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Thanks for your comment, and for watching. That's an interesting idea: do you find that more convenient than playing the "inner interval" on the keyboard? The reason I like the method I described, is that I can play a sus2, minor, major, or sus4.

Thanks for your comment, and for watching. Despite being good synths, I feel like the Sonicware Liven series are relatively niche devices at present. It's nice to see some audience overlap between Sonicware and Hydrasynth: perhaps this hints at a growing market for Sonicware. I hope this is true; in any case: I appreciate your support.

Thanks for your comment, and for watching. When you press the save button, it brings up the save context in the master control section. You can select the bank and patch number you want to save to (and do other things like set the name to use when saving). Press save again, once the context reflects your intent and it'll save.

​Thank you so much 🙏 ​@@ChalkWalkMusic

Thanks for your comment, and for watching. I'm not much of a sequencer person, but I think that (for rhythms) a simple sequencer can be instructive. I'm glad you think it worked well here!

Thanks for your comment, and for watching. It's definitely a fun synth. In the end I haven't found it to be my go-to for anything specific, but it ends up being an (often used) fallback option when nothing else fits. It's also become a permanent fixture for use as a controller for software. Very many parameters send CCs, so you can make quite refined mappings to just about any subtractive+ VST.

@@ChalkWalkMusic Rad. Good to know.,. Ive been using my Sequential as am midi controller. Its nice to not waste space with a dedicated midi keyboard wgen that space could be used for a synth.. The hydra I think shines with sound design. There is a blade runner patch on it that I cant stop playing.

Thanks for your comment, and for watching. I have always thought that there are pretty diverse goals among keyboard players. Traditional piano lessons are great, but I find they tend to lean in a direction quite a lot of synth players aren't all that interested in. My hope was to put something together that gave a foundation, and some room to grow, all with a focus on gaining an ability to improvise. For me, improvisation is what unlocked jamming with others and collaboration: two key ingredients, for me, in transforming music from a transient hobby, to a lifelong pursuit. In any case: I appreciate your support!

Thanks for your comment, and for watching. It had always been my hope that people could use this series to learn FM synthesis, and not just the XFM, so I'm pleased to hear that. I actually also have OPx4 (on my MPC Live) and I think it's an excellent synth. I don't recall what I said, but I think I'd have said that (minimum for FM synthesis) on the 2 operator video, as without 2 operators you aren't able to independently control the harmonics vs the amplitude. Also sometimes self FM is handled prior to the envelope, meaning it's a fixed timbral transform (even less like an FM synth). As a case in point, the Opsix has a feedback internal to the operator (a fixed timbral change for the sound source) and FM of itself (meaning the envelope is factored in). One might say that 2 operators is the minimum for FM synthesis as with fewer than 2, you don't have independent control over timbral evolution and carrier level (amplitude). That's to say a 2 operator FM stack can function similarly to a subtractive synth with a VCA envelope and a VCF envelope. Note that there are only 2 possible algorithms, modulate + carrier or two carriers. 3 operators is the number that is needed to get beyond the subtractive synth style I mentioned. In particular, having 2 operators modulate the carrier, or having all 3 operators as a stack, gives you a second level of timbral shaping. You could say that some of this is achievable on a subtractive synth if you have a wave shape parameter (and 3 envelopes), but that is more restrictive. You now have 4 possible algorithms (if I'm counting correctly) putting you well into the territory that can only be achieved with an FM synth. I hope this clears up what I meant, irrespective of how I said it. Thanks again for watching.

@@ChalkWalkMusic Thanks - it was in this video on 3-op FM patches that you said you thought 3-op was the minimum for real FM, but your explanation in the comment (I think you are saying that 3-ops enables you to break away from the subtractive synth paradigm) makes a lot of sense. Thanks again! I need to dig into the OPx4 more than I have done. It faces strong competition from my EssenceFM, but in theory it would be really useful to be able to do everything I want with the MPC without external gear. In theory 6-ops beats 4-ops but I can see that a matrix style FM synth where every operator can be both a carrier and modulator has some advantages over a traditional DX7-style synth.

Thanks for your comment, and for watching. I think setting the curves is useful, but I tend to think of it as a "second order" parameter. That's to say you get the values at the centre, upper and lower limit to your liking, then adjust the curve to get the sound across the intermediate ranges to your liking. I could definitely have tuned it for this sound, but with 3 similar operators and 2 curves each would take time. That's not to say I deliberately chose not to adjust it at the time: I just had a sound idea for each episode and a rough time limit. What you see in these videos is me designing these sounds for the first time: I expect to miss things. In any case: thanks for your feedback, and I appreciate your support.

@@ChalkWalkMusic I've enjoyed your run down of the OpSix. I've watched all of them!

Thanks for your comment, and for watching. Most operator modes have two ways to add feedback. One is in the operator settings (which is applied prior to the level and envelope and works as a timbral control of the raw wave) and self modulation in the user algorithm. In this case I was referring to self modulation in the user algorithm (as I did in the prior episode) as this is the form of feedback that is responsive to the envelope and levels (what we want to get interesting timbral motion).

@@ChalkWalkMusic thank you! following along with this patch right now :)

Thanks for your comment, and for watching. I'm not sure exactly what your expectation is: are you expecting the key to trigger earlier in travel, or later? This definitely varies by keyboard, but they usually measure velocity based on the time to move between two (or even three) points in the travel (three points is intended to detect if you were accelerating or decelerating, which is useful for modeling a piano hammer). The key triggers when you reach the final timing point (and doesn't trigger if you didn't reach it). For some keyboards, the second trigger point is at the bottom of the throw (where aftertouch starts). In this configuration, it's actually quite difficult to measure release velocity cleanly (as the key is still accelerating, and may be in the aftertouch range (this is more significant: without aftertouch you can place it very low), as the first time is measured. The Hydrasynth Deluxe (and the Explorer) both capture release velocity. I presume this is why they chose to place the latter timing point above the end of the key throw, but also fairly far down (I'm guessing the upper sensor is not right at the top of the key travel either). This gives them a relatively clean and reliable way to measure note on and note off velocity. In any case: if you want good velocity expression, a hammer action is preferred, which has a fairly long travel before triggering. The difference is that the hammer weight gives you good feedback for the velocity. For spring (synth action keys like the Hydrasynth) it's always harder to get precise velocity control: especially at the low end of the velocity range. The only keyboard I've used that manages to pull off subtlety with shallow motion is the Osmose. I believe the Polybrute 12 actually has a similar approach to key on/off, but lacks the pitch bend and is far more costly.

@@ChalkWalkMusic Wow, thanks for such a quick, detailed response! I will have to re-read it more carefully. My other keyboard is Yamaha M8x, which has a triple sensor hammer action, and doesn't trigger the note until the bottom of the travel/throw. So, the Hyrda was throwing me off because it was triggering significantly earlier than expected. So just to confirm, yours behaves like mine, right? I guess my main prior was wanting to make sure it's on purpose, and that there wasn't a problem. Thanks again...I've recently gotten into sound design, and didn't have experience with synth keys.

Thanks for your comment, and for watching. I really appreciate your support!

Thanks for your comment, and for watching. I primarily started making videos as they were a much more direct way of capturing my thoughts about a topic, and scaled better than just replying on a forum like Reddit. If I had more time, I might try and make something like a book, but between my children and work, I don't really have enough time to dedicate. Maybe once I retire!

Thanks for your comment, and for watching. If you hold shift when turning the jog wheel, it jumps banks. You can also browse by name (alphabetic) and sound type vs number/bank which can be helpful too. Hope this helps!

@@ChalkWalkMusic my next attempt will be to connect it to mpc 2 live. still studying videos.

Thanks for your comment, and for watching: I appreciate your support!

Thanks for your comment, and for watching. I can't be certain without the device in front of me. but IIRC, in FM Edit mode, settings like portamento and legato are just to preview the sound; that's to say they aren't part of the FM patch you save but just tools to help you preview how it works. Those patches are used by the engines which use one or more FM patch to create the sound you use (in the main groovebox mode). Settings like legato, polyphony and portamento are associated with the sequencer track that hosts the engine instance and get saved with the corresponding pattern. I hope this makes things clearer. FYI: lately I tend to either leave the Liven in FM edit mode and play it from an external keyboard (allowing me to make changes in realtime), or I make a family of related patches, specifically to morph between (varying only levels, envelope shapes and tweaking modulation levels); this tends to yield nice smooth morphs, vs making independent patches and morphing which often yields weird intermediate timbres. I also use the Opsix quite a bit now, which is more advanced all around, but the truth is that the Liven XFM was the first FM synth that I really enjoyed programming.

Thanks so much for your support!

Thanks for your comment, and for watching. I'm glad the series has been of help to you. The Minifreak is a quirky synth, in some ways, but it has a lot to offer: have fun!

Thanks for your comment, and for watching: i appreciate your support!

Thanks for your comment, and for watching: I appreciate your support!

Thanks for your comment, and for watching. I had the idea to make this series about a year earlier, but I got busy with other things, so I think I missed the boat in it. I'm glad someone is getting some use out of it!

@ yah there’s always a rush of videos when a synth is new, but a lot of em are prettier than they are helpful haha. This one was great and people will find it over time and enjoy it!

Thanks for your comment, and for watching. I think the Microfreak is a very interesting instrument, though I haven't made all that many videos for it. I'm not sure I'll do an extended series on it, but I'll try and think of some interesting use cases to showcase. It's definitely an "outside the box" type of synth that deserves some outside the box use cases: I appreciate your support!

Thanks for your comment, and for watching. My initial music experience was on piano; the range of possibilities that synths opened up to me was amazing. I hope you have the same experience growing your horizons from bass!

Thanks for watching: I appreciate your support!

Thanks for your comment, and for watching: I appreciate your support!

Thanks for your comment, and for watching. My hope, for this series, was to show the end to end process of how you might actually go about making a piece of music (albeit a fairly boring one), vs being featured focused, or a jam/showcase. I hope you find it useful!

Thanks for your comment, and for watching. I appreciate your support!

Thanks for your comment and for watching. This comment is over a day old, so I presume you received your synth. I hope you are enjoying it: I appreciate your support!

Thanks for your comment, and for watching: I appreciate your support!

Thanks for your comment, and for watching. Those are two quite different synths, but both offer a lot of sound design possibilities. I don't have a Deepmind, presently, but that's mostly as I try and keep my synth collection focused on things I really use, and it didn't see enough use. This isn't because it's a bad synth, but I think it covered some of the same ground my Peak. Anyway: enjoy the rest of the series, and your synths!

@@ChalkWalkMusic yeah, the difference is why i got them. I was looking at a Modwave as well, but the hydra came up, so maybe later. I can see myself losing afternnons to noodling, and acheiving nothing lol. Using a Yamaha RS 700o to run them to keep it DAWless for funsies. Thanks for the reply.

Thanks for your comment, and for watching: I appreciate your support!

Thanks for your comment, and for watching: I appreciate your support!

I also just saw this on r/synths and oh boy did i need this. Tiime to dive in.

Thanks for your comment, and for watching: I appreciate your support!

Thanks for your comment, and for watching. I find with synths with very few destinations, you just get used to some not being available and accept it. When they give you access to almost everything it's always a little confusing when a small minority get excluded. Either way, we got to the end of the series. Thanks for following along: I appreciate your support!

Thanks for your comment, and for watching. The effects wrap up the series: my plan is to focus on synthesis and sound design (more than all the features of a synthesizer). I'm hoping that someone could get a reasonable start in sound design with just this series. When I get the intermediate and advanced series done, I'm hoping that watching the set of series will get someone to a fairly competent level of sound design for most contexts. What I'd like best is if I could then get back to "sound design - here:create" and some people who followed along with these series would try and do the sound design challenges with me.

Thanks so much: I really appreciate your constant support!

Thanks for your comment, and for watching. So the XFM doesn't process the external audio except passing it through the effect (with send amount control). If you are hearing other changes, my guess you are accidentally controlling the drum machine: do you have the midi out of the XFM connected to the drum machine (for clock sync)? I'm guessing the XFM is sending midi CC when you turn knobs, causing the changes. You can control the midi channel the XFM sends on (and if it sends CC IIRC). You can also change the midi channel the drum machine receives on. So you want to either stop the CC, or make sure the midi channel the XFM sends on and the drum machine receives on don't match (by changing on either side).

@@ChalkWalkMusic Only cable between XFM and my drum machine is a TRS cable. stereo out from drum machine to line input of XFM. I thought I was going crazy but infact all the knobs in XFM are affecting drum machine. This is very strange.

Thanks for your comment, and for watching. In case you aren't aware, the original author of Ardour is also the original author of JACK. Pipewire is becoming something of a successor to JACK: it supports multiple audio interfaces at once (without bridges) and has bridges to Pulse and Jack, in addition to also supporting video. I used to exclusively use JACK, but have switched to Pipewire. The latency is slightly worse, but many distros now include it by default (telling you something about the simplicity it affords). I'd say it's something of a middle ground between Pulse & JACK without any work to get it running.

Thanks for your comment, and for watching. Ardour is free and open source. They just don't distribute a Windows installer binary for free. You can follow the build guide and build/use it freely. You can also pay as little as $1 if you don't want to do that (Paying $45 gives you unlimited updates). If you want another free DAW that doesn't require a build, check out Tracktion Waveform Free, LMMS or Reaper (unlimited full featured demo).

@@ChalkWalkMusic No, I'd never pay someone who uses such fishy schemes. Also, telling your average PC user to 'compile it yourself' is ridiculous.

@@korynt3984 I can understand the sentiment, but I would certainly not call it fishy. Every version they need to maintain and release is another cost to the developers (on top of ongoing costs like website maintenance and support). The vast majority of users of free software never donate, so free software foundations need ways to get income to cover their expenses. Charging for a simplified distribution is a perfectly reasonable strategy from my perspective; at least a preferable strategy to simply not supporting Windows (which would cost them nothing). Ignoring all that, the purpose of this series is not to demonstrate Ardour (any DAW, or VST host will do): it's to demonstrate learning a synth (such as Odin).

Thanks for your comment, and for watching. I should have put on a Santa Claus beard: that would have been confusing! In any case: I appreciate your continued support!

Thanks for watching: I appreciate your support!

Thanks for your comment and for watching. I think the mod matrix, combined with the single shot LFO mode and loopable envelope give you a surprising amount of flexibility. Hopefully you have fun with it; I think it's a great sounding, interesting and fun synth.

Thanks for your comment, and for watching. It's definitely a great synth for unusual, but still musical, synthesis. Given that the mk2 wasn't much of an upgrade, I'm hoping to see a mk3 which really leans into the sound design side; maybe 8 operator, 5 mod LFOs, 5 mod Envelopes, 32 mod slots, bitimbral, and macro controls. In the best case, in a good quality keyboard with a poly aftertouch keyboard. I feel like something like that could definitely sell for $1500 and be something of a must have for sound designers.

@@ChalkWalkMusic Indeed and understandable. Sales has probably disappointed, therefore management was likely to be cautious in further development. Would love to upgrade it for the SE version one day. Just for the 61 keys. The prices are better now too.

Thanks for the feedback, though looking at the video it doesn't seem that bad: mostly just a bit of dust/some fingerprints that are accentuated by the lighting. Not that it's not worth wiping: this comment just made me imagine it looked much worse.

@@ChalkWalkMusic fair enough. It may looked bad to me because I didn't come across a video before with gear looking like that. Maybe one. To be fair it shows that you use it 😂🙈 But looks yucky in the video thats all. Content wise...great video nonetheless.

Thanks for your comment, and for watching. My thinking is primarily that, when imagining a sound, I think about the core timbre (oscillators), then the loudness contour (Amp EG), then the brightness contour (filter EG), and then other movements (probably LFOs first, then other EGs next). I'm hoping that showing the elements of synthesis in that order, will help show how you can look at all your sound design through a similar lens (on any subtractive synth, and beyond).

@@ChalkWalkMusic yeah that makes sense. i kinda think the normal order people explain it is more from the perspective of "how does a synth work" like in an engineering context/framing but i think thats less musical/creative. its how i learned but i can see it had some shortcomings

Thanks for your comment, and for watching. My first hardware synth was the Bass Station 2, used for $225 just after it was released. This turned out to be a great choice as I still have and use it, but I could just as easily ended up with something I stopped using after a couple of years. I feel like a little knowledge can go a long way in helping guide your decisions, if not toward a forever synth, then at least away from synths that you don't move on from too quickly. I feel like most synths can transition into secondary roles in bigger setups, but in the end there are only so many of these you need. Hopefully this series will equip people with enough understanding of how synths work, to realize what really matters to them. This is in contrast to trying to find a synth that "does it all" or one that's "easy". I'd, personally, prefer something with a much clearer purpose in my setup vs either of these. Anyway: thanks for your support!

Thanks for your comment, and for watching: I appreciate your support!

Thanks for your comment, and for watching. Mute indeed doesn't work on midi channels: this is not very convenient. The knobs for things like LFO and sweep send midi CC, but the DX7 doesn't respond to such messages (and the parameters wouldn't align in any case), but instead relies on sysex messages. This means that the Liven can sequence notes on the DX7, and set their velocity, but can't control the sound. You can send the audio out of the DX7 into the line input of the Liven and apply its effects to the DX7 audio. The Liven will, in this setup, output a mix of its own audio and the DX7's audio, meaning no external mixer is needed. I think it could make an interesting duo of instruments in any case!

​@@ChalkWalkMusic Indeed, by using MIDI and XFM's line input together, I can process the DX7 through effects while still sequencing it. It's a shame I can't use XFM's filters, though. Since my DX7 has a Grey E chip installed, I was hoping it would offer a bit more functionality. However, with the DX7's function buttons and slider, I can create some amazing effects all afternoon 🤩🤩

Thanks for your comment, and for watching. I try my best to keep videos like this concise: I'm glad you found it useful. Thanks for your support!

Thanks for your comment, and for the watching. Indeed, the tunable sub oscillator feature was added in the 4.14 firmware: good shout out.