 Hello, Oscillator Sync here and welcome back to another video in the series where we are examining sound design tips and tricks for the Behringer Deep Mind. So today we're going to be talking about the LFO, the Low Frequency Oscillator. For those of you not in the know, the LFO is one of our two main modulation sources that we find across a great many synthesizers, the other one being the Envelope. Now modulation source is just a posh way of saying something which takes hold of one of the knobs or sliders on your synth and moves it for you automatically. In the case of an envelope, it takes you on a journey moving the knob based on when you start pressing the key and then when you release it. The LFO on the other hand takes the slider or knob and sits and moves it in a sicklet fashion like so. Now of course that was me moving it automatically but we can tell an LFO to adjust our filter which gives us tonal movement. We could send it to the pitch of the Oscillators which gives us vibrato and most importantly arguably you can send it to the pulse width modulation if it's available. And ideally you would maybe bring a couple of these different modulations together. It's maybe a bit over the top but you get the idea. So our low frequency oscillators are somewhat in contrast to the other oscillators that we're used to on our synths. The ones that we actually hear, the ones that have a pitch. So the reason that we hear these oscillators as a pitch is because they are moving at a much higher frequency. Anything above about 20 hertz we perceive as a pitched sound rather than being able to hear the actual movement. So here when we introduce our LFOs we can hear that there's an e-wee-wee-wee-wee-wee-wee-wee-wee. We can hear that movement it's not forming a pitch itself. Now as it turns out on a lot of synths our LFOs are somewhat mislabeled because they can actually get above that magic 20 hertz point at which point they are modulating whatever they happen to be modulating at an audio rate and what that means is that it starts to contribute a pitched element to the sound and that can bring about some really interesting textures. So check this out. There's a little bit of pitch modulation there. If we turn up the rate of LFO 1 there's a sweet spot here where suddenly stopping out to hear the fact that it is moving instead it starts to introduce these harmonics and texture. If we turn the pitch mod off that's our sort of basic oscillators and as we turn the pitch mod up with audio rate we start to bring in these harmonics and texture and grit and as we push it things get really really quite strange. To the point where the pitch essentially of the LFO begins to take over now once you've got audio rate modulation there are other parameters that suddenly make differences in ways that they didn't before so at the moment the LFO is set the HFO I feel like is set to a triangle wave with our pitch mod but if we change the wave shape now we introduce different textures. You subtly we can bring in some grit we can do the same thing on our filter modulation so rather than having our whurbs we might use it to bring in really quite crazy sounds. One thing that works really well on the VCF actually is if we change the shape to sample and hold sample and hold when it's very fast is essentially a noise source so we're sending a noise movement to our VCF. I'll turn down the pitch mod you start to get this sort of dusty just use subtly to get some grit like that can be really really interesting. Now the thing is at the moment whatever pitch whatever rate our LFO is set to it's going to contribute that harmonic and so you start to get these sort of clangorous atone-arties which can be fun but check this out so before I play this patch I just want to point a couple of things out to you both of the waves for oscillator one are turned off the level for oscillator two is turned all the way down as is the noise level so in theory when I strike a key we shouldn't be hearing anything and yet so what's happening there so I actually have the LFO routed to the filter cutoff and it's at an audio rate so what you're hearing here is the filter being opened and shut at an audio rate and it's leaving behind this pitched sound but what I was just saying before is that the rate of the LFO is just fixed right it should be just the same pitch across the whole keyboard but listen I can play notes and chords so it turns out that on the deep mind you can couple the rate of your LFOs pretty much perfectly to track across the keyboard and it's real simple to do in the mod matrix all you need to do is set your note number as a source set its depth to 100% and send it to the rate of your LFO and what that will do is it will adjust the rate of the LFO across the keyboard and give you keyboard tracking now the tracking is not perfect I've calibrated the deep mind recently and you can hear that in this octave we're not getting a perfect octave there certainly in the middle here it's pretty much in tune so this gives us a couple of opportunities the first is that we have oscillator sounds that we can't get from the other waveforms this quite sort of dark squiggy waveform that's not a waveform that's usually available to us and of course this has been formed by the audio rate LFO moving the filter around it's introducing lots of artifacts but we can go into our LFO to here and adjust the shape and we get different sounds mellow triangle it's a nice most filtered mellow sawtooth sound what's interesting is that in theory ramp up and ramp down should sound the same audio rate but they really don't I guess because the filter is introducing its own slew and artifacts let me move into our noise there and that's all very well and good but then we can start to bring in our oscillators and have all of this modulation interact we can adjust how much of the LFO is doing its thing changing the resonance is going to give us new sounds and even if we're not messing with our filter cutoff we can also send our keyboard tracked audio rate LFO to the pitch modulation to adjust it slightly bringing again these awesome new textures great does that sound now of course we can make use of our filter as well might even bring in some of our audio rate filter movement as well and again changing the shape of our LFO it's going to give us new and as I say we have to be a little bit careful with the keyboard tracking because it's not spot on but we get all of these beautiful new textures that we can involve in our patches anyway guys I hope that was useful and interesting it's a really really neat trick that I really really like so I hope you can make use of it as well if you did enjoy the video make sure you hit the thumbs up and make sure you subscribe to the channel so you don't miss out on any more deep mind videos and videos on synthesis in general if you're following the channel you would have seen that I have recently got a electron digitone and I'm enjoying it immensely I will be doing some tutorial and other sort of sound design videos on that soon I just really want to make sure that I've dug into it in enough depth so that I can explain things clearly that is coming soon hoping to do a couple more deep-mind videos soon as well other than that guys thanks so much for joining me and watching this video I will see you again soon take care