 Hello, Osleigh to sync here. I think when the mod wave was first released, a lot of attention was given to the wave part of the name. The last few years have kind of seen this resurgence in interesting wavetable synthesis and rightly so, I think it's a great way to explore sounds. But I think really where the real power of this synth lies actually is in the mod part of the name because the way that the modulators are laid out, the types of modulation sources that we have, the way that we can mangle them, the way that we can have them interact, and the very, very extensive mod matrix on this synth. Actually, the fact that it's a wavetable synth is always not that important. The way that you can interact with that synthesis engine with this extensive set of modulation options is really where the excitement lies for me personally anyway. To that end over the course of the next few videos, I'd like to explore each of the different modulation sources on the mod wave and talk about why they're interesting and what sort of creative things you can do with them. Because the level of flexibility in some of these modulation sources really are only otherwise available in the in the world of modular and even then selling on every module that you're going to come across. So there aren't many synths that I feel like I could spend an entire video talking about its envelopes, but the mod wave is one of them and that is what we're going to do in this video today. So the first thing we should probably note before we talk about any particular features of the envelopes is that we have four of them on the mod wave and they are labeled filter amp oscon and os2. What is important to note about each of these envelopes is that you can send them anywhere. The only one that has to go to the place that's listed here is the amp. The amp will always go to the amp, so the loudness of each note that's being played, but filter os1 and os2, they're kind of suggested that that's where they're going and there are sort of pre-rooted knobs for you to turn to send them there, but you don't have to send them there and you can send them to any other modulatable parameter on the synth. So the next thing that we should probably look at here is what type of envelope we are dealing with and it is for all intents and purposes our good old familiar ADSR attack, decay, sustain and release envelope. And if you'd like to learn a little bit more about how envelopes work then I'll put a link in the description to a video that I did about envelope recipes, but this is probably the envelope type that we're most familiar with seeing on most synths. One thing that is definitely worth noting about the envelopes that aren't the envelope is that our sustain can be negative and that's a really really interesting thing. Let's take a look at how that might be used. So I've just got an initialised patch here with just a little bit of release on my amp envelope here and if I will just stick with the filter envelope I think as a starting point we'll just darken the filter a little bit like that and our filter envelope is currently set up, we'll have it in a sort of standard way that you would maybe expect to see kind of a slightly plucky patch here and if we give that some some envelope amount there on the filter this is kind of the standard filter set up isn't it really. A little bit of resonance we've got that pluck it's sitting at a particular point and then we have that sort of dying away aspect at the end there it's sort of typical of a standard sort of filter set up. The nice thing with the envelope on the filter here is that we can set our sustain to be lower than its starting point. Let me open up the filter overall a little bit so it goes down to a really low place and then swoops up as you release which is kind of a different feel than you're able to easily get on a lot of synths which I quite like and it's just one of those things that through the nature of this envelope set up we can achieve so rather than dying down we die which is very nice. So each of our envelopes has three pages the first is where we can set the envelope shape with the ADS up and I'll just set this to be like a little kind of sound maybe like a second decay and same on the release something like that. On page two we have this ability to alter the curve so what does this actually do and what does it do to our patch sonically. So we're going to start with the amp envelope here because it's probably where we can most easily hear what's going on here so the curve allows us to change each of our the movement parts of our envelope our attack our decay and our release between being linear and exponential or logarithmic as it is on the attack portion. So let's just listen to what that does before we talk about why and what it might be used for so I'm just going to my decay portion of my envelope here I'm going to set it back to linear I want you to listen to the way that the tail end of the note kind of goes. Can you hear the very end of that note there it's kind of unnatural right it kind of just feels like it dies very quickly at the end there despite the fact that it's got a smooth transition to zero and that's because in the real world the volume of things don't tend to die off like that in a linear fashion. Now if we contrast that with say setting it halfway so this is halfway between linear and exponential and listen again to the very end of the note sounds a lot more natural right the very end of the note seems to die off a lot more sort of sensibly you might think that also if you compare that with linear if we listen to the starter note now when we go halfway here that very first part of the note is now sort of pluckier and a bit more tacky so what's happening here is as we move towards exponential at the very end here with exponential the start of the decay will be very steep it will go through a sort of more or less linear portion in the middle and then the end of it where it's already very very low is going to be very very smooth linear on the other hand obviously just goes down in a linear fashion so here the start is a bit more abrupt and the end is a bit more smooth and if we go right the way to the end the start is very abrupt very plucky and the end is it's very smooth although we can't necessarily hear all of it because we're so low by the time that we get there again in the middle and then quite unnatural there when you hear it with the linear so generally for the amp envelope we probably do want it somewhere in the middle somewhere from sort of five upwards and we can still even with our 10 where it feels like it's dying off a lot faster we can kind of compensate by lengthening the decay and we still get that much more plucky start out of it and so sort of balancing the decay time and the curve can get you slightly different characters of both the onset and end of our sound it's a really really nice way to find chain what's going on in your patch so on the other hand we have our attack here so I'll just send this fairly long like not 20 seconds but maybe like 10 seconds somewhere around there yeah and then we'll come into the second page here where we have our curve here we'll start what we're doing start with a linear attack and listen to the very start of the note on this can you see how it almost felt like there was a lag to the onset of the sound like actually when I play the note it almost doesn't start straight away if we turn this up maybe to halfway again what this is going to do is the kind of the opposite to the exponential and that is that the very start of the note is going to go and the very start of the curve is going to increase quite quickly go to a kind of linear bit and then sort of slow down at the end and now so this was the linear onset if we go to a logarithmic or sorry a halfway can you hear there that the start of the note happens quite quickly but then we still get all of that movement throughout the rest of the range so for very very long envelopes being able to switch to something approaching a logarithmic envelope especially for attack that can make sure that your patch still kind of starts when you play a note and right the way at the other end at at at 10 comes on real quick and then a lot of movement happens in the middle and then when it slows down towards the top of the attack you don't hear so much movement because it's moving so slowly by that point but this means that you can have obscenely long like 90 second envelopes and still start as soon as you hit the key but then still have all of that movement happen up there so generally with our amp envelopes we're going to want to have somewhere sort of you can probably a bit lower than five but somewhere between sort of like three and ten would generally be a good place for our amp envelopes and as you go longer and longer you might want to consider going more logarithmic to accommodate that so if my advice is for amp envelopes to stick towards the exponential logarithmic side of things what's the point of having the range really so it's nice for fine tuning on the other modulation sources we can be a bit more creative with our curves and not necessarily stick so hard and fast to this rule so i'm just going to set this back to be like a gate with a bit of a release something like that maybe let's move over to the filter for a second and i'll just shut the filter down a bit and give us some mount there so here i want to set this like a plucky thing like that something like that so at the moment the way this is set what are we doing the way this is set is that we're sort of halfway again if i set this back to linear for our decay that's still a very useful sound compared to the halfway and compared to full exponential very plucky now that first bit feels a lot more abrupt and sharp so for maybe trying to do like a really sort of acidic plucky attack to a to a bass line or something we might want to go towards the exponential but i think like the the linear portion here sounds almost more like someone smoothly moving a novel right it's a bit more synthetic but synthetic is good on a synth you know that's what that's kind of what we want sometimes so here it's a much more creative choice much more of a static choice rather than something that's sort of like you probably want exponential most of the time that's not the case on modulating other parameters other than amplitude again also on the attack if we give this a bit of a longer attack so here's a linear attack and frankly that's perfectly nice again it kind of sounds to me like someone turning the filter on which is which is nice if we go to the extreme within logarithmic we kind of get that swoop in a lot sooner which again is really nice and it's a purely aesthetic choice the other side effect of having this set to logarithmic instead you might be able to hear is that it feels like we've got an attack portion and then it kind of chills out more or less at the top because that last part of our curve is so gentle that it's almost a way of delaying our decay portion so it feels like it's finished but the decay only just kicked in there right so we can also use this to almost give us a pseudo hold section on our attack envelope as well which is cool and again it's going to vary from parameter to parameter and patch to patch well what you don't want to do here but like I say unlike the amp envelope this curve fine tuning gives us a lot more of a creative license to do stuff that's interesting I think on other parameters okay so having those really flexible curves on the envelope a really nice way of fine tuning things but the final page of our envelope actually gives us something that's really quite exciting so let me just set this back to be like a plucky friend again and I'll do something like that great okay so page two we have our curve page three we have this trigger page and this is the same on all of them the difference with amp compared to the other pages is that on the other page we have this trigger at note on setting and I'll talk about that in a second but they all basically function in the same way otherwise and what we're able to do on this page is say that I want this envelope to not necessarily only trigger because I press the note and so I want this to trigger because of something else and that list of other things is basically any modulation source in the entire synth so anything that we can use to modulate another thing we can also use to trigger this envelope and this is really really exciting so as a basic example here if I set the trigger source to be our um let's use our our amp LFO in fact there we go um our amp LFO is sat here it's going at um two hertz and if I now play a note you can hear that my amp envelope is being triggered over and over again to be clear this isn't the amp LFO that's actually doing this if I was to change the shape of my envelope it's absolutely the envelope that's being triggered here the LFO is just being used as a source to trigger it that's really cool so I'm just going to get rid of that for a second move that back over to off there we go so back to our normal implementation and I just want to show you a few different applications of this envelope trigger that are I think particularly interesting and creative and hopefully that will spark some other ideas for you to look at as well so the first example I want to give you is related to the sequencer so I'm just going to set this um amp envelope just to be a little plucky friend again so something like I'll do yeah okay so um let me just give it some release as well there's a little plucky sound so um we'll talk about the sequencer in depth in another video because there's a lot to talk about about the sequencer but the thing that you need to know about the sequencer is that it's not a normal sequencer it's not kind of a sequence that you play things into and then they sort of play back I'll show you what what I mean um so if I come across to the pitch lane here and I'll just make our sequence a little bit shorter maybe just like six notes or something and um let's just sequence some notes in here or rather sequence some offsets because you sequence the transposition of the note that's playing rather than um the actual note that's playing which allows you to repitch the sequence on different notes by playing different notes on the keyboard as I say there's a whole other video about this please don't see this as a limitation what I'm about to show you because the flexibility that this gives you to do other stuff outside of normal sequencing I'd much rather have this on this synth in particular than a conventional sequencer anyway so step one we'll just have to play the root note then we'll have it do a fifth and then uh like a minor third and then an octave above and then like another minor third and then a fifth again or something like that um doesn't really matter um for this illustrative purpose so if I play a note well we can kind of hear that the sequence is playing in the background there but it's just kind of been faded out by our envelope and if we turn up the sustain on our amp envelope you can kind of see what's going on here the sequence is playing and it's changing the pitch of our notes but it's not it's not doing a key thing that we would expect a sequencer to do which is to retrigger our envelope right um so can we have our sequence retrigger our envelope the answer is yes certainly we can so if we come back into that third page here with our trigger here and we're going to change our trigger source to be on generators down here somewhere we have the step pulse here so we've told our envelope to um retrigger on each step pulse of the sequencer and now if I hold down a note we get what we would expect to have with our sequencer now the interesting thing is this is going to be working per note that I play that's something to discuss on the sequencer video as I say there's a lot to talk about with this sequence there's a lot of things that we can do but one thing I do want to show you um before we um move away from the sequencer is that at the moment we've coupled our notes um our envelope being played to the notes uh on every step on the pitch and one of the brilliant things that you can do with the mod way which I love to do in the world of modular and I can't only think of another um sort of normal hardware synth way you can do this is decouple our gate and our um our pitch so um we've got these abcd lanes of sequencing here as well so I'm going to come in here and I'm going to set the trigger instead to be step sequence a we see we've got our threshold here of plus 50 and that means that um any um step on this um sequencer lane which is above 50 it's going to trigger um I'm just going to make this short a bit a different length to the other one so I'm going to go with seven and I'm just going to send set the transition to be um I'll set it to be uh off actually uh individual work as well but we'll just set it off this just means that we're not getting slew between the which can mess with the envelope triggering but now if I play a note go back to our original situation because we're not getting uh any more trigger information because none of the uh steps here have anything other than zero on them so if I set this one to anything above 50 it doesn't matter you can now hear that every seven steps we're getting a uh trigger happening there we choose another one like the sixth one and now we can decouple these two uh different parts of our uh pitch sequence we could turn our sustain out a bit so we still hear the bit in the background and we get these cool rhythms happening and if we hold that uh we could turn our filter down and have this set as a nice little uh plucky thing as well it's not going to trigger at the moment because we're not playing any notes but we could set uh this envelope our filter envelope to trigger uh using the next sequence perhaps um step sequence b uh we can come down to step sequence b again set it maybe to another length as well maybe like four this time and maybe just on that first step we set it to be so now we have our filter envelope being fired based on a pattern defined by one of our sequences and then uh amp by a different one and by changing the length of the sequence so maybe we can have as five instead we can get some really nice things going on that are quite complex sequencing ideas and I say there's a lot more to talk about with the sequencer which we will get to don't worry but you can see how having this uh trigger is something that isn't the key can really get us to some very interesting places so this next idea is kind of related but um a little bit different so we're going to start again by setting our amp envelope to being a plucky friend just because it's easiest to hear what's going on that way okay and I'm going to come across to my amp helipho and I'm going to tempo sync it maybe run a little bit faster um or a lot faster and I'm going to set its shape to be a random one which is a uh sample and halt kind of thing going on there so I'm not using this to modulate anything I'm just going to use this as a trigger source so coming back to my amp envelope here and we'll come it into page three and I'm going to set my trigger source for this envelope to be that LFO so generators uh amp LFO there we go and if I now hold down we can hear that that is being triggered in time but not on every step and if we think about the shape of our um amp LFO here it's whizzing up and down and every time it crosses that 50 threshold it's going to trigger the note and it's going to be doing that about um 25 percent of the time because um it's also going negative it's about 25 percent of the time we're going to be getting a trigger happening now we can come back to our amp envelope here and we can change how often that's going to be triggering by lowering our threshold so we should get more now which we certainly are and if we put the threshold up like as high as like 95 it's going to be barely happening very very rarely uh based upon that tempo that we've got defined there so it's been a while yep okay there's another one there now uh unfortunately um this is not modulatable but we can go around that but this idea here of creating um timed but um semi-random triggers is like a cornerstone for generative patches if we want to create something that's chance-based but controllable this is a great way of doing it a great way of approaching it now ideally i'd kind of want this to be performable uh but we can't um assign this to a modulation source like the knobs because it um it just can't so we can't do it but it's kind of another control which um we can kind of do the same thing that is modulatable so if we come across to our LFO here we have this offset parameter here and what this is going to do is shift our waveform up or down and we'll talk about this in a bit more uh depth um when we come to the LFO video but uh it allows us to to basically do the same sort of thing but it's modulatable which means we could assign it to like a knob that we could have as a macro here so if we wanted to have this happen more regularly we could turn our offset up a bit and if we wanted it to happen less often we could turn the offset down right so if we wanted to we could add a modulation target for that control amp LFO offset to this knob here we could set it uh 50 yesh in either direction like that and now we have a nice sort of control over how often that's going to be happening to basically nothing there to more there but we probably also want to change the threshold around a little bit to make it fine tune but yeah we can make that perform well there so if we want um this sort of generative thing we'd probably want to slow it down a little bit but you know semi-random but still in time and controllable triggers which is cool so this final idea I want to show you is a little bit different to the other two we've been looking at because this is a way of us being able to get more complex envelope shapes than we can usually get with just a single ADSR by combining two different envelopes via that trigger source so let me just turn down one of these oscillators okay and to make this really really obvious I'm going to work with the pitch of the oscillators just because it's easiest to hear you probably know what you may want to do with pitch but you might want to experiment with some more idea with other parameters that we can modulate let's start with this first oscillator here and we'll set it um sorry this first envelope here this oscillator one envelope we'll set it to have like a an onset like that and then it could just have a hold and release something like that that's fine um and we'll assign it to the tuning of this first oscillator here so mod we want it to be assigned to the tuning and I want to use this envelope here enter and we'll make it really obvious we'll jump up by like a fifth so if I play a note now we get that raise up to a fifth right so that gives us our sort of basic pitch shape to this um note well if we wanted to do something a little bit more interesting with like a little flourish here so hopefully we want to go uh like someone sort of bent a whammy bar on a guitar right at the end of that ascension that we had there with our um pitch now we can't do that with a normal a dsr but we can do it by combining two different envelopes so let's think about that kind of shape what that is is um this sort of triangle shape that we already have set up here on oscillator uh two envelope um so let's make it a little bit shorter we have a little wow wow kind of sound uh shape going on there if we apply that negatively to our pitch we're going to get um kind of happening now um let's assign that to pitch first of all so we're going to say yep we want it to be the tuning of this envelope we want to use this here press enter and we'll just maybe go down by three semi tones i'll do so if i now play a note there's it's not doing what we want it to do that's kind of a weird delay to start to the um uh uh sweep up there so what we really want to happen is we want oscillator one envelope to get all the way to the top and then when we get to the top we want it to go okay so what we can do is come into page three of this um envelope here the oscillator two envelope and we can send its trigger source to be the other envelope we're using so oscillator one envelope and we're going to say that when it gets to not quite 100% because for some reason it doesn't work if it's 100% but if we say 99 it's going to um trigger this envelope and we don't want this to happen when we play the night we only want it to happen when it's triggered so we can turn trigger add to note on off so now if i play this note we should have this rise up as defined by this envelope it gets to the top and it's going to do the little wiggle fingers crossed hear that so we've actually added two stages to our envelope here i'm going to make it a bit shorter um whether or not that in particular is a useful sound your mileage may vary um but hopefully that demonstrates this idea that um we can combine different envelopes by having them trigger at different times and we could we could chain four of them together having each one triggered by the the next envelope so this one triggers this one which then triggers this one which could then trigger that one again uh we can create quite complex envelope shapes by um having them trigger when they hit their peak each time i think probably just having two changes is is enough most of the time um nevertheless it is interesting that you could take this to it's a logical conclusion and do something bonkers make a bit more obvious might be diving down further and of course these two envelopes don't have to be affecting the same thing either we could say we get to the top of our pitch swoop and then you do a little filter dip or something rather than a tuning dip or whatever it happens to be um we could uh configure this to a wealth of different things um but i just wanted to highlight that you can trigger one envelope to fire at the end or at the apex of another envelope so anyway um that's it for today uh with the envelopes i hope that demonstrated how flexible the envelopes can be uh in terms of how they can be combined how they can be triggered and how they can be fine tuned using that really really useful curve control um as i say it's a level of control that i haven't really seen uh for uh envelopes on on many other sort of hardware since uh and it's kind of a testament to the ideas that the mod wave envelopes kind of came up with if you did enjoy the video um as always if uh you wanted to leave a thumbs up uh that would always be massively appreciated and make sure you subscribe to the channel so you don't miss out on any upcoming synth fun especially if you're interested in the mod wave quite a lot of mod wave stuff planned to turn up in the next few weeks and months other than that um as always thank you so much for joining me and until next time take care bye