 Hello, oscillator sync here. My love for the digatone is by this point fairly well documented. It encapsulates for me almost every aspect of an electronic instrument that makes me happy. But I think the thing that constantly has me coming back and being delighted is the synthesis engine itself. There are layers of depth to the engine that invite you to explore and be playful to find ways to twist it into new shapes in order to find new sounds. This was never more apparent to me than when I was putting together the patchback I recently released which focused on drum and percussion sounds. There were so many sound design techniques that crystallized in my mind and lots of little tips and tricks that I learned that made the whole process so rewarding. And in this video I'd like to share a bunch of that learning with you. A load of tips, tricks and techniques that I'll always have in mind when I'm building drum or percussion patches on the digatone. This is going to be a long one so you'll find timing references in the video description if you prefer to skip around. But I hope either way that you can learn some useful tips for your own patches. If you do then feel free to pop a like on the video and share it with similarly synth obsessed friends. And if you have any tips of your own feel free to share them with the community in the comments on this video. So given that the very nature of percussion sounds is it's one thing hitting against another thing. The attack portion of the sound is something that we are going to talk about quite a lot during this video. So let's start by talking about the absolute simplest way to create attack in the sound. Here is a low tuned sine wave. There's no modulation going on at all. Nothing in the filter. It's just the sine wave. And if we want to generate an attack all you need to do is turn the attack time on our amp envelope down. And by the very nature of how fast the attack envelope works you'll get a click at the start of the note. I always think it sounds a bit like a low pass gate almost. It's worth noting that this clickiness is going to interact with on page two of sine two. Your phase reset here. If we turn this to anything other than all pretty much. Sorry C is fine. All is okay. But off and only the other ones. You'll hear that there is a click but it's not consistent. It will click sometimes and other times. And that's because the phase of the sine wave that is making up the operator is going to be different for every single hit. And as a result you'll get an inconsistent click and quite an aggressive click in some cases. So if you're looking to get a good deal of controllable attack from the amp envelope make sure that you are either on all phase reset or the very least carrier phase reset. So on the amp envelope we should probably talk about the general shape of the amp envelope for percussion sounds. Naturally when you hit a percussive thing it's going to create a sound that's going to die to nothing. There's no way to sustain a percussive sound if you're trying to emulate something that exists in the real world which you might not be. But so generally speaking for percussion sounds you're going to want to have your sustain level down at zero but that does raise the question what are you going to do with the decay and release. So if you want to have a consistent result make sure that your decay and your release are set to the same thing and you'll have a consistent response no matter how the note is being played. But I would argue that it is quite interesting to set these two differently and in particular the way I usually approach this is that I will set my decay a little bit shorter and my release a little bit longer. What this will have the effect of doing if we set some of these notes to be different lengths so if I make this one a little bit longer maybe even more than a step this one will leave where it is, this one will make a bit shorter and this one will make really really short indeed. The notes that have a longer note length now decay quicker because while the note is being played we're going to be dealing with the decay portion whereas when we stop playing the note when we release the key it's going to shift to our longer release. I like setting up this way because it kind of makes me feel like the difference between hitting a drum and leaving my hand on it as opposed to hitting a drum cleanly and releasing the the the skin of the drum if indeed it is a drum immediately. I think this is a really interesting way for you to very very easily get a performance aspect into the sound. This next tip is kind of a meta tip because it explains a concept that we'll need for some of the other tips and that is that our LFO on the digitone can also act as an envelope. I'll just put this over to pitch because it's probably one of the easiest ones to hear. If I turn up the depth we can hear that we have an LFO effect in the pitch there and the LFO is characterised by the fact that it is cyclical, it's going looping round and round and round. However if we go into LFO page two at the end here we have two trigger modes one and half which rather than giving us a cyclical modulation gives us a journey that starts and then ends which is what an envelope is essentially. Now which one we choose whether it's the half or the one will depend on whether or not we are dealing with a bipolar or a unipolar shape. So we have a number of different wave shapes over here. There's triangle, there's sign and you'll hear how to slow them down so it's a little bit easier to hear that in both of these cases the pitch is going up it's going down below where it started and then it's going back up again and that's the same for almost all of the shapes except for the exponential shape here and that's because that is the only unipolar shape that we have. Hello oscillator sync from the future here I just got something wrong there that I'd like to correct along with the exponential LFO shape the ramp shape is also unipolar however you'll generally still want to use the half trigger mode for that one as the first half of the waveform is the actual ramp the second half just sits at zero. The ramp and half trigger was a great way to fake portamento in your patches before they added the portamento feature for real and it's still great for doing fixed slides at the start of notes. Anyway back to the tips and then random at the end so if you want to use the LFO as a traditional envelope your triangle your sign they give you if we set the shape to half kind of an attack decay with an even attack and decay square gives us a an up and down kind of thing so it gives us quite a nice falling tone exponential as we mentioned we want that set to one rather than half ramp gives us a rise that ends in a particular place and by changing the depth we can change where it ends and let me have random in almost all cases for percussion sounds we're probably looking for a kind of an an attack decay kind of shape so we're either going to be using exponential with our mode on one or saw with our mode on half I tend to use exponential the one other thing that we need to highlight here is on page two of the LFO you have this malt here now by default when you load in a patch that's going to be related to the BPM but if we're using this LFO as a sound design element that's going to do something particular to the tone of the sound we don't want that to be changing as we change the tempo of the song so generally speaking if we are using our LFO as an envelope we're going to want to switch to one of the basic multipliers here I think these are hard coded to be related to 120 BPM don't quote me on that I think that's right but they won't change their characteristic as you change the tempo of the song which obviously is going to be pretty important if we're trying to define a sonic characteristic of the sound anyway with that concept out of the way we can get on to our next attack related tip which I've strongly already hinted at which is that we can use our LFOs to apply a pitch envelope to the sound so if we just set our depth to zero here and we've just got our low pitched sine wave there if we start to introduce pitch modulation and it will be the bouncing of the depth and the speed which will give us different feels we might want to up the multiplier here and we can get a wide range of sounds lowering the pitch sorry lowering the speed of the envelope will give us a more obvious bump as opposed to a click we can keep it quite subtle we don't need to do that much depth to get a meaningful attack here we can go for bigger depths and get more laser gun sounds and as we bring the speed up the laser gun kind of disappears and we just get a nice thick click we can get riddies up if we want and don't forget that if you have an LFO to spare you can layer these LFOs so if we set this second one up to be the same but slower also going to pitch you can use one to give you the click and then the other one to give you the general pitch bend of the note and layer those two things together to give yourself a more fully formed complex sound okay on to the next attack tip and this is an obvious one but I would be remiss not to mention it given that this is indeed an FM synth and that is that we can create attack on our sound by introducing frequency modulation so for this obviously we can adjust our ratios here and I'll do that in a second on page one of sin 2 obviously this is where we're going to be setting the level but it's worth noting that on page two in order to do this in a sort of percussion way in that it decays naturally no matter what you're doing with the note you need to make sure that as by default the envelope reset is on otherwise it will only start to decay when the notice released which is not generally what you're going to want here so we can introduce some modulation set our envelope and where if we want it to be in terms of the tone of the sound and you'll tend to want to have your decay pretty low otherwise you'll start to hear an obvious modulation not so much when your level is low but as you bring the level up you'll start to hear that obvious FME decay there which is very nice for bass sound for example but not necessarily for percussion and just as with our LFOs the balancing of how much attack and how fast it happens gives you a wide range of tonal options and of course how you have the ratios set related to each other is also going to make a massive change I sometimes quite like having it quite high and then not too much of it probably apply a filter maybe in this case get introduced some feedback for some rasp many many different tonal options here very quickly gets kind of hand drum sounds and so on many many options here to explore so one more place to go and search for attack would be in the filter envelope so I've just engineered a slightly more harmonically rich sound just so it's more easy to hear coming into the filter page we can start to darken the sound off quite like the four pole and then if we introduce attack rather envelope death sorry and lower our decay time especially there are attack up four don't really want anything but lowest attack here otherwise you get whoops and really like in the other cases it's going to be the balancing of the decay and release times with your envelope depth in order to get different attack characteristics and of course this is going to be a separate issue to the envelope of course all of these areas of creating attack become really interesting when we start to layer them together so we could get a bit of thump there with the filter accentuate a little bit more with the fm there and then also introduce our two pitch envelopes here to give us some more maybe brighten up the filter in general and we're layering up lots of different places for our attack to originate from and this kind of leads me to I think possibly we're coming full circle here a little bit um because this is a really important tip that I think is sometimes overlooked and that is that on our amp envelope because it is so snappy because our amp envelope is so snappy there's actually quite a wide range of attack times that especially once you've laid up other sources of attack you can go to where it will still sound percussive and attacky but not necessarily as clicky so we've softened the amp attack there it still sounds like it's got plenty of attack in it but it's a little bit softer probably pushing it a little far there but you know anywhere up to about 15 there we've got different flavors of attack that we can be playing with and sometimes having that softer amp attack and the other elements of attack coming from other places that's where all the nuance and all of the fun can lie see there we've got much more attack for our LFO now and we can actually push the attack time quite high for different flavors still attacky but with a softer front end almost like it's sidechain there so for the last few tips we've been using a kind of a kick drummy tommy kind of sound certainly a tonal sound so let's move to the other side of the spectrum for the next tip and look at a method for generating noisy signals obviously noise is going to be very useful for simple sounds and for snare sounds and for claps a whole wide range of percussion sounds are going to need a noise element to them so let's look at a couple of methods of getting to noise so for this first tip we're going to generate noise via over modulation of a operator so for this the easiest way or the most economical way in terms of operators to achieve this is to have a algorithm where you have a carrier of some description and then an operator with feedback on it so in the case of algorithm one you probably want to do this with the x side of the output algorithm two maybe switch over to the y side of the output for example so really straightforward and people are probably already aware of this but if you crank the feedback or if we just start with the initialized sound if we crank the feedback and we go into sin2 and we just whack a bunch of modulation and there we're going to get a noisy signal in there now the relationship between the operators is going to give us different flavors of noise but actually generally the noise sounds kind of similar it's the overtones which are changing here so next tip you'll notice that in pretty much every case here you're still getting an element of the fundamental happening inside the sound so you've got a very obvious tonal aspect to it you can try and mitigate this a little bit by detuning the oscillators but it doesn't really ever go away so my advice for this next tip is if you're generating noise with over modulation I would suggest that your carrier you tune as low as possible now that means you've got a big rumbly sound sat underneath there but that big rumbly sound is easier to get rid of than a high sound because of course we can go into page two of our filter page and pretty much completely get rid of that fundamental if we had a higher tuned carrier that's going to be hanging out in the signal for much longer you do still have an overtone there and you can try and tune it using the fine tune and you'll probably find some places where it feels a little less obvious like there for example so the way that we can generate noise rather than using FM is actually to make use of our LFO so you're probably aware that in the LFO page one of the waveshoots that we can use is random and a noise source is really just a very fast random source so we want to make sure this is running as fast as possible so I've got the multiplier here set to k I've got the speed turned up pretty high and we've got our signal here and we can try sending this to a couple of different places at first you know we can try it with pitch which works pretty well gets you this quite gnarly cool 8-bit vibe and it is kind of different as it goes similarly if we send it to ratio or that's essentially a pitch change but in steps again really cool gnarly sort of 8-bit vibes going on there that I really like you can try it with your modulation amounts even but I think you get too much of the fundamental still coming through there similar kind of idea with the filter amount if we can get quite a cool sort of crunchy noise in there but again the fundamental is really sticking around in there in a way that kind of makes it sound like it's superimposed on top of the sound so maybe not always that useful I think some of the that's the filter again at the base I think one of the really cool places to do it is in the drive again you can kind of get the fundamental still in there but I think it's more integrated more interesting so that's going to be a way of adding noise into a sound that you already have elsewhere similarly doing with pan if you're listening in headphones what we've actually achieved there is kind of a stereo noise signal with our main signal still going down the middle which is really cool and also just hitting it with the noise similar sort of idea I think the other thing to bear in mind is that we can do the same trick with our filter if we set our carrier nice and low we can always filter out more of the signal down there and also remember that changing the speed is going to change the tone of the noise in this case crunchy particle noise down the bottom there okay so one more tip for noise right now I've come back round to having a an over modulated operator to get my noise sound I've set my carrier super low and filtered it off in page to the filter I've also set my modulator as high as possible so that my overtone is as high as possible so it's kind of almost disappearing all together so my final suggestion if you are trying to make noisy sounds do not underestimate the power of having some resonance on your filter in order to give that noise character and make it sound more real so at the moment it sounds very very digital we can enhance the top end just by turning up the resonance but as soon as we bring that down immediately this noise seems to live in more of an acoustic space to my ears anyway try it with a high pass as well that sounds like a china symbol to me kind of getting the resonance around a snare drum of course you could boost this with distortion as well to get it just slightly dirtier if we compare that to how it sounded with no filter sounds digital immediately has some kind of acoustic space added to it I guess by the resonating frequencies at the cutoff okay so we've had some tonal stuff we've had some noisy stuff let's talk about one of the other elements of percussive sounds which is metal and metallic sounds now obviously as you're probably well aware FM is great at doing metallic sounds and we'll get to that in just a moment but first I want to look at a method of getting metallic sounds that was used on some of the early analog drum machines which is just by using multiple detuned high-pitched oscillators essentially and we can do that on the digitone quite nicely so if we want to do this with as many operators as possible the best algorithm for it is seven because it gives you the outputs of a c and both b's if you put your x y in the middle so obviously at the moment by default they're all tuned in unison if we tap sin one we can start detuning these operators we don't want to necessarily form too much of an accord but there we have a bunch of operators which are now detuned from each other and if we start to tune them higher we can get that kind of classic drum machine metal sometimes sort of clave sound and if we wanted to introduce a little bit more i might so of course if we can just turn up our FM amounts just a little bit to get a bit more sparkling there which is a cool sort of classic sound and you can of course experiment with different offsets I tend to find that having them sort of tuned in pairs or in threes where they're quite close so there we have these three all pretty close then and I want you to get higher fever might be a bit much and of course you can fine tune the sound with your x y mix and of course once you've set this up you can always experiment with different algorithms you know that's one of the great things about the digitone is we can just sort of go into different algorithms that one's pretty cool bit pure because we've only got three operators coming straight out there with some feedback so we could add a little bit of nice ting at the top there okay so let's talk about using FM to create metallic sounds so I've come back down to what is essentially a almost an initialised patch just with some amplitude set up here and I'm going to switch over to the y side so we're listening to the two B operators here instead and what I'm going to do is just bring up my level enough here so that we're hearing some modulation so generally speaking metallic sounds the reason that they sound metallic in FM is that you are generating in harmonic overtones and the way that you generate in harmonic overtones is by having a non integer relationship between the two operators generally there are some sweet spots that are also not integer but generally speaking having a complex relationship between the two numbers on the modulator the modulator in the carrier that's where you're going to find these kinds of metallic sounds and actually it doesn't have to be that far off to start generating metallic sounds the easiest way to get to in harmonic relationships is to use page two of the sin one page where you've got the fine tune here you can try and do it with the detune knob as well but I find this gives you a little bit more control over what you're doing and as soon as you start bringing in any sort of complex relationship you'll start to get some metallic sounds yeah FM is absolutely set up to do this kind of thing we probably want to experiment a little bit with the overall numbers here so we might want to push our modulator a couple of octaves higher to fine tune how much we are sending in terms of modulation metal tuned higher is glass there's a good rule of thumb for you now of course we might find that there's some lower side bands being generated here that aren't useful to us so never forget that you have page drawn filter and are able to actually take those out and we might also want to just filter the top end as well and again like so many things in FM we're thinking about balancing a couple of different parameters to find different flavors so here's an interesting side tip when it comes to metallic sounds if you take a metallic sound and generally speaking if you lower the modulator level a ratio and then lower the modulation amount that's where you'll find woody sounds which of course you could enhance by giving it some pitch envelope on your LFO if you wanted to give it more attack or softener so the next tip is to be aware that quite often percussion sounds are made up of two different elements so if we think of a symbol for example we have a metallic element to it where the stick is hitting the metal of the symbol and then you have the noise which is going to be fizzling away in there so really what this tip is is to not forget that you have the XY mix which gives you access to do two different areas of sound so for example just come back around to having a bit of a metallic sound here if we go over to the X side which is the A into C we're already getting some metallic sounds in there because B is being modulated into C as well but we can use this side to generate our noise again so we can set our carrier down low and our modulator up high crank our feedback and bring up the level here and we have noise over on this side here and now we can think about balancing those two elements of our sound the noise and the metal we really do have two different patches here which we're kind of crossfading between it's also worth noting on the metal side here that we can if we want have a little bit of decay which is going to change the feel of the sound over time along with everything else and we may even want to experiment with making the relationship between the two noisy operators less linear to get a more complex sound you can even experiment with not over modulating it quite as much we can get a bit more of a metallicy noise in there as well and having the ability to crossfade between these two elements and of course we could be parameter locking these within our sequence as well to get different vibes and different grooves we'll come back to this xy control so for this next tip on the xy crossfader i've set up a patch on algorithm two so two completely discreet lanes on the y side i've set up some noise and on the x side i've set up like a little thunk sound just by using the pitch mod here i've also filtered out some of the bottom end might put a little bit back in actually like that so we have two very different elements to our sound here but what i've kind of set up here is the two different elements in snare drum snare drum you've got the impact of the stick on the skin which is actually basically a almost like a tom sound and it's everything else in the drum the metal frame of the drum and also obviously the snares crucially which create that rattling noise on top of that so actually what you do with a snare drum is you really that very first impact is very much thud and then the rest of it is crackle at the end so what we can do in our LFO section is come back to this idea of using the LFO as an envelope so we'll do that setup again so i'll just set the just 16 for the moment we'll make sure that our trigger mode is on one and go with our exponential here again and for our destination we're going to send it to the mix so what i want to do is flick all the way up to our thunk sound and then drop back down quickly to our rattle sound for the end of the sound so if i set my mix all the way over to y and then have my depth negative which will throw it back towards x and we're going to want to fine tune the depth the speed so without any modulation it's all noise but we can bring those two things together to get thwack and noise out the other end we can also change the final mix as well of course if we want to add a bit of character to this sound which we should as previously discussed just adding some resonance gives our snare drum an acoustic space and we can try different combinations in here as well bring in some attack from an alternate source and find all sorts of different flavors kind of snare sounds or by crossfading those two different elements of the snare sound accentuate some of the crackle with the drive there this is more than one tiff altogether i guess okay so let's swing around back to where we started let's let's look at some more kick tips and the first one is going to be along the same lines as we've just been looking at with our snares with the crossfade and that is thinking about using the crossfade as a way of adding attack to the kick so here i've got just a basic kick drum sound set up with the pitch mod happening as normal that's on the x side on the y side i've simply got a higher pitched oscillator there and we can use that crossfade modulation to have that little tweak at the start of our kick sound to give it a little bit of character at the start so i've already got it set up here the mix as my destination i've set up the one shot and the timing here and we can mixing the higher operator just at the start of our hit which is kind of a different vibe to having the pitch bend because it's not really a pitch bend happening here it's it's just giving you a higher harmonic right at the top there and again it's tweaking the speed here and the depth it's going to give you different feels to your kick drum but it's a nice variation on some of the other tricks to get that sort of higher attack at the start of your kick sound okay another tip for character in your kicks i've moved over to algorithm one here which is essentially can be exactly the same feel as i have i've still got my crossfade happening here all that this is meant is that i'm able to have feedback on my lower pitched side of my sound rather than sort everything around so the next tip here is that having a bit of noise at the start of your kick drum can also sound pretty badass as well so i've cranked up the feedback here and if we come into here and start modulating we're immediately going to start getting noise because of we're overmodulating and if we just want it to be like a little noisy punch at the start we just shorten our decay here the nice thing about having the noise implemented here is that on the way back from it being noise we're also passing through that cool FM vibe so we're getting noise we're getting the FM vibe and we're still getting that crossfade happening in our mix LFO as well we could also experiment different so next tip on the kick drum characters here we've got a pretty sort of strong meaty sound but what if we wanted to give it more bottom end umph well we can move over to our filter section and the the instinctual thing if we're thinking about low end is okay we want a low pass filter to give us more low end but actually the more effective way of giving ourselves more bottom end is actually to make use of a high pass filter this is a old synth trick if you already know apologies but it's a goodie and i wanted to make sure i mentioned it so obviously if we turn our high pass all the way up we're losing most of our bottom end of our high passes low down we still get quite a lot of low end but we're not boosting the low end at the moment however if we raise our resonance that's going to give us a boost at the cutoff frequency and as we there's an example there if you're listening on good speakers or headphones you're here that we're getting a big old thumpy boost and we can go quite mad with this and we can find other points where this will work nicely as well so that's less bottom end there but you've got really punchy thunk there which can be really useful in the right context as well you can kind of think about this as like tuning the body of the actual kick drum so let's take a moment to talk about long kicks so i've taken the patch basically as it was i've made the envelope longer so it's a longer sound i've also made a bit duller just because it felt better and if i hit play now what you might be able to perceive if you're listening on good speakers is that we're kind of getting a build-up of sound the low end is sort of throbbing in and out in a quite inconsistent way and low end is is tough enough to to deal with normally having a throb in and out with the kick drum is obviously going to be a problem so the reason this is happening is because at the moment if we come into our voice management here if you watch the lights at the top which tell you which uh voice is being used to play the kick drum you'll see that it's actually cycling through all the voices so that any one time by about now there's eight versions of this kick drum all happening at once and that's not necessarily a useful thing so in the most recent firmware update one of the things that they introduced is the option to turn on voice reuse which means that for the same note if we turn this on and we hit play now so first of all listen with your ears and notice that we're not getting that strange sort of throbbing building up and dying down but also watch the lights at the top you'll see that for the same note being played the voice is being reused so we're not getting a build-up anymore immediately a much more manageable low end but arguably this way of working doesn't go far enough if we were to change the notes of these kick drums if we were doing tuned kick sounds um because they are different notes now although when it loops back round it's going to reuse the voice it's still building up and you're getting those weird overtones happening which is quite interesting in a way actually it's probably a place for that kind of sound but it's probably not what you want in most instances so um if you're doing long tuned kicks probably what you will want to be doing is coming into the setup menu so shift and trig and this again is something that is new now as you want to go into play mode and you want to switch that to mono so this means as would be the case on a traditional drum machine now the kick drum is actually monophonic or indeed on a natural drum a real drum is monophonic as well so now even with different notes we're getting different or are the one individual hit it's being reused each time the resonance that's pulling up here is probably just due to the low pass filter I suspect yeah so the low pass filter is picking out some different harmonics so we are nearly there with getting that all sort of working right and and feeling right with those tuned long kicks but that shifting of the resonance where we've used our high pass filter to pick out the body of the drum is still actually causing a problem now that we are moving notes because some notes are going to naturally be more around the resonant frequency of that high pass filter so to solve that we want to once again come into the setup menu what we're going to want to do is turn on our filter key track 200 percent which means that our filter will now track with the notes that are playing so hopefully when we hit play now so that will have shifted the the resonance probably up so let's go back and find there we go and you can hear now that we've got that ringing resonance but it is an even ringing across all of our hits if we want a obscene amount of low end okay so I want to talk around a few tips that relate to making your patches sort of more performable and alive and that's really around what I think is probably an underutilized area of the sound design on the digitone which is coming in and looking at the velocity mod in particular for drums so sort of subtip before we get on to this if we are going to look at dealing with velocity in our patches what I like to do is set up a really simple pattern and I'll set a step with a very low velocity a medium low velocity one with the default velocity of 100 and then one at max velocity so what you'll notice here is that these are varying massively in volume now and actually if we're going to use velocity to change the timbre of the sound we probably don't want this much volume variation in there especially for percussion sounds that first one is barely even there so what I tend to do if I'm going to build a patch where I'm making use of velocity variations is I will come into the setup menu here and I'm going to go to velocity to vol I'm going to change the curve so at the moment it's linear and I will tend to try logarithmic that usually works fine and that's working for me here but if not you can turn it off altogether so that the velocity is making no difference to the volume at all and that can be viable as well I like logarithmic so it gives just a little bit at the lower end there okay so I've set up my pattern here with the velocities across here so what I want to do now is look at what I want to vary so for a sound like a kick drum the main thing I'm going to be looking to vary is the attack of the sound so I'm going to be looking for the elements within my patch which provide attack and that's what I'm going to vary so the first thing is obviously we can look at the actual attack envelope on the amp and what I will do is I will come into the page and I will find what is my lowest point of attack and because we've got other modulations in this patch we can go quite low so something like 26 now that's really really lacking in attack but that's okay because that is going to be our absolute lowest point so what I'll do now is I'll come into the setup menu we'll go down to our velocity mod and along the top here I'm going to choose amp attack time and I had it set to minus 26 sorry I had it set to 26 so what I'm going to do is set it so that the maximum mod it will be a minus 26 which is where I started so that would take off what I've added and take me back to zero for the maximum so if you listen to the pattern now not only are we getting a variation in velocity now we're also getting a variation in the tone or rather the attack transient okay so let's go and look for another area of my patch which is giving me attack so good example there would be my the noise that I was sending by modulating that operator there so at the moment that's set to 41 so we can find the minimum point which is probably zero yeah I think it's probably zero right so we went from 41 we could push it even higher maybe say 50 down to zero so we'll leave that at zero for a moment we'll come into the setup menu go back down to velocity mod we're going to be looking at the level of A and we're going to set the modulation amount up to 50 so that's going from where it is at the baseline which is zero and when we hit it absolutely hard as we want it going up to 50 so now when we hit so I'm being ridiculously anal here I'm going to hit play now again we'll have the difference in our attack envelope we're also going to be having the difference in that sort of noisy part of the sound as well so I'm making our patch more performable as we build our patterns with this patch we could be using different velocities to give different grooves and fields so let's maybe look at one or two others so a good deal of the attack is coming from the change in the pitch so it's at 28 point uh I'll say just 28 that's fine we probably still want a little bit so if we say like eight and it's going up to 28 so that's a difference of 20 so we'll leave that at eight there again we'll go into our setup down into velocity mod we're going to go to LFO depth one give it 20 and again when we hit play now we've got the amp attack the noise and the LFO depth all creating differences in our sound just for the sake of completeness because we've got four slots let's use them all the final thing that's probably creating some variation is this mix envelope here so that's going up to say 38 so we'll put that down to zero I think it's our starting point so we don't get any at all like that and we can go back in here velocity mod that's going to be LFO two depth and we'll give it what was it 28 I think another candidate I guess if we're thinking about hitting it hard it might be our filter resonance which has given us that big old low end bump so that's at 75 um we could lower that down let me not to zero say 35 so in our velocity mod here we could change that to our filter resonance filter resonance which is there give it 40 and then our harder ones are going to have more bottom end instead which is quite cool as well so another place we can think about our velocity mod in order to give our patches more life is around harmonic content instead so I've got that sort of hi-hat metallic cymbal sound that we had set up previously so we'll come into here and we'll do our velocity to valve back to logarithmic so we're not getting such a massive drop off in volume as we modulate the velocity so let's think about what is giving this its harmonic content so one thing that you would maybe see with symbols is that you get more noise the harder that you hit them so in our patch here at the moment we've got a mix which is at minus 20 between the noise there and the metallic sound so we might for example say at the hard you hit it the more noise you get so we might leave that at zero and go down to say minus 30 so we'll say zero as our starting point we'll come into here we'll go down to velocity mod we're looking for sin mix and minus 30 for our mount so the most modulation is going to be minus 30 we're starting at zero and the harder we hit our symbol now the more noise we get so where else are we getting our harmonic content from well the big important one probably is the modulation of the metallic side so that's the B side here which is currently at 87 some really interesting points along there so if we go from 80 up to say 92 let's give that a go so I'm going to be adding on 12 to sin B level that's pretty interesting we could also maybe check out what's going on with the feedback here so at the moment it's 102 see that's really interesting because we can go metallic there so if we go up by 42 or something from 60 that might be cool so we can go ahead and go feedback 40 something and we're getting a really really dynamic symbol patch now that we can really build these ideas into the groove with different velocities so by using velocity to modulate the timbre of our sounds we're able to really fine tune the the feel of our grooves and that's something I definitely advocate for for working into your percussion patches but kind of the flip side of this is that if we were thinking about this being played by a real percussionist or drummer there are going to be changes to the sound which are probably almost random certainly not under direct control of the player you know little variances based on where say a drum was struck you know how a symbol was hit and and those really bring grooves to life as well and so adding an element of randomness into our percussion patches it can be really really powerful so the easiest way to do that is to make use of a spare LFO if you have one so we want to have our waveform shape set to random obviously everything about randomness but we don't just want that randomness to be going at a constant rate constantly rather what we want to do is adjust that randomness on a per step basis so we want to have the trig mode set to hold here we can also crank the speed not that it particularly matters actually as long as it's faster than the beat and then we can think of a something to modulate so just going back around to our hi-hat metallic sound here one thing that could be quite interesting here is actually to think about the attack because if we go longer on the attack it stops being such a hi-hat and becomes kind of a shake sound so for this we want to find the midpoint of our modulation because the random LFO is bipolar so whatever depth we set it to it will swing that much that way and that much the other way as well so I guess really zero is the minimum point I think there at 30 is going to be the highest point so we can put this at 15 and then make the depth of our LFO at 15 and make sure we also set the destination to the attack envelope for example envelope amp attack time let me go and now if we set the beat going so here we have the velocity that is giving us a common grounding cycle but then how it's articulated through the amp is being randomized which gives us a cool feel that is both controlled and random at the same time okay so one last tip and this one's a bit of a longer one but it's one that I've seen people talk about a fair number of times so I did want to address it and that is related to making a clap sound and in particular the key defining feature of a clap sound which is its multi attack envelope so let's just start by creating some noise for our clap to be based on so we'll use the standard frequency modulation over modulation recipes I'll set my carrier down very low I will set my modulator here very high I'll turn my frequency up feedback sorry up high and I will create some noise that way we can filter out the fundamental maybe some of the harshness at the top as well and then we'll use our other filter to add some resonance and character just a little bit off the there we go there's some noise there we'll put a standard kind of amp envelope on there and what we have at the moment is a sort of semi-passable clappy snare okay so we don't have that big thwack for the snare so it's kind of like a clappy snare hybrid not one nor the other really so what we need to think about is how we can generate the particular characteristic characteristic of the cap which is that multi attack the idea on most clap sounds that you hear on drum machines is that it's not just one person clapping it's multiple people clapping in a room which is why you get that sort of clucker clap sound happening and that's actually what we perceive especially in electronic music has a clap sound it's not one person clapping it's a room full of people clapping so we need to go from one attack to multiple attacks so how are we going to manage that now for this we're going to head over to our LFO um so I will that you don't want these set to bpm and multipliers because we don't want it to be related to the tempo necessarily and what we're going to do is have something modulate the amp volume which is the same thing our envelope is modulating as well now we don't want it to be a fading out kind of sound what we want instead is this to be an envelope which is going to have a hard attack so I'm going to go with the exponential envelope here we can't hear at the moment because it is unipolar but if we turn down the volume we don't have to go all the way to zero but we can fine tune this you can hear now death of we have multiple attacks there now what we want to do is speed them up so now the problem we're having right now is that is going on and on and on and on and that isn't really what we want now if we were to set our mode to just once we're only going to get one attack so that isn't going to be right either instead what we'll do is we'll make use of the fade control which is going to fade out the modulation over time essentially giving us an envelope on our modulation now if I turn this to fade out what you'll find is that past a particular point it's going to stop doing anything which will probably weird you out the first time it happens there's a good reason for this although I don't necessarily agree with the reason at the moment our mode is on free running and once we've faded out our free running and LFO to a particular point it's going to stop modulating at all however if we switch this over to the trig mode now it's going to restart the LFO every single time this has the extra bonus effect of making sure that we have a tacky clap at the start of every single um trick now we can fine tune off fade and we'll find a sweet spot probably where we have a nice multi attack envelope there and the nice thing is here if we do bring up our overall volume on this patch it almost sounds like reverb which is a trick again that that drum machines would use and now of course we can fine tune our speed we can have it more loose which is quite cool we can go faster and you'll want depending on the speed here you'll probably want to fine tune the feed the fade out as well and there'll be lots of sweet spots in here where that works and if you're feeling particularly fruity you could of course actually use a random LFO step by step on the speed of LFO one just a little bit to give it some variation as well and of course you could go on to fine tune the fine tune the filter put a bit of the fundamental back in there to give it a bit more of a thwacky attack move some drive and so on anyway I hope that was interesting useful and if you made it to the end well wow look at you well done um I've just looked at the total running time of the recordings I've done and also there's going to be significant editing to do boy is this a long video so thank you for joining me if you've made it to the end if you found the video useful and maybe learned something new a new tip for you to apply in your music please do give the video a like and make sure subscribed to the channel and I'm a hundred percent certain that I've missed out some useful tips you know it's inevitable so if there's a tip that you particularly like that you'd like to share with the with the community I will have a pinned comment in the comment section for you to add to and hopefully this video can be a useful resource even beyond the video itself for people looking for tips for drum synthesis on the digitone and beyond as always I'm so grateful that you could join me here today until next time take care and I will see you again see