OPx-4 Warm Analog Vibes - Patch Walkthrough

so we all know that aphpx4 is an FM synth right I mean of course it is but I'd say that's only about half of the story and maybe a little less than half it also has multiple multi-mode filters tons of envelopes and a full modulation Matrix not to mention its oscillators can also make a huge array of waveforms and it has a sample layer and a full array of effects too it's capable of making some sounds that don't sound like FM at all so today I thought we'd do something a little different with Opex 4 and go for a patch that sounds more like an analog synth like this warm pet sound that you're hearing in the background right now this is a pretty simple patch to make but I hope the ideas that we explore will get you thinking about some new ways to use this versatile synth hi my name is Joe thanks for hanging out with me today as we take a little journey with Opex 4. all right so let's start off with this patch that I call full init which is if you haven't watched any of my op X4 videos yet this is just essentially you can go to the factory and it patch and we're just going to come over to the modulation Matrix and just turn all of these modulation slots off they don't do that by default in the factory patch so there's eight tabs of them 32's total slots just go through and turn all of these off and that way we're starting with kind of a clean slate all right so let's get into this patch the unit patch is going to be kind of a clean sound a clean sine wave [Music] so let's begin by adding some character to that waveform I'm going to come over here to operator one and we're just going to take the this pulse width control and turn this up to about 50 and that's going to give us more of a square wave kind of sound more Buzzy something that we can carve up with a filter so let's go ahead and shape the envelope for the amplitude of the sound a little bit which is going to be envelope one so we'll just take a look at that and maybe let's bring up the attack sum foreign maybe about 800 milliseconds sounds good to me and let's also bring up the release a bit uh let's bring that up quite a bit actually maybe up to I don't know 25 00 milliseconds or so [Music] perfect so the next thing I want to do is try to add some analog character to this and this is not an analog synth but because it has such an extensive modulation Matrix we can actually set it up to do that so we're going to begin on the filter LFO utility tab and let's come over here and take a look at these utilities and we've got this thing called a note counter here which this basically just counts notes and it outputs some kind of modulation signal that's different for every node and you can use this for like sequencery kind of effects but today we're just going to use it as a source of Random so let's go ahead and set this output mode to be random for note counter one and let's come back over here into the modulation Matrix and assign this thing so we'll set the source to note count one and let's set the target to be ratio one where are you are you right there and let's turn this on and give a listen to what happens here so I'm going to play this same node over and over again [Music] and you can hear it sounds totally busted right it's playing like a different note every time I hit that same note so this is the effect we want but we actually don't want it to be anywhere near this extreme so let's turn this modulation amount for slot one down a lot like down to maybe two percent or so so now you can hear that the pitch is just like a little bit different for each note so it just almost sounds like a detune kind of chorusing effect which is exactly what we want that Emily light is kind of what an analog oscillator would do right and it works across multiple notes if I play chords [Music] so it just gives it kind of a warm character nice huh all right let's let's get into the filter for this so I'll come over to the filter tab and this is already running through bus one that's the default configuration is that operator 1 by default runs through bus one which contains filter one and let's go ahead and change this to a low pass 2 filter that's a 12 DB per decade filter and it's a pretty commonly found filter on a lot of analog poly synths and let's just bring the cutoff for this down some maybe bring the resonance up a bit foreign [Music] yeah I think I like that about there and let's go ahead and shape that filter with an envelope I'm going to use envelope 5 for this and let's go ahead and set this up in the mod Matrix first so we'll choose slot two and we'll choose envelope five and let's assign that to the filter cutoff which is cut off one and we'll go ahead and set this one to bipolar and let's go ahead and turn that on and I get almost no sound and that's because we haven't adjusted the envelope yet so let's go take a look at envelope 5 which is now controlling the filter cut off and you've got to kind of watch it with envelopes five and six especially if you're starting from the init patch because envelopes five and six as you can see here they have this time scale set to 10 and what that means is that like all of the time values that you see down here are actually going to be one tenth of the value that what they show on the screens so as it's set up in the default patch this is meant to be a really really Snappy envelope but we're making a pad here so let's go ahead and come back and turn this time scale back up to 100 that way the values will be as they're shown on the screen so now we can start to shape this filter envelope sum [Music] so let's start by giving it some sustain [Music] and some release let's go ahead and bring that up to match pretty much what the envelope releases for the the amp envelope [Music] cool so let's give that a little bit of Decay as well um go ahead and bring this Decay level up to full and let's adjust a curve um two [Music] I like that but um let's go ahead and turn that modulation down just a little bit so that it doesn't affect it so strongly foreign [Music] I like that that's shaping up let's go ahead and add some effects to this let's come into effects number one and let's add a chorus here and for this one I think I'm going to bring the depth up quite a bit maybe turn that to about six SEC milliseconds [Music] make it nice and thick but let's turn this rate down quite a bit it's moving it off really quickly this LFO let's bring that down to maybe between 0.2 and 3. and let's maybe bring that feedback up some too [Music] um I think I'm going to bring the filter modulation down just a little bit more getting a little bit too much sweep in there for me for this patch [Music] and I think I may even bring this this modulation down to one percent [Music] let's also set this filter up to track the notes up and down that way we can move the filter as we play higher notes on the scale the filter will move along with it so for that I'm going to choose this third modulation slot and we'll choose note as the source and again we'll choose cut off one as the target and this can be unipolar and maybe let's turn this amount down to strike 50 see what that sounds like [Music] let's add a little bit of Reverb to this so we'll go into Global effects one let's choose just the regular Reverb we'll leave it on room I think I'll bring the time up to maybe three and a half seconds and bring the mix down maybe to 34. [Music] that sounded pretty good so I think the other thing I want to do is kind of a Finishing Touch here is just add a little bit of movement to that filter at all times and we'll do that with an LFO so let's make the assignment first and we'll go ahead and assign slot four we'll set this to LFO one and we'll set the target to way back up here cut off one once again and turn that on let's take a listen to what that sounds like [Music] so that's obviously like way too much right but let's go ahead and take a look at the LFO I want to show you something over here so we've got this Global switch right so right now if I leave this on we're just going to have like a single LFO for each Voice or each note that we play here and so the LFO is going to kind of stay in sync with the different notes so let's have a listen to that [Music] setting off uh then each Voice or each note in this case is going to get an independent LFO so they may go out of sync with each other and I think that's going to sound a lot more analog-ish foreign let's go ahead and bring that rate down quite a bit maybe about 0.3 [Music] that sounds really nice I do want to bring that level down like I said from 100 and let's bring that down quite a bit I want this to be kind of subtle maybe just around 32. all right foreign [Music] 's pretty versatile huh if this video has been helpful for you at all today it would mean a lot to me if you'd reach out and hit the like button that just lets me know that I'm hitting the Merc with the kind of content that I'm making so thanks for that well that's all I've got for you today I hope you learned a little bit about Opex 4 I know there's a great sale on it this weekend so if it's something you've been looking at I've had a lot of fun with it and I pretty much full price anyway I'll catch you next time this is Joe

Channel: Joe Filbrun

Views: 3,594

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Id: ee0ugHGnzuU

Length: 13min 22sec (802 seconds)

Published: Sat Mar 18 2023