 Hello, Oslo here to sync here, and welcome to the series where we are building patches from scratch on the mighty Arturia Mini Brute 2. So I think it's an inevitability that the first episode in this series is going to be about building a bass sound. I'm a simple man. I get a new mono synth. I build a bass patch. That's just the way it is. So before we start to give some context to the kind of patch that we're going to aim for here, the Mini Brute is pretty versatile, but it does kind of like to be mean, so I'm going to lean into the meanness on this patch and get something hopefully pretty evil sounding, kind of an evil sounding bass. We might look at a more classic sounding bass on another video, but I figured, you know, let's play to the strengths here and get something that's pretty evil sounding. With that said, let's get evil. So we've just got our sawtooth wave here. My plan is kind of to get the character of the oscillators happening in VCO1 and then use VCO2 just as a sub-oscillator to give us a little bit more weight and donk at the bottom end. So I think what I'll do is I'll try and set up the general character of the sound first and then we'll start looking at envelopes and getting some movement in there. So I think in the VCO1 we're going to make use primarily of the sawtooth and the square wave and then we're going to introduce the ultrasonic saw and the pulse width modulation to get some additional flavour in there. So let's mix in these two oscillators. So obviously the square wave is a little bit more weighty. We'll get a bit more mid-range from the sawtooth there. So let's get our modulation in here. So we'll start with the PWM. Definitely a sweet spot in the middle there, isn't it? I'll just turn it down for a second. Here's our sawtooth wave and we've got our ultrasonic amount here. Ultrasonic is kind of like PWM but for the sawtooth wave. Here it kind of brings in this sort of chorusing. So by default the PWM is controlled by LFO1 and Ultrasonic is controlled by LFO2. We can override those on the patch rate and I might do if I need one of these LFOs to do something different. At the moment the two of them are at slightly different speeds and when we mix them together it's quite characterful. I'm tempted to bring it in the triangle wave because that's going to give us some more bottom end. But I might add the sub in first and make that decision based on whether I think I need a bit more fundamental happening. So oscillator 2 let's bring that in. At the moment that's in unison. Great sounding, it's not quite in tune so we're getting just that extra sort of wobble and chorusing. But I want to put it an octave down so I'll just tune it, I tend to find it easier to tune on higher notes. Can't quite get there in the fine mode so we're going to switch over to all which gives us a much wider range. I have to make smaller movements as a result but about there. We're on a square wave on here at the moment. Thought about sine but that's sort of pure fundamental and I don't think it adds as much meanness to that. Nice. So let's make that decision about the triangle wave and perhaps we can balance the triangle wave in oscillator 2 a little bit. I'm in two minds, it does have a load of fundamental which is just cool for the bass. But it's also kind of robinous of some of our character I think. There's a spot sort of half way up if you listen carefully on good headphones or monitors where you kind of get that proper bottom end happening. And I'll just try and get it just on that bit so it's kind of doing its job but not taking away the character as much. Here it's just there, the fundamental just pops a little bit. Okay that's cool and buzzy, sounding pretty evil already. But let's get over to the filter and try and get things a bit darker. So we're on the low pass filter here. What's really cool about this filter, I think it's a Steiner Parker filter, is that we can bring in the resonance and it doesn't eat all of the bottom end. If anything actually with the cutoff low it adds to it. Just get that kind of ripping mid-range thing happening. Push it too far but just on the cusp it's that mid-range like mmm, love it. Okay good, now although this is in the amp filter, the amp section sorry, the Brute Factor is definitely something which interacts really strongly with the filter. So the Brute Factor is this thing on the Brute series which basically a feedback loop back in. It's kind of like the classic taking the output from a headphone out and back into the external input on some synths. I think the MS-20 is the one place where it's sort of famously that's done. On the MiniBrute 2 editions they've tamed the Brute Factor a little bit so that you've got a bit more nuance to what it can do. Because I think on the original ones it could get a bit overbearing pretty quickly. But what we can do here is there's certainly in the first half of the sweep you'll hear that there's just extra saturation and it actually brings in an extra bottom end if we have the cutoff set like so. Can you hear that? It does dull the top end a little bit but that is cool sounding now. Okay so we're getting a little bit of clickiness so that's going to be mostly coming from the AD envelope which is currently controlling the VCA, the output VCA that is. We can probably leave that just by giving it a little bit of attack and decay. It's gone. If you hear people complaining about clicky envelopes what they're often complaining about is fast envelopes and if you just move the attack and decay a little bit then that really does help us out. We're currently on gate mode on the AD envelope which means that as long as I'm holding down the note this will stay fully open. If we go to trig it's going to open and close really quickly. Or lock quickly. This might be an interesting way to play it. Yeah, perhaps we'll have that decay a bit longer here. Okay let's get a bit of movement happening now. I think we need to have a bit of an attack to this sound. Do we want a plucky attack? Do we want it sort of one pin? Let's try those two options and see which one we like shall we? So a sort of an attacky plucky envelope we would define on the ADSR. So by default the FM amount for the cutoff so that's how our filter movement is coming from the ADSR. We can obviously override that on the patchpad if we want. So let's try plucky envelope. So plucky envelope, instant attack, quick decay so low but not instant and low sustain. That's pretty cool. What if we have something which moves a lot slower? So if we have our attack and decay kind of a bit higher that's going to ramp up slowly, ramp down slowly and land on the sustain. And we'll also have the release set as long as the decay so that we sort of have parity if we play staccato. Wow, in two minds. Oh man, I know which one I want. That's really cool for gato playing. Yeah, okay, okay, okay, that's... Yeah, I think I want it long like that. I want to get some more movement in there now. I want to hear the filter rubbing now, right? Because that would be really cool. So how are we going to do that? So FM here is being controlled by the ADSR, but I want to get the filter moving the envelope... Sorry, let me start that again. I want to get the LFO moving the filter cutoff as well as the ADSR. So I don't want to override what this is doing. I want to add to it. And luckily what we've got here is this at one to cut off knob. Now what this does is it allows you to mix another control voltage source. Kind of into the filter. So this allows us to have the cutoff move more and more depending on how we set this up. So at the moment it's set to pressure. So if I turn this up, now it allows me to push harder to get that to open up, which is cool actually. It's not quite what I want. I want it automated. So basically what this means is we can put any modulation source into the patch point associated with this control and then use this to have an essentially additional FM control if you like on top of this one here. So what we'll do is we'll take LFO 2 and bring that into the input for that attenuator, which is down here. So in one attenuator. Now if we turn that up, we've got it controlled by our LFO here. Faster than that, that's pretty cool. I kind of want that to fade in a bit. Could we achieve that? I think we could. Right. Now I don't know if this will work. I haven't actually tried this yet. So I don't want that to be happening the whole time. I kind of want that wobble wobble wobble wobble to fade in as the filter comes up. So essentially I want the strength of that to be following the ADSR envelope. Can we do that? I believe we can. Shall we find out? So let's take the output from LFO 2 and instead take it into this VCA input here. And then we're going to take the output and put that back into the attenuator like that. We should basically have the same thing happening as we had before. Cool. So what the VCA allows us to do is also have the amount that this is sort of letting through. You can kind of think of it like a valve if you like. And we can control that valve using another CV source. So if we take the output of the ADSR and put it into the CV input of our VCA hopefully... So our LFO is doing more as that envelope opens up. Which kind of makes me feel like I'm able to push the amount that it's doing because it was at the start of the note where it felt like it was getting in the way. Yeah, that's cool. That's cool. So what we've done here essentially is we've added what you might call an LFO delay on some sense where you have kind of a ramping LFO happening. We can achieve that by making use of our envelopes, the VCA and the LFO output. So that's pretty cool. So I think we're nearly there, but I've just thought of one more way that we can make this a little bit more evil and angry. It's really easy. We just have to turn on the knob and don't have to patch anything else in. On the VCO 1 section here we have an FM knob. Now you might think FM or that's usually assigned to an LFO or something to get sort of vibrato. But actually on the MiniBrute 2 it's hardwired into the output of VCO 2 which of course is audio rate or isn't in our patch at the moment anyway. So this is audio rate FM and it's exponential FM which can get pretty unruly if we crank that control. But there's probably, if we're careful, a sweet spot where actually what we get is just additional harmonics happening which could be very, very cool. Let's check it out. So yeah, pretty much smack man in the middle there. We get like a really cool extra bit of sort of harmonic. So there's it off. Here there's just this extra grit. If we push it like almost a millimetre further, immediately we get into weird, not unusable, but in the context of this patch. Okay, that's pretty much done except like this is the kind of patch where I want to add some reverb. So I'm just going to reach across and turn on my Polara which this is plugged into. Just see how that sounds. Bring setting. Let's try Hall Pubs. Okay, there we go. That is at the patch. It is an evil bass sound. It's probably not a conventional classic bass sound. So I'll do another video with one of those in. But it's certainly a fun one especially once we put that reverb on at the end. And we've seen some interesting stuff here. So we've got this idea of the LFO decay delay rather by using the LFO output into the VCA and then controlling that VCA with another modulation source. That's really quite an neat little trick that I quite like. And we've also looked at how we can use the FM to get an additional grit. We've looked at the brute factor and how much more nuanced it is on this version of the mini-brute than it was on the previous version. We've brought together multiple modulation sources into the filter to get lots of movement out of there. Yeah, so quite an interesting patch. Not a general use bass patch perhaps, but I think it's quite a nice sound. A nice sound. It's an evil sound. It's a nasty sound. But nasty in a good way. Anyway guys, thank you so much for joining me. I hope that you enjoyed that. If you did please leave a thumbs up on the video and make sure you subscribe to the channel. We will be coming back to the mini-brute quite a lot over the coming weeks because it's ace. As always, thank you so much for joining me guys. Take care and I will see you again soon. Bye bye.