 Hello, OsladeSync here. A few weeks ago now I posted a jam where I reversed the roles of my two new volkers. The Volcker module was providing percussion sounds whereas the Volcker drum was on melody duties. In that video I asked if people would be interested in some follow-up content talking about some of the ideas I used to put these patterns together. The consensus seemed to be yes, so here we are. I'm going to talk about using the Volcker drum melodically over two videos. This first one that you're watching now will cover the sound design aspects and in the next video we'll look at sequencing and crucially the tricky subject of actually sequencing pitches. For the purposes of this video I'll be making use of my free online editor for the Volcker drum. It just means that it's easy to see all of the sound design parameters at once and it avoids any menu diving. But to be clear everything I do can be done just as well on the Volcker and I'll occasionally jump over to the Volcker if things need clarification. Before we go any further, I know that there will be some people watching who'll be asking a very important question. Why would you even want to use a drum machine to make melodies? For me at least there are three big reasons. The first is that this kind of creative problem solving is fun. I think that in the world of music technology, although a great deal of the enjoyment comes from the music we make there's definitely a ton of fun that comes along with working out the how of it all and this misuse of gear falls into that category. Secondly, the sound. One of the beautiful things about misusing gear is that the sounds and music you uncover will often have a character that you would never have come across with a more conventional approach. If you're a long time subscriber you'll know that I love to turn synths into drum machines and that it always results in textures I'd never be able to get from one of my normal drum machines. Thirdly, I believe that misusing your gear like this helps you gain a deeper understanding of how your gear works. Every time I take on a project like this I come away with ideas and knowledge that I go on to use in other patches or compositions and of course knowing your gear inside out is one of the best known cures for gear acquisition syndrome. So, back to the task at hand. I think that one of the best ways to start thinking about using a drum synth monologically is to flip the question on its head and ask how we make a melodic synth do drum sounds. So taking the monologue as an example, what tricks do we employ to take a melodic sound and make it percussive and really all comes down to extremes of modulation. So, for example, if we wanted to create a kick drum sound there are two extremes that we would introduce. We'd have a pitch envelope that was pretty extreme. We've kind of already got a tom sound there if you like. But then of course we'd also make it fast. So, wide and fast and we'd get that kind of percussive stuff happening. You know, another place where we would use extremes is if we wanted to take a sound like this and make it metallic and sort of clinky, what we would do is we would generally employ quite a lot of extreme frequency modulation. So, both in terms of making it fast and making it wide. And of course the other thing that we would do typically is we'd probably introduce or one of the things we could do is introduce noise to give it that kind of snappy quality which you don't get so much in melodic sounds. So, coming back around to the vocal drum, if we have a percussive sound and we start to take away that extreme modulation we actually end up with a fairly conventional sound and that's because what we have with the vocal drum is actually a fairly conventional synth voice but one that is just sort of set up so that it's quick to get to these kinds of percussive sounds. But that doesn't mean that we can't do more conventional things with it instead. So, let's just quickly talk about the voice architecture. You've got the six parts which would be your six drums normally and each of those parts are made up of two identical layers plus some additional processing out at the end there. So, let's just quickly turn down the level on one of these layers and let's just talk about just this one here. So, what do we have? We start our layer, our voice with a sound source that will either be a sine wave, a saw-ish wave and then you've got three different noise sources each with a different type of filtering. You have a level control for that sound source and then you have a pitch control. The pitch control when you're dealing with one of the pitched sound sources, the sine or the saw-tooth, is pitch as you would expect. When you have it on the noise sources, it's your filter cutoff. And always remember that you do have different flavours of filter. Not necessarily super useful when you're making melodic sounds but definitely when you're making percussive sounds it's worth bearing in mind that you do have those different filter types. I think some people missed that. So, next up you've got a way of modulating that pitch control or filter control depending on what your sound source is. And that can either be an envelope type modulation, an LFO type modulation or a random kind of pseudo-noise source modulation. How much modulation is happening and how fast it's happening is governed by the mod amount and mod rate controls. So, if we go on to the LFO modulation, we'll set the rate low-ish as we turn up the mod amount, we can hear that we've got that pitch modulation and a little goes a long way because it's set up to work best with percussive sounds and you want the extremes there as we discussed. So, even at 13 there, we're already getting very, very C6. So, we have to moderate our use of that a little bit. And then finally, the sound for each layer goes through an envelope generator, the amp EG, which is kind of like our VCA on a sort of conventional synth, if you like. We've got controls for the attack and the release. So, at the moment, the release is nice and long. It can be short and plucky. The attack again can be made much, much longer. And then we have these three different types. So, we have a linear one, which is what we were just on there. We have an exponential, which I quite like for these sorts of sounds. It's kind of this cool sweeping thing. It's also really cool when you're being really plucky. It seems to have a bit more of a natural reaction to the sound. And then the last one here is this really cool one, which is more useful for percussive sounds. This is kind of like a multi-trigger attack. And the way this works is that your release is your release. And your attack governs how many multi-taps and how... Well, not how many there are, but how quickly they happen. And you go quite slow, like that. The other thing that's worth noting about the amp envelope generator is that it is a trigger-based envelope, which means that if I tap it and then I tap it again while it's still happening, the whole thing will restart. I don't need to be holding it down for it to do the whole journey. And if I tap it partway through, it will restart the whole thing. So I've already kind of hinted at the first tip or rule for creating melodic sounds. And that basically is keep things moderate. So for example, let's start with the envelope generator, as we were just talking about it. The attack when it's set really, really low is very, very sudden and clicky. And just softening it a little bit can make things a little bit more sort of natural-sounding. Again, you don't necessarily want very quick releases, something moderate. Although, you know, if you want to get ambient, sure, have it set long. When it comes to the mod amount and moderate, I mean, these are the places where you really do need to be very moderate indeed. So, you know, as we've seen, even as little as sort of 13 on the amount when you're doing a LFO, it's kind of too much to be useful for a lot of sounds. So I find really eight is kind of where things max out for standard sort of things. And similarly with the rate, it doesn't take you long to get into sort of FM sounds, you know, about halfway up on the right here. And we're already into generating additional harmonics, which is useful for other stuff. We'll get to that in just a second. But if you're wanting actual noticeable pitch modulation, you want to be down here in the lower areas. I will say also similarly, right at the bottom, it's really, really slow. So sort of in this sweet spot here, you'll probably find most of your most useful sounds for doing vibrato. So next, let's talk about timbre. So in terms of our sound sources, we have this vibrato for a second, make it a lot less. We've got a boring sign and also sort of boring saw-ish tooth wave. And if we were stuck with just these two variations, and that was all we had, this wouldn't be a very exciting synth. But this is where the processing and the wave shaping really does come into its own. So we have three ways to adjust the timbre of the sound on top of selecting one of the two different sound sources. We have bit reduction, which is sort of the bit crushing kind of thing. This is a lovely way of introducing, I kind of call it glitter. When you do this sort of bit crushing sample rate reduction, you kind of get this glitter to the sound. And not all of it is pretty, and it can get very, very aggressive towards the end. But there are just some bit where you just kind of get a shimmer around the sound. Of course, you're going to get different kinds of variation whether you feed it a sine wave or a saw-tooth wave. It's also worth noting that, as is the case with all of these, when you start to bring in the second layer, you will get different kinds of interactions happening, which can be quite interesting. So yes, anyway, we've got this bit reduction. Of course, if you feed the bit reduction a sine wave and really crank it, you basically get a square wave because you've basically squared off the wave altogether by only having on and off basically in your signal. So next up, we've got the wave folding. This is one of the most interesting ones for me. So this is kind of the West Coast, I guess, if you want to talk about it in that way. A way of generating new harmonics by having the wave fold in back on itself. And there are some really great timbres in here. And again, if you feed in two things at once, I think especially with the fold, the way that things start to interact, it's really interesting. Finally, we've got the drive, just like an overdrive. So it's going to err towards being a square wave if you feed it a sine. Just kind of get more harmonics out with the sawtooth. What's really interesting though is when you start to bring these in together. So for example, if we go back to our sine wave here, if we've got quite a lot of fold going on here and it's introducing a bit too much top end for us maybe, I find that putting a bit of drive in keeps the basic timbre, but maybe we shave some of that off and perhaps then we want to bring in a glitter to it as well. You can also hear how the vibrato is having a more pronounced effect in the bit reduction there. Really interesting. So if you haven't read through the manual or I guess watched a tutorial video, it might not be immediately obvious how to get some of these wave shaping features. It's not too tricky on the Volcker, but it does involve a little bit of menu diving really. So we've got this sound here on part one. So I'm going to go into edit step mode. So this is the mode where you would usually step sequence, but the other thing that you get access to here now is if we use the select param knob, which usually selects your source, modern EEG, you can now scroll through a bit, just a bit crushing fold with your way folding, your drive, which is your overdrive, pan, which is panning obviously, and your dry gain as well. To change the level of these, you want to use the level value here. So it's a bit of a faff now to preview things by tapping it because you're in step mode. So you have to kind of go in and out. All the other thing you can do of course is just set a sequence going with just that part that you're working with. But it is worth exploring because there are some really interesting textures that you can get at in that menu. The other way that we can modify the timbre of our sound, which I kind of hinted at earlier, is through our frequency modulation. So if we have a moderate amount of mod amount and then we bring our moderate up and start to bring this up a little bit, you can hear that we start to introduce sort of bell tones. And as long as we don't push this mod amount too much, we don't seem to push ourselves away from the fundamental pitch. Eventually we will. But there are lots of sweet spots in there. This also sounds great when you start putting in the other processing. So let's talk richness. How can we make our sounds richer? So here I've got kind of a start of a pad sound. So that's just one layer. I've got the second layer tuned roughly an octave above. And of course the fact that it's roughly an octave above is the first place where we can get some of our richness by having things slightly detuned away from each other. We get that kind of beating happening against the frequencies. But it's still not super interesting. But one thing we can do of course to introduce further frequency interaction and therefore richness between the two parts of the sound is we can add a little bit of LFO modulation. So just a little bit maybe, we'll try five and minus five. The mod amount is bipolar so you can make it go up or down to begin with. So now you can hear that we've got a little bit more warbling between them. But if we want to get really, really thick and interesting, down on part four here I've got basically the same sound duplicated possibly with some different notes in. So I'll just unmute that. And let's have a listen to both of those together if I play parts three and four together. Let's just match up the envelopes there, let's try that again. Pretty nice, pretty nice, but what can make it particularly big is if we actually pan these two parts left and right. So 75, 75, either way. So not hard left and right because it sounds a bit weird, but that's quite nice. But this is still not quite there. I want it bigger, more ambient, more frequency interaction happening. How can we do that? Well, we can do that by introducing ambience. And this is a great time to talk about the wave guide. So every part has a send amount for the wave guide. I'm just going to put that to about halfway-ish on both of those two parts there. And down at the bottom here in the editor we've got controls over the wave guide. Now the wave guide essentially is, it sounds like it's emulating strings and tubes, it sounds like it's kind of a reverb-y kind of thing, but ultimately it's based around delays. And the really interesting thing with the wave guide is if you set the tune low, you do literally just get a delay, and that can sound... You can hear there that we've got a delay rather than a reverb. And on these sort of longer sounds, because you're then getting stuff sort of laying over the top of each other, that can be really interesting, maybe a bit faster. And of course as you bring the tune up, you do get into more of a reverb place, which can also add quite a lot of nice warmth resonance to a sound. So lastly I'd like to talk about timbre or change over time, what would usually be associated with, say, a filter envelope. Now one would have hoped that if we increased, say, the file or the drive, and over time with an envelope going, we'd maybe hear quite a pronounced change in timbre, but it doesn't seem to be the case. This stuff seems to be happening early on. I'm not quite sure of the architecture, but there's not an obvious change in timbre as it also fades out. And it's the same with the drive and the bit reduction. The levels of the actual sound sources don't seem to have a whole lot of change of the timbre over time, which is a shame. So what can we do if we want to, say, emulate a filter cutoff thing? Well, one thing that I've been doing is I've been using a sine wave on one layer and a saw on the other. Now that isn't obviously given us a filter cutoff, but one way that you can approximate this is by having the sawtooth layer fade out sooner than the sine. So you can hear that we've got a richer attack and then a more sort of fundamental decay. This is emphasised, I find, if you use a bit of wave folding. So although we don't have a conventional filter or even a conventional way of altering the timbre over time based on how it's feeding into the other processes, certainly with a little bit of thought, we can at least get to a situation where the richness of the sound, the harmonic content of the sound is changing over time. And of course it doesn't have to be this way round. We can have the richer sound come in afterwards. Again, this is definitely emphasised when we're using the fold and the drive. Or we can have a longer, rich sound and have the fundamentals swoop in a bit more afterwards. Like that, for example. That could be quite interesting if we used the multi. Almost like there's a pulsing LFO underneath there. So anyway, I hope that was interesting and has maybe given you some ideas of parts of the vulgar drum that you can explore further. As I said at the start, this is the first of two videos and in the next video we'll talk about sequencing melodic parts on the vulgar drum and especially the issue of how to pitch the sounds. As always, thank you so much for joining me. Take care and I'll see you again soon. Bye-bye.