 Hello, Osolite Sync here, and welcome back to another video where we're taking a look at the Korg Ops 6. Today we are going to be diving into one of my favorite features on the Ops 6, which is the user algorithms. So in this video we're going to describe what the user algorithm feature on the Ops 6 actually is. We'll take a look around the menu system which allows us to interact with it and then we're going to take a look at how this feature along with the operator modes allows us to define entire synth architectures inside the Ops 6 and in doing so we're going to build a Juno style synth that lives entirely within the Ops 6. So before we can talk about the user algorithm, let's just have a quick recap on what an algorithm is in the context of the Ops 6 and FM synths in general. If we're on the algorithm home page here, we can select the algorithm by turning this knob here and we can see these little boxes are moving around and shifting around. So here's algorithm 5 there. What the algorithm defines is how the operators are joined together. So in algorithm 5 we have three operators 1, 3 and 5 which are at the bottom of the algorithm which tells us that these are the ones that we're hearing. Operator 2 feeds into operator 1 and will, if it's operating in FM mode, it will frequency modulate operator 1, 4 is feeding into 3 and 6 is feeding into 5 and all the different algorithms that are available to us change that relationship. So for example on algorithm 18 operator 1 is our only thing that we're hearing on output and that's been fed into by operator 2, operator 3 and operator 4 and then operator 4 has been fed in to by operator 5 and 5 has been fed into by operator 6. Now if this was just an FM synth, of course this is just talking about frequency modulation but as we've seen in the previous three videos that I've done on the op6, we can actually use operators not only to do modulation of parameters but also to process the signal that's coming in from above it in the algorithm. So in order to make use of user algorithm we turn the algorithm knob all the way to the end where it says user. Our normal boxes disappear and we're left with this kind of dot matrix here and if this is an initialised patch which this is this is going to leave us with no sound coming out basically and that's because currently none of the operators are set to do anything. All of the lights are off your your notice there. So in order to actually set up our user algorithm we want to come into the miscellaneous menu here and come down to where it says user algorithm and then it says press yes to edit user algorithm we say yes and now we're into the editing of our user algorithm. Now this set up here this menu has two different pages and actually the first page that you want to go to probably is the second page. So if we go to the second page what this allows us to do is set which of our operators we actually hear which is functionally the same if we come back to my hastily drawn diagram as deciding which of our operators are set at the bottom of our algorithm. So if we just want to hear operator one coming out we can turn operator one on turns red so we can hear it and now if we actually turn it up we can actually hear it. None of these other operators are going to do anything because they're neither set to be an output nor are they set to do anything. Now if we come into the first page again this is where we are able to select our operators and decide what is feeding into them. So I've moved this across to operator one you can see it's on this top line here and now our controls say how much of each of the other operators do we want to feed in to operator one. Now this is still going to involve us turning up the level control for that operator but for example if I want to set up the Opsix as a simple to operator synth with op one being our carrier and op two being the modulator what we want to do is turn up the control that says two into one. Operator two goes purple which now tells us that it's operating as a modulator and now we've got a simple to operator setup here. Now what's really interesting here is that we can also decide to say well actually on page two I want to hear operator two as well as it acting as a modulator. So now you can see that this has gone purple telling us that it's both a carrier and a modulator at once so we can hear operator two and also hear its effect on operator one which incidentally allows us to set up algorithms that work in kind of the same way as some of the interesting x y stuff that you get on the digga tone for example so we can have operators which are acting both as carriers and as modulators we can also do crazy stuff like if we come back into this page here and select operator two we can now say that we also want one to run into two so now we have a situation where we're hearing both these operators and they're also interacting with each other which causes feedback we can get all sorts of interesting digital craziness going on. This is actually really interesting when we work with ring modulator modes rather than FM because it's a bit more forgiving we can get all sorts of interesting cross-modulations happening and that's basically how the user algorithm works. We are going to use this along with the different operator modes in order to set up an entire Juno style synth inside the Opsix so let's initialize this patch and take a look. So before we try and create a Juno inside the Opsix we probably need to talk about what the Juno synth architecture kind of looks like so I have another hastily drawn piece of paper here and this is more or less a Juno synth with some caveats but let's just discuss what's going on here and then where you can set about actually creating it in the Opsix so let's start with the oscillators so Juno style synth typically has a sawtooth and a pulse wave or square wave these are tuned at the same frequency because they're derived from each other. I think usually on a Juno you can choose one or the other or both you can't really fade between them but our patch will be able to fade between them. Independent to those two we also have a sub oscillator which is obviously an octave below what's going on with these ones here and then we also have a noise source. These are all then mixed together and then passed into the filter and output now I think strictly speaking the high pass filter comes after the low pass filter on the Juno but for our purposes we're going to put it first just because it will allow us to do something that makes more sense so all of those are mixed together they go through a high pass filter into a low pass filter and then out through the VCA. In terms of modulation we have fairly limited modulation not that it stops it being a classic synth I guess we have an LFO which can be sent to the cutoff of the filter it can be set to the pitch of our oscillators and it can also be used to do pulse width modulation on the square wave. We also have a single envelope which can be sent to the pitch of the oscillators probably won't bother with that well we can but we'll see but also it will go to the cutoff of the low pass filter and also to the ampersay one of the sort of defining features of the classic Juno synths was this sort of limited modulation sources but with them it sort of added to the character one other thing I should probably mention is that you can also switch the VCA to be gated rather than coming off the envelope which allows you to have the filter move independently to the amp and we can address that in our patch as well so that's the basic architecture that we're going to try and replicate we're going to stick to this sort of limited modulation source as I say I think strictly speaking the high pass filter comes later but for our purposes we're going to put it earlier because it allows us to do something that makes more sense to do it that way basically yeah so that is what we are going to aim for now to help guide us along the way I'm going to let you know what each of our operators what job they're going to be doing hopefully that comes up on the on the camera but operator one is going to be acting as our sawtooth operator two is going to be our square three is going to be our sub four is going to be our noise source operator five is going to be our high pass filter so we're going to make use of the filter modes on the operators and operator six is going to be our low pass filter and also our amp output VCA if you like so we're going to have to think about how we are going to set that up in our user algorithms so before we get going let's make sure that we are actually on the user algorithm there we go all of our lights turn off and we can come back into our menu so the first thing we want to do is define which of our operators we're actually going to hear which ones are going to have that direct out so you can come across to the second page here where we can turn the outputs on and off if we come back to our diagram obviously the only thing we're going to really hear is the VCA so that's operator six so we can turn that one on that's going to be our output in terms of what feeds into everything it's probably easier to work backwards so operator six is our filter and our amp so that's those first two bits sorted out there the high pass filter then flows into the low pass filter so high pass filter is operator five so if we come down to operator six here we can say that we want five to flow into six so we can turn that all the way up in terms of the rest of the architecture really we're talking about our other four operators our source square sub and noise or flowing into the high pass filter so we can select operator five which is our high pass filter and we can say that we want one to go into five we want two to go into five three to go into five and four to go into five and in terms of setting up our user algorithm that is basically it so pretty straightforward actually to replicate this architecture from the algorithm perspective now we need to set up the various different modes on all of our operators okay so let's go into the mode screen probably makes sense to work backwards here as well so operator six that's going to be our low pass filter and our amp so the mode that we're going to want to select for this is filter we are going to want to turn off the oscillator mix because we don't want to hear any of the oscillator that this operator is creating and the other thing we're going to want to do is come into the pitch screen and set it to fix which is going to allow us to control the cutoff frequency of that filter by adjusting the pitch of the operator obviously we won't hear anything yet because nothing's being sent through it but we will be able to check that in just a second in terms of what filter mode we're going to use this is going to be a low pass filter but i have been playing around i think that the 24 bits 24 decibels per octave mg filter sounds pretty good in this setup it might not be totally authentic but that's the one that just seems to sound nice operator five is a high pass filter so we also want that on filter mode and we'll just set that to high pass filter but they also we have got the modeled ones i think the high pass filter is 6db per octave on the on the Juno might be wrong there let's just leave it on the basic high pass filter and again we want to turn the oscillator mix all the way down we don't want to hear the oscillator that's actually coming from that operator so in terms of our four sort of oscillator operators so we'll come up to one first we can leave these on FM mode in FM mode they're just going to if nothing's modulating them which is not they're just going to act as oscillators but the additional benefit that the FM mode has is that we have the width control which is going to allow us to do the pulse width modulation on our square waves so in terms of choosing the different wave shapes should we turn these two up for a minute and we'll be able to actually hear stuff hopefully just that one at the moment cool yeah so we can prove that stuff's running through here we'll check the filters in just a second we're going to set this to SOAR i've tried both SOAR and SOAR HD initially sounds better but then when you have it in the context of the patch i think the basic SOAR sounds better so now we're able to just check that our filters are working um so that should be our low pass sounds good or i've forgotten on my high pass filter to set that to fixed make sure we do that great there is our high pass filter and our low pass filter use them together to get a band pass filter lovely okay so that is proving that the signal is flowing the way it should go uh so let's carry on with our other operators so for our square operator on operator 2 i'm going to use the standard square the square hd you can't hear that much difference the way they're tuned at the moment but i'll show you on operator 3 the square hd has a better low end to it but it doesn't seem to the pulse width modulation doesn't seem to sound quite as authentic with it i don't know why so for the one where i'm going to actually do pulse width modulation we'll have it on the basic square and now we have our two basic waveforms being able to be mixed together there as i say on an actual genome i think you won't can only turn them on or off but here we can actually fade between them so our sub we can bring that one up that's operator 3 as i said we're going to use square hd for this one and we're going to drop its ratio down to set it octave down so if we compare that to there's not a whole lot of difference it just seems that the the hd just has a little bit more bottom end like it's marginal but in my testing i just felt that that kind of sounded a little bit better so now we have our basic waveforms and we can mix them together like that and they're all running together through our filters uh the final one here is going to be our noise so operator 4 will set the waveform to noise and white now what i found when i was playing around with this is that i felt that the white noise is just a little bit too pure sounding a little bit too bright even with obviously the filters open so it would be bright but i just found it was a little bit too much really so what i've done previously when i've been playing around is i've actually set this to a filter as well turn the oscillator mix all the way up set it to fixed and just adjusted the pitch so it's just not like pure white noise it's a little bit tapered off i just felt that it blended better with the oscillators okay your mileage may vary but that's kind of what i ended up with so now we have our basic setup we have our oscillators running through a high pass filter and a low pass filter now we need to set up how the sort of modulation all works now the one thing that isn't really working as it should do i guess in terms of our setup here is that strictly speaking all of these first five oscillators should be wide open in terms of their level at all times and everything really is only being shaped in terms of its volume by this final operator now there's no way for us to have always on operators unfortunately not currently in this firmware version anyway but we can get as close as we possibly can and the way that we'll do that if we come up to operator one is we are going to set the sustain up to full the attack down to zero so these come on as soon as you press a key and we'll set our release as long as it will go which is 90 seconds which is pretty long and then we will set its curve to linear which means that it has the gentlest journey down as you start to hit that release stage now this is still going to interact a little bit with the the amp envelope but we can adjust the curve on the amp envelope so that we're still getting a good sounding curve even with this these other operators fading out as they go this is going to kind of add up to be kind of like an exponential things sort of but this is basically the the hack that we have to do in order to pretend that all of these are always wide open so we'll replicate this across each of these other operators so all the way over to linear and longest release possible sustain all the way up linear longest release possible same thing on four and same thing five that means that we have level control over all of those operators in operator six so if we come back to the hastily drawn drawing here it is important to note that we have a single envelope which is controlling the low pass filter and the vca at the same time so what that means is that we can't really make use of operator six's level envelope because that's not going to also control the filter so what i'm going to do instead is i'm going to turn operator six all the way down so that its envelope doesn't really come into play and instead what i'm going to do is i'm going to come into mod first i'm going to say that eg1 is going to be the one envelope for this patch so we'll leave it set as it is currently that's fine and then what we're going to do is we're going to come into the v patch and we are going to patch that envelope into the level of op six and also the pitch of op six as i described in my video when we're looking at the operator modes the pitch of a filter operator which operator six is is also it's cut off so that's going to allow us to do cut off and level at the same time so let's do our level first so our source is going to be eg1 our destination is going to be op six's level and now hopefully when i play a note we're going to hear nothing uh because sorry mind but because we haven't turned the intensity up of course terrible moment of confusion there so now that we have our envelope intensity turned all the way up we can hear that working now during testing what i found was for some reason having it set to a hundred percent made the release portion of the envelope feel like it came in late like it's pushing it past a hundred percent so i found that setting it somewhere around 80 actually led to having a more realistic envelope so that means this patch has now got a little quieter but we can compensate for that if we come into the miscellaneous menu and on program miscellaneous we can just turn the volume up the whole patch and we still get what feels like the full amount so that's good so now we have uh that's first envelope processing the level of operator six come back into the v-patch and we can do exactly the same thing eg1 this time going to op six's pitch set the intensity here that it's getting brighter now but if we turn down the cutoff you can hear that is now opening up our filter and we can set different combinations of our various operators which are off some of the bottom end there and we're starting to get this basic architecture set up and behaving like it should so let's check that that's all working properly so if you come back into the mod menu if we turn up our attack we should get a one pep in there sounds good give it some sustain we can play sustained notes give it some release uh hearing the release so much that's interesting why would that be have i missed somewhere uh on one of these other ones with the level uh yeah so we need to still crank the level the release on that one as well then okay um yes that's that is a good point we should also have done our um trick on operator six as well so we also want to have this sustain up for that yeah so i knew i missed something so now we should be able to great control the level and filter in its entirety and we might want to set this not to linear sounds a little sort of fake at the moment classic juno piano sound cool now of course if we wanted to um give this um resonance we want to come into operator six's mode and we can turn up the resonance here take out some of the bottom end what we might also want to do on operator five is give it just a tiny bit of resonance as well not much but just so that's boosting around it that allows us to do that juno low end boost with the high pass filter then that's probably a bit too much resonance yes there's that boost point so uh that's our envelope working as it should do and now one thing i mentioned with the architecture here is that there is a way on the junos to basically set the envelope to be a gate instead so that we can have um filter movement that's independent of the vca so the probably the easiest way to do that is just to come down to our next envelope here and just set it to be a gate so not really all the way off just so it has a little bit of a movement there and then when we want to have that behavior we can come into our v patch here which the one that's going to our level here and we can set the source to two instead that's going to gate instead which means that we are able to do things like uh have that filter sweep happening at the start of the note without it also having a volume fading so you hear more of the filter great okay so let's uh get on to the LFOs then so like with our envelopes uh we only need one LFO which can be patched to various different places so that LFO will use LFO one and we will then send it to places using the v patch um so if we just come down to our LFO one here we've got it set with its speed the key sync is set to common which means that it um if there are no uh notes playing you press the first note and the LFO starts and then any notes that you play within the chord um don't restart the LFO um as opposed to voice key sync where every time you press a key it gets its own LFO starting at this beginning phase I think strictly speaking the mode that we want um in order to replicate the Juno's functionality is off so there's a LFO that's um just running constantly in the background I think it's a single LFO on on the Junos that rather than LFO per voice I'm willing to be told otherwise but for this patch we're going to work into that assumption so um in terms of um patching this to our various different uh places we can come into our v patch again and come into an empty slot so the first place we probably want to send this is going to be to the pitch of the um of the oscillators now there's two different ways that we can approach this there's actually two different ways we can patch this in the first is we can do it through the v patch which is how I'm going to do it because I want all of my controls within the v patch but for um the sake of completeness the other place that we can get it is in the miscellaneous menu here uh if we go to the program pitch we can set how much of LFO one has been sent uh to pitch here but we're going to do it in the v patch instead so in our empty slot here our source is going to be set to LFO one our destination is going to be program pitch uh and there is our pitch vibrato for all to see um let me just make sure let's set that back to a eg one cool and that should be nicely blending on all of the different um operators there so um let's go ahead and set this up to be controllable by the modulation wheel as well because we don't want this on all the time but we probably do want access to it at all times so um all we need to do in order to do this is uh underneath the intensity we've got this control parameter here and we just set it to the mod wheel and that means that the amount goes via the mod wheel i love the way that the modulation works on the opposite um so that's that done that's easy enough the next destination uh for our LFO if we come back here uh it's probably going to be the pulse width modulation for the square wave square wave is operator two so um empty slot source is going to be the LFO one the destination is going to be op two and we're going to come across to where it says FM width let's listen to that one just change our uh yeah uh sorry uh operator two FM width and if we up this now it sounds a little bit weird and i think the reason for that is that because the LFO is bipolar but the width control doesn't go negative um it sounds a bit strange so probably the easiest way to fix this um is to come back to operator two's mode here and start with its width at 50 which makes this a skinny square wave by default we can adjust that if we want to but now we have our pulse width modulation and more or less and if if we like if we come back into the v-patch here we can also send that through the mod wheel if we like uh okay so that is that set if we don't want it going via the mod wheel we just turn this control off and then we just have a control within the v-patch but i'll have it go through the mod wheel i think the final place that our LFO can be sent is going to be to the cutoff of the low pass filter or in terms of our purposes with the um filter mode on op 6 and that's going to be uh the pitch of op 6 so free slot here source is going to be LFO one again destination will be op 6 pitch and there's our filter wobble as well we probably don't want that on at all times and we probably don't want it going via the mod wheel but we can come and grab it inside the v-patch whenever we need it cool so that i think is most of our um architecture here we have our modulation sources going to the relevant places we have control over the filter and amp and we don't want this going quite as fast at the moment if we want to adjust the filter depth for our um envelope uh we can do it in the v-patch on that second slot there we just lower the intensity it jumps a fair bit but you can hold down shift to do it more granularly if you need to and then this sets our starting cutoff so in terms of finessing this patch a little bit uh what can we do well the first thing that i think might make this sound a little bit sweeter is if we implement some fake oscillator drift a little bit just so that the oscillators between the voices are slightly out of tune with each other just to create a little bit of that richness i think that would be nice um so what i'll do for that is i'll come on to LFO 3 i will set it per voice and i will set the mode to the random level and time set the speed fairly low so we don't really hear the pitch drifting but it just kind of does and then in the v-patch find an empty slot easier but it's one at the end um our source will be LFO 3 destination will be program pitch so that's um the pitch of each uh voice essentially and just turn the intensity up a tiny bit a lot much probably not even that much but more than five percent sort of around there it's just one of those little sweetening things that can just make a little bit of difference and it's enough difference to be worth doing we can set some velocity sensitivity for stuff if we want to the easiest way to do that would be just again if we want to set it for the output level so that's the op 6 level and we can just set the intensity to go via velocity or we want that velocity to be fixed but we want the filter cut off to do that we can do the same which is nice but i guess probably the big thing that's missing if we're trying to make a Juno style synth is we should add some chorus now luckily the op 6 has a uh rather generous selection of effects so if we come into the effects here and would you believe chorus is the default for the first slot anyway so we can turn up that mix hello just slow that down a bit great sorry i just got lost in the patch there a little bit we could add some reverb as well i mean why not while we're here uh let's go smooth and remember it's our single um envelope that's uh giving us all of our envelope movement and also our single LF as well if you want to slow that down cool so uh there we go i've i've got a Juno now um yeah so so the uh user algorithms are really really powerful because you can define this entire um architectures within the op 6 um i will put a link to this patch in the video description as well if you want to download it for your op 6 and have a play with it and refine it if you like because i'm not saying this is perfect you might spot some things that i've missed uh that'll be worth um implementing i'm going to do another video uh looking at um the user algorithms and how we can use it to define different synth architectures um might be the next video i put up it might be a couple of videos time but i'm going to take a look at um putting together a booklet music easel inside the op 6 yes uh because we have wave folders we have fm and we have a way of redefining how all the operators move into each other we can do it i believe in us before we go i just feel duty bound to um to do an arpeggiator patch that just just seems to be a requirement so so we're going let's do a lovely good stuff isn't synthesis fun let's turn down our pitch modulation amount if we're going to have it actually let's just speed up our elephant again anyway um ah synths are good aren't they do you like synths anyway um thank you so much for joining me today i hope you enjoyed that um if you found it interesting or useful then as always if you could leave a uh like uh on the video um and make sure you subscribe to the channel it would be a wonderful thing um i should stop trying to play and talk at the same time um but otherwise um as always thank you so much for joining me and until next time take care enjoy your synths and i will see you next time take care