 Hello OscillatorSync here, and welcome to the first video in the series where we're going to be taking an in-depth look into the various different operator modes on the Korg Ops 6. So in this first video we are going to introduce the idea of operator modes, talk a little bit about how they operate and what we mean by algorithms, and then we're going to take a dive into the first of the operator modes which is FM. So Korg described the Ops 6 as an altered FM synthesizer, and although I understand why they've lent in to the whole FM thing, for sake of familiarity, the success of the Volcker FM, actually I think leaning too much onto the FM side of things actually undersells the capabilities and flexibility of the synthesizer, because what I think Korg have done with this synthesizer is they've taken the idea of FM and taken some of its sort of key philosophies, its key ideas, this idea of having multiple operators which flow into one another, changing the sound as they go, and ask the question, what if it's not FM? So before we talk about the operator modes, we need to talk a little bit about algorithms. Now the algorithm is what you see in this diagram here on the left-hand side here, and what this diagram describes to us is the layout of the operators. So in this algorithm here, which is algorithm one, at the bottom we have operator one, and we have operator three, and these two operators at the bottom of the tower if you like, those are the two operators that we actually hear, which in FM we refer to as the carriers, although it's worth noting that for some of the operator modes, the carrier and modulator terminology doesn't actually work, we'll get to that in future videos though. So at the bottom we have our two operators that we hear, operator one and operator three, and the operators above them, so in the case of this first tower here, we have operator two, which is flowing into operator one, and that is going to alter the sound that we hear from operator one. For operator three we actually have a tower of operators, and that means that operator four is going to flow into operator three, altering the sound that we hear, but before that operator five is going to flow into operator four, which is going to modify the characteristics of operator four, which is again going to have an impact on what we hear, and above that operator six, again flowing all the way down and making an impact on the sound that we hear at the end. I'm being intentionally vague because what that actually means, what altering the sound actually means is going to be determined by which operator modes we actually use. So if we go to our algorithm page, we're able to go through various different algorithms, and as we scroll through the algorithms we're changing the way that things are laid out. So here we have two towers, so we're hearing two operators on our output, and we have various different arrangements of how things are altering the sound of those output carriers, output operators, I should say. Again, two towers there. Here we have three operators, one, three, and five that we're hearing on our output. These are those are fairly simple arrangements of operator into one operator which we then hear, operator into an operator which we hear, but we get to more complicated and complex algorithms where we have multiple operators in parallel flowing into a single operator here. Big fan of algorithm 12 for various things where we have three different operators or flowing into that operator and modifying its sound. We have lots of different and increasingly complex in many cases layouts, and then towards the end here we start getting slightly more simple layouts. Algorithm 32 for example is just simply listening to each of those operators which in old style DX7 style FM, that's kind of your organ patch layout, but on the opposite because of what it can do and because of the flexibility of the operators, that could be a really really complex six oscillator if you like patch depending on what operator modes you're using. At the end here we also have the user algorithm. Now I will speak about the user algorithm separately in another video because there's quite a lot to discuss there, but suffice to say that using the user algorithm you can do incredibly complex layouts of operators and subvert the idea that there are operators that you hear versus operators that change the sound of the other operators and actually you end up with a situation where you essentially have operators which can be carriers and modulators at the same time. Really really interesting stuff that you can do with user algorithms, but we will get to that in another video. So when we're talking about changing an operator's operator mode, what we're talking about is altering how the operators that sit above it, so if we take operator one as an example, as we change operator one's operator mode we are deciding how operator two which is flowing into it is going to affect its sound, and that's the way it works all the way through and we can mix and match operator modes across all of our operators, so we can have a different operator mode in sort of part way up the tower here, for example to do very complex things potentially. So before we get into the FM mode let's just quickly introduce the various different operator modes from a really really high level and they can kind of be grouped into two different sets. You have the set which maintains the idea of carrier and modulator from FM, but we're using different types of modulation rather than straight frequency modulation and then we have the modes where actually the operator is going to more directly affect the sound of the incoming operator that sits above it. So from a high level we have FM which is FM kind of as you would expect to see on like the X7 or the Volcker FM. The next one is ring mod which is another type of modulation so we can still think of this as carrier and modulator. Ring modulation is essentially amplitude modulation, a very different flavour of sound compared to FM. This next mode is filter. This is the first mode where we can't really think about carriers and modulators because what this mode does from a very high level, there's some other stuff to discuss as well, is it takes the waveform, the sound coming from the operator above, it mixes it optionally with this operator and then it filters. So we're actually at a base level we're filtering the sound coming from operator 2. So that's a completely different idea to standard FM. The next mode is filter FM where we kind of have a similar situation where we've got a filter set up on operator 1 but in this case we hear operator 1 and operator 2 is going to modulate the filter cutoff. So again we've got a carrier and modulator relationship here and again a very different flavour to standard FM. The final proper mode is wave folder. This again is one of the modes where rather than there being a carrier and modulator relationship instead the lower operator in the algorithm is going to directly affect the sound coming from the higher operator. In this case it's going to apply wave folding. There's a lot to talk about for this mode as well. Finally there are two other modes. One is bypass and what bypass will do is it will do nothing other than directly pass through the sound coming from the operator above. So that's easy enough and finally there is mute which mutes the output at this stage of the algorithm altogether. So you could for example if you wanted to you could stick a mute on operator 5 here and essentially cut off the the top part of this tower and just have two two op voices for example. I don't think the mute is always that useful and certainly not that interesting because it doesn't make a sound. So one last thing before we get into the actual meat of talking about the FM there is one control which is shared by all of the different operator modes and that is here the wave control on this just take down everything else allows us to set a different waveform for the operator that we're currently listening to. So by default that's a sign which is classic in FM but we can also have different resolutions of signs and then a whole host of different flavors some additive stuff there some essentially pitched noise and then also white noise. So what we should not overlook is that given that we have multiple different wave shapes and we do indeed have a filter the op 6 even if you don't do anything else with the operator modes can be a virtual analog synth a pretty fully featured one with quite a powerful modulation setup and with good effects. So it is quite possible to make very very compelling patches on the op 6 without ever making use of any of the features of the operator modes. Indeed if we think about the way that the algorithms are laid out if we go over to algorithm 32 where we have various different operators all set along the bottom there we essentially have 6 oscillative virtual analog synth which we can start doing interesting stuff with of course. So let's talk about our first operator mode FM so my operator that we're listening to at the moment is operator one we can see it down here in our algorithm that's anyone that's turned up it has a single modulator which is operator number two which is currently turned down so it's not having any effect on operator one so FM what is it frequency modulation frequency modulation if you do it slowly is just vibrato right so as I turn up operator two what that's going to do is it's going to add more and more pitch wobble to operator one obviously that's not doing anything interesting from a synthesis perspective and that's because the frequency of operator two is below audio rate so it's somewhere below 20 hertz 20 hertz is kind of more or less a good ballpark for the frequency at which we stop hearing a movement and we start hearing a tone a pitch now if I increase the frequency of operator two and move it into audio rate so it's still just about sort of discern a wobble there maybe but now rather than hearing a wobble as we apply more frequency modulation to operator one instead what we get is a time rule change and that is FM synthesis it's basically doing a pitch wobble but at audio rate which introduces new additional harmonics to the sound so in FM there are basically three things which are going to affect the complexity or frequency content of one of our carriers the first we were just playing with which is the level of the modulator above it higher level more complex sound the next thing that's going to affect the complexity of the sound of our operator is the complexity of the modulator that's going into it so for this I'm going to move over to op three for a second and I'm going to bring up op four and this is basically sounding the same way as it was before because at the moment op four is just a simple sine wave however in our algorithm here op four has a modulator sat above it up five and if we up the level of op five that's going to in the same way that op four changes the complexity of op three op five will change the complexity of op four which will then change the complexity of op three which is what we're hearing and the relationship between these two can lead to a whole range of timbres and of course we could also change the complexity of op five by introducing modulation from op six we can get some very very harsh digital tones this way now that's the way you would have affected the complexity of the modulator on say dx seven where everything was a sine wave but of course on the op six we don't have to stick with every waveform being a sine wave so another way of changing the complexity of our modulator is simply to change its wave shape so if we go up to op two here and we can change its wave shape so change it to a triangle get a different range of timbres there change it to a saw again immediately a much richer sound without having to do anything to operators above the these additive modes are really interested for this kind of thing because they tend to really accentuate particular resonances in sound and of course we could also frequency modulate with noise which is going to create a bit crushy kind of lo-fi fives into our sound maybe more interesting to do as a further upstream so maybe op five almost adding like a digital vinyl dust to sound so the third way that we can influence the complexity of our operators is by looking at the frequency relationship between the carrier and its modulators so we've come back to over to just operator one here and if we go into its pitch page we can see two things of note the first is that the frequency mode is set to ratio and what that means on the opposite end on the dx seven as well is that when we play the keyboard this operator is going to follow the keyboard it's going to give us keyboard tracking essentially alternatively if we set this to fixed it's just going to ring out at whatever frequency we have set here we will come back round to fixed in a little bit but let's stick with the ratio for the moment now as we bring up our operator two we can hear that as we know it's going to change the sound of operator one now if we move over to operator two and look at its pitch settings we'll see that it is exactly the same as operator one it is set to ratio so it's going to follow the keyboard and its ratio is one so both of these operators have ratio of one let's just turn operator two down for a second all the ratio basically means is that we're going to multiply the frequency but still have it work across the keyboard so one if we go to two that's going to bring it up an octave because we double the frequency if you go to four that's going to double it again and move it up an octave we go to eight and we have another octave there in between there we have the frequencies in the harmonic series essentially or not essentially that's exactly what we have so that's our harmonic series there we can go down as well into subharmonics as well so at the moment operator two is set to exactly the same so what we have here essentially is a one-to-one relationship between the frequencies whenever I press a key operator one has a particular frequency and operator two our modulator is going to modulate operator one by the same frequency because the ratio is the same so one-to-one is a very simple it's the simplest ratio that you can have between two frequencies and it is a simple relationship they're both whole numbers and it is close it's as close as it can be it's the same number and generally speaking if you have something that is a simple relationship and also close by what you get is an integrated sound which is tonal so by tonal I mean it sounds in tune it sounds easy and simple for us to comprehend but integrated what I mean is as I bring up the level of operator two it very much sounds like what it's doing directly is changing the timbre of operator one the carrier we're not really aware of what operator two might sound like it kind of sounds like really as we turn it down we're kind of just shutting off a filter almost filter and reverse kind of thing now if we change the the ratio the relationship between these two operators something that's still pretty simple and still pretty close so an obvious one would be to change operator two's ratio to two so now operator two is always going to be double the frequency of operator one we still get a nice tonal integrated sound but it's different in fact as a sort of a cheat sheet for like an analyzer when we have one to one we kind of get like a soft sore tooth when it's low and then more complex stuff up at the top there when we have a one to two relationship kind of get this hollowed out sound almost like a square wave we can kind of see a sort of pseudo square wave there and we get that sort of classic hollow square wave sound and it gets more complex and folded as we turn it up if we keep the relationship simple between them maybe go to half again on my favorite relationships a two to one relationship if you like operator two is going to be going at half the speed of operator one in what wave shape that's representing but you always like that relationship doesn't seem to get out of control quite as much as the other ones so close simple relationships we have a tonal and integrated sound now if I take operator two and boost it up to say 10 so we have a one to 10 relationship now when I turn up this operator now the vibe that we get is quite different because while it's still fairly tonal unless we push it hard and suck in weird side bends it's not as integrated it almost sounds like we're introducing a sound on top of the sound that we already have you can still kind of hear that original sine wave with a ringing over the top of it so when you have a relationship which is simple also still nice integer numbers but distant then generally speaking what you'll get is a a tonal but less integrated sound that doesn't mean that it's not useful this sort of glassy resonance over the top is just kind of a hallmark of digital synths FM synths in particular but it's quite a different flavor to when we were sort of noticeably changing the original sound with our closer ratios so if we sit with our ratios just for a little bit longer but now think about creating relationships which are a little bit more complex so if we maybe go to like 1.25 so we have a one to 1.25 relationship close so it's still pretty integrated sounding but now it's slightly less tonal 1 to 1.25 is not a dreadful relationship in terms of complexity but we can immediately hear that the harmonics they're introduced here are not as straightforward still pretty consonant but there are definitely some side bands there which are a little bit more interesting it's similarly something like 1 to 1.66 that's a much more complicated relationship and we're getting more of these bell-like atonal sounds still sounding pretty integrated because it's still a close relationship we can choose something that's totally off the something that's very complex so a 1 to 0.94 ratio is a complex ratio to comprehend and as a result we get harmonics which are more complex and difficult for our ears to decode but still pretty integrated because it's still pretty close yikes now of course if we go complex and distant then we start to get stuff that's less tonal and also less integrated but conversely where you have these more complex relationships having them distant does make it slightly easier to stomach them in terms of the dissonances because you have fewer clashes because of the way the harmonic series is laid out so that's a very complex relationship not well integrated but it's kind of not quite as dissonant as it was when it was much closer yikes so with all of those examples so far we've had both operators in ratio mode which means that the friction relationship is going to remain consistent as we move across the keyboard so we've even when we had sort of quite complex sounds the and atonal sounds they were playing consistently across the keyboard and we were just sort of getting the same sound at different pitches more or less so what about the fixed mode well the fixed mode is really really interesting and I think what it does really well is it introduces resonances into a sound it's very powerful and you use it quite sparingly or you can use it more aggressively but so we can quite clearly hear the original pitch of what I'm playing there but with this fixed ratio mixed in there we kind of get these bell like ringing clanging atonal overtones when it's at low if we set it higher the sort of the original sound is going to be somewhat lost the original pitch I should say is going to be somewhat lost still interesting especially when we mix in with something which is easy to hear and changing the frequency of the fixed operator is going to obviously give us different sorts of resonances it's interesting to note that you can tune this somewhat if you're going to use this to introduce these resonances to the key of what you're playing in so because this is currently set to 440 my a's are going to sound easy to understand my ease pretty easy as well because a fifth above is a fairly straightforward relationship when we get into thirds it's going to get a bit more complex so this for example at the moment with 440 is not set up for playing in in C if you want to root things at C but we could adjust it so that it is give my fifths and my octaves pretty easy to understand but that's quite a nice way just to add a resonance into our sound when you're sparingly and of course you don't have to do that directly into your operator you could have that modulator modulator so if we now move over to operator five here and set it back to a sine wave so it's fixed so now it's not my carrier that's being modulated by fixed amount it's the modulator that's going into my carrier that gives a different vibe it's so easy to make e-piano sounds on with FM a great way to add grit to add a fixed resonance to a modulator modulator modulator with a fixed amount now when we're looking at our fixed ratio operators there's no reason why they actually have to operate at audio range we can actually use them as a way to introduce pitch wobble now that would be probably kind of boring to do a lot on a dx7 where you only had sine waves but of course on the op6 we have lots of different waveforms so let's move across to a different algorithm let's go across to our sort of three voice so carrier carrier carrier modulator modulator modulator and then we could bring up that first operator there and we can switch over to say like a sawtooth instead and then we could bring up our modulator but rather than have it going at a ratio and fast we can switch it back to fixed and move our frequency right the way down and now we can hear that it's just sort of happily wobbling away which then immediately we get to that introduces a lovely richness to our sound and the reason this creates this lovely richness is that all of these all of the voices are going to be slightly out of tune with each other and the reason for that is that we're coming to the miscellaneous settings here and up to prog uh misc the phase for all of our operators is set to sync which means they restart whenever i play a note and no matter how carefully i try i'm not ever going to play all those notes at exactly the same time so everything's slightly out of phase and washy and lovely and we could um actually we could take that and copy it across and then we can copy our modulator across as well give our carriers a little bit of detune and we can get a really really rich sound just by treating this as as a virtual analog and using our modulators to introduce oscillator drift essentially more drift or less drift no FM synthesis going on there at all just treating it as a virtual log so let's take a little look at the different algorithms and what they're kind of good for and generally speaking you can group your algorithms or the parts of your algorithms into two different things you have your towers like this and you have your parallel inputs so where you have multiple modulators feeding into a single carrier so the way i usually approach these two different ideas is that if i want to have something which is evolving in terms of its frequency content then a tower is really good for that whereas your parallel inputs are good for mixing together different qualities of sounds so if we took the tower here that sits above operator three we could and we'll just leave all of these at one to one ratios just for the moment so we could have operator four fade in slowly and back out perhaps we would have operator five start high and and fade to basically something very low but then maybe we would add some LFO to operator five maybe something slower than that so instead maybe have operator six fade in very slowly perhaps change the key sync there to voice and then of course we could filter that down and give it a bunch of effects we have a lot of power to change the timbre of the sound over time with our tower algorithms conversely something like my favorite 12 where we have multiple things that can feed into one carrier here we can kind of treat each of these modulators as doing a different job so we can have one which is a simple relationship so come across to operator four we can have a simple relationship maybe a half there and then we could have the next operator along has something which is a much more complicated relationship but maybe don't mix in as much so we've mixed together two different qualities one it's that quality and the next one is that one and they're still going to interact with each other then we can balance them and maybe operator six we could do a fixed one to get kind of a bell like resonance in there and we bring in these different qualities that still interact with each other we can get some interesting sounds based on how they interact so we've come all this way without having to talk about back on the mode screen the fact that without having to do any FM at all without having to raise the level of any of our modulators the FM mode has an incredible amount of power to shape the timbre of the sound and that's because we as well as obviously been able to change the wave shape we also have this feedback control so this is per operator feedback and also the width control so I'll start with the feedback control what this does is it essentially feeds this operator back into itself as if it was its own modulator and this can introduce a lot of really useful new harmonics indeed if we're dealing with a sine wave as our basis as we turn up the feedback what we actually get to about sort of 57% is a essentially a sore-tooth wave with a bit of curving us on it which is a really good basis for applying filters or indeed via the V patch we could also so if we apply each one and apply it to op one feedback and drop the feedback a bit so we're just modulating the feedback with an envelope this one in fact it kind of sounds like a really convincing filter across a sore-tooth wave now of course changing our input waveform is going to give us different vibes there more harmonically rich sounds might not generate as useful that's really interesting I'm not doing anything with the actual FM here just all with the feedback no filtering just all doing with feedback crazy so turn that feedback down the other control we have is width and what width does and we can see it easily when we look at our oscilloscope here is it squeezes our waveform and sticks a bunch of DC there which let's put it another way it's kind of like PWM but for everything so obviously this is going to sound good if we move over to our square maybe going to our V patch here and uh oh here's that LFO one can go to operator one width slow it down but it doesn't have to be on square waves we can do it on anything now and pulse width on the trial away for example sounds pretty good just a little sine wave sounds good of course now we can introduce FM in there as well this also sounds good being modulated by an envelope as well and of course we can combine it with modulating our feedback so as you can see the FM mode on the op 6 is obviously a very fully featured FM operator but even if we don't touch anything in terms of pushing the modulator into it it has an incredible amount of control over the the sound and it can provide the basis for all sorts of sort of pseudo um a virtual analog type sounds because of course we do have the digital filter with multiple different modes full control of its modulation on top of it so we can do some really really interesting things there you could as well potentially and we'll get to this in a future video have a filter per FM voice that's working independently to the master filter but we will get to that when we talk about the filter um operator mode anyway i hope that was useful and interesting if you did enjoy the video then please do give it a thumbs up and make sure you subscribe to the channel because there's going to be a bunch of op 6 stuff coming up very very soon other than that until next time take care bye