Creating your first patch - Modular V Tutorial

(modular synthesizer music) - [Instructor] Let's start with some instant gratification. We're going to patch together a typical sound, or voice on this Modular V synthesizer. In doing so, we'll get an idea of what the different modules are and a common interconnection of them. Now the first thing I need to point out, that there is something in Modular V that makes your life much easier. In a hardware modular synth or also in some software modular synths, your keyboard normally has two very special output connections. A pitch control voltage, a voltage that corresponds to what key you're playing. And a gate output of voltage that goes high whenever you're holding a note down, which goes low whenever you release a note. That tells the synthesizer how to articulate or shape the sound of a note in response to the note you're playing. Now fortunately the Modular V does not force you to make this connection for every single patch. They have it built into the modules. For example, on our main oscillator control section, oscillators being our main tone generators inside a synthesizer. There's this little symbol K1. That K refers to key follow, how accurately an oscillator or other device follows the keyboard. At a normal slope setting of one, every one octave change in the keyboard results in a one octave change in whatever's been assigned to follow it. Such as an oscillator. (modulator synthesizer music) However, the Arturia Modular V software allows you to have four different key follow settings. Different strengths or amounts that a parameter can follow the keyboard. For example, if I set this down to say, half strength, you'll hear that the oscillator doesn't follow the octaves in the keyboard. (modular synthesizer music) Or if I increase it over one we get a very exaggerated response to the keyboard. (modular synthesizer music) For oscillators unless you're doing alternate tunings with different numbers of notes per octave, you'll want to keep the key follow slope at one, which is usually it's default. But there's other parameters such as filters where you indeed might want to have alternate key follow settings. Similarly, to trigger an envelope, the thing that shapes the loudness or the tonal contour of a note, you normally have to patch a gate to its input to tell it when to get louder and when to get softer. Well in this case, if you click on the input instead of a patch cord you'll get a long list of possible inputs hardwired behind the scenes for you. The default is keyboard trigger on. And that indeed is a very good default. That means whenever I play a note, on the keyboard, either in the software or over MIDI, to indeed trigger these envelopes to start playing. And when I release a key, tell the envelope to wrap things up. I'll leave that at its default as well. Now the way that the Modular V software is set up is to resemble an old modular Moog synthesizer. And the old Moogs grouped together their tone generators or oscillators in a very certain way. They have one module which they called the oscillator driver and it controlled three slave oscillators. What this allowed you to do is have one master frequency or pitch control that then would set the tuning for all three of those oscillators together. Likewise you could set other parameters for all of the slave oscillators in the group, such as the waveform shape. Notice the pulse width here, and also have separate controls for frequency modulation, the pulse width, et cetera. So inside our first oscillator group, we just following the keyboard, I'm going to select one of the waveform outputs from the first oscillator in that group. I happen to like square waves, so I'm going to pick that one first. I'm going to click on the output of that square wave. You notice that this patch cord starts to grow as soon as I do that. And all of these red circles indicate potential destinations I could patch this square wave into. Now in this case, I want to patch it to our voltage controlled amplifiers input. A voltage controlled amplifier or a VCA is what controls the loudness of a note during its life. Going up from silence to some maximum level and following back down to an intermediate level, then following back to silence. In most modular synths, the VCA is a separate module with a voltage input to control its loudness. Well in the case of the Modular V, that controller and envelope is built into the master view save module. A typical synthesizer envelope has multiple stages. This case the attack stage or A, which is how long does it take to come from silence up to a maximum level. The decay stage, D, says after you've reached a maximum level how long does it take to fall back into an intermediate level. The sustain level which is that intermediate level, and then the release time or R, says after I've released a note, how long does it take to go back to silence. When I play a note with its default settings, (modular synthesizer music) We hear the amplifier open and close to let the pitch of the oscillator through. (modular synthesizer music) Now this oscillator by default, in this patch is tuned very low. So I'm going to set it up to no semi-tone offset, and take it from 32 feet which is its lowest octave, like the longest pipe on a pipe organ and move it up to eight feet which is a very typical pitch. (modular synthesizer music) I'm going to increase the sustain level, what level we hold while I'm holding down a note. (modular synthesizer music) And you'll notice that the waveform it's on the output of my synthesizer gets larger or smaller in response to the actions of this amplifier. I start a note, the waveform grows taller. It falls back to an intermediate level, then goes back down to a flat line. No sound. (modular synthesizer music) Let's say I wanted that note to swell rather than start immediately like a percussive sound. To do that, I'd increase the attack time. (modular synthesizer music) (modular synthesizer music) (modular synthesizer music) I'll go back to a pretty short attack. (modular synthesizer music) The decay again is how long it takes to go from that loudest level back to intermediate sustain level. (modular synthesizer music) Short decay means you have a very short snappy attack the middle leaf falls back down to that intermediate level. (modular synthesizer music) A longer decay means it stays loud longer. (modular synthesizer music) Let's try a lower sustain level to make that more obvious. (modular synthesizer music) Maybe split the difference. (modular synthesizer music) I'll go with that for now. The release time is how long it takes to fall to silence after I've let go of a note. Again, I'm following the keyboard trigger to tell this envelope when to start and when to stop. If I had a very short release time, the note would end quite abruptly. (modular synthesizer music) If I had a longer release, it would have more of a decay and a silence. (modular synthesizer music) (modular synthesizer music) Let's go somewhere in between. (modular synthesizer music) (modular synthesizer music) So there's a little bit of a ring out after I let go of a note. So that's a very very basic patch. One oscillator, one amplifier, controlled by one envelope. But it can quickly become boring. (modular synthesizer music) The note sounds the same whenever I'm holding on to it. (modular synthesizer music) And each note sounds the same. What's very common in a synthesizer is to instead of going straight to amplifier, take the output of your waveform, and instead run it into a filter. A filter removes some of the harmonic components of your sound. So I'm going to go into the input of my filter. Take the output of my filter and drag that to my VCA input. Now you hear a much duller sound. (modular synthesizer music) That's because a filter is removing a lot of these harmonics. And notice we only have one spike instead of a large array of harmonics. But to change that, I would edit the cutoff frequency of the filter. That says at what point do we start removing harmonics. If I turn the cutoff frequency up, we'd let all the harmonics through. (modular synthesizer music) And you see the wave shape change in response. As well as this harmonic mix. (modular synthesizer music) (modular synthesizer music) (modular synthesizer music) Most filters also have a resonance control, which is basically a feedback loop that emphasizes the harmonics right around the cutoff frequency. So let's increase the resonance. (modular synthesizer music) And change the frequency. (modular synthesizer music) (modular synthesizer music) Okay that's a little bit more interesting. But, what if we wanted the tone character of a note to articulate over its life just like its loudness does? Well to do that we'd bring another envelope into the game. I'm going to take the output of this envelope into the modulation input on the filter. That's because I wanted to modulate or change the reaction of the filter over time. I'll make sure that this envelope is also being triggered by my keyboard trigger in. And now. (modular synthesizer music) You can hear the cutoff change over the course of the note. Let's go ahead and slow it way down so you can really hear this emphasized. (modular synthesizer music) (modular synthesizer music) I have an intermediate sustain level. (modular synthesizer music) And a fast release. (modular synthesizer music) (modular synthesizer music) (modular synthesizer music) And you can get a bit funky when you also have a faster decay as well. (modular synthesizer music) Now if you want to change how strongly that envelope was affecting the cutoff of the filter, you would need to change the modulation depth. That's what these little orange lines are above each jack. That's basically a control level, or attenuator for each of these inputs. So I'll sustain a note. (modular synthesizer music) Click on the orange area. (modular synthesizer music) And increase the effect that the envelope has over this filter. (modular synthesizer music) Or I could decrease it. (modular synthesizer music) Just has a very small effect. (modular synthesizer music) Or I could even drag down to make it a negative effect. (modular synthesizer music) Start low and then add more harmonics back in. (modular synthesizer music) (modular synthesizer music) (modular synthesizer music) (modular synthesizer music) (modular synthesizer music) And quickly you can see that these different controls are quite interactive. As you raise one level, you might need to lower another level et cetera. Indeed, it's fun to interactively tweak a sequence while it's playing. So I'm going to set up an arpeggio. (modular synthesizer music) Start tweaking these controls. (modular synthesizer music) (modular synthesizer music) (modular synthesizer music) (modular synthesizer music) Just by changing the envelope controlling the filter I really change its character over time. (modular synthesizer music) (modular synthesizer music) (modular synthesizer music) (modular synthesizer music) (modular synthesizer music) Let's also change the shape of the loudness contour. (modular synthesizer music) Very short and percussive. (modular synthesizer music) I can go to a faster sequence. (modular synthesizer music) (modular synthesizer music) (modular synthesizer music) (modular synthesizer music) (modular synthesizer music) (modular synthesizer music) (modular synthesizer music) (modular synthesizer music) (modular synthesizer music) (modular synthesizer music) (modular synthesizer music) (modular synthesizer music) (modular synthesizer music) (modular synthesizer music) (modular synthesizer music) (modular synthesizer music) So, there's your first patch using the Modular V software. A very simple one oscillator, one filter, one amplifier patch with one envelope controlling the cutoff frequency, the action of the filter and another envelope controlling the loudness of the note, the amplifier. In the following movies we're going to dive into each of these modules in a lot more detail to see just what range of sounds we can coax out of them.