps you're going to want in your timing lane as opposed to your other lanes so that kind of sounds a bit more sort of easy to understand now that I've got 12 steps in the timing lane now we could go with something that's a little harder to parse and because we don't have that repetition it's kind of hard to hear where where things lie but if we come into the master here and make use of that maybe two bars is even too much there see there now everything is repeating once per bar so we've got that more complex part going on there but because we now got a repetition that we can easily hold on to things are a little bit easier to understand so the thing to bear in mind with making use of the master lane is it's going to reset everything including all of your other sequences here so it does mean that it constrains you a little bit in terms of how you can create evolve them patterns because they're going to naturally not evolve as much because they're they're repeating but we can go for longer repetitions and still hopefully hear what's going on see just having to repeat every four bars just grounds the sequence so if you are you making use of the timing lane to do these kind of complex patterns of timing you do need to maybe consider how you're going to ground that to make it sound musical so I'll just set these back to the defaults one other thing that you can for sure do with the timing lane is make use of it to do ratchets by going with much lower values here I'm gonna do four of those but it's not going to repeat what's in the in the pitch lane in this case it's it's just going to ratchet through them in sequence so it's not a true ratchet on each of those steps to do that you'll have to modify what you're doing in the pitch lanes perhaps but certainly of all the things that I use that for that's one of the ones I keep coming back to now if we want to create stuff that again is sort of musically meaningful but evolves a little bit we could also make use of the random order of course so perhaps if I set this one to be three notes long and then we trim off two notes then three notes there so we've got a nice of lullaby feel there but if we go into the random order here we can maybe get something which is evolving in more interesting ways which somehow works better than just having something sat at the start each time for me I don't know what it is about it but of course because this is going to be happening per note if we play two notes at the same time we get interesting interactions between them as the different notes start to go over each other in different ways right let's turn the random off and get this back to just one note thing and go back to eight notes here because we should probably probably a pun intended talk about probability so probability on the timing lane works differently to probability on all of the other lanes so we come into the pitch lane just to remind ourselves if I set the probability of this first note well let's set it to zero what's going to happen is that this step is going to be skipped over every single time so we're going to have essentially a seven step sequence right and if we set this somewhere in the middle then sometimes it'll get skipped and sometimes it won't which will give us that kind of phasing thing happening we turn on the hi-hat we can hear that our sequence has been pushed and pulled into different places as we go through so probability normally on the other lanes just skips over that step on the tempo sorry on the timing lane I should say it works a little bit differently so if I set let's just set the probability of this fifth step and set it to zero so it will never actually fire now if the timing lane work same as everything else having a step in the timing lane set to zero probability but all of the other steps being identical it should just roll through right but what we get instead is this so what's happening here well we can kind of see it if we look in the sequence for you here if you watch the timing which is the top one as opposed to the pitch one you'll see that it is skipping that step but the length of that step is still being taken into consideration so what we're talking about with probability on the timing lane is not at the probability that the step will fire it's the probability that step will make the rest of the sequence advance so you see the rest of the sequence is pausing each time we get there so if we set this step to be a probability that somewhere in between we'll get this same thing where things are being thrown out of sync but it's happening in a different way what's happening is that at some point the sequencer pauses essentially so this is a really interesting way for us to get complexity into a sequence that's otherwise pretty straightforward and probably the most effective way to do it compared to like the the change in the length of things in my opinion I think this is a more instant way to get stuff that sounds right most of the time maybe if we layer up another note as well and as long as your notes are chosen carefully so they don't clash too badly you can use this to create evolving patterns evolving rhythmic ideas which are different to having the probability set in our other steps the one thing we haven't discussed on a per step basis is this type parameter here now it's been set to note for all of the stuff we've been doing so far what that means is that any step that has a note type on it it's going to progress the sequencer as normal and it's also going to fire out a step to any thing that's listening for a step so for example in this patch I've got it so that a step in the sequence there is going to fire off my amp and filter envelope which is why we're getting the sound that we're getting there you don't have to set it with that way but that's how I got it set up at the moment but of course we can change it that's why it's a parameter here so the first thing we can change it to is a rest and what a rest will do is it will still progress the sequencer but it won't fire out a step so anything that's listening for a step is not going to hear it it's also not going to do whatever is sat inside each of the other sequences so it will go back to a default value for each of those so you can hear that on step five now we're not getting a note being fired off and if we rest on this one as well you can hear that you've got that gap happening there our filters are being opened up etc the other thing that's happening there which is subtle when I play this note is that on those steps in the pitch sequence so it's going back to whatever note I'm holding down now that could be a problem because in my pitch lane here I've got fit to scale turned on so it's always playing in C minor so when I am playing a note which still kind of works within that scale and it drops to that sort of unset note that's fine but if I play like an E natural when it gets to that rest it's going to sound pretty gross playing that E natural against it whereas when I had notes going on in those steps so that one and that one even when I'm playing in any natural because of the way the pitch lane is set up I still get something that's in C minor it's fitting it to to the scale so that's something to watch out for there now of course with the rest they work the same as everything else in terms of the length so we can use that rest to lay things out differently and the same with the probability as well so you combine the fact that things aren't getting fired things aren't progressing to get again pretty complex sounds and we can make use of the master if we wanted to to re-synchronize that every couple bars again to get to the revolving but meaningful sequences going on there the last type that we have here is called gate and what gate does what gate does I'll qualify that in just a second is that when it gets to the gate on the the timing lane is it stops sequence to make sure we can see what's going on here if we come back here so we get six it just stops so the manual says that it should stop when it gets there and the sequence should restart when it sees a note off but it doesn't the manual is wrong or there's a bug I don't know which one it is I don't know which one of those things would be more useful but there we go that is the situation is that it just stops when it gets there so what's this for so there are a couple of different things we can do with with the gates that are actually quite useful again this is going to lead to a situation where there is a finite sequence no matter what we do here but for example if we set our mode to random what we have essentially is a little phrase generator which is actually pretty cool and has definitely some really interesting practical applications you could have random stuff going on in the pitch we could also have pitch set up to note advance so that it sort of naturally moves through a particular sequence so there are definite things that the gates can be used for but you have to think about its application musically in terms of what you're trying to create it certainly not going to be a patch where you're just holding down a key and something continues to happen the whole time but yeah having the gate in there is a really interesting way to create different lengths we can also for example modulate the start length and sorry the start position in our pattern based upon velocity and you could set up a timing pattern where you have multiple gates going on there and then you can be modulating the start position based on say the mod wheel and that allows you to move through different musical phrases or with the velocity or something like that so there's definitely some applications there but it's not necessarily as obvious as an application as most of the other modes for the steps in the timing later I don't think so I think that probably concludes our little excursion through the I think wonderfully creative sequence on the mod wave as I said many times I'm sure I think the secret is probably my favorite aspect of the mod wave and I'd love to see some of these ideas turn up in future sense I mean I can't know so I'd love to have this sequence on the up six for example but it is what it is if you enjoyed this video and if you enjoyed the series I hope it was helpful as always leaving a like on the video really helps out the channel and make sure you're subscribed so you don't miss out on any upcoming synth fun that we have planned on the channel but otherwise until next time take care