Moog Grandmother Deep Dive — Daniel Fisher

[Music] Oh [Music] [Music] hi I'm Daniel Fisher here at Sweetwater sound and today I'd like to introduce you to my grandmother that is the mo grandmother semi modular analog synthesizer and for starters why is it called semi modular and that is because one it's modular in that every one of these sections whether it's the ARP or the modulator or oscillators or mixers or filter or envelope or the output or they're very very cool real spring reverb each of these things will work together without any cables plugged in because it's all pre-wired but as soon as you start putting in your own wiring you can change the order of this or isolate any of these modules to use somewhere else so if you have this near a gyro rack set of modules you can come out of this into that out of that stuff into this you could use these oscillators with some filter on your rack you could use if you have some digital oscillators you wanted to go through a mogh analog filter you can come out and come into this everything can split off and it also has a really useful arpeggiator and sequencer there are three sequences that are saved after power off which is cool and each of the sequences can be 256 steps and you can have notes and rests and accents and so some really clever stuff with that and so what I want to do is show you each of the individual modules what they sound like and then give you some ideas of what you can do with this thing first we'll pull all the wires here okay so now we have all the cables out and it's pre patched so the outside just going to the filter the modulation can go to the pitch amount cutoff amount pulse width amount now you get to choose your waveform your envelopes can go to your filter the envelopes can also go to the amplifier and then everything can go to the reverb your pezzi adders go to the pitch of oscillator so in other words all the standard things you would expect in a synth and so I'll start that way to show you the waveform so this is just one oscillator this is the famous mo Goss laters and they just sound great [Music] and here's the same thing a triangle [Music] [Music] and in square and with both the square and the pulse [Music] both of them can have their pulse width modulated so I'm going to take an LFO set to sign and turn up a little bit of pulse width modulation [Music] [Music] I remember this is a single oscillator with no effects going on no filtering no nothing that's just the sound of the oscillator I love that sound now add a second oscillator and things just get ridiculous so [Music] now slightly detune it [Applause] [Music] [Applause] and then they have oscillator sync which lets the second oscillator sleeve to the first oscillator so that as you change its pitch it's constantly correcting back to the pitch of the first oscillator which creates all these very cool harmonics like this [Music] let's do that with a little bit of spring reverb [Music] this is such a classic sound and I love the reverb but I also like delay and that's why I brought flashback by TC electronic and I have it set to ping pong so it just alternates left to right I love playing since the ping pong and so some of the times I'll be using reverb sometimes I'll use delay and sometimes I will use both of them but I'll always tell you when the flashback is on other than that you can always assume that you're only hearing this set and right now it is often has been off so far so another sound source is noise and this is probably a good time to start playing with the filter so this is the mo bladder filter you know it is it's a great 4-pole low-pass filter [Applause] definitely a classic 50 60s kind of sci-fi movie sound and and then on the filter we can't track the envelope so let's go back to an oscillator [Music] so we could track this envelope and it gives you a DSR but the S is on a slider instead of knob and it kind of lets you see it's the only one of the four that actually is a level the other three are x so one it's kind of a teaching thing that shows you that it's different but two it's just very easy to put that where you want it and see it in reference to level of sustained so I'll start with a fast attack short decay and as you can hear it can be very snappy [Music] and go pretty long but just super high quality sound you can't go wrong with moji analog and so the envelope typically is assigned to the filter but then on the volume or UV CA you have a switch that goes between envelope keyboard release and drones so when you go to drone the sound is just always on that's perfect for if you're just doing sound experiments and so now I'm going to turn on the ping pong delay [Music] [Music] [Music] so now we'll talk a little bit about the modulations so the whole modulation section is basically an LFO that can be sign saw ramp or Square and then where that goes if there are no cables in it you can send different amounts to pitch cut off of the filter and pulse widths so if I an insult tied to the mod wheel so if I just get a note here and turn all these down except for pitch go hear that I now have a ramp going upward in in pitch [Music] and I could change that to saw [Music] or sign or square [Music] then I could also do filter cutoff so same thing but now moving the filter yellow faux goes very fast [Music] [Music] and then over here on the left is the arpeggiator and sequencer section and it looks fairly simple and yet it's actually quite powerful both arpeggiator and a very powerful sequencer when it's not plugged in it's running pitch to the oscillators it's running a gate to the envelope which then goes to your filters of your amp and it does a thing called order forward backward and random order means that the order of the notes that you play is repeated over and over so instead of just going up or just going down or just going up and down you actually get to in real time change the order of the sequence so for example if I just play a little chord here going up it's gonna repeat over and over going up if I go down but where it gets really cool is if I do some particular order that's not in a row it will follow that and if I need more fingers than I have I can use the whole button - and now I it's following the order that I played but by switching to forward backward it'll go up through that order and then backwards through that order if I go to random it just randomly goes through all of the notes that I play and then there's an octave 1 2 & 3 switch so right now we're only hearing one octave but if I switch to 2 it'll do all those notes and then jump up and [Music] and then when you switch the mode switch from art to sequencer you now have access to three very long sequences there are 256 notes each and each of those notes can be a note a tie arrest or an accent the know can have an accent and when you do an accent you get a voltage pulse out of the keyboard velocity out that you could assign to something here or you could send for example to a drum machine to make the drum machine move forward a certain step or it can be a certain sound that triggers externally a lot of variation with that and each of the three sequences can be played either in their normal order or all the way through the sequence then backwards so you can really have a 512 note sequence and to record them you just throw it in a record and start touching notes and you can hit the tie button the rest button or the accent to add those so I've got one already made here and the cool thing about the sequencer is that whatever key you press transposes the sequence so you can you could make really interesting little sequences and then change chords [Music] and then like I said you could do it forward and backwards [Music] or random [Music] and in real-time you can switch from one sequence to the other [Music] if you want both hands you can press the whole button [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] very very cool so now I'm gonna start playing with fetch cords and I'm not using the ones Moe gave they're white and gray and black and I thought colored might be a little easier to see what's going on once it gets complicated but we'll start with the modulation in that and we'll go to a single note here single oscillator and and now I'm going to take I told you that it normally has sign saw ramp and square way for the LFO but they also have a sample and hold out that's kind of our sampled random and I'll show you what that sounds like I'm gonna put that into a note now go into the pitch in now maybe maybe that's too much maybe it's it's pushing the pitch too far in each direction so what you do is they have a thing here called an attenuator which will basically knock down a signal so I'm going to come out of the attenuator and into the pitch in again and with the attenuator I have it just set a little bit you're only hearing a little bit of pitch shift all the way back up to the full amount that we had and this attenuator is often called it an attenuator because it can both attenuate in a normal polarity but it can also go upside down and attenuate that way and so it's a bipolar knob so what I'm going to do is I'm going to use a sawtooth out I slowed down a little bit I can hear it's a ramp thank you saw so just anytime you need to lessen the amount of a control signal and flip it upside down this will do both things so a lot of power at that and while I got patch cords out in this same utility row there's a high-pass filter and I haven't talked about the high pass filter yet because it's not normally in the audio chain when there are no cables but now that we got cables we're gonna come out of the oscillator we're gonna go into the high pass and high pass filter passes the highs and blocks the lows and then I'm going to go into the VCA in and I should hear my oscillator this and now because it's a high pass it's going to roll off the lows [Music] and now I'm going to run the second oscillator through a different path so I'm going to take the wave out of that one and going to the regular low-pass filter so the first oscillator is going into the high-pass filter the second one is going to the low-pass filter and on here is a thing called a mult and typically a mult is used if you have a control signal like an LFO or an envelope and you want it to go to multiple places why it's called a mult you go into one of the four jacks and the other three are basically splits of that but this one has some extra features that you normally don't see in that it's able to mix analog audio signals and most of them won't let you do that so it's pretty cool so what I'm going to do is take the second oscillator into the low-pass filter I'm going to take the output of that so my VC a in is already full so instead I'm gonna go to this mult so I'm gonna send the low-pass filter to the mult I'm gonna send the high-pass filter to the malt and then I'm gonna take mult out into the VCA and now I should hear both oscillators into two different filters and so it definitely has a different kind of sound and then using the VCA mode I can determine whether I get a drone or an envelope that works on both or an envelope that only works on marvel [Music] [Music] and maybe I'll take that sample and hold that I like and put that to only one of the oscillators so now it will kind of go crazy all on its own and to control it I think I will go into that attenuator so I'm going to go into that and out of that and back in to the pitch [Music] or I could do that to the other oscillator and have that one do random [Music] kicking a little delay [Music] [Music] okay so who needs a grandmother it really can be used for a lot of different purposes and I know it when you first see it it looks like a toy but I promise you these are all top quality components that the unit is really solidly built and as simple as it looks there are 41 patch points and there are patch points on the back you have an appreciator you can do clocks the whole thing runs off MIDI so for one thing it's a great teaching tool because it lets anybody start simply the colors help them see what's going on but then very quickly as you could see just plug in cables and you learn what happens when I connect this to this what happens and you could read books all day long but until you actually plug something into something else and hear what it does you'll never really know it in your gut so it's a great teaching tool but it's also just a great when I need a monophonic massive set of oscillators in a spring reverb you know that what a great feature that is this thing will just add a fatness to your recordings especially if you don't already have a mode this is a great one to add to it the sequencer having 256 notes for something that's really easy to program and like anything else you can use the sequencer for something else while you're using the synth for your own different thing everything about this can be patched out can be brought back so I find a lot of people who have your ax that are just the rack units they often get accused of just making Boop's and bleeps and I gotta confess I I can't listen to boobs and bleeps all day sometimes in my office I'll set something on random and let it go and I like to listen to that stuff yeah I'm weird but when people say well can't you make something more musical one of the things that really helps is a real keyboard and this is full-size keys with velocity and very easy to get to octave changes so you basically have a wider range than a grand piano but to also have the arpeggiator in a sequencer that tracks your order and three sequences and just the ability to go in and take stuff and send it to other things it can go to external filters and go to external pitch you can go to other envelopes it can and it can run other things basically this can be the hub of your eurorack system and let you take more musical control over it and if you don't have a keyboard yet or you only have a controller keyboard I think you'll find that this will take any eurorack system and just explode it out I know I haven't covered every feature because there are just so many of them but that's a quick run through this thing and I hope you got a good listen to the sound if you have any further questions about the mo grandmother semi modular analog synthesizer please contact your Sweetwater sales engineer if you like these kind of videos please subscribe to our You Tube channel my name is Daniel Fisher thank you very much for watching [Applause] [Music]

Channel: Sweetwater

Views: 100,687

Keywords: moog grandmother synth, moog grandmother synthesizer, daniel fisher sweetwater, grandmother synth, moog grandmother, grandmother moog, moog grandmother patches, moog grand mother, moog grandmother review, moog grandmother sequencer, moog grandmother jam, moog grandmother bass, moog grandmother ambient, moog synthesizer, moog, grandmother, grand mother, moog grandmother tutorial, sweetwater, moog grandmother sounds

Id: J5_fZUyj9jg

Length: 28min 29sec (1709 seconds)

Published: Thu Jan 31 2019