 Hello, our Slater Sync here. The mysterious world of Boogler synths is a quiet fascination for me. One that, out of necessity, is conducted from a distance, as the instruments that make up their catalogue are eye-watchingly expensive. Part of the mystery definitely stems from the exclusivity and scarcity of the instruments, not to mention the interesting legend of the creator. That aside, even through simply watching, listening and reading, the circuits, design, philosophy and musicality of the instruments are all worth exploring. There seems to be an air of sonic exploration that surrounds these instruments, and the instruments themselves must be guiding that in part at least. I'm not always sure that the two pigeonholes of East Coast, i.e. inspired by Moog, and West Coast, i.e. Boogler inspired, synthesis are always that useful. The individual parts that make up the systems have a lot in common with a few exceptions here and there, and even then the reality is that there is a whole lot of middle ground between those two points. I think it's more interesting to think about how the individual parts are interconnected, and how they interact with each other, because it's that aspect that will guide the user to a particular way of thinking, and ultimately, to the music they create. For me, the book and music easel seems to typify the whole vibe. It looks like some kind of retro-futuristic control panel in the alien spaceship, and sometimes sounds like one, but if we look at the specs on paper, we have two oscillators, a wave folder, a low pass gate, an envelope, a source of randomness, a five step sequencer, and a cool pressure sensitive keyboard. Well, the Mini Root 2S has a lot of that, and I reckon we can bodge the rest, so let's see if we can apply some music easel magic and build a West Coast brute of sorts. So spoiler alert, we're never actually going to end up with a music easel, leaving aside the difference in user interface. By my estimations, we're short on a number of utilities, particularly attenuators and VCAs, to plumb everything together at once, but by trying to capture some of the vibe and patch around some of the limitations, we will get a chance to know the Mini Root a whole lot better, and hopefully create some cool sounds along the way. So here we are at an initialised patch, what passes for an initialised patch on a synth with no patch storage. I'll put a link in the video description to a video where I talk about setting up an initialised patch. Let's start by coming clean with the one place where I'm going to cheat. I didn't want to add anything to the system no sort of external stuff in the patch by no additional instrumentation, but the one thing that the music easel, if we use that as an example of a typically booklar type thing, has, which the Mini Root doesn't have, and that's a spring reverb, and reverb is a vibe, and I really like reverb. So for when we need it for the vibe, just out of a shot, I have a reverb pedal. That's the Digitech Polara set on the spring algorithm, not going to win awards for the most realistic spring algorithm, but it's nice enough, and will suit our purposes just fine. So let's start towards the end of the signal chain of our synth, and we'll talk about the low pass gate. So officially we don't have a low pass gate on the Mini Roots 2S. What a low pass gate is, in essence, is a VCA and a filter that are coupled together in such a way that when the amplitude, the volume if you like of the VCA is high, so loud, it is bright, and as the amplitude comes down and gets quieter, so does the filter shut off a low pass filter, so that it gets darker as it gets quieter. Now a low pass gate is actually a very wonderful thing, because that kind of idea of things getting darker as they get quieter is something that a lot of acoustic instruments will do as well. So in this very, very synthetic way, we're still getting something that's sort of intrinsically acoustic, and that's a wonderful thing in my opinion. So how do we emulate a low pass gate on the Mini Roots 2S? Well, all we need to do is make sure that our amp VCA, so this section here in the patch bay, is being controlled by the same modulation source as our filter. The FM control, we could do it with a cutoff, either would work. So as it happens on the Mini Roots 2S, our amplitude is by default controlled by the AD envelope here, which is either a 2-stage or 3-stage envelope, which is good, because that's kind of what we have on a Music Ease as well. So if we have this switch set down to Trig, it's a 2-stage envelope where we have an attack and a decay, so we can do plucky kind of things like that, and what you should note here when it's in Trigger Mode, is it doesn't matter how long I hold down the note for, whether it's a short or long shape, it's always going to complete its entire journey. If we set it to Gate Mode, what we have is an attack hold decay, so we have an attack section, it gets to the top, it holds, and as I release, rather we get this decay section. In this case, how long I press down, the key is going to make a difference. Essentially, as soon as I release, the key goes straight to the decay section, no matter where it is in the envelope otherwise. And we can do things like do things as well, which is also something that's quite west-coasty, west-coasty. So, how are we going to couple that together? Well, we can come from the output of our AD envelope and take it into the FM of our filter. Now, on the Mini Roots Patch Bay, the outputs of sections, whenever you see something that's highlighted in white, essentially, these are half-normaled. So that means that because I've patched into the output of the AD, it doesn't have any effect on the way that it's rooted behind the scenes, so we still get that behaviour in the Amp VCA. So, essentially, as soon as you plug into the output, you are splitting the signal. So, it's still going to the original place and it's going to the new place as well. If you want to break a connection, you have to break it at the input. So, if I wanted the amp to not be affected by the AD, I'd have to go into the AM of the amp, which is where it would be connected behind the scenes, half-normaled. So, we go from the output of our AD and we can go into the frequency modulation of our filter. We can turn our cutoff down and turn our FM up. And now we're getting that going longer, so you can hear it. You can hear that as it gets louder, it's also opening up the filter. Lovely plucky sounds. Now, low pass gates are built around a slightly different circuit architecture to the way that what we're doing here, there's factual's involved and stuff, which give a particular character, but on a synth where we don't have a proper low pass gate, this will be close enough for jazz, I think. One other thing to note is if we wanted our low pass gate in inverted commas to be controlled by another modulation source, we do need to make sure that we are going to patch both the AM on the amp and the FM on the filter together, where you don't have to patch anything here at the moment, because of course it's half-normal behind the scenes, but if we wanted it to be controlled by, say, an LFO, we would need to make sure that we split the signal out, possibly by using a stack cable, so we would go to the AM and also the FM like that. And there we have our low pass gate being controlled by an LFO instead. But as it happens for now, let's stick with it connected to our AD envelope, I think. Great. So in East Coast synthesis the typical approach is that we take one or more rich sounding oscillators, we run them through a filter, that filter moves over time through modulation, and that sort of shapes the timbre of the sound over time. And that's a great approach that serves us very well in a lot of places. In West Coast one of the typical ways to alter the timbre of the sound is not just to make use of our low pass gate, but also to take our oscillators and either process them or modulate them in such a way that they generate additional harmonics on top of the basic waveform. And the two ways that that happens in the music easel world is through modulation of one oscillator, either on another oscillator or on the amplitude of the oscillator, so FM or AM and also through wave folding. So let's take a look at that now. So let's start by thinking about the modulation side of things. So I'm going to start with my first oscillator here. I'm going to switch over to the triangle wave. Do you like a triangle wave? Underrated wave shape. Okay, so modulation of this wave. Let's start with the frequency modulation. Now you'll notice maybe that there is an FM knob just here and as we turn it up, let's switch to a gate envelope so we can hear it. We can do some pretty extreme FM there now. The FM knob by default is taking its input from oscillator two. So we're doing audio rate FM here. So oscillator two almost perfectly in tune. Good. So even without hearing it by adjusting the FM amount we're getting quite radical changes to the timbre of the sound. We're also getting when we do that however it's quite a radical change to the tuning of the sound. The main culprit of that in this case is the fact that the FM here on this knob which is represented on the patch bay just here as an input is exponential FM and exponential FM is great for getting very rich timbres potentially and getting very crazy sounds but as you apply more modulation which is what we're doing as we're turning up this knob it's going to throw the tuning way, way out. Now if we look at the patch bay VCO1 in this section here there is also an input for linear FM so linear FM is going to be slightly less extreme in terms of the timbre but also less extreme in terms of the tuning drift. So if we want to have VCO2 be affected by our linear FM instead we can just go from the output of VCO2 and remember outputs are half nulled so even though I've plugged something in here we can still hear VCO2 and we can plug it into the linear FM and it's still sounding pretty extreme and you can still hear that for different notes things are still being thrown quite a lot out of out of tune there and the reason for that is that the linear FM is not rooted through an attenuator in the same way that the exponential FM is so whenever we patch into the linear FM directly we are getting the full whack so essentially it's the same as having the FM knob turned all the way up where you've got no way to get any subtlety out of this so let's tame this a little bit so rather than going straight from the output into the linear FM here let's go into an attenuator down here in our attenuator section and attenuator is just going to allow us to lower the output voltage that we're getting here so we come out of here and we can go into the linear FM input there and now when we turn up so this is attenuator 1 which is on this knob here in the filter section it's just where it is you can hear that about halfway up it starts to get a bit of tuning drift and yeah we do get into that kind of extreme side of things but we've got a lot more range there where it's actually sort of usably staying in tune now of course if we change the wave shape of VCO2 we're going to get a different flavor to those harmonics as well I like to say right now so we've got a way to introduce new harmonics into our oscillator through frequency modulation here but we still don't have any way to change this over time what if we wanted for example this knob this FM amount to be influenced by say our AD envelope how can we achieve that so our AD envelope is outputting control voltage of course that's what is controlling our filter cutoff amount, the FM of the filter and also the loudness of our amp and whenever we want to use control voltage to control the level of another thing what we want to use is a VCA okay so let's come let's unpatch this for a second so let's come out of VCO2 and into the input of our VCA then we're going to come out of our VCA into our linear FM so without anything patched into the control voltage we're back into that situation where we're getting the full whack so what we'd like to do is come out of our attack decay envelope oh no the fear we can split the signal with a stack cable so I'll grab the stack cable here I can continue where it's going and now we can also take it over to the CV input of our VCA now if we play a note here we can hear that FM is being influenced by our AD envelope which is a pretty cool sound but it's again at the upper end of the envelope sweep we're still getting that full full power linear FM so we do want to still use our attenuator on top of that so we can come out of our VCA into our attenuator out of our attenuator into our linear FM now we have an attenuated VCA control voltage controlled FM amount quite a cool sound doesn't have to be as extreme having that little wobble at the top there quite a cool bass sound ok so now we have control voltage controlled linear FM wonderful ok so that's our linear FM and that's what I'm going to use for the rest of the patch but I did also mention that an option that you would have on music is for amplitude modulation as well and we can do that on the mini-group but there are two approaches that I've kind of come up with and neither of them are perfect both of them are kind of hacky and they have some great sounds you can get from them actually so I do want to just quickly mention them so I'll just un-patch everything to do with our linear FM just for a second I'll re-patch it off camera in a minute so just un-patch un-patch so just one our fake low pass gate there ok so two different approaches to do the AM so the first is going to make use of the VCA again so what we can do is we can take the output of the triangle wave here and remember tapping an output is not going to stop it from going to where it was going normally so we're going to take that into our VCA we are going to take the output of our VCA into the external input there and what that means is now that we've got a copy a slightly quieter copy of the triangle wave on the external slider and if we want to amplitude modulate this signal of course all we really need to do is take the output of our VCA 2 into the CV input for our VCA and there we have some AM now the nice thing about AM it doesn't really matter how we apply the AM amount it kind of stays in tune obviously let me qualify that it's not the same pitch as it originally was but it will stay in tune across the keyboard in a much more manageable way and at the top of the tuning we can get all these great glassy sounds and we can mix between the two so we just want a little bit of glass and using different wave shapes is going to give us different so that's quite neat what we can't easily do in this setup is give ourselves control voltage control of the AM amount we could run stuff through in a tenuator but we can't automate it because we've only got one VCA here so let's look at another approach that gives us potentially access to control voltage control over the AM amount so for this approach a bit like we started with the linear FM let's take the output of our VCO2 which is going to be our modulation source and go into the input of our VCA we're going to tap off the AD because we'll use that as our modulation source again go into the CV of the VCA and the output this time we're going to go into the amp amount of control of our amp you can hear that we've now got a changing timbre from our modulation and that's a very lovely thing as well now a reason I say that's a bit of a hack I can't hear it now is that I would expect to have a little of bleed through just naturally happening at all times oh no I guess you wouldn't actually okay so one of the main disadvantages I thought actually isn't there now I think about it more clearly but what we don't have and what we cannot have is an unAM version of anything now because it's going into our master amp here so there is no way that I can now say mix in a clean version of anything oh okay we do get a little bit of bleed through without any signal wasn't totally wrong so we can never get oh that's nice with the oh reverb sorry I digress that's a cool sound so what I was saying is we can never get a non AM version of anything out of this synth now because it's the main amp output that doesn't matter to you perhaps you are a big enough fan of this sound that you're willing to live with that fact and maybe I am as well in some situations but not today I'm going to repatch the FM linear FM control instead and then we'll move on to another section of the synth okay so that's enough modulation of the two oscillators the other way that we can introduce additional harmonics in a west coast environment is via a wave folder and the lucky thing is on the MiniBrute2S we have a wave folder great that wave folder is called the metalizer in this case so by default it's applied to the triangle wave let's go back to a catered sound and let's turn up the metalizer in here we have all of those additional timbres across the sweep of that knob now if we want to have control voltage control over that all we need to do is patch it into the metal mod input just up here in the VCO1 section and then this knob here will act as an attenuator for that control voltage so just for the moment let's double stack should we use the AD envelope as well so just a quick note we could double stack and take the output of the AD into the metal mod and I think that probably means that our patch is easier to read right but it's worth just pointing out that we don't need to actually use an additional stack cable I can actually daisy chain out of this control voltage here straight into there and if we turn up this knob we may turn the metalizer a little bit we should be able to I find that smaller knob movements are useful in the metalizer it gets really extreme very very quickly the other thing that's worth noting is that sometimes you kind of have to balance where the start point is by turning up the metalizer knob a little bit as well but yeah that's an easy one so I'm just going to double stack this it's easier to read so I'll split twice out of here under there so the other thing to note with the with the metalizer is that essentially what we're getting on the triangle slider and the triangle output on our patch bay output of the metalizer so internally in here somewhere the triangle oscillator is going into the metalizer and then out via this slider here but we can actually put anything we want into the metalizer and it will come out of this slider here so for example if we wanted to instead of folding our triangle wave instead fold our sawtooth the output of our sawtooth and put it in to the metal in there and now this slider is actually the folded version of our sawtooth wave and that means that we can blend together the two as that sound low down nice brassy sound give it a bit of FM as well quite chaotic sound let's try that back with the triangle instead oh yes yes yes yes thank you bit of spring we can mix oscillator 2 in as well if we wanted which is a big low sine wave try that quite a mighty bass sound and by balancing these two different additive approaches we can get quite the range of different timbres ok so let's talk a bit more about the control of these timbres at the moment we've just got everything going through the AD envelope which is fun but maybe a little bit limiting so we've got kind of three different places where we have modulation of the control voltages other than our AD envelope if we were thinking about this in a kind of music ease or kind of place we've got the keyboard a cool metal keyboard and we don't have one here we can maybe plug in a micro freak book there is something that this does which is similar so we'll talk about that we've got some random voltage and we've got the five step sequencer as well so let's start by talking about the metal plate keyboard metal plate keyboard is a really really cool thing it's one of my favourite features of the micro freak and the reason for that is the whole approach to pressure how much of the key you're pressing down on having some effect over the timbre of the sound now we actually have that on this little keyboard here as well and that's because by default the pressure output of these pads is represented on our on our patch bay if we don't do anything else to the sequencer it comes out of this patch point here so for example if I wanted my FM amount to be modulated not by my AD envelope anymore but instead by how hard I'm pressing down this key here I want to unpatch the CV going into our VCA which is what's controlling our FM amount and we'll just extract that stack cable so we're still going into the metalizer so now we don't have any control that's been modulated what we do still have the attenuator there if we want it so if we want to instead control the FM amount by how hard we're pressing the pad we can simply take an output from the pressure there CV on our VCA if we go for a gated sound turn this up find a balancing point now how hard I press down the key will be how modulated that sound is but that sounds good on a lower octave it's quite sensitive maybe plugging in the micro-freak would make more sense in this case an output on the micro-freak for the pressure of the keyboard gives you a bit more granular fine control there ok so let's talk about the sequencer now we have a 5 step sequencer on the music 5 steps is a great thing because the most common meters in western music tend to be based around 4s and 3s so by having a 5 step sequencer you have all of these really cool sequences which run over each other so one way that we can approach this is simply to go last step number 5 and we could just have a sequence here running maybe slower and just approach it in this way which is fair enough and that is indeed a 5 step sequencer but it's a 5 step pitch sequencer actually what's more interesting potentially is if we have a 5 step voltage sequencer instead and we could apply that voltage to pitch of course because that is how we get pitch movement anyway naturally but we could apply it to other things and we could have a bit more granularity that a quantized pitch doesn't actually give us so what I'm going to do instead is I'm going to come across to the mod 1 track here what's marked fellow here but won't be for much longer if I hold this down I can change what this is going to be outputting and I'm going to switch it over to 5 volts because I find that's a good good balance right so let's assume we want to control pitch to begin with so if I take the output of the mod 1 track and go into the pitch of VCO 1 that's going to override whatever pitches we set here so although we have all of these pitches set on here you can hear that changing these is doing nothing now because it is what we have on this sequencer instead that's the important thing hook needs to set that to 5 steps of course so now we're controlling pitch but via voltage instead which means a side effect to that is that we don't necessarily always get things exactly in tune which I think is quite cool your mileage may vary maybe slow that down okay I need to slow down everything for me to do that but we don't have to apply that just to pitch so we could take another one of our stack cables nice and rather than just setting that to pitch we could have that controlling our FM mount our higher notes are going to be more more modulated or we could have that affecting our metal mod about instead so I'll light it up and then we can have our metal mod about instead so our low notes have very little and our upper notes have much more I quite liked it when we had it on the FM though so we will go to having this go into our FM CV amount and stick with this go into our metal mod or indeed just when I'm thinking about it we could take the output of thinking it loud so the other source of let's take it away from our FM for the moment okay so the other source of modulation that we have is really really important in this kind of environment is random at random voltage source so the way that we most easily going to be able to apply this is by switching one of our LFOs to random we set the sync to seek so it's going to change on every step now we have a tempo synced modulation amount so if we take the output of LFO 1 and go into CV of FM again or maybe we instead of having this control our pitch perhaps we just use a stack cable between our LFO and our pitch now we get random notes and random FM amounts and we can use the voltage sequencer to do our metal mod instead and now we have a rhythmic and then we can start thinking about well let's take another random voltage this is cheating a little bit because we have two here whereas we would only have one and we could take LFO 2 now to affect the attack time or the decay time perhaps would be better for the moment and we get some very electronic places you might need a music easel full of acid to fully enjoy this certainly it's nice when the machine starts talking back isn't it ok so I've been patching off screen for a few minutes just to put together a patch which does a load of stuff it's kind of really meant to be set with the envelope looping as the attack and decay are being modulated by various things etc but I guess the turn the envelope for a second the last part of the puzzle here is that at the moment our clock is being controlled by the internal clock of the mini-brute which means everything is happening on a regular pulse which you know it's very conventional so let's sort of piece of the puzzle let's decouple the mini-brute from its clock all together so the approach that we're going to use here is by making use of one of our random VCOs so the clock is basically looking the clock input here on the sequence patch here is looking for a high voltage and our random LFO is occasionally going to hit a high voltage and then the rest of the time it's not so what I'm going to do is I'm going to set this one to be a free running LFO rather than a synchronized one and I'll just set the rate somewhere in the middle I'm going to press the sync button here and get it so that it is on the clock setting and then I'm going to patch from the LFO one output into the clock here now hopefully when I press play now we'll see that this is no longer moving at a regular pace and the low we have the right here the generally slower it's going to run let's set all looping and this is cheating slightly because we've got a second random voltage from the LFO 2 here which you would necessarily have in Buchler World the music is on anyway but by decoupling the sequencer the stuff that's reliant on the sequence progressing which is going to be things like the pitch primarily the pitch of the VCO but also the synchronization of this LFO here love it got lost in the sound for a second the pitch of our main VCO which is also going to be controlling the pitch of VCO 2 plus the synchronization of this random source which is going to be controlling the FM amounts and the decay rate of our AD and then our AD cycling around is controlling obviously our low pass gate but also the metal mod we're getting a very interesting and some may say experimental patch and it might be an acquired taste but I like it my god low pass gate no darker that's a lot of fun that's a lot of fun anyway thank you for making it to the end of the video if indeed you have made it to the end of the video which I guess you have if you're hearing this I know this is probably quite a long video the feedback that I got back from my big long Digitone drone video was that people quite enjoyed the long form videos so I hope that that is still the case on this day with this video if you did enjoy it, if you learned something new if you've found some inspiration to go play with your synths please do leave the video a thumbs up and make sure you're subscribed to the channel so you don't miss out on any upcoming videos always new synthy things and performances coming as often as child care and child sleep patterns allow as always thank you so much for joining me take care and until next time bye bye