 Hello, Oscillator Sync here. Neo Trinity from Bastel is a module for generating control voltage, which is the most generic description of a module I've ever made, but that's because it's a very flexible module which makes it hard to describe in a single sentence. It caters to your envelope, LFO, offset generation needs, but that's mixed in with a very jammable approach to sequencing and automation that welcomes rapid iteration on performance if that's what you want. But I'm getting ahead of myself. In this video, my plan is to introduce Neo Trinity to you from an architectural standpoint, then try to give you a feel for its workflow by building a patch through a few layers of complexity, while mixing in a few extra examples of patches I've been playing with as I've been exploring it. I don't intend for this video to be a full video manual, that's something I want to tackle in smaller chunks because as you get in depth with Neo Trinity, it can be shaped and bent to do many different jobs and a single video would be too long even by my standards. Before we jump into looking at the module in the interest of transparency, this video is sponsored by Bastel, so thanks to them for supporting what I do on the channel. Architecturally, Neo Trinity is made up of six channels of CV generation labelled A to F, each with their own outputs. You select which channel you're editing with corresponding buttons also labelled A to F. Each of these channels can be independently configured to do one of three general jobs, which are LFOs, Envelopes and CV, the latter which you can think of as offset generation with some extras. Each channel has a main parameter which you can control manually with the rate knob. This sets the rate of an LFO or an Envelope channel, or the offset of a CV channel. Beyond that, you can select other behaviours for each of the channels such as the shape of the LFO or Envelope, pitch quantisation for the CV channels, whether there is a slew applied, whether the channels are bipolar or unipolar, if the LFOs are tempo synced or free, whether the Envelopes re-trigger and so on. There's a lot you can customise basically. There's an input labelled Meta which sends CV to all six channels, which each channel can interpret in different ways. So that can be controlling the rate parameter, which can also be attenuated or inverted, scaling the output like a VCA, triggering Envelopes or resetting LFOs or sample and hold. You can also configure a channel to just ignore the Meta inputs altogether if that's what a patch calls for. Channels E and F additionally have their own extra CV inputs, which can do an extra job on top of what the Meta input is doing for those channels. The real superpower of the module however comes from its automation. Each channel has two lanes of automation, one for triggers and one for that channel's rate control. The automation can be quantised to a clock, either the module's internal clock, which also has its own output as it goes, or an external clock, and each channel's automation can be of a different length so that you can get your polymetric vibes on the go. As you can see there's a lot that the module can be configured to do within a patch, so it's especially useful that you can save up to six of these configurations, including the automation data in one of six banks for recall later. Let's dive in now and build a patch. So to get acquainted with Neo Trinity's basic workflow, we're going to start off in this patch with something really basic, and I've basically got the makings of a mono synth patch here, so I've got an oscillator that's going into a filter that's going into a VCA there. Obviously we want to modulate those things so it's playable. Just off to the side here I've also got a microphone because I'm just using as a pitch controller because it's conveniently got CV gates and so the pressure mod out as well. So the main thing that we want to do if we want to turn this into a mono synth patch is we need modulation of our filter and crucially our VCA so we can actually hear things. So I'm going to take a channel of Neo Trinity, I'll just take channel A here, I'll just bring that into the CV input for my VCA and turn up the CV. It's any way to hear. And now we can hear that it's modulating the VCA and we can hear the output. Now at the moment it's modulating it like an LFO, which is not really what we want. Here we want to have an envelope. So making sure that I'm on channel A here just by tapping the A button, I'm going to tap the mode button and go down into envelope mode. So we're in envelope mode now. It's that if we go down to CV mode what we get is direct control over the CV and some other things we can do as well. But we want an envelope here. Now as a pro tip when you're in envelope mode if you want to preview what your envelope sounds like you can hold down shift and tap wreck here. And what the rate knob is going to do here is alter the length of our envelope. So a longer envelope. To the right. It's quite a long envelope at this longest and over to the left we get snappier little dinks. We can also alter the shape of the envelope by selecting one of the A through D here. So if you hold down shift and we go to B for example what we're going to have now is something like the soft pop envelope where to the right it's still a decay envelope like we had before. But over to the left we kind of get this attack decay thing instead. So that's the most versatile mode if you need to get a bunch of different shapes all at once. On C we have an attack envelope. So we alter the length of the attack and then have that instant off. And on D what we get and this is useful in certain types of patches maybe not in every patch. This lets you set the length of a gate. So if I do this we get a short little gate but here we get a long gate. I think probably for this patch we want a decay envelope though like that. Obviously as fun as it is to be tapping things in on the buttons here what we want to be able to do is trigger this envelope via the microfreak in this case. The way I'm going to do this is I'm going to bring the gate signal from the microfreak into the meta in. Now if I'm tapping away on the microfreak now which I promise I'm doing we're not going to be hearing anything and that's because per channel you can tell the channel how it is meant to react to the meta inputs. So to select this we hold down shift and we use the mode button here. Now the default as far as like the initialized patch goes is that it's going to be affecting the position of the rate knob essentially. So see for control over the rate knob which obviously we're not going to do anything here because we're not hearing the trigger at the moment. And you can cycle through different modes so that's attenuated rate that's inverted rate that's inverted rate that's attenuated as well. And then we have VCA scaling of the output and the one I want here is trig which is going to trigger the envelope or in the case of the other modes so in the LFO we'll reset the LFO for example. So now if I play something on the microfreak lovely we have a triggered envelope. So I also want my filter to be affected by an envelope but not the same exact shape as the VCA. So I'm going to take a second channel of neo20 I'll just take b here and put that into the cv input of my filter. At the moment it's being an LFO quite fun but not what I want in this case I want it to be an envelope. So what I could do is I could sit and set everything up the same way as I had a but we have a shortcut for this as well. So if you hold down a channel and tap bank that's going to copy it and then if you come across to another channel and then press and hold then that will paste the channel settings in and now if I wanted to say on b just change the filter shape maybe to that sort of slower attack decay thing we can do that but all the other settings are still set up. So at the moment when I play notes on this mono synth even if I hold down a key here the envelope completes and we don't get a hold section which is a shame because that's an articulation that might be useful to be able to play legato but luckily we can actually set that up on Neotrinity. So I come back into channel A here and we have our envelope shapes A, B, C and D. E and F allow us to set up our ears to do with re-triggering. F is commonly called smooth and what smooth does is different on each mode so on cv it gives you sort of sloughing on the LFO well it gives you sloughing as well but it sort of changes the shape of the LFOs and on the envelopes it essentially turns this into a slew limiter with a hold so now if I play a note to hold it down I can play legato when I let go we get that release segment there which is great it's a bit more playable. So this oscillator that I'm using here has PWM on the square wave and it seems a shame not to be modulating it so let's do that let's take I'm going to take channel E here and I'm going to plug that into the PWM on the oscillator and you can hear now I'm still holding down the note that the sound keeps disappearing and the reason for this on this oscillator is that it expects the PWM to run from zero to I think five volts it expects it to only be positive and at the moment channel E here is going to act to also provide a negative voltage you can see it when it goes red here that's not what we want we want it to be unipolar instead well we can set that up really easily if you just hold down a channel and then tap mute that sits it into unipolar or bipolar if the light is on so now we should be getting sound the whole time which is good speed up a bit now the LFO mode kind of similar to the envelope mode we can hold down shift and choose different shapes here so square wave it's also a random one here and here if we turn on the smooth mode like we did with our envelope and so we get kind of smooth modulation instead so that's a smooth random which is really cool actually or we can have a smoother sawtooth I like the smooth random though let's stick with that yeah that's cool now I might not want this to be going at full strength at all times so I might want to be able to modulate this and obviously on the microfreak we have the pressure per key here that we could use now it probably doesn't make any sense to be affected by the meta because that's just the gate signal which is why I've gone into channel e because this has its independent input and in the same way as we can with our metas we can select what this input is doing so I've just plugged in the pressure here so at the moment if we hold down e yep it's going to be just doing the rate knob so yeah so I'm going to affect the rate by how much of my finger it is on the key there but that's probably not what we want here we probably want it to be affecting it like a vca so I'll hold down this and we'll tap through until we get to just the top light which goes as vca so now we're affecting a smooth random lfo for the pwm based on aftertouch essentially let's take a mini patch break in this patch here neotrinity is primarily acting as a bank of lfos which are affecting the level of four different drones so channels a b c and d are all set up as unipolar triangle lfos and they're controlling the level of the vca that each of the different drone signals are going through if you listen to the way that the drones are fading in and out you'll notice that it's somewhat chaotic it's not a constant repeating pattern sometimes a particular sound might be fading slowly sometimes it's faster and the way that i'm doing that is by controlling the rate of these four channels via the matter input but each of the four channels are set up to respond to the meta input differently so some are set up to just respond to it at full scale some of them are attenuated and some of them are inverted and some of them are inverted and attenuated what that means is that as the voltage coming into the meta input changes some of them are getting faster some of them are getting slower and by different amounts which kind of gives us this sort of unsettled chaotic feeling in terms of what's actually driving the meta input here initially i had channel f which is set up to be a smooth random LFO just plugged straight into the meta input but the changes that i was getting in the rates was too high because the signal was just too hot now obviously i could just grab an attenuator from somewhere else in the rack or even just a flying one by thought let's just do it on inside in the o trinity because it happened to have a channel free so what i've done is i've taken the output of our smooth random LFO and brought it into channel e which is set up in cv mode with its input set up as vca mode which basically turns this into an attenuator and i've just turned the signal down by turning down the rate knob until the changes were noticeable but not sort of too much so the whole thing is built inside neo trinity without any external modules this slightly silly patch which we can hear here is one of these patches that you build to kind of prove that you can do it because proving that you can do a thing is a great way to sort of learn a module a little bit more depth so other than the reverb that's floating around here the only thing you're hearing actually is the neo trinity itself and in particular you're hearing channel f which is in LFO mode but it's running at audio rate therefore sort of acting like a vco and it would actually respond to vod's proctave via the in or the meta input actually we could change the wave shape that we're hearing they're all kind of low-figh soundings this is the triangle wave some sawtooth some square and you can hear there's lots of alias and going on there because you know it's not meant to be a vco but that could possibly still be quite a neat basis for kind of low-figh oscillate sound so just to explain the rest of this patch probably to go backwards now to channel E so channel E is what's providing the pitch information it's a triangle LFO and it's patched into the input of channel F but you'll notice though that the pitches are stepped the reason for that is that the input of channel E is set to samplen hold mode and what's controlling that samplen hold is channel A so lots of self-patching going on here so channel A is a pulse LFO square LFO and every time that LFO goes high it's going to samplen hold the current level of the triangle LFO which is given our pitch information which is what's given us that stepping it's kind of a fairly classic computer game sound technique from the 70s and 80s you'll notice though that the speed of the arpeggios is not consistent and that's because of a bit more self-patching channel B is a slow triangle wave which is patched into the meta in it itself is not responding to the meta in but channel A is in terms of its rate which is what's changing the undulations here just to sort of prove that sort of put into a more sort of complete synth context this could be quite an interesting basis for an VCO what I've done is taken the square wave out here which is sort of our trigger that's going into an envelope that envelope is then controlling a filter and VCA and obviously our oscillator signal is going through that and those are quite pleasant lo-fi characterful bloop bloops actually I think so yeah lots of self-patching lots of misusing the module to do audio rate stuff but hey kind of cool sound so that's all fairly basic use of neo trinity but let's say that I'm not a very good keyboardist because I'm not and I want to be able to have this patch play itself or sequence itself and this is kind of where the superpower of neo trinity comes in so I'm just going to unpatch a couple of things I'm going to unpatch the meta input from the gate signal I'm just going to get rid of the PWM just for a second as well so we're back to the point where I would have to trigger things manually essentially so I showed earlier that you can preview an envelope by just tapping shift and sorry holding shift and tapping wreck if you do the other way around holding down wreck and tap shift what you're going to do is write a trigger into that channel's automation lane so now we can hear that particular note has been fired off and we can add more like so and if I decided I don't like what I've done I can just double tap shift and it's gone but we'll put some of that back in I think we've got a sequence happening for our VCA on channel A we haven't got our filter moving because that's on a different channel and I could copy and paste the channel across again I quite like decoupling filter and VCA envelope sequences so let's just tap something else in here or I quite like it with that rate changing there as well and it's just as well because what we can now do is hold down wreck and automate that and if I decided I don't like that I just double tap wreck to get rid of it I do like it so now at the moment our two sequences are the same length so they're kind of repeating nicely but you can change the length of automation on each of the channels independently either in sort of blocks of bars if you like by holding on wreck and tapping the letters or if you hold on wreck and go with mute or clock for up and down we can lengthen or shorten by one beat so we could do this so now our filter envelope sequences one beat shorter than our VCA one so we're getting this kind of overlapping sound so obviously at the moment we've got quite a static melody here which might be nice to have something a bit more dynamic of course so I've unplugged the microfreak from the VCO and instead I'm going to plug in channel F and so obviously at the moment that's NLFI which is not necessarily what we want although you know all these sort of sounds are fun instead I'm going to move this over into CV mode instead now CV mode gives us direct control over the CV and in the same way that hold down shift and pressing the letters change things for our shape of our elephant envelope in this mode this is going to mostly affect how we are dealing with quantization so if I turn D off here we get smooth control of CV if I turn on the D then it's going to quantize the pitch and if I turn on E what this will do is give us a much wider range over the CV which we don't want for this I don't think we want a smaller range and A, B and C in combinations are going to give us different scales so I'm just going to go just C on its own and then C and A just C on its own from minus minor pentatonic and now if I wanted to quickly sequence some sort of pitch sequence we can just hold down Wreck and so the length here is actually longer than our VCA sequence about kind of like having that static bit at the end of course we could do a similar thing as we did with our filter and actually make this shorter or longer try that yeah that's kind of fun so obviously this isn't designed to be super precise in terms of the sequencing but it's designed to be quite jamable and if I just want to get a new sequence in here I can just do that really quickly or if I wanted to come into A and change the way that my and it's all about being able to iterate those sort of performances quickly within a framework let's see where we can take this next but first let's take a look at some other patches that I've been playing with what we have in this patch are three oscillators which are all being controlled by a single knob to find different chords so what's going on here is that channels A, B and C are all CV channels which are quantized minor pentatonic in this case and that's what's affecting the volts per octave for each of the three oscillators for each of them the CV level is being affected by the meta input but the way that they're responding to the meta input is different in each case so one of them is responding full scale positively and others attenuated positively the other one is I think inverted negatively which means that as you move this in control each of the oscillators are staying within the scale but are moving around by different amounts to find these different chords now obviously we don't need to be controlling this with a knob we could give it an LFO or a random source like we have on F here and then if we combine that with a little bit of CV for envelopes coming from channel D where I've automated both the triggers and the rate of the envelope and then we give it a little bit of tempo synced stereo delay from basal we find ourselves in quite a nice place for a sort of chordy sequence that could go quite nicely with a little bass line I think neotranity is all about generating or processing control voltage but it's got an input it's got some outputs and voltage is just voltage so it may wonder what would it be like to run audio through neotranity so I've got this sample running here this is the raw sample you're hearing at the moment and this is what it sounds like running through neotranity so the first thing to note is that the meta input which is where my signal is going into has a sample rate which is a fair bit lower than cd quality and it's also filtered to smooth it so you can hear that we've got kind of a dark sample rate reduced sound with all the a-listing going on as well so you're hearing outputs from channels f and e here and they're both set to triangle LFOs at the moment but the important thing is that their meta mode is set to vca in both cases which means essentially we've got the LFOs acting like a vca across our sample rate reduced signal and we can go faster to sort of a faster tremolo kind of thing I've got one on each side of the panning here we can go all the way up into sort of like a sample rate reduced ring mod to feel the other side as well so a niche sound but I think it's quite a fun one I've also got them um synced to the clock at the moment let me just grab these and plug them into cd because I've got a slightly different set up here so rather than LFO I've got envelopes which are sequenced on one side you've got a decay envelope on the other side you've got an attack envelope and of course we can record in different patterns if you wanted to or delete the ones that are there or change the shape of the envelopes I've also got the output of neogenity molted into a reverb and that sounds quite nice with these sort of envelopes so obviously this is not the main reason to use neogenity but misuse of modules is kind of a key fun part of modular so this is what it sounds like processing audio and I think in some cases this could be just the thing if you happen to have neogenity sat idle why not run some audio through it so to finish off this patch I need a beat and I need it quick and this is where some of the algorithmic filling on neogenity come in really really handy so I'm just going to plug into channel c in that moment this is an LFO which is not what I want I want it in cv mode so that I can just trigger and I can record in you know a trigger pattern here but I don't want to program in anything at all instead I want it to program it for me so if I hold rec then shift and then go for one of the letters across the top here or indeed we can choose different fill patterns changing the rate knob it will fill it in different ways so a is kick patterns b is snare patterns I think so here we are very quickly got to a kick pattern or we could choose a different one that's quite actually yeah that works so only I have a basic hi hat setup waiting for some triggers so we'll put that into D and instead of using triggers in this case I'm going to just use envelopes again but fill them out algorithmically again so I'm going to go rec shift e for euclidean and immediately we've got something in there so quick and then we could change the length of the pattern for euclidean fills it's just so quick to get stuff in there and if I had a snare going fast somewhere I could also do a similar sort of thing with the with the snare algorithmic filling as well in pattern really quickly so this really plays into this idea of this being a jammable instrument in the same way as sort of quickly iterating on those melodies and gate patterns it's really fun just to just move around these little beats and ideas in this really sort of quick way that's cool and of course you could record another beat as well thanks so much for watching folks and I hope that was a useful introduction to neo trinity there's a lot more that I want to talk about with this module because you can go in really deep with the various different modes but that will have to wait for another day and another video or probably series of videos in the meantime though if you have any further questions about the module then feel free to leave questions in the comments of this video and I will do my best to get them answered as always thank you so much for joining me today and until next time take care bye