Ive found the learning curve on this machine surprisingly easy.
But I can’t figure out what’s going on with the LFOs…is there a tutorial somewhere? I haven’t been able to find one.
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The LFOs really confused me too, at first. I must have spent a month frobnicating the knobs before I got a handle on it.
Here’s my $0.02 in a nutshell.
Shift-4 to bring up the LFO choices.
The easiest one to understand is the Element LFO, which modulates exactly one synth parameter, although the others are similar. The “source” is the oscillator input — G for gravity, the microphone for audio (so you can essentially do AM modulation using the microphone input on a synthesized sound!) or one of two waveforms – the synth engine envelope or instantaneous level. The green is the amplitude, how much the LFO’s going to drive the effect. The white and orange encoders together pick the destination, the object of your modulation. White is essentially a “category” picker — do you want to affect the ADSR envelope, the FX, or the synth engine itself? And the orange encoder lets you pick which of the four colors you want to modulate within the choice you’ve made with the white encoder.
What I found difficult to understand was the last point — it’s the combination of white and orange that picks what any LFO is modulating; everything else is just picking what the modulation signal is and how much the modulation drives the parameter being modulated, just like with an analog synth’s LFO.
The others are similar in terms of setup, just different kinds of waveforms, except for the MIDI LFO, which I haven’t tried, but looks like it lets you map MIDI CC messages to synth parameters.
The manual’s worth close study in this area, if you pick a synth patch with a parameter very sensitive to modulation (string should work well) and work just with it — set up the element LFO on one synth parameter with the destination set to the synthesizer, choose each setting on the orange knob. Once you get a feel for that, add FX to the bus, go back to the LFO and flip the white knob to get to FX, and repeat twiddling the orange knob while you experiment. That should get your ear tuned pretty quickly as to what to expect.
Hope that helps!!
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thanks so much for this, very helpful.