Moog Spectravox is in production! // Review, tutorial and 10 patch ideas

hi spectrox from m is the fourth in their series of 60 HP analog semi modular synths and what makes it special is that instead of just one filter it's got 20 of them arranged in two banks these filters can be used for interesting spectral effects as well as a basic [Music] vooder and many other creative uses when combined with the other elements on the panel and Patch bed in this video I'll go over everything in depth explore quite a few patch ideas and discuss the pros and cons of this instrument I'll also post several multi- sampled instruments of it on my patreon on before I start a quick disclosure Mo sent me Spectra box other than that no money changed hands they have no say over the content of this video and don't get to see it before it's published this channel is funded mainly by viewers who subscribe to exclusive content and book updates on patreon you do premium and ads and price check affiliate links in the description which help the channel regardless of the product you choose to buy okay let's get going if the name spectravox rings a bell it's because Moog already offered it as a limited edition DIY kit at mogfest I made a video about it back in 2019 I'll link to that below the now in production spectravox is a bit different besides the different panel color Moog has replaced the big filter level faders with small knobs to make way for per filter VCA inputs and envelope follower outputs these are 20 new patch Jacks with quite a few patching opportunities other than that it's pretty much the same at its core are 20 filters in two filter groups or Banks the synthesis filter bank and the analysis filter bank I'll explain what that means in a bit and it also has the same single oscillator LFO and envelope controls as well as the same 16 patch Bay jacks on the right inputs are written in regular text and outputs in inverse text and all of these give you quite a few ways to rewire the synth or to connect it to external modular gear Spectra vox's analysis filters can accept audio either from the XLR combo input or the pro prog input and it does not come with a microphone any Dynamic mic should work or just line audio input spectravox doesn't Supply phantom power for mics that need it but you've got plenty of gain for dynamic mics and then to complete the overview the entire synth can be taken out of the case and mounted in a eurorack case the enclosure itself comes with a single mono quar in output in the back okay like I mentioned there's an analysis filter bank which runs the vocoding we'll talk about that in a bit let's start with the synthesis side both because it's a little bit easier to understand and also because spectravox is a pretty interesting synth regardless of any vo coding the audible signal chain starts with an oscillator that has both a saw and pulse mode with variable pulse width you can control its frequency from clicks below audio rate to about 3,000 HZ and you can extend that even further with CV and then you've got a carrier mix which will bring in no noise alongside the oscillator signal if you want to play the oscillator chromatically you can using an external keyboard or a sequencer it accepts voltage per octave and triggers and you can control it [Music] over an almost 10 octave range with pretty good tuning within a few cents and then that oscillator gets fed into the synthesis filter Bank this filter includes one low pass filter then a series of band pass filters and finally a high pass filter the outputs of all these filters is summed up at the end let's lower them all down and just listen to the low pass filter for a bit this is with resonance closed all the way down still hear a bit of resonance it's a 12 DB proactive State variable filter increasing res resence doesn't reduce the [Music] base and it won't self oscillate if we cut out all the signal to it so that's just one filter that's the low pass filter let's listen to a few band pass filters this is one of them the first and then they're spread out at different intervals with a single resonance knob to control them all and these resonant Peaks are what give spectravox its character and we can bring any of them in or out play with resonance you can hear them ring out we'll explore that later so these are the band pass filters and then at the end of the chain is a high pass filter with resonance and even without you can see this one is a bit resonant as [Applause] well of course the beauty of spectrx is when you start bringing in these filters it starts to reveal its character as you increase the level of the various bands and play with a spectral shift you can't control the frequency of these band pass filters or low pass or high pass filters individually you can only move them together using the spectral shift control sounds almost like a coal filter when modulated and the spectral shift has its own LFO and LFO amount and right so this interplay between the band fast filters is something you just can't get on a single filter safe so those are the 10 filters of the synthesis filter bank and spectral shift audio out of the filters is sent into the main VCA which has two modes either on which just keeps the VCA open or EG mode where it's controlled by the single stage Decay envelope generator this envelope generator can be triggered either by pressing the trigger button by sending a trigger or gate into the trigger input or if we plug in a microphone you can set it so that the envelope generator is triggered when audio passes a certain threshold and then the last synth side feature we need to cover is the hiss and Buzz switch when the switch is in Buzz mode it's just the normal operation of the synth when you bring it into his mode audio sent to filters 9 and 10 is swapped with white noise and this is regardless of where the carrier mixes at the reason being to make consonants more intelligible when you use spectravox as a vooder which is a good opportunity as any to talk about the vocoding side of spectravox vocoders are instruments that are designed to take any musical instrument we feed them an oscillator or an external synth and ideally have that instrument speak whatever audio is being spoke token into the microphone plugged into the program input or if you don't have a microphone any line level audio recording playback you want to plug into the program input to get an understanding of how vocoders work I'll temporarily plug the program output the microphone output into the carrier so we can hear the raw microphone tone and the discovery behind vocoders was that as we pronounce different vowels different specific frequencies resonate in the Spectrum check out how the frequency Peaks change as I pronounce different vowels at the same pitch a a e notice also as I increase your suffering and sing the same vowel at different frequencies the for and Peaks remain more or less the same regardless of my fundamental frequency ah so the thinking behind Homer Dudley's invention of the vocoder was let's copy those frequencies from our voice and emphasize them on a harmonically rich syn signal this trick is pulled off on spectravox using a hidden second set of 10 filters called the analysis filter Bank these are set at fixed frequencies strategically placed to capture different formats as each of these filters captures frequencies in its intended Spectrum it sends the level of those frequencies out through its respective envelope follower and then those envelope followers are normal or connected directly to the levels of the synthesis filter bank so if we take a listen to our carrier this is what it sounds like and if I put it in vocoder mode Let's try a few vs and these will work regardless of the pitch of our [Music] carrier and to increase intelligibility I'll add in hiss [Music] in order to help visualize what's going on at the outputs of the envelope followers I'll plug a bunch of Halo cables into them and maybe turn down [Music] lights notice how the letter H H lights up the higher frequencies to increase intelligibility you need to play around a bit with the synth settings generally speaking pulse works better than saw and a nrow pulse width works better than a square wave and for best intelligibility no Spectrum shift works better and resonance can help too [Music] resonance and then finally there's a hold feature which will freeze the analysis Spectrum [Music] [Music] okay so that's the core of spectravox but it really comes to life when you start exploring its patch Bay like I mentioned earlier you really want to pair it with some sort of keyboard or instrument that can send out CV and gate signals this works well whether you just want to play spectravox as a synth run a sequence into it or use it as a vocoder [Music] so that's all good and well if you just want to play single monophonic Melodies if you want to V code over chords and harmonies you can do that by swapping out Spectre Fox's single oscillator with an external polyphonic synth and you plug that into the carrier input thus replacing the internal carrier so without any vocoding in just regular synthesis mode this is the clean synth being passed through through all 10 filters it would have been nice if Spectra box was in Stereo by the way and you could pan its various filters but you can't I can still add in Noise by the way or hiss and if we go into the optimal settings for vocoding and enter vocoder mode [Music] now the carrier isn't the only thing you can replace you can plug in any musical or rhythmic Source into the program input let's try a drum Loop I'll increase gain and the bleed you're hearing is vo coding of the noise floor basically of the synth anyway you can hear the rhythmic character of the drum Loop [Music] transferred to the chord and you can choose any other kind of loop or sound this one isn't a drum loop it's just a rhythmic ARP you're hearing the chords from the synth but the Rhythm and Spectrum from the program [Music] Loop next the patch idea when you crank up the resonance then the filters will ring and if we just ping them with an envelope you can get various marima like tones different filter levels will create different tones now we're basically bypassing the carrier here with the envelope generator so to attempt to play this chromatically I'll plug my volt per otive signal not into the carrier but rather into the spectral shift the filter frequency and I'll plug key step into here to trigger the trigger and I can now explore playing my marimba more or less chromatically let's look at a few more patch ideas if we go back to treating this like a regular synth by default when you patch the keyboard's gate into the trigger signal you only get one trigger and it will deay regardless of that trigger whether you hold the key or not you can get around this either by connecting an external envelope generator into Spectra box or just plug a gate into the VCA CV and then in VCA mode you'll get notes that play for as long as you want them of course for more specific Contour control you'll want to hook up an external envelope and always a classic to get more oomph out of a single oscillator mono synth you want to modulate pulse width luckily we have a built-in LFO which we can hook up to the vco pwm and we now have pwm at the now the four8 to give us some motion to our sound and this also works nicely at audio rates for Less tame sounds so pwm Works nicely and then another synth staple point the envelope generator to the filter cut off meaning shift here to get a nice zap based on the envelope Decay and for extra credit pass this through an external attenuator to tame the envelope mod depth to make it less extreme we can only control time here not depth and for even more craziness and audio rate modulation plug the vco the oscillator into either shift or pwm let's try shift for now so this is the before this is the after resonance matters here just nice ways to coax extra tones out of [Music] this and with a bit of chorus and Reverb and then one final fun I think patch idea to explore I'll plug our drum Loop both into the program and into the carrier so we can hear it and this is the entire loop as fed through um the filters and let's close down the VCA the idea here is that if I wanted to use certain elements of this drum Loop to create a trigger either for this synth or for an external module I could say hunt down the kick so now the envelope follower of filter one creates an envelope every time it latches onto the kick let's try and hunt down the snares frequency could be this one no not exactly maybe this one yep so a nice way I think just to hunt down various elements of a loop and create triggers external triggers or internal ones using the envelope follower outputs okay let's talk about pros and cons for spectrx on the pros side in a world full of mono synths with one to three oscillators and a single filter a synth with 10 filters in the signal path is a refreshing tambal change and the additional 10 analysis filters behind the scenes and the envelope followers opens up plenty more opportunities as I hope you saw in the patch ideas section then on top of these the spectral shift and modulation with resonance controls along with pingable filters give you a synth that I think just doesn't sound like anything else and I mean that in a good way that said on the cons side if you're expecting a vocoder where every word can be understood you'll be better off with a modern digital vocoder spectravox has an analog vocoder and is relatively simple with only 10 bands its strengths are its filters and what you can do with them less so intelligibility further on the cons side unlike moog's other semi modular synths that can stand nicely on their own you're going to want to at the very least connect some sort of keyboard or sequencer a spectravox and and it doesn't support midi so you'll need one with CV gate capabilities then finally this is a fully analog synth so you can't save presets be ready either to film the panel or record any gems you want to your computer otherwise it might be hard and take time to get back to sounds you like so that's it for spectravox you'll find plenty of playable multi samples of it on my patreon along with my ever expanding book of electronic music ideas tips and tricks hit like if this was useful ring the YouTube Bell below if you want to make sure you don't miss the next one thanks thanks for watching [Music] [Music] you you [Music] [Music] I [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] oh [Music] [Music]

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Length: 22min 7sec (1327 seconds)

Published: Tue May 14 2024