The Most Beautiful Synth Of ALL TIME???

a few weeks ago fellow youtuber hey it's andrew huang said that he had got his hands on the most beautiful synth ever now whilst i love the make noise people so it has a beautiful heart and whilst it is amazingly gorgeous i don't think he's ever seen one of these meet analog solutions colossus a k a dave the thing is this isn't even the most beautiful synth in the world it's the second most beautiful synth i'll show you what is the most beautiful synth not in person because i would never be allowed to get my hands on one of those but that'll be at the end of this film in the contents down below let me take you through what dave is all about so we have not one not two but twelve oscillators two noise generators a random voltage generator and a sample and hold thingy we've got four vcas doesn't sound like many but i'll come back to that two lfos and again that doesn't sound like many but the oscillators have such a wide range that you can actually drive them down to low frequency oscillator speeds we have four envelope shapers four multipolar filters and four lpfs these are also vcas two spring reverbs two ring modulators some slew limiters don't really know what those are two 32-step sequences that can work in parallel or serial a six-track stereo audio mixer assignable joystick controls two-touch keyboard controls and in this version i paid full price but they did me a special deal and gave me two oscilloscopes for the price of one now you can patch absolutely everything along the patch panel underneath the main panels but also we have these two pin matrixes which keep things tidy so what i thought i'd do is set up a patch to give you an idea of what this thing is made of how do these things work well first things first have to attach my oscilloscopes so we can see what we're doing i've actually got both attached we've got the out from the mixer here into this oscilloscope there and both scopes which can be patched in direct from the pin board here now theoretically all i need to do is put one of the oscillators into the mixer mute level pan but what if we would put it say through one of these filters let me put the oscillator into multi-mode filter and then the filter out post amp here right that's not working now i've actually looked at the manual and i suspect that this is something that tom has all the time when people buy his wonderful things they go the filters don't work they're actual amplifiers as well you've noticed that we've only got four vcas but we've got 12 oscillators well all of these filters are vcas as well giving us a total of 12. so we need to feed this filter something to open the amp and in fact there's a 12 volt feed from the pin board into wherever you want to put it 12 volts into filter amplifier one hey presto and let's just check that out so that's the band filter this is high pass so response is like the queue and then we've got a low pass [Music] amazing sound i've never heard a filter like it i'm just actually going to create a bit of a filter sweep using the one of these lfos here so using this lfo here and lfo1 into filter frequency so great got this lovely filter sweep happening now great sounding filter amazing sounding oscillator time to switch on the sequencer so i'm going to put just control the pitch i'll keep the oscillator just going continuously and let's put this in here it's currently on stop i guess this is an external clock in there but we want to switch it to internal right now i have to tune each one of these steps [Music] okay i fancy a bit of reverb so what i'm going to do is i'm just going to route the same filter output to the reverb here and this is what's great this is why you don't need loads of malts because basically any source can go to any destination okay so that's the reverb and then let's put the reverb out of mixer channel 2. awesome so basically on this mixer here you've now got a reverb return beautiful so i'm going to plug in oscillator 2 into this filter and then have this filter coming out into the mixer channel 2 and a bit of splosh as well so we've got that and add in the step cv there as well let's just tune that up so let's patch in another one of these oscillators but this time i'm going to use it as like a bass tone so what i'm going to do next is patch a second base oscillator in so so this will go into the sixth low-pass filter here we'll stick a second 12-volt signal into that so we've opened the amplifier of that and let's put that into the next mixer along okay nice in that tune so let's tune that up so it's interesting these pins they've got different kind of ratings and i think that um for stuff like cv i really should stick to red but i'm feeling adventurous so i'll stick with black for now so we've got these the tuning isn't as tempered with those which is interesting i want basically it not to just sustain all the time so what i'm going to use is the sequencer to gate it so instead of using this 12 volt signal let's put the step sequence of the gate so what i'm going to do is actually put it into split mode and go to the right hand step sequencer and we can see here that that's basically times four and that's split both going at the same time and i think i can reset them so they're in sync by just doing that right so let's try my first patch on dave and just a final note actually you'll notice we've got some trailing cables here this is the sound out there is an alternative pair of sound outs on the back of the unit as well i just need to get it all kind of patched into the the main studio so let's have a go [Music] so [Music] [Music] okay this is a proper musical instrument and i'm gonna have to learn how to use it not least the difference between these red and black pins but for me what i love about the spirit and the heart behind this synth is that it's truly analog so the oscillators aren't being controlled by kind of digital servos there's an imperfection to it and i think as an audience we respond to that imperfection what justifies me getting this is i have a sample company and i also have this community so i'm going to sample the bejesus out of this am i going to use it as a performance device well it's hardly something you can carry around with you but i'm very interested to use the sequencer to create synthetic evo grids for example so why don't i today create a sample patch to share with you and i know what you're thinking what would those 12 oscillators sound like all playing the same note let's do some panning hard soft very soft and switch them all in right let's see what 12 oscillated doom drone sounds like got this tuned version as well so [Music] [Applause] [Music] also bit floppy down there anyway free for you to download and use on whatever you want from piano book links in the description down below and i hope you agree that we're going to have a lot of fun and games coming very soon but as i said before this isn't the most beautiful synth in the world this is the afro-rack sound sketch i don't know if you know about aphroric but something that we do at spitfire before we even pay ourselves the very first thing we do is give one percent of our total take away to charities and afro iraq is one of those charities an arts organization that wants to stimulate and invigorate communities through technology and the sound sketch is something that i will never be able to get my hands on only 100 have been made there will be more being made but basically they're given to vulnerable children in vulnerable communities to give them an alternate outlook on life i think that for me as a father there's something so appealing about modular for kids because it gets them away from that screen and they can lose themselves in the maze of spaghetti they create with these wonderful things so check out afro iraq and if you can do donate it really is a charity that's incredibly close to our hearts not only is the sound sketch the most beautiful synth in the world it has to have the most beautiful heart too thanks as always for watching to find out more about all of these devices and most of all afro rack check out the links down below do subscribe if you haven't done already because we're going to be having a lot of fun with dave one of those for afro rack and do ding the bell to be notified the next time i put a video up see you next time bye you

Channel: Christian Henson Music

Views: 78,738

Rating: 4.9006896 out of 5

Keywords: spitfire audio, christian henson, behind the scenes, orchestral programming, media composition, media composing, media composer, orchestral samples, orchestral sampling, behind the scenes in recording studios, recording studios, music programming, music programming techniques

Id: GSiJS93H6Kk

Length: 12min 29sec (749 seconds)

Published: Sat May 01 2021