 Hello OscillatorSync here and today we are back with the NoRam Mono. In the last video we took a fairly deep dive into looking at some of the sound design potential on this rather interesting mono synth and how every single knob on the front panel here essentially has its own LFO and envelope and what that allows you to do from a sound design perspective. In this video I want to expand upon some of the sound design ideas but also dive into a little bit more on the sequencer side of things because again in the same way that the controls sort of make it look like there's not like a whole lot going on in here similarly the sequencer looks like it's pretty basic but actually has some really really very very cool tricks up its sleeve. So what we're going to do on the way to exploring the sequencer and some more sound design ideas on the mono in a bit more depth today is as you've probably guessed from the thumbnail and title of the video we're going to turn this synth into a drum machine. Now it's pretty much my favorite thing to do with a synth, turn it into a drum machine and I've certainly done it a number of times on the channel because I think it's fun, I think it's a little bit funny to do it to be honest in some cases but also trying to get a synth to do things that on the surface it's not really designed to do necessarily is a really really fantastic way to get a really in-depth understanding of all of the features that the synth has so I'm hoping that along the way turning this into a little drum machine we can learn some useful interesting tricks as well. One thing that's definitely worth noting before we get going actually is that this synth has a feature called Mod Notes and what that allows you to do is assign a different patch to each note on the keyboard and then sequence those notes in the sequencer and you basically get a different patch on each step so something a bit like sound locks on an electron box something like that and that would be for sure definitely one approach that you could take for creating a drum machine you create a bass drum patch you create a snare drum patch you create a hi-hat patch and so on and then you just sequence them across this sequencer. That's an absolutely legitimate way of doing it and arguably a very sensible way of doing it as well that's not how I'm going to do it in this video because it means that I can't show off a bunch of features about the sequencer so we're not going to be using Mod Notes in this example instead we're going to be doing everything on a single patch and then using the sequencer to manipulate the patch in real time to get our various different sounds which is a different approach and people might have their opinions on whether or not it's the better approach but that's the approach that I want to take in this video because I personally prefer it I think it's more interesting and more performative in the real time as well so yeah Mod Notes is an option it's just not one I'm taking today. Oh just in the interest of transparency and now I've sent the mono over to me to make some videos on but I've not otherwise been paid and they've got no say in any of the video content that I make nor have they asked for that and as always I just won't feature stuff on the channel that I don't think is interesting and cool and as I mentioned in the previous video I really do think this is a very interesting synth indeed so let's make a drum machine out of it shall we? So in terms of the goals I'm setting for myself here I want a kick drum I want to snare hats and then other electronic percussion types of some metallicky stuff some woody stuff maybe some tom type stuff if we're feeling a bit fruity also just for your interest in the interest of I was going to say for the interest of brevity but we all know that's unlikely on this channel I'm going to stick to just 16 steps on the sequencer each pattern can go up to 64 steps though on on the mono and you can also do odd number meters as well so if you want to do things outside of sort of four four that's perfectly possible work just as I say for the interests of sort of keeping it more simple to demonstrate the concepts here we're just going to stick to 16 steps so let's get started so let's start by making ourselves a kick drum sound because that's always a good place to start I think so we'll just use one oscillator for this so we'll just turn down oscillator two we'll just have oscillator one halfway because remember we can drive into the filter so unity is about half here so I'm just on the initialized patch here and I'll go over to a sine wave on oscillator one there let's open up the filter just for a second there are actually some harmonics in this sine wave it's not pure sine because it's difficult to do pure sines on analog so let's let's assume that we just want to get this nice and low so we'll tune this down low but we'll still tune it to C I think that's a good place to start and let's give it that classic pitch envelope that you have on a sort of electronic kick so we'll make sure we've got the frequency selected here and we'll come over here to the X end and we'll just crank the amount just so we can hear it attack down decay moderate yeah that's sort of getting there we'll give it a longer decay and the reason we're going to give it a longer decay at the moment is because we might want to have incidental things happening within the notes because we can do that on the mono but we can tweak that as we go along let's also give this a bit of a push into the filter hello oh that's meaty isn't it yeah that's what we tweak the cutoff while we're fencing places where distorts in a really nice way that's that's pretty big isn't it um and of course we can get different flavors of it with our wave shape here great okay so let's just pop a couple of steps down like maybe something like that as a place to start so that's a good kick drum sound I think to get us started no complaints about that but now to drive the filter just makes things real meaty it's almost too big okay so that's our kick drum so let's get our snares happening next now one thing you might have noticed looking at the front panel of the mono is that there doesn't appear to be noise and you kind of want noise for a snare drum and for hats indeed as we get there and yes as in terms of sound sources there aren't but we do have on the X mod a sampling hold random source as a modulation and we can also send it into audio rate which will essentially give us noise one way or another and if we apply that to another another parameter a suitable parameter on here we can get noise going on so I thought what I would do and I'll just bring everything up just for a second but we'll start tweaking things it's a pretty cool bass sound already is actually applying noise to the frequency of oscillator 2 to get some noise happening here so if I just select frequency on oscillator 2 as our context for our X mod if we turn up the amount here okay so there's our pitch modulation going on there and if we press the wave there we go so now we have a random source on here as the wave shape obviously at the moment this doesn't sound like noise but if we tap type twice that'll guess into audio rate and we can get noise this way if we tune this differently right be able to get something a little bit higher pitched something like that now how are we going to get this into our sequencer in a way that works now probably the probably the easiest way of doing it is to actually automate the oscillator 2 knob but I kind of I do want to do that but I want to put another layer on top of that but let's let's do that first so so let's pop down places where we want some some snare so maybe on there so on five and twelve can be where our snares are happening now obviously at the moment we're hearing a bunch of kick drums with all of our snares which we don't necessarily want and we're also hearing a lot of snare with all of our kicks which again we we probably don't necessarily want so what I'm going to do is I'm going to turn oscillator 2 back down and introduce one of the features of the sequencer here which is that we have essentially parameter locks if people have played with electron gear I know a lot of viewers on my channel probably have this will be very familiar to you so on electron gear you can hold down a step in the sequencer and we can lock a parameter to a particular position on the mono it's slightly different actually because you're not locking the actual parameter position what you're doing is you're locking an offset from its current position which means rather usefully you can tweak the parameter that's locked and it will just sort of move itself into its new position which allows you to be a little bit more performative than you can maybe be on the electrons where sort of if you're tweaking a filter and you have the filter locked on a step it's going to jump back to exactly that place every time there are advantages to both approaches I like the fact that it's that the mono's gone with this approach so we've turned oscillator 2 down and so we want to get our snares on five so we can hold down step 5 and we can turn up our oscillator yeah and we want it on 12 as well we do the same what's quite neat while you're tweaking stuff is that you can kind of hear where it is okay so now we've got some stuff going on there we probably don't want to have the kicks happening or not as loud on these ones so we could also turn down the kickers so at the moment this is quite a digital sounding thing it's not necessarily hitting the way that I want it hit at the moment so one other thing that I might do is rather than have um this um x mod affecting the frequency at all times let's actually set it up so that the x mod amount is affected by the x n so we can get more sort of snappy sound on the snare that also will allow us to repurpose oscillator 2 to do other things as well so to do that so at the moment the amount is just a fixed amount if I hold down funk and tap these two buttons you should notice he says as it doesn't make sure I'm just selecting the right thing that's because I'm pressing pattern actually yeah so hold down funk tap those two buttons and you can see here that the amount knob is now flashing what that means is if I can turn this down and if I play we can hear our unaffected oscillator 2 now and if I turn up the effect here you get more dynamics into it okay so that's getting somewhere now now I might not want this to actually be happening on every step either so if I turned up oscillator 2 to be getting that sound happening on the kicks as well so we can go one step further here and we can unlink the x end from the notes which I showed in the previous video so if I hold down these two steps and tap on just those two we don't hear any difference but now if I turn up oscillator 2 now we might want to also now set these steps to be a shorter note length which we can do and now we're sounding a bit more like we're getting some more sort of drum machine stuff going on so kick into that let's get some hi hats in so hi hats are pretty easy from this perspective because we've kind of got our noise source already and it's just going to be like a higher pitched and probably shorter noise sound so let's maybe pick a higher note and we put one on three seven and fifteen that'd be where our hi hats are going to be so where those high notes are right so on these steps we're going to want to get rid of our kick drum altogether so we can and we're going to want to turn up our noise source and we're going to want to make sure that we're triggering our noise on the filter on the frequency of this oscillator so we can select this one come in here and put down trigger steps for the envelope here yeah we want to make it shorter so we can tweak the decalings for these and we probably want to make these a little bit sort of more high-passed perhaps or band-passed so we can actually lock the color control on the filter which is going to give us rather than low-pass we can have band-pass or high-pass let's try we're going to have a high-pass cool and perhaps we want this lesson to be a little bit more snappy give variation in there cool and let's um now we've got this one snappy let's also introduce another feature of the sequencer which is that we can ratchet notes as well so to ratchet a note you hold down the step that's a long stretch for step 15 so hold on the step and funk and then we've got this ratchet control on the decay knob down here and depending on where we set that we get more ratchets hi-hat's a bit loud at the moment I think so let's just turn them down a bit that's just so and because we've locked the hats to be more high-passed we can kind of take the rest of the kit out because that's all low-pass but still have the hi-hats in there which is cool okay uh and you can see here as an example I've just turned the decay up all the way or a lot higher and you can hear that our hats have got longer as well but they're still shorter than the other stuff so that's kind of what we're talking about with this sort of offset approach here pseudo reverse stuff as well with the attack really tight snappy stuff okay um let's get some sort of woody sort of metal sort of percussiony type stuff in here as well because this is starting to sound like a real thing I think okay so let's get some sort of woody plucky metallicky type stuff and that's all going to be down to sort of uh frequency modulation and audio rate modulation I think so let's um maybe let's use the uh volume of oscillator to induce some audio rate modulation of that as a way of getting some um metallicky kind of stuff in it so uh let's just put down on step six let's put down a friend there do you know what I quit quite just like that zap okay we'll get to the woody stuff in a second uh happy little accidents and all that I like that little zap there but maybe we don't want it every single time uh so yeah it's a good opportunity to uh to show off another feature of the sequence here so in the same way that we have uh ratchet we also have the ability to do probability the ability to do probability uh so if I hold down function and six and then the attack knob over here where I just turn this up this turning it up increases the probability that it will be skipped or lowers the probability that it's going to play depending on which way you want to look at so if we want it like 50 percent of the time stick in the middle and hopefully yeah skip to that time skip to that time law of averages means we're going to get this time no no it just doesn't want to come back now it will do there we go um and then we get a couple of times so we can put in these sort of interesting uh randomized bits in there okay so let's get back to sticking like a woody metallicky type plucky friend uh in here somewhere so um let's maybe just stick down something on step 11 here okay um so um what should we do on on this here let's maybe take our kick out on that step and slice it two up and um yeah how are we going to get some audio rate stuff going on here uh perhaps we can audio rate modulate the uh cutoff that might be a good way of doing it um so select our cutoff as our knob of interest and if we double tap type to come into audio rate and turn up the event we can get some interesting something on there cool yeah that's doing the trick but again we don't want this to be happening all the time that we're playing so we'll do what we did with our noise which is first um we will um have our x and be responsible for doing that modulation so funk and double tap there we'll make that flash turn that up turn the attack down okay somewhere something like that so you can kind of hear that there's like a fade in you might be wondering what's going on there and so did I uh for quite some time uh and what that is is that because the audio rate x mod is linked to the frequency of uh oscillator one and we are modulating the pitch of oscillator one we are getting uh a frequency change at the start which is kind of giving this effect of a um fade in it's not really a fade in it's just that the frequency has been modulated two different ways so the next thing we want to do is have this happen on every single uh step so we can unlink the x and and just have it on the stuff that we're interested in so that one for example okay um and uh perhaps we want this to be snappier cool just a little throaty little sound shall I like probably get that more throaty by also maybe locking resonance up on that one oh nice yes little wet little that's so cool yes uh that's awesome okay uh so uh let's hold down funk and uh maybe not have that every single time so just a property that's such a cool little sound love it okay um right we've got some more steps so let's put some stuff on other steps um so one thing I think that is a real simple thing that we could do is just maybe put like a higher note on one of these steps over here like maybe put that like really really short there and maybe again not have that happen every time and how about we try um try to get like a reverse simple thing going on um so maybe on step 10 turn down our kick turn up our oscillator to do and we also want the filter modulation for our noise happening there don't we so let's make sure we drop one of those on there turn up the attack except it's not going to reach for it each time because we've already got this kick drum happening so it's probably not the right step to do that on let's try it on step eight instead and also remove and we're done a short one isn't it so again turn that down turn that up there we go so by parameter locking the attack there get that sort of swoop up thing happening going and we don't want that every time so again probably much less than 50 percent and then we can jam a little bit okay what else can we do what else can we do let's get some more general movement going on here perhaps so obviously we can jam with stuff in real time but it might be nice to have some things just moving around generally so um um by having this wave control change over time might be um an interesting way just to get some slow variations into things so let's select the wave control here and on the x-mod just with it down slow make sure it's in the middle and turn this up full we should get some interesting variations going on there like that um we can also maybe do the same with this one but just not as far and perhaps we want that tempo synced instead so we've got this knob selected tap type one for tempo sync just a tiny bit on variation just turn it down that's fun what else can we have moving um the FM does some interesting stuff just sort of tonally so maybe have that moving just a tiny bit as well again slowly keep things interesting I really like on the filter here that we have this sort of in between points where we can get a bit of band pass and a bit of light pass or a bit of band pass and a bit of sorry a bit of low pass and a bit of high pass which is kind of like a notch filter we can use that to get a bit more clarity without compromising that bottom end we should pop a little bit of reverb we've got some delay over here which is the flash button too let's see what that sounds I just love using synths in the wrong way because I don't think you come you don't get these types of drum machine sounds by using a drum machine perhaps we'll throw just a couple more steps in here just because we can lock some stuff in here one thing that I haven't shown on here I don't know if it will come up nicely is that we also have micro shift on steps so we've got that on there we can actually set it off by make it come early or come late yeah so yeah there's there's other stuff we could do in here we could check accents in here and we can choose what the accents do might be an interesting way to get other variations in here as well I really love these tight sounds that you can get with it anyway um as you can probably tell I could play with this all day and probably will when I stop recording but I think we'll probably leave it there for today hopefully this has demonstrated some of the fun stuff we could be doing with the mono that is certainly not common 303 mono synth type stuff yeah so I hope you enjoyed that if you did then as always a like and a subscribe is massively appreciated and let me know in the comments what else you'd like to see from the mono because I'm happy to show off cool synths as much as I possibly can and this is as I say a very cool synth but until next time thank you so much for joining me and until next time take care