 Hello, I'll say to sync here a few weeks ago Okay, maybe more like a half a year ago I posted a video which was titled electron syntax the world's number one drone synth Now that title was kind of tongue-in-cheek, right? Well wasn't tongue-in-cheek about it was In terms of the sound I thought that the sounds that you can get out of syntax when you're using it in that particular way Fantastic, what is kind of tongue-in-cheek is that? Syntact obviously is not a instrument which is necessarily designed for or aimed at that target audience of people making drone music, but like so many other electron boxes the power of syntax comes from the flexibility of a number of smaller simple systems and By making use of those smaller simple systems in flexible ways we can make it do all sorts of interesting things So in this video, I want to talk about using syntax as a drone synth It's going to kind of be two parts to this video The first is going to be sort of theory and mechanical stuff There are a couple of things that we need to address about the way the syntax works in order to get it to do drones at all and There are some differences between the machines and how we need to actually treat them in order to get things to drone So we'll address that first we'll get the sort of dry mechanical need to know stuff out of the way first And then we'll go on and actually look at applying that and putting together a drone track Seeing what things sound interesting what tricks we can use We'll talk about the composition a little bit But if you're interested in more of my approach to the putting together of compositions of drone tracks I would recommend taking a look at my Digitone drone video Which is a couple of years old now, but a lot of the concepts that I cover in that are obviously fairly easily transferable to the syntax So we'll focus more on the sound design side of things rather than the composition side of things I think perhaps in this video The flexibility that the syntax offers us comes from the fact that on each of the different tracks We're able to assign different machines and these different machines can do different things. So We've got percussive sounds including snares kick drums We've got some utility stuff here on the analog ones. We've got some melodic ones as well and we have a different range on the digital tracks and also Track 12 has a different range as well because that's geared more towards sort of symbols and noises As I kind of alluded to each of the different machines Is going to have different drone capabilities if you like we have to treat them slightly differently depending on which machine that we're looking at And we can kind of put them into three different categories, which is what I'll do in this first section of the video And for each of the different categories, we have to use them slightly differently within syntax to get Drones out whenever you load a machine into one of the tracks the page which is unique to that machine essentially is found on the sin page and as we move to different Machines you get a different set of parameters And the parameter that we're particularly interested in when we come onto this sin page Is whether or not we have decay parameters And different machines have different decay behaviors the first behavior that We're looking for on some of the machines is whether the decay parameters Go up to infinity And if they do I put them in this category that I refer to as true drones and I'll put a list of them up on the screen now So with true drones As long as you have got your individual machine decays set to infinite And in the amp envelope as long as you have Depending on which type of envelope you're using if you're using the attack hold decay You'll need your decay time set to infinite and if you're using the ADSR you'll need your release time set to infinite but as long as you've got infinite Decay or release depending on which Amp envelope you're using and you've got infinite decays on your sin page as soon as you play a trigger It's going to be like connecting the Oscillator into a filter and then into a wide open vca that is going to drone forever. This will never die down And then you've got the opportunity to start playing with other parameters, of course LFOs and all that good stuff So the unique things about the true drones And this is different to all of the other machines All of the categories of machines Is that you don't actually need the sequence of going at all in order to make use of them as drones. You can simply be mixing them In the if I chose the right track that would be useful mixing them in the mixer Now arguably Not making use of the sequencer on an electron machine is illegal, but A good amount of what was actually happening in the performance that I posted was just coming from Playing the mixer and bringing different tracks in So it's a really nice way of working actually and of course you could use Lock tricks within the sequencer on these tracks to not trigger the sound but instead alter it in some way The only way to get this to stop instantly is to turn the unit off Change your release to something that isn't infinite or you can double tap The stop button of course to kill that off moving on to the next category of machines when it comes to drawing Let's talk about something like this beady modern machine here so the decay on this machine does not go up to infinite and Even if I come over to my envelope here, which is currently set to the ahd envelope I have my decay set to infinite. We can clearly hear that at some point this Dies away right so it's not droning forever And if I hold down the trick This decay is still being applied I'm still going to die down even though I'm holding down the trick Now the trick here Is that For the ahd envelope The shape of the amp envelope doesn't have any effect On the synthesis and essentially the decay that's defined in the syn page always wins however Um This isn't the only type of envelope that we have it's the default one that's loaded when you first load in the machine If you load up an initialized patch if you load up an initialized pattern But if we change this to ad sr instead And now hold down the trick As long as there is a gate song the trick is playing We get a drone and some of these percussive sounds Have some really interesting things going on inside them that shouldn't be overlooked So the machines for which you can get them to drone as long as you are holding down a trick I refer to as my Gate drones and I'll put a list of them up on the screen Now so everything that you see on the screen now are machines which will drone as long as you have Something held down in terms of sequencing these gate Drones because we are going to need to have a sequence or running if we're going to hear it There are a couple of things to think about so um the obvious thing that you might want to do um initially is to lay down a trick And set its Length to infinite and that's going to make this trick last forever when we hit play The problem now of course is that we're getting that trigger at the start every single time now So what can we do? Well, this would be a useful application of the first probability type or trick condition rather And what this does is only trigger this step the first time we play the sequence So it's not going to trigger on every subsequent time around the sequence The thing that you need to know about this first trick condition, however, is that this applies to the first time around the sequence And if your track happens to be muted at that point we're muting the tricks Not the sound It's the way that it works on On the digi the digi box and the actual boxes in general setting the modern ones So if we were to mute this track What happened just then was our first trick, but the truck was muted when it happened and if I now unmute it No sound so um The approach that you probably have to think about Here is and this is what I did on my performance is making use of the mixer instead And maybe if you want a track muted at the start of the performance You just turn it down in the mixer But leave the track actually enabled in the sequencer so that first trick still fires so track was unmuted that Trick has fired and if I turn up my track now we've got that train happening In the background there now On some of the machines you might be able to take the approach of trying to create a sound Um, so if I turn this back to being 100 instead Try and create a sound which doesn't have a transient at the start But most of these drum machines No matter what you do are going to have a transient so I can turn my sweep down to zero I can turn my modulation envelope down to zero But um when I press play And each time it goes across it's going to give us that little click anyway Now um we can try and mitigate. I've already done it here. Um, um You probably want to have your amp envelope reset turned off Anyway, so that your amp envelope isn't going to keep restarting If you've got any movement going in there, but you could try and do An attack on here and turn that back on But you're still going to hear that movement to the start of each bar So you're probably still better off making use of the first trig condition And dealing with things in the mixer The next um consideration comes is what if I want to sequence this? Uh, very good question. Um, you probably don't want to put down Another trig especially one that doesn't have the hundred percent infinite length um So what you'll probably want to be doing if you want to sequence things is making use of lock tricks instead and just changing parameters but not firing the um The actual sound just making changes to it the Flip side of this difficulty now is that because this first note is set to first It's now not going to trigger either So um what you can do is put Now I've killed the whole sound it's put another trick here Which is just a lock trick which has your default parameters on all the ones that you count as default and then microtime it all the way over to the um the first step more or less and This is kind of what I was um talking about at the very start of the video where We have a bunch of flexible systems here that we can Make do this kind of thing But it might not be set up to do it In the most instinctive way initially but once you learn those systems then the orders you're always still with the electron boxes And we shouldn't overlook some of these percussive machines that can last forever pretty much all of the digital machines come under this um banner so You know there are tonal parts to our snare drums um Some of the um other percussion sounds have interesting modulations up between them Even the clap will actually sustain forever in a in a way Interesting Kind of eight-bit things going on there actually yeah, so uh And everything other than bits comes into this as well bits is a true drone but these other ones we can On the other melodic ones we can use as cake drones Excuse this very boring Sequence but you get the idea finally we come to our third category of Machines when it comes to droning and I'll put them up on the screen Now and unfortunately these are the machines that you cannot make drone so unfortunately, this is mostly the um Most of the analog drum sounds won't drone with the exception of um bd hard I think which has an infinite decay um So here's a snare sound And although we can make it go For quite a long time and I have tested this it goes on for It goes on for a surprisingly long time But this will eventually end in kind of here that is fading away. I'm not going to Um keep holding that down the whole time Yeah, so most of the analog drum machines apart from bd hard um will um Eventually decay to nothing Now it may well be that you'll kind of be like well we can Retrigger occasionally and maybe put an amp envelope on it and if it has a sufficiently interesting sound that you want to make use of then uh by all means but um It doesn't matter how you have your amp envelope set up. Um, so I've got this one set up to adsr with the sustain Up full But it won't sustain forever this one again Will go for quite a long time though as it happens. I discovered But it will eventually die away I think it went on for A good few minutes when I tested it And I did sit and test these until they actually died away. Yeah, um all of uh Those um machines that I have on the screen. They will not Drone though some of them will go on for a very long time and some of them have interesting decay So it might be worth persevering with and just re triggering sometimes you know If you think they have a sound that you like then You know, you can make it work in my video on droning with the digitone I put forward while I would probably consider a very Sequencer heavy approach to creating a drone lots of conditional tricks Um lots of long held notes creating sort of polyphonic parts within the four tracks And that really is down to the fact that the digitone has Only four tracks you have eight voices of polyphony spread across them But having only those four tracks it makes it difficult to perform A drone in a more interactive way if you like Because on syntax we have 12 different tracks Granted they're all monophonic, but because we have these 12 different tracks We can take a bit more of an interactive approach with the composition of drones or I like to anyway Um and actually build up things that we can perform more Using the mixer for example to bring in different um drones and therefore different harmonies Um based upon the relative positions of the tracks and it can be a bit more of an interactive playable experience rather than one that you can pose and then kind of press play and let evolve So that's the kind of approach that i'm going to Use here. You can absolutely use an approach which is a lot more sequencer heavy and that you can again just press play and it performs itself but um Now that we have all of these tracks to work with I think it's a nice Thing to attempt with syntax. So that's my goal for this example So I think maybe I will start with a couple of the analog tracks and just get a nice Drone going on here and a good reason to start with the analog tracks in in my opinion is that because the two vco sorry the dual vco machine here has two vco's In the title there. We have the ability to build up Essentially a four note chord between say two of these tracks and blend them in out being notes in and out both in terms of The relative volumes of the tracks, but also we have the balance control Which is going to allow us to balance between the two different oscillators that we have going on so um track selected dual vco turned on make sure our amp is set to have an infinite decay this Machine is a true drone. So we should now just be able to Set it going Let's choose Key well, let's go with f perhaps seen as I've clearly already changed this note to f um, and let's find Could just go for the classic fifth Fourth is nice. Maybe take it down octave and we can play with the um Way forms or so probably not quite A fourth as detune it so beats a little bit Um, maybe go for a slightly less aggressive way forms within overdrive them Could this me to get a little bit more bring what once as well Yes, get something nice and deep happening to begin with so we have those two friends there um, let's pan it off to the side a tiny bit and uh come across to the next track go to that same machine and build up a similar sort of Feeling patch just pan it out to the other side a bit I should Just be able to get it going So maybe get that one a fifth up from the roots and then I think a little bit more Interesting going on there to get a similar sort of approach with our Brightest to begin with and filter down in this case perhaps Do you have the lovely analog filter on these tracks as well? One here just to establish the root note and we can maybe Have that sequence to move between different Parts of the scale to reharmonize the other drones that are going on automatically But we'll just leave it draining for just for the moment. So this is already set to just a drone so um I'll get some more movement in here with LFOs in just a second But what I want to do first is I want to bring everything through the analog distortion So let's go into the rooting here and let's just put You can hear immediately there as I put these tracks in there the way they start interacting becomes much more interesting And you know distorted and we'll just run everything in there including our effects See how much drive we have here move just a bit because we're already running So I think one of the things that we could do to introduce some Movement into this straight away is maybe assign our LFOs on these first two tracks Or maybe this one as well to the balance of those two oscillators so we get Different harmonies happening there by virtue of these things fading in and out So I'll go into our LFO page Remember with the LFOs that we have two different settings here We have the bpm version and we have the non bpm version the non bpm version is going to be based around an implicit bpm of I think 120 bpm But if you want to get LFOs that go really slow The best way to do it is to use the bpm one and make sure your bpm is low, so let's go down to For something slow making direct music Yep It's in balance here You can pretty much go 15 inch direction I think I'm not trying to aim for another sort of integer values here So if we just copy that page and paste it over here, it's super right, isn't it? When it's on that side, so we'll come back to the LFOs here Let's introduce a couple of other sounds in here One that I really like to use is on the digital ones The bits which is another one of our true drones here which we can set the I think to infinite here part of the reason I like this is again, we get the two oscillators in here so we can build up a bit of a chord within here But there's also just these really nice interactions between the sample rate reduction and the bit rate reduction Especially when your detunes aren't quite Sort of spot on so you can kind of hear everything sort of beating up against the distortion now if we If we take things out of the distortion just for a second You can hear how much that distortion is actually playing into the movement in the sound And it's arguably a little bit too much with all these things going on the moon. So again, we can just come into the FX Just bring that drive down a bit As we bring in more things, it's going to become It's going to be less hadry minutes so that makes sense So I think maybe we tune this one up a bit Cool, and then we've got all of this Glycine and scrunch that we can get from the sample rate reductions Down but then use the resonance just to bring the top probably also here want to just take the freight bomb end out this one Let's give us a bit more head room and then yeah, the sample rate reduction gives us loads of lovely Fairied timbre so maybe like 20 up and down and this is what I mean about being able to mix it And bringing different chord tones using the mixer Uh, so, uh, yeah, let's uh get a sample rate reduction moving Again really slow 20 up and 20 down I think And the sample rate reduction the bit rate reduction Are especially interesting when your two oscillators inside the bit aren't quite in tune The way that the sample rate reduction starts to create new harmonics on top of that is really really interesting You can almost hear that there's a pitch drift in it Even though there's not and that's just that sample rate reduction moving around I was thinking I might put a pitch drift in this one, but doesn't sound like I need it So I think maybe just a filter movement might be nice Let's do that get nice and slow And maybe let's take the same track bring it over here And uh, tune it differently and to the other side as well It already is too differently because I haven't had a different note on this track Darker I think the ability now to The detune just go up half a semitone And if we use the sine wave modulator, it's going to spend more time at either extreme That might be really cool. Uh, so come in here to sort of fill the frequency. Let's use the tune Okay There's something going on here Let's think about it now It's probably mandatory for us to involve a little bit of reverb in this drone setup It's just going to give us a little bit of extra width and sort of Space Which is going to be a nice thing So, um, let's just start one of our drones going up so we can more easily hear what that reverb is doing to either side of the stereo, so Just get this little one going Which turned down a moment Uh, let's bring some reverb in there a healthy amount of reverb Then our reverb setup here, we're probably going to make it longer Which makes it a little bit more evident on the other side if you listen down stereo Our pre decay Is probably making it shorter because we want our sounds to very much be in the reverb Also notice If you modulate the pre delay You do get interesting chorusing happening And we can do that in the master track might be interesting And then probably the other thing we want to do is just take a bit more of the bottom end out of our reverb And also some of the very extreme top end But at the same time as taking out top end feeding into it, let's give The feedback path a little bit more top end regeneration Okay, let's bring some of the other Tracks into the reverb now the reverb is also going into our Master distortion So it's going to be contributing to that interaction between the different Parts as well so much of this low drone in here. We probably want to think about delay as well Let's get one more drone in here and then get some sequencing running Which one let's try Yeah, let's maybe let's maybe use a gated drone here. So we have to get the sequence of running Let's maybe use Sort of FM to think about where your notes are in the stereo To see if they sort of fit with what's primarily on that side So I think probably just get our modulation and feedback with the LFO there be quite nice I think this is one that we want to hear it moving obviously, but not so much Sweeping in and out like it is currently kind of that speed So um for this for sequencing I am going to probably use the First trick so that uh this note always starts happening When we first start the sequencer and goes on Uh infinitely, but I might put some other notes in here As well. So uh right track Condition is going to be first Infinite I'm also going to make sure that my amp envelope is set to not reset Good Finally start our sequencer, please We're on our master length at infinite. So if we do Polymetric tracks, they all run over each other and they don't ever reset So we always come back down to up. So we've got a bit of movement happening inside there. I think this is too loud currently So let's start to get some Some more incidental sounds in here. I think would be nice So we will come to our Final analog track here and we'll do some filtered noise kind of stuff So not drawings, but just some other little noises to happen it so we can End just set them all at low priority low probability even So let's set this going uh it's fast That's where they lose anything. Uh That's the parent pair. So obviously setting this So that's my slender too like an idiot to also mess with this track So what I'll do is I'll put down a bunch of little twinkles Probably set them off grid. So I'm just tuning the filter manually into different um Notes be interesting because they be slightly out of tune. I mean you kind of have to do it this way rather than playing in the notes because the The filter doesn't track faults per octave. Essentially, you can't play it directly with the keyboard, which is a shame Pretty much slower in a second. So I don't want them so much on the grid So I'm just going to randomly just micro tune these and I'm also going to make it slower in a second I think I want also have these happening on different sides a little bit. So I'm just going to pan them Should I do it with an LFO instead? No, I think they're going to happen so sporadically that you won't really notice that the same note is happening in the same place at each time So I'm just going to adjust with the LFO is the attack parameter here. So some of them aren't Pings some of them are sort of breathy So what up to even 50 something might work So if we put it At the bottom so it biases towards the lower ones So we'll use a holding trick here, but it chooses a new one for each step random We're gonna set this to a 10. We'll put depth of 40, but that will mostly bias it down back towards one So they're mostly gonna be plucky. So I think I'd really like to Get this much slower not happen all the time. Don't know before we do anything else. So let's set the probability down to like 15 and have it I was already going slowly that's fine So only 50% of the time we're going to get a friend in here going to be breathy or plucky Change our drone around a little bit. This one feels like it could be darker That's some stuff happening before we stop a couple of things that I want to Add in here the first is I want to get the delay involved and the second is I want to make use of a couple of the digital algorithms, which are a little less obvious for drones a little more esoteric so Let's do that It's a bit hypnotic, isn't it? I keep losing track of time This is necessarily going to be a long video because it's about drone. So Okay, uh, yeah More esoteric machine then some delay. Okay, let's put our low note back in There it is And uh That's a empty track. Yes Um, so let's make use of say let's try the symbol, right? So Symbol once we have things set up to be a DSR, which is here We have this kind of ringing kind of thing going on But we have ways to actually create like chords in here and stuff All these sort of I reckon we do something with that. Let's just bring other notes here So perhaps we can sequence the shimmer To get these different chords to different sounds we can get here. Yeah, so let's do that. Let's um, let's pop a trick down here Infinite to the default Set this to be first We'll meet the track will be a good idea as well sequence in some uh phone a second Be first so we should be able to hear things happening. Well, let's get our delay happening in here as well Because it's another way that we can build Out our stereo Uh width a little bit and give it a little bit more movement. So I'll just come into my delay settings here um Set it wide ish get it to ping pong brought with the feedback. So it's a bit more sort of tapy. I'll just Sorry for the sudden bits of sound But let's use this because it's a bit more plucky to work out Whether it's sounding right that then sounds if we start sending some of our other friends In there, let's uh, so I don't want things to sound like they're in the wrong given us width But if you turn up too much, it's going to sound like that sound is happening on both sides Rather than spreading across See now We can hear it building up on the other side And it's losing its position a little bit. So maybe something around 56 Don't feel like we need it for our across it's going to be dependent on how loud the track is anyway Make their pitch shift around the fx Phos we've got two fos here. We can do both of them, I guess Um, so if we and of course we have four more tracks here, but I think the video has been going on for long enough Other things that we can take advantage of Is performing the drive So if we feel like we could actually take this the fx track 100 we should consider you with the filter As well or alternatively, uh, you could start with a high pass Emphasize it if you wanted to it's a nice way to transition out of the track as well And because we have our reverb and delay all running into The fx track at this point Then you also get filtered You've then got the lovely interaction between the drive and the filter as well If we're taking more of that bottom end out push it a bit further You see what I mean about the syntax being a much more Performable drone or has the potential to be a more performable drone Than the digitone maybe both lovely. I should probably combine the two really We should discount some of the um do phaser sounds as well And why wouldn't you I could sit and play with this forever and I probably will when I stop the video But um, I should probably leave it more or less here So if you enjoyed the video Thank you for chilling out with me Please do Leave a like and it's always really massively appreciated And I think I'm going to do a couple more electron videos pretty soon as well. So if that's your bag Then um, make sure you are subscribed to the channel so you don't miss out on any of those Coming soon and until next time