Audio Damage Basic - Manual (Page 12)

LFO. When it is fully on, you will hear whatever the sliders are set to.
The AFTERTOUCH switch works in the same way. When it is on, the LFO’s amplitude is controlled by the MIDI aftertouch value
coming from your keyboard. When both the MOD WHEEL and AFTERTOUCH switches are active, the LFO’s full amplitude will only
be achieved when both aftertouch and mod wheel values are at their maximum. !
!
The SYNC switch puts the LFO in to host sync mode, and the value display changes from Hz to note values. For instance, if you set
it to 1/8D, the cycle time of the LFO will be a dotted 1/8th note of the current tempo of your DAW. When the SYNC switch is not
active, the value is given in Hz, or cycles-per-second. !
!
!
Dirt & Output Level: ! !
The DIRT slider in the upper right hand corner of the user interface controls a sound shaping block immediately after the filters and
before the VCA. This block introduces a certain musically pleasing (to some people) distortion and EQ to the signal, and the DIRT
slider controls the amount of this effect that is added. When it is fully to the left, there is no distortion or EQ, and you hear the “real”
output of the filters. When it is fully to the right, a rather extreme amount of distortion and EQ is added to the signal. !
!
This works well for some sounds. For instance, patches that primarily use the sawtooth or “Digigrit” waveforms will usually benefit
from a bit of DIRT. Patches that rely entirely on the square waves will usually not sound very good with anything more than a touch of
DIRT. Apply to your taste, or don’t use it. Entirely up to you. !
!
The OUTPUT LEVEL slider does exactly what you think it does. Basic has a soft limiter that will kick in on extreme patches, and is
designed to never output a signal higher than -2dBfs; the OUTPUT LEVEL slider is a multiplier after the limiter, and will control the
overall volume. However, the way Basic is designed, you can usually just leave this all the way up, and control the volume of the
synth via the channel fader in your DAW. We can make no promises in this regard, but it is unlikely that you will be able to get the
output of Basic over -2dBfs, regardless of what you’ve programmed in the patch. !
!
A pro user may question the existence of these pair of blocks, but remember that Basic is designed with the educational market in
mind, and our reasoning is thus: the limiter is there because a less experienced user may run the risk of damaging his or her ears or
playback equipment with runaway resonance and the like and we wanted to mitigate negative experiences. The DIRT control and its
attendant shaping exists because, while we would normally add shaping and saturation at many points in the signal path to get the
end result we wanted (and we usually do this in most of our other products) we rarely bare any controls for this habit, and we thought
it may be interesting to show the effect of our normal methods. !
!
Also, it sounds cool. And we like things that sound cool. !