 Hello Oscillator Sync here. This new little friend here is the MFX from ALM Busy Circuits. It is a 6U multi-effect unit which allows you CV control over pretty much all of the parameters in each of the effects. The effects are pretty wide-ranging actually. They slant towards delays and reverbs which is fine with me because so do I, but it also has compressor, distortion, it's got some bit reduction stuff, it's got some chorus type stuff, some panning, so yeah a pretty wide-ranging set of effects and because it's digital, fingers crossed, it gets new programs as time goes by as well. So before we dive into the video proper I thought I would just do a really really quick introduction to how the MFX operates and in particular how you do the CV control. If you want a sort of longer explanation of the module and sort of a go-through each of the different algorithms, ALM actually put out a really really good video on ready state which is what prompted me to buy it frankly. But yeah I just thought I'd show a couple of things on it just so that you're aware. So I've just got a synth voice set up here which I will set going, cool. So we're on the home screen now as it was and from here we're able to select different algorithms. We'll come back to this one in just a second, we're in bypass now by the way because one of the cool things about this is that we have a utilities menu here which contains a tuner, very useful. I am not in tune clearly, not even close about half a cent out, terrible. And also rather wonderfully a little scope which I'm very pleased to have in my rack because getting a scope in your rack is very very useful but it's quite expensive both in terms of money and space in a lot of cases. So being able to have that as part of a module that I would otherwise be using just for sort of checking things is actually really really nice. Anyway we'll come back to the home screen, we'll go into this one here, currently in bypass, back and tap the knob to turn it up. So now we can hear that we are hearing the effect, we'll be able to tell the difference and we have lots of different parameters in here for doing various different things, different modes and different programs within the modes. That's quite nice. And then various parameters for doing other stuff. Feedback there, lovely. Let's make it bigger. And if we want to assign CV controls or anything, if you've used Pamela's new workout, it's very very similar to that except we've got three CV's instead. If you go all the way back down a parameter, this is the high cut. Here again, darker. That's lovely isn't it? Lovely dark ambience on it. Yeah, we go all the way down to the bottom of our parameter, we get access to CV one, two and three as as our controllers for this. So you can, you can only have one CV input go into each parameter, but that same CV input can go to multiple parameters. And as we'll see, we're able to actually customize how that CV input is treated. So I'll grab a LFO from over on stages. I'll plug it into CV one. And get that actually into a CV we're useful. You should be able to see here, we've now got this bar graph going off and down here. And you can hear that the high cut has been modulated, right? Slow that down a bit. So if we want to customize how this works, we can hold down the button again, and it gives us these two additional options here which is attenuation and offset. So, probably best to talk about offset first. This allows us to apply an offset to the voltage that's coming in. And again, this is on a per parameter basis. This isn't for this input, it's for this input on this parameter. So what I like to do usually is unplug my modulation and find the start point for my modulation. Which point about there isn't it? I don't want it any darker than that. Then we can plug in our modulation. Maybe we just want to attenuate that a little bit so it doesn't get right to the top brightness. Okay, and now we've got CV control which is customized over that particular parameter if we just long hold to come out of here we could choose another parameter like the low cut and do a similar thing. Grab another LFO. Probably going slower, we don't want it to go all the way to the top there so we probably want our offset to be zero so that it can be as open as possible attenuated quite a bit. Now we've essentially got a high and low pass filter on our reverb which we can modulate individually. Which is certainly a cool sound. Yeah, so very customizable. Pretty much every single parameter is able to be CV controlled. Yeah, which is a lovely thing to have. As I say the range of sounds turn towards the reverb and delay side of things. We're not necessarily sort of standard reverbs and delays in a lot of cases and most of them have a little twist to them. Yeah, so with such a wide range of effects available and with so much control over the parameters within them the FX can do a wide range of sounds which can be really nice and some of which can be really dirty and nasty. But today what I want to do in this video is share with you three patches that I've been playing with where I think the MFX sounds nice, lovely, possibly even beautiful and maybe in another video not so long from now I will share some of the more aggressive shall we say sounds that the MFX is capable of doing. But let's jump in to the first lovely patch. So this is the first patch I've come up with here and this is using the PCM delay mode on the MFX which has a particular property to it which allows you to do this particular trick that I'm using in this patch here. And we'll disassemble the patch in just a second but as this is kind of a generative type affair let's just let it sit for a moment or two more just to see if it does anything else particularly pretty. So let's just for the moment let's just take MFX out of the equation here and also let's just take down that reverb that I've got going on here as well. So we'll just bypass MFX for a second. Just do by pressing those two things together and let's just listen to what the raw sound is and we'll just quickly talk about what that is for your information. So this is the raw sound that's going into the effects. The voice here if you like is just the 2HP VCO the triangle output on that which is going into the top of the tacharb to low pass gate here and it's going through both channels of it so they're normal together if you don't patch anything else in. So it's going through two low pass gates which just allows it to get a bit sort of darker and shorter decay if you're just sort of plucking it and that's just going straight into the MFX. So that's the voice. In terms of the sequencing that's going on here the pitch information is actually coming from stages so this is running the alternative keymem firmware and all I've got here is an LFO which I think is just a like a sawtooth LFO going slowly on channel 5 of stages that's then going out of channel 5 and into channel 6 and channel 6 when you feed it a level in this way basically becomes like a sampling hold and in the keymem firmware I can also quantize this so it's just like a descending wave that's going into a sampling hold and then it's being quantized to a pentatonic scale I think and I can adjust the range of that using the sliders and the knob there. What's triggering the sampling hold is Pam's here on output 8 which is actually just a straight up clock I think. The reason it sounds like it's got some additional sort of gaps and sequencing in it is that I am running a just a really slow LFO out of stages on channel 1 of stages into Pam's and that is adjusting the multiplier for the clock on output 8 so everything sort of stays to clock but the sort of the density of the note events sort of alter as that LFO sweeps up and down and that's just a triangle I think there. So that's what's triggering the sampling hold which is giving us our pitches and that's also we're just molting off there with the stack cable what's going into my low pass gate to ping it yeah so that is the sequencing and the voice that we've got there so let's bring MFX back in. Now the main thing you'll probably be able to hear there a great example of it there is that the apparent pitch of the decay on the delay is shifting around so we're getting these sort of euphoric bursts like that one there of higher pitched trills and then sometimes it also drops down so we get like these sort of slightly furry low end rumble delays which are actually like an octave below or even more than an octave below so what's going on here well if we come into the um it's on um ping pong mode which is why we're getting that stereo movement and I'm also clocking the delay just with one of my outputs yeah just output one on pounds there so it's the delay time is being kept in time with the sequence or rather the the main clock of the sequence so um what we have here on um on this mode on MFX is this bandwidth control and at the moment this has been controlled by um CV1 which is just coming from a random uh random LFO on stages and you can see it jumping up and down there like that but if we take that away from being CV control just for a second so the bandwidth control changes the sample rate of the delay basically and um this is kind of replicating some of those old sort of digital delays where in order to get longer delay times uh the sort of primitive uh digital hardware needed to reduce its sample rate in order to to get more delay time and what you get with that um reduce reduction of somewhere is that kind of uh sort of very anal alias kind of digital glisten which I do adore very nice and you can hear now that that is running quite a lot faster than it was up here you will also have just noticed that you heard that pitch shifting happening so what happens on the MFX when you change the bandwidth is that anything that is in the delay buffer and gets stretched out or compressed so if we go from a high uh sample rate or bandwidth here and drop down you can hear there that our delays sort of halved in pitch they got twice as long and they halved in pitch if we go the other way what was in the uh buffer at the time gets compressed sped up by twice and the delay halves in time so by moving this control around with some CV which we can do of course here we get this constantly evolving uh that sort of always pitch related changes to our delay symbol that signal right and I think that's rather lovely so the other thing that I'm controlling with CV because you can see we've got two CV in here is um here on the high cut so the high cut is as you'd expect it's a high cut so essentially a low pass filter and I'm just moving this around and this applies to just the delay signal and it just adds a little bit more movement in the timbre of the um the the day um it also means that in some cases that sort of um extreme glisten sort of so you kind of disappeared there for a bit and then it has come back with a vengeance there as the filters have basically opened back up and again this has just been controlled by a random LFO on stages so there's not a lot actually going on in here but you get a lot for your for two channels of CV you're getting a lot of movement here and the fact that we've clocked it to the sequence also means that along with these sort of pitch movements everything seems to stay somewhat abstract but musical the um these sample rates um essentially half each time so which is why we get the um the octave effect going on here the other thing that we could be playing with potentially um a couple of things actually um it's lovely uh so we've got the bit depth which is um the bit depth of the delay so I've got it set at 12 which is just ever so slightly furrier just because I just like the way it sounded a bit more high five with 16 bit you can hear there that everything's sort of the dynamics of the delay signal is a little bit more clear perhaps it's 12 where we had it everything's a little bit more sort of smeared in terms of the the the dynamics it's slightly more compressed sounding perhaps um there's a moolow one here which gets really fluffy but not like harsh in the right setting I think having that sort of noise integrated with the delay signal could be a really really beautiful thing I don't know whether it serves it that well on this patch I don't know maybe maybe if we could filter this afterwards that might that might do the trick still nice of eight bit which you can hear like depth and that sort of bit crushing type of artifacts going on in there which again I don't mind and in the right context I think it would be really really nice all the way down to four bit which is probably a bit much for this patch really square wave delay signals but you could see how you could take certain like lead lines not in the context of this patch perhaps but you could see how you might take certain like lead lines and use that to generate like a like a square wave harmony part to something perhaps especially if you kept the the movement of the sample rate as well that could be really cool just like 12 bit a little bit compressed and fuzzy yeah um and then the only other thing I I did was I molted that signal and sent it into disting which is on a reverb setting I can just mix that in now it's 100% where just mix it out my mixer it lets just sort of finishes the the patch off nicely I think so like a self harmonizing generative ambient cluster of pleasant bloops it's the kind of patch that you would kind of set up and just sort of leave on in the background I think it's just a just a nice one to have going on and we can if you wanted to adjust the range of our notes we could do that stages just to adjust in those two controls and also we could change how much the notes change by changing the rate of that LFO gets something a bit more regular more obviously descending yeah nice patch even if I do say so myself so this second batch here is based on the almecon reverb mode which is I believe modelled on high-end 80s digital reverb and the idea with this patch is to not do anything like super flashy but modulate the parameters of the reverb in such a way that the space and the sound sources position in that space is constantly sort of moving and evolving so we might have it very far away in a big room the room might get brighter and we might get even further away and even further away in an even bigger room and that space is constantly sort of just moving just subtly not not often like in big jumps or anything and it just creates for an interesting ambience where this particular sound source is never really stationary much smaller room so let's hear it without effects for a second okay so this is the sound source as is so that's rings and rings has been sequenced in terms of volts per octave just by pams doing a quantized random in terms of the sound that's coming into rings to be resonated that is just the noise from kinks which is going into the aid actual filter here which is then going into a vca and the vca is however so slightly open so there's also a little bit of just rumble happening in there the vca and the filter are both being opened by stages and it's the segment made up by these two segments here which is just a straight up attack decay but you can hear that the length of the attack is being modulated sometimes very slow like that but sometimes it's a lot faster and that's because I'm self-patching stages just from this first random segment into the attack portion of this envelope so that's a much faster sort of still bowed sound but much faster but sometimes it's a slower bowed sound instead so that's all there is going on in the source and then the output of rings is going into a channel of quadrat just to take a little bit of the volume off rings is an especially hot module in certain situations and I was just finding that I was clipping the effects in some cases so let's bring the reverb back in so what are we going to be doing here so basically there are three random channels of stages by random I mean they're doing random movement not that they are picked up and they're all going into quadrat again just taking a bit off the cv stages swings from zero up to eight volts which is again for some modules unusually hot and what I was finding with mfx is if I gave it the full swing of voltage from stages it was actually clipping the top of the cv which meant that any movement was spending more time at the top rather than moving so I've just taken about half of it off so they're swinging about four volts instead which seemed to work a lot better and then what I'm doing is I am modulating the mix amount which obviously is going to set us forwards and back in the space that's quite low at the moment and we can hear that the main sound is quite present and if we wait hopefully we're going to get some movement I've got this one moving the slowest I think so you can hear now that the mix is a bit higher we sound a bit further away and I'm doing similar things here for the size I've got set in the same place damping which is how much of the top end is being lost in the feedback loop of the reverb so when this goes high it will sound like a darker less reverberant room so now it's gone down it got very bright and very long now it's going up down again it's a longer reverberant and when it goes high it kind of kills a lot of what's going on inside the reverb as well so I'm not setting that one too high I've got that attenuated slightly more and what else we've got diffusion is the other one which is going to affect the density of the reverb trails as well again similar idea and we're just changing the character of the reverb as time goes by which gives us this movement in space perceived movement in space without having to do any like panning or anything and it's been really nice to discover that you can get some really interesting subtle variations to reverbs like this I think sending more stuff through a reverb like this if it was a background element in a track would be a really really interesting way of putting a subtle amount of movement in that background element without it being like super sort of higher I'm being modulated a lot which is cool as well sometimes but I just quite like the way this is sort of moving things subtly backwards and forwards in the mix okay let's do one more shall we okay so this patch is maybe a little bit more frenetic than some of the previous ones certainly a lot more going on but there's something quite lovely about the additional sort of harmonies and melodies which have been automatically created and that's all been done believe it or not by using the data corrupter mode on the mfx which from a distance looks like it's probably some kind of bit crusher type mode which you know it does do it does some work reduction and bit depth reduction but on top of that it kind of emulates a described as a malfunctioning digital device where the the data that's in the buffer kind of gets glitched there and just keeps sort of repeating itself and we can use that to sort of create the sort of delayed kind of repeating textures alongside our main part so let's deconstruct this a little bit so we can hear what's going on so let's get rid of mfx just for a second and let's get rid of the reverb so the main voice in this case is beehive which is plaits in that clone in the wavetable mode I think and I'm sequencing it in much the same way as I did on the first example which is just with an NFO and a supplement hold on stages and just doing some modulation of the timbre morph and harmonics harm rather knob which is variously coming from stages and also there's a stepped one I think coming from yeah stepped one coming from pams there that's going out here going into emult and the version that we're hearing now goes into the low pass gate and then just out into xpan so if I wanted to I could pan things around and perhaps we'll play with that to see how we can hear these sort of complementing sounds so the other side of the malt here is going into mfx which is what is feeding the data corruptor mode here so bits corruptor not data corruptor um so let's have a listen to what that is doing so i'll just turn that down so um this is um being fed out into uh filter just to take a little bit of the top end off if we wanted to we could just hear that on its own perhaps so this is the raw sound here and you can hear that it's kind of grabbing on to stuff from our source material and the sort of again it's stuck in a buffer and repeating it and it's sort of jumping to different parts of the buffer as it's doing it so the buffer size here is being defined by a clock coming from pams yep um and we're able to use the clock to define the buffer size which is going to make sure that our sort of um notes if you like are changing in time with our main clock but what i'm doing is i've got this set to skip occasionally so the buffer keeps sort of jumping to sort of double and half the size which just gives us some nice variation there so that's going into um filter just to take some of the top end off it and then out into a lepas gate which i'm then just pinging again with pams i think just with a skip and a rapid gate there and going into x pan where i'm also panning it around automatically uh yeah using pams again just a stepped pan pattern i think so um you can hear that it's sort of doing lots of things which are musically related because of the scale that i've chosen here everything also always sorts of um harmonizes nicely but with some really nice sort of interesting glitchy gritty occasionally sounds in here so uh what you'll be able to hear is that the timbre although obviously we are shifting the timbre around on plus is not going to be the same all the time and that's because i am uh cv controlling the sample rate for the bitcrusher part of the bitcrusher which again i think is just coming from yeah just a random um channel on stage is there and that sample rate reduction doesn't apply to the current output it applies to the current input so um it's not going to affect the the repeats that are already in the buffer it's just going to affect new ones that make the way in which means that we don't just constantly get this shifting uh sample rate reduction curve thing happening the sample reduced there we go the sample rate reduced stuff sort of just makes its way into the sound which is really really cool and quite different to just sort of sweeping a sample rate reduction thing in terms of how things are getting repeated there's a control for repeat risk and glitch risk glitch risk is the thing that sets the repeats going and then repeat risk is um i believe whether or not the repetitions are going to change and i've just got them both on full um and i've got the mix for this on full as well uh we can also reverse the glitches but it's only going to reverse the the new ones i think yeah so we're starting to get some reversed ones in there that might be fun to have on cv control actually and just have that's just switching occasionally uh and there's also this lock-in control which will lock what's currently in the buffer so we could use that for just grabbing so if you wanted to have more control over where this actually changed to a new thing if you wanted to have it every like four bars or something we could set up a gate with um sort of 99 width coming out of pams and just let the new buffer come in at the end of each four bars that might be a nice way if you wanted to have some more control personally like the chaos uh and then uh that's all we're going to mix together in x-pan and then going into disting for some reverb one thing that might be interesting is if we kill that panning just put the raw one right and repeated to one left so we've kind of got two different parts going on here and we're kind of generating this new voice that's musically related from the first voice without the need for a second voice as long as you're dealing with a a scale that's going to sound good against itself so i think it's just set to pentatonic at the moment so those notes are always going to sound good next to each other um you've got a way of creating an entirely new voice that's based off the first one which is kind of similar to what we're doing in the first patch as well but slightly more sort of frenetic pace to it it's very interesting how it sounds like if we turn the tempo down a bit just taking a minute for the buffer to get that's uh that's nice as well a little bit less uh aggressive when we put some slop on the timing let's get a little bit more relaxed yeah so although at a distance this thing sort of uh the bit corrupt a mode sort of looks like an angry aggressive bit crusher friend we can use it to almost generate an entirely new voice he needs a sort of gentle down sampling type stuff if you want to get like an old sort of sampler feel as well um and maybe mix in just a little bit of the glitch on a sample might be really really cool but this is one way you can use it for an entirely new voice essentially i prefer it without the panning yeah so um there are three patches using mfx to do pretty things having cv control over all of the effects parameters is kind of magic um especially in things like the the pcm delay as i showed in the first example so i think i'm gonna have a lot of fun with this um it helps that it also sounds good but uh yeah if you enjoy this video if you found it interesting then as always if you find a moment to leave me a like on the video that's always massively appreciated and make sure you subscribe to the channel so you don't miss out on any upcoming synth fun but other than that until next time see you soon take care bye