SURGE XT THE MOVIE : Amazing FREE Synthesizer - Full In-Depth Tutorial

hello everybody and welcome to this video this is an updated video to a video that i did about a year ago called surge the movie where i went into every single parameter in search and showed you how to do pretty much whatever you want with it because there's so much new stuff in search xt which came out recently i decided it would be worth doing an updated version of that video surge xt for anybody who may not be familiar or just kind of trying to figure out what it is is a free open source synth it's currently being developed by the surge synth team it does pretty much everything it's got you know all the kind of uh types of synthesis that you would want to see in a synthesizer and it also has a pretty crazy amount of effects that you can do pretty much anything including mixing and if you were sort of brave you could probably even master with surge but we're not going to go into that today uh just to show you um i've just done a little snippet here um i've just used the reverbs and eqs and stuff in search to kind of get a rough mix of stuff together just to show you a couple of sounds together here so [Music] so yeah surge is very capable you can do pretty much anything that you would want to do with it um it can do way more than what i showed off there but uh yeah let's basically start getting into it so the purpose of this video if you watch the whole way through is you're going to pretty much know what everything does in search um you're not going to be confused by pretty much anything and you will be able to make the sounds of your dreams and desires for free so let's get into that so like always with these longer form videos i like to start at the top and work my way down and just kind of take it section by section but before we start looking in too much into what everything is doing here let's just have a quick talk about what the synth actually is how it operates so we've got these scenes here scene a and c and b a scene consists of your oscillators here there are three oscillators in both scenes you've got six all together uh then you've got uh various settings i'm not gonna go too much into these things until later on because they'll they'll have their time but you've got um things for setting moniphany and your pitch bend and stuff like that fm mountain which is if you want fm between the oscillators that would all be set up here filter configuration which allows us to choose how the filters are working together there are two filters in each scene uh which are down here then we have our scene output which is basically our master mixer for the scene then we've got this this mixer down here and this mixer is mixing between our oscillators within the scene and also you know allows us to mute you know oscillators or solo oscillators pan oscillators and we also got these ring modulation outputs as well and uh this is the output for our noise too again i'll come back to this um and yeah then we've got our filters and our main envelopes and stuff here that is a scene it's all this stuff so if i change it to b here all of that stuff changes so let's make you know a couple of changes here so we can really see it change up let's change the wave shaper and it's probably going to make it sound awful but you'll just be able to see when i change back to cna they're the same thing but i can set them up differently and then we can use them together in different ways so i can have single which will allow me to just use one of the scenes if that's all i need then i can key split them this will allow me to set one part of my keyboard to be one of the scenes and then another part of my keyboard to be another scene so you might want to have something chordal up in the higher register and then something maybe a bass sound or something in the lower register that's how you'd set that up and then you set where the split occurs here by the note you can channel split it as well if that's something that you need to do and you can also use it in dual mode and dual mode will basically mix the two scenes together so it's just one big sound which is if we listen to it here let's make it more obvious so let's take this whole b part and pitch it way up turn it up a bit [Music] so now you hear the lower part and then b it's the higher part it's set to single then if i go to dual [Music] they'll play together so yeah that's pretty much it for the scenes and how they work um you can also set your polyphony here so you can set your polyphony as low as two just by dragging down on this and you can set it all the way up to 64. so you can play 64 notes at once a good thing to note here as well is that if you're sort of interacting with anything most of the time a double click will reset it to the default so i can reset the mixer to what it's supposed to be here if i just double click and i can also reset my polyphony to 16. so yeah that's pretty much it for over here then we move into the patch browser and the patch browser has been greatly updated for surge xt basically this patch browser we had before was fairly archaic but now it's uh pretty fully featured so there's various things we can do at the most basic form we can use these navigation buttons down here to move through categories so as you can see right now we're in sequences so we can hear the first patch and sequences that's probably a bit low to play that sound so if we're in sequences here we can move to the next patch in sequences by just hitting this navigational button [Music] [Music] so let's say that we don't want to hear things in sequences anymore we can now move through the categories with these so let's move to let's not go to splits let's go to plucks and then we can move through them of course the same way and then you know if we made our own patch we can save it down here too and that will give us an opportunity to name it so if i was to say save this i could call it something else like you know cool bell or whatever and then i would save that and that would go into my uh my user part over here which we'll have a look at in a second um but yeah that's the sort of main navigation down here you can also search which is a new thing that they've added so let's say i wanted to have a supersaw so i've got jpxk or jpak super saw here i can click into that and there you've got a super saw um so you can search anything and then um so you can also search things like you know uh pluck or base or whatever and stuff like that will come up so as you can see with this preset as well um i have it favored it uh you can just hit this little heart to favorite things and uh you can unfavor them by clicking it again uh the favorites will come up here in your favorites under user patches so you can see if i add this jp 8k supersaw to my favorites i come here to my favorites it comes up in here the other things to take note of is if i click on this window here that displays you can see i can come in and browse the categories as i was before and also this third-party patch is in here by various cool people that have contributed their patches to surge and there's some great stuff in here so it's worth checking out then in your user patches um you can see here i've got one called percussion so you can create your own categories here so when you make a patch so i've made one here called layered kick and i've put it into this percussion category so it's just a really simple kick just to show that off and then even if you make your own stuff you could favorite it and it would of course come up in your favorites and uh yeah that's pretty much it for the regular stuff in the in the patch browser you can also initialize the patch from here so [Music] just give you the default patch for surge you can also set the current patch as default if you want to make some changes to the default patch but you can also save your patches from in here so if you just hit save patch here it will give you an opportunity to name it and put it into a category that suits it and you can change the author name to yourself and add any comments if you want to remember stuff about the patch and then the other stuff in here is to do with sort of loading patches and stuff so you can load patches from files if you've got a file with a bunch of patches in it you can bring it into search uh you can refresh the patch browser if you know maybe something isn't showing up and uh yeah just got stuff for opening sort of various patches that you may need and that's pretty much it for the patch browser so moving on we can activate mpe here this will allow search to work with mpe controllers if you have one of those uh you'll probably have to follow the guide on how to set that up with your individual mpe controller but it does support mpe then next here we've got this tune button this will allow us to import tuning files if you want to use a non-standard tuning if that's the sort of thing that you're doing you probably don't need me to explain it to you but basically you can load a file and it will change around the notes um it's good for you know a lot of world music and stuff that's not necessarily done on a western scale there's also a really detailed tuning editor in here and there's a bunch of ways that you can sort of edit the tuning of individual notes [Music] so you can do you know pretty much any sort of micro tonal thing that you want to set up in here um if you want a tutorial for this you can let me know but um to be honest with you if this is the sort of thing that you're into doing you you probably don't need me to sit here and explain it to you you can pretty much do whatever you want with the tuning of the synth then you've got zoom so these are just presets for the zoom you can drag out the synth to resize it but you can also set it to pre-designated zoom levels in here some of them are probably a bit too large for the purposes of this video so the next thing you've got here is you've got the effects bypass and characters the character it's sort of like an eq for the overall synth so you can make a brighter you can have it normal you can hear the difference there you can have it warmer just sort of a warmer sound that's a nice little addition to have then you can bypass certain things so let's say i had this setup sent to a reverb send so let's add a spring reverb in here let's put it on the send and let's just make it really big so now we're sending to the spring reverb and i'm sending a hundred percent here with the send i'll go into that in a while let's say that i wanted to bypass the send now i can click this send and now my send will be bypassed and that's globally then we've got a a second one here which is uh global and send so this will bypass these final effects here so these go over both these go over both the so you can see here that a has its own effects and then b has its own effects and then we have this global effect here so if i add something to this global effect let's add say nimbus here [Music] and then i move this global that gets deactivated as well and then finally we have all so what that will affect is the individual effects on a and b so let's say i had a flanger here on a then i go to all and now every effect is bypass so we've got all the global bypassed all the sends bypassed and all the individual effects bypassed then we've got a master output here this is just the overall output of the synth there's also a display here which will show us roughly how the output is coming out and that's pretty much it for this top section here so next we have the oscillator section uh this is probably going to be the section that takes the most time so there's quite a lot to go into here before we go into all the mental oscillator types and all the stuff that's going on in here let's just have a quick look at the oscillator section so we have three oscillators that we can select between we've got one two and three here and selecting between them isn't going to change which one we're here and like it does up here what we need to do is actually turn them on in the mixer so i can mute one now and i'm gonna hear nothing when i'm hitting the key because it's muted and now we can turn on oscillator two let's put it up an octave now we're here on oscillator two if i mute that and i go back to oscillator one we can mix them together if both of them are unmuted and then we have a volume for each one you can also pan them so we can send one of them left and one of them right maybe if we set both of them to the same pitch and we slightly detuned them we get sort of a supercell sound probably a bit 2d tuned but you get the idea and uh yeah so that is uh that is how the the mixer interacts with the oscillators let's initialize the patch here so uh the other thing about the oscillators is we've gone into it but you can also uh change the octave here so that's minus three octaves to plus three octaves and you can set it to zero the other thing we've got here is key track uh key track when it's turned it will be turned on by default but if we turn off no matter what key i hit on my keyboard i'm hitting them all right now it's going to be the same pitch so we're designating a specific pitch um this can be very useful for percussion sounds fm sounds there's lots of context you may not want one or all of the oscillators to track pitch four so that's worth an on re-trigger is going to re-trigger the oscillator at the start of its cycle every time so basically normally when the oscillator is running it just basically is running freely and when we hit a note it doesn't reset the oscillator so it may come in here it may come in here on the waveform it may come in here and this has the effect of every note sort of sounding a little bit different and if we're stacking things on top of each other they're all going to be in different phases so if you don't want that to happen and you wanted to restart right here every time i there are sounds you'd want that for again percussion and basses a lot of the time you want them to have a really solid consistent sound so you may want those to constantly re-trigger on the same thing and uh yeah so so that's what retrigger does and then we have various controls down here so we've got pitch fairly self-explanatory this allows us to go up or down in semitones to a maximum of seven and minus seven uh if that is not enough for you you can right click on here and you can go to extend range extend range is going to make it so that we can go to -84 semitones and plus 84 semitones there's a couple of more options in here that are worth looking at we've got absolute pitch here as well this will allow us to set the pitch of the oscillator in hertz so if we turn off our key tracking we could have an oscillator that's set to you know basically lfo rate down here or we can set it up 840 hertz um again this can be very useful um when you're working with you know oscillators modulating each other and stuff uh it can be very useful to be able to change the pitch in hertz uh you can add modulation from a source this is not the most effective way to add modulation but if you'd like to do it this way you can so we could add modulation from macro 1 here and then we can set the amount of hearts we want to we want to do it so let's do it by 840. and then you can see here my macro it's now going to be attached to my pitch so let's just reset this patch then we've got the shape so each oscillator here let's start getting into the oscillator selection so we've got classic and modern classic is the old default oscillator so it's got sawtooth and square wave and it sounds a little bit different to modern modern is sort of the same idea so if we go to classic here first which is what we're on we can change the shape and it morphs from a square to a saw to like i saw an octave up then if we're in the square uh the square mode here we've got a width control so we can do um uh pulse width modulation you can also do a different type of pulse width modulation here or we can do both at the same time now uh if you're in a saw wave here so let's set it to a saw wave this first pulse width modulation isn't going to work at all it's not going to do anything and neither will the second one but if you're on this sort of upper shape here this octave saw this will allow you to do ultimate modulation [Music] you can get some really cool sounds doing that uh especially with the saws if you have two saws set up and you pan them against each other and you mess around with these controls you can get some really cool sounds with that uh then we've got modern um modern is very similar by the way when i hit when i hit in classic here if i hit sawtooth or square wave all it's doing is changing at where in the slider the shape is so it's not actually a different oscillator it's just basically a preset for the oscillator so you can see it just changes the shape here then modern if i click sawtooth what we have here is a mixer so we can have everything at zero let's bring them back to all zero then we get silence we can add a pulse within which is basically a square wave and i'm double clicking here to reset them bring in a triangle wave and then we can also um we can mix them together obviously so it could have a bit of triangle a bit of saw and a bit of square maybe bring a more triangle [Music] so you get a lot more range and what you can do here and of course you have your pulse width again here and you also have sync which will allow you to do that whole sync thing so let's bring in just our sawtooth here and get that typical sawtooth sync sound and uh yeah that's also available here in classic that's the only real difference between them uh in classic you can also bring in a sub and the sub is basically going to be a square wave an octave down so you can mix that in you could have fifty percent you could have a be all sub uh sink just like the other modern oscillator and then also you've got unison on both as well so unison basically lets you to duplicate the oscillator so we can duplicate it 16 times then we can detune those against each other [Music] so basically lets you set up huge super sauce we can go into modern it's going to sound a bit different but same basic idea so yeah you've uh you've got unison abilities on these and uh yeah that's pretty much it for those basic oscillators next we have a wave table oscillator here same stuff again i'm not going to go into every time to change the pitch and stuff you you can understand that we can morph our wave tables here [Music] and we can select the wave tables if we click in here so we could go to something let's go to something third party let's do venus theories wave tables and let's go to flow belt 3 and move through that with the morph [Music] so really nice wave table we can also sort of i guess you would call these like they're like oscillator effects almost so we can skew the waveform a bit and that'll do to the whole that will do to the entire wave table you can sort of see visibly what that's doing to the waveform you can also saturate it so this will have the effect of sort of bringing in more square wave harmonics if you want to think about it like at that very top here it's first of all louder but second of all it's taking on much more of a square shape and we can move into another let's go for something computer here [Music] and let's move through that now if i take that saturate down [Music] it's got much less of that distorted square wave sound so yeah definitely worth playing around with those and then you've also got this format this is almost like um in serum or massive you have these like bend plus and minus things that you can do to the wave table so let's say if we were to modulate these together we could modulate the morph here let's choose a different let's choose a different one let's go banjo here and i'm just going to allow the uh maybe not banjo let's go for something more obvious let's go for uh venus theory fm so you can hear it's morphing through the wave table there then we could also say add another lfo here to the formant [Music] so you can see by by manipulating the formants and manipulating the morphs you can kind of get infinite possibilities out of each of these wave tables uh let's just initialize that again and go to our wave table and you can see here we can also skew horizontal again this is sort of pinching the wave table in that sort of bend plus minus so yeah definitely combining these as well as morph them through the oscillators [Applause] you can get a bunch of different sounds out of pretty much anything we have unison again here we can go up to 16 voices [Music] and do the same thing that we're doing on the previous oscillators so next we've got window so window basically what this is doing is it's almost um sort of mimicking what amplitude modulation would do so we can sort of select a waveform here so we've got a bunch of different options with our wave tables uh let's come and go to uh growl here and let's pull back the formant and stuff and then we can set up a window so we the window basically let me just let me just show you it's the easiest so if we go more for basically morphing through our wave table here and then we select a frame we like and we can mess around with the format but you can see there's sort of separate formants happening here so you can almost see three distinct places this is happening so as i change this so if i change it to sign here [Music] [Applause] you can see the sine wave shape that's happening here it's almost like amplitude modulation or if i go to cosine here you can see that slightly changed [Music] or i could go to triangle again slightly different way of distributing the formants let's have a look at one of these weirder ones like blend [Music] and you can hear some of them sound pretty slightly different and some of them sound very very different like i would imagine these square and rectangular ones are going to sound very different so you can see the square wave here that's important so yeah it's almost like an amplitude modulation sort of effect and then this is this formant is almost like increasing the pitch of the amplitude modulator [Music] or decreasing so yeah very cool oscillator type um we also have a high cut and a low code here so we can do some filtering within the oscillator we have to enable these first by right clicking and hitting enabled and that will allow us to do that sort of stuff within the oscillator so that's the windowed oscillator next we have sine so this sine wave oscillator is particularly useful if you're doing the oscillator fm routing um because you can use sort of these different kind of sine waves based on old sort of fm synths there's a lot of different shapes in here and you can use these to fm each other so let's have let's have one and two doing doing an fm thing so now i've set up a simple two oscillator fm relationship here where um oscillator 2 is going to fm oscillator 1 and i've got oscillator 1 an octave lower then the second oscillator so if i increase the fm depth [Music] you can hear the effects of that and if i change the pitch you can hear it changes drastically [Music] now what we can hear as well is how different these sort of subtle sine waves are [Music] so yeah a bunch of different options for um you to use for mainly for fm i mean you can use these on their own but but i think these are sort of set up with the idea of them being used as fm modulators in mind you can also feed back into the oscillator so we can now feed oscillator 2 back into itself and we could also feed oscillator 1 here which is just a regular sine wave back into itself that's going to get pretty noisy pretty quickly if we're not careful but yeah that's the uh sign operator we have a couple of other controls here the high cotton low cut just like in the last oscillator have to be enabled you may want that for fm because it can get pretty noisy so you may want to cut out some of the higher low frequencies we can also add unison like we've been able to in the other oscillators and of course we can change you know our oscillator one here as well so the other thing in this sine oscillator is we've got this behavior and uh we've got same as fm2 and fm3 which is the new way it behaves um it used to be slightly different from those oscillator types so basically this is just here so that any patches that were made before it was updated sound the same but it's much better in this context now because everything is more consistent speaking of fm2 and fm3 we're going to now move on to them so what are fm2 and fm3 let's actually initialize the patch so we're not fm anything twice here so fm2 and fm3 very simply are sine waves that modulate each other so we've got this baseline wave here that we're hearing and then we can modulate it by this first uh this first sine wave here which is m1 that'll give us a very basic [Music] sound and uh we can change the pitch of that so we can change its ratio so we can have it be double the pitch and then sort of multiply it on upwards until it's extremely high frequency [Music] and then we have another modulator that's the exact same thing so we have modulator 2 here same thing and we can change the ratio of that so the other thing we've got here is an offset and this will allow us to offset the pitch between modulator 1 and modulator 2 so you'll start to hear sort of a warbling effect as these go out of tune with each other and then you can sort of take that to the extreme as well then we've also got a phase this will offset the phases from each other um you can sort of see this in the waveform what this is doing so let's bring up the amounts here [Music] this generally is pretty subtle but um sometimes it might make it might make a difference to the sound so it's good to have and then feedback which is going to feed back the main oscillator into itself after it's been fmed by um m1 and m2 so that can get pretty noisy as well fm3 i'm not going to go into because it's basically the same thing the only real difference in fm3 is that we have this third oscillator here that we can also use and this is controlled in terms of frequency [Music] [Music] so as opposed to using a ratio like we use with the others yeah we can create pretty crazy sounds using the three of those together but i think you probably get the concept from fm2 so next we've got this string oscillator um this is kind of moving into physical modeling territory um so what this is designed to do is sort of give you a plucked string kind of a sound basically and you can do a couple of things um to that sound to make it more to your liking so first of all let's skip this exciter parent here then we've got the we've got the level of the exciter so currently our exciter is white noise so the more we push it through the more resonant it starts to become and the more we bring it back kind of more plucky it's going to be then we've got string 1 and string 2 decay so let's bring those down so i'm holding my key down now and that's how long it lasts so let's bring up string one decay so that's what string one sounds like and that'll decay very slowly as i hold the nose let's hear a string too you care they sound slightly different from each other and they're probably two different comb filters that's generally how this is done we send a noise burst so you can see i've selected noise burst here through a couple of cone filters and this sort of create this stringy effect now the next thing we can do is we can detune them from each other and we also have the balance between them so we can control the decay up here and here we can control the balance between string one and string two then we've got the stiffness control [Music] and this can sort of work to sort of dampen out the strings of the higher lower frequencies so down here [Music] it's more plucky it can kind of be better for bass and then as you come up get a much more brash sort of sound but let's have a listen to some of the different exciters so this is white uh this is a white noise i believe it's just says noise but i'm assuming that's white noise then pink noise here is a bit darker um because pink noise has less high frequencies than white noise the attack also there's a bit less attack on it then we've got sign so now instead of using noise we're using a sine wave we've got triangle so you can hear when we start using these older waveforms [Music] it really can start to sound like a bass or something like that particularly when we mess around with some of these controls [Music] so it will require pretty much a full tutorial to go into making sounds with this but let's just have a listen to them [Music] so you can hear with the stiffness as it goes up it's sort of affecting sort of the formant of the waveform as well [Music] and down here we're getting sort of a pluckier more low frequency effect so this is a really good oscillator for making sort of plucky bases and stuff like that um as you would expect because bases have strings then we've got these constants which are you know not bursts so now we've got white noise going through the whole time or we've got a constant sweep [Music] so yeah lots of weird stuff you can do with that oscillator i'll probably do a separate video on you know different sound design things that you can do with the string oscillator but just so now that we understand how it works next we've got twist twist is basically a miscellaneous um basically a bunch of miscellaneous oscillators um i think they may be taken from somewhere some some some code or it might be based on something i'm not positive but basically you got a bunch of different things in here so i'm very quickly going to touch on each of these oscillators and twist we're not going to go mad into detail on them but uh just so you understand basically what they are the first one here is waveforms you kind of start off with a triangle wave here and then you can kind of d shape it with these square and saw shapes and then that kind of goes up into a sort of a sink sound [Music] so you can see the sort of the square sinkage that's happening there and then you've also got this saw wave that you can bring in so you can see that saw shape coming through there you can definitely get some sort of weird cool um waveform shapes out of that so next we've got the wave shaper and the wave shaper basically gives you a waveform and you can basically sort of skew it with these different controls so you got this wave shaper here that distorts the waveform then you got fold which sort of brings in almost an fme kind of distortion and then you can bring in this asymmetrical and depending on how you combine these you know we can get closer to sort of a sine wave [Applause] or we can shape it into these crazy shapes these are great to modulate as well [Music] and then we've got variation mix which allows us to kind of move between i suppose different variations of wave shape [Music] there's a lot of really cool waveforms you can get out of this and next we've got this lpg and the lpg i think it stands for low pass gate this is basically a a a pluck low pass filter that's built into the oscillator so if i bring up this if i enable it so i've got it enabled here and i bring up the decay here we've kind of got a plug going on now we've got response sort of letting more high frequencies through but this lpg the reason it's called a low pass gauge is it's decreasing the frequencies and the volume at the sort of same time so it gives you a unique kind of plucky sound that's on quite a few of these operators now we've got two operator fm this should be pretty familiar idea to us because um let's just turn off this little pass gate so next we've got two operator fm this should be a pretty familiar idea to us so what we can do is we can bring in fm here from another oscillator and then we can change the ratio [Music] we can also feedback and we can bring in sort of a sub mix here for some low frequencies [Music] so yeah very simple little oscillator but you can get some cool sounds out of it then we've got this formant and phase distortion oscillator so this formant slash phase distortion basically this is going to allow us to distort the phase of an oscillator in various ways and uh sort of mess with the formant of that so the best way is to hear it kind of got a similar vibe digital sort of vibe to fm so we've got this ratio type and then we've got this forming control and this sort of works similarly to how our um our window control worked where we're sort of increasing the frequency of this this format then we've got shape [Music] and then we can also change the shape down here so by messing with these the format and the ratio you can get a bunch of sort of vocal sounding sounds [Music] and this is especially good as an fm modulator as well so you can hear everything kind of that you get out of this when you're modulating it has a sort of vocal quality to it wow so yeah that's the formant and phase distortion so next we've got harmonic here and uh harmonic is sort of um almost like an organey type of oscillator so it sounds to me like we're mixing a bunch of sine waves together and then we're kind of changing how they're laid out so if we go through this organ mix here and then i change the peak you can hear we've got different frequencies coming in and out then we've got bump again this seems to be changing the relationship and frequencies between stuff it's almost like we've got sine waves stacked on top of each other so yeah this seems to be really good for like weird organy kind of sounds and also you can do some weird sort of additive sounding [Music] especially in the lower registers [Music] [Applause] yeah kind of a weird oscillator but uh there's a lot of cool sounds that you can get out of that as well so that's a harmonic oscillator next we've got wavetable i'm not going to go through this too much because there is another wave table oscillator but this one is slightly different in uh we can sort of morph through the wave table on multiple axises so we've got a bank here so we can morph through various banks of wave tables and we can select one and then we can move through on the x and y axis [Music] again i'm not exactly sure how this is set up but what i would imagine is if we've got this grid here and you imagine that the wave tables are set up where it can move through them both horizontally and vertically it just gives you more options on how to move through it [Music] so there's definitely some cool sounds on there as well then we've got this lo-fi mix this is sort of bringing in a digital edge it's probably doing some some minor bit crushing or something like that and we've got our low pass gate and our low pass gauge decay like we have in the other oscillators as well so next we've got chords here um so chords basically allows you to morph between a bunch of chords uh so we've got this root mix which is very important if this is 100 you're not really going to hear many chords so let's set it to around 50 here first here we've got an octave then we move up to a fifth or a power chord then we've got a suspender 4 minor chord minor 7 minor 9 minor 11 and so on into the major chords major sevens major nines everything is in there and you can also change the inversions [Music] give you the same notes but the pitches are sort of oriented differently and yeah that's basically it can be a cool one to modulate so for instance if we move through if we move through uh by the way the the key is based on whatever key you're pushing so it will basically you know give you all the chords based on that key that you fit but if you modulate it you get some really weird sounds again cool little weird oscillator that's in there um and it can't be cool for certain stuff and next we've got vowel speech this is an oscillator that's basically designed to allow you to create vocal sounds by manipulating various parameters here again this video is going to get really long if i go into every single oscillator in detail but basically you can create some [Music] weird vocal kind of sounds by messing with these parameters here and the best way to do it is just to do it by ear so next we've got granular cloud and granular cloud basically starts us off with a waveform a saw wave and we can mix in a sine wave here as well but uh basically what this allows us to do is have a number of grains so we can decrease their duration you can kind of hear the grains cutting out there and we've got our density set up really high let's bring that back it's going to start to be much more clicky and rumbly because there's very few grains happening so you can get really nice random clicky noises with this and as we bring up the duration start to hear that saw wave coming through again now if we bring up the density a lot we can also randomly pitch these and it'll start to sound a bit like a super saw first then as we go it's going to become nonsense very detuned so yeah cool little granular oscillator there that you can do with synthesis so filtered noise here will allow you to select a type of noise basically its brightness sort of filter out some of the frequencies you can also affect the clock frequency actually sort of have this low-fi effect and eventually it'll morph down into crackles because the frequency is so low then we've got resonance here [Music] so we can bring in this dual pick mix you can sort of hear the resonance of the frequency we've got it set up so you can create a bunch of different noise sounds this again i'm not going to go into too much detail particle noise just a different noise generator so we can have sort of really dense noise that sounds like white noise you can set how random the frequencies are filter types so great way of creating crackles vinyl sounds stuff like that next we've got inharmonic string [Music] [Applause] and this is sort of another oscillator in the physical modeling realm and this is great for sort of creating brash in harmonic sounds [Music] so it can be a great thing to layer with pads or or stuff like that or even just a sound effects [Music] a bunch of different weird sounds you can get out of it you even got these weird sort of cushion sounds yeah that's inharmonic string mode resonator again i encourage you to look into all these in more detail but this is another way again modal resonator it's very similar to some of the other oscillators you get a few controls and it's basically set up to be another sort of physical model and type of thing [Music] you get sort of windy sort of sounds with it so next we've got analog kick this is designed to sort of let you quickly make some kick drum sounds you may want to team this up with using the amplitude envelope to get the sort of decay that you want on it [Music] um if you actually want to make good kicks in surge um i would recommend mixing this with other oscillators not just using it by itself but it's cool to have in there next we have this analog snare so we've got this sort of tone and noise mix and we can manipulate the two of them just sort of get the snare sound we're after also pitch is going to make a big difference here and also the decay of our amp envelope we'll tighten things up and then finally we have a hi-hat very similar to the snare so we've got like some filtering that we can do we can mess with the decay got this variation mix in for sort of giving us a different timbre and then obviously you're going to want to manipulate the um the amplitude envelope here to get exactly what you want and don't be afraid to manipulate the attack on the decay you can create shakers again pitch makes a big difference this one is the one i out of the drum since that i actually think is the best i think you can get a lot of uh very convincing cool hi-hat sounds out of this so yeah that's that's just a brief overview of everything in the twist oscillator i can't go too into detail on them there's just too much stuff in there so next we have alias and alias is sort of designed to be almost like the video game oscillator so you can create you know chip chunny sort of sounds so you can degrade these oscillators these basic shapes you know you've got ramps and pulses and and sign um so you can do things like big crush them [Music] and then manipulate them in these other ways you can see we can sort of squarify it and then warp the wave as well [Music] and it just tends to give us that really sort of aliasy you know almost chip tuning kind of sound but it's good for other stuff too you can create [Music] weird sounds that have nothing to do with that you can even bring audio into this so yeah there's a bunch of weird things you can bring in here like you can bring audio in here you can add some of those tx waveforms it's even got some weird stuff like memory from oscillator data step sequencer data uh daw chunk data so you can get [Music] really weird aliasing glitchy sort of sounds out of this let's bring in uh oscillator data [Music] so yeah you can bring in a whole load of weird glitchy stuff into this and get crazy sounds so it's definitely worth experimenting with and just while we're on this alias oscillator one of the best things about the alias oscillator here is it has this additive shape that you can select so you've got all these regular shapes and then you've got this additive one and what this additive one actually lets you do is a little bit different to the others it starts off with this sort of a saw wave shape but you can actually click this edit button here and it will bring you into an additive menu where you can individually change the partials and basically draw your own oscillator shapes you can see if we close this we've got this crazy oscillator shape now and we can edit it more so you can basically draw whatever sort of oscillator shape that you want within here there's also some presets so you can just go with a sign and i'll just give you one partial or you could do a square and that's going to give you the odd partials and then once you start one of these presets you can sort of edit it from there so that's one of the coolest options that's within this alias oscillator so next we have sample and whole noise sample and whole noise is basically using sampling so it's sampling a waveform at sort of random points and we're sort of getting a bunch of different clicks so you can hear as i bring the correlation down you can really hear that we're just getting sporadic random little clicks and as i bring it up it sounds more like a waveform and basically it's using that idea to create noise and this is allowing us to change the shape of the waveform but uh the thing i recommend doing with this is extending the range of the pitch and as you bring it up into these high frequencies you can create a bunch of really weird bunch of really weird noise types and that pretty much does it for the oscillators and we also have an audio info so we can take a stereo a left or right input so you can basically pulse anything you want if you wanted to put a guitar through surge or something like that you can use the effects you can use the filters and everything like that but uh yeah that concludes the oscillator section of surge okay so next we're on to the control section here of the synth and that's this sort of big area here so this contains everything from you know how we set our pitch bend range or whether it's mono or poly to oscillator fm routing which will let us fm between the oscillators filter configuration this one is extremely important um a lot of people struggle to understand what this is doing and if you don't understand what this section is doing it can lead to headaches with your sounds that you may not understand it's very important to understand what this section is doing see now put relatively simple uh then we've got you know our mixer and pitch settings and then we've got our filters and envelopes and all that anyway we'll get into them in detail one by one so let's just start here simply with bend depth this couldn't be simpler by default [Music] this will allow you to use your pitch wheel to bend the note up and down two semitones and then you can control how many semitones you would like to bend up or down so you can go all the way up to 24 which is two octaves up and two octaves down don't think that requires any further explanation uh the next one to have a look at is these settings for uh whether the synth is mono or poly by default is going to be set to poly which simply means you can play multiple notes at once the amount of notes that you can play at once is controlled by this poly counter up here so you can set it to be as low as two and then when i add a new note it's going to cancel out one of the old ones and uh yeah you can set that to be as much as 64 as i said at the start let's just leave it at default for now next you've got mono mono's very simple when i play and you knows the old note dies that's all that mono means and then we've got latch this is another really simple one to understand latch basically is the same as mono but it's gonna hold my note down until i hit a new note so if i just press a key here when i'm in mono you know it's there for as long as i hit it and then it's gone if i hold if i put latch on it's going to hold my last note until i hit a new one and that's a latch so next we have mono single trigger or mono st this is very simple as well what this is going to allow us to do is uh the easiest way to show this off is if i just put a filter on this and let's make it resonant and then let's make that filter it doesn't matter if you don't understand what i'm doing here i'll get into it later but let's make that filter be controlled by the envelope and let's give it a long decay somewhere around there so what is the difference between mono and mono st so mono if i whenever i hit new note so i'll just keep my note held down i'll hit a new one you can see that it's restarting that filter envelope every time i hit a new note [Music] and if i hold if i put it onto mono st here and i hold the note down every time i add a new note it's actually going to continue that filter [Music] so it's not restarting this uh this filter envelope [Music] and then back to mono [Music] [Applause] let's see that it's restarting every time i hit new note um the thing to understand with this mono st as well is if there's a gap between the notes if they're not overlapping [Music] then it will actually restart the envelope so if i just hit a note and then hit another note it starts at the beginning of the envelope but of course if i keep the notes held [Music] it won't restart so the next one we have here is mono fp and that stands for mono fingered portamento and what that means is that uh it's basically to do with the way we've got the portamento set up so let's set up portamento here on mono and you can see that it's sliding between each note right and if i go to this mono fp here what this is going to do is it will only slide between notes if they overlap so if i'm holding the key and then i hold the next one let's make that portamento longer if i hold the key and then i add the next note it will slide between them but if there's a gap between them so if i play one and then play another there won't be a slide between them [Music] so it's going straight from one note to the other and if i hold the first note down [Music] then we get our portamento and then mono st plus fp is just both of these together so we get our single trigger where our envelopes are going to continue on so let's set that up again let's just set up our filter here and have it go to the envelope [Music] so now if i hold down the first note it will glide in pitch to the next note and it also won't retrigger the filter envelope so we get this sort of effect [Applause] [Music] [Laughter] but if i do sort of the exact same thing mono you can hear how drastically different that's gonna sound okay so that's pretty much it for those uh play modes and if we right click we get some additional options for no priority so currently if it's in mono [Music] let's just turn down that portamento because it's kind of annoying so currently if it's in if it's in mono it's going to prioritize the last note so that means that if i play a new note it cuts off the old note very simple then we've got no priority high this will prioritize the highest pitch so i'm hitting a key now that's below that it's not going to change notes but if i hit a key that's above it it will and i'm just going to go down and pitch so you can see that it will stop changing once i go below the original note now i'm going below and it will no longer change notes we've also got no priority low this will only change the note if it's lower than the one currently held and if i try to go above it's not going to change the notion and finally we've got legacy mode here and legacy mode is just here so that any patches that were made in the older version of surge will behave the same as far as no priority goals so next we're going to move on to this oscillator fm routing this is very simple this is just going to allow us to use these three oscillators that we have to fm each other so the most basic relationship here is we can hit this first one which is oscillator 2 and you can see it's indicated by the arrow it's going to fm oscillator 1 and that's decided by this fm depth so the more that we bring this up the more and that will eventually make its way into noise um then uh just to show you as well so oscillator two here or oscillator one so we can have whichever oscillator we want um we can set it up to be any of these oscillator types so we could have it be say this alias oscillator and we could go in and go to our additive and then edit and create our own oscillator shape and then use that [Music] that shape now to fm our first oscillator this is not an fm tutorial um if you want i actually have a pretty long fm tutorial on this channel um it's using vital but it kind of gives you the concepts of fm but basically what's very important with fm is the oscillator shape and also the pitch relationship between the two oscillators so it sounds drastically different depending on the pitch relationship we've got set up then the next option here is very simple so oscillator 3 is going to fm oscillator 2 and then oscillator 2 is going to fm oscillator 1 so let's pull this back a bit because it's going to be pretty crazy and let's uh [Music] make the oscillator shape for two a little less crazy so now we've got this now oscillator three let's change the pitch maybe change the waveform [Music] and then the next one is a little bit different instead of oscillator 3 fm and oscillator 2 in this third set in here it's actually going to also fm oscillator 1. and this is generally going to be a little bit less harsh because when we've got three fm in oscillator two oscillator two is going to be pretty distorted and and complex sounding by the time it gets to oscillator one but in this setup we have two sort of simpler waveforms that are fmming oscillator 1 which is our output oscillator and just to note as well if we wanted to have an fm relationship set up here but we also want to hear the the oscillators that are doing the fm we can just unmute them in a mixer down here so let's say we wanted to hear oscillator 3 as well as having it fm oscillator 1 we just unmute it here we can even just here by itself and change and then mix in the fm signal and we can still change the fm amount [Music] so yeah that's pretty much it for the oscillator fm routing section um one of the other things to note in here is um the noise so the noise is in the chain here and you can see that is just directly outputted so after the output of these oscillators put out the noise is then mixed in [Music] so the noise is not fmming any of the oscillators it's basically just being mixed in with them okay so the next section here that's extremely important to understand is this filter configuration section this allows us to set up the filters basically however we want so first of all let's familiarize ourselves with what we're actually looking at here so by default it's set to this setting and if you right click you can select the settings here by their name so we've got serial one through three we've got dual one and two stereo ring and wide um and those correspond to these selections that we can make down here so obviously this is serial one and then we can select them as we'd like by default it's on this white one which is quite important because it's stereo so for instance if i add unison we get a stereo signal and you can see that up here see how the left and right channels are fluctuating if we set it to serial one here you can see we've only got one line instead of two and that's letting through a mono signal so see left or right channels are the same so that's the first thing to to understand but let's have a look before we go into any of that really let's just have a quick look at what we're actually looking at here so this is our signal and this is coming into filter1 which is located here then it goes through the wave shaper which is located here and then it goes to filter two which is located here so pulse the wave shaper we're filtering again then it goes to our amplitude output this is our amp and this is our amp envelope so this is basically our our output volume section you could think of it as and uh after it goes through that it goes into a feedback loop and feedbacks into itself if you don't understand what feedback is basically we're sending the signal through again sort of makes the signal sound a bit more distorted and stuff like that so now that we understand what we're looking at oh yeah and this is the high pass filter so you can see there's a high pass filter here so this will allow us to take out some of the low frequencies uh in the signal so it goes through that after it goes through the the amp the amp section here so let's start here with serial one so serial one very simple mono signal again very important to understand so no matter how wide the oscillator is set up to be if i put it through this it's going to come out mono um this is very simple so we've got filter one here so let's just uh let's actually just turn off that unison just here a solid contour here so let's go for 24 db low pass [Music] so there's our filter one and then filter one is going to go into the wave shaper here so let's select something for the wave shaper let's select some weird sorta [Music] so now filter one going through the wave shaper then it's gonna come through filter two so let's use another low pass and now you can see all those high frequencies are gone and we're not gonna be able to bring them back because we're low we're low passing them and this filter is not going through the wave shaper so until we increase this you're not going to hear those sort of distorted high frequencies and then that goes to the amp envelope here so if we were to set up our amp envelope differently and then that goes to the high pass filter so we can take out all the low frequencies so that's the first serial one there and now let's go to serial two which is here and serial two is basically exactly the same as serial one except now we have a feedback loop so we can now use this feedback control to feed the sound back into the filters [Music] and this is going to give us a more distorted sound it's also feeding back into this wave shaper so we're pushing into this wave shaper a bit harder and that's basically the only difference between uh serial one and serial two now we have serial three this puts filter two after the amplitude envelope and sort of right before the feedback loop you can hear right away it sounds pretty different it's louder for one [Music] so yeah that is uh that is serial three now we have these these two options here which is dual one and dual two these are putting the filters in parallel so instead of one common after the other they're sort of both happening at the same time so right away you can hear that that is not ideal for what we want here [Music] now they're they're both sort of happening at the same time so one isn't going through the other [Music] and then both are being passed through let's use a different filter here so let's use um let's use this bam so the easiest way to tell here is you can tell i'm using this bam but we still have low frequencies because it's also going through this low pass filter but if i send it through one of these serial ones you can hear we're losing all those low frequencies [Music] because the band pass filter is coming after the low pass filter now the only difference between dual 1 and dual 2 really is that in dual 2 here um only filter 1 is going through this wave shape [Music] so you can hear this this second band pass filter sounds really clean because it's not being distorted by this wave shaper and then of course we can feed that back in in which case now it is sort of going through the wave shape and yeah that is it for the sort of basic serial and parallel setups let's just initialize the patch here and have a look at the last few so now we've got left and right left and right is going to basically have filter one and filter two be on separate channels so one of them is left and one of them is right so let's put a low pass filter on filter one and a also low pass filter on filter two and now you can hear let's up the resonance that as i change these maybe the best way to do this is with two different other folds let's use that available to here at a different race [Music] that the filters are both on different sides so if we take the filter bounce over here so this will allow us to mix between filter one and filter two let's go to filter one wow [Music] so that's a great way to get stereo filtering sounds in search this can be really nice for adding stereo widths and things you can do super obvious stuff like that or you can just have subtle differences between the filters and it will just add a bit more stereo depth so the next setting that we have here is a ring and this is going to basically ring modulate the filters against each other so instead of being added together they're now being multiplied by each other so you can see this is done when they're being added together it sounds like this ring mod is going to multiply them so the same sort of chain setup sounds drastically different when you do that and of course [Music] so it's just a way to get i suppose different kind of sounds as well and then finally we have our stereo filter and this is actually the sort of default setting so basically the only difference between this and the first one as i said in the beginning is that this is fully stereo so filter one goes into the wave shaper goes into filter two goes into the amp and then we have a feedback loop before the high pass filter and that's all stereo so if we set up our unison we're going to get full stereo goodness instead of sad mono sound so i think if you understand the filter configuration you're pretty good for the rest that's probably the most complicated thing to understand and even that's fairly simple once you understand sort of what you're looking at in here it's very simple it's very visual um it's very well laid out so finally at the top here we have the scene output this couldn't be simpler so as i said earlier we've got a and b these are two separate scenes and this is just controlling the volume for our overall cna so volume up volume down so if i go to b here that still has its default value and then if i put them together this is how you would sort of mix them is just by controlling the volumes on each channel or we could even pan them both to separate sides so now a is on one side and b is on the other side so the next thing we have here is width and this will allow us to control the stereo width of the output of the scene so if i've got a bunch of unison voices on here see we've got a big stereo sound if i set this width to zero now it's mono and it's very important to understand the middle here is zero so this is plus one hundred percent and this is minus one hundred percent they are both stereo it's just as far as i know it's just inverting sort of which way around the stereo width is but at the middle here is what's going to make it mono [Music] and the last two controls we've got here it's actually four controls and we'll find out how to find the two hidden controls here now in a second these are our send effects so i know i haven't got into effects yet but basically here's scene a and here's scene b they have their own individual insert effects here which go in these four boxes and then those after we've gone through those insert effects on a and b so these are individual to each of the scenes then they go into a master effects section so these four effects here and these go on both of the scenes after they've had their own effects okay so then finally in the middle here we have our send effects so these are effects that we can send a and b b2 if we like so you can see by the little arrows in here how that works so we can have a going through its own effects and then we could say have a delay here in the middle that we send both a and b two so they can kind of interact with them and it will allow us also to have a certain amount of dry signal coming through as well so generally you'll want this for reverbs and delays and stuff like that so this will allow us to send so we've got on number one here we've got delay so i can send the level and the amount that i send us it's just going to determine the amount of the signal that's going to the effect and then we've got send two so here i've got a spring reverb so if i send to that the more i sent to it the more i'm getting so now you might be wondering how we send to these other two effects that we've got here so on this third one here i've put a flanger and if i click on it you can see that now send efx3 and sound effects 4 come up here so now i can send to that or i can send to this second reverb that i've got here on four [Music] and then if i want to get back to these first two effects i just click on one of them and then i'm back to send effects one and set effects to now we're on to a very simple section here so we've got the scene pitch and uh portamento controls and stuff like that also i just forgot to mention while i was up here um about the oscillator drift and noise color i wanted to kind of tie them in with this section because i feel like they're more related to this than they are to the the poly and stuff so we've got our scene octave selection here this will allow us to change the octave of the entire scene and the difference between that and doing it in the oscillator here is obviously if we've got two oscillators mixed together i can change the pitch of oscillator one oscillator two remains the same let's say i want to bring the whole lot down one octave both of them get shift down an octave very very simple uh then we've got a pitch and this allows us to control in semitones the pitch by default at seven the same as the oscillators and we can also right click here and go extend range that'll let us get into the crazy levels there as well uh so that's basically all that's important about that then we've got portamento which we touched on earlier this just allows us to glide between nuts and the the higher this is set to the longer that's going to be now it's going to take four seconds to get to the next pitch [Music] or we can have to be really short takes .02 of a second that can be a nice effect on some things you can also right click on this and tempo sync it so if you wanted the the pitch change to be exact so like let's say we wanted it to be um a 16th dotted note that can be really important for some sounds to have it temple synced so that option is there as well and let's just turn off this other oscillator just wanted to mention while we're sort of talking about pitch and stuff we've got this oscillator drift parameter and if i say set this whole thing to default again so that we've got two oscillators that are the same pitch [Applause] mix together you can see it doesn't sound very interesting we can now introduce this oscillator drift and this is subtly changing the phase and the pitch of the oscillators but it's doing it at a different rate so [Music] they kind of they kind of um they kind of rub off each other and sort of different pitches and phases it makes it sound a little bit more analog you can even say pan these oscillators in different directions and get sort of a stereo [Music] effects doing that and uh finally we've got this noise color here and that kind of ties into the mixer okay and kind of while we've been doing all this stuff i've been using the mixer down here so you probably have a pretty good idea of how this works um basically really simple controls like you would find in your daw we've got a mute so if i want to mute oscillator one that's oscillator one muted or i can unmute it if i had everything active here which would sound pretty wild i and i just wanna hear say oscillator three i could solo it and that will allow me to adjust here oscillator three for now let's mute everything that's not oscillator one then what else can i do here i can pan so i put oscillator one to the left or the right or i can have it in the center and obviously that can be controlled individually for the oscillators and the noise and also as well as being able to do that i can control the volume so this is a good way to mix between the oscillators so [Music] you know i might want oscillator three might be higher in pitch i may want that to be lower or higher in volume so you can control pretty much everything you'd want to do there the other thing to note about the mixer here let's just initialize the patch again is that we've got these two ring mod outputs here and these are just different ring modulation relationships that we can mix in on top of the oscillators or we can just have them by themselves so let's mute oscillator one for now and unmute this one x2 so what this does is multiplies oscillator one by oscillator two sounds pretty boring right now but if we do something to oscillator 2 like maybe change the pitch [Music] we can start to really hear that ring mod relationship [Applause] and you can mix this in with say oscillator one or we could maybe change the um maybe let's change the oscillator here to something weird so now you can hear even though we're not hearing oscillator 2 because it's muted we can still have access to this ring modulation mix of oscillator 1 and 2. we also have one of those for two or three i'm not going to show that off because it's basically the same thing it's just you know the changes i make three or the changes i make to two are going to change the sound and then finally here we have a noise and this is why i waited to cover this noise color thing here because obviously if we don't have the noise turned on or we don't know how to turn it on it doesn't matter what color it is so we have a mixer for our noise here so we can have it muted or solo to turn it up and down same as everything else and we have a noise color here which is basically a filter so we go here we get bright let's just have the noise by itself so when we go up we're sort of high fasteners getting brighter and then as we go down here sort of get more resonant darker sounds so it gets less resonant brighter more resonant and darker until we kind of have a little rumble down here and that is basically it for the mixer section and our oscillator drift and noise controls the last thing to note here is we have an overall gain this is just so say we have oscillator one and two let's just say we want to turn the whole lot down that'll turn everything down or you can turn both of them up at the same time using the gain and yeah that's pretty much it also it's worth noting that the gain here is probably going to have a pretty big effect on the filter because we're sort of pushing into the filter here so that being said let's look at the filter section you probably already have a bit of an idea of how it works but there's a couple of extra things that we're going to want to look at here that aren't necessarily obvious so let's just focus on one filter the filters are essentially identical there's a couple of extra settings over here that have to do with how the filters interact with each other we already understand how to set the filters up um if you've clicked forward in the video to understand the filter section and you haven't watched the part of the video about the filter configuration please go and watch that part of the video because it's super important if you're dealing with the filters so filter basically we have a bunch of different filter types we've got low pass band pass high pass notch multi effect these are all just different types of filters some of them standard some of the more interesting um we can we can disable our filter here um or we can enable it and that's basically all there is to it so we've got a bunch of different low passes some of these are sort of surges own ones and then we've got these sort of legacy ladder vintage ladder these are sort of based on moog filters so you can hear these all sound pretty different let's go for a k35 here i think this is based on some korg [Music] so you can hear that sounds drastically different there is something i want to call your attention to though when we go to some of these filters and you may not have even noticed it but something popped up here and it's this one and two that we can switch between by clicking and these are actually variations of the filter we've selected so if you right click here you can see we've got a standard and a push which is a sort of more distorted version of the filter and we have those for a lot of them we don't have them for some but we do for a lot so in here you can see we've got a clean driven and a smooth [Music] and they all sound quite different let's see what else we got if we're going to cut off warp here we have a bunch of different weird ones so these are different sort of clipping stages you can hear they all sound drastically different so we have all these different filters in here but we also have variations on most of them and anytime you see these this sort of extra square come up here that's how you know there's a variation available and the amount varies massively between the filters so some of them have one or two variations and then some of them have like this cut off warp has like 12 or 13 so you can come into these weirder ones like you know the comb or the cut off all pass and then we have you know 100 wet [Music] and then let's see what other effect ones we've got in here we've got um we've got sampling holes [Music] i think this doesn't have an option for variations then we've got this multi tripol [Music] and this has some variations as well so you can see there's a bunch of different high low pass low first or low second loads of different variations of this that are going to sound completely different so yeah definitely check out all the filters and all their variations um because there's some pretty cool stuff in there and you can also have you know the same filter on both but have a different variation on the different filters so the next thing to have a look at here and we're just going to use a basic low pass for this that's very resonant is the wave shaper so the wave shaper is basically a distortion unit it's just distorting the signal [Music] but what makes this particular wave shaper very cool is all the options we have so we have basic saturation and then we have some of these crazy wavefold and fuzz trigonometry let's just flick through a couple of these with the cut offset at the same point [Music] so you can hear we can get vastly different sounds out of you know the same sort of filter setting just by changing these wave shapers another thing that's good to note about the wave shaper is we have this sort of view here push it's sort of showing us the effect it's going to have on our signal so let's push into this and let's move through so you can see when we've got them pushed really hard they're just going to sort of square you can see especially with some of these uh let's go for some of these trigonometry ones you can see this is having a pretty crazy effect on the signal [Music] but there's a bunch of stuff you can do with sound design with all of these wave shaper options now moving on i touched on this before but we've got a filter balance so let's say we had you know some crazy comb filter here on on filter two and we had you know just a band pass we can mix between them so this is all filter one and this is all filter two so any changes we make here aren't gonna make a difference until we go back and we mix them together so the other thing we've got here is a key track key track is very simple all this is going to do is as i play a note the filter is going to follow it so the lower i play it the lower it's going to move the cut off and the higher the note i play the higher the cutoff is going to be [Music] so that can be very useful for some sounds and we've got uh independently we've got an amount of key track for um filter one and filter two and we can also set a center frequency so this is gonna set sort of at which nose to cut off is centered [Music] the higher it's going to be and the the higher we set it the lower our cutoff is going to be and then finally here we've got a high pass filter and it's just going to take out the low frequencies at the end of the chain like i said earlier with the filter configuration the next thing to be aware of here is the filter envelope and this is basically a envelope controller for the filter very simple so you can send it to either filter one or filter two by increasing the amount so now we've got this plucky filter sound if we increase the attack it's gonna sort of bring up the attack and then bring it back down anyway i'm not going to go into detail about explaining um envelopes i've done that in another video you can find it on my channel there's a couple of things in this filter envelope that you may not have actually noticed at first glance first of all there's two different settings for the filter envelope there is this analog one which is kind of tends to be a bit snappier because um it's got sort of a more curvy profile and then there's digital and digital has these little bars that you can see in here and these actually allow you to change the curvature of the digital filter so you can see if i bring this out the curve gets much tighter here and if i bring it back and it's the same for the attack envelope here as well you can change the curve of the attack drastically [Music] and even the release here so yeah that digital filter is just giving you extra shaping options and they can also be selected by right clicking and you can select linear quadratic or cubic here and it will change it to the appropriate set everything i just said for the filter envelope uh just so i don't come back to it later and bore you also applies to the amp envelopes you've got the digital analog sentence and you can change the curvature of the amp in here [Music] now there's just a couple of extra controls to look at in this secondary filter so if i set up my low pass here on my first filter [Music] there are a couple of options here on the second filter so i can control the second filter completely independently if i want control the resonance independently in the cutoff or i can hit this plus button here that sort of looks like a plus and i get an offset so instead of independently controlling it it sort of takes the cut off of filter one so let's just set um set this filter balance so we only hear filter two it sort of takes filter one setting as a center frequency and then i can offset from that so let's hear them together now and as i move this both will move and we can also link the resonance so that any resonance change that i make to filter one will also affect filter two [Music] so that's pretty much it for this middle section and there's only one real other thing to talk about in the amp section here because i think everything else is pretty self-explanatory given what we've talked about already um the velocity um the way it works here is probably a little bit counter-intuitive to most people so by default velocity is set to this maximum value here and you might notice it's not really affecting the velocity at all there's no difference no matter how hard i hit the key um the velocity seems to basically set the minimum the i suppose the minimum volume that we can have with velocity so by default it's at zero which means you know everything is going to be zero db and if we set it down here the different velocities i hit the key out will actually make a difference and that is pretty much it for the control section of search okay so this next section we're going to look at here is the effects section probably one of the simplest sections we're going to look at um we've already touched on this quite a bit but we i suppose need to go into it in detail just so we understand everything about it um we're just going to probably make i know some sort of a simple pad sound here or something just to show off different use cases for the effects section so first thing to talk about here is by default um when surge's output here reaches plus 18 decibels it's going to hard clip the output you can change that setting by right clicking on scene a or scene b in here you can turn it off um i honestly don't recommend that uh it is good for it to hard clip at some point or you can set it to zero dbs which means when it gets to zero it'll hard clip but if that's something you want to change that option is accessible here the next thing to talk about is how this is actually set up and what we're looking at so scene a and scene b as we talked about before two separate sections scene a goes through these four effects exclusively scene b cannot come up and go through any of these effects it's impossible uh scene b goes through these effects again same rules apply scene i can call through those they share these effects in that you can send a portion of the signal from scene a after its effects into the send effects or you can send a bit of scene b after its effects into these effects i'll explain why you might want to do that just in case that's not a concept you're familiar with and then finally there's these master effects so that's when everything gets added together in here it gets sent out into these master effects and the whole sound goes through those effects so you might want to put some compression on there or you know a final eq or maybe even want to put a chorus on everything that is where you would do that so let's just i suppose mess around with these effects sections and get an idea for them because there's a couple of other things i need to show you as well i'm just going to play like a chord progression here in the background [Music] and we're just going to sort of turn that into more of a pad sort of a sound so and we're not going to use any of the synthesizer we're just going to use the effects just so we can see so the first thing uh let's just stick with scene a for now and let's add say a chorus to us [Music] so now if i go to scene b here that chorus is not applied it's just a straight saw wave and then let's go in and also add to scene a perhaps some sort of a filter so let's see if we can get something here in air windows that might work for us so we've got this capacitor filter here from air windows so i'm just going to filter out some of the high end and of course we go back to scene b [Music] it's still default so let's say that we're happy with that let's maybe put it an octave up uh let's put oscillator one and octave up right and now let's move on to scene b and let's let's then mix them together so let's put say this ensemble or maybe a rotary speaker might be cooler so let's go for rotary speaker here and let's go for uh rotor chorus [Music] so that's getting pretty loud let's turn down scene b [Music] and that definitely needs a filter so let's bring in that air windows filter maybe let's use a different one so let's use hombre here so we're getting sort of a phased out sound there so that scene be their cna probably sound terrible together but yeah they do let's change up uh just to make it a bit more possible let's just change up the amp envelope here on both of them and maybe let's put something extra here on scene b let's put an ensemble uh let's go for monster dirt [Music] that'll do so let's just say that that sounds good it sounds terrible but that's just an example of how you can put individual effects on them so cna sounds like this cmb sounds like this pretty weird uh so yeah then let's mix them together okay so now we've got this sort of weird sound let's say we wanted to add a reverb to it but we don't necessarily want a different reverb on scene a and c b it would be a waste of an effect slot and we probably want them to be the same anyway so we just have to set up the same set and twice so let's um into this first slot here let's insert a reverb so let's go for air windows um so there's a bunch of effects the way these are laid out is you've got filtering distortion mangling modulation time and space these are all the surge effects and you know you can go through them here and select the preset so as the arrow comes out it's giving you basically presets and then also you've got these multi effects and this is where you can go in to say air windows and it has its own suite of effects that are sort of completely separate you've got conditioner mid side tool i'm not going to go into detail and all these it would take all day but but just so you're sort of aware of the the way that this is all organized you can also clear chains so you can see here you can clear send effects chain you can clear the global effects chain which is this master effects here at the end you can clear scene a or scene b that would clear out these uh you can also refresh the uh effects preset lists if more have been added and they're not showing up or you can copy an effects preset and paste it somewhere else so that is uh yeah that's that's basically how this sort of effects browser thing works so let's go back to what we were doing and let's say we want to put a reverb on this sound so i'm going to go for an air windows ambience and i'm going to go for this chamber here so let's just focus on one sound so let's go back to single and just listen to a and let's send a to this send effect here this air windows reverb pull down the volume so let's make it wetter and darker and lighter and longer [Music] [Applause] so that's the sound of our reverb here and let's bring b let's listen to b and let's send that through as well [Music] let's up the volume on b a bit [Music] so there's b going through as well and now let's mix them together [Music] [Applause] and now let's say uh that's maybe not the best reverb set never but it doesn't really matter let's say we wanted to put them through a delay as well so let's say we want to put them through a ping pong sixteenth um preset here so now we've got that now we can send to fx2 or just to be difficult let's put it on fx3 here and then if we're in sort of our default position we're not going to see it so we've got to select it here so that three and four come up let's just hear b by itself and send that to fx3 here the delay and then let's send a to it as [Music] well and then just to be fun let's also add a phaser and let's just select one of the presets let's go with aliens it's probably crazy but and now let's send effect a to that and now let's send b to the phaser which is effect four here on this end and then let's hear them together okay so we've got kind of a weird sound there now let's say that we wanted to eq the whole lot that's where our master effects will come in so we can come in here to our master effects and say um let's go for just this graphic eq here let's initialize it sorry i want to go for the graphic eq initialized and let's just start messing around with these frequencies maybe pull out some [Music] so let's pull out 120 of it let's make it a bit more airy so let's pull out a lot of these low mids if you want to get rid of 30 hertz altogether just clean it up a bit [Applause] maybe we want to bring out the airiness a bit more so we want to say boost you know everything above ak and this is applied to everything so so this will apply to our reverb tail and all that will go through here [Music] so now let's say that we you know don't like that phaser anymore we can double click it or right click it and that will disable it [Music] [Applause] let's say we don't like this rotary on b let's double click it get rid of it okay maybe we missed the phaser so we can double click it again and then the phaser is back and the sends are where they were so when we double click it we're deactivating it we're not deleting it we're not removing it so we can always come back to it [Music] and that is pretty much it for the effects section again every effect is going to have its own controls some of them are really obvious like the eq and some of the air windows effects have you know bigness and brightness and coolness and you know you kind of just have to play with them to see what they are but there's a whole host of stuff in here and you can route them pretty much whatever way you want so that is the effects section okay so the final section we're going to look at here is the modulation section this section allows us to modulate all the other parameters of the synth over time um and in different cool and interesting ways so let's start with how to assign a modulation and also um you know let's start with this macro which is the simplest form so this basically allows us to modulate various things at once control say you know maybe your pitch and your shape with one slider so there's a couple of ways to attach a modulation you can come in and right click on what you want to modulate and then you can go add modulation from and we could go macro one and then we could type in 12 semitones and then we'd have an octave of modulation here [Music] on one slider and then with our macro the other thing we can do is we can attach it to other stuff so let's say we also wanted to mess with the shape parameter here so another way that we can attach modulation is we can simply take our modulator that we want in this case pitch and we can drag it onto what we want to modulate and then type in say 12 so now we're modulating both of those but the easiest way and the most effective way is to click on it until it turns green and then we can simply visually slide all of our modulations to where we want them so let's say we want sync up here so we want to sync that much [Music] now we've got that and the advantage to this is we can control a bunch of stuff so we could say you know change the width here or we could change i know the unison amount the detune amount let's turn on unison voices and now it's pretty loud so let's turn that down now this macro is controlling all those things at once let's say we wanted to rename it we could also rename the macro and call it i don't know cool so now we've got our cool macro that does everything here a couple more things we can do if we right click on it so we can turn it into bipolar mode and this will basically set our current modulation so so basically if our pitch is here it sets that as the center point and then we can go plus and minus that whereas in non-bipolar mode or unipolar mode we can only go up [Music] the other thing we can do if we right-click in here is let's say we're not in love with this unison modulation we can come in here and we could either mute it which means we're not deleting it we're just we're just turning off just to see what it sounds like so maybe we decided after all that actually the unison made the sound so let's unmute it and now we think that sounds way better or let's say maybe we don't want to hear any of the modulation so let's come down to these apply to all so this will actually allow us to mute all the modulation now this will do nothing we'll just stay where it currently is and now we can unmute all which is here [Music] then we hear them all again let's say we wanted to get rid of this width we can also hit this x and that will allow us to basically get rid of that modulation [Music] and we could also get rid of them all if we wanted to down here with this apply to all the other thing is the pencil so say we wanted to change the pitch from 12 semitones to 24. it's out of the range so we would have to extend the range of our pitch slider here so let's go back and do that again and let's edit our yeah so let's change this to 24 semitones [Applause] and yeah that's um that's basically everything that you would want to know within the context menus we have those for each of the modulators so we could rename our lfo as well to cool lfo and you know if we had this attached to a bunch of stuff like i just showed you we can come in here and do all the same stuff so we can you know knock some of them off or mute some of them so the exact same thing is available for each modulator okay so let's move on to some of the other stuff available in this modulator section besides the macros um so we're going to skip these lfo and slfo modulators just for a second because these are sort of the main modulators and there's quite a bit of depth to them so we'll go over some of the simpler ones first so we'll start here with velocity um velocity is available here via this control we can send velocity to the amp or the volume of the synth but this will allow us to attach velocity to other parameters so let's say i wanted the pitch to change as i hit the key harder i might do a velocity control to that let's make it more drastic [Music] so now the harder i hit the key [Music] the more the pitch will go up or maybe i don't want to attach it to the sink as well so i'm hitting the same key here very simple so you can attach velocity to whatever you would like to then we have release velocity this is the release velocity so basically you can attach this also to whatever you might want to so basically all these modulators on the top here basically are covering stuff that you can do with your keyboard controller so this next one here poly aftertouch if your keyboard has polyphonic aftertouch available this will allow you to control uh different parameters with poly after touch the difference between poly after touch and channel after touch is that if you've got a keyboard with after touch um basically it just sends out one signal and if you've got poly aftertouch that's going to send out one signal per node so you can have different amount of aftertouch for each note that you're holding down so for instance my keyboard doesn't have poly aftertouch so i would have to use this channel after touch and i could say attach that to maybe the sink here and then as i push down on my aftertouch the sink will go up and of course if i had poly aftertouch i would be able to do that with multiple notes and have each of them move independently next we've got pitch bend so obviously your pitch bend is attached to the pitch so you can bend the pitch and as we've seen you can control that up here but let's say you wanted other stuff to happen when you use the the pitch bend maybe you want to let's set this to a square wave here maybe as we bend the pitch we want the pulse width to change we could attach our pitch bend wheel also to pulse width and then obviously mod wheel as well very simple let's say we had a filter here let's go for one of these low passes and let's pull it down and attach our mod wheel to it then we can use our keyboards mod wheel to control that [Music] then we have breadth cc information here as well so if you want to send this out to anywhere in the synth you can as well also if you have an expression pedal attached to your controller you can map that in here using this expression your sustain pedal here can also be mapped to whatever you'd like to map it to in the synth you may want to map it to release or you know you can map it to whatever you want and then also we've got mpe timbre here so this is going to allow you to control parameters per node if you have an mpe controller i'm not going to go too much into into these ones because to be honest with you if you're using these with your controller you probably just need to reference your controller manual to see how to best set this up with the synth but once you've got your controller set up to use any of these things you can easily map them within the synth using these so next we have our filter envelope generator this allows us basically to map our filter envelope here that you can see we used earlier to anything we want so let's say we have it set up like this going to filter one and maybe we wanted also to control the sink and the shape here we can do that same with the amp envelope so these are basically just allowing us to use these envelopes to control other parameters we could map this to say another pitch or something like that okay so next we have random here this is going to give us a random value each time we strike a new key so let's say maybe we want to attach this to the sink here um every time we hit a key we're going to get a different random sync value and also i just want to draw your attention to these three lines here so these are actually separate outputs for this random modulator so we've got this random bipolar uniform that's our first output but we can actually use these other so we've got random bipolar normal and then we have random unipolar uniform and random unipolar half normal these are just different types of randomness basically um and we can actually use these as separate outputs so i can have this one connected to something but i can also have this random unipolar uniform connected to the [Music] and these operate independently of each other so this is still operating on the sink and then this separate output is operating on the cutoff so next we have this alternate modulator here and this is going to alternate between the minimum and maximum value that we set so if i apply this to say the pitch over here it's going to be at this value and then the next time i hit the note it's going to be at this minimum value and also um we have a separate output for this we also have a unipolar version so bipolar is going to give us the maximum up here above the center frequency and then it's going to give us the maximum below the center frequency here and unipolar is just going to hit our center frequency and above and it's going to alternate between those so let's uh unlink the first output here and remember these are separate outputs so i have to select this one and then i have to unlink it from this and then i'm going to select this second one and i'm going to actually link this one so you can see it's actually a separate modulator and now this one is just going to see how it's already modulated differently this one is going to go between the center value and the top value here so then the next one we have here is key track key track will simply allow us to take a parameter let's say sync and attach it to the keyboard so as i play up in range in the keyboard um basically it's going to increase the sync value so you can sort of hear that here [Music] so you can see as i'm getting higher we're getting much more of that sync effect and then we've got a couple of sort of variations of this there's sort of just more specific versions of it so for instance lowest key here basically what it's going to do is it's going to set the modulation value of what i'm controlling to whatever the lowest key i'm holding is so if i'm holding say this note you can hear where the filter is and then as i go up you can hear that that value isn't changing but if i hold a higher note and i start going down [Music] you can hear the lower that i get the lower that filter cut off is and as soon as i approach the note and go above it the position of the filter remains the same uh highest note is the exact same concept but the other way around so on this time instead of it only being the lowest note that's going to change the value it's the highest highest note so if i start really low here you can hear as i go up this filter is going to open [Music] it's going to close back off again and then latest key basically just means whatever key that i hit last regardless of whether it's high or low is going to be the one that decides where my modulation is and that's basically it for the modulators that we have apart from these main ones which we're going to go into now okay so our sort of main modulators here are these ones lfo1 through lfo6 and then we've got slfo1 through sl46 so what's the difference first of all between an slfo or and by the way these can be changed to anything so by default they're an lfo but we can also change this to a step sequencer and you can see it's renamed sequence one there or we can change it to you know a formula or we can change it to say a multi-segment envelope so for now let's just leave them all in lfos and these can be independently changed so i could have this one be lfo and number two could be say a step sequencer number three could be an envelope a number four could maybe also be an envelope and then five could be say you know rmseg and then this last one here could be a formula so you can have them be basically whatever you want them to be and these slfos are the same so you have the exact same options that you can set up for them so you can have them all be different if you want them to be so what is the difference between a regular lfo up here or a scene lfo or a scene envelope so you can see when you click in here this one is called a scene lfo and this one is called a voice lfo so the difference between them is that this lfo is per voice so every note that i hit basically gets its own lfo so if i attach this to say the cutoff that's one note but if i play multiple notes they're all going to start off their lfo at the point that i hit them so you'll hear the lfos are kind of moving differently to each other right so that's what a voice lfo is now let's apply that same modulation to a scene lfo so that we can see the difference so there are definitely use cases for both of these so let's use the scene lfo and now i'm going to hit a bunch of different notes [Music] right so now you can see all the lfos are synced up so basically this lfo is basically an lfo for the whole scene and then the the normal elephant the non-scene lfo uh this one is for each note so now let's dig into one of these lfos and see you know what can we actually do with it so first of all um we have all these options here which we'll come to in a second but you can actually load up presets so you can see there's a bunch of different envelope presets here lfo presets uh multi-segment presets there's a whole load of those so let's load one of those up and see what it looks like so there's all these different presets in here and it's worth messing around with these to see you know if you can find something cool or useful in there and we have presets even for the step sequencer so there's a bunch of different stuff that you can find in here and also if you set something up in here that you like say you know you change this around and you mess about with those and you do a bunch of stuff here and you're like oh that sounds awesome and you can also save your own presets by hitting the save up here and it will let you name the preset and all of that stuff okay so let's start having a look at the actual stuff in here so first of all let's look at these first few choices that we have together so we have a sine lfo here then we have a triangular fold a square lfo then we have a saw lfo or a ramp lfo and then we have these sort of more random ones so we've got this like random glide lfo so you can see it has random values in there but it glides between them and then we have a random step delta false this is going straight from one value to another and these for all intents and purposes are the exact same they're just different shapes but they have all the same settings so within say our sign lfo here we can increase or decrease the rate so let's just attach it to something so we can hear how this sounds and let's turn on the filter here let's go for a low pass 24 so you can hear that lfos [Music] now we can increase the rate we can go pretty fast we can go up to 512 hertz we can also if we want we can right click on this and we can actually tempo sync it so now i can set it to um say if i want to set it to an eighth note i can set it up here that would be an exact eighth note now we can also set the phase which is you can see what's happening here by default it's going to start sort of at the zero crossing of the lfo let's tone it down so we can see that a little bit better so it's going to start at the zero point here and then it's going to go up and down we can change the phase and sort of set where we want it to start this really is only massively applicable to key trigger and i'll go into what this is in a second then we can deform so deform is just going to let us slightly skew the shape of the oscillator so it sort of widens out or if we go this way we're sort of thinning out the sine wave so in that respect we can get a lot of different shapes and then we also amplitude so we can turn the actual lfo itself up or down so you can see when i bring it down there it's having less of an impact and it's worth an alton with this deform parameter here there are multiple different types so we've got type one at the moment let's see what type two looks like so completely different shape change there it's almost like an fn sort of effect then we get the inverse as well and then we've got type three here as well [Music] so slightly different type of a d form there as well and these are going to do different things on the different oscillators so let's have a look to a triangle wave [Music] and then our types here as well still the same idea but obviously our base wave is different so the result is going to be a bit different then we could change it to our square wave here and the square wave hasn't got multiple deform types all it has is this one deform type and that's going to change the pulse width so you can bring it right down to zero then we've got our saw or ramp here and this has a different deform so similar enough to the sine wave again just our starting point is different and we also have those almost sort of fm shapes that we can impart on it and then on our random oscillator or a random glide oscillator here the deform it's going to let us sort of have a bit of control over that randomness [Music] and then with this sort of sample and hold lfo it actually will let us sort of glide between as well so we can make it more similar to this one we can also change the shape in this direction and it's going to sort of sharpen it and create more of a sawtooth kind of a shape um another thing to note about the lfos is that they have their own envelope so this will allow us to say bring in the envelope over time with this attack parameter so you can see it's sort of fading in there we could even delay it so that say we take this out so that it doesn't happen for the first say second and then we'll come in we can also tempo sync this so let's say that we wanted it to come in after the first eighth note or the first quarter note so it's going to give us a quarter note with no modulation and then it will start to modulate we could even say fade it in with this attack so it won't do anything at all and then it will begin to fit in and then we have a sustain here so this will allow us to bring it back down to zero and then our decay will decide how long the lfo effect is going to last so you can see there's no effect for the first quarter not then it begins to rise up and it will hit its peak and then it will start to fade back down again until it hits zero and if we wanted to stay at that peak level for a certain amount of time we use the hold parameter so that will allow us to hold it for a certain amount of time before it starts to decay and we can also tempo sync this so we can tempo sync everything within here so we can have our lfo come in and out as we want and it will all be synced to the grid so the only other things really to be aware of in the lfo is we also have these options free run key trigger random and this unipolar one as well which is kind of separate basically key trigger means that every time we hit a key the lfo is going to start here at the beginning the lfo is going to start here at the beginning and then basically just keep modulating until we hit another key then it will restart free run basically means that the lfo will just keep running in the background temple synced and then whenever we hit a note it just kind of comes in wherever it comes in so it could be here could be here could be wherever wherever the lfo is at the moment so it's not restarting every time and then random means every time we hit key it's going to bring us in at a random point in the lfo and then unipolar here what this means is basically by default it's in bipolar which means that when i modulate something it's going to go above and below the center frequency if i hit unipolar here it's only going to go above and you can see that reflected here as well so that's kind of what's done with the lfos the next option that we have within these modulators is an envelope and this is extremely similar to the other envelopes we've looked at before but basically i've got this currently attached to our cutoff here right now it's pretty much just set to be on and off but i could say bring in my cutoff over time by increasing the attack again i'm not going to give a full envelope tutorial here i have done that in other videos um but we'll just go through the basics of it so attack it's going to bring it in over time and then our sustain sets the level it goes down to so basically i'm going to set it to zero and then the decay here is basically going to dictate how long it takes for us to go from our maximum value here back down to the sustain level which is currently set to [Music] zero then we have the same options that we had within the lfo here but now we're just applying them directly to the signal so we can also hold at that maximum value for a certain period of time and we can also delay the signal for a certain amount of time [Music] and these can all be tempo synced as well so you've got a lot of flexibility with this envelope we've also got release here as well and release basically is how long it takes it to decay back to zero after you've let go of the key so this also has a couple of controls here it doesn't have a radar phase because they don't really apply to an envelope but um you can also deform this which will allow you to sort of change the curvature of the envelope so you've got a lot of options there for shaping your envelopes so the next one we have here is our step sequencer and this is basically the same as the sample and hold random lfo that we looked at earlier except this time we get to draw the steps in so i can draw in a bunch of random stuff in here and we can do other things so basically we've we've drawn the shape now and then we've got these uh little buttons here which will allow us to nudge it one step forward or one step back so we can sort of move the modulation we've drawn and we've got a lot of controls that are going to seem familiar here from the lfos we can change the rays [Music] and this can also be temple sinks just like the elephants we can also shuffle it so you can see that what it's doing is it's slightly offset in the steps from the grid and then we've also got the deform control which is going to sort of smooth it out on this [Music] and make it sort of more similar to this lfo that we looked at earlier and then on this end it's going to sort of turn it into more ramp shapes [Music] so you could even have them all set to maximum and then you'd basically have this sort of a ramp elephant ship and really tighten those up as well then we've got our amplitude which is the exact same as what we had on our lfos we also have the option to apply an envelope over this like we did with the lfo so we could bring this shape in all the time [Music] and have it fade out another thing that we can do in here is we can sort of set up a loop point so let's say that i wanted to loop let's say i want to create like a little rhythmatic sequence so i'll tighten these up so they're sort of saw more saw-like and then i'll create this rhythmatic sequence with these three then i can pull this handle back and you can see what that's actually doing is it's looping these three steps over and over again so you can see how they're looped here and i could maybe change the length of that maybe i want to bring in this fourth step and of course you can fade that in with the envelope or whatever you'd like to do so there's a lot of options with this step sequencer lfo and then the final one we're going to talk about in a lot of detail is this multi-segment envelope here i am going to go into this formula modulator a little bit but we're not going to go in depth it's kind of beyond the scope of this video but i will show you where you can get started with this one um but this multi-segment one basically gives you the freedom to draw whatever sort of shape you want so you know we can draw different points in here and we can basically create whatever shape we would like to create there are a couple of things to note about this so first of all i'm going to start over here with the movement mode this sort of um this sort of controls how the editing of this multi-segment envelope behaves so in single mode you can see i can move this point sort of freely between these two other points and it doesn't really affect anything else when i go into this shift mode here it's actually going to move all of the points after it they're going to stay in the same place in relation to each other but they're going to move forward however much i move this point so there may be certain times when you would want to use that then there's this draw mode and basically what this draw mode does is if i come in here and click around and create a bunch of points i'm double clicking by the way to create points here and i'm also you're able to zoom by holding control in my case you can sort of zoom around and you can also zoom in and out using the mouse wheel but if i draw in a bunch of points in here and then i'm in this draw mode i can kind of hold down my mouse and it will sort of just allow me to draw those points without kind of selecting them and dragging them around i'm just sort of moving them freely with my mouse then we have a couple of different modes here so we've got edit mode envelope and lfo and basically this allows us to edit the multi-segment envelope as if it were an envelope or an lfo you can see it actually has in this envelope mode it has a basically a sustain point here so if i were to attach this to something so now i've got it attached to the cutoff um you can sort of see what it's doing here but basically what it does in this envelope mode is it's going to play through this initial part [Music] and then once it's done with that it's basically going to loop this sustain section here so you can see as i bring the red up this sustain section which is relatively flat is just sort of kept in place here until i let go of the key and if i'm to edit something in this you can now see that my sustain section here the point that's being looped it's just this part over and over again and i can make as many changes to that as i want in this lfo mode basically what we're doing is we are looping this entire shape as if it were an lfo so let's uh it back in the draw mode let's draw this into sort of a more lfoe kind of shape uh that'll probably do obviously we could do a much better job than that but it doesn't really matter so if i bring the rate down here you can see that basically as i go up [Music] and get like a crazy looping shape also if we're in this envelope mode we can also turn the loop off so basically what it will do is it will just run through this once and then finish and then it sort of flat lines and if you are looping stuff in here you sort of have the control of what points you want it to move between as well so if i wanted to loop this section i could or if i only wanted to loop a very small section over and over again i can select that from within here also when we're messing with these points they will by default snap to the grid so you can see that they are snapping in sort of very tight intervals here and we can control the resolution of this snapping here so you can see by default we have sort of 16 steps of vertical snap which you can see drawn in here and it will snap towards those lines and you can have sort of up to a hundred lines of snapping both on the horizontal and the vertical axis you can also turn off snapping altogether if you'd like and then you can just basically freely move these points around however you might want so there's also a lot of actions that we can perform on different parts of this mscg so we can do actions like for instance there's a bunch in here i'm not going to go through them all but you could say flip it vertically and that will sort of flip it upside down and mirror it on itself you can create eight sawtooth plugs and that will just literally draw one in for you that you can edit there's a bunch of those that you can create so we could do 128 sign lines and then if we zoom way in here you can see that this is a sine wave made out of 128 points and we can manipulate that however we might want to there's also different curve options here so if i've got this really simple shape here and we click we can go to right now it's a linear curve we could have an s curve so you can see here now we've got an s curve we could also have a bezier curve or we could have a hold curve we can also do other stuff like for instance we could have a sine wave curve and this will actually let us put sine waves in between two points and you can actually put these up to really high frequencies as well if that's something that you need to do and you could have say a triangle or a saw shape or square shape in between and then there's some other unusual ones like bump here which is sort of like uh like an eq point or something like that there's this stairs one as well which allows you to have stairs in between two points smooth stairs which is just a smoother version of that and a and also brownian bridge which is a sort of weird stair shape as well the possibilities of how you can shape the multi-segment envelope are absolutely endless i could go into absolutely every detail of everything in here but it's best to just explore and play around with it you can pretty much create any shape that you want to in here you can also impart an envelope onto this you can delay it just like we could with all of the other lfos and again just like the other lfos we can have this be unipolar or bipolar and we can set up our key trigger or our free run whatever suits for the sound that you're making now the next one that i'm going to talk about is this formula modulator i'm not going to go into detail on how to create things in this that would make this video extremely long maybe i'll go into it in future um but i will tell you how to get started with it first of all what this is is this i suppose just basically allows you to program your own modulators you can program whatever shape you want in here by writing in i believe it's lua is the scripting language that they're using um so this is a multiple output modulator so you can see that you can actually set up eight different outputs from this one modulator and uh just how you get started with this if you want to mess around with it is there are some tutorial presets in here for the formula modulator where you can click in and it will have little formulas written so you can see it's written a formula here and there are notes which explain to you sort of what things are doing and how it's all set up now the final thing that we're going to look at here in this modulator section is this sort of list modulation list that we can do this is really cool because it's just a way of organizing our modulations it basically acts as a big modulation matrix so let's say we had lfo1 attached to a bunch of stuff and then we had lfo2 attached to a bunch of other stuff doesn't really matter what it sounds like we're just showing for the sake of it and then lfo3 which attached to maybe some of the same stuff and some different stuff so now we've got a bunch of modulations happening those all show up in here and we can edit them so we can change them out let's say we wanted our lfo1 oscillator shape one amount to increase we can increase it in here we can also mute it in here we can delete it if we want to and it's also just a good way of organizing all of our different modulations so right now it's organized by source so you can see everything lfo one is modulating everything lfo2 is modulated and they're all listed underneath we can also mod we can also select target so say if i had a bunch of stuff modulating oscillator one pitch so let's just modulate oscillator one pitch with everything so i'm just gonna use all six of the lfos you can now see when i come into this list under oscillator one pitch we can see all of the lfos are modulating it and we could change the amounts that it's going to or we could mute them or we could even delete them from here um also if we have an awful lot of modulations going on we can filter so let's say we only wanted to see what's modulating the cutoff we can see now that lfo3 is modulating the cutoff and we could change that if we wanted to so a great way of organizing everything in here we can also add modulation from in here so we can select a source say we wanted to module use the macro one to modulate let's say the oscillator one level we can now add that let's clear our filters here and now let's search for that modulation that we did so we used our we used our macro one so we can search here by source macro one and there's the modulation that we just added and then we can change that from within here as well and the other thing that we can change in here is we can see what's being displayed so by default it's showing us the depth and the values and the ranges we can simplify that so that we literally just see this slider here or we can just see the depths or we can see values and depths or we can see everything here so just a nice way of organizing your modulators and quickly getting to them you know being able to filter them quickly being able to quickly mute things try them out quickly change a lot of values at once in different modulations without having to click between them and of course easily remove things that you do not want anymore so the last thing to touch on here is just the menu the menu will allow you to change things like the zoom level or say you know you can change from this classic skin here to the dark skin or whatever you might want and also browse for skins through the skin library as this is open source it will also give you access to the code you can access the manual or the website contact the developers find additional preset content change your mouse behavior so if you want it to be faster or slower you can set it up for touchscreen mode you can set up patch defaults different workflow things for changing basically key bindings and stuff and you can access your tune and editor and all that from here so yeah there's a bunch of of different stuff in the menu um it's all fairly self-explanatory i do encourage you to go and read the manual if there's anything that you feel i didn't cover in too much detail it's all very well covered within the manual but i think as far as the synthesizer and effects of modulators go this video should be fairly comprehensive in terms of getting you using all that stuff um i just want to give a big thank you to my patrons who support the channel they really do help a lot for me to be able to put some time into these videos um if you want to become a patron you can go and check out my patreon um i put like wave tables up there um bit wig project files and also probably in about a week from this video maybe a little bit less i will be making an entire track with surge so there'll be probably 20 30 presets and i'm gonna it's probably going to be about as long as this video where i go through all of those presets in search and instead of just showing you what things do really show you more the context that you would use them in i'll be doing that on the channel as well for free but um i do have a big video planned over there for my patrons as well so big thank you to them i hope you enjoyed this and i hope you learned a lot and please do leave a like if you enjoyed it it took a lot of effort to put this video together and uh yeah leave a comment if there's anything you want to know or even just let me know that you found it helpful because it does help to know that people are actually finding these videos helpful thank you very much

Channel: Garron

Views: 80,273

Keywords: garron, bitwig, surge, free, free synth, open source, 1.8, sound design, bass, best, best free, analog, best free synth, top 5, free vst, free linux, linux, osx, m1, intel, dubstep, electro, house, dnb, drum and bass, pads, new, greatest, 2021, 2022, tutorial, walkthrough, all controls, explained, filter, envalope, lfo, distortion, fx, FX, routing, hybrid, deep, mseg, random, difference, Wavetable, fm, configuration, Feedback, volume, window, windowed, classic, square, sine, shaper, airwindows, vst, vocoder, Surge XT

Id: kTvBgb4HGx0

Length: 143min 22sec (8602 seconds)

Published: Fri Feb 18 2022