 I'm Anfa. Welcome to a monthly live stream. If you don't know, I am a music producer and a sound designer, so I exclusively work with open source software and Linux. And every month, on the first Sunday I do a live stream, two hours where I make music with open source software, I answer your questions, and then the last half hour I play your music submissions. There is a form, it's linked in all my videos, live streams alike, you can find it, you can submit your music, just follow the rules. Yeah, today we're doing something different, both in terms of software and in terms of music, I think we're gonna be making, because today it's fully modular, or fully, maybe not fully, because I am really excited about a new software synthesizer called Cardinal. Let me show you. So Cardinal has been released like 20 days ago. Actually, yeah, something like that, 14th of February, 2022. And it's a new open source plugin based on VCV Rack. If you don't know, VCV Rack is a modular, virtual modular synthesizer for the next Mac and Windows, I believe. It is open source and it had something called Rack Bridge or DAW Bridge or something like that. Basically, you could run a standalone VCV Rack program, and then you can use a plugin in your DAW to kind of send the audio back and MIDI back and forth. But that's really not, that isn't truly using VCV Rack in your DAW. There is also something called Rack Pro, I believe, with VCV Rack 2. And that's also an option. So that is different from Cardinal, because Rack Pro is, first thing, it's a commercial plugin, but second, it ties into the VCV network services. So you can log in and have your purchased proprietary modules appear there. Cardinal is different. Cardinal is completely detached from that ecosystem. It's self-contained, it has a, I think, couple hundred open source modules built in. And that's all we have and all we need, really. Let me just open a patch I was working on. So I made this. Okay. Yep. And it's making weird noises. I really like the noises. So I thought today we could do some dark ambient. I've got some clipping, okay. All right. I think what I'm gonna do is I'm going to put a limiter after Cardinal to raise the level a bit with X42 DPL, which is the best digital limiter ever created. Yep. Now we can have both loud and clean sound. All right. Let's take a look at this patch. What is going on here? Also, maybe I should make my face smaller. Also, maybe I should hide my hand. I don't know. What do you think? Apart from hitting some notes, I'm not going to be doing very complex things with the keyboard. So maybe it's good to see when I'm triggering notes, basically. All right. So what do we have here? Cardinal has some special modules for handling the communication with your DAW. So there is host audio, which gives you output and input of audio, of course. So here I'm feeding the sound out from Cardinal and there is Cardinal host MIDI. This is the MIDI input. So when I'm pressing a MIDI note, I'm going to go for a very high note. You can see that V voltage per octave is going green and the same is going copying with the gate. Perak says, I vote for hiding your head. Okay, I'm going to make my head smaller then. Hide it completely, but make it less intrusive. What about that? I've got some clipping going on. Maybe I'm going to turn down the slam on the tape processor. Basically, there's a whole lot of cool things going on here. There is an oscillator which is triggered and there is another texture synthesizer. It's a different module that it's like a granular synth which mangles this oscillator output. We just feed it with a salt of wave. Then that gets processed with a weird resonating, I don't know if that is like, it's called resonator. I think it's a bunch of COM filters and these COM filters as well as this texture, the synthesizer, which is a granular processor, they are also modulated with LFOs. So three flowing, smooth changes of voltage. I'm going to go for a low note now. So I think what we are hearing now is individual peaks of the salt of wave or impulses, pulses, when the salt of wave goes from low to high again. And that's processed with this granular processor. So the pulses are not cyclic. The cycles are broken and they're not creating something like, they're not resembling a, sorry, a simple tone anymore. So we're getting reorganized. Then this resonator creates some interesting formats that sound like this is echoing in a pipe or something. After that, we get and saturate the signal with the tape and then we put it through compressor. Actually, we left and right channels independently and then to plateau, which is, I was told a fantastic reverb and indeed it is. I'm pretty astonished about how awesome this reverb sounds. There is an amplifier here, which is used to turn down the sound so it doesn't play all the time. So we're first exiting from texture synthesizer, then we go into quad VCA to turn this down, which is controlled by this envelope generator. And then that goes to resonator and tape and then blah, blah, blah. Okay. So then this is just for me to visualize what's going on so I can see. And I'm using the midi, am I using? Oh no, I'm using an LFOs sort of wave to drive the X input of the oscilloscope so that I can like have a scanning action. All right, I'm going to play you a sequence I made with this, et cetera. So I made a simple kick, the mandatory kick drum. Let me show you how the kick works. If we disable the reverb, so I'm going to turn down the wet and turn up the dry, this is the kick. So there is a Chao pulse, which is specifically designed, which is an interesting envelope generator, I think. And then that goes into a amplifier that helps me just reduce the pitch because it was too high. This then goes into a sine oscillator to modulate the pitch of that. There's also a reset going on. So when I press the note, the sine oscillator gets reset. That then goes into another amplifier, which this time is driven by the previous, sorry, by the same envelope oscillator, sorry, envelope generator, which is called Chao pulse. And then that goes into reverb. And when it's all wet, we get this. All right, let's make something from scratch now. So here is our empty canvas, the rack itself. By the way, can everyone hear me correctly? Everyone is good. Everything is fine. I'm going to start recording on my camera. So maybe I'll do some highlights if we make some awesome things. Tick testing at all. All right. Seems that everything works. Okay, I shouldn't say that. You know what happened last month. All right. So let's start with a oscillator. If you right click, you will open up a list of modules available. There are 623 modules. We can change the zoom to see the modules better. It's an overwhelming number. So I recommend to first start with a couple of suits. Audible Instruments, I think is a very nice starting point. Because there's a lot of different things like a VCA mixer, an EQ there was somewhere. Yeah, there is a bunch of different cool oscillators. There's a filter. Oh, there's a gate. And it's pretty easy to get started. I'm going to start with the macro oscillator. And now to make sound, first we need to get the output of the oscillator to our output of the plugin. But that's not going to be very useful because this is always going to play the same pitch. So we can pass the volts per octave output from our host and put it to volts per octave input. Volts per octave, this is because VCV Rack uses something called CV or control voltage. Control voltage is in the real physical world. It's just a standard of a voltage that is used to control different things between modules. It's like a standardized interface for modules for a module synthesizer to communicate. And VCV Rack, if you don't know, is a software emulation of a hardware system called Eurorack. And many of the modules that you can load in here have hardware counterparts. So you can actually build the physical modules, the devices, put them in a real rack, get real patching cables, connect them together, and make these sounds with hardware if you want. I'm not into that kind of thing because I have limited space and limited budget. But I know some people like to buy modules and build their own racks and play with that all day. That's cool. I wasn't interested in modular synthesizers, basically VCV Rack. And VCV Rack before because it wasn't possible to use it in a DAW. And only now with Cardinal being released. That finally is an option. And we are doing it right now. And this makes it possible for me to really build patches in Cardinal and use them in my tracks. Now, cool things are, we also get automation inputs. So we can pass automation 24 parameters and we can just, they are converted to virtual control voltage and we can feed them to different things. So we can automate various parameters. I think 24 slots is really enough. Yeah. Okay. So we have an oscillator. Now, to build a synthesizer, we need a few more elements, namely we need an amplifier and an envelope generator. So I'm going to right click and find, see if we have an ENV or ADSR. Okay, we don't have an ENV envelope. This is a segment generator. That could be, that this may be a, it may be some kind of envelope generator. But no, I'm going to go all brands and search for ENV. And now envelope or maybe better, I'm going to type ADSR, ADSR. ADSR stands for attack, decay, sustain and release. And here the BGA or bog audio has a very simple and small module that does just that. It's a very standard way of generating envelopes, which has been around for decades, probably like maybe even 100 years. Do they have ADSR envelope generators in the 20s? In the 1920s? I don't know. Maybe in the 30s? 40s? I don't know. I don't know how old the stack is. Okay. So envelope generator is going to give us a control voltage that stays, starts at zero. And then when we press a key on our keyboard, it's going to rise, it's going to rise, and then it's going to stop, and then it's going to hold there until we release the key, and then it's going to fall down. What this will do is allow us to change something with time based on what we're pressing. So I'm going to route the gate input, the gate output from our DAW into something, maybe color. Okay. And now if we, no, sorry, wrong. Well, we set gate, send gate to the gate input of our ADSR. Now if I press a key, you can see we have these little LEDs shh moving around and lighting up. Let me maybe change our looks a little bit. Okay. So now if I press a key, you can see that attack lights up, then decay, then sustain. And now I'm holding my key, as you can see. Hope you can see. And then if I release it, we go into the release part. That means that we are at different stages because this ADSR is a four stage envelope generator. Now if I go without and put it say to color, you can see the output gets bright, and then I release, and it gets dark again. If I increase the attack, it's going to get brighter over time. You see the voltage is rising to 10 volts, and now I let it go and it dims back. Okay, let's try and see what happens if I connect this to our output. All right, we're pressing a very low note. Let's play something higher. All right. We are now changing the color over time, but we would rather change the volume. So let me add another module. We need an amplifier, also called VCA for voltage controlled amplifier. And you can see that in audible instruments, we have a quad VCA, which is a module that has four, that has four. By the way, is the darker look of the cardinal rack better or is it worse? I wanted to make it easier to see the LEDs. Okay, I don't see anybody complaining. If there is a problem, let me know. All right. So here we have basically four amplifiers, four voltage-controlled amplifiers in one. They're just numbered one, two, three, and four. I think these are like just yeah, squiggly, interesting digits, or maybe something broke. I don't know, maybe it's just stylization. Okay, I think I'm going to turn up the blightness a little bit, 75% maybe. Okay, so now I take the output of the oscillator, I put it in the input, not in the CV input, and the input. So these are inputs, but when you see the tooltip, this is channel one input, and the other socket is channel one CV input, which means it's the control voltage input. So here we should plug our output from our ADSR module. Now if I connect the output of this amplifier into my host audio output, and I press a key, I don't hear anything, and that's because I need to turn up the gain. Yeah, and now if I go and play a higher note, and we've made our simple synthesizer, you can already play some music with that. So it isn't very interesting to listen to, but we're gonna soon make it more interesting. Okay, what could we do? I would like to make some ambient textures. So how about we add some filters? All right, let's see and find a filter. I'm gonna go maybe with the audible instruments again, and see if we have a filter here. Oh, I'm already searching for VCA. I'm gonna go filter. Okay, there is something called liquid filter. A cool thing is that we have, you see outputs for high pass, band pass, low pass, etc. What is this? EQ filter. Okay, that's interesting. I'm gonna go with the liquid one. Okay, so here is our source signal. I can click and drag and just disconnect this output. I'm gonna put it in the input. Wait, that's resonance input. This is audio input. Okay, so the label is on top of the socket. So now I'm feeding audio to this filter. Now I want to take audio out of it. Let's take the band pass to output. Okay, we have resonance. This filter is really gnarly, I would say. It has a lot of character. It has a lot of nice saturation. Maybe even a little bit of drift. I don't know. Drift could be a thing that is emulated because with hardware synthesizers, hardware analog synthesizers, the problem is that components like capacitors and resistors change their, change how they operate, change their parameters, depending on the ambient temperature. So the desynthesizers can go out of tuning to actually tune them between performances. So they keep in tune. And I don't know if they implemented that. Maybe they did. I am not a fan of that kind of feature. So it can add a little bit of warmth and instability and liveliness. All right, so we have a band pass filter. What can we do? We can have the filter cutoff be automated, actuated by something. So we need a control voltage source. Let's go for an LFO, right click. I'm going to type in LFO. What is an LFO? LFO is a low frequency oscillator. So I think I'm going to just go for oscillator. Maybe VCO, voltage controlled oscillator. Okay, there's also bog audio. There's a slow option. Okay, I guess slow is going to make it a, what is that? LVCO. Maybe that's going to do. This is a little oscillator. We can send the output to frequency. Whoa, that made sound even though we didn't press a note. And that is kind of interesting. Okay, I think what I need is, I want to control the levels. I'm going to use my quad VCA to just change the channel gain. Oh, that's CV. Okay, channel. Yeah, I guess I can put output here. Yeah. All right, so now the oscillator is modulating our filter cutoff frequency. The crazy thing is that in the world of CV or modular synthesis, control voltage is only an agreed convention. But everything is control voltage in here. Like, I can plug audio into a control voltage socket and that's going to work. And this all is interesting because every single module here will support what is called audio rate modulation. But normal synthesizers have a limit to how often they can change certain parameters. For example, in Zenith SubFX, you can't have a filter cutoff move, you know, 15,000, like have 20 or 10,000 oscillations per second. You can go up to like a hundred times a second, so 100 Hertz, but you can go much higher. And this is where we go from low frequency oscillator, which I believe the definition is an oscillator that operates in frequencies that are below human range of hearing, but the LFOs often are still very useful in the range of, you know, 100 Hertz even or 200 Hertz. But in CV, yeah, this is a low frequency oscillator. I enable the slow mode. That's 18 Hertz, 40 to 6. 100 Hertz. And I can disable slow and this is going to be 13 kilohertz and still works. There is also, it sounds a bit weird though, there is also an FM input. I wonder what happens if we use that instead. Yeah, so you see FM is really just a convenience because we could do the same thing otherwise, but the FM input is a very convenient thing because we can plug our output from our LFO not through this amplifier. We can plug it directly into FM and here we can control the amount of influence that it's going to have on the frequency. So now our frequency is controlled by something, could be controlled by an envelope. Okay, where is an envelope? Here's an envelope. Let's go and control the frequency with an envelope as well. And we can have FM going at the same time. Playing a violin on that low note now. All right, interesting things. Let's see and try to mangle this more. What do we have? What is Terraform? Oh, Dexter. Okay, Dexter is a Dexter is a FM synthesizer. It's a single module, but really it's like a whole bunch of modules. But I think the cool thing is that you can, like it's a bunch of modules, but you can route things between them completely manually so you can decide exactly what you want to do. Cord. What is that? Is this polyphonic? I didn't figure out yet how to make polyphonic synthesizers. Like for now, everything I do is monophonic. I don't know how to make polyphony work. There is probably some option, but I don't know how to do that. I saw some videos about how to do this in VCP Rack, but it doesn't work the same way in Cardinal. Is it enabling it? Wow. Okay, we have that. All right, maybe let's not go with this one. A very known common effect in synthesizers is glissando or portamento, and this is achieved by something with something called slew limiter. Let's try and search for slew limiter. Nice. I have trouble typing because Arthur intercepts some of the keystrokes and others. Okay, so we have a bunch of slew limiters. Bog Audio has a slew limiter. Let's use that. All right, so let me make some room for that module. Okay, a bit more. Oh, can I push it? Okay, there you go. Okay, now if we go and put voltage per octave into input here and an output feed to voltage per octave where it was before, you can hear that our pitch is now ramping up and down. If we increase the time, now we have almost five seconds of time. By the way, I think our frequency is a bit too much. I'm going to put it into the amplifier and use it to, yeah. The cool thing is we can now have something else modulate the amount of modulation. All right, so we have slew limiter. Slew limiter makes the voltage changes limits the rate at which voltage change can happen. So before, when we had our notes, our voltage per octave, voltage going from high to low instantaneously, now we can determine how long it's going to take for it to rise. I wonder if this is like an octave, so it like double the voltage and fall is determined differently. So we can have things take slow to rise, but instantaneous to fall or the other way around. We can be instantaneous to rise, but so to fall. I think that's a pretty funny effect. Fun. Okay, let's try and maybe incorporate this a bit into that piece I have here. Okay, I'm making this a regular. All right, let's do it like that. Okay, I'm going to pause it. The transport didn't stop. Stop. Let's synthesize farts with Cardinal, says B Music. Yeah, I want to give this some stereo action and also like mess it up more. Let's see what does analog, sorry, audible instruments have in star. However, there is some other, like there is a hecton of different modules. For example, there are child DSP modules. Do they go with stereo though? Because it seems like most of them do mono. Oh, there is chorus. I want a chorus. Okay. So I'm feeding out the low pass, sorry, the bands pass. I'm going to go with input and I'm going to feed output left and output right. It's better getting a bit loud. I'm going to turn it down by 12 decibels. All right, that's too much. Six. What's up with the flashy thingy? I would like to have something I can modulate more. By the way, there are also modules that are based on air windows plugins and they are called rack windows. And you may recognize some of them or more or all of them. For example, there's console where you can have an emulation of analog summing. I don't know, there is also tape. What do we have here? What was called rasp, the edger, high frequency tamer, acceleration limiter. Let's try that. I'm going to insert it before the chorus. Input. Oh, that's the input. Okay, band pass input, limit output, clamp output. Okay, I want to limit. I think we need some reverb. Let's go maybe a phaser or flanger. Okay, I'm searching in rack windows. Oh, what is that? Okay, it's a blank panel. All right. Sure. Maybe let's just look around and see what we can do. What is that? Fixed filter bank. Oh, okay, let's do that. So I want my chorus to be at the end because it adds stereo and nothing else gives me stereo. Let's go input to our fixed filter bank. Okay, there's odd and even and all. Okay, let's go all filters. Frequency. All right, we can create formants here. Let's get something to modulate that for us. I'm going to copy, duplicate this oscillator from bog audio and I'm going to make it slow, send output to this. Maybe add a spectrum analyzer. Yeah, that could be good. I'm going to see, maybe I'm going to go with calf analyzer because it has also a vector scope. I'm going to put this one on bottom. Okay, it's going to be a little bit difficult. Will that work? I think it will. There's a really interesting module from Chao, the SP that is called Chao RNN, simple recurrent neural network. And if you give it four inputs and it gives you an output based on a randomized neural network structure that is created inside, I would love to do that. But when I tried it, it crashes everything. So don't hit the randomize button. Basically, this plugin is useless. This module is useless for now. There's some weird things going on in the chat. What are you doing guys? I'm going to use the plateau reverb. Oh, wait, there is also a reverb from rack windows. Rack windows. MV, dual mono reverb. Let's see. Oh, it has left and right inputs. Good. So I'm going to plug the outputs. So this goes to our system output. And now I'm going to connect this here. Nice. Okay, I'm really glad I've done this. And we have four control voltages that we can use. I also like the design of this visual design. Okay. We got some interesting stuff going on. Let's, oh no. Oh no. Let's go back to our sequence and see how that sounds together. I'm going to call this ambience two. I've been recently playing some Fallout New Vegas. And I think this kind of fits the vibe of exploring a dilapidated building. Shabs asks, are all sounds from Cardinal? Yes. 100% except for some limiting. Like the only thing that is not Cardinal in this project is X42 DPL and Calflim analyzer. Yes, all sounds are made with Cardinal. And the cool thing is, because Cardinal is self-contained, I can very easily share my patches. And it's going to sound the same on your side, which is difficult to do when you're using, well, if you would be using Rack Pro, then it would only sound the same if you had all the same modules purchased, I guess. So yeah, it's like not, this is where, yeah. I see you have some weird discussions about languages and what's going on in here. All right, let's try and make something else. Do you have any ideas of what we could try? Like what modules I should test, et cetera. What's the state of pipe wire currently? Well, I'm using it right now. So I guess it is operational. That is the state of pipe wire. Let's try and find some interesting things. I saw some interesting oscillators and audible instruments. Let's try that. What is that? Model synthesizer. Sure. Let's give it voltage, volts per octave. Let's give it out. And I get it also needs gate. Why does it, why is it pan weird? Why is it like pan to the left even though I'm going to just plug the left output? Okay, what is that? Alpha, you can sort modules by random. What about blow? Oh my goodness, this is a physical modeling set. That's so cool. Bow. That's so cool. What about the stereo output? Okay, it's strange. It outputs the, it outputs the exciting signal in the right channel. So how does this work is by creating resonant filters that are tuned to musical frequencies. And there's also FM. Oh, FM. Okay, let's go with a macro oscillator. And I'm going to control drag to get another voltage per octave. Trigger is going to reset the waveform. Okay, let's do that. And now I've got output to FM. Where can I make it do something? It doesn't seem to. Oh, there's the FM. Okay. Okay. Okay. Give me a, what about using something else? If we right click on this display, I can go to model and this select one of many, many modes for this macro oscillator. It's pretty crazy how much different modes there are like for guys, just this single freaking module. I think I could explore it for days. What is sauce warm? WTFM? What is WTFM? Operator face modulator with chaotic feedback. All right. Sure. Wow. Triple sine wave. Geometry of the resonator. Hmm. I would like to have an envelope generator tweaking that for me. So let's go with a DSR. Bog audio. A DSR is very nice because it's small. It's simple. It does the job. For now, I don't need anything more complex. Okay. Output goes to geometry. WTF mode. Yes. I think I recall the macro oscillator is based on a set of fixed wavetables. Is that correct? I don't think it's just wavetables because it has multiple, like if these are wavetables, they would have to be like at least two dimensional because we have the timber and we have the color. I think it's more of a specific algorithms. Sounds like a dying android. What about a lower note? Oh my goodness. It's so bad. If I disable the voltage product, I like this. What is flow? Timber of the bow. It sounds like a band pass of the exciting signal. Ah, we're not using blow. But we could be. Let's get loud. I love the lower notes because it sounds like there's a square wave like component. The bow or blow, somehow it creates this interesting space. Oh, there's a reverb in this. What if I go? Yeah, but I would like to not have the excited signal in the right channel. If that would be the case, that would be awesome. I would love to have this reverb. But as it stands, I need to add my own. Let's try and find reverb. Maybe we can find some interesting other reverbs. Hmm, the verb. Oh, I know that one. Chow FDN. Feedback delay network reverb. Okay, let's try that. Let's hope this Chow module doesn't crash as well. I'm going to save my session, by the way. There we go. All right, let's feed our output. Into here. Oh, but it's mono. I can copy it, though. And have it be stereo that way. Where is my output coming from? Oh, here. There you go. And we have stereo reverb. Nice. Okay, let's sequence a note. We can call this one Dying Android. Oh, nice. That sounds like a charging, like a charging capacitor or something. Like a charging energy weapon. Dreamer says, you're not even picking the right output, Noob. I think you didn't see, I think you've just joined the stream and you didn't see why. Because the right output doesn't give me the signal I want. It gives me the exciting signal and it's useless for me. That's why I stereo-fi it with a reverb, or whatever, dual mono reverb. Not use the stereo output because it's not doing what I would expect it to do. Let's try a very low note here. Let's see what happens. Dreamer says, well, waiting for some musical sounds so I'm not paying attention. Huh. Wait, are my notes gone here? What the? Oh, yeah, these just got wrecked. Yeah, I can just, oh, wait, yeah, I can just copy and paste them, but that sucks. I hate when Arturo does that. Let's hope Arturo 7 is gonna fix all that crap. Okay, we can, I can try and make something melodic, but I really wanted to just explore the possibilities of sound design with this. Under MIDI, Gert Barz says, I guess you've missed my earlier remark about using polyphony in Cardinal. Right click on the Cardinal host MIDI module. Oh, polyphony chat. Ah, okay, all right. Thank you. Let's go. Four channels of polyphony. Also, host audio. DC blocker, okay. I wish there was also an option to change the sampling rate because doing like running the entire Cardinal rack at a higher sample rate would be great for avoiding any aliasing. All right, let's try and make something melodic for once. I'm exploring audible instruments. Model synthesizer is really cool. Texture synthesizer. Title modulator. I don't know what that is. Random sampler. Keyframer mixer. Okay, weird resonator. Let's go with macro oscillator 2. I haven't used it yet. Let's give it false per octave. It takes trigger. Okay, I guess for resetting. Let's give us a quad VCA. Let's give us an ADSR envelope. This one is great. Okay, so gate goes to envelope generator. Output goes to CV input. Output goes to here. Output goes to there. Ah, needs to add chain. Okay, I don't seem to be able to do polyphony. Maybe low CPU. Okay, maybe there needs to be a polyphonic. This only works for poly modules, of course. All right, how do I know if a module is polyphonic? Maybe I can find like, maybe there's a tag called polyphonic. Oh yeah, there is. All right, let's see what our polyphonic module is then. So we can build our synth with that. Okay, macro oscillator 2 is polyphonic. Great. Multiple. It seems I need an envelope generator. That is going to be polyphonic. Okay, BGA are polyphonic. So what isn't polyphonic here? Because it seems like everything here is polyphonic. Quad VCA isn't polyphonic. Yay, quad VCA isn't polyphonic. All right, maybe multiples then. I'm going to zoom in. Okay, so in, out, one divided by three. Okay, I think this doesn't do what I thought it does. Oh, multiples. Okay, I need a freaking amplifier. Just give me something polyphonic. Okay. A polyphonic amplifier. VCA. Great. That's what I wanted. All right, nice. Now, output goes to input. Output goes to CV. Output goes to output. Yay. We can play chords now. I don't know why left is not duplicated to right. Oh, you hear it only in the left channel. What's going on? I think something must have, oh, okay, my panning got, somehow I may change the panning. Perok says maybe you need a polyphonic summing module. Yeah. You can also split merge polysignals, says Dreamer. What does that mean? Splitting polymonosignals? I don't know what you're talking about. Fishy Pugbra says, I think you need a module that combines the poly audio cable into a monocable. Okay, but I've already solved that. I just needed all the outputs. Left is mono and duplicates to right. Yeah, it does. I just had the panning in my track in hardware somehow swept, like pushed all the way to the left. I don't know why. All right, we can play some chords now. Oh, I think the UI stopped. All right, I think I know what's happening. I need to disable and enable compositing for a while. Yeah, it's back to back to working. What is that? Pitched models. Okay, nice. It's very quiet, though. I think I need to app something. Oh, this is dual, by the way. I need to tweak the levels. Maybe here. Oh, I like that. I want to know a foe for this. Maybe I can just use the envelope. Dreamer says, if I use the S merge, S plort. S plort? Is that a thing? Modules from area to split combine polyphony cables. Okay, I'm gonna see what is splort. Splort exists. What does splort do? 16 channels, polyphony split with optional linkable sort mode. Oh, hey, that's cool. What about smurge? Smurge. It's called smurge. Oh, no, smurge. Okay, these are different. My goodness. So many modules. I think one can really get lost in all of that. Okay, smurge, poly output. Okay, so that will take polyphonic inputs and give me a polyphonic output. I am not sure what that does. I haven't wrapped my head around polyphonic cables, because that's clearly an invention of the digital domain of VCV, of Eurorack or anything, because you can't push more signals through a one wire, basically. Torgalos says, I believe four poly makes four copies of each plugged module, which is why it's good for CPU usage to merge them at some point, for example, before reverb filtering. Ah, okay. Yeah, of course. Right, if I don't need to process every single voice separately for reverb, and I don't, unless I want to, like, do some very weird things. The cool thing about modular synthesis like that is that I can, I can process every single voice separately through a reverb and, like, I don't know. I don't know why, but I could do that. Like, I could process every single voice through reverb and then, like, distort it without having intermodulation distortion going on because I'm playing multiple notes. And that also would let me finally do a proper, like, road synthesizer, because their distortion in roads happens on the individual coils for each note, and not later in the chain. And all the roads or electric piano patches I made are always applying the distortion after all the voices are summed, because no synthesizer allows me to do it differently, unless I would do it in, like, vitalium with a wavetable, where the wavetable would simulate distortion. Yeah, but here we can do it, like, for reels. Crazy. Okay, I don't know how to do this, so I think I need spl- no. Swerge. Dual 4-channels single 8-channel polyphonic merge optional sort mode. Splerge. Awesome names. 4-channels polyphonic split and merge with optional sort mode. I have no idea how to use that, so I'm not going to right now. You need a sum module, okay? Sum? Sum's BGA? What is that? Arithmetic logic. Not really what I was looking for. A subpar ring modulator. Why would you want to make a subpar? A subpar distortion and bit cruncher. Why would you want to make a subpar unless it's ironic? Like, clearly broken software. Dreamer says, does anyone know what ANFAS wants to do even? Nobody knows. All right, let's see what we have here. Oh, currently we have nothing, because I- I didn't. Yes, what I want to do is we want to make some interesting dark ambient. Oh, hello, Chris. Chris from AirWindows is here. Nice. Have you seen I- did you know that your plugins have been turned into modules here? They're called rack windows. Micro-delayable crossfader. That sounds interesting. I remember I was using Interstage. Interstage has a nice effect if you, like, push things hard through it. What it does is gives you nice little high frequency limiting. So it makes things less harsh. It's nice on hi-hats and snares, but you need to push signals hard into it to achieve that. I'm gonna search for an amp. Ah, all 10. Okay. So let's get input. Let's get output here and output to host. Now I can turn down, turn this up. Oh, we just get six decibels of gain. That's not enough. I think I need a different module, but for now I can just daisy chain these amplifiers. It's hard to AB compare things in the rack. I would need to probably I'll probably need to set up something. Airwindows says it's a couple of things. It's a tone shaper. Even interstage. I wish it had a gain control, you know, because I always, always need to use a preamplifier to get it to saturate how I like. If it had like a gain or drive control, drive and I don't know, something to preamplify and then attenuate afterwards. That would be awesome. I would love an interstage too. That would have extra controls. All right. I think I want to add some reverb and I think I would use the rack windows. Oh, I need, oh, wait. If I want to do anything, are these polyphonic? That's the question. I think they are because this cable is polyphonic. Okay, four. Okay, nice. Let's see. All right. Airwindows says, by the way, anyone watching, redownload the Linux VST or Retro Mac or any Windows VST zips from my site or media fire. Everything is now updated for better CPU only signed Mac left to do. Ah, okay. Nice. So Airwindows plugins got some optimizations going on. Nice. What even is this? So as you can see, you can get lost in VCV rack. 21 kilohertz. Anti-aliased chaotic sync voltage controlled oscillator. CPU friendly voltage control oscillator with poly bleep blamp anti-aliased anti-aliasing. Anti-aliasing is nice. Polyphonic module for modifying the voltage product of signals by transposition and inversion. Oh, that's interesting. Airwindows says, my stream from just now knows. Now you know. And they all have a sneak peek of tonight's plugins of tonight's plugin, Dirt. Oh, Dirt, the idea of sound from a speaker being like through a window glare color, etc. So Airwindow means nothing in the way. Oh, fishy pug bruh asks, do you have Shapr incarnal? It's distortion. Let's see. Shapr. Multi-stage envelope generator. Okay. Nice. Razor. A symmetrical voltage processor. Looking for a wave shaper. Full scope. Snare n. Snare drum kit based on innovation drum station. Shapr. Multi-lay tool. Harbor block wave shaper. Okay, let's go with that. Head trick. Whatever that means. Oh, you know what? I'm going to push that into Shapr and push output into interstage. Wave shaping amount. Yay. What if we go without interstage? I don't think I can hear a difference. We're not saturated enough. Range. What about low notes? Okay, I'm turning the wrong thing. I wonder if we can do feedback loops. Homebee Bearcat says, I saw you on an issue opened a few months ago about Beespoke Symphony 2. Just in case you still use the software, there's a build flag enabling VST2 hosting, meaning you can just use Karla. Oh, nice. Okay, yeah. One time I saw I was able to use Karla in Beespoke Symphony and I know some people did and then I installed some other version and it didn't have that. Airwindows also says, yep, it's the soft clip version of Edge. Same controls, lower gain, smoother. Okay, I don't know what is. Dirt? I love the ANFA crew so we can hear about this before I have an actual plugin release because you're special. We love you too, Chris. A hat trick or hat trick is the achievement of a generally positive feat three times in a match or another achievement based on the number three. I see why hats are have anything to do with number three. Hmm. I would like to do something very weird. I want to go with some delays. Trigger to gate converter with delay. I don't know what that is. Chainable master clock with swing, clock delay and pulse width. Whoa, nice. I want delay. Trigger to gate converter? No. Simple delay assigned for triggers and RCVs. Simple delay designed for triggers and RCVs. All right. Okay, guys. Can I make a feedback loop and VCV rack or is it going to burn? Because I want to make a feedback loop. I know if I want to have a feedback loop that's not going to get out of hand, I need to attenuate the signal between. I think it should work. Also, I think I'm going to disable the polyphony because I really don't think I'm going to use it. It's good to know it. It's there. Anfa, can you right click a parameter and enter values in cardinal? Yes, you can right click and type in a value. All right, let's go make feedback loop. So here we go with the delay. Then we go into amplifier. And now we need to sum the inputs. Oh, I need a mixer. Oh, base. Okay, mixer. I don't need an amplifier. I need a mixer. That's already going to give me the amplification. Okay, so for a feedback loop, we have the delay. Dreamer says, I want to see you make some drum sequences based on order transport using host time module. Oh, sure. That would be nice. Do you think I can crash cardinal making a feedback loop or is that allowed? I hope it's allowed because feedback loops are really fun. Okay, so I need the output to go into the input. This needs to go into the input as well. And we need channel gain. Okay, does it mean it's going to be attenuated? Let's hope so. Okay, I think these are summed together because these arrow point down. So I guess, and now if I feed output of, ah, because, but I'm still not outputting anything to my speakers. Channel one mode, attenuverter, attenuator, attenuator, please. Okay, something is happening, but it's not what I want. One sample latency. Feedback loops are allowed. That's great. I can't mix things. So I need a mixer. Six channel mixer. Yes. Oh my goodness. That's an overkill, but whatever. I want a feedback loop. All right, let's do this. I think you need a signal merge for this. What's a merge? Oh, let's see. Merge. There's something called meld. Eight track stereo merge for mixpaster. Pre-post VCA. Merge eight. Eight channel polyphonic merge. I don't think that's merge. Four channel polyphonic merge in split. I think I need a mixer. Ah, okay. Repulsion mixer. Repulsion? Is that one? Six channel mixer. Okay, let's go. Whatever. This is also six channel. It's a bit smaller. Nice. Okay. Inputs. All right. Inputs. So I want interstage. All right. This thing is not doing what I want. Goodbye. Left audio output. Let's put it here, and I'm going to put it here as well. Master. Negative 30. Okay. All right. All right. But I'm not feeding that into into shubadabadi. Okay. This is dangerous. We have feedback. Okay. Oh my goodness. That's so cool. We have an actual feedback loop. Sweet. And what we can also do is like apply EQ. All right. Okay. Okay. That's very easy to burn. It's very easy. Any kind of gain creates a runaway reaction. And there's also sands and stuff. Nice. Okay. We can make it a bit of a delay. Time CV input. Okay. We can modulate the time. What if we modulate time with the output of the mixer? Oh my goodness. Okay. What we need to control the amount of CV. Okay. There is no amplifier here. I'm going to use send outputs. Hey, that's great. I mean, yeah, it doesn't sound very good. What if we increase the timescale? I think we're sending too much. If we filtered, if we low pass that. I think we need a low pass. Give me a filter. You see, a cool thing is we can use the same processes to affect our control voltage. Yeah. Give me a low pass for that's better. You know, so we can resonate. What about larger timescale? Cocoa not 2.0. This is weird. Weird, but cool. What if I send this again to another delay? This time a fixed one. And put that into the feedback loop as well. All right. I see. I get it. We cut those highs a little bit. What about a high note? Sweet. Perfect. Let's create some sequence for that. I would like to add some stereo delay to that. Is it really that hard to get feedback delay network reverb? But I want a delay. Is it really that hard to just have a delay? Hey, maybe I should use my delays here. Okay, I have a delay. Seven, nine percent CPU usage 10. The ping pong delay is good when we're feedback. Where's ping pong delay? Ping. This one? I guess so. All right. Let's use that as well. Well, I want to have more delays. Let's put that into the input. Where is the input? Output. All right. Left. I think I need to split that. And now outputs. Nice. Filter type. Low pass. Band pass. Feedback. Left to left. Right to right. This feedback is getting out of hand. Can I modulate the delays with CV? Because they are sound really cool. I wish I could modulate the delay times with control voltage. I like this. I think it's time for us to move on to music submissions, you know? Let's just hear this one more time. And we're going to move there. Sorry. We have a little bit of delay. Alrighty. Here's some dark ambient we've made. I'm going to close this. It's time. Here, it wasn't a crash. It was... Oh, I messed up this transition. It wasn't a crash. It was me closing order. Alrighty. Welcome to the music submission playback time. Three, two, one, go. We're kicking it off with a track titled Hotel Room Preview Edit by Sahativa. And this was made with B-Spoke Synth and Ardor 6.7. They also write another live jam recorded in a hotel room away from home using a minimalistic setup. One controller, MIDI Akai at one 15 years old, 25 MIDI keyboard, 25 keys MIDI keyboard jamming on B-Spoke Synth stands recorded while jamming and then mixed using Ardor 6.7. I used two beloved synths, Helm and MDA E-Piano via Falk TX Ildale's Bridge. Plus some drum samples from B-Spoke. FX are mainly Dragonfly, Reverb and Tall Dub 3. That's a delay. Plus some Airwindows Galactic Reverb. Mixed using X42 NLSP Salt and Butter. I hope you will enjoy this. Love me some E-Piano. I really like the melodies and chord progression. Nice job Sahativa. A track titled Between 0 and 1 by... Oh my goodness. By... I don't want to pronounce this way wrong. By Faster Key. I hope I pronounced this correctly. This track was made with Ardor, Calf plugins, Airwindows plugins, VCV, Swank Amp, Swanky Amp, Dragonfly Ether. A delicious recipe. They also write... ANFA. Hi. It's a new year. Try new things. I started by painstakingly routing all MIDI and automation control from Ardor into VCV for the synthesis, then routing back the separate audio Ardor channels to break out instruments. Who needs the VST anyway? Oh man, you would really enjoy Cardinal. I hope you will. Once happy with structured melody, recorded it all into Ardor dry, added plugins and guitar after I was done with VCV. I made a quick video here just because it was only pleased with myself and I didn't have time to anyone's doing this yet. Anyway, I continue to enjoy lurking on your Discord. Nice. Thank you. I guess you'll enjoy VCV... Sorry, Cardinal. So you don't need to do so much routing. Ardor Mind says, kind of sing for AV. I would also like to appreciate the music a bit louder. Is that better? Sadeva says, I really love Ether, but it's hitting my CPU too hard. Yeah, Ether is really heavy. I can lower my mic. So here is a track titled FAQ by Danf. I shouldn't have the music as much now. So that was FAQ by Danf. Now, a track titled, How Loud Is Loud? by David Martinez Martinez. Ardor's name is David creates awful music. Ardor is an answer to FX, Serge XT, tall noisemaker on Debian testing. And they also write, started composing in November 2021 and self-studying to make music for myself, for my own streams on Twitch. In the end, I stopped streaming and only making music. I must say that if you've been doing this just for four months, five months, then that is really good for this short time. And I'm impressed if this is only six months of redoing this or five. Mark Forest says, I can't see how many decibels you reduce the track by. This track, five decibels. I'm using replay gain and mix. The track is a little repetitive, but there's a lot of interesting things going on. So the same theme going throughout the whole thing. It would be good if you would, like, find a different theme that would nicely come flat and minimalistic. It doesn't sound horribly disharmonic and that already is great for progression here, especially for such a short period of time learning. That's, I think, that's a great start. Keep going. So that was How Loud is Loud by David Makes Bad Music or something. And now a track titled TBA, so to be announced, Transwave Preview by Advent Tuner. This track was made with FNMMS, Surge, Lin Drum TR909, or Chestra Hip Samples. They also write Transwave, Transmix with Simway. Let's try it out. It feels like it's slowing down here, but it's not. The beats are even all the time. Classic Trans breakdowns, love them. Alrighty, that was to be announced, so an unknown title yet, Transwave by Advent Tuner. And now a track titled Dating Met an Artist, I don't know if I'm pronouncing this right, by Lemon8. Home Noisemaker, Tull Vocoder, Renoise on the list. Oh no, it was made in Renoise. Renoise isn't FOSS. Even with Auto-Cow Anti-Sture can't sing. I need some singers and writer, but nobody I know are able to. So I drink some beer, write something down and try to come as close as possible to the notes. I think it did a pretty good job. It has a recognizable melody. So alcohol doesn't help your vocal chords. It makes them swell and that can make you hurt yourself. So don't sing after your drunkard. At least if you're doing this a lot, you need to work. Oh, Lemon8 is here with us, because Renoise is a tracker on the way for me to make music. That makes sense. But we have open source trackers as well. There is a radio, for example. A community has been discovering and appreciating radio artists as open source Renoise went. Alrighty, that was Dating Met in Artist, I don't know if I'm pronouncing it right. No idea, by Lemon8. And now a track titled Garden of Centers by Arc Forest. You see that are not occupied by the vocals so that they don't clash. And also I think you need to use a de-esser on vocals badly. Stay tuned for my next tutorial. It's gonna be about the best. I've been making it for a long time, but things happened. Like, war! So that was Garden of Centers by Arc Forest. And now Carapace by Quantizer. Oh, by the way, Garden of Centers was made of Ardor. Carapace was made of LMS, is an aspect of vital audacity and cult plugins. The bass, maybe? I'd really love to get the stems and try to remix it for you to improve the mix and give it more punch. It's getting a little bit repetitive by this point, but if this is intended for, you know, dance lord and um, that's what you expect it. There is one last repetition done in the previous tracks by Quantizer. It's improving! Nice. Always happy to hear more drum and bass on this show, because I love drum and bass. I'm a drum and bass junkie. So that was Carapace by Quantizer. And now let's hear OV Velocity X. Here as well! Nice. It wasn't too long. I mean, it was on the edge of being too long, but it didn't cross it, I think. So now we have a very nice quiet breakdown to recover after this madness. Oh my goodness, this pose is like that. My favorite elements from Dubstep and Complex Strobe. It is, I would say it's Complex Strobe, not in Dubstep. Well no, that drop was Dubstep. I like the halftime. I've got a piano part now. Wow. So that was Velocity X by OV. Nice. Really cool. And now a track titled Lekka Lekka by MiloFi. MiloFi was made with zero rhythm, drops and lunges too. I wonder where did all the synth sounds come from? Could you give us some insight? Oh MiloFi. So silly. It was just a joke we've made in the chat. And oh, MiloFi says, and Vitaly. Okay, now we know where all the sounds come from. Right, that was Lekka Lekka by MiloFi. And now a track titled Rising by Xavier Treningovsky. And this is the last one for today. This one is in full stereo. That's cool. And it just ends like that. Okay, that's all for today. Thank you so much for joining me on this monthly live stream. By the way, I missed the TransWolf track. What? I missed the TransWolvy track? Okay, wait a minute. We're coming back. We're playing TransWolvy track. Okay, once again. So this is Life, Life by TransWolvy. I really missed it? Or I just... Okay, no, I didn't. I didn't miss it. I did miss it. Okay, thanks for letting me know. I thought you just liked it so much that you wanted to trick me to play it again. And it would also be okay. Sorry for that. Oh, here we are. This track was made with LMS, the nuts of effects. They also write, pumping some positive energy with some late 2000s trans slash rave, I don't know, whatever. Trying, at least. P.S., it's pronounced TransWol... TransWolf. Without E at the end. Oh, okay. TransWolf. Okay, I stand corrected. So in the end, we get someone. Sick trans for the finale. This track is a terror core remake. Thank you all for joining me this live stream. I hope you're all well. I especially hope everyone on the Ukraine and Russia is holding on well. I really hope the war is gonna be over really soon and we won't have to worry about a fallout becoming canon in the true, authentic timeline of this universe. Yeah. Oh yeah, that's it. Stay tuned for the the best tutorial from me coming up shortly next week. Arkforist says, everyone always forgets Belarus. Yeah, there is that. It's difficult. I don't want to go into politics. I just, you know, I live in Poland and Ukraine is very close to me. We are sharing a border and if this war goes on, then I may be a refuge myself soon. Andrej Vitula says, bunkers have nice room though. Yeah. Sure. Oh yeah, I'm gonna try to locate the nearest nuclear vault where I can relocate my studio. Yeah. All right. Thank you so much for joining me. Thanks to everyone who has submitted their music. Um, if you haven't submitted any music yet, please go do that because I have nothing to play the next month and the stage is yours. So use it, make something cool with open source software, submit it. The link to the submission form is in the description of every live stream archive and every of my recent videos. Also, I want to thank everyone who is supporting my work financially. Thanks to the people like that. I can dedicate time to make these live streams to make videos. And this is a part time job for me. Hopefully one day it's going to be full time job, but for now it's a part time job. That's still awesome. And if anybody watching right now would like to help me keep doing this, then you can go to patreon.com slash ANFA or to liberapay.com slash ANFA and you can donate. You can pledge in and like donate even a dollar a month that goes away goes a long way. And if you would like to meet other people using free and open source software to do music production, then go and check out my chat, my community chat. So chat.anfa.xyz You will find there is discord and also rocket chat, whichever you want, whichever you prefer. If you go to this address, you will find a whole page. You can read all about it. See you there. Now go get cardinal and make some control voltage music.