The World's Most Beautiful Synthesizer

hey it's andrew huang and in today's video we are expecting a very special delivery package incoming pull it up engaging exterior telephoto package receive make noise black and gold shared system plus modular synthesizer this is the best day of my life all right so this is going to be a full video dedicated to the make noise shared system ever since i first came across it a few years ago it struck me as the most beautiful synth not only for its unique look but also for all the interwoven functionality within it so a huge thank you to make noise for sending this over when i approach them to make a video on it that opening delivery sequence was actually filmed a while ago and since then i've just spent all my time absorbed in this synth becoming one with this synth so let's take a look i'm going to look at the system as a whole first and then do a little segment on each of the individual modules notice in the bottom row of modules a lot of the jacks are concentrated near the top and in the top row of modules a lot of the jacks are concentrated near the bottom so even though these modules were released one at a time and are available to buy individually there's an overarching design that make noise founder tony rolando had in mind with eventually pulling them all together into this beautiful cohesive system on top of that check out this strip in the middle this is the make noise cv bus it's only available if you buy a shared system case you've got audio input on the left and audio output on the right but in between this genius approach to routing signals within a modular send it's essentially a mult so it just makes copies of signals but by virtue of the eurorack form factor a typical mult will look something like this it's great because it's super compact but all of the outputs are crammed together vertically the cv bus can make four copies of four signals but it distributes them in a series going horizontally across as you can see by these lines so for instance one shows up here here here and here there you go little green lights going all the way across it's a simple but brilliant design that just makes patching an even greater joy and cuts down a little bit on how much your cable gets spaghettied spaghetti is a verb also the lights around the jacks are genius so first of all they're color-coded there's green red a lighter orange and a darker orange i kind of wish those were a little bit more distinct but it still works these let you know which signal is which they show the strength of a signal by the brightness and they also show the polarity of the signal by whether the light is up or down so for instance if we reverse the polarity you can see the bottom of the led is now what's lit up i know this is super nerdy to get excited about but elegant synthesizer design is just chef's kiss i would make out with my hand to show you how let's move on [Applause] mavs is definitively the most popular eurorack module ever and that's because it does so many of the common things that you need in almost every patch [Music] [Music] boom [Music] [Applause] by the way i went really deep into how modular synths work in general in my modular synthesis explained video so if you're new to this that would be a great video to check out to understand things a little bit deeper so next i want to look at the dpo the dual prismatic oscillator because it's the main sound source for the shared system so it's a complex oscillator which means it's actually two oscillators that modulate each [Music] other [Music] so [Music] optimix is a low pass gate it's actually two low pass gates the top section and bottom section are identical a low-pass gate uses all analog circuitry to control the brightness and the loudness of a sound at the same time and people tend to say it sounds very natural optimix uses factuals and a vactrol is a combination of a light source and a light sensor taking any short burst of voltage like this blip from maths and feeding it to optimix's strike input will quickly turn on that light causing the photoresistor to decrease its resistance which in this circuit lets sound pass through but when the light turns off the resistance takes a little bit of time to fully build back up again leading to this plucky sound that's very similar to real world instruments which often decay in brightness and volume at the same time [Music] [Music] [Music] do [Music] and that's basically optimix oh wait down at the bottom there's a summed output so channel one and channel two both go to here as well as this aux signal uh that's for what make noise calls decentralized mixing which i'll talk about later in the video tempe is all about rhythm you've got six buttons for doing sort of a tap tempo that are output at these six outputs at the top you can set the master tempo internally or externally using this tempo input and then all of the outputs will be rhythmically related so like using multiplications and divisions of rhythms rather than just a bunch of completely wild unsynced pulses so for instance let's tap one a little faster one slower than what the others are doing a bunch of others at random and let's hear what these are doing so i'll take channel one and two out and strike optimixes channel one and two and we'll feed different waves from dpo into each of those channels and what can we do to make these two sounds more distinct [Music] so you can see they're both going at different rhythms but they're in the same tempo so occasionally they line up they're playing a sort of a polyrhythm or polymeter i don't know which would be the appropriate term right now since we're not notating this and it's not in a larger musical structure it's just two free-running pulses let's switch which channels we're listening to and here's some different rhythmic relationships now one fun trick with tempe is this mod input and that means every time it receives a trigger the output switch places and that can be in sequence so like one becomes two two becomes three three becomes four etc or it can be random and right now i think i've got it set to random but let's just activate the mod input for all channels actually let's do all channels except six this will be better for our demonstration so if i plug back in one and two but then i use channel six as the mod input you'll hear that every time there's a trigger here the rhythms being output at one and two change now i wanted to use a regular rhythm first as an example so you could hear those changes happening at regular intervals but of course you can use one of these mod active purple channels to go into the mod input so that even the timing of the timing changes changes oh my god what a horrendous sentence let's switch this to uh channel three being the one going into mod so a really fun way to play it with rhythm and that's just the basics of it there's this state knob where you can save up to 20 different combinations of rhythms you can see uh some of the ones that are currently in there and you can modulate through those different states you can also mutate states and what that does is slightly change the multiples or divisions that each channel is using so that it's a little bit different from what it was before and of course if you want to make it a lot different from what it was before you can just mutate it over and over so very fun way to play with rhythm [Music] do [Music] [Music] hmm [Music] so we're moving from clocked sequencing to manual sequencing with pressure points which is relatively speaking a much easier to understand module three rows of four knobs and each row has an output for the values of those knobs you can select which column of knobs is active using the touch plate so let's have a listen to our dpo again i'll patch it through optimix and if we send the top rows pitch to the dpo [Music] we can hear it the second row sounds different according to these knobs [Music] and of course the third row is another set of values pretty easy so far across the top you've got pressure and gate outputs and they alternate so you've got pressure gate pressure gate pressure gate pressure gate let's patch the pressure from pad 1 to the pitch of dpo again well that's very sensitive so i'm going to turn down the pad sensitivity here so now as you can hear the amount of pressure i'm applying to the pad is affecting the pitch of the dpo and it's not actually pressure that it's sensing but it's how much of my flesh is covering these gold colored traces on the module so each pad has its own pressure out there's also the gate out which is basically an on and off based on whether you're touching that pad or not but one important thing to note is that the fourth touch plates out are actually global so that means anytime there's pressure or gate from any of the pads those outputs will be active and that's handy because you maybe want to send a gate any time that you're pressing any pad to trigger the same instrument and let's see we could take the pressure out to control the note or we could take one of our knob rows so it's a very open flexible manual sequencing concept this doesn't just have to be for normal sequencing jobs like controlling pitch this could be used really as a controller you know turning things on and off controlling the amounts of any modulation it's a really fun tactile module and just makes me feel like i'm that much closer to the synth you know instead of setting up sequences and twisting knobs and stuff i'm really immediately controlling stuff with the pressure sensitive pads [Music] up next we have waggle bug which is a random source random triggers random cv this demo is not going to sound good but it's going to be the best way to demo it i'm going to patch the wago bug to the dpo's pitch and let's take the clock output to strike optimix so we've got three cv outs step smooth and wobble stepped is just discrete values so you can hear every time there's a clock pulse which is striking optimix here we have a different pitch if i go to the smooth output you'll hear that the pitch is wiggling around a bit and it's trying to get to the same values as the discrete output but it's just kind of lagging a bit and it's moving up and down it's not going to the next one immediately the wobble output is doing the same thing as the smooth output it's chasing those values but it's kind of wobbling around them and then there's smoothing of that signal controlled by this knob so if we have smoothing all the way up it's going to sound very similar to the smooth output actually i won't do the striking for this i'll just let you hear the signal less affected so you've got a smoothly moving around signal as i turn down the amount of smoothing on the wobble circuit you'll hear it starts to get a little more erratic as it chases those changing voltage values [Music] [Music] in addition to that you've got this burst output which is just like random gates and you can slightly control them you can have them occurring a lot more or a lot less but it's always random [Music] and this button down here is called the disturb button which is really just a freeze so if you've got some stuff happening holding that button down just keeps the current value there [Music] and that is the internal tempo knob now of course you can also clock it externally that happens with this jack there's cv over the burst speed you can use an external input instead of the wobble bug's internal cv for what it is using to generate these random signals so essentially you could have a sample and hold here and then this knob that blends between ego and id as they have labeled it here is blending between uh the probability of it using the external signal versus the internal signal these top three outputs are just kind of weird audio outs so you've got what they're calling a shark fin waveform you've got more of a pulse wave and then a ring modded signal and all of those by the way are smoothed out with the wobble control [Music] next up before we get to in my opinion the most fun modules we have the mod d-mix which is the smallest module in the shared system and it's basically like a simple mixer with ring modulation if that seems like kind of a random combination of functions it's really because when you strip back what modular is all about to the foundations it's just controlling signals remodulation is basically using one signal to amplitude modulate another signal and when that's happening at audio rate it gets pretty crazy but let's do a demonstration dpo square wave through the first channel of mod d mix so first of all this strength control is basically volume it's the strength of the signal going through let's listen to uh the other oscillator from dpo take the triangle wave [Music] cool so let's listen to the first one again in the main input what if we use that second signal to ring modulate the first some pretty wild tones but if i turn this oscillator to oscillate slowly enough switch to lfo mode maybe you can hear it's just changing the volume of that signal it's amplitude modulating it [Music] so that's basically mod d mix it's got two channels where it does that same thing and it also has this aux input and there are individual outputs for those channels as well as a summed output which is where the aux also comes out so that's part of the concept that make noise calls decentralized mixing so as you can see on this system there isn't actually a mixer you can't just plug in like eight channels of audio and adjust the volumes between them you have some modules like the mod d mix and the optimix that are mixers with other functions as well so to mix you have to be a little more creative with your patching you have a couple signals kind of getting bust together and then finding a way to mix those but i find with the shared system or a lot of modular synths around this size are smaller decentralized mixing can totally work great you generally don't have tons and tons of different sound sources because within this space you've also got to fit in your effects your sequencing your modulation so it's kind of neat that there's a different modular approach to mixing the first of our audio effects we're going to look at is echo phone and this is a delay unit with a few tricks up its sleeve so i'm just going to turn up the input so you can hear the example sound that i'm going to put through it this is a sequence from renee controlling the dpo [Music] now as i turn up the dry wet you'll start to hear the echo effect [Music] the time of the echo is controlled by this knob it has a nice kind of pitch glide as you change it [Music] you can also have tempo sync delays so i'm going to take the same clock that i'm sending renee and send it to the tempo input of echo phone and now you've got in-sync delays echo phone also pitch shifts the delays though you can go up or down maybe i'll turn it all the way wet so you can hear that [Music] and the range is set with this knob here so that's really cool but probably the most unique thing about echo phone is the feedback knob if you go towards the right you get traditional delay feedback more and more repeats at 12 o'clock there's no feedback it just delays once and as you turn counterclockwise the feedback goes into the pitch shifting side of things [Music] [Applause] herb verb named after tom erb who collaborated with make noise on this module as well as the ecophone and uh the morphe gene that we're going to look at next he's a dsp wizard i've been using his stuff forever i randomly found some of his old sound mangling applications uh in the early arts so cool that he and make noise cross paths and are releasing modules together let's have a listen to the herb verb here's what we're gonna put through it same rene dpo stuff as from the previous example let's uh mix in the verb [Music] you've got the typical reverb controls that you expect like room size [Music] pre-delay a little bit of time before the reverb signal comes in [Music] there's decay of course as you can hear the herb verb can do regular reverb but also gets extreme at the high sides of the dials tilt is also pretty easy to explain it uh basically high passes or low passes the tone [Music] absorb is a pretty cool feature it's kind of a two in one diffusion and damping control so you can hear as i turn it up we lose a bit of the high end a little bit of the tail and then speed and depth work together to control the internal modulation so i'm going to turn it to full wet to hear this example to the left of the knob you get sort of sinusoidal pitch movement and to the right of the knob it becomes more like shimmery and granular a reminder this is the signal we came from so it can serve as a basic reverb or it can turn into this crazy monstrous otherworldly cavern made of metal and of course you've got cv control over all the parameters including mix out here and uh there's a 10 inverters for the depth tilt and decay [Music] controls [Music] last but not least morphogene is this crazy sample mangling pitch shifting granular big noise calls it a tape and microsound music module it's basically all about taking tiny slices of audio and messing with them check out this patch that i've made using most of the rest of the system that's what we're going to sample into here and play with [Music] [Applause] so i'm going to record a loop and now if i turn this sound on sound knob sos at the top all the way to the right you're hearing just the recording and you can blend between the recording and the live input that's still coming in now with this splice button i can start cutting points into this loop [Music] and now it's just going to loop which one i have selected using the organize control within those slices or splices i can also use this jean size to reduce the portion that's being looped [Music] and i can use the slide control to move that gene window around when this light is green it means you're at the original speed you can go up a whole bunch [Applause] actually you can go down so far that at 12 o'clock you're stopped now when you're going counterclockwise on the other side of this knob it's in reverse speeding up green is the original speed but in reverse actually let's use a bigger gene size so you can hear it more reversed and then of course you can go faster than that the morph control starts adding random additional grains on top and as you turn it further it also starts adding octaves and fits [Music] now remember we came from this [Music] and we're mangling it in so many cool ways here [Music] it's a really cool module you can go ambient with it you can go glitchy with it as usual you've got cv control over the parameters so you can get them doing even crazier sounding stuff and then there's a few other helpful inputs you can send triggers to play to record and to make splices so if you want to do something that's a lot more exact and on beat you can get a perfect loop that way you can set up perfectly timed splices it also sends a trigger out every time there's a splice and there's a cv out that's basically an envelope follower so it sends a cv that matches the amplitude of the audio actually they have one of those on the herb verb too just another way to get a musically useful and musically related signal out of your modules so that is the make noise shared system the world's most beautiful synthesizer in my humble opinion i feel like it is a balanced well-crafted well-curated selection of modules that gives you so much to explore uh it really feels like a complete instrument it feels like something that i could be so happy exploring just on its own for a very long time which is saying a lot for someone with as much of a modular addiction as i have working with it is a joy i'm struggling to find anything to really critique it on but i'll talk about a couple things that come to mind the decentralized mixing might take some getting used to should point out those aux inputs don't have their own volume control and then the only other little thing really is uh if stereo is important to you there's not a whole lot here the herb verb is mono in and stereo out and then the morphe gene is stereo in and out obviously the system as a whole gives you stereo outs here so yeah basically you've got a couple of stereo effects but you don't really have control over individual panning of tracks per se you can see there's a couple of blank panels here so there's a little room for expansion i think it's something like 12 hp maybe obviously though this is modular if there's something you don't like or would like better just swap it out you can take most of the beauty of this system and just tailor it to exactly how you like to patch so i'll put all the music i made today on my patreon thank you again so much to make noise for sending over the shared system i'm having so much fun with it it is a very good companion in the cold blackness of space i'll explain the space mission in a future episode but in the meantime here's a playlist of everything that has happened in space so far if you need to catch up don't forget to subscribe and turn on notifications if you haven't already i'll see you next time [Music] me

Channel: ANDREW HUANG

Views: 270,110

Rating: 4.9413548 out of 5

Keywords: andrew huang, andrew, huang, music, musician, producer, song, canadian, canada, toronto, AndrewHuang, producing music, how to, how to make music, music producer, making music, weird gear, songwriting, learn music, modular, synth, synthesizer, modular synth, eurorack, make noise, make, noise, ambient, electronic, beats, idm, techno, drone, patch, patching, overview, demo, review, tutorial, space, maths, dpo, morphagene, rene, module, rene v2, spacetime, shared system, system, black, gold, electronic music, experimental

Id: kZQ9BQuHhwc

Length: 31min 26sec (1886 seconds)

Published: Mon Mar 29 2021