 Hello OscillatorSync here and welcome back to another video where we are taking an in-depth look at the operator modes on the Korg Opsix. So in this video we're going to take a look at the ring mod and filter mod operator modes. Now the reason we're going to group these two together is that they share the same basic idea as FM and that is that you have a carrier and a modulator. The carrier is the thing that we hear and the modulator modulates something about the carrier in order to create a timbral change. In FM obviously what's being modulated is the frequency of the carrier and ring mod and filter mod and we're modulating something different. This video is very much a follow-on from the previous video that I made on the FM modes so I won't be going into detail on a lot of the concepts that I covered in that video so ideas around the algorithms and how the relative levels and frequency relationships between the carriers and modulators those are all ideas that I went into in quite a lot of depth in that video and I don't want to repeat myself here. So if you haven't checked that video out yet and my video on the FM mode I would highly recommend that you go and check that out before we go into too much depth into this video because these two modes share a lot in common architecturally with the FM mode a lot of those ideas will translate very nicely. What we're going to focus on in this video instead is how these modes operate if you excuse the pun and I guess crucially how they differ from each other we'll go back to the FM mode as well so that when you are building sounds and you have an idea in your head you can have a good idea as to which of these modes might give you the result that you are looking for. So let's start by describing what these three modes so that's FM ring mod and filter mod are doing technically. So operator one is in FM mode and if I bring up operator one and I bring up the modulator here which is currently set very very slow what we hear is that pitch wobble and then when we make that pitch will go fast enough and come into audio range what we hear is a timbre change rather than a pitch change. So operator three is in ring mod mode still just a sine wave and as we bring up operator four which is its modulator again which is moving very slowly at the moment what we hear rather than a pitch wobble is a volume a tremolo wobble if you like and again at the moment this is below audio rate as we turn up the speed or the frequency rather off that wobble rather than hearing a tremolo we hear a timbre change. Operator five here is in filter mod mode and as we turn up its modulator operator six we can hear slightly different to operator three what we hear here instead is a filter opening and shutting and as we make it go faster rather than hearing a filter wobble we hear a timbre change. So the same principle applies across these three different modulation modes filter sorry frequency modulation ring modulation and filter modulation but the way in which we are generating those timbre changes is different so let's just hear that one more time with the actual timbre changes here and we'll just do a sweep of the modulator level so this is filter mod these are all just on sine waves and one-to-one relationships so that's frequency modulation here's ring mod this is all just with the default settings at the moment we can of course change things around and this is the filter mod so we're doing kind of similar things but different flavors now one thing it's worth pointing out straight away and the keen eared amongst you might have already noticed this if we compare so modulators all turn down to zero now if we compare a sine wave coming from FM or ring mod which is slightly quieter for reasons but they're both nice pure sine wave sounds up five you can hear has some additional harmonics nice pure sine wave some additional harmonics and this is just with the basic settings here i'm not doing anything extra the reason for this is that the filter modes on the op 6 quite correctly um introduce some saturation and some grit and some character even when they're not doing anything here so we we have a sine wave here going through a filter slightly closed filter for reasons i will get to but the filter model that's here introduces some additional harmonics and you can see them here on the analyzer as well so that's just a sine wave going through the filter and that's just a sine wave with a single frequency peak there as opposed to these additional harmonics that have been introduced up here so the filter mod mode even doing nothing introduces some character into the sound which is worth knowing i think so let's continue this basic sound comparison but with some different ratios so let's maybe do a uh one to three ratio which is a bit more interesting ratio so um here is um FM in here as we push that modulate up it gets quite harsh quite quickly maybe glassy metallic might be a way of describing that uh here's operator three which is our ring mod mode and ring mod is a lot more forgiving in this default setup and in general to be fair it's kind of a bit more orginy maybe i would say that original frequency of our carrier is allowed to exist within the sound a little bit more clearly as opposed to here where that original frequency that fundamental is kind of obliterated when we push that level high with ring mod that fundamental frequency there stays pretty much consistent uh with filter mod again we have that little bit of extra saturation just by turning it up like ring mod we're getting a little bit more of that original fundamental still persisting within the sound but with a bit more of the harshness that we get from the FM so the filter mod mode in this basic setup is potentially a way we can think about if we were interesting maintaining that um that uh fundamental so for the lower sounds see our fundamental is basically obliterated by that point there but we can get lots of extra harmonics there without totally treading all over our fundamental in terms of a sound character as you would kind of expect uh we are as we increase the uh amount that the level of our modulator we are opening that filter further and shutting it down further so that kind of brassy sound that you would associate with a filter you maybe get here so a bit brassier less metallic less digital you might even say so let's try a relationship between these operators which isn't an integer relationship so let's let's find a good one with the FM mode first so let's find something so they're like that so you've got one uh 1.17 so let's set the others to that as well oops am I doing the wrong one 7.17 okay so uh non-integer relationships tend to create more complex sounds less tonal and you can certainly hear with the FM and we have that up at the top we can sort of still discern the fundamental but it's definitely harder to hear beneath that atonal character that we're introducing with the ring mod again that original fundamental is still there it's much much more gentle in the default settings and with filter kind of like before what we're getting here is this sort of halfway house where we're not treading all over our fundamentals so much as we do in FM we're not quite getting that same level of sort of metallic atonality so we're introducing grit and we're introducing that atonality feeling of unease but we're not quite getting to that metallic glassy space and we're not treading over the fundamental as much so again kind of like that halfway house between the ring mod and the FM so let's just do one more comparison between the three modulation modes some in algorithm 12 here and we're just interested here in operator 3 where we've got these three different modulators all running in in parallel into that one carrier in terms of their pitches we've got one that's just an integer pitch we've got one which is sort of detuned and then we've got one that's running at a fixed pitch as well introducing that kind of resonance so at the moment we're in FM mode we're getting quite a complicated sound here if we were a bit more gentle with the the levels and and had a different level envelopes for the modulators it's been actually quite a good way to get kind of electric piano sound but probably doesn't highlight the differences quite as well so let's without changing anything else let's change the mode of our carrier here over to ring let's put this back to the defaults playing with stuff there we go and again much more gentle that fundamental frequency not being overrun by the other sounds but just kind of got this grit there's some sort of bell fun things happening in there if we raise the levels we would get more of them obviously and but for comparison sake i don't want to raise them right the moment so that's ring mod as opposed to FM quite a different vibe going on there and then we have our filter FM here again just with the default settings a lot crunchier much more of that sort of a harmonic stuff happening in there FM filter FM and ring mod three different flavors all working in similar ways modulating something about the carrier just whether it's frequency amplitude or filter cutoff will make quite difference so everything we've done so far with all of these sounds we've been doing with the default settings but of course as we know from the FM mode there are some additional controls that we have for each of these modes so in FM we had the feedback and the width which i covered in the previous video so let's head eye on on over to the ring mod here and what we see here is we have depth and we have shape so let's just bring out our so we're just back to the one to one relationship here and let's see what the depth control is going to do for us and the depth control is almost kind of like having the ability to fine tune the level control because it's affecting the the depth of the ring mod the amplitude modulation and maybe a good way to see this again if we take the modulator down to below audio rate and we take a look at our analyzer here and we can see that at the moment we've got our amplitude of that sine wave being modulated and there's b so we just remember that now as we turn b down we see that our sine wave is not getting squashed as much as we turn depth back up and take it past 50 percent we'll start to see it's not quite keeping up with us what's actually happening here what we'll be able to hear is that it feels like it's doubled the speed of the modulation that's a hundred percent for going down to 50 yeah it feels like it's double the speed it's not quite double the speed what's actually happening as we've pushed that to 100 percent is that and it's not showing on here sadly you can see that the the scope is freaking out a little bit the reason for that is that now what the ring mod should be doing is actually flipping the phase so what should be happening is that we're actually going all the way past zero and flipping the shape of the the wave shape but I think the oscilloscope here is actually compensating for that so we can't see it but that's why it sounds like it's doubling but that does essentially also mean that we're getting more modulation as well okay so the other control that we have just going down to 50 for a second there is shape and as we turn it up we can hear that we're getting a more complex sound as well if we look at the scope you can see that we're almost getting to like a triangle wave with this particular relationship we'll get obviously different shapes with different ratios and actually having these higher ratios will probably help us be able to see what the shape is actually doing so I turn that shape back down to zero and we look at the shape that we're getting in our wave form and as I turn it up can you see what's happening there whereas before we had peaks and valleys being sort of drawn into our wave here when we turn up the shape we're only getting peaks so what the shape control is doing in this case is rectifying our modulator which gives us a more harmonically rich sound it's treading on our fundamental a bit more and using that in combination with our depth is where we'll find all of those different sweet spots and opportunities for modulating parameters immediately that feels like a great place to put an LFO right or even an envelope having those two controls modulating at different rates so do you know what let's stop talking about it let's actually do it let's come into mod here we've got two LFOs we can use LFO 1 and LFO 2 would be fine go into our V patch to patch this stuff up and we're going to go LFO 1 to op 3s ring depth and then we'll go LFO 2 to op 3s ring shape slow both of those down we're getting things that sound like additive organ swells we're getting like stuff that sounds like filters some sort of almost sounds like a phone wave table in there as well and this is all just with sine waves at the moment of course much more gentle much more forgiving perhaps than fm for doing this kind of thing not as extreme of course we could put some more discordant if we had just a fundamental more yes lots of interesting things going on there it's also worth noting that even without any level happening on operator 4 modulating the depth is still going to give you volume changes happening there of course it's probably more efficient just to modulate the level but it's worth noting that slightly tuning anyway yeah so generally speaking a bit more gentle even with that depth and shape turned up we're still getting much more gentle overtones compared to what we would get with fm the other thing that we should note here of course is that we can also set our let's take off that installation for a second we can set our pitches of our the frequency rather of our modulated to be fixed and that's where you get that classic classic ring mod sound from guitar pedals down the phone and much like when we're having the fixed frequency relationships when we're talking about fm this is the sort of thing where you can tune things to the key that you're in so if i wanted to make this weird but also we can see that lots of sort of old school classic quite organic sounding madness to be had there the other thing we should say about the ring mod is because it's so much more gentle is that it is a lot more forgiving when you do more extreme things in terms of the wave shapes so i've been using sine waves here but moving to things like squares let me go back to a ratio instead if we had done the same thing here with fm for example something like this set the modulator to square things get pretty squashy pretty quickly things tend to hold together better in ring mod mode so if you need something that's a bit more forgiving for doing more extreme things then ring mod might be the way to approach it okay so let's talk about the filter mod mode so we have three controls here basically we have type which is going to change the type of the filter that's been modulated we will come back around to that once i've explained the other two the other two are just cut off and resonance which if you've dealt with any sort of subtractive synth ever our terms that are probably very very familiar to you resonance does exactly what you think it's going to do it's going to increase the resonance at the cutoff point of the filter cut off you would assume it's just going to change the cutoff of the filter but that's not quite right in this mode and i will show you why and it's probably easiest to hear if we go over just to white noise just quiet at the moment like past white noise it would be so if i just crank the resonance here so that the filter starts to resonate what you can hear as i move across the keyboard is actually that filter is resonating at different frequencies as i play different notes and that is because the filter in the filter FM and the filter mode actually is always going to move relative to the frequency of the operator which means if i change the ratio of this operator working in filter FM mode it's also going to change the cutoff of the of the filter similarly if i come into the pitch menu and move to fixed mode the frequency of the fixed frequency operator is also going to change the cutoff as well if i turn down just just to prove this is really happening if i turn down the resonance here and change the pitch here you can't hear the pitch of the noise change because it has no pitch but you can hear that frequency cutoff frequency being changed as i do that so what does the cutoff control actually do the cutoff control is going to basically change the offset so if i want to change where this filter is resonating but i don't want to change the pitch of this operator if i had a pitch sound in here now the cutoff knob is going to allow me to move that independent of the frequency of the operator because i mean fixed mode that's not going to change it so if you want to do the sort of pitched noise sounds which i'm very fond of to be honest so i'd use it for quite a lot then this is one mode where you can do it however if that's all you want to do you're probably better off using the actual filter mode because it gives you additional flexibility in terms of mixing together two signals we'll get to that in another video though so let's just move the resonance back down and give ourselves a sine wave again just so we can think about this operator in terms of the modulator carrier relationship instead so the final control that we have here is type and the type is going to change what type of filter is being modulated which is going to have an effect on the sound obviously so let's just bring this up to full just for a second again that sort of brassy feel there that's not as metallic or digital sounding as as fm and let's try some of these other types we have low pass filter lpf we have a high pass filter actually gives us a little bit more bottom end we'll get to the resonance control maybe actually let's let's back to low pass filter and let's give it some resonance giving resonance to the filter is going to make things a lot more chaotic and actually gets things a little bit more wild in some ways than fm which is interesting but in a different way a grittier maybe more analog sounding squelchier wetter if you want to describe it as wetter and then full resonance really quite wild so that's the low pass filter next one is high pass filter low resonance kind of similar i think yeah a little bit more bottom end almost half resonance a little bit more under control some real stuff going on in there it then have band pass which naturally is going to lower the overall volume because it's less of the frequency spectrum being allowed through smaller movements generally speaking with the high resonance work out better cool glitchy textures as it picks out lower bit there is really sweet and we have a band reject filter a bit more chilled out generally we have an mg lpf 12 the manual doesn't ever say what mg is but we can maybe guess at it so compared with the standard low pass filter this one has a little bit more grit a little bit more interesting sounding maybe with the resonance interestingly actually holds together a little bit better so it's both more gritty and character but also more sort of together on those sweeps oh lordy and not with the resonance filter wow there are some there are some textures there out there very interesting cool so both grittier and more together and more chaotic it's the 24 dv per octave version oh there's some stuff there isn't there sorry it's got so loud suspect that this filter self resonates a bit more than the other one which is why we're getting all those additional things going on there so I just need some silence to get over the chaos a high pass filter from the same family there that's lovely smooth and brassy and again chaotic at the top lovely stuff um same with 25 db similar sort of vibes going on in there a band pass filter for that mode as you would expect with resonance high 12 db vision and then we have the ms 20 at models as well here which you also get in the main filter section now these ones overdrive a lot when you push the resonance similar sorts of things going on there high pass filter and that's a lot there so different vibes going on in there depending on what you're wanting I think the mg ones offer a really good range in terms of what goes on with the resonance as well and of course you probably want to actually give these some more um and uh changing the ratio obviously it's going to give you different feels as well lovely scrouchy scrouchy things to be had ms 20 model holds together a little bit better at that high resonance I think right up until the last moment where it goes probably crazy excellent no longer need a modular because I can make far sounds here one final word before we finish and we kind of cover this in the fm mode uh as well in the fm mode um if we had a more um complex actually do the right operator we go here if we had a more complex um wave form and if what we wanted to do was actually just give it some wobble we can always set our modulator to be fixed and down in below audio rate hoping great things sound uh seasick the same can be said um for our ring mod and filter mod modes so with our ring mod here if we come across to the modulator which is up before and we set that to fixed and we bring this down nice and low what we get just give the carrier a slightly more complex wave form perhaps triangle is a way of getting tremolo that works independently to any of the LFOs if we want to use our LFOs for other things of course our um modulators um shape doesn't have to be a sign we can use sores and get fake arpeggios some things with squares we have some of the interesting additive modes here to give you interesting pulsing polyrhythms potentially some cool stuff to be had there with our shape when we're rectifying it as well we can kind of get shuffles in there so we can get quite complicated rhythmic things happening within our tremolo there way beyond a normal trying to wave tremolo some really interesting stuff happening there right and similarly if we come across to our filter mod um maybe give it a again a slightly more rich wave form to begin with and in our modulator here if we set our pitch to fixed and down nice and low and maybe set the resonance lower there and of course the um what I should have said with the um ring mod is that the level of the overall modulation is going to be affected by this level which of course we can also control using our envelope for that modulator and having different filter modes and then again using different um shapes for our modulator especially some of those more interesting additive shapes we can get interesting there's the fake arpeggios again if you slow it down a bit more again get those cool um rhythmic things happening and so on yeah so don't overlook especially with the ring mod and the filter mod even more than having that nice pitch wobble don't overlook the possibilities of creating more complex LFOs affecting volume and filter this way so anyway I hope that was useful and interesting if it was as always it's always very much appreciated if you can leave the video a thumbs up and make sure you subscribe to the channel especially if you're interested in the Opposites because there'll be lots of Opposites videos coming up as well as some other stuff haven't quite decided what yet maybe some more modular stuff um let me know in the comments if there's anything in particular you want to see on the channel and I will do my very best other than that thank you so much for joining me as always till next time take care of yourselves bye