 Hello, Oslade Sink here. This little artifact here is Oven from Crow's Electric Music, a small company from Vancouver, Canada. And it's an instrument that I've really been enjoying recently. And I want to share it with you. This video is not sponsored, I bought this with my money, and the only contact that I've had with Crow's Electric Music was to ask them who their retailers were in the UK. But I'm keen to try and shine a light on interesting instruments from smaller makers. And this certainly is an interesting instrument, at least to me. Let's give it a little reverb, why not? And in this video I want to introduce what Oven is on a technical level, but also how I've been enjoying using it, and how you might enjoy using it. So let's talk about what we have here. So Oven is conceptually a really simple instrument. It's basically five things repeated, each of these columns here represent one of five voices. And each of these voices have a slider which gives us a volume for that voice. We have a pitch knob here which allows us to change the pitch of the voice freely. It's unquantised, just knob to pitch control. This toggle switch here allows us to switch between two different waveforms, a triangle wave which is the core of the oscillator, and also a square wave. This knob at the top is a tone control which is a simple low pass filter. And you can hear even with the triangle wave that there's a good bit of fluff on top of that fundamental for us to filter off. The range of the pitch goes down sub audio where we get clicks on the square wave up to that pitch there. Of course the fun comes when you start to combine different frequencies because everything is freely tunable we can find interesting in between tones where we can hear the interaction of the different voices. And although it's fun to play with it solo as kind of a sound toy I guess certainly a device which likes to play well with others. So for example adding some reverb immediately brings us into a lovely space for these different voices. And it's also absolutely lovely to add some overdrive to because overdrive or distortion always emphasises the differences between voices. So while we're on the subject of smaller makers this is the accomplished badger from Frederick FX. This is the Mark 1, there's an even better Mark 2 when it's pretty much my favourite drive for electronic instruments. And when we bring in the drive the relationships between yes the different voices become more obvious and things become dangerously blissful or frighteningly discordant. And although it's fun to use it just on its own to create these lovely drones I found it particularly gratifying to pair with other instruments. So for the bulk of this video that's what I want to show you. Some pairings that I found enjoyable with Oven. This is the Wingy 2 from Menki, an instrument that probably deserves its own video if I'm being honest. It is a digital stereo resonator. At the moment we're just hearing the dry sound from Oven albeit with a healthy dose of reverb of course. But if we bring up the mix on me we should be able to start to hear some of those resonances. Because we have these freely tunable voices on the Oven we can really go and search out the various resonances. And because it's in stereo with different resonators on each side it provides a lovely spread. This oscillator is currently set up on the square wave and down in the clicks. So this should excite all the resonances all at once. It pings them. Which is right, rather lovely. I've got the version 3 firmware on Wingy here which allows me to access the alternative tunings in this particular mode. I think this is the well-tuned piano temperament. It's rather haunting. And if we go full wet on Wingy, I'm pretty much just listening to the resonators at this point. I can kind of strum them by detuning and retuning the voices. We have very small movements we can find. It's lovely. Sometimes slightly dangerous resonances. It's a rather lovely time. It is quite meditative and kind of the combination you can really get lost with. There's Oven on its own. There are those slightly dangerous resonances. Yes, quite lovely time. We live in a world where we've literally never had better access to high quality sample libraries, paid for free, instantly downloadable. And it's a wonderful thing if you want to work with samples on a sampler. However, there's something extremely satisfying about sampling something that is new and using a sound that literally has never been used by anyone else ever because you've just recorded it. And the Oven makes for a really lovely sample fodder. So let's sample a couple of things. Scroll to that. And what I've got here is just a square wave on every single oscillator all tuned to the same note to make the fattest super square in the world ever. And let's just grab a few seconds of that. Maybe probably four or five seconds will do. Yep, lovely. Thank you. Turn all those back down and we will save that. Yeah, we'll terrible sample management. I'll stick it on eight. That'll be fine. There we go. We have a square super square there. So maybe shape that a little bit with an envelope, a little bit filtering. Yep. Go to that. Let's make a high hat. So we'll just get a bunch of triangle waves all tuned high and then detune them work with. Yes, please. Don't need much of it because I'm going to be short. And yeah, we'll keep that and we'll stick it on closed hats. Resonance. Let's make a kick drum. So we'll just grab, go away. Wrinkles with detune between them. Yes, please. That'll do. And yes, I want it. Yes, we can call it that and I want it there, please. And we'll bring these friends back up. And yeah, we're building up a track, which is all of our own because no one else has these samples because I've just made them. Hope it won't last thing unless maybe like a chord or something. Save that and we'll stick it. Yeah, so we've got our very own samples from the FM that literally haven't ever existed before. And that's always so much fun. But if sample several redux just to get some of that woodiness in there, that's nice. And we can go on and build a whole track just using samples from the open. If we wanted to, of course, other instruments are available to sample from. I'm going to simply play with this for a bit longer. I'll let the video transition to something else. So we should take a brief moment out from exploring the sounds just to talk about the build and the IO. Firstly, what's probably not obvious from this sort of top down view is that most of the unit is actually made out of reclaimed wood with rounded edges here. The top panel, I believe is aluminium. That sort of looks that way from the side. The knobs and sliders, the knobs feel good. They have a nice deceleration on them. The switches are, well, there are many toggle switches. They feel like many toggle switches. The sliders are not the smoothest in the world. They're certainly not unpleasant. They do have a bit of wobble as well, but then sliders almost always do. I'm not particularly worried about them in normal use. But in terms of the overall look and aesthetic, I really, really like it. Taking a look at this top panel here, we've got a volume control just on a slidey pot here. We have our output, which can also drive headphones, so it will push out a left and the right signal. So just be aware that if you plug in a TRS jack into here and plug it into a balanced input, you might have issues in terms of the signal dropping out, same way as you do with Valkers. And the power is on USB type C, so although it doesn't have a battery inside of it, you can power it off a USB power bank. And the power requirements are pretty low, so it should last a good while. I guess if there was a main reason I wanted to pick up the Overmits this, and I was to use it as a side car oscillator bank for the LiRate. The LiRate, obviously, is a wonderful synth for drones and ambient music and experimental music. And part of its fun and why it's an enjoyable instrument is that it has an element of unpredictability to it, the way that everything interacts is chaotic in a way. And sometimes at the patches I made I was kind of left without something to hold everything together. And so I thought the Overmits would be perfect to introduce something a little bit more controlled and static to hold everything together. And I could now combine chaos with something a little bit more controlled if I needed that. And because it's going through the external inputs, it's still able to take advantage of the delicious distortion, the self-mode on the delay. So we are actually affecting the modulation of the delay by putting stuff in on the Overmits here, which is always fun. I think if you own a LiRate, it could well be that the Overmits would be a very good friend. The Overmits is fundamentally a bunch of oscillators in a box. So if you have a synth with a number of oscillators and an audio input, like the monologues or an external input that's sometimes called. And we want to add some oscillators to the synth. We can do that with the Overmits, especially if we're interested in introducing a static pedal tone, which allows us to establish harmonic ideas. So there's a nice bass note in there that's staying static against the melody. That's what I'm highlighting. 20th thing happening in there. Another chord tone. And because it's going into the audio input, it's being affected by the VCA and the filter. And we can mess with the tone control just to dial some of them back into the background. I'm using the square wave and all of them here, but we could try the triangle as well. But it blends really nicely with what's going on inside the synth already. A bit of finality to get the tune just right. But it's a nice way to add these pedal tones to a patch. So adding pedal tones to another synth. I suspect that in many ways the Overmits somewhat of a divisive instrument. And you probably decided very early on in the video whether it was something that was interesting to you one way or another. If you decided that it wasn't, and you've made it this far into the video, your objections are almost entirely, I suspect, practical. Overmits is unconventional. It doesn't have a conventional playing surface. There is no keyboard. There is no sequencer. There's no LFOs. There's no envelopes. And if you need those things to create the music that you want to create, then Overm is not right for you. And you are absolutely valid in those views. I think similarly a lot of those criticisms are probably for the people that think that it is an interesting instrument. The things that are kind of turning them on to it. The fact that you have an unconventional playing surface that is not like most other keyboarded instruments. The fact that you can tune the voices independently to find these interesting interactions. These are all of the things that you're probably thinking are the cool things about this instrument. And both views are absolutely valid, aren't they? And how blessed are we to be living in a time where electronic instruments of such variants are available to us, and in the case of the Overmit, relatively inexpensive prices. The final thing I kind of want to talk about is that although this isn't a review, that's not my intention, I am aware that at this point there are probably some people who are thinking, yeah, this is something that I would like to take a look at and maybe purchase. And to that end, I want to make sure that I give it a fair shake and level some criticisms where they are deserved, I think, so that you don't feel misled by anything that I've shown you in this video. Now, nothing I'm going to talk about, in my opinion, is a reason not to grab one of these, but I just want people to be aware of these things. And the main criticisms all sort of sit in the tuning of the instrument. This knob, in particular. So we have a fairly wide frequency range on this knob, and this knob is really quite small. And as a result, finding particular pitches with accuracy can sometimes be a little bit tricky. But what's slightly worse is that if you're not careful when you even remove your hand from the knob, see, I've been practicing so I've got good at not doing it. Yeah, when you remove your hand from the knob, just the act of removing your hand because of the tension in your fingers along this small control, you can nudge it out of tune as you let go. And in the heat of a performance, in the heat of a performance, that might, see who's doing it now, of course, in the heat of a performance that might not be in the heat of a performance that might not be certainly isn't a desirable thing. The other thing when it comes to the tuning is, although it has a wide range, actually don't find that the top end of the knob is necessarily as high as I might like. Maybe like to go a little bit higher so you can get those sort of squealing into modulations between different notes. To that end, I'd like to offer into the ether some suggestions for the ways that I think the oven could be elevated and maybe I can manifest an oven v2 just by saying these things out loud. So the first thing when it comes to the pitch, I think it would be great if there was a range control and you could switch the pitch between a low and a high range, essentially halving what this knob has to do, giving you more accuracy and less likelihood of a small nudge pushing it out of tune in a in a meaningful way. I think that would be a worthy addition to make it a more performable instrument. Beyond that, there are some sort of timbre things that I think would again elevate it and I recognize that any sort of addition to an instrument like this is going to increase the billet for materials. It's going to make it more expensive. So take all of these things with a pinch of salt. The first is that in pretty much all of my favorite situations where I've been using it, it's been in conjunction with something providing distortion. So either distortion pedal or for example, the distortion on the lyra or on the syntax. And as I showed right at the start of the video, having a distortion combined with these slightly detuned oscillators really enhances what's going on between the oscillators and that creates these really beautiful and sometimes fragile or dangerous textures. So I think there being a built-in distortion or just a simple clipping circuit on the output could really elevate what you could do with the instrument from a timbre perspective. And I think that one would maybe be a smaller technical hurdle to overcome. The two other things that kind of spring to mind would be it would be great if there was intermodulation between the different voices. I recognize that that's quite a jump in the feature set and what I'm essentially asking for is a tiny little lyra 8. But you know, if you say these things out loud, they might happen. Some form of cross modulation, whether that's ring mode or FM, I think would be a really interesting thing. And finally, it would be great if there was panning. I love anything in stereo. And if we had panning on the different voices or even on some of the voices and had a stereo output, again, it would elevate what you could do with it. But that's a big jump in terms of what you'd have to deal with to build the instrument. So again, that's an increase in the price, which might not be desirable. Anyway, I hope you enjoyed this little exploration of an interesting little audio artifact. I've put the details for Crow's electro music in the video description. So if you want to check it out, then you can easily find it. Otherwise, as always, thank you so much for joining me. And until next time, take care.