 We'll come to another monthly live stream, you're all feeling well. Today we'll be doing Cardinal, which is a free and open source modular synthesizer plugin, a self-contained modular environment that can be used as a plugin in any DAW that supports LV2 plugin format. And today I'm joined by John the Bard sub-John. You became green, suddenly. I believe so, yeah. The green screen is too powerful. There you go. So, John... I'll just be a disembodied voice for now, if you can't figure it out, but I'm still logging into YouTube. I'm in a YouTube. I got you back. All right. I had to click one thing. Oh yeah, that's always the hard part. Yeah, so John is going to be a co-host, and he's going to be reading chat when I be jamming with Cardinal, and also giving me tips, because he's got some nice experience with Cardinal. So I think we can all learn from him some things. And I think I need to figure somehow how to patch you through, so you're always audible, because as soon as I try making music this is going to collapse. Uh-oh. Oh, that's all right. I need to find a place where I can set the laptop that I don't have to move 10 feet to the side to see it. So, I'll keep talking, though, so you can tell that my audio is coming. Yeah. Although that'll make this a bit of an acrobatic exercise. Then I want to switch to my headphones, but I've realized my amp is not plugged in. So I'll be doing that in a second, once we're actually started. But you shouldn't be able to hear me for now. My speakers are really low. Any feedback? I don't hear any feedback. Also, hello, everyone. Technical difficulties time. I hope you're having a good one. Yeah, starting out on a strong foot. Cardinal SYNF of EDM right here. I mean, Golden said Cardinal SYNF, but yeah. Okay, so which one of these Chromium or Brave are actually John? I don't know. We'll find out. Can you say something, John? Yes, I'm going to be Jake with a picture of the bronze knee cap, is my thing. I just said hello. This is the first account I could log into. So we'll take it. All right, I have you. I have your audio. Perfect. Now you're not gonna cause a cataclysm when we get to business. So that's great. Okay, I think we're getting ready to do the thing. Excellent. I think I need to shift you around a little bit, because you're oddly upset. Oh, maybe not. No, you're in the perfect spot. Beautiful. Yeah, that looks pretty good. You're a little bit big. I'll compensate. I compensate myself, because I don't want to be so tiny. I'm comparison, even though you're two meters high, almost. So that would be appropriate. All righty. Just make me fill up half the screen. We can do that. So I'm going to do the same thing. We can do that. So, well, John is towering above me. I almost just put on my dead mouse shirt, too. I settled on the Zelda shirt, but someone mentioned him in chat. My exposure is a little bit low. Okay, correct it. Yours is a bit high, but if you tweak it, I'm going to have to tweak your screen screen. Yeah. I think I can tweak it for you, because thanks to the amazing magic of does it work? Oh, yeah, I can. I can tweak your exposure for you. Yeah, it even does it on my screen. Wow, that's what I look like for real. Where is the per color balance? Oh, shoot. Oh, that's good. I was terrifying for a second. Okay, I think that's better. The video ninja is amazing. I like it, but it's hard. We had some stuff to figure out. Okay, you're shrinking now a little bit. I'm going to shrink you a little bit as well, but it was more shrinking in three, two, one. Okay. Oh, my God. All right, sweet. We're having meme fun. How long is the top of me? It's cut off, so that's fine. You don't really need to see the top of my head. It's fine. Oh, yeah, we do need. That's my fault. It's because I set the camera up wrong. You can, you know. Actually, hang on, hang on. Tweak it a little bit. It's good to have some headroom. You know, because we're all about the dynamics. I'm going to make it back to my camera. All right. By the way, John, can you type something in the chat? So I can make you a moderator. Here, I'm going to be Jake, is my name. Okay, I think I see you. I got to run the game, this is my picture. I said hello again. All right. You're now a moderator. Rob's here anyways, but let me, I'm going to adjust the microphone, which is bound to go terribly. Good to see. Now that I lowered my seat, because I have to sit really upright. Rob van der Berg says, if you say nasty words, then Google alerts me. All right. We are ready to go. Finally, let's go. Cardinal, let's do some cool modular synthesis. I haven't been touching car or VCV rack for a longest time, because I'm, it was supposed to be around standalone and one instance only. And I'm not interested in that, but I'm interested in being able to do this in my DAW. And Cardinal is that thing. Yeah. I wish I had some screenshots of old projects I did, routing a bunch of our door MIDI into VCV. It was really brutal. And then I'd have to reroute everything when I reloaded. It was, I have some of the tracks, but I don't have pictures of it. I should have, it was obnoxious. I think the audio is a bit hot. I think what I'm going to do is put a limiter on my master and turn it down after the limiter. Is it, is the voice, music balance, voice, audio balance good on DAW? I think it's, if it's, sounds the same from the stream as it does from, actually I'll turn up my laptop for a second. I can hear the stream. I think it's probably pretty decent. Maybe a bit more voice and a bit less, so just a bit less master. Okay. Yeah. Ouch. Oh, shoot. Yeah. High frequencies. I'm going to switch to bass. Yeah. Yeah. Good idea. Is that bad? Well, it's on my mind. Use as many limiters as possible because we're going to be working with feedback. Yeah. So I've loaded cardinal synth, which is a variant of cardinal that has the MIDI input and a stereo audio output. And by default, it loads with a super simple synthesizer patch, which is really cool because we have a starting, a starting patch. By the way, is the audio clean for everyone? Is this sine wave clean? Or are there clicks? Smooth. Okay. That's good because I hear a bunch of clicks, but I guess this is just my computer somehow messing it up for me. Thankfully, not for everyone. I can deal with that like, you know, software correct for that in my brine, but I can't have that on the stream. Instead of usual coffee, I'm drinking tonic with ice because it's hot. And I've had my coffee already and, yeah, I thought I'm going to break the habit a bit. Alrighty. What shall we do? We should start with a freaking kick drum. What we have is a sine wave oscillator now, VCO, so voltage controlled oscillator. And we have actually this one is, yeah, it can do money things. We can actually use that. I'm going to close this and delete this notes. Can I use the delete key? Yeah, I can. Okay, nice. So I'm going to maybe shift this stuff around a bit. So this is an amplifier that turns things down. This is the envelope that controls the amplifier. And this is the oscillator. Okay. So for a kick drum, we need another amplitude generator. So I'm going to control D. It's so cool that it just duplicates a module for you. That's really nice. Rob van der Berg says rule number one of live streams. Start out with a kick drum. Yes. That is correct. Also, if you highlight stuff and control shift D, it'll duplicate with connections. So you can duplicate like a huge group of stuff. Whoa. So I can like, okay, this isn't, well, I changed some things. Oh, and undo works. That's so cool. I can undo tweaking a control. That's amazing. Ah, so I can control D and should maintain connections. Shift D will do connections. Shift D, control shift D. Control shift D. Okay. Oh, and it also routes to sources. Wow. That's cool. That's a nice trick. Awesome. I don't think it works in Cardinal, but in Rack itself, you can actually copy and paste between patches, which is kind of crazy. So I wonder if that'll happen in the future. Wait, so I can open another track in our instance of Cardinal. I don't know if Cardinal does it, but VCV Rack itself does it. So you could like make a copy of something and then load a different patch and then paste it in. So we don't have to see, but I don't know if Cardinal does it. I think copying, I don't know if there is an option to copy. Okay, there is. Control C, control V. Okay, it doesn't work between instances. That would be pretty crazy. I know programs would do that. And it is doable. You just need to store the data as, for example, XML or JSON in the operating system. Anyway, I've sufficiently distracted from the kick drum, so I'll let you get back to it. Yeah, sorry, I need to blow my nose, so I'm gonna try and mute myself. Oh, it's gonna effectively mute both of us, okay. Yeah, I, yeah. Alrighty. So we have an envelope generator. I keep touching this failure even though I don't know what to. So we can send that, actually I can do the same thing. I can control shift D and it will be connected to my gate input. And gate is getting hot when you press a key. It's a pulse that says, oh, a key is pressed. Kat says that you can copy paste between patches, but there's a current Linux bug preventing it. So in 22.06, it's supposed to be fixed. Oh, I guess 22.06. So that's the next release of Cardinal, right? Yeah, I'm at 22.05, okay. I did do a full system upgrade, but I didn't check for Cardinal upgrade. It's not actually out yet. So it's not, it's just apparently going to, this is according to chat. I don't know. Okay. Well, I don't think we'll have to use that anyway, but it's really cool that it will be possible. That is awesome. Coping and pasting modules between different instances. Wow. All right. So we have an envelope generator. Now let's put it into patches to our, so I'm going to disconnect the voltage, volts per octave. So now our sine wave. Okay. Why is the sine wave still playing? Is this the other patch? Yeah. This, this must be the other patch. Okay. The other patch is playing. I'm going to remove it. And now, no matter what key I press, I can actually show the aux camera for that. It's not looking great. Nice pie. Thanks. I've yet to do something useful with it, but it's there and I want to do something with it. Okay. There it is. Now it's amazing. You spend all day preparing for a live stream and there's still so many things you shouldn't prepare for. All right. So now whatever key I press. I forgot my caffeine. Oh damn. You can't go and take it real quick if you want. And then scan chat. Yeah, I'll probably go grab, I'll grab a drink in a second. I've just been waiting for everything to really start. Okay. Fantering for a second. So, right. No matter what key I press, we have the same pitch because I've disconnected the volts per octave source from our oscillator. And instead of that, now I'm going to plug in output from the envelope generator. Oh, sorry. Sorry, Rob. And that creates a pitch envelope. Now I will enable slow mode. So now we are like moving by a factor of 100 times down. So instead of being 200 Hertz, now we're two Hertz. And now we can tweak our envelope generator. So I'm going to go with attack at zero. I also want to get attack for the amplitude. Ask the lobe at zero. So now we have a nice little click. Now I'm going to make decay something like say 0.1 second, 0.15. And I'm going to lower sustain from 100% to zero so that our envelope is going to decay. And now we have a pitch envelope. I should bring up a scope, you know. There should be some scope. There should be a scope I can use. Ah, I think typing is a bit weird. Oh yeah, you have to use the keyboard lock in the top, right? Yeah. And it's going to disable itself constantly without telling you. All right. What should I use? Weird, our door bug. Okay, this looks nice. I know there's polyscope. I don't know how to use that. Either the JW scope or regular scope. The one on the left works well, but you have to right-click it and change its mode. Then the scope itself is just as straightforward as it gets. This one, right? Yeah. Let's go with this one then. That's the stock one from VCV themselves. Oh, nice. Okay, so now we can, I hope we can monitor if I hit control and click and drag. I will, oh, I need an input, not an output. We can see that our envelope generator creates this little peak. Okay, I need to enable trigger. Yep, nice. So if I make the decay time shorter, our envelope gets shorter. And our kick drum reflects that. Dreamer says we have a brand new scope coming in 2020.0. It's 06 version of Cardinal. What is that new scope? Actually, okay. Okay. I think I would like to be able to control the magnitude of my pitch envelope because it's a little bit, I need to amplify, increase the amplitude. So I think I'll need an, what do I need? I usually use offset for any random utility needs, the first one. Okay, BGA offset. Yeah, it's got the scale and the offset. So you can change starting voltage and you can also change, and they're both, yeah, CV controllable. They're great. Awesome. Wow. Johnny, you're a goldmine of knowledge about Cardinal. It even inverts. Oh, that's useful. I think maybe I'll shift you a little bit to the left since we are kind of... Yeah, good idea. Yep, you've sliding back. Nice. All right, offset. That's a very nice thing to have. So instead of routing fall stitch directly to our oscillator, I'm going to route it to offset's input first and route the output. And now we should be able to make it larger. Oh. Oh, you need... Interesting. It might be, I'm thinking... I'm going to... Okay, great. Let's go. Let's see it. I wonder if... We can also see it's already peaking at 10. It's the... What's it called? Envelope itself. Sorry, I was missing for a second to see where the problem was. The envelope itself goes from 0 to 10 by default. So it's already hitting 10. So I would try running it into the FM input and attenuating it there. I haven't used the LVCO to make a thing, but try instead of the Volt per Octave on the LVCO, the FM. Okay, I... I'm sorry, I didn't catch that. Could you repeat? Oh, yeah. So we can see on the scope that it's already going from 0 to 10. So it should be sending... Although I think Volt per Octave is minus 5 to 5. So if you try offsetting it to minus 5, that may help. Otherwise, I would use the... Oh man, my video got destroyed. Anyway, I would use the FM input instead. Maybe that's why, because the velocity is already at maximum. So I think... No, because that's not sending any signal. Either way, I would try the FM input instead of the Volt per Octave. On the... Oh, that makes sense. And then you can attenuate it with the knob. Up above there. Yeah, that's doing better. And now we can make a 404 by connecting our Voltage per Octave. Yeah. And I think I'm going to disable the slow mode because... Oh, okay, that's not gonna be good. Oh, yeah, yeah. I will shorten the decay and reduce the scale. That you can control the scale with the FM. You actually don't need the scale anymore because the FM control and scale do the same thing. But you can... Up top, there's a pitch knob. So you can change the... Oh, I guess you're controlling it with the thing anyway. So you don't even need the pitch knob. It's actually good where it is. What pitch? Yeah, so you just need less FM. Yeah. All right, so what FM does is... FM is basically audio rate pitch... ...pitch control. So we can use that to chain multiple oscillators. I believe we can use that to chain multiple oscillators. You can... If you take the attack and decay and release all the way up, you'll hear what it does. That'd be the easiest way. Okay. Attack. Because you hear a pitch up and pitch down. Attack. Oh, I wonder if there is an option to... Oh, yeah, nice. Oh, with shift I can snap. Whoa, that's so cool. Hmm. Now if you play it, you'll hear what the FM is doing. And you can see it in relation. Yeah, you can see it in relation to the scope on the left. They may want to turn off trigger. I think I'm getting a tiny bit of feedback from your microphone. Oh, is my... Nothing should be making sound. I'll turn my headphones down. Oh, that sounds so 80s, or even 70s. Actually, this is the perfect environment to make like super retro sci-fi sounds and then make them super not retro. I mean, these sounds were made with systems like this one. It was just... It wasn't your rack, which Cardinal or Vcvrack is modeling. It was stuff... Other things like Bucla or Mog Mug. Mog Mug, I don't know. But yeah, basically the FM input is just the same as the volt per octave input. They do the literal same thing. It's just modulating the pitch of the oscillator. So that's why it slides up. And we have a depth control for FM inputs. That is super useful in this case. Yeah, it's functionally a volume knob to the FM. Yep. And now this is kind of... I'm gonna lower the sustain for the amplitude envelope. And now we have... Kind of Sightrans kick. Not really, it doesn't work very well. I think what we can do as well is use the sync input in the oscillator to reset the oscillator. So it always starts in phase when we start our kick drum. Because now our transient may be inconsistent. I wonder if I can catch that on the scope. Oh, I wonder, maybe you know, John, if is it possible to just control, drag something, and replace an existing connection without first removing it manually? I don't think so. No, I think it wants you to do it, to remove it. It would be great if I could hold shift. You can use input too, though, but... Okay, let's do that. Whoa, okay, I clicked shift, and that... Oh, so I can go shift, click, and then... All right, let's do that. Yeah, so you can see that our oscillator, by the way, is putting out audio all the time. And this is also apparent. Maybe I can increase light bloom. Increase room brightness. No, I... You know, messing with this really makes me want to find a way to create a 3D version of cardinal interface, where everything is a 3D model and lighting is real, and this kind of stuff. Someone makes Blender videos of card... Or a VCV rack, somehow. I don't know how they do it, but... It's over in the rack discord they do. I don't know his name, so shout outs to whoever you are. That's nice. So we can see that... Yeah, I'm slightly green, for some reason. You can see me, but it's not that big a deal, I suppose. I saw someone chat mentioning it again. Yeah, I need to click a button called Rainbow Puke Fix. I'm going to show this to you guys. So we're using something called video.ninja, which is an open source tool for sending video and audio. And there's a button called... This is a real button. Yeah, it's a real button. It's a real button. It's called Rainbow Puke Fix. And what it does is it forces to send a video keyframe, to refresh the video feed when it somehow lost the keyframe and got messed up. It's a real button. All right, so our oscillator is producing a tone all the time, and we can modulate its pitch. But actually, what I need to do is I need to grab this audio after our amplifier turns it down. Yeah, okay. Oh, wow, it's vector-based. That's so cool. So, yeah, I don't think we can actually see the transient. It's... You can set a really... You can turn off the trigger and just zoom in really far. It's super, like, turn it super... Make it very high. Oh yeah, so it only captures the transient. Yeah, that works. Okay. You can see that our peaks and troughs are shifting around. There should be constant, or like... So, if we send the gate input to sync or gate source... Sorry, that was output. If we send the control clicking and dragging, if we connect the gate from cardinal host input to the oscillator sync input, then it should get more consistent. And it generally is. There are tiny differences. I think it's just because the threshold doesn't work exactly the same every time. But many times I press the key and it's the same. And that's gonna be great because it's gonna give us an exactly identical kick drum every time, which is what we want. I wonder if there is something that doesn't math, like, can I apply a power function, for example, to do something like gamma correction to, like, bend my envelope? Yeah, there's something called function funktion. Also, there's a envelope generator. It's funk, like function. And funk, okay. Yeah, the first one. Okay. Oh, it's tiny. Ah, you can select the function. Oh, that's so cool. Yeah, although you'll want to offset after it because it's gonna do, at random times, it gets really loud. Oh, so an offset will clamp the output to a reasonable. You can just scale it by hand then. Oh, I see. Okay, I'm gonna duplicate offset. Maybe I'm gonna keep it in the same row so we can easier zoom on it easier. Alrighty, so I want to grab my pitch envelope and put it to function and then put it to offset. Actually, I could use the same one offset because I'm not really doing anything here. It may help depending on the math going into it. Some of the functions are strange and, like, we'll clip really easily. So we have, where do we, how do we change the function? Oh, the plus and minus. Okay. Round, ceiling, floor, power two. Okay, so this is a square root, I guess. Oh, I would like to do something else. Oh, but it doesn't do everything, but it's got... Okay, so that's, no. So that's power of two and that's square root. Okay. We can grab our scope and see what it does. Gotta do the easiest one. Oh, I need to lower the threshold, I guess. Oh, this is the odd, oh no, that is the, I don't know if it's processing. As you say, is this the audio it's processing? Yeah, you can see, though, that it's a much lower envelope now because of the difference. You'd want to scale it back up. I can put it on output input to the original one. All right, so we can see the... There we go. All right. Oh, by the way, the attack isn't instantaneous. No, it is not. Actually, it's far from it. There are a couple ones that are, I like Perkall. For we are zoomed really far in. Yeah, it's a really short initial, but some of them are instant. Okay, we can play with the functions. Oh, log. Whoa. Okay, that's interesting. Log 10. All right, cosine. Oh, if we actually, if we make it smaller before it inputs and then invert it because offset can invert it because I could be, whoa. Ah, okay, I need to fit it out through offset output because I've, okay. Yep. Oh, it actually does go the right way initially, but then it swoops down. Look at that. Wow, that's interesting. This reminds me. I was sending envelopes through filters for a little bit to see what that would do. That was fun. It sounds like fun stuff. I don't know. I need to click rainbow puke fix again. It keeps happening. That's not nice. I wish it could click itself. I guess that's not possible. We'll make a bot. Oh, I don't know. I could do X do tool to click, move my mouse sometimes there, click it, and then move instantaneously back like every 10 seconds. But I guess that's a bit silly. By the way, I don't know, John, if you're scanning the chat for questions. Yeah, I realized I should be keeping more up on that just a second ago because it's a bit out of my field of view. So I'll try and be more cognizant of chat. Okay, I'm going to try to change your color. Oh, no, it's rainbow puke again. It's so annoying. We don't like rainbow puke this much. Trying to fix your color balance. Okay, I think it's a little bit better. So we're trying to make something sign. Okay, 10 arctangents. I think I'm going to go for power functions and see what that does. Also, we probably should send the original envelope into input one so that it's the one triggering the threshold. Then it's consistent. Oh, I see. There's also external trigger. So yeah, you could set that to retrigger itself. Yeah, that's a good idea. Yeah, yeah, I should have used their brains. There we go. Oh, man. It's all about using your brain. But I think it's also helping to grow your brain. It's very interesting. The weird green distortion seems to like move around with me. Anyway, I think we could use a different video codec to fix that. Yeah, but that's not happening now. So I think the stream will survive. Yeah, I think so. Well, we'll iterate on that next month. All right. So let's grab again the function output after offset. Okay, that's... So that is rounding. That means it removes unsealing. Just floor. I got different types of rounding. Hey, power. Looks like we got a super chat. We do. Okay. Oh, no, wait. Oh. Oh, nice. Thank you. So Robert F, also known as... I need to maximize the window to see that. Oh, I can't see it. It says Bo Diddley. So thank you, Robert F, aka Bo Diddley. Thanks so much. Yeah, I've enabled this thing that YouTube keeps nagging me about, which is called super chat and super stickers and something. And I thought, okay, if people want to give me money, then let them give me money. I mean, just make sure that you understand that you're probably giving some money to YouTube as well. So, well, it is allowing us to have this live stream in the first place, even if it's proprietary and centralized and all that kind of stuff. PeerTube is not our replacement yet. And Odyssey has a way worse video quality, so it also isn't quite. That great of a replacement yet. Yeah, I've gotten some decent quality out of Odyssey for my music that I upload there, but I haven't streamed to it, so I can't speak to it there. Okay, I am happy with this. The power function, I'm quite slow with all of this, but I think I can get faster and better over time and I'll be able to get some nice results. Oh, I've got, I managed to clip the voltage, okay. I think it isn't clipping internally. There's some modules that will clip the voltage and some modules that will just go forever. Like I've seen things outputting 150 volts before. Oh, that's no good. I would, yeah. I'm gonna try. It won't actually, like it'll clip on the output, but you can just send output way too hot and then turn it down later. As far as I know. You know what, John? I am tempted to try and switch to a different video codec. You can if you want to. Because the rainbow puke is really hitting hard, and I don't like it. I don't know if I can do that, so at the time. Rainbow puke messing with my stuff. Can change the quality of the room. Not sure if that's gonna help, but let's try that. I don't know. Maybe it's gonna make things worse. You never know. No rainbow puke for now. All right, so I managed to do what I wanted to do, which is get a more sharp output, and now I try to apply the power function again so we get even more. Awesome. This is great because we're getting a snappier envelope, and I like this. I like the sound of this envelope. I'm gonna do this again. Sometimes I have trouble with cardinal shifting things around. Okay, we need to make this small. We need to lower the scale even more for that. I think you can hold control to really specifically adjust. Oh, I went to minus. Yeah. Oh, that's great. It's increased. So I think we're clipping at some point. You should probably just put an offset in between two of the powers. All right, I'll just lower the one on the input. It still gives me a nice snappy. Math shouldn't change. Okay, nice. I'm liking this. Now I can tweak the FM. Holy snap, that's a snappy envelope. I can also increase the decay now. I'm not sure if we're clipping or is it something else? I think it just might be that sharp of a transient now. Yeah, maybe it's a bit too much. You can try turning the FM down, the FM knob. Yeah. That is a very clicky kick. Click. It's a click with a K. Yeah, it's a click with a K. All right, let's call it that. So we've made a one patch. Let's call it click. Beautiful. Now we can sequence it. Just put some quarter notes. I'm tempted to make some side trends with this, I don't know. Because it's just... Side trends is fun. We can pump out a bass line in 30 seconds, so that's probably a good idea. Okay, yeah. Ardor doesn't like touching MIDI notes, at least Ardor 6. It might be... You might need to use retrigger instead of gate for your trigger. Ah, so that might be... Yeah, because using the gate for everything, it might... Although it won't hold any longer because the retrigger just sends a brief trigger. So you'll have to use your release to control the time, so it'll mess with that stuff. Okay, I don't want that. You can shorten it as well. But just so you know in the future, that'd be the easiest way to do it. All right. So retrigger will send an impulse every time I hit a note, no matter if any other notes are still in the background. So it's like... And gate is kind of like with legato. It just says, hey, there's notes playing. Still playing notes. Nothing changed. Still playing notes. Okay, no notes. Ah, I see. That's a good distinction. I wonder why they are not grouped together, because they seem like doing a very similar thing. They do do two different things, because the retrigger tells you that you've pressed a new note, but it won't tell you that you've let go of the previous note. So if you play... Like if you walk up and down in arpeggiation, it's really easy to have notes lined right up next to each other. And technically the gate is never released, because the next note comes immediately after that one, so then you'd need a retrigger. So it's just a specific use case, really. Okay. I think this is a bit too fast. Yeah, that is one clicky kick. Let's duplicate it a bunch, maybe seven times. So we have eight times eight duplicates total. And now let's zoom in and see if we actually hit the grid. Yay! Awesome. Yeah, we did it. We did it. Ardor didn't mess it up, no. Someone to help all it's fixed. Yeah, we're waiting for Ardor seven. And I don't know... We're praying for Ardor seven. Yeah, that's more like it. That's true. I hope the complete timing rewrite will bring a salvation from all the nasty MIDI problems. All right, so this is our clicky kick. I'm tempted to do some processing afterwards without cardinal because I'm just more comfortable doing it with plugins, but we could try doing it with cardinal. Yeah, if you tell me what you want to do, I can tell you if it's a reasonable thing to achieve in a short period of time. Apply a resident hypers filter. Apply a compressor and some light saturation. So the easiest resident high pass, if you want it stagnant especially, is the LVCF from Bogue Audio. LVCF. There it is on the far left. Oh yeah, it stole your keyboard again. Just so you know, Ardor has stolen your keyboard again, so you have to click and unclick the green icon. Oh. It'll like turn, yeah. Every time you click off cardinal, Ardor will steal your keyboard. Okay, so I won't be able to type. But somehow I managed to type a bit. You can type certain things. I know because you pressed C and C didn't type. Oh, maybe because there are some hotkeys assigned. Maybe it did work because the L worked. I don't know. I've had this issue across multiple OSs, so. So it's consistent. I just figured it was. Yeah, maybe you have the only one that works. No, it doesn't. We had the problems at the beginning. That's true. Okay. So now I'm going to send this to our filter. A really cool about this cardinal host audio stereo output is that when it doesn't have anything plugged into the right output or the sync for the right output, it just duplicates the left one. That's why it's marked left slash M. That means left or mono. Otherwise, you know, it would have just in the left headphone would have to constantly plug in two cables. Okay. That's a low pass now. I want a high pass. Yeah. Yeah. You got to press the button. Oh, those. Yep. Okay. I was trying to click on the LED because that felt like. Yeah, I know. I've done that. I do that still. But yeah, it makes sense. This is modeled after like this. The most skew morphic you'll ever get it. It really is mimicking a hardware. And many of the modules are available in hardware, I believe. Yeah, a solid chunk. All right. We have a high pass. Of course, we don't want to high pass our kick at 1K. That's kind of defeating the point. Can I increase resonance? I wonder if I should drive it hotter input. Yeah, you can. There's a soft clipping VCF that I really like. I can't remember what it's called, but if you just search... Not VCF, VCA. If you just search VCA, it'll show up. That one in the middle on the top, the SC-VCA. To the left. Okay, SC-VCA. Soft clipping VCA. It's got a soft clipper. Yeah, it's nice. It'll add a little bit of... I'll put it before, maybe after as well. Oh, nice. We're getting some nice distorted goodness. Also, you can just run the output back into the right input if you want to go crazy. All right. Of course, I want to go crazy. Yeah, because we have two channels and we're using just one. Holy snap. I love that. Oh, wait, these are two knobs in one. What a crazy design. Clip sealing. Okay. So we're going hard style just with... Yeah, it is obviously too much. And then there's the softness knob, which basically determines how hard of a clipper it is. Oh, yeah. This is excellent. Actually, this is like a saturator, which happens to be a amplifier as well. Well, makes sense because the distortion plugin needs to amplify this thing. That's so cool. And we can also drive it with an envelope. We can change the softness with time. Let's try that. We have our amplitude envelope. I'm going to send it to this knob. Also, pre then works just to control amplitude. So you can use it as a... It's just like... It literally just turns the big knob. I don't know if it's doing something. You might need to use offset to change how it's going in. That makes sense. I'm going to copy. Let's offset this. Right now, your scale is like nothing, so... Oh, right. So I guess this is increasing softness. Yeah, it should be increasing it as it... Typically, the knobs turn left to right with voltage. Or clockwise, I guess I should say. Makes sense. So if you invert it, it'll become less soft to harder if you invert the scale. Whereas this way, it'll become... Or well, it'll become... Yeah, if you invert the scale, it'll peak as a soft and then become harsher as it goes along. Isn't it the opposite? Like it's going to start... No, it's the opposite. Yeah, I was saying the right thing the first time. Yeah, knobs are confusing. Yeah, so now we're making it harsh at the start. It's soft at the end. Now we're doing the opposite. I think it's better to have it soft at the start. And then... Yeah, I guess... As the input amplitude decreases, we're kind of compensating by making it a little bit more harsh. Okay, wow. I want to apply another Lopez filter after this whole debacle to just have a nice... Now I'm starting to hear a kick. It has a bit of a tone, maybe a bit too much, but I think I need to up the monitoring because for me, it is a little bit too quiet. I think what I'm going to do is I'm going to up the master, but I'm going to lower the level in OBS, so basically... Okay, now I hear it better. Yeah, it's about the same volume, only a little bit louder for us, so that should be fine. Okay, I wonder, are you getting it louder now? I think you should be getting it. I think you'll be getting it louder. Yes. Okay, I hope it's not a problem. I think that's probably good for a kick. Yeah, I think so. I hear a bunch of clicks on top of that, but that's, I judge. You can always just throw an EQ on outside of Cardinal, just EQ it out. I don't think we even need any compression. No, I think the clipper is already compressing it. Yeah, it's a bit harsh. I will tone down the distortion a little bit. I'm going to play it in loop because it is easier to hear what's going on. Okay, yeah, that's better. So I think, huh, okay, maybe no. I can't stop playback when I have Cardinal on top. I could use my keyboard's transport controls, but that would require me to route it. Maybe I'll try doing that really quick. I think it's in control surfaces, generic MIDI and coming MIDI on Oxygen. This should be for one or one doing seven. Okay, now if I move my keyboard to auto mode, I think, yeah. Okay, I can start and stop playback at least using this keyboard. Squeezing more out of my hardware. Okay. I really enjoyed the UMPHA MIDI setup speedrun. I think that might have been a world record. Wow. All right, maybe we do. Maybe let's compress it. Still, do you have any compressors you recommend? Honestly, the compressors I liked aren't in Rack, so I just use the, I can't remember what it's called, it's like a bar or something, like D bar or something like that. And it's fine. It's not in mini bar. There it is. The middle one is mono. Mini bar. Yeah, it's not amazing, but it's fine. It does compression. There's also Bog Audio's compressor. They're kind of interchangeable. Oh, Bog Audio. CMP? No, it's a different one. Maybe I can search by brand. Yeah. There we go. There it is, presser. Top right. Presser. Yeah, that would be your two options, so whichever you prefer. It's big. Well, we can use both in sequence. Reminds me of a little meme image. There's a father and a little daughter, and the daughter, the father says, bitch, do you even compress? And the girl responds, that I'm just six. I don't even produce. And dad responds, compress it six times. Is that from the mate? Do you even compress Facebook group like a hundred years ago? Maybe it originated. I don't remember that meme. There. I saw it somewhere else. Oh my god, from back in the days when I was on Facebook. Anyway. I'm going to turn myself down. Some turbulent fluid simulations going on in the background. Does the chat say anything interesting? Desmond wants to know how much he needs to pay you to make a tribute about him. And everyone's talking about how it's funny that we have set out with a big project in mind and we have successfully made a kick drum. Yeah, but you know, little steps. It's been an hour. It's been a hard little work, bro. It's been an hour and we have a kick drum. And we're not even done yet. Oh yeah, now we're compressing. You can even run it out of the left into the right in the same compressor. Yeah, absolutely. Let's do that. I mean, what can go wrong? I think this kick is really shaping up. Dude, that is some meaty kick. I will rename it to kick with two C's. It is earned a new title. Because memes. Well deserved title. I'm going to save this because this kick is precious. It's worth two man hours basically, you know. Actually, if we include all the viewers, it's probably a hundred man hours or more. That's the most expensive kick there is. All right, let's make a baseline then. Also, someone's wondering if they can donate with Bitcoin or Ethereum? I wouldn't need to dig up because I have something. I would need to figure it out. Nobody asked this before. Thank you. But I'm not really into cryptocurrencies. But if someone wants to give me some, I guess I'll accept it. I would need to spend time figuring it out. It's definitely not something to do right now. Yeah, yeah. Setting up a wallet is not a trivial process. I do have some accounts and something because I use Brave browser and it just sends me some money sometimes. I have something on an up-hold account or something. Yeah, we'll talk about it after for a bit because I can probably give some info on that too. Oh, that's interesting. You can decrease the length of MIDI. I bet this is in your video that I've totally watched and just there was so much information, I cannot recall it now. I'm going to have to re-watch it now that I've been using our door a lot more. Yeah, there's a lot of time, a lot of things there. So yes, if you hit T for time stretch, you're switching to the stretch mode. It should be called time stretch. Okay, and now we can just click and drag to change the length and it works on audio and on MIDI. And now all the T just creates a copy and puts it. Yeah, so this patch sucks, of course. Let's make this a baseline. Probably want to loop it. Oh, right. With a kick. First, I'm going to shift it a couple octaves down. And I think I'm going to do it in MIDI. Right-clicking MIDI transpose octaves. One, two, I think two. Oh yeah, two octaves did it. Okay, shift D. Seven, and we're golden. Now this would probably be a good time to use both the gates and re-trigger. It's probably the right kind of thing for it. I'm using the same notes, so there are spaces between them. Oh yeah, that's true. Dreamer says, honestly, this kick sounds weak. Just load the 808 sample. I'm not interested in loading samples. That's really... We could make a generic 808 in like eight seconds, but... Yeah, but we're having some fun with making something unique. It doesn't involve like 30 occasions of POW2. Yeah, plus, you know, we're learning and, of course, I'm learning as we go, because John really has this stuff figured out. I don't. So yeah, and after we do this slowly, we can do it faster, and then we can do more complex things faster and have fun. All right, let's go with a sawtooth, I guess. Oh, we need to click the button, right. I know I do that every time. Every single time. Noice. So we do have a simple sawtooth oscillator. I'm going to use the retrigger to retrigger the oscillator. I think we need to shift this in octaves. Is there something that can... Well, if I want to retune stuff, I just use offset, and I just give it minus one volt or plus five. There's also the octaver that comes from VCV themselves, but I don't know, offset works fine. Just add or subtract a volt. It's also polyphonic, so it'll do it across the whole thing. Just don't touch the scale knob, because then you'll screw all of your pitches. Tuning. Yeah. If there's an option to lock it, no. But you can always double-click it to reset it immediately. Yep, correct. Okay. Let's then send our volts pro... You go into the input. Oh, right, yeah. Then output to here, and we right-click, and I'm going to type negative one. You got to click the keyboard. Enter. Okay. Now we're octave lower. We need a filter. What was that filter? We were using the LVCF. For basses, I usually like the one from Audible Instruments. I can't remember what it's called. I just look for filters. Liquid? Yeah, the liquid filter. Yeah, that one. That's just the best for thick basses and stuff. All right, let's do it. I'm going to route. I learned when I was messing with it with envelopes, it actually kind of rings out in the lower frequencies really well. It kind of adds a sign, and I think that makes it thicker for basses. Very strange. I don't know how to explain it. Oh, you're going in the resonance, which is interesting because the resonance is making sound. It is interesting. I was wondering why? I imagine the frequency knob is a voltage for octave, so I bet you can pitch control it. That's the amazing things you can't do with another synthesizer. Yeah, that's not... I don't want to kill Rob Bunderberg's ears with this, so I'm going to do it the proper way. Yeah, there we go. Nice. A little bit of resonance. It's just such a thick filter, isn't it? Oh, it's so good. Nice. I wonder if it saturates if we give it... Desmond Spar says, I'm the same annoying Desmond from your server, Anfa. I know. This is my first super chat donation ever, and he donated... I don't know what his sec, but it's a lot. 69.69. Great donation. I assume that's a joke. Thank you. Thank you very much. Wow, nice. We needed an envelope to drive this filter, so I'm going to... I will Control Shift D this thing. It's good that it doesn't copy output. It can't, because this is monophonic input. And now, let's move that into frequency. You can use the FM, because then it'll have a built-in attenuator. Yeah, and then you can attenuate it yourself. This makes me do some really crazy stuff with LFOs and this filter, which makes no sense, but it's just... I wonder how it will sound. Oh, it's such a thick filter. I love that resonance. Or maybe, maybe even we can duplicate this filter and use one of its instances to drive another. I don't even know what I'm doing now. But it's... Sounds amazing. It sounds cool. We have some interesting notching effects. I'd love to see a spectrum analysis of that. This is a spectrum. Oh, there is. There's a built-in spectrum, yeah. There's also the Ranalizer, which I've used before. Yeah, I'd grab XL, the Analyzer XL, the middle one. Yeah, and then there's one called Ranalizer, which is more complicated, but we're not going to do that. But it would tell you... It gives you a frequency spectrum of the response of any static thing you put through it. Although, I guess this isn't static because of the FM, so it probably wouldn't work. It would probably give us too much noise. I wonder if we can change... Okay, we can change... If we right-click on it, we get stuff that isn't possible in hardware, of course, but we can change... Move it up so you can see it on the stream. It's underneath your piano. Oh, okay. Sorry. Yeah, just your mouse, you just need to move up. Right, now you can see the whole... So, if you right-click on this frame, we have lots of settings. We can change from the scale, the logarithmic, or linear. We can change the frequency range. Amplitude, plot, smoothing. I guess this is like decay. I'm going to set it to 50 milliseconds. I like fast... And also quality, window. I guess quality means... I think that's the... Whatever would be called. You set it up to like 16,000, whatever. So it starts like 4,000. I can't remember what that'd be called. It's actually window size, and this is window function, I believe. Yeah. So it's like... I think I don't need more than good high. It's funny that they call the lowest one good. I wish they would have some extra options, and the lowest one would be shitty. Yeah, right. It just shows it either is full amplitude or none. There's no actual... It's just one window. It's literally a VU meter. Yeah, it's like... Placebo level spectrum analyzer. Something's going on, something's moving. That reminds me of these very cheap MP3 players, or even apps on all their phones that show you a bunch of moving bars when something plays that they have no relation to the sound at all. It's just a looping animation of something. I used to have a shirt with like a fake light up equalizer on it, and it was battery powered, and the equalizer would like sound activate, but it wasn't accurate at all. It would just randomly like jump around when there was sound. I think I saw this kind of thing. What was the answer to that shirt? Anyway. Oh, excuse me. This is sounding amazing. I like this, but I think we can also modulate it with some amplitude, some envelope envelopes. Oh, sorry. I'm going to control Z. I'm going to control shift to D, so I have another amplitude rooted to my gate, and now I can route the output and put it into frequency. Oh, okay. I think I need to send it right up through offset. Yeah. Look at the way it moves like a comb filter on the end. Yeah. We're getting some kind of FM. Well, it is FM, so it's filter modulation. It sounds like FM, but I couldn't make this kind of sound with basic operators. I think it's weird. Yeah, it's really cool. I think you could probably put a fundamental under it and then put a third filter to pluck it and have a really sick side trans base that just moves all over the place. Let's do it. Maybe it won't work, but we're on the idea of making a side trans base. So yeah, I'm going to duplicate the oscillator and we need a mixer. The easiest probably is probably VCM, because then you can control, it's a voltage-controlled mixer, so you can control all of them with 8SRs if you need. I see it has four channels. That's plenty enough for this kick there. Sorry, that's the best. Yeah, you can grab an 8x8 mixer if you want to go insane, but I think we're done. We can always duplicate it. Yeah, exactly. Oh, now we can do some crazy things, because we can actually... I don't know. Oh, we can do a lot of crazy things. Let's grab the bypass. How crazy do you want to get? Well, this is cardinal. Let's go crazy. Let's just hope we can have at least a kick and a bass by the end of the stream, which we have like 20 minutes. Okay. I guess it depends how creative we want to get. We could have a kick and a bass in 40 seconds if we... We need an amplitude. Well, actually, we need an amplifier. This has to be a sine wave. Oh my goodness, I'm clicking on the LEDs every time. You could send control voltage to its input on the mixer if you just send it into the mixer straight up, because it's already got... That CV input should attenuate it into... But then you can like LFO it or something. Otherwise, you can do a lot of things. Yeah, that's the bottom line. You can do a lot of things. I think I'm going to separate the amplitude. I did something. Oh, that's my amplitude. And that is my envelope generator. Okay, this is getting quite messy. Okay, I think the band bass input isn't. That's great. What if we do that? It's just crazy. You can do so many weird things here. Okay. Yeah, it's... That's nuts. Once you start and you can route the output into another input and then you got feedback and you can process it and then send it in a feedback loop to it. So you could like filter it after the mixer or distort it after the mixer. I'll do things like I'll use a wave shaper on a loop bag... A wave shaper and a filter on a feedback loop into it to add like top end crunch. I know you can do endless stuff. Sus. That knob's looking pretty sus. That knob's looking pretty sus! I think I'm getting quite lost in my own patch. Oh, that's really easy to do. I think you should make the attack more transient and then put a final filter and pluck it. Yeah, that seems pretty cool. I'm trying to add a little bit of a... Oh, but the FM... FM is controlling that. That's the thing. Yeah, you can either... Well, I don't know what you're trying to achieve. I'll let you. I'm trying to sweep the filter a little bit. Yeah, if you put it all the way down, the gate should sweep it or the envelope should... Not the FM. The FM should be fine. Although actually, yeah, that's what's sweeping it. You're right. You're right. Because that's not... That's being controlled by an envelope. Yeah, so that'll do your sweep. Then you can set the base frequency and use the FM to control where it moves to. I think I broke it. Control Z. Now, if you turn the FM knob down, now the frequency knob should do more. It lost sound. Okay, all right. Yeah, but that's the second filter. Okay, I think I'll just apply an amplitude... Oh, even more bass. There's our bass. I think we grabbed the second... Oh, yeah. Yeah, there we go. We have a sub. We have a sub. Yeah, we need a VCA. I can copy this one. I'm going to copy it, but I'm gonna put it here. I'm gonna also copy an envelope generator, but I'm gonna put these here so I know they are not related to this stage of processing. I'll put my retrigger or gate. Let's do gate into gate. Makes sense. Output into CV. This into input. That in from output. Now. Should be able to plug that. Yep. What if we do linear? Nah. Ha, this makes me want to do that power function. Or maybe there is just an amplitude generator that lets you... You can use the shape master. If you want to get really complicated with envelopes, the shape master is your way. There it is. Look at that beauty. Oh yeah, it does it all. You got eight of them. Oh, eight envelopes in one. Yep, they're all independent. They've got their trigger gates on the left. You can use it as a VCA as well. So you don't even need a separate VCA. The left is your input and the right, I just pointed to the screen, like you can see what I'm talking about. The left is your input and the right is your... You kind of can. I mean, I'm gonna make you bigger. And now... That's funny, yeah. I could point... Dear, where's my finger? I got a left test on this side. Yeah. On this side above my head. There's all these. That's your inputs. And then the other side, the equivalents are your outputs. You can see they're labeled VCA. If you just take your audio signal into the VCA on the left and put it in, take your output from the VCA on the right, it will just work as an attenuator for you. You don't even have to use an external module. But then you can drag those around. You can shape them by dragging... You can add curves by dragging the middle of the lines. And you can... It's either double-click or right-click to create more points. So, I think it's double-click. Yes. And double-click again and remove it. Well, you can't have this in hardware, I think. No, that would be a bit complicated. Okay, so... Yeah, if you need to make really complicated envelope shapes, this is your guy. Hmm. Oh, I think the problem is release. You can set it to be a trigger mode so it won't care about the length of the note. It'll always have the same. Like it won't care about the gate length. I think I won't go into shape master right now. But let's start on our patch and use it there. I'm gonna... I'm gonna delete it. But we have a... All right, let's see if that sounds like music at all. I think we have... Oh, you should put a retrigger to one of that... Yeah. How can we do that? We should like... How can we make it happen every so often? Because this is great. Okay, I've got it. What we'll do is we'll use a clock divider. But it's like the notes are kind of... I think we have... We must have some... Huh. What if we move it up an octave? Yeah, maybe moving it up an octave is a good idea. So we can use our hefty little offset. Click two times and we have... And then we should... So you see, take the... You can grab a U mix and an LFO. And we can start combining signals into the filter real fast and make it like sweep up and down as it goes. Because I think it's only one filter that's sweeping, the one on the left. Yeah, I think maybe we should use some automation to control that. Yeah, you could just unhook it from the ADSR and just do it by automating it. Yeah, just... I think it's the FM input on the first filter if I'm understanding correctly. Let's watch the voltages. No, it's frequency on the second one. Yeah, there it is. Okay, yeah. Maybe it just has a release. Yeah, it just has a release, so it... And it picks up from where it left off. That's interesting. Oh, yeah, yeah. It does do that. Oh, nice. With all the releases down to zero, now we finally have something punchy, or plucky at least. Okay, whoops. Control Z. Yeah, thank God you can control the moving modules. Yeah, that's great that we can undo everything. Yeah. Moving a knob, that's good. Because I undoed probably 20 different operations because I messed up the sound and I didn't know how and why. But I could just undo that and go back and recover from this. It's beautiful. I think there's a redo button too. Oh. Some reason I don't hear this. Maybe chant hears it. The music? Wait, you're not getting audio output? No, let me turn up the... You should be getting it. I think we need to saturate this thing. Let's use the same saturator that we were previously. Okay, okay, I hear it again, yeah. Oh yeah, here it is. We're good. Yeah, this bass is lacking some key components, which is saturation. You can also saturate it just to the distortion signal and not the clean undertone. Oh yeah, so we would do that before mixing our sub oscillator. Okay, so I would send this thing here, now put it here, and now put that there. And then you could high pass it after, real quick, with the LVCF after the distortion. Good idea. So after the saturator. Yeah, so that it doesn't mess up the... If you right click on it on the filter, it has a mode to change its slope. So you can make it more transparent. Oh, great. Yeah. I wonder what's going on, but I think I made something weird. Oh no, it's just DfM. Yeah, I think that's good. I think it's just... I think we've just made a weird bass. Yeah, it's really weird. I would compress it a little bit, so as the meme goes, compress it six times. Compress it six times. There was the bar in the presser, if you want one from in here. Press... Presser. Yeah, the presser was the big one. Wee! Okay, let's do a double threshold. Oh, it's doubling as a kick now. The sound is crazy. I think we need to find the right notes to make the most of it. I'm going to just make a new... I should probably do this like that. The problem is the notes are going to overlap and Ardor is going to... Ardor can miss notes and like fudge them. I'm doing quarter notes and I wanted to do 16s. No, I wanted to do... This is sounding nice. This is going to be sweet. It's a bit too loud now. It might be the side chain because it... No, I don't know. I don't know why it cuts out. Maybe it's fine for the chat. Yeah, I think we need a side chain. Oh yeah, we need a side chain anyway. But I mean the audio. I just heard like reverb there. Like it sounded like the room in your house. But I could tell that it was playing because at one point I heard the correct audio. I think... Interesting. You should be getting the dull audio and my voice. And that's it. Unless you have... No. It doesn't make any sense. I have no idea. But I believe the live stream gets the proper audio. Yeah, well then that's probably fine. Yeah, I think we need to side chain this kick. Oh yeah, now you hear it again. I'm going to use just a stock Ardor compressor. Yeah, if we do it... To do it inside of Cardinal is mildly complicated. We'll talk about it sometime not on stream. Yeah, I would like to skip this. It'll take more than zero seconds. Well, certainly. This is inaudible. Oh, I think. Wait, something with my grid. The melody. Hey, the rainbow puke didn't happen in a while. Woo! Yeah, now that you mentioned it, we're screwed. You're right. Oh, and there you go. The notes just blend together. I can't perceive the pitch very well with this patch and that is a little bit problematic. It's not very clean. I think it's because of all the resonance. I wonder if we can send a pitch signal to somewhere in the filter to fix this. I don't know. We could probably gate, like, remove the resonance when the note is off or just reduce the resonance in the filters. Because I think... Because the frequency knob should be volt per octave. So if you grab a U mix, which is literally a unison mixer, and then you combine the note, what's going into the frequency with... I guess that's a summer. You grab the frequency knob. Yeah, it's a summer. So you grab the volt per octave and you grab the signal you're going to the frequency knob and you send them both to the frequency knob. Okay. That one, you take it off, and then you send both of them. And if this works, then it should be pitched. No idea. It's a muster. And then you could repeat it for the other one and that would be the best chance at just... I think it's a little bit better. Yeah, it's still a bit muddy. But yeah. I would like to apply a little bit of reverb and I'm going to go for ether because I like it. Ether is beautiful. So we could use plateau inside of Cardinal, which is also sounding amazingly smooth. It's crazy how good it sounds. Yeah, it might be just the nicest of all the... It's a toss up between it and ether is my favorite reverb. But I don't use ether very much, so it has to be plateau. Oh, and the good thing is we can only apply reverb to the high-past part, so we don't mess up our sub without having to high-past it in the reverb itself, which we probably can and should do anyway. What you can do is you can grab the signal of the top part and send it to the reverb and just send pure wet out so that you don't get the dry... Actually, auto-monos if you just give a left input. Oh, nice. But yeah, it just doesn't tell you. That's good. You connected it to something, but that's fine. Okay. But then you could use two unison mixers, so two U-mixes, and then just sum all of the signals together. So you sum the clean signal left and right, and then you sum the left output of plateau into the left, and then the right output of the plateau into the right, and then you sum the... Or you send the output of those two into cardinal. It's like a poor man's mixer. Can we use a stereo mixer instead? You could, but I usually find them annoying. The mixers in cardinal are... Unless it's the MixMaster, but it's huge. But you can use it. I think I use this. Yeah, that's what I usually use if I do use a full mixer. Otherwise, there's like build your own mixers. There's that Bafako and the CF, I think. Like build your own mixers, but I don't know, this just kind of does everything. Okay, we could replace this little guy with this. Yeah, it also has a send and return. If you add the expander to it. Yeah, it's got everything you could want. I think we should also be heading towards music submissions. We're kind of running out of time. We have a cake and a base, and we don't even finish it. But I've learned a lot about cardinal. Hopefully the chat has, too. I hope everyone has learned a lot about cardinal, except for you, John, because you know already everything. I guess definitely more than me. I know a lot of stuff. So I guess I'm going to skip plateau for this thing and just do ether. So I can very quickly do what I want to do. And then we're going to move on to our music submissions. Okay, musically, this is not very exciting. I would barely call this a melody. I'm not even sure if it plays in any key. It's kind of bad. Yeah, I think because of the way we're doing the FM on that filter. Yeah, it's really hard to have a solid pitch. Yeah, I can think of a few ways to start to establish a pitch, but we're not going to do that right now. Yeah, all right. We'll take more than no time. That is our cardinal session. And there's someone in the chat asking what that reverb is. They've never heard of it. Yeah, it's really great. Ether, a certain source. Yeah, it's incredible. Ether is like my favorite reverb in the past months, maybe more. Since I've discovered it, I've been using it everywhere all the time. It is CPU heavy, but there's kind of nothing that beats it, I think, because it's very smooth. It's very versatile and well, yeah, it does lots of cool stuff. Okay, that's it for our music making. Didn't make any very exciting tune composition, but we did learn a bunch of our cardinal. Let's go and transition into music submissions. I'm going to clean the decks because I've been previewing some tracks. And I kind of make myself too too big now. It looks weird. Wait, I need to shrink myself. That doesn't look right. I'm going to chug some more caffeine real fast and come back and hang out for these submissions. Okay, but I'm yawning a bunch, so I don't want to make the chat tired. Let's go. We're starting out with a track titled System Debased by Steve Pixis. And this track was made with LMMS and Zinatsev FX. The author also writes, Music. If anyone knows, name the genre. It's Bob's. This is perfect party music. Sahativa says, Falk TX made an LV2 version of Plateau for us in the chat room. It's nice and light. That's cool. This Bob's so hard. Chichu says, very dance. Whoa, it sounds like PWM. But I don't think Zin can do PWM. And that's so cool. I was thinking if I needed to mention the sub bass or not, but not there it is. It was very deliberate. It was withheld with purpose. Dude, that's so good. I would call this progressive house trans, but I don't know. So that was- Yeah, it is very progressive. So that was System Debased by Steve Pixis. And now let's hear words that start with ABA by SG75. Quite experimental, I'd say. Miss a distinct kick drum. There is a bass that is hitting the quarter notes, but I don't know if there is a kick that is missing and kind of lost in the mix. Abba Tuar, Abba Tuar. If I could hear the slightest of transience underneath that bass. So this track was made with Ardor, Helm, Geon Kick, FDN Symbol, E-Speaker, and the author's voice. That was weird. But interesting. So that was words that start with ABA by SG75. I think it's over in chat saying, what did you think of this? It's like an avant-garde from 98. I can't tell if that's- If that's- He's saying this is his track either way. He also says that Zin can PWM. Yeah. So that might be some nasty, some funky FM stuff. Yeah. And now we're hearing Edamon by OV. Oh, there he is. Yeah, this is it. Okay. The track was made with Ardor, Vitalium, Zinus of FX, Kalf, and LSP. This is the stream compression, but I feel like it's lacking a mix to me. Like the low mids. But I like that talk bass in the back. Yeah, some nice switches. Yeah. I like the drum pills. I am missing a sub-basin here. Like the lows are kind of underpresent. They seem to be there on the spectrum analyzer, but I need to like crank the headphones way up to hear the bass. To the point where I'm not comfortable with the highs and mids. So I think OV may have very bass heavy headphones or a very boomy room. And that made the mix a bit unbalanced. I don't hear sub at all over my mains. Like I don't feel bass whatsoever. So I think there's a possibility it's like phase canceling or something, but I don't really know. Yeah, there must be something. You probably have cleaner audio than I do. So probably that's the case. Okay, but overall I really like the composition and the sound design. And the snare was a little bit obnoxious, but really cool stuff. I want to hear more from OV. Yeah. Good job. Next track is titled Morning Breeze by Jobin Rezai. Rezai, I'm not sure how to pronounce the name. And this track was made with Q-Tractor. We don't have a lot of these. That's nice. The author also writes, This is the second song I made using free software, Q-Tractor. I'm still learning new things about making music in Linux. And even though the learning process has been a bumpy ride, it's also been very enjoyable. I like this a lot. I really like the composition and the mix is very balanced. My drum and bass junkie would like to hear more kick and bass, but I wonder what all the sounds are. Unfortunately, the submitter didn't write anything else than Q-Tractor. I'd love to know if they are synthesized or are these just, you know, sample instruments or something. So I had to kill a bug. These are from sample instruments. I hope I killed it. They might tell us in chat. Yeah, right. But these sound sampled. Yeah. Some of them sound synthetic. Yeah, maybe it's like a general MIDI sound font or something. Very good composition. Yeah. And even if these like are all sampled instruments, like, you know, no sound synthesis was done. I think they're pretty well put together. Yeah. Maybe a bit more EQ work could be done to like clean it up. I unironically love this one album. That's literally like Windows 95 MIDI instruments. So it really doesn't matter what it is. If the composition is good, the composition is good. That's true. Alrighty. Now let's hear a track titled flagship approach. And I guess that's a date. So I assume this was exported from Ardor. The artist's name is TD. Oh, I got the full name. Techie Damien. This track was made with Ardor. Geon kick. You should recognize it. They write vitalium. Drug and fly early reflections. Culp saturator. LSP sidechain compressor stereo and mono. GX epic. I don't know that one. X40 water tune LSP multi band compressor mono and my voice. Nice. I like the swelling distorted bass sound. I think there's a noise component pushed into the distortion. It's something that is like the... I think I've got very popularized by the Doom 2016 soundtrack. I wish there was a little bit more variation in the composition. It guides kind of repetitive. I think I hear... Oh yeah. There are some voices in the background. They're just very faint. I hear classical inspirations in here. There's some interesting play with rhythm. The kick is a little bit overpowering I think. I like the background vocals but they are very quiet. And I think maybe there's some face canceling going on. But the mix is in stereo as the vectorscope shows us. Alrighty. So that was flagship approach by Techie Damien. I think it's... Oh yeah. I wanted to read a short message from them as well. Really quick. It's not short though. I'm gonna do quick. When I switched to Linux a few years ago, I thought that I wouldn't be able to make music like I would on Windows. I could on Windows. After a quick search, I found your channel which taught me a lot of basics of art or a bunch of plugins and sound design which complemented well with my classical music theory education. Ha ha! There we go. As such, I have been having a blast playing around with all the available settings and by putting my DSP load through the roof. This track culminates a lot of what I have learned from you and others in the community. Thank you for everything you do. Awesome. Thank you very much. I'm really happy to hear that. And yeah, it's awesome. There's a lot that could be done but there are some really cool ideas here. And I think the most important thing is that you're having fun making it and looking back at yourself from months ago and seeing if you've grown or not and then looking at other people and comparing yourself because that can only make you stop and be depressed which is pointless. So have fun, make stuff and I want to hear more. Let's now go with Quantizer. A track is titled Chain Waltz. Ah, bass 34. I love 34. That's some deep bass. Oh, there's the signature drums of Quantizer. This track was made with LMS, Zenitsu FX, Vital and Audacity. I really like the rhythm. It's the 34. 34 is the best. 304. It's 34, time signature. Oh, right. Yeah, it's a Waltz. Makes sense. Wow, I rarely hear it used in electronic music in this way. It works very well. Yeah, actually I can't even think of EDM in 34. I know some in 74 but... That's odd. There's like a remix of a Zelda song, I think, because the originals in 34. But I can't remember if they re-sign... Anyway, this is great by the way. Yeah, it builds up slowly but I don't get bored listening to it. There's some things going in the background which keep me interested even though the music is progressing very slowly, unfolding. I think it's kind of entrancing just how slow the movement is. Yeah, but it does enough to keep me interested and not feel bored. Exactly. Oh, I love the key change, the chord change. The audio of this track, too, to listen to it. Because I think whatever you're streaming to me cuts the low frequencies. Because there's only a bit of sub-bass on this. But I can tell that there shouldn't be more. You can see on the spectrum analyzer. Yeah, it's hitting like down to 40ish hertz. So it should be pretty deep. It's like 655. I don't know. You can check and compare if the live stream module is different. I don't know how to pronounce that. I'm going to say Sa. Sa says in chat that because of my hand making the 3-4 beat, he can see the latency between me and Poland. I'm in the US, so it's quite far. Oh yeah. I think the latency is pretty decent for the video call. It's pretty, I think except for a bit of rainbow puke, it's been really... Okay. Latency is very minimal. It's almost like we're just talking to each other. So... Yeah, that's really nice. We can actually have a conversation. Which is really good. Okay, so that was Quantizer's Chain Waltz. And I think the chain, maybe he's been recording some chains and making the drums out of that. Because there is some like metallic clanging stuff. That gives me a cue, a clue. Alrighty, let's hear a track by Advent Tuner, which is a moniker of Outer Mind. And it's titled To Be Announced, so it's not titled yet. And it's a Drum and Bass Work in Progress 1A. He also says the piano is sound fun. Okay. Oh, Quantizer says the real chains. Nice. This was made with LMMS. Oil of the bass. But that bass sounds like the bass line in Freestyler. Oh yeah, even the melody. Oh yeah, this is great. Synthesizers use our Surge and Synth 1, which is freeware but not open source, sadly. And there's samples from Music Creator, Producerspot, Wave Alchemy Evolve, Hexwave, so a lot of free samples. And the author also writes small break from Hardstyle. This time it's some Drum and Bass. I guess it's more breakbeat if you consider the tempo. I think D&B is like set to 175, 174. Yeah. So I think it's technically breakbeat. But who cares? It's basically Drum and Bass. Yeah, that was fun. It was a bit slower than Drum and Bass, typically is. But you know, that was really nice. I like that. Okay, let's now hear a track titled Shattered by MiloFi. And MiloFi always drops some bombs. Before I read, I want to guess that this was made with Talenoistmaker or OBXT. Let's read and see. This track was made with Ardor, 38X Sinister. I don't know what that is. LSP plugins, B-Shuffle and many more. What is X38 Sinister? Oh, it's an open source plugin I've never heard of. What the heck? I'm pasting the link into the chat so everybody can figure it out. There's some really cool sound design going on here. So there is a couple of things missing. And I think it's mainly in the mix that would push it to being like... I'd love to remix it. Or like take it on... Maybe, I don't know. Do a live stream where I try and work on it and see how far can I push it. If MiloFi would like to do that, of course. So that was Shattered by MiloFi. Now we have a track titled Ukrainian for Europeans by Chechu. And I believe that's the first submission by Chechu. Who, uh... Yeah, let's hear it. What is that? I guess that's basic Ukrainian language, vocabulary. So this track was made with Ardor, LSP multi-sampler with air windows and drums. Ah, air windows samples. Zenit Zenfusion Helm Delay Architect Dragonfly Reverb and LSP Compressor. That's some heavy lyrics. My daughter was raped and killed with a headshot behind the trash container. So I think my immediate thought would be, I wish there was a snare roll under that snare to give it more of like... Like, because there's the two, the timing of it, the like... But then if you had a little roll underneath that, I think it would really fill out the track. I'm not entirely sure if it was meant as a piece of music or as a statement. Yeah, but I think if it is like a military drum roll, because I think that's kind of the feel the track was going for. Maybe. I wish the backing elements were a bit more loud because the vocals kind of like were very, very... Like they were very clearly audible, but they were like way too loud and compressing to the rest, I think. I would like to hear the plucking strings a bit better. I think they're really nice, like... They have a nice atmosphere, I think. Yeah, I agree. That was a heavy piece. Let's hear a Tarak titled Jumpscare, I believe. It's without any vowels. Excuse me. GMPSCR. Okay. Oh yeah. So this is Nicholas Augustine. Oh man, that's so good. I love that. I wish it had more transients, though. So this track is titled Soft Fizzly Jumpscare. Nicholas Augustine Remix. So this is a remix. I don't know how much original material is in here. It was made with Ardor, Vitalium, LSP plugins, and Culp plugins. The author also says... I bet it's the LSP limiter, which is why you can see little trans bits above those. Peeking through. Yeah. It's leaking a little bit. Leak limiter. Leak emitter. Is this a rhythm? It does remind me of LRFG2, that's a good point. And there's a very scroll-exy part with the vocal chops. Oh man, I love this kind of sound. Well, tonight. Yeah, pretty much. It fits right in its quality stuff. Yeah. I remember the author has posted it in my community chat, and I asked them specifically to submit this to the livestream, because I thought it was so cool. And I also... He shared a screencast of the session, so how the Ardor track really... Like the Ardor session, how it really looked. And I asked about the drums, because I saw he was using samples. And he said it was... He made it... The drum samples were made by him as well. Him and a friend, I believe. And they were also synthesized, I think. But they exported that as a sample and used them. Really cool stuff. So that was a track by Nikolas Augustin. And it's a remix of Sophie's Lease Jump Scare. And now the last track of the evening. And we are over time. We are 13 minutes over time. We're gonna be like 15 minutes over time. Let's hear. Saha and Chant says... Tagged us both and said... Ternary? I don't know. Ternary. What they're trying to say. Ternary. But they tagged both of us. What could that mean? Oh, Nikolas Augustin is in the chat. That's really cool. He says there's a walkthrough in his channel. Awesome. Oh, nice. Okay, let's hear the last track of the evening. And it's titled Composition. No, Commosition. I don't know if that's a typo or is it deliberate? I honestly can't tell. By Xavier Treningovsky. That's going to be something special. Line two, punky. I love this. That's so cool. It's very, very weird. By the way, the vocal kind of... Where it was kind of like... It reminded me a bit of Trent Reznor. From some of his tracks. Really. I know it's kind of... Maybe sound ridiculous. But the vocal quality in some parts were very similar to what I hear from Trent Reznor. In some of his tracks. So that was really... I don't know. Oh, there was a huge deficit of de-assing on the vocal. That was a bit painful. But yeah. That's it. That was Commosition. By Xavier Treningovsky. Made with ardor. And he also says it's work in progress. That's kind of implied. I guess. I also got two more submissions, but they were submitted one right at the start of the stream. And another 10 minutes ago. So you know, I can't really pull that in. Plus we're already over time. So I'll check them out for next month. Stick around to hear your music played. Thank you very much for joining me for this live stream. Thank you, John, for being my co-host for... Yeah, thanks for having me again. These are a ton of fun. Yeah, it was great having you. I'm really happy. I want to do that more. Yeah, me too. Alrighty. This is going to be kind of awkward because I can't paste you on all the screens. I mean, I can, but it's going to be weird. Okay. I'm going to do the usual outro. Airwindows makes a surprise appearance in chat. Oh, nice. Hello, Chris. Good to see you. Okay. So that was monthly live stream number. I don't know what I've been doing this for many years. Thanks for joining me this month. Once again, thanks to John for joining me as a co-host and bringing some awesome knowledge about Cardinal and helping us make a kick on the bass. And 1.6 hours of time. That was fun. It was great fun. Yeah. If you guys would like to get in touch with one another and learn about open source music making, a good idea is to check out my community chat, which is available at chat.anfa.xyz. There's also Discord, which is proprietary. You can join that too. The link is in the video description as well. And if you go to this chat, anfa.xyz website, you will see a link there as to, you just need to read it, read a little bit. And if you guys would like to support me with a multi-donation, you can do this on Patreon or on LibraPay. LibraPay is open source and it takes less in fees. And I don't do any bonuses for patrons really. I do sometimes I do exclusive posts, but I try to really provide all the value I can to everyone because my mission is to educate people and make the knowledge available. That's it. Golden asks, also Bitcoin and Ethereum donations? Well, I can think about it. If there is a need for me to accept Bitcoin and Ethereum, I can think about it. Kind of skeptical. I'm very, very cryptocurrency skeptical because I think they're environmentally harmful and they're mostly used for bad things. There are some legitimate use cases. I'll think about it. Thank you. Thanks to everyone who has also donated into Super Chat because that's the new thing we've done. So I'm glad someone used that option. It's really cool. I need to buy a new graphics card. So that will come in handy. Alrighty. Thank you very much. I'll see you hopefully not super long ago. I have a video coming up, but I'm very slow to do it because I'm kind of overwhelmed with work and things. Yep. That's pretty much it. Go sleep. Go to bed.