 Hello, Oslater Sync here. Towards the end of last year, I posted a few jam videos using the deep mind that I described as being generative. I've had a number of questions both about what that means and how I put the patches in those videos together. So let's have a look at that today. For a long-form discussion of generative patches, I can think a few better videos to suggest than Mylar Melody's excellent video on the subject. I'll put the link in the description. But put briefly, a generative patch is one where the synth seems to make its own decisions about the music, whether that's the notes that are played, the rhythm and the articulation of those notes, the timbre of those sounds being played, or any combination thereof. Of course, until our synths come equipped with their own artificial intelligence built in, we're not actually talking about the synth making decisions per se. Rather, a combination of sources of randomness and a network of modulation, where we're not just modulating the voices of the synth, but also modulating the modulation itself, all come together to give the illusion that the synth has a life and will of its own. As the synth assist, composer and performer, our job is to set and adjust the parameters of the patch throughout the performance, so that the synth tends towards creating the music that we want to hear. We're not talking about pure randomness here. Instead, we're setting up a framework for music to happen in, like setting up a jam session with your synth. Typically, generative patches are found more in the modular world. The flexibility of how you can control the minutiae of every parameter of the patch, patching LFOs into LFOs, triggering envelopes in non-standard ways, lends itself to these kind of ideas. But the DeepMind also offers a huge amount of fine control over every aspect of the synth, as a very comprehensive modulation matrix that allows us to set up complex patches. So let's see what we can build. Okay, let's start at the initialised patch here. What I'm going to show here is just one of many different ways we could put together a generative patch. And what I'm hoping is that at lots of different points, you will look at what we're doing and think, oh, I wonder what would happen when, I wonder what would happen if. And those would be the interesting places where you can take your patches. But this is just kind of one potential way that you could put together a generative patch. Okay, so let's start by talking about what's going to be generative and what's going to be kind of led by the performer. In this patch, as with the patches in the jams, I'm going to choose the notes. But everything else, the rhythm, the timbre, the articulation, we will be allowing the patch to decide upon. So let's start by getting the notes playing kind of when they want to, as it were. So the envelope, which is responsible for sort of when the notes are playing, if you like, is the VCA. That is literally the volume envelope, so that is when we actually hear the sounds. So let's just start by getting a slightly more plucky kind of sound here. So I'll just set the sustain to zero. I'll just have the release and the decay more or less at the same place. We'll play with that a little bit as we go along, but that's kind of our starting point. Now, up here on the VCA menu page, you can see where it says VCA N for Trigger, and it says Key. That means that the envelope is triggering when you play a key, which is the default behavior. What's interesting is that that is not the only behavior on the DeepMind, and actually we can adjust how this is happening, and this is how we're going to get our variation in our sound in terms of when things are being played. So there are a bunch of options here. You can have it loop like that. We can have it fire off with the sequence of what I'm going to do is set it to LFO 1, and what this means is that it will fire every time LFO 1 kind of goes high and starts its cycle again. So because we've got LFO 1 set so slow at the moment, we're not hearing a bit if we adjust the rate of LFO 1. We can hear what we've basically got like an arpeggiator, because all of the LFOs aren't currently in phase. We've kind of got this fine arpeggiator thing going on, but it's not super interesting because it's the same rhythm over and over again. So let's think about what we can do to adjust those rhythms. So what we're going to do is we're going to introduce our first source of randomness. We're going to do that by going into the LFO here, and we're going to set its type to sample and hold. So this is a random source which is getting sampled based on the rate of the LFO, and then that is when we're getting our source of randomness. Now at the moment, that still sounds like it's this regular thing, and that's because it is. So what we're going to do is quite cunning, I think. I'm going to head into the modulation matrix and we're going to set up our first bit of modulation, and this is a bit of a weird one, but trust me. What I'm going to do is I'm going to use the source of LFO 1, which is our stepped random source here, and then the destination I'm going to set to LFO 1 rate. So what I'm saying is that I want the random source in LFO 1 to be randomly changing the rate of LFO 1, so we've kind of got this feedback loop happening here. Because all of the different LFOs are out of phase, if I introduce the depth to this, we start getting these new rhythms happening. Now, one thing that I'm going to do now just to make my life a little bit easier is I'm going to make use of the hold functionality, which basically means if I turn the hold function on and I play some notes, and then I release, they'll carry on playing, which is just going to save me a hand, basically. So we've got this sort of movement going on here. Let's have a think about our VCA here. So I'm going to just make it a little bit longer here, and then I can the filter for a moment here. Okay, so at the moment we've got sort of this random rhythm happening here, but it's the same kind of style of note each time. So let's start bringing in some of the different sort of articulation that we can do here. So I'm going to introduce our second source of randomness here. I'm going to head into LFO 2, and I'm going to set it to sampling hold as well. Maybe sampling glide, should we try sampling glide? So this is rather being stepped, it's kind of swooping between different areas. I'm just going to increase this right a little bit. Okay, then we go into the mod matrix here, and I'm going to use my source of LFO 2. There we go. And the destination, I'm going to send it to the rate of decay on envelope 1. If I can find it, there we go. You can hear now that some of our notes are held up longer and some of them are much shorter. So we might try, let's try just envelope 1 rate. Okay, that's interesting because now we've got some variation in the start of the note as well. So some of them are being plucky, and some of them are being swooped in a little bit. Should we try different chords perhaps? Okay, so now usually with the VCF we might be introducing some timbre movement by having the envelope swoop our VCF around. Again by default if we go into the envelope here for the VCF, we've got the trigger being key. But let's instead of having the key there, use LFO 2, which means that we've now got two envelopes on the go. We've got our VCA one, which has given us our volume, and then within that swoop we're occasionally getting these extra little pings coming from our VCF. So okay, let's set something quite plucky here. Okay, so at the moment this is happening quite regularly, that's because again LFO 2 is at a fixed rate. So let's head into our Mod Matrix and let's do that same trick where we use our feedback of LFO 2 into its own rate. Let's try that, that'll only get quite interesting. This is all happening in mono at the moment, so I'm going to head into the VCA menu here and I'm just going to go to pan spread and let's spread this out a bit. Should we turn the boost on? Yeah. Okay, so we're starting to get this feeling happening here. So let's try and introduce some more timbral movement. So one bit of timbral movement we could introduce could we be by bringing in oscillator 2 a bit? Okay, so let's have oscillator 2 move about a bit so we could either use sync and use it to get timbral sounds. Yeah, let's try that. Okay, so we'll turn on sync on oscillator 2 and the way that we introduce different timbral movements would be by making use of the pitch. So we could head into the edit menu for oscillator 2 and we're going to set the pitch modulation source to our swooping random source, LFO 2. And if we turn up the pitch mod and because it's a swooping thing happening here, occasionally you get those little vocal huayongs happening. Which is cool. I like that a lot. Like that. So another way we can get oscillator 2 getting different sounds of course is by using its tone mod here. So if we go down to the tone mod source here and let's set that to LFO 1, the one that is getting sort of changed in time with our VCA. Maybe get some of that happening as well. We'll just turn down LFO 1 a little bit. Okay, perhaps we could also get our filter, our VCF, moving a little bit as well. And we're doing a lot of this without having to actually touch our mod matrix because of the level of control that we have here. So let's set the LFO for the VCF to LFO 1 as well. Now usually I'd leave this sort of thing to the end but this is now crying out for some effects I think. So let's add some. So I'm going to go into the effects menu. I'm going to change the algorithm so that we have two lanes of effects here like this. And in slots, let's say slot 1, let's put some delay shall we. So I'm going to go across and find just the straight up delay here. And I'm going to its settings here and in the setting here I'm going to switch it over to ping pong. And then I'm going to change the factor of the left and right so that we have some more interesting. Okay so it's a little bit of loco here so it's not quite as much bottom end happening. And maybe a little bit of high curse as well so it sits back in the background a bit more feedback. Okay and then let's add some reverb as well while we're here. So I'm going to add a reverb in slot 3. I'm going to use the plate reverb because I just like it a lot. And we'll just reduce the level of some of this stuff. Let's try a different chord. Just going to slow this delay down a bit I think. Okay let's get a bit more timing stuff going in here. So at the moment our VCF envelope is just the same thing over and over again. So let's introduce some randomness into that so perhaps we can do that in a similar way here where we had. LFO 2 adjusting the rates of envelope 1 we can use maybe LFO 1 this time to adjust the rates. These little vocal things that keep popping out of that. Okay so we still have one envelope left our mod envelope here. Let's set this to loop and then use it to modulate something else. So it's like acting as an LFO. So if we set this to loop I'm going to set it into a shape. And then maybe we can use this to just maybe gently undulate the fine tune of oscillator 1. So we get some sort of slight dis... Or maybe the pulse width modulation. Let's try the pulse width modulation shall we? So if we come into the oscillator 1 parameters here. And we're looking for the pulse width modulation source and we'll set that to envelope 3. So although usually an envelope it's now going to act as an LFO essentially. I'll bring this up. Of course any time you bring in pulse width modulation it's going to sound better. Let's just hear that on its own but turn off that nice rate. Okay let's get the envelope here sort of changing speed a little bit. So come into our... Actually I'll maybe do that if we've got one spare. Actually we'll come back to that. So let's get a bit more sort of unpredictability into this patch. So in the poly menu here we're just going to head into the oscillator drift. I'm just going to set that to 25 arbitrarily. Just because I know that usually sounds really good. And we'll also introduce some parameter drift as well. So that'll be affecting other things which will make things a little less stable. Another chord. Let's try something like that. So what else can we do? We can make use of the resonance bit more perhaps. So let's maybe head into the modulation matrix here. And let's use LFO to our swooping random source to affect the VCF resonance there. Let's try some lower notes shall we? Pretty stuff over the top and then this other stuff. Yeah that's nice. Okay what about us? Our noise here. I think noise can be a really interesting thing to some time. A thing to sometimes pop out. So let's use LFO 1 so that it's sort of per note a little bit. And we'll set our destination as the noise level. And give that to modulation some depth. Okay one thing that I did in one of the jams that I posted. I think for jammuary rather than one of the original jams I did. It's like experimenting with the idea of having distortion after the reverb which was kind of cool. So let's just try that again here. And to head across here I'm going to use the rack amp here. It just brings in this really cool resonance to it. It might not be for everyone but I love that so much. So let's just drop that level down a little bit so it's not dominating so much. And perhaps this is going to be something that we don't have every time. So perhaps we can actually use one of our random sources to control the level or the distortion perhaps here or maybe one of the EQs. Yes maybe the drive here. For FX4. It's a bit sudden perhaps we'll try LFO 2 instead. Now and again you just get that blast of distortion. Let's head into here and let's stick the moving filter after our delay. Maybe before it. We'll move that delay down, put the filter before it which is called the move. So this is like a digital filter that has various different settings. At the moment it's set to just modulate I think slowly. We've still got something in our modulation matrix left. So what we could do here is we could try and introduce more randomness to an element of what we're doing here. So at the moment we've got LFO only affecting LFO 1 and LFO 2 only affecting LFO 2. So we can introduce LFO 1 to affect LFO 2's rate and then we'll just introduce even more randomness the other way around. Let's use LFO 2 or LFO 1's rate. Quite pretty up at the top isn't it? And now we've got our modulation matrix set up in the patch basically working for us. We can start experimenting and seeing what we can do to get more of what we want both in terms of what's on the front panel and also with our modulation matrix. So perhaps we want to get more of those to let's turn up this modulation here which is affecting LFO 1's rates. And perhaps we want more of those little pings that were coming from the VCF so it could turn up the rate of LFO 2. Perhaps we want to maybe get darker in general so we can bring down blasts with the drive on the reverb. Ah man! And if we want to get more notes happening overall we can turn up the rate of LFO 1. We want it to be sparse so we can bring that down. More of those sweeps because of LFO 2 sweeping in and out. And that's nice. Oh slightly more happening. So that's coming from LFO 2 happening to fire off really rapidly suddenly. It's an interesting one with LFO 2 set. Fast and LFO 1 slow. And remember that distortion is just on the reverb it's not the actual sound. It's just why it's the aura which is getting sort of getting a little bit more weird detune these things happening. So we'll turn up the drifts. And you can see how one might get lost hours and hours in these sorts of patches. And if I don't choose to stop now then we'll never finish. And I hope that you also find time to get lost in patches like this. Because I've found this aspect of the deep mind very satisfying indeed I have to say. But yeah we've hit half an hour so I'm going to call it a patch there. Thank you so much for joining me on this exploration. I'm sorry if there were long periods of time where I was just sat listening to the patch. I honestly don't know I might have zoned out for great big chunks of time. But if you have any questions about patches of this type then obviously feel free to ask them in the comments below. If you make your own generative patches I would love to hear them. If you've made it to the end of this patch then I can only assume that you like these kind of sounds. And if you do then you might be interested to know that I put out the generative jams from the end of last year as an EP. It's free to download if you want to download it and if you want to pay for it then it's a way of showing your support for the channel. But absolutely do not feel like that is something that you need to do. You are absolutely welcome to it as a freebie. That's nice. Sorry. Anyway, thanks so much for joining me guys. I will see you again soon. Take care.