 Hello, Oscillator Sync here. The Electron Digit Act is a wonderfully deep but focused sampler sequencer groove box thing and it's already become one of the favorite items in my collection. But what if I was to tell you that it could also be used as a ridiculously over-the-top mono synth? You might say that that's the rantings of Mad Men, but let me ask you a question. It's got two thumbs and eight tracks that can be configured to act as oscillators. This guy. Okay, let's just quickly talk about the hardware setup. So just really briefly, I've got my keystep which is plugged in via MIDI into the mid-in of the Digit Act. That's basically it. The keystep is set to channel one and I'm down, I think, two octaves on it because that's the range over which you get the most playable notes on the Digit Act. I'll keep this out of shot for the rest of the video because you don't need to see it. It's a keystep that's useful and great if you don't have one. They're really useful. There we go. Let's get to the main event. Okay, in order to make this work, what we need is for whenever I press a key on the keystep, it triggers all of the different voices all at once. So at the moment, if I hit a key, it's triggering that kick drum sample there. But only this one, you can see it's just lighting up. So what we want to do is make sure that everything's been fired off all at once. We can do that by going into the settings menu, into MIDI config and into channels. And here you've got the channels that each of the tracks is going to respond to. So at the moment, they're set sequentially one, two, three, four, blah, blah, blah. But we just want to set all of these to one. And once we've done that, like that, and we come out of this menu, when I hit a key on the keystep, we get that massive cacophony there, which, you know, might be useful in some musical contexts. Who knows? So in order to make our oscillators, we're going to make use of a lot of single cycle waveforms. So let's load those into RAM so we can make use of them. So we go into settings and samples. And just here in the factory, obviously, if you have other single cycle waveforms, you can make use of them. I'm just going to use the ones in the factory. If we go into the toolbox folder and into oscillators, we've got a bunch of single cycle waveforms. I might just load them all. Should we do that? Yeah, let's just load all of these in. Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes on all of these. It's probably a shortcut for this. I don't know what it is. So almost at the bottom. Yes. Okay. So let's load all of those into our project. 72 of them. Why not? They're only very, very tiny because there is only one cycle of the waveform there. So one of the little bit of housekeeping, if you like, before we get into the real meat of what we're doing. At the moment, if I play something on the keystep, you'll see that all of these are lighting up. So that means that all of them are playing all at once. Now, unfortunately, muting the ones that we don't want to hear doesn't work because it actually, the mutes on the dig attack are muting the sequence and not the actual sound. So they're all still playing all together. So in order to make it so that we can kind of work on them individually, we need to change the output volume, which we can either do up here on the main volume here, or if you want to sort of get a view of all of them once, if we go into the master page, page two of the master here, we can turn down all of them that we don't want to hear like that. Wonderful. Now, although they're all lighting up, we are only hearing this first one here. The other little thing that I would say is that as we start to stack all of these things, we do run the risk of actually overloading the internal mixer, although it's digital, it will overload eventually. So I'm also going to just bring the track level down to maybe half-ish, and now we can get going. So what we're going to do in essence is treat each of the eight sampler tracks as an oscillator. So here's the first one, and you can hear this just sort of clicking away. And the reason it's clicking away is that the waveform that's currently in there is very, very short. It's a single cycle of the sound that we want to represent. So it's going through that waveform, it's getting to the end, and it's stopping dead, which is creating this click. In order to get an oscillator sound, all we really need to do is change our play mode to one of the looping modes. And there we have an oscillator, which sounds like that, quite pleasant. Let's just reduce the decay here so it's sort of an auto on, auto off kind of thing. Lovely. And we can play that there. So I thought to begin with what we're trying to do is sort of replicate that classic three voice, three oscillator monosynth sound with three similar oscillators, which are all slightly detuned, beating off each other to make them sound big. So I figure we may as well go for the classic starting point, which would be a saw tooth way. So let's go down here. We should have a saw just there. Yep. Classic. Let's filter that a little bit. Maybe give it a little bit of resonance, and maybe also give it a bit of envelope movement as well. A bit of a faster decay there. A bit darker to end with. Yeah, something like that. Nice. That's kind of our starting point for that. So I want to make a three voice version of this. So if I hold track and hit record for copy that will copy the sound for this track, not the sequence, but the sound itself. And what I'll do is I'm going to go to the next two like this, and I'm going to track and paste the next one and track and paste. So now I have three, three of my tracks all doing that same thing. We also need to make sure we go here and turn up those voices as well. Around there, that'll do. And around there, that'll do. So now if I play all I've got is the same sound, but louder. And that's because I'm playing exactly the same sound on all of these tracks, and they're all identical. So the first thing we can do to try and get a bit more movement there is on each of these two copy tracks is just to change the tuning ever so slightly, maybe just a few cents, maybe 10 cents, something like that, not much, in either direction. So one up and one down. Immediately bigger, cooler. The next thing we can do, which you can't necessarily do on a traditional mono synth, is let's actually pan the two slightly detuned versions left and right, just a tiny bit just to make things a little bit wider, which should sound pretty cool. Don't want to be so precise. Yeah. Immediately, there's just something that's a little bit cooler about that. Let's maybe overdrive these oscillators as well, just to get them a bit meaner. I'm going to hear a bit of fluff. Happening, let's just compensate that. Do the same on these ones. It's interesting because they sound quite out of tune when you... But together they sound really cool. Nice. Everything's going to be in C minor, by the way. Obviously everything's going to be in C minor. It's always in C minor. Right. So at the moment, it's cool sounding, but everything's quite sort of static still. So one thing we can do is try and introduce that thing that we fetishize in analog synths, which is that the oscillators don't have a staying tune by introducing some drift to each of these. So if we go into the LFO page, I'm going to set the speed quite slow. We'll fine tune that as we go along. I'm going to go and set the destination to tune and just like maybe another 10% each way. We can start to hear that the beating is slightly different. So if we take the LFO button and we hold that down and copy, that allows us to copy that LFO page to each of the other pages. And what we'll do is we will just alter the speed a little bit on each of them, so that they're kind of all moving at a slightly different speed, which means the beating won't be constant either. I feel like now we've got that movement we can actually probably afford just to make them ever so slightly more detuned. Not by much. It's amazing how little we'll make it sound out of tune, but kind of getting that super sore kind of sound. Nice. Okay, so there's our sort of three voice thing happening. Pretty cool. Let's move on to the next track because we want a sub oscillator. So there are some of that called sub. So we should try those. An acid sub sounds good, doesn't it? Let's make sure we actually turn this track up as well. I want to make sure we're also looping it otherwise when we're hearing anything. Well, let's move that to K. Not sure about that sample. Let's try some one. That's cool. Bit of sort of hollow sounding. Try a bit of overdrive. Too much of the moment. Maybe filter a bit. A slight upper harmonic there. What if we also get that filter moving just to give that a little extra sun sun? That's kind of cool. Nice. Next one, let's have a super oscillator. So something that's pitched above. So let's make sure we have this turned up. Make sure our play mode is set to loop. And let's find something maybe like maybe one of these FM sounds. Yeah, that might work. Let's set the decay to zero there. And then tune up. Perhaps we can high pass this because we don't need to do all that. Let's get some modulation on there. One thing that I'm wondering whether like a faster that's kind of cool. And the other thing I was wondering about was maybe having it pan about a bit. I quite like the panning. Cool. Okay, next one along. I reckon we need some noise into this to give it a little bit of this. So we've got some noise samples actually sneakily off camera brought in. Where is it? Down the bottom. This noise sample here. Turn that up. Get that looping. Get that decay down. That's interesting because of course it's repitching this noise. It's still a sample. We are getting a pitched element. So let's tune this in. This seems like a good candidate to have that filter moving in and out I think. Envelope. Ominous. That'll sound good when we've got some a little bit too much envelope. We had a bit of reverb that'll sound kind of cool. We still got two more tracks to go, two more voices to go. So one of the things I thought would be cool is to kind of fake a sort of crossfading wavetable thing by having these two voices crossfade volume wise between two different waveforms. So let's take a look at how we can do that. Let's turn these tracks up and this one. Okay, so let's pick the first thing we want to crossfade between. That's quite cool. I'll do the first one. And loop this one. I'll just change this one by accident. Let's try those two. Okay, so the way we're going to crossfade these also we'll just drop the decay time down like we have for the other ones. The way we're going to crossfade these is by using an LFO going to the amplitude. So to make this work the first thing we need to do is make sure that we have got the LFO set to start fresh every single time. So on this mode here we're setting this to trigger rather than free. I'm going to make it slow to begin with and then we're going to send our destination to the volume there. And then, oh, can't operate this machine apparently. I'm going to set it to the volume and then we are going to set the depth to full and you can hear that that's now fading in and out. Now if we take this LFO page which we can do hold down LFO copy and go over to the other voice here LFO and paste and we play them together they're just going to fade in and out together which is not what we want. We want them to crossfade and the way that we'll do that is by setting the start phase of the waveform to halfway here. So what this means is that rather than starting, I don't know where it's starting where they're starting at the top or at the bottom it's not going to start at the bottom halfway through the waveform. So if we play these together we now get this crossfading thing happening. So let's take each other in context. You've got this tonal sweep it's not a filter it's something else. We could also try maybe just slightly detuning these that might be again quite fun to do. See if that makes things sound a bit bigger. I like this noise but I want to hear it a bit more so we can turn that up on the track here. I think we can hear more of this like that noise. It's adding something cool. Perhaps we can also pan these left and right just a tiny bit not much just enough to give it a slight movement across the stereo field. Okay I think our our main sounds here can also be a little bit louder. Hopefully we won't start running into clipping issues. I think probably this sub can be a bit louder as well. In fact let's let's try tuning the sub down an octave as well. See if that sounds more evil. That's what we're looking for with the sub oscillator. Now of course what we need to do now is add some reverb and delay because everything sounds better when you do that. So I'm just going to use the control all feature here so I'm going to hold down track here which means that anything I adjust now will adjust for everything and I want to put let's not mess around. Let's just put loads of reverb on there and we'll go into the reverb page so we can fine tune the reverb. Now that is a short reverb that's not what we want. We want massive lingering reverb. I think it sounds better. I'm just going to make it a little bit darker. I think these ones are too too bright so let's just filter those a little bit. I think this needs to fade a little bit slower. There we go. Just not as much as well. Sorry let's add some delay for sure again so track for control all smack that up halfway maybe. Going to the delay make sure that's on ping pong because it should always be on ping pong nice and wide slightly darker. I don't want to sound too much like repeating exactly the same thing. More feedback maybe you'd put some of that delay back into the reverb as well. Yeah like it. More feedback. Dangerous feedback. More reverb. Some people would say that's too much delay reverb. I would disagree. That is quite a lot of delay reverb though. That is quite a lot of delay reverb. That's maybe too much. Is that ever going to end? Nice. Let's force it to end. Now some people might say that to use the Digitact A great sequencer sampler beats machine groove box to create a single mono voice is probably a slightly silly thing to do and I would agree with them. Yes it is but I thought that it was an interesting thing that we can do because once you've created these massively stacked voices we can of course sample them and load them back in as samples to use in our compositions. So there was a serious point to this and if the Digitact is the only real synth that you own then you really can build huge, huge sounds with it that actually really you couldn't easily do on any other synthesizer because not many other synthesizers have eight voices that are so hugely configurable available to you. So anyway I hope you enjoyed this slightly silly but hopefully entertaining video. If you did make sure you hit that like button and also if you're not already subscribed then do subscribe to the channel. There'll be lots of Digitact stuff coming up soon. If you're interested in supporting the channel I don't currently have a Patreon or anything but I did release an EP of ambient music at the end of last year. I will put a link to it in the description of this video. It is free to download but it's sort of pay what you want. So if you want to chuck up a quid my way then that's one a way to do it. I would very much appreciate it and of course any money that I make on the channel will of course go back into buying gear because I'm an addict and I need to maintain this habit. Anyway guys thanks so much for joining me once again. I hope to see you again soon. Take care. Bye bye.