 Hello, I'll slay this in here. Basel from Bastel is a stereo time-based effect module. It is capable of traditional delay and echo sounds as you might expect, but through its wide-ranging controls, CV, and a selection of parameters which really modify the behaviour of the two delay lines, you can find chorus, flanging, comb filtering, pseudo-reverbs, low-fifex and more, and all in stereo. Basel is built upon the same hardware platform as Bastel's pizza oscillator module, and indeed, if you own a pizza, you can flash the Basel firmware onto it for free and get to exploring a new sound world. In this video, I've aimed for the first part to act as a kind of video manual going over each of the features in turn. That's followed by a number of example patches, which can hopefully show the module in context and show you some more of its versatility. Basel is a module with a lot of hidden depth, so this video is predictably pretty long. To help you navigate to the material that you're interested in, I've added extensive chapter markers, so feel free to jump around to find the info and sounds that you are after. Before we get to know Basel in some more depth, in the interest of transparency, Bastel provided the module to me for free in order to make some videos on it, but I haven't otherwise been paid for this video, and Bastel haven't asked for or been given any editorial oversight. As always, I only show stuff on the channel that I think is cool and that it's worth talking about. Right, let's check out Basel. Before we jump into any of the sounds, we should just quickly talk about the input and output for the signal flow purposes. You have two inputs, a left and a right, and two outputs, a left and a right, and that's because Basel is a stereo module, and in the truest sense the delay architecture is actually duplicated. There's a delay that sits on the left side and a delay which sits on the right side. What goes into the left input goes through the left delay and what goes into the right input goes through the right delay. We can introduce crosstalk between those two delays to do all sorts of stereo stuff which we'll definitely be getting into, but it is genuinely a stereo delay. If you don't plug anything into the right input, the left input is normal to the right input. For the purposes of the demonstrations, certainly in the sort of video manual part of the video, I'll probably just have one input going in here just because it's a little bit easier to hear the crosstalk stuff happening when we get to that side of things. Let's put a little sequence from pizza going into Basel here. Seems appropriate. At the moment our dry wet slider is set fully dry, which means that at the moment we're just hearing the dry sound coming straight from pizza, but if I turn up towards wet a little bit, we start to hear what Basel is adding in terms of a delay. Now I'm going to try and work through the module in a sort of logical top-to-bottom fashion, but there's a lot on this module where things further down affect what's going on further up, so there'll be a little bit of jumping up and down maybe. We'll see how we get on. One thing that I also want to highlight right at this point and we'll dive into it a bit more later is that every control on Basel is CV-able, not necessarily all at the same time, but any of the controls which are present on the face of it can be assigned to the control CV, so we can CV the wet dry, for example, as well as anything else. So with a time-based delay-based effect, it's probably worth starting up at this big delay knob at the top, and as on pizza, this knob can do multiple different things depending on the status of various button presses. We'll start at the most basic side of things though, which is with the time light selected here, the delay knob is going to affect the delay time. And the first thing you'll probably notice compared to a lot of delay devices is that the delay knob in time mode appears to work backwards in that as we turn it up, our delays get shorter. And this threw me a little bit when I first started using the module because it is backwards to most delay effects that I've used, but it does make sense when we start to think of it in terms of CVing the delay amount. If you stop thinking about this as delay time and more in terms of repeat frequency, and you think about that in terms of volts per octave, a higher voltage would create a higher frequency of repeats. This becomes really, really important when you start to think about carpal strong type synthesis where actually you want a higher delay value to be a higher frequency and a shorter delay. But we can see here that we have a range on the delay knob which goes right into audio range repeats. You can start to hear chorusing at the top there which we can certainly be doing. So we're going to have to do our first jump in terms of jumping down the interface to talk about the time here. Notice that the longest delay here seems to be pretty short. And what we can find on the battle is that we can affect the overall range of the delay time by making use of this button here. So if I tap this button now, it's going to put us into half mode. And now our delays are twice as long or the speed is half for the repeats. This gives us a different range of delays to work with. You might also be able to hear slightly that the quality of the delays is now slightly darker and that's because it's running the delay at half the sample rate. Personally I like delays getting darker so that works fine for me. If we want to go even longer, however, we can long press this button and that puts us into a different range of delay times. And now you can definitely hear the effect of that lower sample rate with a little bit of crunchiness happening in the delays there which I really, really like actually. And we can tap this again to go to a different range. So that's the shorter side of the longer delays. And that's the very longest one where you can hear a lot more of that grit. But I think that's actually a really lovely sound. Now this selector here is also CV-able by the control knob. We'll do that a little bit later. But because with each of these different selections we are either halving or doubling the delay time, we also get these nice octave jumps. Which are really cool. Lovely. Back into the standard range here. Let's talk about the next thing that this knob can do which is if we tap this again we go into the stereo spread mode. Now if I turn the delay knob down in the stereo spread mode we hear what we were hearing anyway because that's how I had it set. Now as I turn the stereo control up however you can start to hear some stereo widening happening and what's happening as I do this is one of the delay lines, the left one I think is getting shorter and the right one is getting longer. So the delays are coming out of sync with each other on the left and the right hand side which gives us this lovely stereo widening effect. And as we push it further we get to the point where we're kind of not just getting a stereo widening but introducing different rhythms to the delays that are happening there as well. Now this is not ping pong, we can do ping pong we'll get to that in just a second this is just the delay times of the left and right being set differently. When we get to the furthest here you can probably hear that one of the delays is now twice as long as the other one. Which is cool. Just bring that back down to mono just for a second here and we'll talk about the final adjustment we can make here. With the long press we go into fine mode and this gives us much finer control over the delay time. And again this works the same way around as the delay time normally in that shorter delays are found further up. So I think this gives us a range of halving the time I think. Something like that. So just coming back into the main time mode here we should also talk about the sync control. So I'm just going to grab a 16th note gate from Pam's and plug it in to our sync control. And if there is a gate signal detected on the sync control the delay time is now going to be quantized to that sync signal. So we should now get jumps between different tempo synced delay times. And of course we can affect that overall range by going into half mode or one of the longer ranges. Now one of the really really neat things about the sync mode is that the fine control still operates independently of the sync signal. So we can still take this synchronized time synced delay here come into fine mode and offset it. So it's still tempo synced but we're getting a different sort of pattern vibe with it. So you can finally sort of shuffle and sort of slightly wonky delay times which are still synchronized that happen periodically but they're not sort of quantized to the grid so much. So that's a really nice feature here it also means that we can modulate the fine amount even in synchronized mode to get some chorusing effects as well which we'll get to in a little while. So perhaps we'll leave the synchronization in here just for a second and we should talk about the feedback control here. So the feedback control as you might imagine is going to introduce feedback into the delay loop which allows us then to have echoes delays which go on for longer. And it's a two-way control. If we push this positive we can hear that those delays are starting to roll over in a way that you would maybe expect and we can push this right up to the top here and we'll start to get that rolling over of the delay and it starts to get gritty and... But what you'll notice hopefully is that although we're starting to get this over- overloading delay things are getting crunchy and nasty they're not getting really really loud and that's because inside the feedback loop I'll turn that back down now inside the feedback loop on Bazzle there is actually a compressor and distortion or overdrive or clipper or saturator which means that past a certain point the delays are not going to get louder and overload the DAC of it so we're not going to get that really nasty breaking up distortion but it's actually quite a fun, almost dare I say analogue sounding distortion instead which is lovely Now as I said this is a two-way control If we turn it to the left what we get is ping pong So what's happening now is that rather than feeding back within a single delay line the right delay line will feed back into the left and then the left feedback delay will feed back into the right so we get the signal passing back and forth as we go So this is our sort of classic delay for ping pong which is always a lovely thing and again we can push this to the point where it starts to overload and bloom out but again we don't get to the point where it is completely overbearing it's sort of crunching up inside itself instead and again what I think is quite a pleasant way We should also probably just quickly talk about the wet-dry here This is a wet-dry mix in that at the far right here we're just hearing the delay and not the original signal at all You can hear that that's mono from the centre is gone We can use Bazzle as a straight send effect as well as an insert effect which is always really really useful If we're talking about the feedback knob we should probably also talk about this button here which in many ways is one of the most powerful buttons on Bazzle So if I tap this button here what this is going to do is it's going to freeze what is currently inside our delay buffer So you can hear that our input is continuing to play through but it's no longer impacting on what is going into the delay line whereas inside the delay line is now frozen inside that and indeed if we take away our input altogether we can hear that still going Now in freeze mode a couple of the controls work in a different way The first thing is that the feedback knob will have no effect over the frozen delay line so that's one thing Obviously dry wet still operates as it should do What's really interesting however is what is going on with the delay control because although it sounds like we are just capturing this one little snippet of time as we move the delay knob around instead of getting that smearing we're just going to be lengthening and shortening the delay line and in fact if we go further back we'll find that the rest of our sound that was set inside the delay line is still there which allows us functionally to go back in time a little bit which is kind of lovely bit of time travel why not This will also still be affected by the speed but this will still be changing the sample rate So rather than getting a shorter snippet of sound if we change this from currently on half back up to full speed we get a double time frozen loop and if we go into the long range mode we'll be able to drop it down by an octave or some other stuff further down here which we'll get to that allows you to do even more interesting stuff with these frozen loops So the stereo control still has an effect over the sound as well the delay lines on each side now a different length as does the fine control of course basically doing what it always did but now without smearing the sound Now it should be noted that this operates slightly differently if you have a sync signal coming in here so let's unfreeze this and let our sound die away we'll give ourselves an input again and I'll pop the sync control in here as well let things stabilise there we go So if we freeze the delay line again we'll take the input out again so we can hear our frozen signal Our delay control now is going to now that it's synchronised jump to things in a synchronised fashion so we can get these tempo synced snippets of whatever was going into Yes! These tempo synced snippets work that was going into Bazel at the time How can you not love this? Now in synchronised mode as far as I can tell this stereo control no longer has an effect I don't know whether that's intentional or whether that's something that might be affected in a firmware update It would be really good if we could get tempo synced movements in the stereo there as well with frozen loops but as of the firmware that I have installed on this that is not the case We can of course still make these half time and quarter time as well which is really good fun as well Pop that through some reverb for a good time I reckon So I'll say to sync from the future here I've been editing this video and I've realised I've managed to completely delete a section where I talked about the lo-fi mode which is illegal because I love the lo-fi mode on Bazel So what does the lo-fi mode actually do? Well it disables the anti-aliasing filters within the delay What does that mean? Well, when it comes to digital audio the highest frequency that you're able to sample accurately will be the frequency which is half your sample rate So if your sample rate is 10 kHz the highest frequency which you can accurately filter is 5 kHz If you try to sample any frequency above that you'll get what's called aliasing There's a reason for this happening but what happens in practice is that it will start to introduce frequencies that weren't really there because of the ability to sample the frequencies that high So what happens in digital audio is that we have a low pass filter which is placed before that frequency that half the sample rate called the Nyquist frequency filter basically stops any audio coming in that would cause aliasing So that's all good if you're trying to capture something accurately, but what if I told you that aliasing can sound really really cool and as a result it's really nice that on pizza we have the ability to remove the anti-aliasing filter and get some of that sparkly new frequency content introduced So you turn on the lo-fi mode by long pressing this here Now, if you listen very carefully there will be a slight difference in the delay repeats now but it's going to be very very subtle because at the moment we have our speed set to fullest So I'll just turn it off on again so it's lo-fi You can probably hear that it's slightly darker with the aliasing filters in place but you're not hearing that much of a difference and that's because we're running at the full sample rate here If we go to half speed here not only are we getting a longer delay but we're actually running at half the sample rate which means that the anti-aliasing filter is now further down which is also why things are sounding darker it's not just that we've got a longer delay it's getting darker If we turn on the lo-fi mode now you can hear a little bit more high end and maybe a little bit fluff at the very top there and that's because now that we've half the sample rate the frequencies which cause aliasing are happening at a lot lower down so there's much more chance for aliasing to occur Now if we continue along this path so I'll turn the lo-fi off and we go to longer range here again you can hear we've got much darker now because our anti-aliasing filters have to be set that much lower for aliasing to stop It's in this longer range mode that you're going to hear a lot more of the effects of the lo-fi here so this is without it You hear how that sound has opened up from the top end but you've also got this ringing almost bell-like quality to the repeats with the lo-fi mode off you can actually hear some of the aliasing happening even with the lo-fi mode off in these longer ranges because I suspect the filter is not precisely set or isn't a steep enough curve that's not a problem, it sounds cool and if we go into the very longest range here things will get much darker You can already hear some of that aliasing still again because the filter design not being absolutely perfect but if we go into lo-fi mode now there's this beautiful glistening ringing aura that sits alongside everything and it's introducing all of these glitchy ringing sparkly frequencies which were there especially on these high notes the way it affects the reverb trail that's sat inherently within this sample as well is really really lovely I have to admit that I spend a lot of time with lo-fi mode just left on when I'm playing with battle on my own then we'll get to this a bit later but we need to have the ability to then post-filter some of these frequencies to accentuate them all or dial them back a little bit but we'll get to that later yeah so that's the lo-fi mode back to what it was I was talking about before this jump cut so let's get to this tantalising space section here so what space allows us to do is introduce three different additional processes inside the delay line we have blur which allows us to smear the delays we have filter which allows us to filter them we have taps which allows us to introduce additional taps inside the delay now before we get into these one thing I want to highlight this space mode can work in two different ways there's the default mode where you can only have one of each of these different effects active at any time so as you switch between them so if I was using blur and I switched to filter you'd lose the blur settings and you'd just move on to just filter settings and so on that's fine if you want to work that way personally I think that's a little bit limiting but there is what is also called the hyperspace mode which is how I have this setup at the moment and to enable this if you just hold down the speed and freeze buttons when you turn the unit on that would enable or disable if it was previously enabled hyperspace mode and what that means is that you keep the previous settings for each of these different things as you move through the different modes which personally I think should be the default mode but there we go so let's talk about the first mode here blur and actually with all of these space effects they do two different things this is not zero at the bottom and maximum at the top it's zero in the middle and then two different flavours of each of these space effects going either way so what blur does is it adds diffusion to the delay sounds so you'll be able to hear that pretty clearly you can actually move that to the left you can hear that the delay there is getting smeared now if we move this to the left the diffusion is happening at the input so the first delay gets diffused and then it just goes into the delay line as normal so we get a diffused delay that then sits inside the delay and actually if we push this all the way to the end we also get a bit more stereo spread as well if we move this to the right the diffusion happens inside the feedback loop meaning that each delay is going to become more and more diffuse as we go essentially so that first delay is still kind of fairly clean but as it carries on and feeds back more and more we get a more diffuse dare I say dreamy sound let's mix our original sound back in there a little bit more now this kind of idea of diffusing delay taps is kind of where you start to get into reverb territory especially if we start to bring our time down a little bit and our feedback up we start to get these quite dreamy pseudo reverb sounds oh yeah and it's lovely when we start to move that delay time around which of course we could do with CV as well beautiful and of course changing our speed here is also going to give us different kind of flavours based upon that sort of aliasing and anti-aliasing so if we go to range here it's just lush this is in ping pong mode as well and we could add stereo offset there and put it into li-fi mode let's get this glistening swamp around our sound and then freeze it sorry, I'm getting distracted by cool sounds so that's blur feedback disappear so the next one here is filter and filter is fairly straightforward this place is a filter in the feedback loop and as we go to the left the filter is a low pass filter so our repeats get darker which kind of lets you have that sort of longer feedback time without it getting in the way so much very pleasant so each of our repeats is getting darker there and going to the right gives us as you might imagine a high pass filter so taking that a low end out of those repeats again getting them out of the way in a different way feels like it gets a little bit resonant when you push it towards the top as well actually with the sound it gets that toy piano kind of vibe so the last one here is taps and what taps does for us is introduce additional delay taps within the delay line turning it into a multi-tap delay as we move it to the left we can hear those taps being introduced and we get a much denser delay sound almost getting some of that reverb vibe at longer delay times isn't that lovely so we get this very lush dense delay moving it to the right does the same thing essentially but rather than introducing all of the taps it only introduces the even division taps so we get a slightly different flavour less dense more obvious more obviously delayy I think still very lush and lovely though and the wonderful thing about having this in hyperspace mode is we can start to bring all of these things together so we can move to this more lush multi-tap sound we can start to diffuse those multi-taps and maybe darken everything a little bit creates that feedback again going to long range mode going to lo-fi mode high pass rather low pass and this is really where you start to turn basil into anything you want really yeah let's talk a little bit about CV when it comes to talking about the CV control on basil probably the most obvious place to start is with the delay volts proactive input here so I'll just start a sequence just a single note going to so it's really easy to hear what's going on so if I just plum in a LFO to the volts proactive input here we can hear that we're getting quite wide variations here so I'm just going to try and attenuate this LFO to try and get more of a gentle wobble to our delay time so my attenuator is almost all the way down but we're still getting quite big movements here cool movements but quite big movements so I can barely get it to the point where I'm getting that kind of wobble and the reason is this input isn't really for that if we want to have fine control over the delay time and get that sort of more modulation thing going on we have other ways that we can do that we should also note here that the delay here is being added to whatever the delay knob is currently set to it's not overriding it however what is quite interesting about this control as opposed to a lot of other delay units is that this is volts per octave so we can put a pitched sequence into it and get pitched delay sounds sequenced as a result which is very cool and we can also freeze what's going on in there as well turn it into an oscillator essentially I guess this is a wavetable synth at this point kind of yeah so this control is for bigger wider movements rather than such small modifications sorry if we just come back calm down if we just come back to the LFO just for a second here when we're moving things around I'll open up the attenuator a little bit and if I just plug in the sync here as well I've just got 16th notes here the LFO will now be moving things around but it will still stay synced as well which gives us a different kind of vibe going on here where things are still staying at those sort of octave ranges although it does still slew towards them so you still get some movements going on in there as well so the next input we should probably talk about is the feedback input which as you might imagine gives you control over the feedback amount before we plug anything in here however you should be made aware that if you are loading Basil's firmware onto a pizza which you can do this on the pizza is the pulse output not an amp the pulse output not an input so if you are putting Basil onto pizza you will need to flip the module over and there is a jumper which you need to move across it's labeled CV4 pulse the manual shows you which position it needs to be in this prototype that was sent to me had it in the wrong position and for a while I thought that the feedback didn't work and it was just the jumper position that was left noting there so if we plum into the feedback here I've just got an LFO going again let me make the delay look shorter you can hear that our feedback amount is being modulated which is quite a nice thing because for these shorter delays makes for quite a menacing vibe now yes you may expect possibly that the feedback control here given that it has a sent d-dent it's going to act like a tenuverto maybe and if we turn it down we get more of the ping pong happening instead but that's not actually the case the feedback CV is going to add to or take away from if it's negative whatever is currently set on this knob here if you want to have the ping pong feedback fading in and out in this way for example you'll need to invert your CV so that it's going negative instead so if I just quickly do a tiny bit of inversion here now you should hear that we're getting that sort of creeping feedback happening in the ping pong mode instead but you will need to invert the CV if you want to send the knob that way alternatively you could set this up to full and send an appropriate amount of positive CV to push it back towards zero I suppose but yes this is not a tenuverto it is just a straight up knob in this mode cranky the next CV input is the one that's sort of outside the main control panel here which is the one which relates to the space control so again let me put a LFO into there and this will give you CV control over whatever this is currently set to so the moment it's on blur mode a bit more feedback so we can hear it so you can hear that the diffuseness of our feedback is getting shifted around and modified and if we change this over to filter mode we're getting high passed now in the same way as with our feedback CV this is going to be adding or subtracting from whatever is currently set here so if you want to move the slider or move the control to the left as it was you'll need to send negative CV into here fun isn't it so I'm sending a positive CV in here so it's starting from low pass pushing it into high pass and then coming back down and we can also do it for taps of course as well and we can introduce those additional rhythmically related taps as we go which is very cool do bear in mind that in hyperspace mode however whatever you've left the set at on the slider will be applied continuously so if you're messing around with the CV make sure that you set the slider back to where you want it to be in a static way before you move on to the next CV location and this brings us on to the final CV input which is the control input which allows us to do assignable control of many different things so let's take a look through what all of those things assignable control on Basil works in the same way as it does on pizza you press and hold this button down here until things start flashing and by pressing different buttons or button combinations you move between different destinations for the assignable control the assignable control has an attenuverter here with the control knob and if there's nothing plugged into the control voltage then this just acts as a fixed voltage range that we can move parameters around with so let's start by assigning to time and this does what you would expect it very much duplicates what is happening on the day knob when you have time selected so we have a secondary control for it on control here the nice thing here however does give us access to an attenuverter so if we do want to try and do very small movements with LFO for example we might find it a little bit easier on the control now but again we do have a better control option for doing those smaller amounts so tapping this button again gets us to stereo mode which gives us a secondary control over the stereo control here so if you just want to have the stereo control easily accessible for example whilst I'm having the delay control here we can do that but of course we can stick a we'll go for an LFO again in there and we can move that stereo delay amount around which is going to get us this kind of stereo pitch smearing as we move that delay amount around which is quite nice I prefer that to the bigger movements that you get for the main delay knob actually yeah it's cool but I guess the main one here that is probably most interesting when it comes to doing those smaller modulations is that third press here where fine is flashing so now we have CV control over the fine amount which is going to allow us to be a lot more granular with what we're doing so if I again plump into the control here now it's a lot easier to dial in those sort of chorusy small movements to get our chorus and flange going on these sort of smaller delay movements this might be nice with a smooth random source as well to get that kind of more warbly thing going on sort of broken tape vibes going on so that's all for this button here just brings us back around to time so let's go over to this here so when these top two are lit what we're getting is control over our dry wet so that's dry put that in the middle it's wherever this is currently set and then full wet over at the end there and we can use this to for example fade our delay sound in and out so if I take an LFO here so we're going to add this kind of tremolo onto the delay on a bit of diffusion as well we kind of get that sort of tremolo-y reverb thing which is really nice actually going to go from faster adds an extra kind of modulation over it which is very nice actually I guess we could even do that at an audio rate if we wanted to to kind of ring modulate our reverb so that's just a triangle wave going in there yeah we can ring modulate our reverb there which is quite delay rather there which is quite cool so tap this again and this should give us external control over our feedback on top of obviously the feedback control we already have so if we pretty much what we had with our feedback control already but now we do have an attenuverter so we can take a positive unipolar CV and send it into that ping-pong feedback instead which you saw so pressing this one again this is really really fun so this is CV control over all of the different speed ranges that we have here so let me just take out the LFO for a second and give us a bit more feedback on what's going on so you can see that at either rain side of the range here I've got direct access to those different speed modes which is really really cool and if we put an LFO in there and give it the beans we're immediately into that beautiful glitchy place I mean I can just do this for hours and remember this is just one really really basic sequence that's going in here as well and perhaps if we also add a sync signal to there we can get into that real glitchy territory we go into ping-pong mode yeah I mean fantastic I have to admit this is probably what I've spent more time doing with Basil more than anything else because why wouldn't you we should probably move on to the next one there so next up on this button it does give us access to the wet dry again but when we press it again and the feedback it does get us to some additional settings here and the first one is freeze now freeze allows us to remotely engage the freeze mode easy to hear if we speed up the sequence a bit ok so the control knob here doesn't do anything although we do need to have it turned up instead what we want to do is plug a gate into the control here if we turn this mode off you'll be able to see it more clearly we can see that we're freezing parts of the buffer remotely using a gate it's a shame that we can't do this and also have the CV control over the speed control at the same time because this is where the big glitches live I think so that's a shame yes this does allow us to freeze what's in the buffer which also kind of makes this playable maybe interesting to try this with the gate from a keyboard controller or another sequencer actually cool yeah so that gives us external control the gate mode just coming back into a sign here pressing it again gives us access to low-fi mode so let's make sure we can hear what low-fi mode is doing by going into one of the longer delay ranges so there's our alias filter engaged and then we can turn up the control again we could stick a gate here so it was switching between those modes which is quite nice so finally on the control modes here we can also come down to our space modes and this allows us to get access to all of the control over the space modes that we like now a key reason to do this I think in a lot of cases leaving aside the fact that we can modulate it is this gives us two hands-on controls for the space modes at once so if I have this assigned to and then come out of the sign here and have the space mode set to filter and now have control over blur and filter at the same time but we can of course modulate things here as well we've kind of already heard stuff get modulated with the space control anyway the difference being here that we do have the attenuverter so we can apply negative modulation a little bit more easily with a unipolar modulation source the final mode here however once we cycle through all of these when all of our friends light up here is control over all three space modes all at once which is quite a lot of fun because you're getting quite large changes over the sound all at once so here we're adding in our additional taps we're blurring inside the feedback loop and also high passing and going the other way we're introducing a different set of taps darkening it with the low pass filter and putting the blur ahead of the delay line so sticking a slow bipolar LFO in there turning up the attenuverter might be quite a lot of fun that's the one we want to do that's the one modulation source that's the sync control that's quite lovely low-fi on so just a huge amount of movement inside that ambience just from a single modulation source then we can synchronize it then we can send some random voltage into the delay time lovely stuff I think that's all of the controls so let's put some patches together so we can see in a bit more context chorus flanger and vibrato are all effects which are essentially created in the same basic way you take a short delay and then you mix it in with your dry signal and then you modulate the delay timer but that's basically how you do it the nuance of which one you're going to get is all a function of how short the initial delay is the dry-wet mix and also feedback so here I've got a guitar loop and at the moment we're just hearing the dry signal and if I just go sort of 50-50 with basil you'll hear that we're just getting that kind of doubling so it's a really really short slap-back delay you can kind of hear that there's two attacks to every note but sort of a delay rather than say getting into the comb filtering side of things so I've got something plugged into my control input here which is just a straight triangle LFO from stages and the control is routed to the fine control on basil we could route it straight to time but you'd have to be more gentle with the attenuation if we did that so if I introduce modulation to this kind of doubling effect I start to get that chorus sound very cool now how this chorus sound that kind of sounds at a fundamental level is a combination of the initial delay time so we can make it maybe a little bit short and still get kind of a tighter chorus sound rather than as a C-sick one of course the depth of the modulation is going to make things sound more or less C-sick and the speed of our LFO of course so if I go faster generally with faster I want to go less deep modulation lovely or we could go very slow which usually means we can go much deeper with modulation kind of get that sort of long tonal change instead the other way that we could make this kind of sound a bit deeper rather than just increasing the amount of modulation is to bring a bit of feedback as well that will also just thicken things up a little bit make things a bit swirlier if we want to go from chorus to flanger all we do is we make our delay time shorter so we get into that kind of comb filtering area you can hear that kind of more swooshy sound that's going on there and generally with flanger we also introduce a bit of feedback as well to get some of that aeroplane swoosh and if we want to go from flanger to vibrato all we do is go 100% wet and turn that off feedback of course so three sort of discrete effect types but they're all achieved in very much the same sort of way but of course we've got quite a lot more here that we've not really touched on as also let's explore some of that a little bit so I'll just come back to more of a quality sound and the first thing that I want to do is I want to come into the stereo mode here this is going to offset the delay time on the left and right but we'll still be modulating them and this is well, it's just lovely I love stereo chorus and if we make our time tighter we get into our stereo flange instead it doesn't do stereo vibrato actually which kind of sounds like a kind of hollow chorus kind of thing that might still be useful now there's actually a second way that we could affect the stereo image using Basil and that is to take our feedback to the left which is going to give us our ping pong delay which is also going to give us stereo spreadback kind of different vibe A because we're introducing feedback but also the widening isn't quite as extreme I don't think you can combine the two okay, I'll probably stick with a stereo kind of vibe here let's talk about what we can do on the space control for chorus as well so one of the main ways that you can affect the character of a chorus is to change how bright or dark the delays are which of course we can do directly with the filter control here so if I turn the filter up we're going to high pass our delay and it's going to sort of brighten the chorus and kind of move it out of the way of the main sound a little bit really really high-fi kind of sound and because we kind of moved it out of the way of the main sound we can also be a bit more extreme with the amounts without it sounding so seasick like if I come back to without the high pass that's getting into kind of seasick territory we can go the other way as well we can make things darker kind of soupier and again you can kind of get more extreme with the filtering happening that way as well again just moving it out of the way of the clean sound it's a good way of being able to get things more extreme the taps is really interesting for chorus sounds as well because this is going to introduce smaller delays in between the dry sound and the main delay sound which is going to thicken up the sound but also because those other delays are shorter we're going to mix chorus and flanging together a little bit to get this really rich sound super rich bringing some feedback there to kind of get that hybrid delay and chorus and flange going on there we can even probably make our main delay time even longer and get some slap back happening as well some straight up doubling but still maintain flanging and chorus really super thick sounding so cool and finally we've got blur which is our diffusion on the delay which is not something you tend to see on choruses so much you know why not the pre-blur or the post-blur a bit of feedback to make it more obvious again really really cool and we can combine these to high pass it a little bit bringing some extra taps and we're just into a place which you just could not do with a standard chorus pedal I love chorus I want to run my guitar through this normally kind of pseudo chorus reverb slap back delay flange gorgeous yeah so Bazel makes a fantastic chorus flanger vibrato really really fantastic if you look at the marketing and even the manual for Bazel you'll notice that Bazel seems to try and avoid calling it a delay module I think preferring the term time-based effect or something like that and I guess the reason for doing that is that if you hear a delay module you kind of think echo and Bazel because of its flexibility can do a lot more than just echo but we probably shouldn't overlook the fact that it can also do echo really nicely so I've got a simple little sequence here just hearing it dry at the moment and I've got Bazel set up a particular way so we'll just fade in the delay here so I've got it set up to do ping pong delay with the feedback anti-clockwise I've got the fine control set to offset it from sort of a standard delay time but it is synchronized so it will sort of repeat nicely with the sequence that's going into it I've got it on half mode rather than on full mode which just on its own because of the lower sample rate you get that sort of low pass thing going on there, slight smearing to the sound that I just find nice to my ears I pretty much always use it in at least half mode for just straight up echoes lower in some cases but let's see what else we can do to make this just that little bit more special so the first thing I'm going to do is I'm going to plug something into the control which is a smooth random LFO and the control at the moment is assigned to the fine control so sort of small changes to the delay time and it's a smooth random rather than a straight sort of modulation so we're going to try and destabilize the delay rather than do an obvious sort of sort of chorusing kind of sound more like a I guess like a wow and flutter kind of thing going on so we'll just turn this up a little bit until we hear it destabilize I'm looking for like C-sick just a little bit of destabilization and sort of chorusing slightly too much, just needs a tiny amount yeah just slow it down a little bit cool so the next thing we can do to introduce a bit more rhythmic interest is to turn up the taps amount so we get those additional delay taps in here kind of almost got a triplet feeling there because of how the fine control is set it's nice and now what I'd like to do is just smear those delays just a little bit more I still want to hear the delays as delays but with a bit of the blur control on so we switch up to blur mode and we'll delay in the feedback so it's first few delays like obviously still delays but as things go into the feedback loop and go around a few more times it smears out becomes like a more reverby bed and then I'm going to set this over to filter mode and I'm just going to modulate the filter a little bit as well just using a tenuator to reduce how much it's doing it's almost like there's some string parts in the background there because that diffused repeat left hand side kind of hear it better it can do delays believe it or not read it really nicely that's nice wobble things a bit more this is probably not the main reason to buy a battle but it's worth noting that it does a really good job at low-firefying a signal so I've got drama going in you're just hitting the dry at the moment I've got the delay time set to it's smallest so almost no delay at all so if we sweep across to where there's a slight tonal change just because the delay lines sound different but essentially the same clean signal that goes in if we set our speed to half here you can hear that we have that sort of disappearing top end a little bit if we go into the long range mode and go as long as possible we start getting very dark with that digital grip but we can turn off the anti-aliasing filters and now we've got a nicely digitised low-fire version of our of our input which we can now mess with of course we can a little bit of feedback to get some of that comb-filtery vibe going on there, that's nice that's picking that kick drum out real nice and of course we can start to filter that if we wanted to taps which will make things a bit more comb-filtery and if we introduce the blur then obviously we're going to be getting into kind of reverb-y kind of sounds as well taps on filter that down a bit a little bit more feedback kick real big, that's what we started with actually super cool was a free send of the feedback ping-pong that's weird so yeah there's going to be a tiny bit of delay on this signal of course, a little bit of latency if you like, but it's going to be micro-micro to the point where it's basically making no difference to the timing of a track it's a cool process of that kind of thing comb-filtering is a phenomenon where you take a signal and you delay it by a very very tiny amount and then when you mix those two signals back together there will be a phase relationship between certain frequencies within those signals and certain frequencies will therefore be either boosted because they're reinforced or attenuated because there's phase cancellation between them if you look at that signal in a spectrum you'll see that certain frequencies are basically sort of cut out like the teeth of a comb which is where we get the name from there's a matter you can do to work out the frequencies again to be attenuated based upon the delay time not interested in that necessarily today but let's take a listen to what that sounds like when you do it with Bazel, so I've got Trumbloop here and I've got Bazel set up with a very short delay time and if I mix that very very small delay time in with the visual signal you hear this very characteristic hollowing out the sound that we get with comb filtering now if we change the delay time we change the phase relationship and we're going to change which frequencies are being cut out now you might be thinking possibly doesn't this sound a bit like a flanger and to write that's basically how a flanger operates now one thing that you can do with comb filters is introduce feedback to further reinforce that relationship between those frequencies that have been attenuated or boosted and you'll start to get this kind of ringing thing happening it becomes quite tonal and if we move that delay time we get a different set of ringing happening now what's fun with Bazel is that because the delay time or the delay CV input is volts per octave if we put a volts per octave pitched sequence in there we can use this comb filtering to put a melody on top of whatever signal is going in there now we can take some of the other features of Bazel and start to do some other stuff to this so for example we can introduce some stereo movement and get this sort of stereo harmonized comb filtering and we can start messing with other parameters on here as well like the filter for example to sort of make that effect less obvious or more pingy the blur also does interesting things into that kind of reverb space not really comb filtering so much but with that comb filtering feel on the top of it if we mess with the speed controls we're going to get doubling and halving of the frequencies involved now what we've got here is kind of a pseudo carpalus strong kind of thing going on here so I can put in something that's less sort of obvious obviously musical into this just like bursts of noise instead a little bit higher of course if you take the feedback all the way up how we have other things set we kind of get into a carpalus strong kind of space so yeah playing with really short delay times and getting into that comb filtering space is actually really really interesting and some unique sounds to be found there this patch here is inspired by and pays homage to a video that Vaklav from Bastille put out years ago now on the Bastille time delay unit which I think it's safe to say Basil draws some influence from and that video was all about destructive looping which was where Vaklav was using the time as a looper so the delay buff was set up to loop whatever it was put into the delay buffer but as you put more things in or you affected parameters on the time unit you would destructively change what was currently inside that delay buffer evolving the performance as you went along and that's kind of what I've tried to set up here so what you're hearing at the moment is a kick drum which is coming from Beehive Plats just keeping time everything else you're hearing is what's currently set inside Basil's delay buffer the way I have Basil set up here is that I've synchronized it from Pam's running at the same rate as the kick drum or rather it's running at quarter I think versus the kick drum but it's synchronized and I've set up the delay time so that I'm getting basically two bars of loop I've set the feedback to be in ping pong mode because that essentially doubles the amount of time that we have if you're using just the mono output because you're going from one delay buffer into the other delay buffer and back so you're essentially doubling the time I've got the range set to its absolute longest which is why we're getting all this kind of digital grit and to emphasize that digital grit because I like it I've turned on the lo-fi mode here and otherwise I've basically got a couple of ways I can put things into that buffer I can tap the MMI here to put either some noise in or something from Peter here and then on Akido here on the last two sliders I've got some other little sounds also got rings and just an oscillator going and that's awning through MFX just for some refit by the way so once you've got these things going on inside the the delay buffers you've got a couple of different ways you can then mess with them so to kind of erase a section of it we can bring the feedback down for that section there's a bit of a gap going on in there there's something else in there but anything else that we now affect on battle is also going to affect what's going on you can also hear that we're starting to get some distortion in there because we're over driving that feedback line turn the feedback down a little bit to try and temper that but it's kind of part of the fun so I've got the space mode here to filter so if we put filter sweeps into the delay line we're also going to be recording them into our loop if you like once again some of that we're ringing from the lack of the anti-aliasing filter if I could just pop some more things in there here we can do other things like use the taps control oh my god I just need to get the filter turned down so we're losing one of our top in there so using taps we can throw in some extra taps which give us essentially extra notes in there so we can start to blur what's in the buffer as well smoothing everything out giving us more space to put new things in and we can build up and destroy loops over time and put samples in here or anything else that we like louder things and more kind of force the other stuff out of existence as well and it's a great way to build up loops or textures that we can evolve over time and make concrete changes to yeah that's just a really fun way to spend some time with battle