 Hello, I'll say to sync here, or maybe that should be operator sync, because this is the first video in the series where we'll be building patches from scratch on the Korg Opsix. I'm really, really excited to bring this synth to the channel because I've been playing with it for a few weeks and it really is a sound design playground and there's so much to talk about. And to that end, alongside the sort of patch from scratch videos, I'll also be putting out a series of sort of in-depth looks at some of the features of the synth and looking at how we can use them creatively and musically. Now obviously, me being me, I've sat and I've made patches that do sort of like auto-generated melodies and grooves. I've been doing stuff like trying to recreate the architecture of a buckler music easel to create sort of crawl patches, made weird for voting drones and the like. And we will get to all of this kind of stuff, believe me, because there's some really interesting stuff happening beneath the surface on this synth. But this is a new PolySynth to the channel and has been established if I don't start by making a nice pad, the synth police will come and arrest me. So that is what we will be doing today. So as to the kind of pad that I want to make today, I'm not going to do anything sort of super, super ambient in this case. We will definitely do one of those in a later video, obviously. Instead, I want to go for something that's sort of a bit nostalgic, a little bit retro, warm, fuzzy, dare I say a little bit lo-fi, I'm thinking the pink and yellow neon lights aesthetic may be going on here in our future a little bit. And I'll also set a couple of ground rules, not really rules, but just some guidelines that I'm going to go for with this patch. So the dirty secret of the op six is that it's not really an FM synth or rather it is an FM synth, but it doesn't have to be. It can do so many other forms of synthesis, which we will get to on the channel takes a deep dose into that. But for this patch, I'm going to concentrate on FM for the sake of familiarity and also in terms of the wave shapes that I'll be using in the operators, I'm going to stick with sine waves as well. But other than that, we'll explore the synth and see what we can create. Right, so let's jump in and start thinking about the patch. So with any FM setup, often what will dictate the shape of the patch if you like is thinking about what algorithm we're going to use, what arrangement of operators or rather another way to look at is think about what you're trying to achieve and then choose an algorithm that is going to work with that. So what I'm going to try and emulate here in an FM world is the idea of like a three oscillator polysynth. So what we need is an algorithm which has three carriers at the bottom for our output. And I'm going to go with to make sure on the algorithm page. And I go with my old standby of algorithm five, which essentially gives us three two op FM voices. So three carriers each with a single modulator feeding into them. At the moment, we're just on listening to the one operator there. And each of these separate operators have their own modulator that we can work with. So I think the way that I'm going to work in order to get this patch is I'm going to concentrate to begin with just with operator one and two. So what would be our single oscillator to begin with? We'll get that doing something that works for us. And then I will copy that across to operator three and four and maybe just tweak it a bit, detune it a little bit to get a bit of thickness to get that sort of base sound to what we're working with. And then I'll save operator five and six to do something maybe a little more creative on top of that. So let's just bring up our outputs of our first carrier. First thing we probably want to look at is getting a more paddy kind of envelope to it. So what I'll do is I'll make sure that I am on operator one here, which I am. And I'll go into the level envelope generator page here. And first page here, we have an envelope. So let's give ourselves a longer attack. Don't just be like super long. Something like that would be fine. What do we think about that? I think that decay could be a little bit longer, though. And maybe go a slightly bit lower. Yep, OK, like that. And give it a little bit more of a luxurious release. And there's a certain beauty just to sine waves isn't there sometimes, which reminds me. So if we head into our mode page, we're not going to be messing with the the different operator mode today. But and I did say I was going to stick with a sine wave. But if we go into our wave shape selector here, we can see that we do actually have three different flavors of sine. We have a high definition sine, which is what we're on at the moment. We then have a 12 bit sign, which is a bit more DX7-esque. It's a subtle difference, but there's just a little bit more sort of fluff around it. And if we want to get even more fluffy, we have an 8 bit. And hopefully the YouTube audio compression won't mess with that. But you can hear that there's a definite almost hiss to the sound there, which is probably a bit too much for what we were looking at here. But I'll go with the 12 bit instead. Just a little bit more grit. OK, so now let's think about bringing in our first modulator. So we don't want to push it really, really hard with this, because you don't want things getting too too harsh. We'll also need to adjust that envelope. But let's have a look at our ratio here, because with FM, what defines the tower of our carrier is the level of modulator that's going into it and then the ratio of the frequencies. So we'll stick with something that's a fairly simple ratio. So we want one at the moment, which has this kind of vibe. What about one to two? Kind of hollows things out and gives us like a sort of square wave, reedy kind of vibe. That's kind of cool. Let's try halving the ratio. I like that. I like that a lot. I don't like the fact that we're dropping down an octave. So what I will do rather than having this at one and this at a half, I'll set this at two and this one at one, which will achieve the same thing. OK, that basic tonality is interesting, especially because when we have it lower, we lose what is sort of our new fundamental. And we can push this one quite high without it getting overbearing. So let's think about our envelope. So, so make sure that we were on operator two. Now we'll go into our level EG here. Obviously, we get probably going to want it to fade in. Let's try that. Do you know what? Maybe not. Maybe we want to start it with that lower stuff happening and then we'll have a longer decay coming down to a sustained level where we're almost starting to lose that fundamental and a longer release. It kind of feels like it's moving a little bit to suddenly towards the end there. And that's probably because the curve currently is nearly exponential. So let's start that back so that our level envelope is linear instead and see how that changes the sound of that sort of last bit of the decay. Yeah, that sounds more natural to me. Cool, that's maybe slightly less. And it's extremity. OK, yeah, I'm feeling that now. So let's think about how we can make this a little bit richer. So the first thing we can do, maybe with our modulators, go into our pitch control here and we can either detune or offset our frequency here to get a little bit of wobble to it, just slightly less. This is the thing with FM, you always end up starting out with too much modulation and then just dialing it back to get it to sit a bit better. OK, yeah, I like that. That's cool. So the next thing I want to address is just making sure that this patch is playable. And what I mean by that is that it responds nicely under the fingers to velocity. So the first thing we want to do is probably come back to operator one and come into our level here and go into the second page. It's on the second page, the third page even. And here we're able to adjust how much the velocity is going to affect the level of the carrier, which is going to be our volume. So. Generally, as a rule of thumb, I found that something around sort of twenty five thirty works well for this. So now if I play lightly as opposed to if I play hard, a little bit more difference there. So if I play lightly, if I play hard, things around there is going to work. And then if we go into operator two, we can do a similar thing so that we get more of the modulator, given our modulation, more richness to our sound, the harder we play. So again, I'll start around 30. So I play lightly, some mellow, play harder, a bit more to it. Maybe a little bit higher than that, maybe up the maximum. So lightly and hard, maybe a bit more lightly and hard. Cool. Yeah, that's that's working OK. So I think that's probably a good starting point. So what I want to do now is replicate this across to the next two operators. Now, this could be a laborious task where I have to do everything by hand. Luckily, Cork have thought about this and made it easy for me to copy these things across. So if I go into my miscellaneous menu here and I come down to the uputil page here, we can copy either the holder of the operator, just the envelope generator or just the key tracking from one operator to another. So I'm going to go just going to save first in case I've messed up patches by copying to the wrong place. So that's maybe parallel. So we're going to go from one to three. So from our first carrier to a second carrier and we'll say yes. And then we want to go from two to four. So from our first modulator to our second modulator, press yes. And there we go. And then if I bring these up to similar levels, it shouldn't sound very different at all because they're both doing exactly the same thing at the moment. So let's address that. So if I come back to the pitch and we're going to go over to operator one, and I'm just going to detune it a little bit, like maybe four or something. And then we'll come across to operator three, which is our second carrier and we'll detune it up three and we should get a richer sound. OK, OK, that's that's a good start. So let's take a look how we can get some additional sort of differences between these two oscillators, if you like, in our synth voice. So the first thing is that I might take operator three and maybe try a different set of ratios. Perhaps I'll drop this one back down to one and maybe try one to one ratio for that voice. So listen, maybe even a one to two. Yeah, I like that. OK, so I now think that the decay on our modulators is probably a little bit slow. So that's good to number two and in here, and we'll just maybe from five seconds down to three and a half or something. I want to do the same on this one as well. Cool. Now, I think I also want to get a little bit more attitude out of these these two voices. So there's a number of ways we can we can think about that. So the first and easiest way, and this is one of the great things about the up six over, say, a traditional DX seven set up is that in the up six, every single operator has feedback rather than having the one piece of feedback per algorithm. So if we come over to operator one, we come into the mode here because we're in FM mode, we have access to feedback control. So let's just bring that up a little bit. We don't want it to get clangy or anything. We just want to give it a little bit more attitude. Just drop up three down for a second. You can hear just a little bit of extra harmonics, a little bit more attitude in there, which I do like. And we'll do the same on operator three. Oops, I always forget to change operators a bit much there. And together, a little bit brassier. I wonder also if we can detune them a little bit more. Six and a half instead. Yeah, that's getting somewhere. So the other thing that's in this mode control here is that we have this width control. And perhaps I'll just show you on the spare operator that I haven't done anything to yet. So if we come across to operator five. So we've got the width control here. So just on a sine wave. You can hear that we're getting almost like a pulse with modulation vibe to it. What it's doing is, if we look at the analyzer. It's kind of. Adding a DC section into the oscillator shape, essentially changing its pulse width. But for all of the different shapes, I think that might be a really interesting thing to try with our voices here as well. So let's come back to operator one. I've turned on operator three. I could definitely. See that being cool. Let's try on the higher one. OK, I like it more on that one. So I think we should have that modulating as well. I think that would be a good thing to do. So there's no way to send an LFO to it directly within this interface. So we're going to have to add into our VPatch here. So we'll choose a source for that. Let's go with LFO two. Should we do LFO two or LFO one? Let's go with LFO one. We can always change it. Let's go with LFO one. And destination, we're going to go to op three. And we're going to go across here and FM width. It's too fast, but it's also going across that central point where it sort of turns off as well. So what we'll do is we'll come back into mode here and we'll just increase the width there. And then let's slow it down. So we'll come into the Mod menu. Down to LFO one, which I use. And I'm going to set the key sync to per voice, I think. So that if I play things in sequence, those modulations will be out of sync and kind of blend together in interesting ways. So maybe a little bit too deep at the moment. So we should get on to operate five here and add something special to our patch here. But I think we've gone far enough now that we deserve a little treat and there's some reverb. So we'll go into the effect menu and we'll go down to FX three. So our effects are all applied in series. So the last effect in the chain really is the last effect in chain that it also affects all the stuff that's come through as well. I really like the smooth hall algorithm on this. So let's turn up the level and have a listen. Maybe a little bit longer. Does make all the difference, isn't it? Okay, operator five. What are we going to do? So I think it might be interesting to just make sure we're on operator five to do kind of one of those fifth up kind of sounds with operator five. So we get that constant sort of additional complexity to the chords we play. So let's. Also, but maybe not. I like that operating almost as a sub there and bring in some warmth in. So perhaps I won't do the fifth up thing, but let's try it and see what it sounds like. That's also nice. And the great thing about an FM synth like this is that each of these operators has their own amp envelope. So now I've got this instant onset sound that's the front of my sound that completely changes the character. Okay, I'm going to go with the fifth up, I think. That's, I'm enjoying that. So let's think about the envelope. I like the fact that we now have this instant on to the sound that's really, that's really changed the vibe of the sound, I think. It needs a longer release, I think. And maybe a plucky attack. So if we reduce our decay time and maybe just lower the sustain a little bit, bit of a longer release there. Let's make it really plucky go exponential with our nice. I think this should definitely be quite responsive to the velocity as well. So let's turn the velocity sensitivity over, that sensitive, nice. Now, what are we going to do with that modulator? Now, this has given me E piano vibes now, which wasn't where I was originally going to go with this patch, but I do like the idea. So maybe what we'll do with, and we'll just bring these down for a second, we'll change it over to the 12th bit because we've been low-fi, just a sine wave with some reverb and a nice, it's all you need sometimes. Lovely. Okay, so first things first, let's just come into the pitch menu for operator five, what I'm thinking about it, and on to page two, I'll just give a little bit of pitch modulation, I think. It's quite wide, but with that reverb, it kind of gives it that dream you kind of feel, which I like. Okay, so bringing up the other operator, the modulator for this operator. I wonder if we go with a fixed pitch so that we just get a bell-like resonance to the sound. That might be very nice. So make sure we're on operator six, and on page one of operator pitch, let's switch over to fixed instead. And also we're not going to push this much through it, we'll be somewhere around there. It's going to give us this bell-like resonance to the sound. So let's think about what we're going to do with our envelope and velocity for this. So first things first, we need to lengthen that release. We want to make it a little bit more plucky. So we'll reduce our decay and lower our sustain, and probably also have that be affected by velocity a bit with everything else. It's getting a little bit. I think maybe we need to have this bell sound come down to pretty much zero on its envelope. So back on operator five, we'll drop that sustain really low, because we don't want this hanging out too long, I don't think. Yeah, I'm feeling that as a vibe. Right, let's think about getting the filter involved here. So if we come over to the filter page, here we get to choose between a number of different filter types, both in terms of what type of filter they are, as in low pass, high pass, band pass and band reject. But also there are some modelled versions here, both of the MS-20 and the Poly6, I really like the Poly6 on this kind of patch. So let's just have a feel for how that's going to affect the patch. Darkens up nicely, a little bit of resonance. I love that smooth, hazy darkness that this particular filter model brings on. So I'm going to come to the second page here first of all, it's on the second page, no, ignore me. Stick on the first page, let's put a little bit of envelope on that. Let's mess with that envelope shape a little bit. So on the mod page here, EG2, does it sound like a bit of a tag? So I think instant on, slower decay, don't go all the way down, longer release and keep things linear, so it's nice and smooth. What chord is that? OK, so coming back onto the filter here, I want this to be affected by velocity as well. And the way that we can do this is when we have our EG2 here, at the bottom it has a control, so this is where the envelope generator modulations are going to go via another modulation. So if we go across here and find velocity here, that means that when I play lighter, that envelope is going to open up less, which I like. And perhaps also if we come into the second page here, we might want to give ourselves a little bit of LFO on here as well. But we probably don't want this LFO to be going straight away, we probably want it to fade in a little bit, which is something that's very easy on this synth. If we go into our mod page here, then we go down to LFO 2, which is the one that's connected to the filter by default. And we can just give it a bit of a fade here, maybe like a half a second or something. More than that, let's try that in a lower octave. I now think that pitch wobble is slightly too much on Operator 5, so let's just adjust that. Operator 5, pitch, LFO, just put it back a little bit. It's more obtrusive at lower registers. Filter modulation is probably a little bit too obvious at the moment. So how about, here's an idea, let's make it more obvious, which sounds ridiculous obviously, but then here on this control here, let's send that via the mod wheel, so it's something we can bring in. And how about this as an extra bit of fun here. If we come into the V-Patch here, I'm going to go to a blank page here, let's also send the mod wheel to the speed of LFO 2 as well, so it gets faster when we open up as well, that's cool. Right, this needs some stereo movement for definite now. So let's do that, and we can stick in the V-Patch here to do this. So if we come across to a blank slot here, we'll use LFO 3, which is the signal LFO. They're all the signal via the V-Patch actually, but there we go, and then if we go into program and into pan, okay, let's make that again too obvious, but then again, actually no, that's just happening nicely, but one thing I do want to check over if I come into the mod page here for LFO 3, let's change the key sync to per voice. So each time I play a note, the LFO starts again, which should have things sort of weaving around in a different kind of feel, where it doesn't feel so much like the whole sound is going left to right, rather individual notes are, which I think is a cooler sound, may even allow us to go a little bit more obvious. That's feeling pretty cool now. Adding that pitch, sorry, the filter modulation on the mod wheel there has made me wonder also whether if we come back to our two main operators here, if we come into level and on to page three here, we can also send LFO 1 to the level of, I send it to the modulators instead, so it's changing the timbre. Yeah, quite like that. So let's also have that coming from the mod wheel and we'll do the same with operator three as well, but maybe go in the other direction so we can get properly swampy with our mod wheel turned up. Yes, that's feeling nice. So I think we're definitely in kind of like the final tweak stage of the patch. So often what I would be doing at this stage is listening to whether there's too much or too little modulation FM happening at very high. Like I said, there is some aliasing happening there, presumably on operators one and three primarily. So that basically means that there's too much modulation happening when you get very high up on the keyboard. It's kind of okay there. So what we can do to fix this, if we come into our two modulators, so two and four, so that we're two, if we go on to page two of the level page here, what this allows us to do is taper the overall level of the operator as we move across the keyboard. This works for our carriers as well as our modulators so you can have different carriers come in and out across the keyboard. There's lots of really cool stuff you can do here. But I'm just gonna use this just to tame this aliasing up at the top here. So I'm gonna set my center quite high because I don't think it's particularly oppressive elsewhere, maybe we'll try G6. And I'll just turn this down a little bit until we're here in less of it. Bear in mind there's still some coming from the other operator as well. I think that's taming that nicely. And then we'll just duplicate that, so G6 as our center frequency on operator four now. Then we'll just turn that down a little bit until it kind of disappears. So that's kind of just smooth things out a little bit at the top end there. At the bottom end, often you can find that you're getting similar sort of weirdness or that you're actually under modulating and it's sounding dull. I don't particularly feel there's a problem at the bottom end. I think that's fine so let's not mess with the level scaling there so much. So what that leaves me with is the prospect of going into my effect scale up to spare slots here. So the first thing I thought I might do is there is a, where is it? Decimator, there we go, decimator effect here which is a bit crushing and sample rate reduction. And I thought this might be an interesting way to get additional sort of low fight grit into our sound. So the controls we've got are a bit reduction here which as you hear as we go down it's going to start to introduce, oh we're at the end of a nine inch nails track now. So we don't need to go that low but maybe take the whole mix down to 12 bits. So turning that off. Okay, sorry, yes the damping was also turned all the way up so the damping is also going to be taking away top end from the sound to reduce the glitter. So this is just 12 bit and nothing else. Off, let's just take it down to the cusp where we start hearing some noise. And then our frequency reduction, you can immediately hear that sort of digital glitter. Now I'm going to filter this out using the high damping but I was thinking maybe we go down to like half CD quality or something. Then just dial back on that glitter with the high damping so you can just hear the edge of it and then mix it in with our original sound so don't go full in on that. So without it, it's a lot clearer. It's just some interesting grit going on there. We could push it higher if we wanted. Perhaps we should, quarter CD quality. It's subtle but I like what it's doing. Maybe push it a little bit harder as soon as we're mixing it in. And it might not be for everyone. It might be one of those effects that you turn it on and off on a patch but I quite like what that's doing to the overall sound. The other thing that I feel this needs is chorus. Come on, let's not shy away from it. Let's add some chorus. Just going nice and deep and a little bit slower. Maybe go less of it mixed in but deeper. Yeah, I think that's pretty cool. Add some extra reverb for vibe. Yeah, I think that's nice. So anyway, I hope you enjoyed that chill little exploration of building a pad from scratch on the Op6. We ended up in a slightly different place than I was expecting. That sort of plinky electric piano thing happening alongside the pad sound. But it's a nice place to end up, I think. If you did enjoy the video then please do give it a thumbs up and make sure you subscribe to the channel especially if you're interested in the Op6 because there's going to be a bunch more Op6 content coming out very shortly. Let me know in the comments below what kind of patch you'd like to see me tackle next. I kind of felt like it was probably bass time but I'm more than happy to consider alternatives. Other than that, as always, thank you so much for joining me. Until next time, take care. Bye-bye.