 Hello OscillatorSync here and welcome to a video in the series where we're building patches from scratch on the Arturia Microfreak. As the name implies the Microfreak can get pretty freaky but today we're going to start with something a little bit more classic and conventional but with a bit of a Microfreak twist and we're going to build a really classic sounding lead sound. Okay let's get to building this patch and we're going to start over in the digital oscillator section so the oscillator on the Microfreak is digital it has a bunch of different modes that you can go through and some of them are fairly basic waveforms some of them are physical modeling there's all sorts of crazy stuff in there but we're going to keep it quite classic so the one that we're going to go over to is this one here called V analog which as the name suggests is virtual analog. Now we've got the wave timbre and shape knobs here and depending on which model we're using these will do different things so let's talk about what they're doing on the V analog so here's the sort of in it patch sounds pretty good there's another there's a couple of other patches other models I should say which have sort of virtual analog feels going to them I like this one probably the best for sort of classic sounds but your knowledge may very feel free to try other ones so the wave knob it controls the detune you might be thinking detune detune with what though well here's the thing this particular oscillator is two oscillators so at the moment they're perfectly in tune but as we move the wave knob start getting a little bit of detune and as we carry on we can get full on intervals and I'm a sucker for that proc rock sound so I'm going to keep with that nice interval there but you know we have sort of fine control within even these intervals so if you want to make it feel a little bit squanky we can do and perhaps we shall okay so that's our sort of basic sound so let's move over to shaping our envelope so the main envelope here which is an attack and then it has a shared decay and release and then a sustain this is what is defaulted to doing the amp envelope so here we are amp mod here it's lit up that means this is going to be doing that so at the moment we've got kind of a more or less an organ kind of attack and release here there we go what I quite like on on these sort of classic lead sounds is for us to have a kind of a kind of a sort of a here we go this is the start of my my sound and then when we play legato I'd like it to sort of hang on to that at the moment we're not getting that that feel now if we turn the glide up a tiny bit you can hear that portamento sound happening but we're still not getting a sort of full legato feel so if we go into the utility menu and we're going to click through to the preset and we're going to scroll down and down what we're looking for is envelope legato and it's turned off by default let's turn it on so what that means now is we can start with that fade up but as long as I play legato it's going to stay where it was stop and play another note we get that ramp up again and that's kind of this kind of okay this run is about to happen and while we're here we should probably maybe give it a little bit of portamento maybe not that long on the attack and let's maybe bring it down over a fairly long time with the decay down to a slightly lower level and because we've got a shared decay and release this has now given us a bit of a longer release perhaps a bit too long gotta find a compromise cool cool cool right let's get to that filter we've got a lovely SAM filter here we're going to give it simple with a low pass filter so let's darken our sound up a little bit that's creamy it's a nice sounding filter on this thing the great thing about this filter and we will have the resonance a bit is that the resonance is kind of subtle but also obvious at the same time it's a great sounding filter great sounding filter lovely okay so let's put the resonance up a little bit so it started a darker point here and then here on our envelope we've got a filter amount control so this means that the envelope it can kind of be hardwired to the filter as well so it's going to follow our ramp so you know kind of got a single envelope architecture on this patch we have got a second envelope which we can use as an envelope but we'll get to that so let's give that a little bit of a tweak here you'll notice that has automatically placed a dot on the mod matrix which is linking the cutoff to the envelope so this is still actually affecting the mod matrix it's just kind of a convenient knob here so let's have a listen okay i want that sweep down a little bit longer maybe a little bit deeper maybe overall we need to be a little darker a little bit more resonant i think we can afford to be slightly darker still yeah that's feeling good nice nice okay so i think what we need to do next because this is a classic kind of lead sound we need to have some vibrato it is mandatory to have vibrato on these kinds of sounds now this means we need to head over to our mod matrix and we have two options for vibrato obviously our destination is going to be pitch so we're going to be on this first column here for pitch but um oh there's a spider crawling around my synth hello friend got one less leg than you should have weird um sorry about that um he's going to the desk where you can live for a bit uh so where was i so we've got two options for our modulation so the classic one as you would imagine really if you wanted to do vibrato would be to use our LFO of course that's you know one of its most common uses really on any synth patch but we're not going to use that today instead we're going to make use of the cycling envelope the cycling envelope can be an envelope or kind of an LFO and it can be sort of moved to do different kind of things so if we just take a look at um the controls that we have here for our cycling envelope we have a rise we have a fall we have a hold and we have an amount so if we look on the screen here if i crank the rise and drop the fall um nice and low what we get is kind of like a ramp wave if i take it the other way and drop the rise down to zero and turn the fall up full we get kind of a sawtooth kind of wave and then if we stick the hold up we can end up with these kind of trapezoid wave shapes which are kind of unlike a lot of wave shapes that you see um so we can use these controls to change the overall shape it does also act as an envelope but today we're going to go with um using it like an LFO so we've got the three modes here which are env run and loop loop or or run in this case would be fine i'm going to go with run today so the mod matrix we're going to put down a dot which is going to be the first one here it's going to link our cycling envelope with our pitch our hit the matrix button and we can now choose an amount now we've also got this amount here this is the reason that i'm using the cycling envelope rather than the LFO but i'll get to that in a second i promise so for the moment if we turn up the amount here on the on the matrix and we we get our shape just right so we want the rise and the fall to be about the same so we get a symmetrical kind of um triangle wave cool okay well we don't want that all the time so what we would usually do on a synth is maybe assign that to a mod wheel where's the mod wheel where's the mod wheel we don't have one um but we have a really neat trick that we could be using on the micro freak which we're going to use now so i'm going to move my um let's go back to where i was perfect so i'm going to move my matrix across to press or pressure so what pressure basically means is that more of my finger being on the key is going to essentially act like a modulation source what i want to do is have it so that when i put more of my finger on the key we get more of a vibrato so how are we going to do that well the first thing i'm going to do is i'm going to turn the amount on my cycling envelope down to zero now that means that despite the fact that i've got my mod matrix doing my um my pitch vibrato going via the cycling envelope if the amount on the cycling envelope is down at zero it ain't moving anywhere so what are we going to do well i'm going to move my um pressure across here to one of these three assignable slots here i'm going to go on the end there so i'm going to hold this button here and i'm going to wiggle the amount you can see here on the screen or i'll just do it again that now says that the amount is assigned to that assignable slot great now i'm going to put as much of my finger as i want onto this key here and now i'm going to turn up the matrix amount which means now i have this ability play with very little of my finger on the key pretty straight maybe maybe a tiny wobble push more of my finger down and we can get a vibrato now the pressure as a source is really really cool and we can do a bunch of other things so the first thing i'm going to do which might strike as a little bit weird i'm going to move my my little dots over so that the pressure is affecting the pitch this is something that i only really got into when i had the microphone that could do it but i've found for me anyway if i start um doing my pitch modulation if i also lower the overall pitch a little bit it just sounds a little bit sweeter you might disagree but turn this out so this is before feels a bit seasick to me if i just drop it a little bit so the overall pitch drops and you're turning up the vibrato i don't know it's subtle but it's one of those things i think is worth doing if you can um i think it is born out of the fact that i'm a guitarist and when you do sort of big bendy vibrato on a guitar you're only ever sending it sharp so i think there's something in my brain that doesn't like vibrato going in both directions so much i don't know i don't know it's weird sounds better to me the other thing that we can do with the pressure is we'll head over to the cut-off and let's when we go in for those vibratos let's just brighten up the um sound a little bit so we'll turn up the amount here a little bit it's way too much so um we should come back over to the digital oscillators because we have these three controls and we only really looked at the detune on the wave timbre and shape allow us to change the shape of the two oscillators which are detuned so let's have a quick play with the shape see if we can find a nicer place so we can find some more harmonic rich areas that's kind of cool i think we can go dark and now we've got a bit more buzz happening maybe have that brighter i'll put a bit more now on the pressure and then timbre here controls um the timbre of the other wave and around here we've kind of got some pulse width modulation going on so let's modulate that pulse width so that's the timbre control we want to control so if we move our mod matrix so that our LFO is controlling our timbre and we'll just turn our LFO speed up a little bit maybe slower so one of the things that we would often get on these sort of patches would be that you want to go brighter in general as you go up and darker as you go down and we can do that that sort of keyboard tracking thing and on mod matrix if we go to the key up um mod slot here and we can apply some of that to the cutoff as we go with the keyboard i think we can have that pressure on the cutoff apply a bit more now as well a bit more resonant i don't know maybe a shorter attack yeah a little bit shorter i'll try just one other thing and that is i wonder what it would be like if our cycling envelope was also doing just a tiny bit of cutoff filter modulation as well yeah that's nice which probably means again if we go back down to the pressure on the cutoff probably don't need to be applying quite so much there now yeah let's add a little bit of reverb or a lot of reverb perhaps we don't need a full octave on the pitch pin so let's just fine tune that while we're here so going into the utility again going into the preset and going down to bend range there and let's drop that just to uh probably a whole tone sounds great down at the bottom there especially with that reverb on now lovely and of course we can go in there we can fine tune things a little bit further as well if we wanted to but i think for now we'll call that a patch so i hope that was interesting and i hope it showed off some of the cool things we can do with the mark freak even in this kind of fairly classic framework if you did enjoy the video then please do give it the old thumbs up and make sure you subscribe to the channel because there'll be more micro freak on the way in the coming weeks until next time thanks for watching see you again soon take care bye