MiniFreak: The Groove Is in the Filter Too

For gentle oscillator movement, Sineway previously set up a free-running LFO. The still-unused LFO 2 gets a different job: it stays tempo-synced, switches from quarter notes to sixteenths, and is assigned to the filter cutoff. The wave shaper here shapes the modulation curve—it’s not a tool for direct audio wave processing in this example.

With Shift and Edit, he edits the steps to match the arp’s sixteenth grid. He lowers the cutoff to make the effect clearer, tweaks the shape of individual steps, and finally reduces the filter’s modulation depth. The interesting part isn’t maximum movement, but its dosage: the note sequence gets accents without needing extra notes.

For the bass, Sineway first decides on its role: it should sit in the background and take up little space. He starts with Superwave, sets it to mono, and keeps the cutoff low. Instead of inflating the sound further, he syncs LFO 1 and sends it to the filter in eighth notes. He tries a second LFO in sixteenths as an additional rhythmic layer.

Then he alternatively switches on the arpeggiator. This is an important musical distinction: rhythmic filter movement and repeated note triggers are not the same. Sineway explicitly describes the different character; afterward, he has another LFO free for further experiments.

Not everything in the sound source has to speak at once. In his Vanalog video from March 2023, AutomaticGainsay demonstrates a delightfully odd path to simple bass material: he shapes the sawtooth into a triangle wave and lets the square component disappear by narrowing its pulse width. Later, he shows how a lower-tuned triangle wave can give the square fullness without pushing itself to the front. Here, omission is actually a sound design technique, not a sign of giving up.

Nu-Trix The Synth Guy takes the role change even further in his engine guide from January 2023. He feeds in a drum sound from the TR-8 and processes it with the comb filter in oscillator 2. As he tweaks the filter parameters, he describes how it almost becomes a bassline and the original drum sound fades into the background.

Here, a digital filter processor works in the second oscillator section—not just the cutoff modulation from Sineway’s patch. Oscillator 2 thus takes over processing instead of being an additional sound source. The rhythm is already in the input signal; Nu-Trix plays the filter until the material takes on a different musical role.