 Hello oscillators in gear. This is the Almira 2 from Neutral Labs. It's an instrument that I've really been enjoying recently and I've posted a number of performances with it on the channel, both solo and also paired with other instruments as well. However, seeing as it is a somewhat unusual and dare I say esoteric instrument that is made up of sort of non-traditional parts arranged in a maybe non-traditional way in terms of sort of standard synthesizers, I thought it might be useful for people that are interested in the synth to see what it's like to work with going from what goes for an initialised patch up to something along the lines of the performances that I have been posting. However, before we get to that, let's get the YouTuber transparency stuff out of the way. Neutral Labs contacted me off the back for some other videos that I'd posted to ask whether I'd be interested in featuring the Almira 2 on the channel. I thought it was an interesting looking and sounding instrument, so I said yes. So they sent one of them to me for free to feature on the channel. They have not asked for any editorial oversight for anything that I've done. They haven't asked for any particular type of video to be made. And as always, I just don't feature stuff on the channel that I don't think is going to be interesting, at least interesting to me and that I don't think is good. So apply whatever pinch of salt that you need to apply to this video, but hopefully the sounds, if you're into those sorts of sounds, will speak for themselves. Before we start making any music, it's probably worth just quickly talking about the sort of architecture of the synth, because as I say, it's not a normal layout necessarily. So you can probably see that it is a semi-modular synth. We have patch points here, but there is a pre-patched way that everything is arranged. So it's built around four voices, which are accessible by these touch plates here, or by a gate input, which we might get to later on. Each of these voices is a wavetable digital voice, and we can scan the wavetable and change wavetables as well. And there are four wavetables currently in Elmira. On top of the wavetable scanning, we also have this mod, which modifies the digital waveform in some way. There are a bunch of different mod modes, and you can apply them to each voice individually. But as an example, the default is a detune, so this adds like a detuned second oscillator. So you can kind of get that sort of rich stuff that's going on in there out of one single voice. The envelopes are not snappy. This is a snappy as they get, and as you turn up this envelope control, it's going to increase the attack and the release at the same time. And at the longest, kind of goes on for quite a while there, you can also set any of the voices to drone, at which point the envelope doesn't do anything anymore. However, that envelope signal is available here per voice for you to patch into other things, if you like. All of those four voices are mixed together, and they then go through three other sort of processes, if you like. The first is a delay, which I'll just turn up the mix here so you can hear it. Kind of a grungy lo-fi delay. Got a bit of a low pass going on there in the feedback loop. And if we take it to its longest time, it goes very long, and also kind of gets grungier as well. You can start hearing some of that digital grit happening in there as well. The clock noise getting in there, which, you know, if that's the sort of thing you're into, which I am, that's all good. And the feedback does go into rolling feedback. And we can get some noise happening there as well. You might be able to hear that things are getting clipped there. There's a reason for that, which we'll get to in a second. The next thing we have is a filter. So the filter comes after the delay. So there's our filter there, and the resonance is here. Both the cutoff and the resonance are much later on as well, which is fun. There are different filter modes that you can access through some of the secret key press menus. We'll probably just leave it on the low pass for today, however. Finally, after it's gone through the filter, it's going to go through the distortion stage, which is named ouch. And this can get really, really extreme. So I'll leave choke up at full just for a second. But in terms of the actual distortion, it's the bite control, which is going to turn it up. So it's pretty extreme. You probably hear there's some almost like, sounds like wave-folding kind of stuff happening in there where we're getting a lot of upper harmonics generated. The choke control, I'm not entirely sure what it does. Technically speaking, I think it's probably limiting the voltage of the distortion. But you can hear that it has kind of a limiting effect on the distortion circuit there. You can kind of use it almost like a VCA for the distortion if you want to. There are some interesting things you can do with modulating it. Again, both those things are modulatable. Finally, on the distortion, we won't be getting into this today. I don't think you actually have these patch points here where you can literally patch components into the distortion circuit to change how it works. And it comes with some of these little cards here, which have components pre-soldered to the back for each of those pins so you can actually plug these into change the sound of the distortion. Or you can literally get brew-hole components and stick them in there. As I say, probably not going to do that today, but that is something that is available in the sense. So next up, we have some LFOs. The first LFO, LFO 1, I guess, just has a speed control and gives you a triangle. The second LFO has a bunch of different shapes that are accessible on the wave control here, which is modulatable, which is very, very fun. And again, we have the speed of the frequency here as well. Speed is modulatable on both of them as well, which is really, really nice. We also have a sequencer here, which is a pitch sequencer, which is per voice. And each voice can have a different length in terms of its sequencer length. However, it is just a pitch sequencer. It doesn't output gates. So you're going to have to gate things separately if that's what you are looking to do, although to approach this like a traditional synth is probably not the way to approach it. And then finally, we just have a couple of utilities here. So we have an adder here where you can take two different sources and add them together with different amounts. We've got attenuators for each of the inputs. And then we have an attenuating multiple here where you can take one source and mult it out to two different outputs and then attenuate each of those two outputs. So all sort of sensible stuff just to allow patching to be a bit more robust. Of course, you can also introduce other modulation sources from modular, from Eurorack, from other semi-modular synths. It will take Eurorack voltage, but it will clip it at some point. So it doesn't go all the way up to the kind of plus five minus five. I think it's three volts clipping, which is kind of common on some of these semi-modular synths, especially the less usual ones. I think Soft Pop, for example, has the same limitation in terms of clipping the CV. I have also just off the side here got a reverb pedal. I've got the GFI specular reverb. So that's dry. And that's with it engaged. I might tweak the settings as well. So it is a mono unit, mono as in not stereo. It's polyphonic. But it's just a nice thing to be able to add a bit of stereo width to any sort of mono device. So let's get going with some sound. So I'm going to start at the low end and maybe we'll just get this droning to begin with. So each of the oscillators are completely freely tunable. So you can go for microtonal things. You can turn on a chromatic mode, which allows you to clip to a tempered scale. But for me, I prefer to be a little bit free with the instruments of this type. So as I mentioned, we've got this mod control here, which allows us to modify, I should say, the wave tables. We have a bunch of different modes here. Some of them do kind of distortion. Some of them do filtering. So let's maybe find something other than the... Actually, maybe perhaps we will just leave that one with the D-Tune because that's quite nice. And we also have our wave table that we can scan here. Perhaps we'll get some modulation going on that. So we'll just patch that in. Actually, we'll go... No, we'll just go straight out of LFO1 and go into the wave input here. And maybe we'll add a little bit of delay to the mix to get some character in there as well. It's a nice place to start. Okay, let's find some sounds on the other voices. So one of the things I like doing on Amira is one of the wave table modifiers allows you to get noise, which is always a lovely thing to bring into a drone because it brings some of that crispy crackle at the top. So if we want to change the mod modes, we hold down the Select button for that particular voice. Then we click through on the mod. And I want the white mode, which I know to be noise. So we'll just click through to get to the white mode there. If we just turn off that drone just for a second, just still sat in the... We can now also use that voice as a noise source, which, if we pair it with the first voice, and especially if we bring up the resonance of the filter, which holds onto the bottom end fairly well, even when you push it high. We've now got that noise source in there that we can introduce. We probably don't want it happening all the time. That's probably something we want to modulate a little bit. So perhaps we'll make use of the second LFO here. Now the waveforms are pretty interesting in LFO2. At the lowest setting on the WAV, or Wave control, we have kind of an exponential sawtooth. So maybe we'll take that and put it into our multiple here, because we might want to send it to a couple of different places. Put that into the mod here. Okay. So perhaps we'll not have that going at the same rate the whole time. So we can... Let's take the other LFO. We'll just use a stack cable and go into the frequency control here. You can see that on the light. Yeah, that's interesting. We could have a little bit more mix on the reverb, on the delay rather. Okay, let's have a think about some of these other voices we've got here then. Turn down the delay for a second so we can hear. I'll turn up the end of the LFO here. So when I start my noise, it can just sort of fade out naturally. Okay, kind of a gross note at the moment, but sometimes you need a gross note. Let's try some of the other WAV tables. That WAV table is a little bit more mellow. Just disable our main drone for a second. Yeah, cool. Okay, let's think about how we're going to mod this one. So I don't think we want necessarily the detune here. So let's try some of the other modes here. So we've got a sub octave here. That sounds kind of evil. Turn that delay down for a second. Probably not the right for this though. So we've got kind of a saturator. That might be fun. Let's see what else we've got. So a straight up distortion kind of thing. Bit crusher. Well, that's probably sample rate reduction. That might be fun because you've kind of got those different harmonics which naturally start to pop out there. Yeah, so let's maybe have that going on and maybe have that modulated by, oh we can modulate that using its own envelope perhaps. So let's go from our envelope output for that voice into the mod input here. Turn the mod up a bit. Make the envelope longer. There are loads of cool interactions in there. I want to maybe modulate the WAV as well. I'm kind of using a lot of the LFO at this point, this first LFO. So let's put that into the mod. I've already got something into the multiple. I can just go for the other side of the stack cape with that kind of LOD. So that was going into the WAV. I want that also to go into the WAV on this one as well. There we go. And maybe we'll also sequence the pitch of this one. So we'll have a look at how the sequencer works. So I'll just start my drone growing again so I know what sort of no time sequencing against. And I'll also get this draining just to make it easier to do the sequencer. So the way that we do the sequencer is we hold down the selector for this voice and press record and that starts the sequencer recording. And then each time we want to record a step we just sort of tune this knob and hit the record button. So let's start with this slightly ugly note, that also ugly note, less ugly note, that ugly note, and that less ugly note. And then we'll go to play to start that sequencer going. And we just need to give a sync signal to the sequencer to get that going. And we can just tap that in. I'm just going to go for something that's slow. Now this sequencer is going to run independently of the the gate signal. So I can sort of start a note going and it will kind of continue playing that sequencer in the background. Things have a bit bring that delay back in. And now that because we have that delay happening in there, that's kind of beating against the each note in this sequence. Now we can actually tempo sync the delay as well so that it's moving at a division rate of the sequencer. But I kind of like the free flowing nature of it at the moment. And perhaps we'll set up another sequence over here. So let's find a sound over on this last voice. I'll just bring that delay down just to make it easier to tune again. Perhaps we'll have a descending sequence on that one instead. What should we do for the mod on this one? Let's try a couple of different ones out. So that's your sample rate production, I think. And some noise. So you also have a non-resonant low and high pass that you can set up. And you can kind of use that to gate things out as well. So you can maybe use the low pass to add an additional character to when we sweep in the envelope. So we'll patch envelope into mod again. So making here we're not just getting a volume increase. We've kind of got a filter sweeping there which kind of gives you that low pass filter kind of vibe. So I'm just going to stop the sequence and we'll get another sequence going on in here. So set it into record mode. We'll start with this note at the top here. So we'll go for a longer sequence there because the sequences can be different lengths for each voice here. There's some interesting discordances in there but they resolve nicely until they don't. Interesting. Okay we just need to be a bit judicious about how often we're having both of those happening at once. But there might be a little bit of discordance as a nice thing. So you can hear that it's sort of naturally dirty at all times. That's kind of nothing you can you can do to move away from that because it's always running through that distortion even with the distortion turned all the way down. There is a headroom setting if you want to have it. Now with the filter turned down low we're kind of losing some of that noise stuff that we had going on before. So what we could do is maybe patch the actually a short one for that. Maybe patch the envelope of that one into the cutoff of the filter. And now this voice when we trigger it is going to open up that filter for us. And similarly because we have this voice droning perhaps we can have its envelope used to modulate something. How about maybe the resonance. The envelope shape still applies. Or maybe the feedback. Oh that's menacing yeah I like that. So we don't just need to we don't just have these as triggers. We can use these as performance controls for other things as well. Now we can try and make things a bit dirtier and see what we can do. So maybe add some reverb now. Oh here we go. Yes that distortion. Maybe try choking it a little bit. Maybe we can try a different different wave shape on that noise. Now there are a bunch of sort of hidden settings things like portamento for synchronization for different tempered scales that you can access by holding down the mod button and tapping in codes like one one three four something like that across the selector buttons. So there's a bunch of other deep stuff that you can do to affect things. Actually I guess one thing we could try is we could try tempo syncing the delay because then you can get some quite interesting pitch shift things happening. So let's give that a little guy perhaps. So the code for tempo syncing is one three two. So we'll hold down mod and go one three two. You heard there that the delay just snapped in its time and now if we modulate the time it will snap to the divisions of the sequencer. See can I get these pitch shifting. That'd be cool if we increase the feedback as well. So that's one of the things that we can sort of adjust on here. What else could we do? Oh well we could add portamento some little slur to the sequence notes so we could do the code for that is two two three. You can hear now that those notes are slurred instead of stepped. That's quite nice. I can really hear that sort of more sort of interesting waveform shape there. Anyway I hope this has given you a flavour for what it's like to work with the Almira. It is a synth which is opinionated in terms of the way that it wants you to interact with it and like a lot of esoteric synths it's a synth that you will choose for that character not just its sound character but its workflow character and you know if it doesn't suit you then you're probably not going to enjoy using it frankly but if you're into being forced to approach an instrument in a different way then you might find that you do indeed enjoy using it as I do. But if you want something that's going to do 303 bass lines then there are lots of other synths out there which will do it a lot better than this. You can kind of hack this to make it do it with some of the low pass filter mod stuff but it's probably missing the point a little bit. Anyway until next time drone on take care.