Behringer Crave Tutorial #5 - Envelope (mod)

Alright, today we're going to talk about using our

envelope

generator as a modulation source. As we move forward in longing, we have to start understanding why things work on a synthesizer, and in the case of synthesizers, everything is done using electricity. we call that control voltage so whenever you see cv or vc in white somewhere on your instrument that's what you're referring to so we have the oscillator control voltage voltage controlled filter here we have the control voltage voltage controlled amplifier control, that's what this section is doing. passing electricity through the inside of our instrument, the knobs set a voltage like sustain or frequency or cut it off or alter it like the attack and decay on the oscillator mod and the switches that tend to choose where those speeds are sent, what things They are plugged into the instrument now, if you remember, in our last video where we talked about the

envelope

section, we talked about the attack time would increase and the decay time would decrease and then the sustain would set a level, so if you can have that consider.

While we talk about how it modulates other things besides volume, it will be easier to understand the attack adds voltage drop removes voltage sustain sets a level and as with the volume section, this is a one-time modulation, so which when I press a key on volume it will do this until I release a key and then finish, it doesn't repeat the process, it's just a one time thing, it's a triggered action and therefore the only way to making this modulation happen again would be if I press the key again, this is different to ifo which just runs continuously, so in the envelope let's set our attack and our decay time to their maximum levels, we'll set the sustain to 0 and go to do make sure it's off in the oscillator section, let's set our pulse width right around the middle and then the oscillator mod and mix knob we're going to turn all the way to 0.

We're going to make sure we're turning on our square wave or our pulse wave, otherwise this knob does nothing, this time we are going to set the source to envelope, it usually defaulted to ifo now we are going to use envelope, so we are going to set our target to pulse width , so this says we're going to use the envelope to send the output of this knob to the pulse width knob and what the oscillator mod does is add voltage to the pulse width setting by adding zero when it's up to here below, if I turn it all the way up now it adds the total amount it can to wherever it's set, so if I turn it all the way up to zero and press a key, we hear it go through its volume. correct process, it went up and down, but we don't hear any change in pulse width and that's because the modulation is set to nothing now, if I turn this up a little bit, we'll hear it essentially turning this knob up and then it goes back to where was, so now you hear him go through that process.

It would be like if I were holding this and I just turned the knob for real and it would change the width of the pulse now if I turned the pulse all the way. down and leave it in the middle, you'll hear it move from a very thin sound to the full sound and then back again. Now if I turn it all the way up, you'll hear the full range from very thin to its The square space goes back to very thin at the top and it's going to come back down now, that alone doesn't take us through our full range because this it only adds some frequency if I turn the sustain knob all the way up and turn it on.

I'm going to hold down a key now, I'm holding it as long as this can help, now if I turn it and listen to it get thinner and thinner until it disappears, now when I release it, it will decay back to that level now onwards . to launch, let's set this target to frequency and then just for something new and to make sure we're not thinking about pulse width, we're going to set our shape to sawtooth, let's not change anything else and we're going to press a key, oh, and so we can hear that the oscillator mod is now adding a bunch of frequency to whatever frequency is generated by the keyboard.

I can set the attack time to be faster. I can set the decay time to be faster and so on. with volume what happens is the attack will go as high as possible before dropping to sustain level right now our sustain level is 100 it just stays as high as possible and then when i decay it drops to zero if i turn the sustain here, you'll hear the pitch jump up to this drop and decay down to the sustain level and then when you release the key it'll decay back to its normal level and of course, We're still hearing the volume changes too and just to demonstrate that we're listening to the volume, I'm going to lower the sustain, so not only is this setting a lower sustain for the modulation, but it's also setting a lower sustain for the volume. quiet but it's still there, you can hear it, so the fact that the volume and modulation are always happening at the same time can obscure some of the effect and we'll get into that idea in a couple of minutes, so before we start talking about how to modulate the filter section let's reset our envelope to 0 0 100 we're going to turn the oscillator mod all the way down just to make sure we're not hearing any siren sounds we're going to toggle the source of the envelope filter mod and then set our envelop knob cut about halfway through and then set the resonance to about 3 o'clock and remember that the resonance knob helps us hear where this frequency is and so if it moves it's helpful to have the resonance as a little arrow pointing. so just like the oscillator mod change the value of this combined with this the vcf mod is going to alter the value of the trim mod or trim knob sorry though we can change the direction in the which changes right here, it was always a positive addition, so with this toggle policy set to positive, the mod will increase the cutoff frequency and boost it, so now I only have sustain, so we're just hearing this note , the mid cut and some resonance, this is set to Positive, if I turn it up you can hear the resonance increase.

If I set it to negative, it will be subtracted from the cutoff frequency, so it will disappear. Let's turn up the resonance a little bit so that it moves in a negative direction when I do this, okay? so it's important to understand what's going on with the positive and the negative and then how that's affecting this and how that's affecting this now when we use the envelope section it's a little bit easier to understand so set our limit to nothing and our mod to maximum and then we're going to set our attack and decay to about two o'clock, leave the resonance right there and then for now I'm going to turn off the sustain, um, we're not hearing anything, what did I do?

Oh my gosh, it's still set to negative, set that to positive, there we go so you can hear the resonance get real, so turn this knob very quickly up and then because of the drop it goes back down, let's switch to a high pass filter now. that sound is also affected by the resonance knob because when the resonance knob is up, it actually lets in some of the lower sounds again, right now, the next thing I was going to show you, of course, is what you already I accidentally showed. If you set your modulation polarity to negative, what I'm doing now is subtracting the maximum amount from the lowest frequency, that's why we don't hear anything, so we have to raise the cap all the way now we'll hear. the resonance drops and then when I release it it will decay again and again because we are altering the volume because the envelope is internally connected to the volume, we don't hear the whole effect very clearly now you could use the patchbay in order to connect the filter output directly to the amplifier, going from the vcf output directly to the vca input and that would eliminate the effect of the envelope on the volume, but there is another way we can do it, it's a really simple way that we talked about in several videos.

We were recently able to turn on VCA mode right now it's set to surround, so now we're hearing a tone. I'm going to turn it down so it's not so loud. There we go, now we're hearing a constant sound, which is something we'd have to deal with using the patchbay, but if I press a key I can hear the effects of vca vcf mode without losing volume while doing so, so okay, there it is. You have, we're almost done with the main panel of this. instrument we still have to talk about the lfo shape and the glide, those are the only main elements left here. vc mix is ​​connected directly to the patchbay and then we have the sequencer section so I hope that helps me, this was one of the hardest things to understand when I started with synths was understanding how all these pieces start to work together, they change the sounds, so I hope you found it useful and we'll see in the next one.