Oscillator sync - Modular V Tutorial

(electronic keyboard music) - [Narrator] Now that we have the fundamentals down, in this chapter, we're going to get a bit more adventurous, playing around with the way that oscillators can interact with each other, alternate filter modes, and introducing effects, randomness, and other fun stuff. In this movie, we're going to talk about oscillator sync. Having one oscillator automatically reset, based on where the waveform is on a second oscillator. We're going to choose another template for this, and start off with the one oscillator one filter template. Here's our typical sawtooth wave going into our filter. (keyboard playing) Just for a comparison, I'm going to listen to the output of a second sawtooth. (keyboard playing) Turned down for now, but we use it to fatten up the sound later on. Now you might have noticed the switch on the oscillators called Sync. That says I know you're playing your own waveform, but reset as soon as this other waveform resets. To set up Sync, you want to do two things: one, I recommend starting with the bottom switch position, just click on it to change it. That says use hard sync, which is the most typical, and to my ears, the most musically useful sound. The second thing you want to do is click on this little black switch below it, this will bring you up a list of what do you want to synchronize this oscillator to. This is about to become a slave to another oscillator, maybe in this case oscillator two. Now, initially, when we look at the waveform, we don't see much difference. Turn it up a little bit so we can see it better. (single keyboard note playing) There's our sawtooth. However, when we start to change the pitch of this oscillator, we won't necessarily hear its pitch change, but we will definitely hear its tone change, and see its waveform change. Namely, that sawtooth will reset based on the master oscillator. (single keyboard note playing) You see where it's starting another waveform and then being told to reset and start again. (descending keyboard note) We're starting to get some more interesting harmonic spectra here as well. (keyboard playing) Now for oscillator sync to work, a slave must be tuned higher than the master. Otherwise, the slave will not have reached the end of its cycle and started over before its been told to restart. Now, I can demonstrate that here by just reducing the pitch. (single keyboard note playing) This being told to restart before it's over. It's really fun if you turn it up, say an octave. (keyboard notes ascending) (keyboard notes descending) Now you could go ahead and vary this control to dial in a particular timbre that you like, but what's far more fun is when you start modulating the frequency of the slave oscillator. It will still keep the same fundamental pitch since it's being resynchronized by the master oscillator, but you get this variation in tone, changing over the life of a note. So I'll grab one of our envelopes, drag it down to the FM, or Frequency Modulation, input on this oscillator, and just start playing a simple arpeggio, (keyboard playing) and start increasing the FM amount. (keyboard playing) Play around with the decay to make it happen faster. (keyboard playing) Let's go ahead and layer the master oscillator back in with that so we have a stable source next to this ripping, moving, varying source. (keyboard playing) Now the variation between the two wave forms while the frequency of the slave is being enveloped really creates an interesting initial tone. (keyboard playing) Now again that was hard sync, and in my mind, that was the most useful one. It tells the slave always resync when you see an edge of your master oscillator. But there is a variation on that, and it's called soft sync. That says only reset if you're close to doing that anyway. And it's a little less predictable, a little more unstable, it doesn't get quite the sound you might expect. (playing single keyboard note) See we're just getting de-tuned oscillators 'til we hit a good interval. (keyboard playing) Then when we envelope it. (keyboard playing) I like hard sync better. (keyboard playing) Makes a great lead sound, and of course, you can still go ahead and envelope the filter and create other variations on the sound. Go ahead and drag in a second envelope to the modulation input. What do we have here, let's add a little bit of decay, very low sustain level, (single keyboard note playing) bit of resonance really makes it- (keyboard playing) very juicy, very animated sound.