 Hello, Osle to sync here. As any good sommelier will tell you, an exquisite meal can be elevated to new heights by pairing it with the perfect wine. Similarly, a delicious synth patch can be further enhanced with the application of the perfect effect. In this video, I would like to serve up a three course meal of synth tones, and I will be pairing each serving with an effect that I feel enhances the patch. Mmm, delicious. The synth that I will be using today is the diminutive quirky and characterful Stylophone Gen X1, and I'll be choosing my effects from the tasting menu available on the ever-popular Zoom multi-stomp MS-70 CDR. This is a sponsored video, it's sponsored by Dubreck who make the Stylophone Gen X1. They approached me and asked me whether I wanted to create some content about it, and I said yes. Rather than asking for a fee to make this video, instead I have asked Dubreck to send me a bunch of Gen X1s I've sent me for, which I am going to give away to viewers of the channel. So, stick around to find out how you can enter the giveaway to get one of these for free. For our first course, I thought you would start down at the bottom end of things with a bass sound. So, I've got everything set to a fairly neutral position at the moment, and you'll notice that I haven't got the Stylophone tuned that low, and that's because on the side here we have these three buttons, and these two bottom ones here allow us to engage a sub-oscillator, either one octave or two octaves down or both. So, the two octaves down which you would think is kind of the bassist one, and I guess you'd be right, sounds like that, which is a good sound, but I find that to get a punchier sound, just the one octave down kind of sounds more sort of together, more sort of integrated with the main oscillator, your mileage may vary of course. So, the kind of bass sound that I want to create here is kind of our donk-donk kind of sort of slightly funky kind of bass sound. So, the first thing we're going to want to do, of course, is drop our cutoff to get a darker kind of sound there, and then we're going to want to set our envelope to be quite plucky, sort of, as I say, sort of donk-donk kind of sound. So, for a plucky sound, we want our attack turned all the way down, and we want to bring our decay down pretty low, and just balance the decay and the cutoff to get the kind of pluck that we want. So, a longer decay is going to give us a sort of a slower descent, less of a plucky sound, and if we go very low on the decay, it's going to be probably a bit, maybe a bit too snappy, I don't know. So, the thing around there kind of feels about right for me. Now, it might be tempting even to add some kind of squelch to the sound by turning up our resonance, which is a perfectly legitimate thing to want to do, but be aware, as soon as we start cranking the resonance, you'll hear there that our bottom end kind of drops off. I don't know whether this filter is based on a Mo Glada filter, but it kind of has that sort of bottom end reducing resonance. So, for my part, I think for this, I'm going to keep the resonance at low or off, actually, I think probably. We don't need any delay, and we probably don't want any wobble to our sound. We want our bass sound to be sort of quite solid. So, we'll keep the depth and rate turned down here and make sure the pitch is turned all the way down on our envelope, and I think this is a nice bass sound to be getting on with. Let's just try it with the two octaves down, just to see if we can prefer it. So, it's got a bit more low end, but it's not quite as punchy, I don't think, maybe both together. Kind of loses definition a bit. I think just the one octave down is probably what I'm after for this sound. So, in terms of our effects pairing to go with this sound, I'm going to go with some stereo chorus. So, we're going from this to this, which is a cool sound indeed. I think this particular recipe probably draws influence from the Roland Juno synths with their built-in stereo chorus, which added so much depth and interest to the sound. Now, our conventional knowledge tells us that in the context of a mix, we don't want to have our bass too wide. You tend to want to keep the bass in the middle of the mix, and we've certainly put our bass out towards the side. But because this stylophone isn't the weightiest of synths in the world, we're not going to get in the way of our kick drum. So, actually, I think having our bass going out a bit wider is a really, really nice thing. In terms of the settings that I've got here, I've got my depth turned quite high, if we turn it down. We still kind of get that stereo widening, but we don't really get so much of the swirl up high. Just got a little bit more movement. The rate I've got quite low. If we turn it up high, we get a much more obvious wobble, which might be your thing, but I think for bass sounds, you want to get the widening and just a bit of movement rather than an obvious wobble. My mix I've got turned up pretty high, but we can adjust that to taste with a dry sound. We don't want quite the same level of obvious chorusing. We can have that set more sort of 50-50, but I quite like it. Quite high. Something like that. Now we've got another page, just a tone control. So we can get things brighter. I don't think that sounds good. So we'll go nice and dark there. So without our pairing. And with our pairing. Delicious. For our main course, I thought we would go for a pad sound. Now pad sounds, I grant you, are usually reserved for polyphonic synthesizers, which the Gen X one certainly isn't. But with some tricks, we can get a pretty cool paddy sound that we can make use of. Certainly would work well if it was sampled and then replayed polyphonically, but we can also get some sort of pseudo polyphonic hangover in order to get some of that vibe. So I'm back with a kind of neutral sound here. And the first thing I'm going to do is just bring our filter down to a sort of middling position. And what I want to get is a slow movement in our sound. And for a slow movement, we want to have our envelope attack set very long and the decay set very long. We don't want pitch movement necessarily. But now we should get a nice sweeping sound on the filter. And here we have a nice long journey up and a long journey down. Cool, we might want to add a little bit of resonance and we're not so worried about the bottom end on this patch. So that's not such a concern. Great stuff. On the side here, as I mentioned, we have these two switches which allow us to add a sub oscillator and perhaps we'll add a sub oscillator in. But the one I'm more interested in is this top button here. And this engages a kind of cross mod into the sound, which allows us to get much richer oscillator sound, almost like a chorus as it happens. So without and with. And this cross mod is controlled by the rate of the LFO. So if we turn this up, it should become a little bit more obvious. Yeah, see, almost like a chorusing sound. Really cool sound. And while we're here, we might want to add a tiny bit of pitch wobble in there again, just for that added richness. So just bring the depth up on the LFO, which will bring in some pitch modulation as well. Like only the tiniest little bit. I've barely noticed that up. Just want to barely be able to hear it. Should we try some sub oscillator there? Maybe the one octave down. Yeah, I can vibe with that. I think that's nice. So we need to address the fact that we have, you know, what is currently a very monophonic pad sound. So we're going to try and get around this by making use of the built in delay. So I'm allowing myself to add some seasoning, if you like, with the built in delay here. So I'm going to turn it on. And I'm going to turn the level up a little bit. Just halfway and turn the delay time up a bit and the feedback up. And this should allow us to get some sort of hangover on the notes that we play. I'm just going to adjust the level so that the delay sound is kind of in line with the clean sound. And maybe bring that delay time down a little bit. And then bring the feedback up. Now this feedback will self-oscillate. So we have to be a little bit careful not to go all the way up. And we're okay there. So now we can kind of play chords if we move across the notes to get a kind of paddy sound, right? So that's a pretty nice pseudo pad sound, especially given that this is a monophonic synthesizer. Now my effect pairing for this is probably pretty obvious. It is probably the effect pairing that you would most associate with a pad sound. And I'm going to be adding a bit of reverb. In this case, I've gone with a plate reverb, but many different reverbs of course are available. So let's have a listen. This is without and with and a little bit darker. You've kind of got that sort of fluttering of the delay happening in the background there. Now I will note that this is a stereo reverb, which is going to make a lot of difference if you're trying to widen the sound of this monophonic pad. A mono reverb would work fine as well, but stereo reverbs just add stereo width of course. So in terms of how I've got this set at the moment, pre-delay is basically all the way down at the bottom. So pre-delay will have a delay before the reverb kind of kicks in on any particular note. What you can use the pre-delay for is kind of separating the dry sound from the reverb tail. So it kind of sounds like you're close to something in a big room, if you like. So you hear that the reverb there is coming in a little bit later. That might work for this sound, I don't know. Whereas a shorter pre-delay, sorry, would usually make the reverb sound more integrated with the dry sound. I actually like that with a little bit more of a pre-decay actually. Yeah, my decay is set sort of in the middle, so it's not the most epic reverb of all time, but we can make it more epic if we wanted, if we wanted a much longer tail here. I'm finding that a little bit bright now. So actually if we come into the second page here, we can adjust the damping here so we can turn the height damping down a bit. We still have a long reverb, but not quite as bright. Yeah. Now as an alternative, because it's nice to have alternatives, if you wanted something a little bit different that would add more of an additional sound on top of our reverb sound, I also have here, if you'd like to have a taste, a reverse reverb as well. So a reverse reverb is a weird effect that, well, you're here, kind of here that you've got this reverb sort of fading in. On its own, I think it's maybe a little bit harder to manage. Adding a lot to the sound, but if we bring our plate back in as well, not that I'm suggesting that you mix your drinks, but we can get quite a rich, wide ambient sound. And as I say, by playing our chord tones appropriately, we can get kind of chords out of this, which I think is a very satisfying main course. So hopefully your appetite is suitably wetted, and you'd like to know how you can get your hands on a Gen X one for yourself for free. If you take a look in the description of the video, you should be able to find a link to one of those social media raffle kind of pages where you can enter a raffle to win one of these devices by following me on YouTube and following me on Twitter and like me on Facebook and all of that kind of jazz. So you can enter there. I will announce the winners on my various social media platforms and hopefully get them shipped out as soon as possible. I'm probably making a mistake by not limiting where in the world you can enter. So it's probably good to cost me some money in shipping them out, but that is the life of someone who is bad at doing YouTube like a business like me. So take a look in the description, follow the link, enter the raffle and hopefully you will be able to win one of these quirky little friends. So I think it's very much time for dessert and for dessert, I'm going to propose that we have a lead sound, which I guess more than anything else is what the style of phone is traditionally known for. I'm going to go for kind of a vocally kind of lead sound, almost like maybe like a pseudo-theramany kind of thing going on here. So we're going to be doing a couple of things to enhance that kind of vocal quality. So I'm back here with a kind of neutral sound on the style of phone. I have tuned it up a little bit because we're more at the top end of our spectrum here. And the first thing I'm going to do to introduce some more vocal qualities, get a bit of resonance happening with the filter. So I'm going to bring our resonance up to half to begin with, which is a bit stingy when our cutoff is all the way up. But I'm going to bring the cutoff more into the middle and find kind of here a sort of vocal vowel, like wow, wow kind of sounds around here. And this can be the kind of thing that really you could be performing as you're playing the lead as well. Now you can hear there's a bit of a tweak or tweet at the start of the sound there. And that's the envelope still affecting the cutoff. We just want to soften that a little bit. So I'm just going to bring our attack up a little bit, which will take that away, but it has now brightened up everything because now the envelope is bringing us up. So let's just find more of our vocal sound again, like so. Okay. The next kind of thing that we want to do to introduce that vocal quality is, of course, add a little bit of vibrato. So let's do that by making off the LFO, which is our pitch modulation vibrato being a pitch modulation. So we'll bring the rate, the depth up first, taking here, moving around a little bit and bring the rate up. We want to get kind of that sort of natural kind of rate. That's kind of our target, which is quite fast actually. And we just want to adjust our depth. Generally speaking with vibrato, you can afford a higher depth if the rate is faster. If you have a slower rate and a high depth, it tends to feel a bit seasick, but we can push the depth a little bit higher. If things are feeling a bit sort of wobbly and seasick, increasing the rate of the LFO is generally going to help things out. And again, this is probably something that we can be performing as we play, like so. I don't think we really want a sub oscillator this time. Doesn't track so high at the high end anyway. The cross modulation might be nice, a bit much. It's probably more of an electro lead sound, which is cool, but we kind of lose that vocal quality. Okay. So that's I think our basic patch. And the effect that I'd like to pair with this patch is something which I think will further enhance the vocal tonality of the sound. And what that is going to be is a phaser. So without and with. So we're getting a lot more of that kind of vocal valley sound. So a phaser is a modulation effect which is related to things like chorus and flanges. But whereas chorus and flanges make use of very small delay times and modulating that delay time, phasers are making use of an all pass filter and modulating the phase relationship between the dry sound and the wet sound giving us this more sort of valley kind of sound, which is very nice. Plus we want to tune this up a little bit further even. Now if we wanted to get a bit more ambience to this, of course, we could add a reverb on top of this, but maybe as a digestive at the end of our meal. If you like, let's use our delay on the styler phone to create sort of an additional pseudo reverb here. And to do that, we can turn on our delay. And if we set our delay time to zero and our feedback up quite high, we should just turn the phase first, get kind of a pseudo reverb there as well, which if you want those sci-fi sounds is very appropriate. And with the phaser again, we're flying off into space to the forbidden planet. Anyway, I think that has concluded our meal. Thank you so much for watching the video. If you enjoyed it and found it interesting, as always, a like on the video and a subscribe to the channel is massively appreciated and it will help you not miss out on any upcoming synth fun. Remember to check out the link in the description of this video if you want to win one of these Gen X ones. And otherwise, as always, until next time, take care. Bye-bye.