hi I'm Ryan West and we're at dungeon beach in Williamsburg Brooklyn remember
back in the day when in order to get a synth tone or a bass tone you had to
have like all these crazy cables modules and you had to be like an electrical
engineer a neither do i that was before my time however there's been a great
resurgence lately in that kind of technology so today we're going to take
a look at a really cool plugin from soft tube called ironically modular let's
take a look the first thing that you're going to notice when you open up modular
as a plugin inside your DAW is that you have the opportunity to add modules in
whatever order you like mixers vcos BCA's VCFs adsr modules and
these all do different things and they operate in different orders and we're
going to help you demystify how you might start setting up your own patches
the first thing you're going to want to do is add a MIDI 2cb module CD stands
for control voltage what's basically happening here is it's going to convert
your virtual MIDI from your keyboard or your controller into virtual control
voltage that control voltage is then it going to go on to trigger other modules
so now that you have your MIDI 2cb which is you're controlling module you need to
add something to control and that's going to be your VCO or your voltage
controlled oscillator that's the thing that generates the tone so if you're not
familiar with modular synth technology one of the most important things to know
about this VCO module is that on the bottom you're going to see a couple of
funny shapes you have a choice between four different waveforms and going from
left to right you can choose from a saw waveform to a square to a triangle or a
sine if you have any experience with building synth patches in any different
kind of synthesizer then you're going to be familiar with these usually have a
little knob you can select which but in this case we're going to use a cable
from module to module to select exactly which waveform we want so get started
with this from your MIDI to CV module you're going to connect the note patch
to the cv one input that's basically sending the note control value into the
VCO module the next thing that you're going to want to add after the VCO is a
filter and of course that's the VCF here the filter is really just a way you can
shape the tone that you're creating with the VC
on the VFC module you have five filter options you have the 6 DB low-pass 12 DB
low-pass 24 DB low-pass 48 DB low-pass and then of course you have a bandpass
what you're going to do is you're going to select the waveform that you want
from your VCO module and put it into the audio in don't worry that you don't hear
anything yet because we haven't really connected anything to our outputs first
there's a couple things that we want to add still I want to be able to shape the
envelope of my tone that means I want to add a BCA and to control that VCA I need
an adsr so now that you have your VCA and your adsr modules up you're going to
want to take the chosen filter output from your VCF and go into the input on
your VCA module next you'll take the output from your BCA and go to the main
synth output those are the two main outputs that are labeled left and right
in the center of the modular plugin
now you're going to hear magical tone but don't worry we're going to add some
more control value stuff so that you can actually play this thing I'm going to go
ahead and take the gain value down on the VCS output and I'm going to raise
the CV value now I'm going to go ahead and take the output of the adsr model
and go to the CV in on the VCA module there's one more step you need to take
the gate output of the MIDI to CV and send it into the gate input of the adsr
module don't worry we're going to explain this a little bit more in detail
later just to clarify make sure that on your
VC a module that your static gain is all the way down at Absolute Zero and that
your CV is all the way up on stun at ten so let's do kind of like a little
summary about how we set all this up we started with our midi de cv module which
of course is just translating your midi data or whatever is coming from your
midi controller or keyboard into controlled voltage or virtual control
voltage that is information that these modules can understand so first we took
the note output and we sent that into the control voltage input on our first
VCO module we chose the waveform and in this case it was a square waveform and
sent its output to the audio input on the next module which was the VCF the
VCF s-- output and you can choose whichever filters let you to use was
sent to the input on the DCA module that's the voltage control amplifier the
output of the voltage control amplifier of course is going to go to the main
output that's where you get your sound from but we also wanted to be able to
tell the VCA module what the heck was going on who does that that's the adsr
module the adsr module also needs to know that there's no value coming in so
of course we sent our gate output from our MIDI to CB module to the gate input
on the adsr that is the whole chain
so why was modular synth technology so revolutionary and so popular in the 60s
unlimited creative freedom that's why it's regaining in its popularity today
all these different modules offer you almost endless options to create sounds
it may be no one's ever even heard before sounds that work just for you
just for the production that you're working on so dive in have fun be
creative see you next time