Behringer Crave Tutorial #1 - Setup and Oscillator

Hello, welcome to this first video to get to know your Crave synthesizer. We'll start with the basics in this video, the bare minimum you need to get started with this instrument and then we'll talk about the first section here, the

oscillator

section. This is going to be a pretty basic video, so if you're already familiar with how the instrument works and whatnot, this probably isn't the one for you. One of the nice things about the Crave, unlike other analog synths, is that it has a built-in keyboard, meaning that with a minimal amount of stuff you can get going, the only thing I've plugged in now is the power and the only thing I We're going to need a way to get the sound. out of it, so what I'm going to use is a 3.5 millimeter to quarter inch connector, this end will go to the vca line and the other end will go to my mixer.

What you can also do is you can. take a pair of headphones and plug them into this jack and that's it, I want to tell you, make sure you turn the volume down to zero before you start. You will be very surprised if you hear a loud pop in your ears. Okay, the other end of the VCA line goes to the mixer, that's all we have to do. We have midi connectors here and we can connect the midi keyboard, but we'll talk about how to do that in the next video, so let's turn it on. a little light show and there we go down to zero, here we go, I just play a note on my keyboard, I don't hear anything because I was smart, I turned the sound down, so I just held down a picture and uploaded this.

We'll set it up there to be a clickable keyboard, so if you're trying to play soft melodies and stuff like that, this won't be the option for you, but again, today we're going with the bare minimum, this is all we have. need. I want to make sure that we set our synthesizer to some sort of initial state. If you're used to a digital synthesizer, you might have a starter patch. This one of course has no patch memory, apart from the fact that the knobs and tiles stay where they were when you turn it off, it doesn't remember patterns, but that's it, so let's set our frequency knob to about the width of medium pulse on the medium

oscillator

mod, all the way down the mix knob to the left cutoff. off all the way up resonance all the way down vcf mod all the way to the left volume is where we set it attack at zero decay at zero sustain all the way up lfo rate all the way down slide at zero vc makes it zero i' I've got my thing set to octave four here um, as we go down, it's hard to distinguish the tone at that low volume or at that low pitch, so the fourth octave is where your instrument will default to the toggle switches that I have, uh, let's go with sawtooth. lfo wave low envelope frequency positive envelope on and triangle and if those words still don't make sense we'll cover them all well let's start with the frequency knob which is this one right here and unlike a digital synthesizer you can change it. the frequency of the note you're playing just by turning this, maybe if you have a coarse tuning knob or a fine tuning knob on your other instruments that would be something similar, the difference here is that nothing tells you when you're actually in zero. in tune, so let's say I play an f here, I can lower it as much as I want, it goes down about an octave plus a major second or it goes up about the same distance, so there's nothing to make the instrument sound in tune. so what we need to do is like if we're playing the jelly or the bassoon or something like that, we need to tune our instrument.

Now you can do this by playing an external sound source and then turning this knob so that the tones you're hearing match each other or you can use a small electronic tuner like this one, that's what we're going to do here, so I'll take the output of my instrument here and I will send it to the entrance. of the tuner and then when I play a note, it will tell me if the note is sharp or flat. I'm going to use a separate cable to do this, but you can just take the end of your vca line and do this if If you're using headphones, I suggest you use the method of having an external sound source and blending it, so I'll just plug it in. to the input hold note and you can see that it's pretty sharp so I just turned this into a little bit it's a big range so I don't have to do much right low here season two E flat there is B flat now because this is a analog synthesizer the more likely it is that the longer it is on the pitch will stabilize, so

behringer

in the manual suggests giving it about 15 minutes, so if you plan to play with other instruments and are worried about playing in tune with them, give the instrument about 15 minutes to warm up before you start playing with them, and then double-check your tuning.

Right now we're playing in tune on a440, before we continue with this section I just want to point out that you see these toggle knobs and the toggle switches and they're directly below the knobs, which doesn't mean they're directly related. This was one of my first misconceptions when I found this instrument and was that, well, this lever must affect this knob. Actually, that's not always the case in some cases, it's like here you have a low pass filter and a high pass filter connected to the instrument. cutoff frequency, but this mod destination has nothing to do with the oscillator mix knob, so don't think that they have to work together in tandem all the time, so we have three internal sound sources, well, we have two sources internal. we have three different sounds that we can start with on the

crave

uh and we can start here with this shape switch it says 3340 vco that's just the oscillator model built into this instrument it's the same on the neutron it's the same on the ms-1 so we have two waveforms, we have the sawtooth wave and then we have a square wave, well, different sounds there and then we also have a noise generator and to listen to that we use our oscillator mix knob, so we turn it all the way to the left we hear the sound of the oscillator if I turn it all the way to the right you'll see it says noise and no matter what key I press it's always just white noise if I set it to about halfway you'll hear the oscillator and the noise.

You can also use this knob to get sounds from an external sound source that you would connect to the external audio jack. We won't talk about that here today, so let's stop until the end. the left one just listens to the oscillator for now the next knob to talk about is pulse width now the pulse width knob only does something if you have square wave selected if you have sawtooth it does nothing the pulse width is purely a function of the pulse wave or the square wave, so if I keep this here you can see how the character of the wave changes, what happens is that square shape that is perfectly up and then perfectly down, it gets to where a side is very narrow and the other side is very long at least this nasal sound, so as you go through it you go back to the pure square.

Now we've seen that there are two knobs here that can change the sound of what comes out of our instrument. One is the tone knob. where we can change the frequency and one is the pulse width where we can change the sound of the square wave now I could sit here and go like this, that would be very tedious and leave my hand busy all the time so what we have to do is we want modulate those sounds using another part of the instrument, so we'll just use the lfo for now. We can talk more about this later, but for now we just have our lfo rate set to zero.

You can see this light is flashing. very slowly and that is the speed at which this wave moves up and down, if I rotate it it will move faster and faster, okay, and here I have the shape set to triangle, if I set it to square it becomes a kind of on and off. of blinking you can see it come and go here, it just goes on and off, so we'll get a different sound, whichever way we use later, so let's say I want to change the pulse width using the lfo. so the modulation source is our first switch that we're going to talk about.

I can use the envelope but I'm not going to use that or an oscillator modulation. Let's leave this switch on lfo so that the lfo is the source of the modulation. and then where I want that modulation to go, that's the destination. I can send it to pulse width. Now, if I hold a tone, you can't hear anything. What's happening is because we have one knob left that we can talk about. That's the oscillator. mod, this determines how much change it can make, so if I turn it up, let's say halfway and now I turn it on, you can hear the pulse width change, it would be very similar to if I did, if I turned that knob very slowly if I turned it up this faster the pulse width changes faster if I turn it all the way up and let it do the maximum amount of change and turn the lfo speed up to maximum, turning the mod sources and amount knobs to maximum usually leads to crazy results and fun ones, put it back to zero, no modulation, now the other thing I can do is modulate the pitch, so if I change my target to frequency now, if I hold down lfo, I'll hear the pitch moving up and down. of the pulse width, this could go slowly, so as I increase the amount I let the sound modulate, the distance between the two tones gets wider and wider, so I can go very slowly, but turn it up all the way up and you're going to Hear the full range of this oscillator and like I said before, if you turn it all up, funny things start happening overseas, so there's our oscillator modulation section.

From here we would move on to using our filters, using our envelopes, and then talking some more. about what we can do with the lfo and then of course how we use the patch bay on top, but for this first video, that's a good place to stop next time we'll talk about using a midi keyboard so than not having to press these click keys all the time and we'll talk about filters. If you have any questions, leave them in the comments section below and I'll see you next time.