 Hello OscillatorSync here and welcome back to another video where we are building patches from scratch on the lovely Arturia MiniBrute 2S. So today we're going to draw inspiration from sort of arcadey 8-bit sounds but with a special mini-brute twist and along the way we're going to dig into one of the other sort of non-standard modes that we have on our sequencer mod tracks to get something that is sort of very archetypical of that sort of arcade sound. So before we get into the real meat of the patch let's sort of establish our baseline. At the moment we've got an initialised patch here with a sawtooth. We're going to get rid of that straight away because this is chip-tuny type stuff and we want that square wave immediately. Yes and we're also going to turn up the pulse width modulation on that lovely and I'm just going to give it a little bit of a softer attack and a bit more of a decay. Lovely. Okay that's a starting point. We'll probably come back and tweak that a little bit but I just wanted to sort of establish that because trying to do chip-tune stuff with a sawtooth wave just doesn't feel right to me. So the effect that I really want to go for in this patch is that really, really classic arpeggiated kind of sound that you have on a lot of arcade and 8-bit kind of sounds. We have that very, very rapid often just sort of octave jumping arpeggio going on and it's sort of going on the whole time when you're playing the notes. So it's not like a standard arpeggio because it kind of moves and scales with the notes and we're going to make use of one of the alternate modes on the mod track to do that. So before we go any further let's sort of set up what my plan is. The control voltage on the MiniBrute2S for pitch anyway is based around volts per octave right? So what that means essentially is that if we add a volt to whatever is currently going into the pitch control for an oscillator that's going to jump it up an octave add two volts it's going to jump up two octaves. So wouldn't it be great if there was a way to sequence those kind of voltage jumps or sequence control voltage? Well as it so happens the mod tracks have a bunch of settings for just straight up voltages. One, two, three and eight volt voltages. I'm going to go to five. Now if you want really fine control then one is probably better because the steps are much, much smaller as we go into these other modes you'll see that that one's jumping by point zero two of a volt each time or something and this one is jumping sort of even more five gives us for this kind of patch the best range to precision I think through my experimentation anyway. So my plan is that we're going to sequence some voltage jumps and then we're going to plug it into the FM of VCO1 and that is going to allow us to jump an octave. So if we add on one volt it's going to jump one octave which add on two volts it's going to jump two octaves. Right so let's check out how that's going to work. So what I'm going to do first I'm going to go into the record mode for this mod one track which is now set to our which store track gets five volts sequencing and I'm going to put down three steps. The first step I'm going to leave as zero volts the next one I'm going to set to one volt and the next one I'm going to set to two volts and I'm going to set it so that it's going to be last step which all that last up on this last step here that's a redundant sentence the last step is on this third step here which means if you watch here it's just going to cycle across those three there okay so that is the sequence in theory of our octave jumps so we can take a patch cable we can go from the mod one track and we're going to go into the FM input of VCO one now in theory in theory if we now turn this all the way up so that we're getting the full voltage passing through when we play a note as long as we are running our sequence we should hear a wonderful pure octave jump which is not what that is now we can probably get a bit closer if we turn this one up a tiny bit and if we turn this one up a bit more sort of but I don't like having to set these into non-exact jumps so the reason that this is happening as far as I can tell is that the pot here the resistor essentially the variable resistor that sits behind this knob here is still taking off a bit of the voltage is still attenuating some of the voltage as we're going through and that means we're not quite it's not it's not very nice to listen to we're not quite getting that pure octave jump so what that means is that if we want to get this to work nicely we need to boost the voltage by a little bit another word for boost of course would be amplify so we might find some help in our VCA our voltage controlled amplifier so we're going to go from our mod track into the VCA and we're going to go from the VCA out into the FM we're still getting things not working quite well and that is because we need to make sure we are scaling this by the right amount so what we want to do is apply some control voltage to our VCA which is going to allow us to sort of trim that voltage so that it's just right and that it is those perfect kind of octave jumps now if we want to apply a knob to the control voltage we have really one choice the second attenuate attenuate to two what this is normal to what its input is is a pure five-fold DC level so that means that when we turn this knob up we're just increasing our voltage from zero volts or less up to five volts so that basically allows us to have a knobby control over our VCA so what we can do is take the output of that attenuate it there and plummet into the CV here now as soon as we start turning this we're going to be getting a drone the reason for that is that this knob is also normalled to the amp this is how you get drones happening in the mini route is you just turn this knob up we don't want to be getting drones while that's happening so we want to break that connection really easy to do this here if you can just see mine will be able to see on this camera but it says at two so this is the input where that's going to that's our normal sort of connection if we just plumb something in there but not onto the other end that will break that connection so we'll no longer get that thing happening now we can use this knob which is now controlling our VCA which is taking the input from our our mod track and it's going out into the FM or keep the FM up to full and now we can fine tune those voltages and just give them the tiny little boost that they need so that it really is one volt two volt going in here so let's just set that going again cool that's better like it i might drop down an octave even i like it that much cool i might give the decay a bit higher and i think crucially to really get the sound that we're looking for for this kind of chip tuning thing let's make this sequence go a lot faster so first of all we can set it to 32 notes instead which is pretty close we could even also increase the tempo in general that's pretty cool we're going to come back to the sequence but let's just take a break and head into the rest of the synth a little bit so that we can kind of fine tune our sound a little bit i want to make the sound a little bit more retro to begin with sort of a bit clean and bright at the moment so i'm just going to bring the filter down to a tiny bit and then to compensate just at that top end i'm going to bring a little bit of resonance in and then i'm just going to turn up the brute factor the brute factor in the first little bit of its turn is kind of like a time machine it's like a let's make the sound a little bit less clean a little less new rolls the top end off a little bit and these old arcade circuits aren't perfect let's add a little bit of noise and what would also be pretty cool let's bring in the second oscillator now this second oscillator is not being modulated by this track the pitch of the second oscillator is controlled separately so we end up this is tuned an octave down at the moment and with this uh awesome bass note sat underneath that's cool maybe a little bit darker a little bit more pulse width modulation there we go that's cool right that's sidebar concluded let's go back to the sequence and have a little look at what we're doing at the moment we're doing these really rapid um no octave one octave and two octave things now we can add in more steps if we change our our last step here uh i'm going to maybe seven we can put other jumps on here so that could be back to uh how about we go sort of up and down instead um that could be back to zero that could be up to hey why don't we jump over to three octaves and then this one can be back down to two maybe go faster that's really really cool maybe go down an octave again dirty but we like dirty now of course the thing is we don't actually just have to do octave uh steps we can tune these knobs to hear other interesting notes along the way so for example so we can find another note uh maybe a different note here as well go faster interesting things happen when we start to introduce swing as well actually uh i sort of crank it all the way we kind of get sounds a bit broken but in an interesting way and of course we can set this going different ways as well so we can make it go backwards and forwards instead ping-ponging which just looks really fun let's go back to going forwards uh forwards and maybe try a different try to find another different note in here uh or is that one there so you can get really different feels by adding these different notes in we can change the length of these i think in a lot way shorter ones or ones that repeat a lot work best oh it's a bit a bit ominous and also i know this isn't sort of vintage correct but it sounds really cool the limit of spring reverb so i'm just going to turn my pallar on oh i haven't actually got a thing on that no have i uh let's stop six that's high and of course we can still actually um sequence stuff the sequencer has to be running for this to work so you know we could uh it might make sense to make this a slow sequence we could start sticking some notes down here so anyway i hope you enjoyed that and i hope you maybe opened your eyes up to another possibility uh for the sequencer especially on the mod tracks on the mini root 2s if you did enjoy the video please do give it a thumbs up for the old like and if you aren't already then make sure you subscribe to the channel because there'll be some more mini group videos coming up as well as lots of synthesizer videos in general um hopefully got some new bits and pieces coming to the channel fairly soon um no spoilers but um i'm very excited to get my hands on some of them um so there'll be some new stuff to take a look at as well as always thank you so much for joining me i will see you soon take care bye