 Hello Oscillator Sync here and happy mini freak firmware update day to all those who celebrate because yes indeed today Arturia have released the 2.0 firmware for the mini freak It's available right now and you can install it by making use of the mini freak v software There is I think probably one big headliner edition in this firmware Which is the addition of the wave table oscillator type and we will get to that Later on in the video But there are a bunch of other things that I want to Highlight to you first because I think often with these updates There's like one big new thing and these sort of little useful things that have also been added Kind of slip under the radar a little bit and there's some real Corkers in this one that enhance what you can do some which are Actually fairly big deals and some which are just sort of quality of life things Yeah So in this video we're going to go through all of the interesting things that have been added in this firmware update The first thing I'll mention is not necessarily an update to the mini freak itself However, Arturia have launched the mini freaks sound store Which allows you to get new presets for your mini freak? You can get them all via the mini freak v software. It's in the main menu. You'll find it up at the top and At launch there's a combination of paid for and free patch packs I think there's two big paid for packs and then three I think Smaller free packs and I'm excited to say that one of the free packs is one that I made for Arturia earlier this year And I'm really proud of the sounds that are in there. So I hope you can check the one out So it's free. I'll do a video in the next couple of days going through the sounds from my back in there Yes, I'm going to check out the sound store and see if there's any New patches that you can grab for your mini freak that you like sound off I guess we'll carry on now with what's probably the second biggest update in this firmware Which is that we have a new effect type called super unison. So I have a basic Interesting quarter a basic polypad going on here and if we turn on the super unison, which is in effects slot one It sounds like this lovely and Wide sounding so what this is doing is it's duplicating our sound six times in DSP It's applying moving detune to each of them and then it's spreading out each of those duplicates across the stereo range Which kind of gets us in a similar sort of place as we can get with some other synths which have stereo Vca's for spreading out the voices although it's a little bit different Yes so as with all of our effects we have our three knobs here which affect various different parameters I'll start with The amount of actually because this is our wet dry mix and if we turn it all the way down it is Just our original sound and we can start to mix in that unison so if that first example was a little bit aggressively wide We can just mix in a little bit of this sound Which I think is really nice since I kind of prefer this used a bit more subtly for a lot of patches especially a patch like this But we can of course make it more aggressive And this is a wet dry mix so at the full amount here our original dry sound is Completely gone And so the mono part of our sort of stereo spread the mono image has kind of disappeared a little bit Which could actually be useful in a mix if you've got like another sound going down the middle So this is kind of got rid of that middle part of the sound I'll just put it somewhere Sensible for a second The middle knob here is a filter that is applied just to the unison signal At the center point there's no filtering going on if you go down from the centering point from the center point Sorry, we're going to apply a low pass filter. So You can hear that our unison sounds are getting darker But our dry sound is not so we've still got that That's our dry sound which is quite a lot brighter than our unison tube cuts now Of course, this is modulated as well. So you could Do that kind of thing in the mod matrix, which might be really cool actually Absolutely that bit later when we're making a patch going above the center point we're going to high pass instead So these are both ways for us to move the unison sound a bit out of the way of our main sound Can I get sort of airy? Sort of just fuzz around our sounds quite nice It'd be nice with a bit of reverb on it, I think So I'll just put that back into the middle again Our time knob is going to affect the detune amount. So down at the bottom We get almost this comb filtering sound because there's so little difference between the duplicates Quite cool sound though actually Nice odd glassiness to it as we turn it up we get more detune introduced And we kind of move through sort of more flangy type sounds through chorusy type sounds And then as we're up in the sort of final quarter we're sort of obviously out of tune I think there's a wider modulation being applied as well So that's pretty aggressive with a little bit of low pass Maybe just dining it back a little bit There's probably some interesting patches that you can make around that sort of area So the other thing we have here as we do on all of our other effects are the different subtypes as Well and some of these are quite interesting actually so let me just get to kind of like a decent midway point So we can definitely hear what it's doing Yeah, just just short of being seasick. I think so this mode that we're currently on here is called classic The next one is ravey. So I'm just to compare here's classic Sorry Here's classic and here's ravey So ravey pulls out quite a lot of the bottom end. It's not the same vibe as the high pass filter It's almost like a slight resonance to the way it's pulled stuff out The next one is called solely which kind of goes the other way and goes darker So compared to classic is classic It's solely It's not as wide either It's actually really nice. I think this is my favorite mode as it happens It's easy to get this one to sit more nicely with a patch This next one is called slow Which kind of does what you'd expect the modulation to the detune is slower Some nice or tight weird room sounds with a low detune with this one This one feels very 80s to me these next few are interesting and what they appear to do is a Wait for a signal to come into the effect and then increase the depth of various parts of the effect as we go So it's probably easier if I just turn the amount of a little bit here I'll just make the detune a bit more obvious as well So if you listen carefully When I first play a note It's not that detuned and then it gets more detuned afterwards now. It's worth bearing in mind that these effects are Applied across the whole keyboard, so it's not going to be able to do this sort of per note that you play So if I play a chord and then play another note on top of it It's already going to be sitting within that deeper detune. I find this one a little interesting because it kind of has that I Know this is Don't remember those cow toys. It's all they got When you turn them over kind of makes that sound when you trigger it and I'm not sure if I'm totally into that Like it's really obvious on deeper detunes It sounds more like a flange on low-end detunes Yeah, a bit of an odd one So that's slow trig we also have wide trig Which I think also applies more of the stereo panning as it as the note plays It starts quite mono Still get the cow sound though We have a mono version of this one as well I kind of wish there was just a straight up mono version without this trig thing going on So it has some weird behaviors when it's in mono So I kind of just like a standard mono one perhaps in the next update will get that and we finally have this one called wavy And This one sounds not as wide as like the classic Even it's almost like it's doing like some sort of phase inversion or something Quite like this one for more subtle things as well So we have various different flavors here. Some of them are more extreme and some of them are more subtle I prefer the subtle ones as it goes, but that's just me We do also of course have a bunch of effects which allow us to widen things a little bit as well As here's the dry sound again And here's super unison Probably the closest contemporary to this is going to be the chorus You can hear it's quite different vibe much more of a swirly thing going on there and not as obviously Stacked voices. It's more kind of trying to emulate that so chorus Super unison We also have the phaser Obviously, it's a very different vibe in terms of spreading things out But certainly a lot more subtle than chorus or super unison and some of the modes are slightly more obviously stereo than the others next space Makes things more obviously stereo. We also have the flanger Which obviously sounds like a flanger And again doesn't give you that kind of voice stacking thing. So it's definitely a useful new sort of entirely Unique thing in terms of what was currently offered on the minifreak. So a welcome addition Right next we'll look at what might be considered kind of quite a minor quality of life thing But I think it could be quite a big deal when it comes to finessing more performable patches on the minifreak and it's all to do with the macro assignments So for those of you aren't aware on the minifreak the macro sliders Which we select by pressing this button here allow us to control multiple parameters on the minifreak Or using one slider and those parameters can be moving by different amounts They could be going in different directions and to assign something we go into a sign mode by doing shift and macro We choose which of these two strips are working with I'll just work with this first one And then generally speaking what you do is you turn one of the knobs To select a depth So that's who wanted to modulate to the cutoff frequency of the filter down when we move the slider And there it is assigned there as a macro and then we can assign other things that could all be moving at the same time I'll just remove that for a second The one blind spot that the macros had however Was that you couldn't use them to control the depth of a modulation assigned in the mod matrix? But in this new version you can so let me give you an example of that So let's say on this patch, which is just using the noise engineering saw X. I wanted to maybe affect the Wave control to get that sort of faux sync sound that would come into our mod matrix We go to we'll use the cycling envelope for this wave one and we get to that amount up We can all do synth mouth together Which is a cool sound, but let's say that we wanted to control the depth of that modulation using the macro controls, so I'll turn this down To begin with and the way that it works is this You start by selecting which one of these slots that you want to control in the mod matrix, which is our wave one here We go into this assign here make sure on the right slider, and then we tap on to here to Select the cycling envelope to wave amount here and we can turn this up not all the way using the edit knob here and now We have control over that mod matrix slot as a macro this actually opens up a bunch of ways for you to Build your macros around having performable modulations, especially when you're making use of the sequencer that can be quite Transformative so as I say it feels like like a minor quality of life thing. I think this is secretly Kind of a big deal on this update, especially if you're doing sort of more in-depth sound design on the minifreak Right, so just one last thing I want to talk about before we get on to the main event And this again feels like a kind of a minor thing kind of a quality of life thing But it does allow you to do something that you couldn't do on the previous firmware on the minifreak And this is in regards to the wave shaper on the LFO So on the minifreak, we have a good range of LFO shapes or the standard stuff you would expect to maybe see But we also have this thing called the wave shaper which allows you to draw your own LFO shapes or Kind of it did on the old firmware Because it you couldn't kind of draw your own LFO shapes I'll show you what I mean now so I've made a little LFO shape here I'll just go into the edit page so you can see I've done it just on the hardware and I've built this kind of multi-stage Triangle kind of a quantized triangle step triangle type thing, which is a cool sound sort of semi-sumplen holdy, but not really And This is the problem. So if I Come across to say a triangle wave and let's assign LFO one to the wave On the oscillator here so they can hear the harmonics Be modulated and you can hear how fast they're going well well well well well so the expectation if I go over to my Changing the rate there So the expectation there is off if I go across to my wave shaper We should be getting a little little little kind of thing, but we don't we get this much slower movement instead The reason for this is that previously on the mini freak each step of the wave shaper would last as long as an entire Oscillation of the LFO. So this is a 16 step wave shaper So it's actually effectively running 16 times slower than the original LFO Which is fine if you're trying to sort of sequence something But not if you're trying to define an actual LFO shape So what we have in this new version if we come into the sound edit down to LFO and Down to shape a one rate or shape a two rate depending on which LFO you're using There's now an option to go between one step, which is the default behavior and all steps and now if I press a key We can hear my steps at triangle wave here running at the same rate as say The sine wave So what this essentially means is that we can now define our own custom LFO shapes that run at the same rate As the standard LFO But now yes It is time for the main event and that is that we now have a wavetable oscillator type on the mini freak We will get into listening to it in just a second But I want to start by managing Expectations because there are some things to be aware of here So the first thing is that this is factory wavetables This is not the user wavetable functionality that we have on the micro freak I have no inside information about whether that is something that is coming I would guess it probably is but take that with all of the salt in the world because I have no Insider information into that the other thing that it is worth bearing in mind is that this Is an oscillator type that introduces some more asymmetry Between the two oscillators that we have on the mini freak because you can only have this on oscillator one So as it stands you can't have two Instances of wavetables running at once to sort of blend them together between the two oscillators not at the moment again Who knows whether that's something that will be added in the future? But that's where we are at the moment Okay, let's jump into actually using this oscillator type So we're here on an initialized patch I've just given the amp a little bit of a release there and We will get over to our wavetables as mentioned we have to be on oscillator one for this So we'll scroll across to the end wavetable here. We are and We're now listening to a wavetable as I mentioned There are a bunch of different factory wavetables and we'll get to that in a second Let's just talk about what our three controls are doing. So probably the most Important one is the wave control here, which is going to scan through our wavetable And you can hear that we smoothly interpolate between the different parts of the wavetable rather than stepping which is really lovely And lends itself to doing sort of LFO movements in there Just move it up into the wavetable a little bit. The timbre control is pulse width Which is really really interesting because it gets a lot of extra mileage out of our each each wave So something quite sort of sign-like We can get loads of extra harmonics in there and if we find something richer We kind of get our standard Pulse width kind of vibe there Which is really lovely to have on the shape control we have a filter and in as is the case on a lot of The filter controls and the main filter control on the mini freak. It's bipolar. So at the moment It's sort of locked into the middle So we're not getting any filtering if we go positive from here We'll start to apply a high-pass filter to the wave Back to the middle and then below here will start to have a low pass to darken things So within that sort of one wavetable we have a lot of stuff that we can get through here Now as I mentioned there are a bunch of different wavetables and to select them You hold down shift and as long as you're on the wavetable Oscillator you can turn the type knob and that will give you access to all of the other wavetables here and there are a bunch, I think it's 32 to begin with So there's a load in there for you to Take a listen to the other way you can do this instant late Although I don't know why you would is in the sound edit and in the oscillator and then in the wavetable select But that's a lot of extra button presses when you could just be Shift and type now pro tip if you want to preview all of these different wavetables What you can do is if we have a wave set in the middle like that and if we Assign a triangle LFO make sure on triangle here LFO one to wave And to a depth of 50, maybe slow it down a little bit So that's this current wavetable that are on now And if we hold a note here Now we are free to go through the different wavetables and audition them Actually tell the right not be good That's dying for some reverb Well, it's chewy Some cool harmonics in that one Kind of a fake sync sound It's called croak quite froggy. It's called elastic. It's got a lovely stringy Twang at the top there. That's cool the classic sounding way table of that one Cool aggressive stuff at the top there. That's crunchy. It's kind of like a wave folder type sound wall That's cool. Another fake sync kind of thing That's such a classic wavetable trick to have something aggressive right at the end there. Yeah, classic harmonics Yeah, I'm like serious, but it sounds really nice because you're blending between them as you go Okay, so kind of a vocal kind of thing But that's calling start to move the timer as well ringy overtones loads of movement in between rather than being like a Like that one a lot. That's really cool. Just nice overtones over the top of the fundamental The most classic kind of wavetable sound like that's what I think of when I hear a wavetable okay, so like a Resonant filter sort of within the oscillator that'd be really cool to free up the filter to do other stuff Just a phase phased saw Can really classic sort of ringy over tone wave table sound. That's chill That's really pretty with that just ringing harmonic Yeah, that's that's our lot there now you would have noticed as I moved between them there was kind of some glitching and And that kind of maybe suggests another slight downside here Which is that the wavetable selection is not currently something that's modulatable There is kind of a gap as they get loaded in Which is a shame because that would have been something that's really nice to modulate But we can still jump between parts of a single wavetable so we can still get this sort of steppy sounds as well One of the things that Arturia have said is that these wavetables are a much higher resolution than the ones on the micro freak Which you know may or may not be something that is a good thing for you because sometimes that sort of grittiness is Kind of a desirable thing, but there are ways that we can introduce that and maybe we'll take a look at that Let's build A patch using this new oscillator type Okay, let's start by choosing a wavetable. I think the one I would want to use is one that's called scowl Just because it has that really classic wavetable Overtone thing and we'll get rid of our LFO there on the Yeah, as long as we can get done with that. Okay So the first thing I'm going to do is I'm going to actually come across to oscillator 2 and I'm going to use the destroy mode Just to There goes the fork just to Add some kind of bit crushing and rather sample rate reduction and bit rate reduction bit reduction. I should say just to Reduce some of the fidelity here And then just bring my filter down to hide that a little bit. Let's get a little bit of envelope going on that filter Let's use our cycling envelope for that just in envelope mode and we'll Cycling envelope to cut off and let's get that wave control Let's get that moving with the cycling envelope first of all, but perhaps we'll have it moving with something else as well So it's like an envelope to wave a little bit Like a super amount or anything Let's get that pulse width control moving slowly I think So we'll go LFO one to the timer control Sustain up right. Let's bring in our CPU innocent here Let's Grab this Okay, here we go. There it is That's a bit much a little bit of the high pass I'm going to put Aftertouch into the filter as well, so we just make sure that the Okay, that's just on the aftertouch now so fellow after touch or just after touch in this case And then what I think would be cool is if there was like a a kind of tweaking of that wavetable position. So let's use a tempo-synced exponential saw probably, I think. How'd that go into the wavetable? It's LFO 2-to-wave. AM, sanderwave is dead. That's so cool. Yeah, and we could assign this to the macro. Assign, can we actually? Now that we can assign stuff in the mod matrix to that. So let's assign on here, that there, and just turn it up here to like wherever it was. It was 80 or something, and then here we'll turn it back down. Oh, it was only 40. Oh, we've got the way now. So now... Yeah. Let's add some delay to that, and we'll go ping-pong. Ping-pong sync. The one downside of the superunison, is it? It's so stereo that makes other stereo effects seem less stereo. I guess we add some reverb to that as well, right? Shall we try a different wavetable just to see what it sounds like? That's one of the great things about having these wavetables. Just take some of that top end off of the actual wavetable. Oh, there's lovely harmonics. It's almost like there's an arpeggiator. Yeah, so there's loads of cool sounds that we can be finding in here. Anyway, yeah, so there's a little patch making use of some of the new features here. The wavetable also is obviously a really welcome addition to the arsenal. It would be great if we could have it on both sides, I think, but at the moment that's not something we have the option to do, which is a shame. But at least we have the superunison to make it sound a lot wider than it is. So anyway, I hope that was a useful summary of the new features in this firmware. It's given you some ideas of things to try out. If you did enjoy the video then, as always, a like on the video is much appreciated. It really helps the channel out. And if you're not already subscribed then you could also consider hitting that subscribe button as well, and maybe even the bell. I don't post that many videos, so you won't get too bugged. Let me know in the comments how you get on with the new firmware, what features are particularly speaking to you. And until next time, enjoy exploring your instruments. And take care. Bye bye.