 Hello OscillatorSync here. If you've been following the channel recently, it will not have escaped your attention that I'm rather fond of the electron Digitone. Now a lot of that comes from the wonderful electron sequencer, but we shouldn't understate how fantastic the synthesis engine is on the Digitone. In fact, I'd go as far as to say that I think this is a future classic. But today I want to focus in on one specific element of the synthesis engine, the LFOs. And in particular, I want to highlight to you three reasons why I think the LFOs and the Digitone are amazing and offer up some ideas of how you might make use of those features. So the Digitone has two LFOs and they can be used to modulate everything that you'd expect on a standard FM synth, just like on the DX7. We can introduce some pitch wobble, quite a lot of pitch wobble. And we can also modulate the level of the operators, which is going to introduce timbre or change as we alter how much frequency modulation is happening over time. And we can very quickly get to really lovely sounds. But this brings me to the first reason why I think the LFOs on the Digitone are awesome. We can start by just thinking about how we can modulate the timbre elements of the synthesis engine. So in a normal FM synth, you can modulate the levels of the operators, but of course this is the Digitone, which means we also have a filter, so we can come down here and apply filter frequency cutoff for a different feel. And while we're talking about the filter, we can also modulate the filter resonance and this can be really fantastic, giving you almost like a phaser kind of sound. Heading back into the FM side of things, we can do things like modulate the feedback of the FM engine, which again allows us to bring a different kind of tonal variation. Kind of bringing in this raspy quality in and out. And finally for another tonal variation, we can even modulate the amount of distortion. You have to be a little bit careful here because when the modulation hits zero, your hair a click where it turns off. This can sound really good. Much slower speeds bringing in this kind of menace. Sticking with the amp section, we can also modulate the volume to create tremolo and the panning to create stereo spread. This might be a cool time to also point out that LFO 2 can be used to modulate the parameters of LFO 1. So for example, we can have LFO 2 modulate the speed of LFO 1, which allows us to create these kind of effects. Interestingly, we're also able to modulate how much of the signal has been sent to the Digitone's inbuilt reverb, delay and chorus. And that allows us to create movements that aren't in the sound itself, but rather in the ambience around it. But we'll come back to another really cool use for that feature in just a bit. The LFO destinations that probably got FM aficionados, the most hot end of the collar, however, is the fact that we can send the LFOs to the core elements of the FM engine. For example, we can send our LFOs to the ratios of the operators. And because of their stepped nature, we get these cool, partially pitched bass and partially tonal arpeggios. This huge range of modulation destinations is exciting in and of itself, but it's also why the next two reasons for loving the Digitone's LFOs are so awesome. So let's get on to the next one. Sample and Hold is a type of modulation where instead of having a regular repeating wave form, like a triangle, a sign or a square wave, modulating your source, instead you have a random source, and periodically that random source is sampled and that then sets the value of the parameter. It's kind of like constantly rolling a dice, and every time you roll the dice, you use that value to set the position of a knob. If you apply sample and hold to filter cutoff, you get this kind of sound. Which is just one of the best sounds in synthesis, isn't it? That kind of robot voice sound is a result of the kind of standard implementation of sample and hold, but the Digitone offers us an alternative, which when used is an incredible way to bring variation not just to your sounds, but also to your sequences. And it's all down to the hold mode. So if we go into the second page of the LFO by tapping it a second time, and on the mode here, I'm going to go across to hold HLD. Now the difference with this kind of sample and hold is rather than constantly rolling the dice, the dice is rolled just once, and that is each time you play a new note. So for example, here we've got this sent to the pan, and if I turn up the depth, every time I play a note, it's going to be panned somewhere different. Notice that it's not constantly panning backwards and forwards, it's staying where it's put when it gets put there. And like I say, when you start to introduce this to a sequence, it can bring some really great variations. So let's try sending this to some other areas of the synthesis engine. So one obvious place to sort of following on from the robot voice is to send it to the frequency cutoff of other tonal variations. We can of course be sending it to the levels of our operators. Immediately we've just got so much more movement going on. It's almost like we've got two different instruments on the go. But we can also do some really interesting stuff by sending it to our envelopes. So for example, if we send it to the attack envelope here, on the other operator, we get all these really interesting rhythmic elements starting to happen. Same could happen with the frequency cutoff envelope for our, we can also be doing things like picking in a whole different algorithm every time. Almost like getting a different patch each note. But I think probably on balance, my favorite trick that I've found with this actually is to go all the way down to the bottom here and go to our send. So this is how much of our sound has been sent to our reverb, to our delay, and to our chorus. And it's just this great way to make certain notes pop out on delay here. Rather than having that constant swamp of the sequence going into our delay, just occasionally we just get a note pop in there. Of course we could combine that maybe with our second LFO, maybe with our operator level here, or even the ratio. Perhaps we could take our ratio on one and we can use this to get so much movement. That's all tempo synced and all linked to our sequence as the notes are played, which is just fantastic. So the third reason why I think the LFOs on the Digitone are amazing that I want to share with you is kind of a bit of a curveball, because what I'm going to tell you is that the LFOs don't have to be an LFO. In fact, you can kind of use them like an envelope. Now the Digitone is not short on envelopes. We've got two envelopes for the operators. We've got a filter envelope and we've got an amplitude envelope as well. But seeing as we've seen that the LFOs can be sent to so many different elements of the synthesis engine, it would be great if we could also send an envelope there and luckily using a specific mode of the LFOs we can. So despite all of those envelopes that I just mentioned there, there was one that's kind of missing that would be nice to have and that's a pitch envelope. So let's see how we can create a pitch envelope using our LFOs. So the first thing we'll do is we'll select the pitch all modulation source and if we turn up the depth we can hear that we've now got pitch modulation going on. Now to turn this into an envelope essentially we're going to head into the second page of the LFO and just like we did before we're going to adjust the mode and the mode that we're looking for this time is one. Now if I play a note now you can hear that the modulation here happens just once and then stops, which is kind of an envelope right? Now the shape is going to be important here because if you listen carefully it's kind of difficult to tell but the triangle here if we slow it down we'll hear it better. It goes up down and then back to the middle. That's because the triangle wave here is a bipolar wave and we have actually got a couple of wave shapes here the ramp and the exponential which are monopolar which means that they go up and then down back to zero. So if we listen to the exponential wave here for the pitch it goes up very quickly and swoops back down which kind of gets us close to be able to create a cool kick drum sound. But of course because we're working with these LFOs which as we know are eminently flexible we can do the same trick with lots of other things as well. So for example have you ever wondered what a feedback envelope on an FM synth might sound like? Well let's find out. Let's add a bit of modulation here and then we can go back to our LFOs and we can select feedback as our modulation destination maybe slow it down which is kind of cool. Over here we've also got the harmonics control haven't we which is kind of an awesome way to create tonal variations so perhaps we can do a harmonics envelope. That's cool like down higher up or perhaps we wanted to use the secondary filter type here which doesn't have its own envelope of course and we can now give it an envelope down here if we go to the bass here and of course we could combine this with the standard filter envelope as well. This is essentially a bandpass filter but I think one of the coolest places that I've seen this technique use and this is something I picked up from looking at some of the presets is in percussive sounds. So I've got a patch here where on the one half of my sound I've got kind of a tonal click kind of sound on the other side a noisy sound. Now a ideal percussive sound would start with that click and end with this kind of noise sound but of course we can do that by applying an envelope to the mix control kind of thing but not having to do it manually. So if we head into the LFO here I've already got the mix set up as the destination I've got my wave set up as being a exponential wave. We go to the secondary screen here I've already got my mode set to one so we want to end up at the noise sound and swoop backwards if you like to the tonal sound right at the start. So by adjusting the depth backwards and finding that nice balance perhaps we just find the point where we've got nice snappy definition. We can essentially have a sound which starts with a nice tonal click but ends up with the noise. There's so much to enjoy about the synthesis engine on the digitone and the LFOs are just one element of it but I hope that during the course of this video I've been able to show off some of the cool things that the LFOs can do on the digitone and hopefully you've been able to pick up a couple of ideas that you might make use of in your patches. If you enjoyed the video and found it useful then please do make sure you hit the thumbs up button and make sure you're subscribed to the channel so that you don't miss out on any upcoming synthy videos on the digitone and other synths. Other than that take care guys I will see you again soon. Bye bye.