Cardinal: The Amazingly FREE Modular Synth Plugin

[Music] howdy duty buckaroonies and welcome back to another episode of music go burr in this video i want to talk about cardinal cardinal is a free and open source version of vcv rack 2 that runs as a plugin inside of your daw it has many of the best modules from the vcv library including hardware clones and has all the same benefits of the vcv rack 2 upgrade and it's available for pc mac and linux for everybody to enjoy in this video i wanted to walk you through getting started with cardinal and walk through your first couple of patches including a basic synth patch a sequencer patch to send midi out of cardinal to other plugins or hardware in your session and using cardinal as a modular effect because that's a whole lot of fun if you don't have cardinal already you can download it with the link down in the description to follow along as we go today's video is also sponsored by the folks over at bjorks i worked with them a little while ago on a digital marketing campaign where they sent me all of their books and i gotta say these are really good although i would love to make more modular tutorials on the channel here with the average watch time being somewhere between five and eight minutes for a video it is exceptionally hard for me to make a video that i think is up to my own standards in that sort of time frame with something like modular which gets pretty hairy pretty quick patch and tweak which is the buicks book on the world of modular synthesis and in a broader sense synthesis in general covers all the basics of getting started with modular and even walks you through creating patches and some creative ideas to try on your own and explore i think the best part about this book though is that it also features some additional free resources for vcv rack and vcv rack 2 made by the one and only omri cohen that follow along with what's happening in the book so you can explore and play with the concepts in real time at your own pace patch and tweak is available now if you want to check it out for yourself and learn more about modular you can find that with the link down in the description below if you're into reading about this sort of stuff in general though i think my favorite book from the series is actually push turn move it's a book about the user interface and user experience design of software and hardware and it's probably one of the most interesting books i've read in a while so if you're into this sort of stuff definitely check this one out so with our books or bjorks in hand let's dive into the world of cardinal all right so to begin let's right-click and delete everything so we're first going to need to add some modules to get information in out of and through cardinal to allow it to communicate and do all the things so we'll right-click to load the module list and right away you'll see there are a ton of modules inside of cardinal including sequencers oscillators effects and all sorts of other just really really cool stuff including ports of most of the mutable instruments modules which are some of the most popular ones in the world of hardware with the brand we can sort for distro and this is where we're going to find these sort of utility modules that are going to allow us to get things started what we're going to need to start things off is a midi module allowing us to play our keyboard or controller and send the midi in to cardinal and then we're going to need an audio output to take the audio from cardinal out into the daw so in the distro brand we're going to grab the host midi module right click again and grab the host audio module so we'll space these out maybe something like this just so everything is nice and clear now we're ready to get started patching let's right-click again and instead of sorting by brand let's sort by tags i'm first going to find an oscillator of some kind that's the thing that's going to make noise i think we'll go with the macro oscillator this is based on braids from mutable instruments and it's really useful because it has so many different modes and sound types next we're going to need an amplifier which is going to allow us to control the level of signal and an envelope generator to control the amplifier so let's right click again we'll right click and go to voltage controlled amplifier i think we'll grab this vca here from vcv this way we can have a visual representation of everything right click again and go to tags and we'll go to envelope generator i think we'll use the bog audio adsr just because this one is nice and simple and should give us a visual of everything finally no synth is complete without a filter so once again right click tags and we're going to go to filter and let's get the liquid filter also based on a mutable instruments module and we've got everything spaced out and we can start wiring this up to create our first patch working from left to right we have our input information our oscillator our adsr or envelope generator our vca or voltage controlled amplifier our filter and our audio output so we're going to connect these in order because this sort of works sequentially first up in the oscillator we need to tell it what pitch to play because if i play something right now nothing happens so this in modular is measured in volts per octave so we have a v slash octave here and we can see we have v octave here meaning volts per octave so we can wire this to our oscillator volts per octave input and we're good to go right no we need to now wire this out if we wired the oscillator directly out this happens and it's just going to play forever and ever and ever and this is where the vca or voltage controlled amplifier comes in what we'll do is take the output of our oscillator and feed this to the input of our vca but right now if i sent this out once again it's going to play forever and ever and ever and that's because we haven't wired up our envelope generator if i move this over a little bit you'll see down here we have a gate input and a gate in the world of modular is what allows something to open or close it's a gate and it's like a square wave it's either on or off it's on when i'm holding down a key and when i let it go it's off looking over at our host midi module i can see we have a gate output so we'll wire that gate output to the gate input of the adsr here and the output of that to the cv or control voltage input of the amplifier very quickly cv or control voltage is really what makes modular so interesting and it's anything flowing through these cables in the world of a regular synthesizer you have sort of a fixed architecture in the way things flow or work and in modular you can connect these things really in any way you see fit meaning every time you build a modular patch you're essentially building your own custom instrument from the ground up in this case we're using cv or control voltage to control the output or level of the amplifier so you can see now it's already set down to zero if i wire this out no more infinite noise but once i play a note [Music] we can see that it's opening up because of this gate and we could shape the gate with the adsr so we could increase the attack [Music] we see it goes on if i release it we'll see it takes some time to release we could shorten the attack and lengthen the release we could add a decay phase with a low sustain and a long release and that is cv how far you take this idea is entirely up to you but for now let's take the output of the amplifier here and instead wire it to the input of our filter and we'll take the low pass 4 output and feed that into our daw now we have things like resonance frequency and fm for the filter so we can use this to create some filter movement and we've built our first patch let's right-click again and go to tags and i'm going to sort for oscillators and i'm going to grab the bog audio lvco here which is a little tiny oscillator that also acts as an lfo or low frequency oscillator in slow mode so let's drop that down and we can see we've got a sine wave here so let's take the output of this oscillator now acting as an lfo and feed that to the fm input of our filter so let's drop the filter cut off down right now nothing is happening but if i increase the amount of cv modulation [Music] or the speed [Music] we can now control the filter cut off with the output of this oscillator for a bit more fun let's duplicate this oscillator and bring it back we'll take the output and feed this into the fm or frequency mod and i'm going to set this to be a ramp wave so we'll click over here and we can increase the amount of fm so now this ramp wave lfo is going to change the speed of this sine wave lfo let's increase the fm depth pretty cool now why not grab another envelope here by duplicating this and use this to also control the filter cut off to some degree i'm going to move this down to the second row and let's right click and grab a mixer here go to tags sort for mixer and i'm going to grab the oh let's do just the quad vca here so we'll need our gate so we'll grab the gate output from the host midi i'm going to feed the output of that to the input of this quad vca and i'm going to feed the final output or the full mix into this fm but you'll see it's being overtaken so what we can do is change this connection to be input 2 and grab output 4 to feed this this way our lfo is going to be controlled at this level on the mixer [Music] and we can get a filter envelope with this input of the mixer so let's drop the sustain down [Music] very cool we've built a synth let's make this patch just a little bit more fun i'm going to duplicate this lfo one more time and let's use the output of this to control the timbre of the macro oscillator here i'm going to change the mode of this maybe to something like wavetable which should be somewhere around here there we go that way we're getting some movement to that wave table [Music] and why not use the output of the oscillator to also provide fm to the filter [Music] that's maybe a little bit intense so i'm going to duplicate the vca here and this way we have a control for this level so i'm going to put this into the input of the vca and the output here and use this to control the level of fm from the oscillator to the filter cutoff and i think that's a pretty neat sound let's cap this off with a couple effects maybe we'll go for a granular effect i don't think it's truly a modular patch maybe without a bit of clouds thrown in so let's put the output of the filter to the input of clouds and then we'll get the left and right outputs here and start messing with clouds a bit to create some interesting granulary stuff [Music] let's increase the output because this is getting pretty quiet [Music] maybe we could increase the attack here on the synth [Music] and you have created your first modular synth patch cardinal can do all sorts of other cool stuff besides just making synth patches so let's use it to make a generative sequencer and feed something like arteria pigments with it so i'm going to grab all these right click and delete them we'll right-click again go into the sort brand and distro here what we're going to need first is the host time this is going to allow us to sync everything up to the daw we'll right click again and go to jw modules because jeremy wentworth makes life worth living and grabs something like the let's do note sequencer 16 here in bit wig i'm going to add a new instrument after cardinal here so i'm going to search for pigments and grab instrument pigments okay wait for that to load and let's just initialize pigments here with something nice and clean to get this party started we'll wire the volts per octave output to the host midi module and the gate output to the host midi module so now this is going to pass the pitch and gate information out to the daw and you can see we can actually send some other messages generated within cardinal here like velocity after touch pitch bend and mod wheel so that's pretty cool to get things going with the sequencer i'm first going to click random down here this is going to generate a random sequence maybe we'll do that so it starts with something and now we're going to need to hook up the host time to the note sequencer 16 to get things rocking and rolling so first off we need to give it a clock or tell it what tempo everything is playing at so for this i'm going to feed the step output actually let's do the beat output here into the clock that way we'll get quarter notes then we're going to feed the playing output here into the restart input this way it's going to play and hold it open and then restart when we replay everything so let's give that a play and we should hear pigments playing some stuff stop and restart and the sequencer has reset after making a few quick tweaks to the pigments patch to make something more interesting i've now got this but you can see we have more than one note triggering at certain times but we're only getting one note out so for this we need to introduce polyphony to do that we can right click on a module i'm going to go to polyphony channels and set this to eight and make sure that this is also feeding out eight polyphony channels not every module in cardinal supports polyphony but if they do you can right click and set the polyphony channel so now let's give that another play and we should hear polyphony whenever more than one note occurs [Music] now we can also see we have a random trigger input here meaning it's going to re-randomize things whenever this input receives a trigger signal so for that let's right-click here and go to something like our clock modulators where we can get something that's going to mess with the clock signal let's take this out i'm going to feed the beat output to the input here and let's do a i don't know division here now this should randomize every three over two [Applause] so now we're getting generative sequences forever and ever from cardinal feeding pigments [Music] you can do this with whatever you want and there are a lot of interesting sequencers inside of cardinal to explore so i'll leave that for you as a bit of a homework assignment with all that out of the way let's finally close things off by talking about using cardinal as an effect in your daw so i'm going to leave this patch running this patch is going to drive pigments i've already got a little bit of delay on there but let's say we want to add something like clouds and i don't know maybe a moving filter to everything so for that in the session we're going to need add a new instance of cardinal called cardinal effects and we'll hit ok and this comes pre-wired with everything ready to go to create an effect so when it comes to effects with cardinal you can really delete all of these modules unless you need something that's synced to the host time in which case you would leave the host time module here so i'm actually going to right click and just delete all of these let's add some clouds and a filter so i'm going to right click go to brand and go to audible instruments let's find clouds which is right here and let's grab a couple of filters so let's grab the liquid filter i'm going to duplicate that and let's go into oscillators and i'm going to grab the bog audio oscillator once again right here and just give myself a couple of lfos to play around with for these filters disconnecting the host audio here we have the outputs so we can feed this into clouds here so left to left right to right we'll take output left into input of filter1 here output right to input of filter2 here let's do oh i don't know let's do just some bandpasses for everything why not so we're going to feed the output of the bandpass to host audio out left and for this one bandpass to host audio outright let's feed the output of these lfos to the input of fm for the filters let's drop the filter cut off somewhere down around here give ourselves a touch of resonance set these both to slow mode give them some different timings and start messing with clouds [Music] that actually sounds pretty cool but i think maybe it just needs a little bit more glorious reverb so let's right-click tags and find ourselves a nice reverb i think plateau is really the only real choice when it comes to reverb and vcv let's swap these outputs here i'm going to grab the left out right out feed the band pass to left other band pass to right and start messing it with the reverb a little bit [Music] [Applause] and we've built an effect inside of cardinal keep in mind that the cardinal effects also does accept midi so you can use cardinal effects to design midi controlled effects as well it's really endless and that is what makes modular so fascinating all good things must come to an end and i suppose that's the end of this video a big thank you to kim and the team over at buicks for sponsoring today's video and making it possible patch and tweak is out now if you want to learn more about modular i highly recommend this book and be sure to go subscribe to omri cohen's channel as well if you want to learn more about modular and the world of vcv it's a phenomenal channel you should absolutely check out of course a huge thank you as well to the vcv rack community the developers behind vcv and all the modules and the developer or developers behind cardinal it always gives me a nice warm fuzzy feeling in my giblets to know that tools like this are out there free and accessible to everybody to play with and start creating with and finally a big thank you to you for watching i hope you enjoyed it i hope you learned something and as always i hope this inspires you to get out there and make something awesome [Music] you

Channel: Venus Theory

Views: 179,766

Keywords: Venus Theory, sound design, bitwig, bitwig studio, fl studio, logic pro x, ableton, cubase, modular synth, modular synth tutorial, vcv rack, vcv rack 2, vcv cardinal, vcv rack tutorial, vcv rack 2 tutorial, vcv cardinal tutorial, modular synth patch ideas, modular synth patch

Id: GNTGF_r36lk

Length: 19min 53sec (1193 seconds)

Published: Mon Jul 11 2022