 Hello, Osleigh the Sink here. Recently, Jeremy from Red Means Recording posted an excellent video all about Crel patches, a type of alien-sounding, self-playing, generative patch originally associated with West Coast synthesizers and in particular, Buchler systems, but which can be applied to a great many other electronic instruments. As an occasional purveyor of generative music, I'm a fan of the songs that the Crel can sing, and I've previously featured videos of various synths being patched this way. But one synth I've somehow managed to overlook for this task is the Artoria Minifreak, which is a crime, because it has a range of features that make it sit in only to the classic implementation of Crel patches, but also iterating on the core ideas to take the Crel to new Sonic and musical galaxies. Before we get started in the interests of transparency, Artoria kindly provided the Minifreak to me for free for the purposes of making videos on it, but they haven't ever asked for more if they've been given any editorial oversight into those videos. Time to go to space. So the general structure of a sort of classic Crel patch is this idea of a feedback loop between a cycling envelope, in this case a function generator, classically, which is articulating the sound by way of, at the very least, its volume, so it's essentially a volume envelope, and a source of randomness. And that source of randomness is being re-selected, the dice has been rolled again each time the cycling envelope completes a cycle, and then that source of randomness is used to affect at different aspects of the sound, its pitch, its tumbling, and so on. So I'm going to start by setting up that interaction between the source of randomness and the cycling envelope, and then we'll go on to sort of set up more of the sound side of things. And then once we've got that set up in a kind of a classic West Coast Buchler style Crel patch, we'll look at making use of particular features of the Minifreak to do other things with this idea in order to create other musical outcomes. The first thing that we're going to have to do here is make sure that the cycling envelope is going to be in charge of the volume of the patch, because by default the main envelope is what's defining the VCA shape, the volume envelope of our patch. And to do that we're going to do a sort of a semi-hack, which is that we're going to set our main envelope to be sort of as fully open as possible. So I'm going to set the attack down to instant, and the sustain to full. And I'm going to set the release sort of half-ish way up. And the reason I'm doing that is so that when we release a key, if there's still a cycle going on on the cycling envelope, we don't immediately sort of kill it off. We sort of have that gradual fade out, which is probably more sort of aesthetically pleasing. So we now have that sort of instant attack and sort of slow release going on there. So to get the cycling envelope to control the volume, the VCA on the patch, we need to assign it in the mod matrix. Now you'll notice that there's no knob here, which responds to the VCA amount. And unless you've read the manual, you might not be aware that there are some additional things that we can assign to in the mod matrix by holding down one of the assign buttons and then turning the preset knob. And one of those things, if we come down here, is the VCA. So we can select VCA. So now this is set to being the VCA. And if I assign our cycling envelope to that at 100%, it will essentially override what's going on here. So now the cycling envelope is doing our volume rather than the main envelope. For our purposes here, we also want it to be looping or running would be fine as well, but I'm going to go with loop here. So now we have a flexible kind of tremolo if you like. And you can hear when I release the note, we still get that fade out on the release. That's probably a bit too long. We'll probably shorten that a little bit. Yes, we still get that one sort of hanging over there. Okay, so that's Job 1. We have got the cycling envelope now in charge of the volume of the patch. So the next thing to do is come over and work out that feedback loop between the cycling envelope and the source of randomness. So our source of randomness is going to come from our LFO set into Sample and Hold mode. So I'm going to, so on LFO 1 at the moment, we're going to select Sample and Hold here. And I'm just going to slow it down to its absolute slowest. So strictly speaking, this could sort of re-trigger on its own, but running at the slowest, hopefully we can mostly avoid that. So I'm going to, just so we can hear it really obviously, assign that to pitch of both of our oscillators and I'll just put it on an octave. So 12 should give us an octave. And now if I play a note and hold it for long enough, eventually this pitch should change. So it is very slow, speed up a bit. Okay, so we can now hear that random LFO is affecting the pitch of our patch, but we don't want it to just sit and change independently. Instead, we want to emulate the idea of the end of cycle with our cycling envelope, so that each time a new note comes in, we get a new value on our source of randomness. And that's actually really easy to do on the minifreeks. There are some pretty flexible features when it comes to the triggering of the various modulation sources. So if we come into the sound edit menu here and make our way down to LFO, and come in here, and then in LFO 1 Retrick, I'm going to come in here at the moment it's set to Poly Keyboard, so there's essentially an LFO per keyboard. I'm going to come across here and I'm going to switch it over to Cycling Envelope, and this means that each time the Cycling Envelope goes round it's going to choose a new value. Also, while we're here, I'm going to do the same thing on LFO 2 because although on a music easel, I think you only have the one source of randomness. Let's have 2 here because it's an option. Why not? So we now have kind of the start of the Crel idea here, but the main thing that changes per note apart from anything else that gives it that kind of unpredictable feel is that the rise and fall of our Cycling Envelope or function generated, the attack and decay should be changing on each note, which then changes the length of each note as well as the articulation so we get a much more sort of chaotic feel. So let's assign some sources of randomness to the attack or the rise and fall as it's called here. So I'm going to assign rise here and assign fall here and I'm going to put LFO 1 on one of them and LFO 2 on the other one. I'm going to put LFO 1 on the fall possibly in an inverse amount so that higher notes are sort of pluckier and shorter. So when the LFO is going high, it's putting the pitch high and in that case I want this to be shorter so I want to send it low. So we'll come into here and we'll choose LFO 1 going to fall and we'll set that to a negative amount. I've got this set about halfway at the moment. So if I do this at just above 50 perhaps, somewhere around there I'll probably be okay. Now when I play a note we should get different decay characteristics per note. And you can hear those lower notes are naturally longer, right? Which is quite fun. And because we have two different sources of randomness let's spread them about a little bit. So let's use LFO 2 to go to the rise and again we'll... This one isn't assigned to anything else yet so I'm just going to go positive by... I'll say 40 or something. Let's do 40 and then let's set the rise down to 40 so we can get instant onset and now our patch is doing this. Which is fun. Right, so I want to move towards getting some more sort of timbre movement going on here rather than this sort of boring sawtooth wave thing. But there's a couple of things we need to fix up first. The first one is you might be able to hear on the attack portion sometimes there's this kind of jump going on. Which is a bit weird. That's just because I haven't set LFO 2 to be a slow sample and hold yet so let's do that. So LFO 2, sample and hold and set it super super slow. I should get rid of that weird jumping. Cool. And the other thing I want to do is just make the pitch range a little bit higher that's being picked out so maybe we'll go to... Let's go to two octaves for now. The first thing I want to do in terms of timbre movement is a really basic one and that's to get that low pass gate behaviour that you have on the west coast since. The low pass gate is basically a VCA and a low pass filter acting together so that brighter sounds are louder and when it gets quieter it also gets duller. So what we'll do here is we'll turn down the cutoff of the filter maybe to about there and then we just need to have the same thing that's modulating our VCA also modulate the filter which is our cycling envelope so we'll come up here cycling envelope to cutoff and give it 65 or something like that so we still take a bit of the top end. Yes, that's doing the trick. Right, so let's do this sort of bulk of the sound design because this sort of wave is very very boring. So on a music easel you have a wave folding type oscillator and then you also have a way to take that and feed it into a ring modulator or something that's doing FM and we can basically set that up exactly the same way on the mini freak here. So what we'll do is we'll set our first oscillator to be the well we've got a couple of different options that kind of do the right thing here so I'm going to go with the wave shaper to begin with and we'll see how that works out so you can hear that if we are modulating these things here we're going to get some interesting stuff happening so happy with that and then on oscillator 2 I'm going to set this right up at the end to the FM AM mode to make sure that the volume of this one is turned up and we have a couple of different controls here one is for the waveform and then we have a frequency mod amount and a ring mod and we can make use of those to get different time changes now if we're going to get the FM and ring mod to be doing interesting stuff we probably want to decouple the pitch of oscillator 1 and oscillator 2 so what I'm going to do here is in our mod matrix I'm going to get rid of the LFO going to pitch of 1 and 2 and instead I'm going to come into the second page of our assignable values and I'm going to set this first one to be the tuning of oscillator 1 and this one to be the tuning of oscillator 2 and then we'll use LFO 1 and LFO 2 going to each of those so that we can get all those kind of beautiful clangy kind of sounds happening so we can come over here and assign 1 we can go to pitch 1 or rather LFO 1 can go to pitch 1 sorry by 2 octaves and then we'll do the same thing LFO 2 going to pitch 2 by 2 octaves maybe just 1 octave no 2 octaves so now we should have these 2 different oscillators choosing different notes each time or different frequencies anyway I love those little short ones okay so let's get some more variation into the sound here and the obvious thing here is on our wave shaper let's send a one of our LFOs into the I think it's the timbre control which is the sort of shaping amount so we'll set this sort of whole range is good I think there so we'll set that in the middle and then we'll maybe use LFO let's use LFO 2 to go into there so timbre 1 LFO 2 by 50 so it's that whole range cool what does the wave control sound like and it's also doing stuff that I like perhaps we can have between that random or do I want the cycling envelope doing that for sure let's maybe just try sending LFO 2 to that as well first of all so set that somewhere in the middle LFO 2 to wave on oscillator 1 let's see how that works I'm not sure let's try the cycling envelope to that instead so cycling envelope to wave maybe turn it down a bit more that's more the thing isn't it yeah that's definitely more isn't it yeah the aliens are singing a bit more now so on oscillator 2 we have our FM and ring mod so let's just try turning up the ring mod amount here just to see how that sounds kind of harsh but there's some interesting things to be over there maybe just the lower yeah maybe set that lower and just have it move around a little bit with one of the LFOs so let's assign shape there to LFO 1 and only by like set to 12 so maybe like by 9 just turn it down a bit a bit of FM in there as well just for yeah and we're basically at that kind of keyhole place except for this is a really crucial thing we need reverb of course we need reverb so I'm just going to come down to the final effects slot here choose reverb and I don't know what type to go for I quite like the dark room one let's see how that sounds should we change the tuning of one of these to be much lower set that lower and then have the amount that it changes by be higher make everything a bit darker of course we can have multiple notes happening at once and certainly the aliens are talking now okay we'll push this a little bit further in just a second with some of the other features on the mini freak but first I just want to come in here and I want to turn on the delay and we'll go with a filtered ping-pong I think is a nice one yeah okay right yeah that's feeling fun so let's see how we can apply some of the additional features on the mini freak to take this to other musical places I think there is a to be fair reasonable criticism that could be levied towards krill kind of patches which is that they're not very conventionally musical I don't think that's necessarily an unfair thing to say so what I'd like to do is try and make this patch as it is more conventionally musical and there's a fantastic feature on the mini freak that allows us to do this because what we have on the mini freak is a way to quantize incoming modulation pitch modulation to each of the two oscillators and we can actually do that separately from one another as well so if we can quantize this random pitch information to a scale or to possibly two different scales we might be able to get something which is more conventionally musical so if we come into the sound edit here and come into pitch we have osc one quant and osc two mod quant so what I'm going to do is I'm going to come into here and at the moment it's set to continuous which means we can get a continuous modulation so we're getting frequencies in between notes but we can set this to be chromatic octaves fifths and a various different other scales in here so what I'm going to do is I'm going to set this one which is oscillator one to be a minor pentatonic, yeah let's try that so now one of our oscillators is staying still musically in tune but the other one isn't but already it kind of sounds a little bit more obviously musical so for this oscillator two because we've got ring mod going on in here we probably want to be sorry that was just a cool sound we probably want to be slightly more careful when it comes to the range of notes that we choose so rather than going with one even one of the pentatonic I'm just going to set this one to fifths so it's just octaves and fifths which should always be consonant with what's going on and should sound good with the ring mod in most cases it might even allow us to push the ring mod a little bit higher and I can bring in another note as well an octave or two or three get it loud there now the krull are singing but they're singing in a conventional goodness me western musical sound they've learned which is nice of them so yeah we can take this krull patch and quantize the pitch information so that we get something which is more sort of conventionally musical if that's what you're going for the other thing which is definitely worth giving a go is not being beholden to the synthesizer structure of a book club musicies and where you have the way forwarding complex oscillator running into an FME ring moddie type thing we can do other stuff we have a bunch of different options on many freaks so we should definitely think about exploring them so one thing I think might sound pretty cool is maybe having oscillator one be our where are we carplus strong and oscillator two a comb filter maybe we don't set this at full wet here go 50% let's haven't changed anything else yet so let's just see how that sounds and we can tweak as we go yeah I mean that's that's instantly really appealing to me let's see what we can tweak here so let's have a look again a bit there cool we've got here that's super cool I'm glad I tried that that wasn't planned this needs distortion doesn't it you need to slap some distortion at the front end of this so we're going to distortion mode here it's going to be too loud when we first turn it up turn the gain down whoa one of the other distortion modes so cool this needs more reverb so cool goodness me amazing okay I'm almost tempted to say that's a separate patch I can come back to it and let's turn off the distortion let's have a look at what other things we can do I quite like the idea of having the second oscillator being one of our let's try the phaser filter and let's run the arm filter into here that might be fun no let's go with saw racks let's put this distortion back on what about what about the 2 op FM this is going to be too weird because we're messing with the wave which is the tuning fun though whoa how about speech is this going to work once it finishes the word it's not going to do it anymore so let's try to form it and then here let's try the distortion mode all of you sing together the one thing that we're missing the one thing that we're missing on the minifreak unfortunately is panning per voice because if these were happening in different places on the stereo spread that would be epic but good fun I love those little short ones just bring the fall down and maybe set it to be the more exponential if you want a more musical in terms of harmony outcome from a crawl patch we can do that and moving away from the music ease or setup of the sounds can yield really interesting results I'm going to sit and play with this for a while but I have that was interesting and I encourage you to go and try out your own crawl on the minifreak let me know what combinations of oscillators you found worked for you in the comments as always thank you so much for joining me and until next time take care bye bye