 hello oscillators in here and this is the blip box from playtime engineering a toy synth which i bought for my two-year-old and a little bit a little bit for me as well i guess but i know my viewership and you're an observant bunch and it won't have escaped your attention that sat next to the blip box is the electron dig attack which is a grown-up proper instrument so why are these two things sat next to each other well it's because today we are going to take a serious and scholarly look at the synthesis engine behind the blip blip blocks and discuss how you can use it as a serious instrument potentially in your setup if you happen to have a young child that you want to buy a synth for but also want to play with it yourself so let's start with the toy aspect of it it has a built-in speaker which is pretty good as far as a built-in speaker on a toy synth goes but it also has a line out it has a usb 5 volt adapter power in so you can power it will also run on batteries of course and it has a midi in which means that we are able to clock it and control it using another synth or another instrument in this case it's going to be the dig attack but let's approach this just for a second from the toy perspective and turn it on and the nice thing about the blip blocks is that you turn it on and it immediately starts making noise and you can immediately start turning knobs and stuff happens of course it has a drum section just a kick drum and a snare drum section and press buttons to randomize the settings and just jam out with it and it's you know it's good fun this big lever here controls the tempo but let's say we don't want it to play its own internal sequences and we want to use it as a serious instrument there are probably two things that you want to do in order to get the blip blocks into a state where it is ready to be used seriously the first of those things is to press these two buttons together and that will turn off the internal sequencer and that's now going to allow us to play it using midi so this midi track on the dig attack is set up to be sending data to midi channel one which is hard coded and that gives you control over the synth sound I've also got on track 10 and 11 which is an off-chromatic control over the two drum sounds so that's on midi channel two hard coded odd numbered midi notes for the kick drum and even number for the snare I think we won't be doing too much with those two though I don't think we'll be sticking instead with the synth engine the other thing that you're probably going to want to do in order to make the synth more usable for serious things is to turn on the parameter display mode which will give you some feedback in these lights as to what's actually going on in the synth and to get to that you press this button which triggers the kick drum normally and tap that one and now we actually have some visual feedback and we'll talk about what that feedback actually represents as we go along as to what the current settings on the instrument actually are but probably the most important control on the entire blipbox is this and that is that our filter well it's a filtered modulation depth actually it depends how things are set up is on a big red lever and frankly any synth that now doesn't provide me filter cutoff on a big red lever gets zero out of 10 going forwards because it's very satisfying to have a lever for filter control I think we have to get a joystick control for my euro rack as well yes I like the fact that we have a lever for filter control good stuff the other control which is universal on the synth no matter how you have things set is this green knob here and this is the release for our amp envelope so turn it down and we have instant off halfway we have more of a sort of a plucky sound I guess and all the way up we have a pretty long pretty long release depending on what's going on with the rest of the synth put it somewhere around there for the moment so the blipbox actually has eight synths engines if you like and when you select one of these eight engines it's going to alter what waveform the oscillator is is is playing or what waveforms the oscillator is playing but also it will change what is able to be modulatable within that synth engine so whether that's sort of sync sounds or phase modulation or frequency modulation there are various different modes that are available to us and we select that mode by pressing this big blue button in the middle here so we can hear some interesting sounds going on in there the way that you know which of these is selected we just keep an eye on this light that's currently red here and as I press it you can see that stuff is moving around it's gone yellow there because there was already a green light there red red red red and red so these will indicate which of the oscillator engines are currently selected that one sounds good so let's let's stick with that one for the moment because it sounds pretty cool so you can hear that obviously stuff has been modulated there how do we know what's been modulated and by how much well these two blue knobs here will control the depth of two different parameters within the oscillator which can be modulated and these are sort of I think they're bipolar depending on which mode you're in but how do you know what is being sent to each of these sources well this synth actually has a modulation matrix believe it or not so we can choose which of the modulation sources are going to each of the two modulation destinations well three actually because we also have the filter and we select the modulation source going to each destination by using these buttons here so this one this one and this one here so these two are for our oscillator and this one is for our filter and we can tell where things are going based upon which thing is lit here here and here so here is a useful thing if you're trying to sort of zero your patch to understand what the particular engines are actually doing if we can get to a situation where none of these lights are lit that means that the things which are modulatable are now just going to respond directly to these two knobs and to the filter lever so now any movement we're hearing is due to like detune and the like this lever is now going to directly be controlled or be directly controlling the filter and these two blue knobs so that's a detune between two oscillators and this is an interval select for that oscillator filthy so let's check out the different oscillator modes and learn what they're about so we're currently in this oscillator mode here and we were hearing that we have like a interval select here and then a detune between two oscillators in this mode so next mode so we're over here now so just two straight up oscillators that we have pitch control over seems to be related to which note has been played somehow addressing and next mode something else to do with multiple freaks and one thing happening there next mode like a phase modulation super saw kind of thing going on there that's really cool it's kind of fading between two different wave shapes i guess and then we're super soaring it next mode that sounds like sync some kind of sync mode happening here nice next mode maybe sounds like ring mod between filthy a good re-space out of this uh some sort of pulse width modulation happening there or for some phase stuff happening pulse width there some sort of cross mod sounds like FM and that's your ratio control yeah that's like a ratio control on FM isn't it kids toy and then that's back to where we started cool yeah so eight quite filthy oscillator modes there and what is interesting is that there's a way of getting to eight more modes by doing a button combination when you turn it on because those two when you turn on all those two those two i think when you turn it on and turning this knob and you can switch to a different oscillator mode as well so you get eight more on top of that so what if you want to apply some modulation using one of the modulation sources well as i mentioned um these three buttons here are going to allow us to do that so for example if we want to apply some filter modulation we press this button and the green light appears here that tells us that it's sent to the envelope so here we've got that fade in happening there if we turn this down so i think when it's set to the envelope the decay is fixed and this affects the attack if we want it set to an LFO we press it again see it's set to this first LFO here we can try the speed here there are your wobs press it again it'll be this one instead so this has got a downward saw and the modulation amount is controlled by the lever press it again the green lights come out and we're just back to manual control using the lever and then to the same same deal going on with the two modulation destinations so let's just remind us as what this is so that's a detune on that one so if we want that to be controlled by our envelope to have a depth i can't hear it so much there LFO or the other one same deal with this control so this one's our offset should be pretty interesting so then we can use them in combination so now i've got the filter going to the envelope the offset going to the first LFO and my detune going to the second LFO so we can do controlled serious synthesis depending on which mode you're using you want to be choosing different locations so now we've got pitch sound controlled by this LFO giving us some nice vibrato so here for example now i've got this LFO going to both the upper sound there and to the filter so they're moving in the same direction at the same time so we can have that lower fade in with the envelope whenever we want to have the filter the same thing yes that's our that's our sync sound there so let's turn off all the control there obviously we want this controlled sync coming from our maybe we want this control on the first LFO going slowly filter with our pingy LFO there so there's lots of fun that we can have the other button i should probably point out is this one here it just randomizes everything that might be a great way to find usable sounds as well or not so usable perhaps the other red button here instantly it's kind of like a circuit bender button depending on what everything's set to quite mundane things quite weird things cranky finally i guess we should take a look at how you can use it in the context of other instruments going on so um this patch not so much let's try and make this a little more reasonable let's turn off our modulation for a second so yeah it's um it's pretty cool sounding bit as a toy well i hope that was interesting to see a toy in maybe a more serious context there's also an after dark version which i think basically does the same sort of thing but i think it defaults to having the weird oscillator modes by default perhaps if you're interested in hearing those weird oscillator modes a similar approach in terms of what each of them does then let me know in the comments i'm happy to to go through them why not um but yeah it's um it's a fun little toy um and if you happen to have young children and you want an excuse to get your children but also maybe yourself and you synth to think with then um i think you can do worse um it's a pretty interesting sounding synth um not a lot else that i own that sounds much like i guess the nearest thing for me is probably that megatron because it kind of has that eight-bit vibe going on as well but it's you know quite quite a different beast um ux is probably a little bit suboptimal if you're trying to do serious work in but but once you realize that you have the parameter display in that you you understand the way the mod matrix works it's pretty quick to get to sounds that um are meaningful a bit downside i guess for me um sadly is that it doesn't respond to midi cc messages which is a shame because it would be nice to be able to modulate this sort of stuff especially the filter i guess um using something like the dig attacks but given that it is a child's toy essentially and it's uh and for the cost of it um what you can get it for now it's come down in price affair but i think um i guess it's maybe expecting a bit much to have a full midi implementation perhaps but anyway as always thank you for joining me um i hope you enjoyed that um until next time take care bye bye