 Hello, Oslidesync here. This is the Morphos from Norand. It is a Eurac module containing two analog VCOs and then lots and lots of other tricks including wave shape morphing, contextual modulators, presets and preset morphing in three different dimensions. It is a complex module with a lot of things to say about it. Now if you follow me on YouTube you will know that I am not exactly one to shy away from a longer video but there's so much that I want to talk about on the Morphos that I think it would probably do it a disservice to try and cram everything into a single video. So rather than doing that what I'd like to do over the course of three videos is explore the Morphos in different contexts and different levels of complexity across three patches. So what I'd like to do in this video in particular and I'm quite excited about this because it's not something I ever really do with my Eurac setup is that I would like to take Morphos and use it as the centerpiece in a conventional monosynth setup. So the goals with this patch in particular are to demonstrate the core tonality of the oscillators, have a listen to the wave shapes, have a listen to how the through zero FM sounds that kind of thing and also to listen to how it sounds in this more sort of conventional setting because not everyone wants to make alien sounds with their racks at all time which is a surprise to me because that's what I want to do most of the time but actually be able to demonstrate how it can be used in that conventional setting I think is a useful thing. I also want to take the opportunity to introduce the functionality around the contextual modulators and the way that the CV inputs operate and what they can actually allow us to do because although Morphos is quite a generously proportioned module because of the utility that's built into it you can actually save on other modules because of the way that some of these CV inputs work they're quite clever so that I want to kind of show that off as well. In future videos we'll dive into some of the more intense use of the contextual modulators and also into the presets we won't really be touching on that today, it'll be more conventional usage, more sort of general VCO kind of stuff but it still has a lot to offer in that area. In the interest of transparency, Noran did send this module over to me to make some videos on but they haven't asked for any content in particular and they've had no editorial input into anything that I'm creating here. I'll also mention that this is a pre-production module so on the final versions the knobs are different and better and the firmware might be slightly different but the core tonality should be obviously more or less the same so with that said let's patch some stuff up. Right so in terms of what's already patched in here just on the malts at the top of the palette case here I've got a keystep produce out of the shot and this is my pitch this is the gate and then this is the module and that's just so that we have a way to control our mono synth. So I think to get started let's just have a listen to the raw tone of one of the VCO so I'll just come out of the output here I'll come into Quadrat which we use as a mixer between the two oscillators, there is no sort of combined output here on the Morphos then we'll come out of there and go into my output mixer I think so we'll come out of B so they can mix A and B together I'm going to go in there and then I'll also grab the pitch from the keystep and pop it into the volts per octave so we have some pitch control turn up this channel lovely stuff. So what do we got here so let's have listen to the different waveforms so maybe go across to the saw first so we have a saw on the end here satisfying the buzzy then we can morph into a square wave I love this area in the middle here lovely stuff so here we have our square wave here nice and weighty nice and buzzy cool and we can morph into a triangle just got a little bit of fur on it cool and then down to a sine wave and this is of course modulatable and we'll get to that in a moment we have a D-Tune which goes up a tritone down tritone and we then have the through zero FM so this is going to FM oscillator one against oscillator two and then if we do it on oscillator two it goes the other way around but you can hear there it's a great way to introduce additional harmonics and until you get right to the end of the knob even even not it will barely ever throw it out of tune because it's through zero which means we can use this as a two operator analog FM synth which is pretty cool and perhaps we'll do that in a minute at the moment I've got oscillator two tracking obviously if we change the pitch of oscillator two we're going to get different sounds and of course this is also going to affect different waveforms differently yes just so many different tones we'll play with those a little bit in this this demo I think we'll also get different tones depending on the modulator's waveform as well yes so lots of things available there great stuff just put a spring reverb on that and you're done lovely stuff okay let's blend those two oscillators together then we'll grab you know put oscillator two here we'll bring it into quadrat as well turn it up so um if you don't have track turned on here you will need to molt your volts proactive into here or use obviously a different sequence all together these kind of operators individual oscillators but if we turn track on then the two oscillators are going to track together and then frequency here is going to allow us to choose the relative tuning between them it's also worth noting that the frequency knob here which you'll be able to hear is stepped so once uh it has warmed up the oscillators you should have frequency as your fine control and then detune as your as your fine control sorry we were doing conventional sounds aren't we I'm bad I can't hear myself sometimes okay good right um so let's just patch up the rest of a mono synth shall we so rather than coming out of there straight into the mixer let's go into a filter I'm going to use my new Hampshire electronics um dual VCF which is a ms 20 style filter will come out of actually that's just here that's just here a filter sweep we love filter sweeps don't we uh turn those up good stuff could also use both for a band pass if we wanted a resonance sounds good okay so we've got uh that there and we'll uh go out of there into vca this one will do and come out with vca oop up into here and then we're going to need to trigger some of this stuff so uh let's take a gate from here and we go into stages something like that and then take stages output into the vca see if you mount up and uh maybe we could take that same output actually let's use a different um envelope for our filter so i'll take another gate here always work in that order for gates with stages and we'll take output into the cv input here turn the cutoff down turn the cv amount up then we have a conventional kind of mono synth patch which works very nicely okay so that's a really really straightforward kind of mono synth setup uh using morphos so let's take a look at what else we can do using some of its other controls and maybe exploring some of the other sounds here so the first thing i want to do is maybe look at modulating this wave control here so just turn down oscillator two just for a second because as i mentioned i really like this spot here so let's set that kind of in the middle of that sweet spot and the kind of normal way that you would approach this maybe would be that we would take an LFO so we'll just turn this channel of stages into a looping okay there's an LFO lovely uh we will take this output here and we would go into the wave input here now so the inputs for the wave volt per octave a volt per octave b which is your detune and the through zero fm these are all contextual so if i want to select that i want to work on a particular input here we can tap the light that goes above it you see the cycle through a couple different colors there we'll get to that so when the light is white the amount just acts as a tenuverta so if i put this in the middle we shouldn't hear any movement or very little and then as i turn it up and it's acting like you would expect any cv input basically with an tenuverta to act on any module so in order to use it this way obviously we've used up an LFO in my case a channel of stages but the nice thing about Morphos is it has a bunch of these contextual modulators so let's unplug this for a second like so and what i'm going to do is i'm going to tap it once which puts it into this orange mode here now in the orange mode this will be modulated by an inbuilt LFO the amount and rate of which can be set here so if we set this in the middle so each of these inputs wave volt per octave a and b and through zero fm each have their own individual LFO so these LFOs aren't shared they are per cv input so we've immediately saved a an LFO here down here we have type and wave wave is going to change the waveform so triangle now square it's a saw and background to sign there type is going to switch between LFO range and audio rate wow so we have audio rate LFOs per input here and we can use them to create entirely new timbres on top of what we've actually got obviously audio rate modulating the uh the volts prox is going to give us you know additional fm on top of the three zero fm from one oscillator to another which is kind of a big deal the rate is always related to the oscillator itself so it will always track across the keyboard as well as long as you've got volts prox of coming in cool but i wanted that that nice little movement just on that wave shape there lovely stuff and if we now bring the other one in and do the same thing and having them goes at slightly different rates so tap that one to select it tap it to go orange just adjust the right a little bit put it in that sweet spot lovely movement very very cool so what else might we want to do with this um mono synth sound well you may notice that here we have a button called sync and this is going to turn on oscillator sync where oscillator two is synchronized to oscillator one so now yeah they should sound in tune and if we were to change the frequency of oscillator two rather than hearing a pitch change we'll hear more of a timbral change so the way that we would maybe usually use sync is we would make use of one of our envelopes to modulate to the pitch of two to get that classic sync sound so let's let's do it the old school way first so i'll just take the um let's just use the filter so i'll just take this and use a stack cable here and you go go into the volts prox of here select this turn the mount up oh we can get that kind of classic sync sound going on there which is very pleasing yes indeed it is um and as i say that would be the kind of old school way of approaching that however because we have these contextual modulators we can do it a slightly different way instead so we've seen that we can press this once to go orange which gives us a an LFO if we press it again it goes green and this is going to give us a an envelope instead so we need something to trigger the envelope here so rather than patching in an amount to the volts prox if we're now going to put in a trigger so we'll just grab our gate signal here pop it in there and now we have the rate and amount of this envelope on the volts prox of instead so starting in the middle no sync and again uh rather than using a um an envelope from somewhere else in the system we have an envelope which is dedicated just to this parameter again this envelope isn't shared with any of the parameters we can set each parameter up to have a different envelope and they could all be being triggered by different things something we'll look at in a future video i think good fun okay let's take that uh sync out just for the moment and we'll try this a similar trick uh but this time we'll maybe look at using it on the through zero FM to create as i say a um an analog to operator FM so uh just put those back into tune a little bit um maybe turn down to a sine wave yeah and now we can patch uh this in now we'll use also like one perhaps we'll patch that into the through zero FM so at the moment it would be an amount but if we tap this till it goes green we now have a um an envelope on that without having to use an envelope here the one oscillator just turn off that wave modulation as well very nice and if we change the frequency of oscillator two we're going to get different things going on there and we don't have to have the two of them tracking either which will give us much more chaotic kind of sounds if we have the other oscillator also being um through zero FM with the other one we'll get much more complex sounds as well plus we made that little bit clickier on the envelope we'll start to get something that's kind of glassy metallic kind of like a one one uh operator sorry two operator FM synth right it's nice not a normal analog sound but nice all the same um so what else can we do uh i know let's get something with some vibrato so we'll un-patch that perhaps uh take that back down off there get back to a more conventional sound uh let's get some vibrato on here so you can probably guess an easy way to get the vibrato here would be to come across to maybe this false proactive B here uh tap that to go into the um LFO mode and turn up the amount then you can hear vibrato going away there but we don't necessarily want that happening all of the time of course so and when you're in LFO mode on the uh CV inputs here if you give it a CV so um what i'll do is i'll take my mod wheel here if we give it CV that's going to be the amount of the LFO now so with that turned down we have no uh pitch wobble there turning up the mod wheel and the amount here sets the maximum here sorry i hope i have demonstrated um that even when you're using the morphos in a more conventional role as just a normal vco or two normal vcos it still offers a whole lot of interesting tricks and functionality that gets us to more interesting patches without having to patch in a whole lot of additional modules i mean really here i mean the only thing that i've got plugged into it is um in fact no i haven't even got stages plugged into it have i all i've got plugged into it here are um the uh gate pitch and mod wheel for my keystep and the contextual modulators are doing all of the other stuff yes so we've saved on a whole lot of um LFOs and uh whole lot of LFOs and envelopes just by making use of the stuff that's built in here to get additional functionality out and certainly in the next video in the series we're going to be throwing a whole lot more at these contextual modulators more doing a whole lot of more audio rate stuff and we'll do a whole lot more clocking of different uh triggers to get different events happening um in a less straightforward patch a less conventional patch but hopefully we've seen here it does in this role regardless because it does do very well as a normal VCO even if it can get a bit weird as well i hope that was useful and interesting if you did enjoy the video then it's always appreciated if you could leave a thumbs up on the video and maybe and subscribe to the channel to keep up to date with any more yes any more synth fun we have coming up soon and until next time take care