 Hello, Osleigh to sync here. I think that the sequencer on the Korg mod wave is fantastic and crammed full of creative potential. However, it's also a little unexpected, crammed full of lots of different features. And on a polysynth like the mod wave, it's kind of a bit weird. And I think for that reason, it's sometimes overlooked as potentially the most interesting feature of this synth. So in the hope of trying to remedy that, over the next videos, I would like to really dig into the mod wave sequencer, understand how it operates, and what possibilities it has in store for us in terms of creating really quite interesting patches. Before we get started in the interests of transparency, Korg did send the mod wave over to me to make some videos on, but they didn't ask for and have had no editorial oversight in anything that I have done with the synth on my channel. So with that said, oddly, in terms of trying to understand the sequencer on the mod wave, we probably have to start by talking about what it is not. And what it is not is a polyphonic melodic sequencer, like you would find on say, the Minilog or the or any of the polyphonic valkers or say the sequencer that's built into the Arturia keystep. It's not the kind of sequencer where you will play in notes and it will play those notes back. You can kind of make it do that some of the times in some ways, but to treat it like that, and only like that would be, I think probably missing the point. If you need to do that kind of polyphonic sequencing with the mod wave, you probably just need to plug in a sequencer to do it. The fundamental thing that we need to understand about the sequencer on the mod wave is that it's not a sequencer for the synth. If you like, it's not a keyboard sequencer. It's a sequencer per note played. And that's kind of massive. But let me show you what I mean. So I've programmed in a eight step pitch sequence. And if I hold down a note here, it's going to play that sequence for me. So we have a monophonic sequence running on this held down note. If I play another note, you can hear that it's got its own sequence playing. And it's actually out of sync with that first note I played. If I play another note, another note, we now have four sequences running because I'm holding down four notes. Now, we can synchronize all of those notes together. And this is probably the first sort of feature of the synth that I'll show here. And if we hold down shift and enable, now if I play one note, whenever I bring in another note, you hear now that they're all at least synchronized together, which is useful. If you have sync notes on set on both layers, both layers will synchronize together. But if you have one turned on the other one, not then all the notes on one layer will sync synchronize together on the sequencer, but not on the other. The other really important thing to note here is that the sequencer is not triggering notes, it's just adjusting the pitch of the oscillators. So if I turn off sync notes here, you can hear there that the sequence is changing those notes. But if I say set my envelope to try me like plucky or whatever, it's not re-triggering the notes for each of those steps. Because I've set my sustain to zero, we've now got silence. So by default, the sequencer is not actually going to trigger notes. So we're not going to be triggering the envelopes. Now we can actually get it to do that. We can do it for each envelope separately if we want. So in our envelopes here and the filter one actually, in page two, I think, page three, sorry, of our envelopes, we have this trigger source parameter here, which is set to off by default. But basically we can set up our envelopes to be triggered by any modulation source actually. But if we want it to trigger in time with our sequencer, if we come in here and we want to come down to generators and down here somewhere, we should find a step pulse here. So if we set this to trigger on the step pulse, we turn down our filter and turn up the envelope mount. You can hear now that we've got our filter envelope being triggered by the sequencer. But not our amp-envelopes happens. This is just a gate being held open constantly here. And because we have an envelope per note, we can still have things being triggered independently out of sync if we need. Right, so that's what the sequencer isn't. And I've also demonstrated how you can kind of make it act a bit like a standard sequencer, but not really. And as I say, to treat it that way, I think is probably missing the point a little bit. So let's come back around to what we do have. We have a sequencer per note played, but actually that's simplifying things quite a lot. We actually have seven sequencers per note played. We have pitch, we have something called shape. We have a timing lane, and we'll get to shape and timing in a future video. And then we also have three lanes of general purpose modulation, a bit like motion sequencing, if you're familiar with the motion sequencing on most corgs since. Although each of these sequencer lanes, as they're called, will all run in sync with each other, we have these seven sequencers or sequencer lanes as they're referred to on the mod wave. And they all have a number of different parameters, which we will be diving into soon. To view those parameters, we can just hold shift and click on the particular lane that we're interested in. So I'm just in the pitch lane here. And we'll, as I say, we'll dive into each of these parameters soon enough. But as an example, on this particular lane, I have my loop set from step A1 to A8. So the sequencers can have up to 64 steps. In this case, I've got this one set to be eight steps. But if we come across to, let me think, A, which one was it? C? Okay, here we go. It seems the lane C here. This one has its loop point from A1 to A3. And if I just start this playing and I turn up this knob here, this sequencer lane is going to be affecting the panning. That's going to go sort of left center right. If you're hearing that in headphones, you'll be able to hear that, right? So immediately by decoupling the length of the two different sequences that we're hearing here, the panning coming from sequencer lane C and the pitch, we're getting this interesting rhythmic idea. But I also have two other sequencer lanes set up doing things. So if I turn up this one, that's a five step sequence, I think, so quickly. Yeah, five step sequence, which is affecting the position of the wavetable. So we're putting a pitch rhythm, a panning rhythm, and a wavetable position rhythm. They're all happening in sync, but they're happening at different lengths. So we get these really cool polymeter things happening. If I turn up this knob, this is going to be a seven step sequence, which is affecting the morph, I think. And because we have everything running in sync, but at different lengths, we can get these really, really interesting rhythmic ideas happening by holding a single note. And this is not something you could easily do with a standard polyphonic melodic sequencer that you would find on many other polysense. As I say, thinking about the mod waiver that way is slightly missing the point, I think. I think that's rather cool. Right, so let's take a look at the common features that all of the different sequencer lanes have. And I'll just go to these other bits of modulation. So we're just back down to pitch, and we'll just make sure that we're looking at the pitch like that. Okay. So the first thing I'll just reiterate is that if we come into the seek view here, what we can see for all of the different sequencer lanes, you can see the position that we're currently in and also how long the sequencers are and when they're going to restart. So although we're not hearing those other sequencers doing the panning and the wavering position and stuff, you can see here on signature A, B and C that they have different lengths compared to the pitch which is highlighted. It's quite a useful overview. What it doesn't show you is anything to do with like the amounts of modulation. It'd be nice if there was like an overview per sequence lane, but currently there isn't on this firmware. So diving back into the pitch here, let's take a look at the common settings that each of the sequences have. So the first thing is that we have this loop parameter here, which generally speaking is going to be the length of your sequence. So we can set our start and end point and this goes into the Bs, Cs and Ds to give us up to 64 steps of sequencing. One thing that's important to note is that although we can use this to adjust the length, we don't just have to adjust the end point, we can adjust the start point as well. So the start of the sequence doesn't have to be the start of the sequence, if that makes sense. So now we've got a seven step sequence, except we've got seven steps by taking a step off the start rather than off the end. Which again is officially you don't tend to find on sequences like this on a polyphonic synth. Now one thing I'll just introduce here as well, maybe we'll just make this much shorter so it's easier to hear maybe like a three step. So we've got a three step sequence there. One of the lanes, I guess it's a sort of pseudo lane that we have here is the master. And the master lane is off by default. What the master lane allows us to do is to set a overall loop duration for the sequence. What this will do is reset all of our sequences when that loop duration finishes. So although we've got a three step sequence here, what you'll hear when I play is that we're actually getting a straight sort of 16 step sequence now, because it's resetting our three at the end there. So without we just get those rolling threes and with it on it's stopping it at that 16th step essentially. So that's really useful if you want to make sure that your complex rhythmic sequence does actually reset at the start of say like every four bars or whatever it happens to be for the particular composition that you're working with. The other thing that we should bear in mind with our lengths here, so if I come back down to or rather up to eight, is that the start and end point of our loops in our sequences are actually modulatable parameters. So if I maybe grab, yeah, so let's add a modulation. We're gonna hit enter because we just want to do the thing that we were just modulating which is the loop end here for our source. Let's just use the amp LFO maybe. Yeah, that'll do. Hit enter to continue. We'll set the intensity to minus five and we'll just make sure this is running nice and slowly. And hopefully we're here. It's longer, shorter, shorter, shorter and then longer again. So we can actually modulate the length of our sequences as well. So not only can each sequence be different lengths anyway, that length doesn't have to stay the same. It can be modulated as well. And because these LFOs are free running unless you have sync notes turned on, if I play two notes together, but each of those is now a different length at a different time, which is pretty cool. And again, we could be modulating the start of the loop rather than the end if we wanted to work that way. Instead, if we wanted to trim off the root note, as it were in this case, we could work that way as well, which is, you know, immediately hopefully creative juices are flowing there. Coming back into the pitch lane here, let's have a look and we'll skip over these ones just for a second and we'll just go to this transition parameter here. So at the moment this is set to off, which means that by default, each pitch is going to jump in this case. If I turn this on to linear, we'll hear that it's going to be slowing all over the place and not necessarily in the most pleasant way. And let me just take that for a second. There we go. Easy to hear now. We also have an exponential slew, which will move slowly at the start and quickly at the end. And logarithmic, which goes the other way. So it's like slurring into each note. It's quite useful. I think generally for pitch, we maybe don't want that set on, but there is a fourth setting here, which is really useful and especially useful for pitch, I think, but really useful for all of them, which is the individual setting. And that's because each step can have its own transition set. So if we just jump into one of the steps here, maybe this step four here, and we can set its transition to be logarithmic, so we should have step, step, jump, step, step, etc. Here we've got our one sort of slowy one there. So this is a way that we could fake our sort of 303 vibes if we wanted to. So I'm just going to remove the modulation of the length just for a second so that we can hear some of this other stuff a little bit more straightforwardly. So I'll just turn transition back to off. So next up, let's talk about the directional mode. So at the moment we're going forwards, we can also go pendulum, we can go backwards, and we can go random. You know me, I love some random movement. And then sort of one thing we should note with the mode is that this is a way for us to take a sort of even length idea and make it sort of odd length. So like if we go for the pendulum mode here, for example, we've no longer got an eight step sequence. It's more like a 15 step sequence. So placing that sort of mode difference against something can be really, really interesting. Next up we have repeats, which by default are set to infinite, which basically means that we have a looping sequence the same as you would kind of expect as normal. But we can actually set this to be something else. So for example first, just take this down to like off, for example. So let's go to off. So this is going to not repeat the sequence at all. It's just going to play it once. Now we're still getting that filter being triggered because we're triggering on the steps and the other sequences are still looping. But we can make use of this repeats, for example, to create makes probably more sense with the mod tracks, but we can basically create complex envelopes. So if we wanted to create like a 64 stage envelope with the sequence of lanes, we could do that and just have it repeat and repeat turned off and we'll just go on a journey across all of the steps and then stop where it is at the end. We'll look at that a bit more when we get to the free sequencer lanes actually, because that's one technique that is really, really useful. It's not that we're short of envelopes on the mod wave. We've got four of them, but we can make use of the sequencer to create more envelopes with very, very complicated shapes. And remember that we have individual curves on the transitions as well. So we can create really, really complex envelope shapes. So note advance is a bit of a weird one. And I will show some more practical uses for it when we get to the episode when we're looking at the timing lane, because I think that's where it sort of comes into its eye a bit more. But what this essentially does is that it makes it so that each time you press the key, it's going to start at the next step. So if I turn this on... So we're starting at our root note that time. Now if I play again, we start at step two instead. And this time we'll start at step three. And then step four. And then step five. Step six. So seven. Step eight. And then back around on our repeat loop point. You might be wondering what that's for. And it does take a little bit of getting your head around. It certainly did for me anyway. And it makes a lot more sense when we pair it with some of the features that the timing track has. So we will revisit note advance and look at some more practical applications for that in a later video. So this last one here that is coming to almost all of the lanes, it's not on timing, but it's on most lanes is use shape. And this relates to the shape sequencer lane here. And the shape sequencer lane allows us to define per step, like a envelope shape, which allows us to create more complex transitions essentially on a per step basis. And this can be, as I say, per step. So the shape lane, which we'll get to in another video in a bit more depth probably when we look at the other sequencer lanes, can be used to modify how each step on a sequence gets modulated. Probably not that useful on the pitch lane. Well, maybe actually for like doing some drum stuff, maybe. But certainly we will take a look at that in a bit more depth on the other sequencer lanes when we do those. The final aspect that is common to all of the tracks doesn't belong to the configuration here, but rather to each step. So if we just select step here, we have this probability control here. And this is the probability that this step will occur. So at the moment, we've got our eight step sequence that if I drop this down just to zero just to demonstrate this, this is not the probability that the note will change. It's the probability that this step will happen at all. So we now functionally by turning the probability of this step to zero, we've got a seven step sequence. But of course, we don't have to have it set to zero. We can have it set somewhere in the middle like this. And then we've got a sequence which is going to potentially change each time around. And if we do this on a couple of different steps, we can create again quite complex ideas from quite simple ones like this. Bring in some other modulation back. Pretty cool. And probability is happening on a per note basis. So when we have multiple notes playing, they're going to desync and find new ideas. We should also note while we're here that pretty much all of the parameters on a step are able to be modulated by the mod matrix. So we could even have things like the probability being controlled by an LFO or probably more sensibly. In fact, let's do it perhaps. Let's set every other one here to zero. And then we can set probability zero and modulation to that one. And we'll assign it to the mod knob and to continue 100%. And just let the next one here. Make sure we selected the parameter. Add that one to the same mod knob. 100%. This one, make sure we selected it. Yep, same mod knob. And to continue. And this one here. Make sure we selected it. Add it to the mod knob there. And 100%. Cool, that should do it. So now if I turn this knob to 100, the probability of each of those steps should be 100%. I managed to not do it for this one for some reason. Just check that. There we go. And now if I turn down this knob, the probability of each of those steps is going to be reduced. And right down the bottom here, we've basically got a four-step sequence. We now have a sort of performance control for the probability of those intermediate steps. Which is pretty cool. And again, not something you tend to see on like the mid-log. For the rest of this video, I want to take a look at the unique features of the pitch sequence. So let's make sure we've got that selected. And we'll come back to configuration in just a second. Let's jump into the individual steps. So we've seen the transition and we've seen the probability. And that leaves us with these two parameters here, transpose and tune. So the thing that we need to recognize about our pitch sequence is that we are not sequencing absolute pitches. I'm not saying play a C, then an E, then a G. Instead, what I'm doing is defining offsets from the played note. So in our sequence here, it starts with the transposition of 0 semitones and then 5 semitones and 7 and 11 and so on. So I can play this notes and I get those offsets. And if I play another note, it's going to be the exact same contour of pitches just played for a different route. So again, very much not a standard sort of polyphonic melodic sequencer. So beneath the transpose here, we also have a tune. So this allows us to tune the pitch in a more granular fashion rather than in semitones. We can do it as part of semitones if we wanted to do 5 and a half semitones up on this second one. We can do that, which means that we can create microtonal sequences or indeed we don't have to use the transpose at all and we can create sequences which create very small offsets from the main pitch rather than sort of like an arpeggio as it is at the moment. The other thing that we should note on the pitch lane is that these semitone offsets will not respect a performance scale. So if you've played around with this at all in the performance menu just over on page on the last page here, we have the possibility of setting up performance scales which use different microtonal temperaments, so equal temperament being the default, but we can do like the, I think we've got the Gamalonguotons in here and Pythagoras and all that and the semitone offsets on the pitch sequence don't respect that because they are semitone offsets, they're not note offsets on the keyboard if that makes sense. So if you're dealing with the sort of microtonal scales in the performance, your pitch sequence won't necessarily adhere to that particular temperament that you've chosen which is a shame and I wish there was a way to get it to do that actually. So the maximum range of transposition that we can do here, so how wide can we make our sequence? So we can go down to minus 24 semitones, that's two octaves down for where we started, up to 24 semitones above. So that gives us a, if we just use the transpose control, it gives us a range of four octaves if we go from the very bottom to the very top, but we can actually take it further than that because we also have our tune control here which at the top end is plus 12 and at the bottom is minus 12 semitones, so we can push it a little bit further for a range of six semitones in total which is probably enough for most people. There's no way to push it any further than that, we can't modulate the transposition beyond 24 and we can't modulate the tuning above 12. So what I said there actually is a little bit of foreshadowing when I said that we can't modulate these values above or below plus or minus 24 semitones because indeed the tuning and transposition per step is a modulation destination. So that means that for example if we take this, maybe we'll take this third step here, we can add this transposition to the mod matrix, so pitch A3 transpose and we'll maybe use, just use oscillator one LFO as an example and we can set this to modulate it. And you can hear on that step things get moved around. At the moment this is probably going a bit too fast so that's going to go a bit slower. And now that particular note is being changed each time we go around and you can hear that it is actually being shifted around so when we hit this particular step the modulation takes over and if it happens to be moving when it gets there we will hear that movement. We can probably negate this a little bit by choosing a more sensible shape so if we go for one of the samplen hards and maybe set it to be tempo synced like that. Now that's maybe not being totally musical at the moment because we've kind of got an implied major scale going on here and because we're randomizing the pitch it's being shifted to you know wherever it might be. But there is actually something we can do and this is probably the most powerful feature of the pitch sequence track actually. Coming back into the configuration here we've got this final row here which is fit to scale which is currently turned off. If I turn this on now and go back to playing my sequence. Now that modulated step kind of always sounds right and we can change what scale we're dealing with here as well. And it's going to move all of our steps to be within that scale. Even one that's been modulated. So we're not getting any notes here that don't sound right and because our LFOs could be running per note we can now run two different sequences and that note there is going to be a different interval each time which is pretty cool. One hidden feature of this fit to scale instance is if we set our loop to be just one step long maybe I'll just turn off the trigger here perhaps actually just for a second. If we have a one step pitch sequence with fit to scale turned on it will actually fit the keyboard to the scale so now I can't play a wrong note so I can just mash the keyboard and it will always sound good which is great for me because as I've noted before not a very good keyboardist and we can change what that's been locked to by just changing this so if I wanted to play a bebop dominant riff and I can do that which is pretty cool as I say especially if you happen to be a bad keyboardist like me. Yeah so that's just that sort of a hidden feature in the fit to scale there. Let's come back to actually having a sequence though and maybe back to that and we'll turn our trigger back on so we can randomize which notes have been played we can randomize the probability and that allows us to create situations where we can play a couple of notes and we get sort of generative things happening maybe a little bit slower than that as long as we're careful about which notes we have chosen within our sequence and we've set a appropriate scale to lock to it's always going to sound pretty good which is nice to know. One other thing that we need to be aware of with the fit to scale is that it does also apply to any modulation that we have going on including the transition between the notes so if I set my transition to linear and if we just slow this down a bit more you'll hear that as we slide between the notes we are doing a glissando rather than a portamento which means we can hear the individual notes as we go which I mean your mileage may vary whether or not that works for you I mean some of them are pretty cool that last one so actually we should probably set this to individual instead so there we go so there are reasons to make use of that but as I say just be aware that that fit to scale does actually apply to the the transitions as well so there are some limitations to be aware of with the pitch sequence attract the first is that you can't decouple one of the oscillators from the sequence while having the other one still going so you can't have a kind of a droning note while the other one is still being sequenced by the pitch track there are ways that you can sequence pitch using other methods which we'll get to in order to achieve that where one oscillator is droning the other one is playing like an arpeggio or a sequence but essentially if you want to create that with the pitch track you kind of have to use both layers so you'll have a drone layer and a sequence layer because sequences are per layer so that's a bit of a shame the next thing which is a bit of a bummer is that you can't send the pitch sequence somewhere else so you can't use the pitch sequence to also modulate say the filter cutoff this is I think a shame because the pitch sequence also doesn't count as a played note let me show you what I mean so if I set my resonance nice and high and make sure that we can hear it okay you can hear my resonance self oscillating there if I come into my page two here we've got the key track in and in theory if I set this to 60 but I'll prove it first if I turn off the sequencer just for a second you can hear that my key tracking with the filter is doing a proper pitched key tracking across the keyboard if I put my sequencer back on you can hear that the filter resonance is just staying still so it's not following the pitch sequence because these don't count as keys being pressed and there's no other way for me to send this sequence to the filter so you can't do sort of filter tracking tricks this way conversely you could also argue this is a way of us getting a drone so I mean I guess there's a practical application for that but certainly it's a shame that there's not an option to actually send the pitch somewhere else at the very least to a volts a volts per octave input on the filter if you like if we're in modular world so that's yeah that that's a shame the final limitation I've already touched on but just to restate we have a a fixed range that we can achieve with the sequencer and that is that we can go down 24 semitones so two octaves plus an extra one by using the tune control so three octaves down and similarly three octaves up and that is the maximum range do we need more than that I mean I would rather have the ability to go six up rather than having to tune everything down and then tune my oscillators up to match it potentially um but you know I guess you have to set a limit somewhere but maybe two octaves or three octaves up and down is a bit stingy I think probably anyway I think we'll leave it there for today if you did enjoy the video I found it interesting and or useful then please do leave a like on the video it does help me out and if you're interested in learning more about the signals on the mod wave make sure that you're subscribed to the channel because there will be at least two more videos coming out pretty soon on the rest of the sequencer and the next video we will tackle this sort of the freeform sequencer lanes and also the shape lane believe or not these sort of standard motion sequencing lanes a b c and d have quite a few little tricks up their sleeves and quite a few interesting ways that you can make use of them to do other things so make sure you are um keeping an eye out for that other than that as always thank you so much for joining me and until next time take care bye bye