This Drum Machine Isn't Normal!

[music] >> Hello, Oscillate Sync here. At Superbooth 2 years ago, as I was walking the halls, I felt a hand on my shoulder and a voice said, "Oscillate Sync, let me show you my groove box." Now, whatever gets conjured in your mind when you hear the phrase groove box is probably not the drop from Mad Sound Factory. But after a few minutes of patching and turning knobs, I had it generating extremely aggressive gabber and naturally I was hooked and named it one of my synths of the show. >> [music] >> In this video, we'll get to know Drop, how it works, how it sounds, how it plays with others, including a discussion of how to get banana jacks and Euroracks to talk. >> [music] >> As the video is long because, of course it is, it's on my channel, I've added chapter markers throughout and scattered in some small no-talking demos, both with Drop as a solo instrument and in ensemble with other instruments. >> [music] >> In the interest of transparency, Mad Sound Factory sent me the Drop to make a video about for free and I get to keep the instrument. But as I said, this is one of my favorite instruments from Superbooth, so I am happy to be showing it on the channel regardless. Let's dive in. >> [music] >> So, I don't want to labor over the sort of on-paper technical specs of Drop because it's definitely an instrument that we want to get to know through playing and patching. But before we get to that playing and patching, it's probably worth at least establishing a baseline of what we have from a sound generation perspective. So, there are basically two different sound generation aspects to Drop. And um what you hear at the moment is what's going on on the left-hand side, the tone section, which is kind of like an analog-style drum synth kick drum synth tom drum synth type architecture with a couple of twists. So, um we've got two tune control. Doesn't sound like it goes super high, but that's because we're currently sitting to sort of the lower range of the the oscillator. >> [music] >> We have an FM control that's just an attenuverter or attenuator rather for the patch point here, so we're not hearing anything there. Obviously, you can hear that we have an envelope on the sound. That's the decay control controlling that. Goes right down to clicks. >> [music] [music] >> Goes nice and long at the other side. You can probably also hear that we've got that classic pitch sweep at the start of the sound. >> [music] >> That you get on a lot of drum synths. That's controlled by the envelope FM knob here. Or rather I said it's controlled by this, but actually these two controls are super interactive. >> [music] >> The other thing that it's interactive with >> [music] >> is how often we're getting triggers. So >> [music] >> So it's it's not kind of like we're setting fully. So if you send faster triggers in, you get a different tonal shift. And that's a great way to get sort of dynamic performance stuff happening in the tone section when you are sequencing it. >> [music] >> So what we're actually hearing at the moment is the sub oscillator of the tone, which is actually two octaves down. The actual sound of this section is on the VCO knob. Which is actually a really tight kind of wiry sounding pulse sound. But we have a uh one octave down version of that on the minus one octave. Which is like a really clean >> [music] >> hollow uh square wave. >> [music] >> Very cool. Uh and then we have the sub that we've been hearing. Which is kind of a more rounded square wave. I personally think of the sub as like the main sound and then I use these controls to introduce overtones. So, if I want a bit more >> [music] >> body to the sound, I'll probably mix in the one octave down. >> [music] >> We've still got that weight from the sub, but we've got a bit more of that sort of mid-range body. >> [music] [music] >> Yeah. And then the uh the sort of the plain VCO sound brings that sort of wiry upper mid kind of >> [clears throat] >> snotty attack. >> [music] >> And we can kind of combine those different sounds >> [music] >> to fine-tune the kind of sound that we're after. >> [music] >> We also have a dedicated click control, which adds that sort of percussive click to the sound. >> [music] >> That sort of transient at the front of the sound. >> [music] [music] >> Which really kind of rounds off what we are listening to. >> [music] [music] >> So turning down the tone controls here, we can turn up the noise control, noise being the other way that we can generate sound on the drop. >> [sighs] >> So I really like this noise generator and I kind of wish I had could have it in kind of a stand-alone format in your rack. It's really cool sounds that you get from it. So um up at the top we have a tune control for the noise. So it's an analog noise generator deriving the noise somehow. And what we're doing with the tune control I think is just sort of changing the sample rate of whatever's being sampled to get that pseudo random You can hear it when it's down at the lowest. >> [music] >> That's sort >> [sighs] >> You can kind of hear the sample rate. It's really cool sort of hollow scoop sounds in the middle there. Nice. Um we've got an FM control which like on the tone is just an attenuator for the FM input. We have a VCA control here which allows us just to turn on the noise. So, we can have it sort of droning. You can also hear that there is an effect on the level as the tone. >> [sighs] >> So, we can just have it droning, but moreover we can control the VCA through the patch point which allows us to decouple the sound from the main trigger if we want to. >> [sighs] >> Uh, we have a decay control. You can hear that we've got a envelope on the noise. And that's a separate decay to the tone, so we can have the noise be shorter if we're going to use the two together. Or longer. This actually still interacts with the envelope FM as well, interestingly. >> [gasps] [sighs] >> So, all of the decay controls, all the envelope controls are kind of interactive. >> [sighs] >> Where this instrument gets really interesting with this noise generator and why I want it as a standalone module is this mode knob. So, this changes how the noise is being derived within the circuit. I don't know the technical details exactly, but this has a massive impact on not only the >> [sighs and gasps] >> general sound of the noise, but also what the tune control does as well. So, let's just have a little cycle through this and um, you might notice the display here is changing as I turn this knob. So, this tells us which noise mode we're in as it goes round. And that's really useful because we have a patch point for the noise mode, which is one of the key things in Drop in terms of getting movement in the patterns. So, let's just have a listen to um mode one was what we just on. So, here's mode two. >> [sighs] >> Right? How cool? What's going on there? Who knows? Sounds good, though. Uh next mode. >> [screaming] [screaming] >> This is kind of the to my ears, it's the most sort of normal noise generator. And here we basically have a tonal noise. >> [music] >> Remember, we can be modulating that with the FM control and CV. >> [laughter] >> Back over to slightly more sort of clappy noise. I like this modulation in there, though. A pretty cool digital sound down at the bottom there. Yeah. Nice. And finally, we got this mode here. >> [screaming] [groaning] >> Again, we kind of got those sort of tonal elements in here, which seem to be very interactive with the the decay portion. >> [groaning] >> Linked to the VCA, so I think if we bring the VCA up, we can hear that there are >> [music] >> different nuances in there. It even kind of gets locked in. It finds places of stability. Kind of almost feels like there's like a low-pass gate on the VCA. Yeah, I'd love this as a standalone module just for noise. I don't know, perhaps people don't get as excited about noise generators as me, but I think that's really cool. Um on top of all of those sort of tonal shaping options, we also have this control here, the mad VCA. So, this interacts with the noise. And it sort of does some sort of feedback stuff. Which both makes the noise sort of harder and softer at the same time. It's so soft there. And it's also really interactive with what happens on the tune control. Like it's on especially on these pure noise ones, it's like a whole different sound. It's also sort of clappy one. So that's a clappy one, isn't it? Kind of shortens the sound, like it kills the decay. YEAH. JUST [laughter] GIVE ME THIS IN ITS OWN MODULE. ALTHOUGH I suspect it's deriving signals from other parts of the circuit, which means that you couldn't really [laughter] quite have it do the same thing in its own module. Yeah. Okay. So I've nerded out about a noise generator for long enough now. Let's start actually patching stuff up. >> [laughter] [laughter] [music] >> So I've patched up a little patch here, um and we'll break down everything that's going on in the patch bay in terms of what's making it play itself uh in a moment, but um first I want to talk about the other tonal shaping options that we have on the drop. Uh and I want to do it with a kind of a patch running cuz they kind of make more sense in that sort of context of something more complex rather than just individual hits. >> [music] >> We'll start over here on the right where we have a master low-pass filter across the output. Uh it's resonant. Uh the range isn't like massive, so we don't go down to like killing the sound altogether, uh but it's useful in in most ranges. I tend to find that like the the lower half is more sort of character things, and then on the upper half you kind of have the more neutral-sounding stuff, but you can really pick out some some sort of plucky resonances in there. So, let's just have a quick sweep of it to to hear what it can do. >> [music] [music] >> We've kind of got that sort of snotty resonance there. Especially in the >> [music] >> the attacky part of the the tone. Really picking out the click there. Sort of slightly pinging that resonance. >> [music] [music] >> And definitely more open, obviously, all the way up there. I tend to like it a little bit dialed back. >> [music] >> It just feels like it emphasizes the low end a bit. >> [music] >> Yeah. I'll just leave it there for the moment. >> [music] >> So, on the left-hand side here, we have a saturation circuit with two controls. We have a bias control, which is going to push the signal either higher or lower into the clipping. And because it's a symmetrical, that's going to have a different effect on the tone. And then we have a saturate knob, which is kind of our gain, if you like. The bias has an effect even with the saturate all the way down to the bottom. So, um what you'll hear as I turn it further to the left, things become kind of softer and rounder. And things get more clipped and almost sounding almost like a compressor uh when we turn it further up. Listen to what it does to the noise in particular when we [music] get to the higher section here. So, let's go to the bottom here. Kind of softer. >> [music] >> Start to get a bit more sort of attack to the sound. >> [music] >> You can hear how it's sort of clipping down on the tone there. Almost like it's tightening the pulse width. >> [music] >> It's also pushing the noise back. >> [music] >> What's that's going to interact with? >> [music] >> Yeah, the other parts of the tone as well. Like the sort of neutral bit as far as I'm concerned it's kind of in this section from about sort of 10:00 to 2:00 just a taste. >> [music] >> So, the saturate knob is going to give us more and more gain. So, let's give that a bit of a tweak and play it off with the bias as well. >> [music] >> Immediately we get that sort of >> [music] >> warmer sound. Voice knob is even more sort of obvious at this sort of lower gain setting here. >> [music] >> You can really feel how it pushes that noise back. >> [music] >> And emphasize the attack. Let's bring more gain. >> [music] [music] >> We've got that sort of twonk on the kick now. >> [music] >> Probably to lower the decay. >> [music] [music] >> More envelope of hammer. Yeah. >> [music] >> Push it harder. Now it's proper distortion. >> [music] >> Bring the decay back up. >> [music] [music] >> Proper destruction there. I certainly like this point from like 9:00 to 12:00 it's like all useful. >> [music] >> It's all just general warm up. >> [music] >> I'm going to buy a stance to relax things a little bit. >> [music] >> Or click it up to four. It's a really cool circuit. >> [music] >> So, yeah. That's the uh saturation and the cut off as well. So, um let's break down what's going on up in the patch day. If you're using the drop solo and you're not just tapping the drop button to trigger it, you're probably going to be making use of the internal clock and the clock divider outputs along the top here. Um before I use a patch cable, I will point out that you can just finger patch because the connectors are metallic for a reason, but I need to use my hands to do other things in this video, so I'm going to use a patch cable. Um there we go. >> [music] >> So, um the first thing I'll point out that uh we have this >> [music] >> segmented display here, and this is actually showing you the status of the different clock divider outputs. On the far right here, you can see the eighth output, which is going at the rate that we can hear. And if I move across to the fourth quarter output, I suppose, uh the one on the bottom right shows us that clock divider's output. So, you get a visual indication of what's going on here. Uh I'm going to get back to the eighth though. So, here we can hear the drop is triggering itself >> [music] >> with eight notes of the clock, which is, you know, it's a beat. And actually, just a four to the floor or eight to the floor, I guess, here is still a useful thing to be able to do. But, we probably want to think about how we can get something more interesting happening with the sequencing. So, one of the things that we can do on drop is we can combine the different >> [music] >> Let's go with the 16th and the quarter note. We can combine the different clock divide outputs to get different patterns. Now, you might have assumed because I was using the 16th here that we would be hearing more beats than we are currently hearing. The reason that we're not is because of the trigger looking for a transient which is going up to a particular voltage. Now, if we think about what's happening on the quarter note output which we can see on >> [music] >> this bottom one here. When that is high, the 16th notes which are being pinged >> [music] >> faster are not going to be creating a transient because the voltage is already high. So, what we're hearing is essentially the one quarter note and the 16th which happen to line up. And then we're hearing the 16th note which is happening sort of instantly in there as well. So, in a way this is kind of destructive sequencing when we combine these different inputs. Uh there is something we can do externally where we can make something more of these clock dividers which I will look at a little bit later in the video. So, that's one way that we can get different >> [music] >> um patterns. I'm going back to my eighth, I think. >> [music] >> So, the next thing I want to show you in terms of getting different patterns is that we do have an FM control for the clock. This is going to affect the clock rate. So, we can modulate this with something to get different patterns. Now we have a second uh LFO here LFO 2 here so we could actually just take the triangle output of LFO 2 put it into the >> [music] >> put it into the input of the FM and find a rate where >> [music] >> some >> [music] >> combination which does something interesting. >> [music] [music] >> So we can get different grooves that way. Uh and of course this is going to be affecting the different parts of the clock divider differently, right? >> [music] >> So again if we now combine >> [music] >> we can get something interesting happening there. We could do the square output instead. Not so much. >> [music] >> Uh or we could rather than doing something with the LFO, we could actually use one of the clock divider outputs to modulate the clock. >> [music] >> Uh let's try the half notes. >> [music] [music] >> And that's going to become a lot more sort of cohesive because the modulation of the clock is actually being defined by the clock itself. >> [music] [music] >> So modulating the clock that's one thing we can do to eke out some different um >> [music] >> some different rhythms there. But, there's some other things we can do as well even just internally. >> [music] >> Now, I mentioned that we had this second LFO. Um we can use the second LFO as uh as a clock essentially. And we combine the inputs to the trigger. I should say um that the general received wisdom in Eurorack would be that we shouldn't be combining different outputs into a single input just by um multing them. It's absolutely fine to do on Drop. So, let's take the square output of LFO 2 and bring it into the trigger input here. >> [music] >> And see if we can find a relationship between the >> [music] [music] >> We get these kind of loops >> [music] >> with these sort of rhythmic interactions that we wouldn't necessarily come up with ourselves. >> [music] >> And because this is unquantized, this might be a little bit tricky to then integrate with another piece of gear, but certainly from the perspective of uh sampling or making loops, you get these grooves that just would not occur in other places. The shape knob on the second LFO is essentially the pulse width on the square output. So, this will also >> [music] >> completely change what we're doing with our beat. >> [music] [music] >> Go fast on. >> [music] [music] >> Now, one thing that we have on drop, which is quite interesting for LFO 2, is a gate control for it. Which just allows us to turn the LFO on and off. So, we can actually take one of our clock dividers in here. >> [music] >> And because now we're turning the LFO 2 on and off at a sort of defined rhythm, >> [music] >> the less sort of quantized stuff is now being sort of encapsulated into something quantized. >> [music] >> Try holding it steady. >> [music] >> So, by using the LFO 2 gate, we can take something unquantized and fit it more into something that's quantized [music] to the clock. And again, just changing the shape, it's going to make quite a big difference >> [music] >> to the grooves that we find. >> [music] [music] >> And that's holding it high so long that we're not getting anything. >> [music] >> And we have a >> [music] >> production to change the rate here, so we can be much faster on the slow setting, but we can also go to audio rate. And trigger it so fast that we're getting >> [groaning] [music] >> It's all trails. >> [music] [music] >> Yeah. >> [music] [music] >> So, the last way that we can get at different rhythms in here is also if we're working standalone going to use the second LFO. I'm just going to unpack some stuff here. >> [music] >> Back to our eighth notes. So, the clock input here is essentially >> [music] >> at the moment normal to what the clock is doing, which is LFO 1 also. >> [music] >> Now, if I plug something in here then well if this isn't plugged in then we're going to get nothing. We could plug LFO 2 in and now LFO 2 is the clock instead, which might be useful in some cases. But, the interesting thing with some of the inputs on Drop is if we don't plug in all the way, >> [music] >> what you end up getting is a combination of what was normaled and then what you plug in. So, at the moment we've got nothing plugged in and we're just hearing the original clock. Now, if I plug in LFO 2 here, what we're going to hear is the combination of the internal clock and LFO 2. >> [music] >> Now, at the moment it sounds pretty sort of straightforward, but if you look at the >> [music] >> clock divider output here, we can see that there are some things which are doing quite interesting little moves. So, perhaps if we instead combine the quarter note and the 16th notes, >> [music] >> and then find >> [music] >> some relationship between >> [music] >> the different inputs. >> [music] [music] >> How about >> [music] >> Cool. Then maybe we could take the quarter note output and bring it into the noise generator VCA and have that. >> [music] [music] >> And then perhaps we can take the >> [music] >> Uh let's take the eighth notes. Run that into the noise gate FM. Turn the noise generator's FM. >> [music] [music] >> Got some delay. >> [music] [music] >> Maybe take the triangle output. >> [music] >> It's still kind of our tone, bring it into the cutoff. >> [music] [music] >> Maybe take the half notes. >> [music] >> We're going to get into the VCO frequency. >> [music] [music] >> Hey, I should mention touching the drop will stop the trigger input receiving triggers. So, you can use this to drop things out. Now, the clock is still running, which is why we're still hearing the noise DCA happening. >> [music] >> Maybe we can take the whole note and use that to modulate the noise mode. >> [music] [music] >> So, there is one other way that we can modulate what's going on with the clock divider as well. Which I'll just unpatch some stuff before we get to uh using the drop with shush with other things. So, the one other way that we can affect the patterns that we're getting. Can I just come back to my eighth notes here with the trigger? >> [music] >> Um actually, let's use the >> [music] >> quarter notes and the 16th notes together, perhaps. So, one of the things that we have here is a reset for the clock divider. And when this gets a signal, it's going to reset where the clock divider is at. So, we can again use our second LFO >> [music] >> in square mode and patch it into the reset. >> [music] >> And now, the clock divider is going to be reset basically at the rate of >> [music] [music] >> this LFO. >> [music] >> Because there's a slight phase difference because of the different rates they're unquantized, we're getting these different >> [music] >> little phrases. And as with when we were using LFO 2 before, changing the rate, >> [music] >> changing the shape. >> [music] >> So, one other thing with the reset here is that while the input is high, it also stops the clock divider moving at all. You see that this little dot here. >> [music] >> So, with the shape skinny, we're only really resetting it, but if the shape is >> [music] [music] >> So, there's a quite a few different sort of grooves we can get just by messing with the reset. >> [groaning] >> Yeah. Couple of the things we can do with some of the modulation sources that are here. If we just come back to the FM synth. >> [music] [music] >> Uh using the LFO 2 at an audio rate into the VCO frequency FM. Kind of get this FM tones. But we're already having a lot of time, so what we could do is gate. >> [music] [music] >> Okay, that's uh easy with something else as well. >> [music] [music] >> So, we're going to look at integrating the drop with other equipment. We're going to start with the Korg SQ-1. Before we get into that, we do need to address how we integrate banana jack type synthesizers with, to be fair, most other things. In this case, the SQ-1, which is Eurorack compatible. In Eurorack, we tend to use this kind of cable. This is a TS, tip sleeve, uh mini jack cable. And inside this cable, there are two wires, generally speaking. Uh the first wire is going to connect to the tip of the connectors here. That's where we send our control voltage, our audio, the thing that we want to actually transmit along the cable. And the other wire is going to connect to the sleeves, and that's where we can share a common electrical ground between the two inputs or outputs. Banana jacks, on the other hand, only really have one wire. It's the wire that connects to the connector. So, what the difference fundamentally between these two systems is is that we're not sharing a common ground on every connection when it comes to a banana jack synth. When you're working inside an individual instrument, the fact that we're not transmitting that sort of common ground doesn't really matter because if the instrument's designed properly, that common ground will be shared within the circuitry anyway. But, as soon as you want to use multiple different instruments, even multiple different banana jack instruments, you need to be able to have that common ground reference. If you think about voltage as sort of the distance from the ground, so if I say that I'm 5' 11" and ask you how high up my head is, well, it depends where I'm standing. I could be 5' 11" at sea level and 5' 11" at the top of Everest, and the height of the top of my head is going to be different because we're talking about different ground. So, we do need a way to share the ground. Now, in Eurorack, that's not a problem because we have the sleeve of the cable. In banana jack synths, uh generally speaking, you'll have a dedicated ground output which you'll need to link together between the two different instruments. There's one here and there's one just around the back on the top here. In >> [snorts] >> Eurorack, we don't have that dedicated ground connection because we don't need it cuz we tend to use those TS mini jacks. To deal with that problem of sharing the ground, you can approach it a few different ways. I mean, fundamentally, what you're trying to do is uh take that ground connection from the banana jack instrument and just connect it to the sleeve of every cable that you're going to interface with in the Eurorack world. You can do that with a special cable or you can get a little interface box like this one. And what this does essentially is it takes the ground connection here and it just puts it across the sleeve of every single one of these mini jack outputs, and then it connects the input to the tip of each of them, which allows you to uh maintain that common ground across the sleeve, but then move the voltage into different uh instruments. The other thing that we should talk about are the voltage standards. So, in Eurorack, we're talking about a 10-V peak-to-peak, generally speaking. So, -5 to +5 for bipolar signals and 0 to 10 or 8. Um 10's fine usually most cases uh for um unipolar. Um so, as long as the voltage standards aren't massively different uh between the banana jack instrument and the Eurorack world, you can just use an interface box like this. Check the manual to be sure. Drop um works um mostly uh within that range. It does go up to 11 on some of the inputs, but I don't think any of the outputs throw out anything that high. So, perfectly safe to interface between those two worlds. So, I've taken the ground connection from the back of Drop and brought it into the interface box. And now we can start patching these things together. So, I guess probably the most obvious thing to do would be to take one of the gate signals, bring it into here. And then we can take that gate signal out into the trigger. And now we can >> [music] >> sequence it using >> [music] >> the SQ-1. We can >> [music] >> sort of build different um types of musical [music] ideas that we couldn't really do with the plain clock dividers in such a controlled way. >> [music] >> We could also try and do some pitch sequencing as well. So, we could take the CV out here, >> [music] >> bring it in here, take that into the VCO frequency. >> [music] [music] >> Now we're not working at volts per octave here, so we have to be a little bit creative with what we're doing. >> [music] [music] >> That's kind of cool. >> [music] >> Yeah. >> [music] >> We could also take let's take [music] the gate on the B channel >> [music] >> and bring that over into the VCA for the noise. >> [music] >> Let's just just >> [music] [music] >> Cool. And then we could >> [music] >> I think we need to Okay, well, that's long enough. >> [music] >> And we could sequence the mode for that channel as well. >> [music] [music] >> That's fun. >> [music] >> And we could also still make use of the clock divider for doing other modulation stuff. >> [music] >> So, we could bring this into the clock input. >> [music] >> And use the sync out >> [music] >> here. >> [music] >> Now, we still have something that is synchronized to [music] our sequencer coming out of the clock inputs. >> [music] [music] >> Let's go for delay. >> [music] [music] >> And because we are using a different clock source, we now have >> [music] >> free access to use the clock LFO one output to modulate something. >> [music] [music] >> slide in there. >> [music] [music] >> Can you hear how that double hit gives us a lot more attack? >> [music] >> Cuz that interaction with the envelope FM. >> [music] [music] >> Yeah, so just sort of >> [music] >> standard sequencing as a way to >> [music] >> unlock different rhythms can be good fun. >> [music] [music] >> Yeah. >> [music] >> So just tearing down that patch cuz it all became a little bit too much fun. Um, I just want to show you something else that we can do with the SQ-1 or another sequencer. So we've seen how we trigger a sequence using an external sequencer of course. What we can also do is drive the clock divider with an external sequencer as well. So by doing this we're sending an irregular but still tempo synced signal into the clock divider which gives us access to different rhythms or any speed up because of course we're dividing down. >> [music] >> And we can still now make use of that sort of combining of clock signals to get different patterns. >> [music] >> To get those sort of interactive grooves now tempo synced to whatever the sequencer is synced to but not running at that constant clock if that makes sense. >> [music] >> Yeah, and it gives us access to different kind of vibes that we wouldn't get by just clocking it straight. >> [music] [music] >> And still we have both of the LFOs freed up to do unquantized stuff, or we can take them using the clock divider, which is now 10% So, if you wanted to do some like FM of our main sound. >> [music] [music] >> One uh I think it's it's fair to say limitation of the clock divider setup as a way of sequencing things as I identified earlier is if we combine together two of the outputs so there's the 16th >> [music] >> and there's the quarter as well. They kind of destructively come together where the quarter note will override the 16th for the period of time that the quarter note is high. I think it's getting through. So that limits the types of rhythms that you can generate with the clock dividers alone. Obviously we can do other things with resetting the clock divider, bringing in additional clock signals, all that kind of stuff. But if we want to get more from the clock dividers on their own, one thing that we can do is make use of logic gates and in particular I think XOR gates work really well here. What XOR gates will do is be high where one or the other of the inputs is high, but if both of them go high, then the output will go low, which essentially allows the 16th notes in this example to punch through the quarter notes. So um I've sent some of the clock clock divider outputs into the um converter box here. We've also got the trigger here and let's bring together the gray, which is the 16ths, and the green one there, which is the quarter note, I think. And let's send that back out to the trigger input and see what we get. >> [music] >> You can hear now how those 16th notes are punching through the held quarter note and and they're punching through sort of offbeat so you get this sort of cool offbeat groove. >> [music] [music] >> Grab a few more cables. Um maybe rather than just bring those together, we could send that one into other XOR gate >> [music] >> and bring the what is it half notes into the other side of that one. >> [music] >> You can hear how we get much more complex rhythms than we were able to get by just combining the clock divider outputs and even more so if you can get some delay. >> [music] [music] >> If we change which clock inputs are going there >> [music] [music] >> we get other patterns really quickly by combining them via an XOR. >> [music] [music] >> And if we were using the LFOs to its fullest potential, we could start involving the binary counter, which is another clock divider really, the ring, the shift registers to get other things on, but just as an example of how to get much more complex that patterns from the clock dividers using logic gates. XOR gates work really well. So, just as a reminder, if I take all of these out, and we combine what was it? 16, 8, and 2. That's what we get doing it the traditional way. I think the 16th again eaten all together actually. I don't think we hear them at all. Yeah, 16ths are irrelevant in this setup. So, yeah, XOR gates are a great way to just generally, not just on drop, but if you have a clock divider, but if you want to make more complex patterns, then XOR gates might be just the friend that you need. The question we need to ask ourselves here is would this be an Oscillator Sink video if we didn't make drop drone for a bit? The answer would be no, so let's do that right now. I've got um LFO 2 here, square wave output, and it's running at audio rate. And I bring it in to the trigger input and start to bring up the different elements of the sound and get different timbres out. Uh the click's really interesting here because it's a really, really tight, tight pulse, so it's quite aggressive. It's also I don't think related to the tuning of >> [music] >> the actual oscillator, so it's kind of an independent overtone. >> [music] >> Uh at the moment, changing the rate of the trigger here is not going to make that much different because the decay is basically staying open, so we're just kind of hearing the oscillator. But, if we turn the decay down, the shape and rate is going to have a much bigger impact. >> [music] >> And if we just want to have that pure sound, [music] we turn the decay up a bit. Let's give it some delay. >> [music] [music] >> We also have the noise, of course, as well. Um so, I've got the clock running really fast here. If we bring that into the noise generator VCA, and just turn up the noise here, >> [music] >> You can probably even extract like maybe that's half speed clock from LFO 1 and 8 FM. >> [screaming] >> Yeah, so yeah, you can definitely set it up to try and it's pretty interesting trying instrument um if you do. We've looked at triggering the drop using sort of electronic instrument signals, so gates and triggers, but actually anything which provides a transient can trigger the trigger input including other music, outputs from drum machines, that kind of thing. So I've got my phone plugged in here um with a video ready to play. So if I hit play on the video, uh Drop's going to trigger along with video. >> [music] [music] >> Yep. If I get a copyright strike for that, I'm going to lose my mind. >> [music] >> Taking the idea of external triggering to its logical conclusion, anything which generates a transient can be used to trigger Drop. So we could use a drum trigger or in this case a contact mic going into the trigger input in order to trigger. >> [music] >> Um because this uh contact mic constantly has a spring inside of it. When I hit it really hard, you kind of get a double trigger, which is where we get that sort of bigger jump on the envelope FM, which is cool. And, you know, I can patch some other stuff in. Yeah, it's really fun to use it that way. And yeah, anything you use in a contact mic becomes a a drum and we start hitting it. Yeah, so get right into the physical nature of Drop using a contact mic. Uh it feels a lot more tactile than using the issue drop button. For sure. >> [music] >> The phrase this instrument won't be for everyone has become a catchphrase on this channel, which is only natural as I've been strongly favoring instruments which issue the norms of mainstream gear. And it's no surprise that the Drop falls into this category. But as with most instruments of this type, for those who connect with it, it will be a real strong connection. I love its heavy, raw sound and quirky rhythms. If I was to level a criticism at Drop, it would be that if you do want to use it as a standalone in a more conventional setting, the clock dividers and their destructive combination can feel a little limiting. While the injection of the unquantized LFOs can be hard to wrangle. As I showed in this video, some external gear such as logic gates or external sequencing can really open that world up. And honestly, I think approaching Drop as part of a wider system is the best way to use it. >> [music] >> If I had wishes for a Drop version 2, it would be for an option to output triggers rather than gates on the clock divider, or two trigger inputs with an XOR logic gate between them, and some odd clock divider outputs. I would happily sacrifice the slowest divisions to get a 1/3 and 1/5 divider, for example. Anyway, I hope you enjoyed the video. If you did, as always, a like, subscribe, and even a tap on the bell is massively appreciated. >> [music] >> Other than that, until next time. Take care. Bye-bye. >> [music] [music]