 Hello, Oslater Sync here. This is the Norand Mono, which is a 2-VCO monosynth with an integrated sequencer. And that's not a genre of synths that I am unfamiliar with, and you might be the same. I think if I looked in my cupboard I can probably find like five, including this one that I own, the five synths that we can call 2-VCO monosynths with an integrated sequencer. So for me to make a fuss about one on my channel, it's going to need to do something or offer something that's pretty unique. And the Norand does this. Looking at the panel, it looks like a fairly basic architecture. And if you want to use it that way, you absolutely can. It does great 303 stuff, if that's what you're into. Which, you know, I am. But what this offers is something that I think is probably unique in the world of certainly desktop units. And that is that this little synth, despite its diminutive appearance and supposedly limited number of controls, actually offers an LFO and envelope independently for every single knob on the panel. Which is bonkers. And allows you to do some performative and sound design tricks that I don't think you can easily do, certainly not on an analog synth. And it's that part of this synth that I want to focus on in this video today. This idea of having, I guess, 14, 15 envelopes and like 18 LFOs. And what that actually means for making sound and making music. Oh, just in the interest of transparency, Norand did send me this unit to make some videos on. But they've had no input and have asked for no input on the videos that I make on it. And as with everything I feature on the channel, I just wouldn't feature on the channel if I didn't think it was interesting and cool and didn't get me excited, which this synth does. So in this video, I really want to focus in on this idea of having this LFO and envelope per knob. So if you want a more thorough overview of the mono, then Loupop has done a really thorough overview, as you would probably expect. And if you want to hear it in a musical context with more instrumentation, Jeremy at Red Means Recording did a pretty good lengthed live set, which featured the mono as its primary synth voice throughout. And I'll put a link to both of those in the description of this video. Nevertheless, it's probably worth just talking about what the architecture is in general, so that you have a good feel for what we're then going to be modulating. So here's just sort of an initialised patch. So we have two identical oscillators. There is a frequency knob for each of them, which rather wonderfully, on the knob at least, steps to semitones. When you modulate it, it's smooth, but in terms of being able to tune to oscillators to like intervals, you'll even be able to see as I change the tuning, it highlights the light as it goes. Hopefully that's coming through on the video. So you've got a big tune knob, and then you've got a detune, which takes you a semitone in either direction, allowing you to detune the oscillators as is your want. The other control here is a wave knob, which is like giving you various different continuous shapes, starting at sine wave, going through triangle, through square, and over to a lovely, buzzy saw. I also love that point between the square and the saw and this thing. Perhaps we can modulate that if only we had an LFO per knob. Oh, wait, we do. So that's basically the oscillator architecture on oscillator 2. If we bring that up, we also have FM between oscillator 1, oscillator 2, to oscillator 2 as being the carrier. And you'll notice that despite this being analog FM, it is super stable right up into the top where you start getting some chaos. So these oscillators have through zero FM, which means that they, as I say, until you get right to the top, basically will stay in tune until you don't get that usual drift off one way or another. Even with linear FM, you still get this sort of global pitch shift, which you have to account for, and you don't get that on this, which is really, really nice. We also have sync on oscillator 2, so oscillator 2 as sync to oscillator 1. So we turn that on. You can get those sync sounds. It sounds a bit weird because it's stepped at this point where we can modulate that smoothly as well. And you can also bring the 2 in together for different textures of the like. So we then have a mixer section. And what is really important to note on the mono is that the mixer allows you to go way past Unity as you go into the filter allow and you should get crunch on the filter as well. So really, Unity is somewhere around half. And actually, if you've got both oscillators on, maybe a little bit below. And as you push it, you can hear, especially if we bring the cutoff down a little bit, you get that blowing out of the bottom end. And if you start to introduce resonance on the filter, it can get crunchy. So if you don't want that crunch, you want to bring that back a fair bit and then compensate on the master volume. Gain station on this thing is something that you just have to be careful with. It's one of those with great power comes great responsibility type situations, frankly. So we've kind of already talked about the filter sort of incidentally there. So the filter has a cutoff, it has a resonance, and then this filter is multi-mode. And you can blend between low pass in the middle, high pass at that end of the color knob and then band pass in the middle. I do love a band pass. Especially if you can drive it. Sorry, I know it's meant to be talking about the other ways. That's just love it though. So we also have this follow button here. And if this is turned on, then the filter will track the keyboard. As you can hear there, we can get almost chord tones out of it. And it does track pretty much perfectly. We then have an envelope amount knob here. And this envelope amount knob is going to refer to the master envelope, which is our VCA envelope. So that's the last bit we have here really. We have VCA envelope, just standard ADSR. This goes pretty long. It can also be incredibly snappy to the point of it being clicky if you need it. But it's got quite a big range on it. And if we turn up the envelope amount on the filter, it's going to be this envelope that it's dealing with. So we can have a type situation if we want. But of course, we don't have to use this envelope amount because we, as I keep saying, have an envelope and LFO per knob. Okay, so we're on an initialised patch. We'll just type in the filter a little bit. Lovely. We're just hearing oscillator one sawtooth wave. Great. So the way that the envelopes and LFOs per knob works is basically based on the last knob that you touched. So if we wanted to apply, say, an envelope to the pitch of oscillator one, we could touch the frequency knob for that. If you don't want to actually change the parameter as you're selecting the knob, you can just hold down function and it doesn't move it. So as soon as you've selected a knob to work with, you can hopefully see on the camera that it is highlighted. So you can see that that's the knob that you're currently working with. And that'll be the knob that is going to be affected by this X-mod and X-end section down here. So we've got the LFO or the X-mod, it does a little bit more than just LFO actually. But let's start with the envelope here. So if I want to apply a pitch envelope to this, just turn up the amount. It's bipolar so we can go down as well. And then we have an attack and decay control for this. So if we wanted to do something a bit, go back to the sine wave there, drive it into the filter bit. You do have to be careful to make sure that you're not trying to tweak the thing that you've just touched. There's something that I keep doing. So if you want to know, if we could get sort of kick drum territory, then the answer is certainly yes. So perhaps this might be a synth that you could turn into a drum machine. Perhaps that's foreshadowing for another video. So one place this is sort of obviously applicable, if we just get rid of the amount on there, is that we can now decouple the filter and the amp envelope. So we're not sat with this sort of 303 limitation, whether you have to move together or you have a gate. We can have a hybrid of those two things. Perhaps we can set like a longer amp envelope. And if we turn up the envelope out here, it's going to have to follow that long envelope. It also has to have that instant on. But if we want to modulate the cutoff separately, we can select the cutoff and we can apply an amount to it. So now we have separate filter and amp articulation. Lovely brassy sound. The filter on this is really nice. So you now have separate articulation over the filter and the amp, which immediately opens this thing up a lot more from that perspective. You also should be noted have separate articulation in this way over the two oscillator because the mixer is not just a passive mixer. It's a VCA that we can control here. So perhaps if we can just remove that just for the sake of hearing what's going on. So here we've got our oscillators tuned differently and perhaps we want this fifth above to fade in a little bit after we've started playing the note. So we can turn that one down because this is the last knob that we touched. We can turn up our amount here and have it fade in over the course of the note instead, which is a really nice option to have. So one place this could be really fun to apply a separate envelope to something would be maybe the FM amount. We'll switch back to sine waves for a second. Get this in tune. Maybe we'll just turn down oscillator one just for a second. Here we've got that lovely FM thing going on there. So perhaps having that FM knob being modulated so we basically have an analog to op synths. So we've got essentially analog cross mod happening here, which is through zero, and we have a separate envelope for that particular control and of course we could have separate control for the cusp as well if you wanted. Cool, so we've got that short FME attack there and then a longer sort of standard sound happening at the one pass. We'll just turn the FM up a little bit so it's just still a bit of FMness happening there. So this is probably a good opportunity to show another feature which is related to the X-Mod but is kind of also part of the sequence as well. So I'll just put down like a really basic just random notes. So we've got just some... just some notes. And at the moment that FM is obviously happening each time we play a note, as one would expect. But what we can do with our X-Mod here is if we hold down these two buttons we can start putting down steps on the sequencer which will decouple it from the note on. So rather than this envelope triggering each time a note plays it triggers per step on the sequencer. And you can do this with pretty much all of them again per knob. So if we just wanted that first one to be FME make sure that we've actually selected the right knob. That's what that's going on there. Here we go, let's try that again. There we go. You need to make sure you're on the right knob. The first one is playing that envelope but we don't have to have it on a note on a tool so we can have it in between notes. So we can get these terrible things happening in the sequencer and it can get really groovy. Especially when you just kind of catch the tail end of a note there or something like that. We've got our filter being separately... being triggered here as well aren't we? We can do the same with this but put them on different places. Which is really, really good fun and an incredible way to get more complex sounding sequences even if you're just sticking with the 16 steps and this does 68 steps, 64 steps in total I think into that filter a little bit. So yeah, we can get to a place where each of the different envelopes on each of the different knobs could be sequenced separately to the notes that are actually playing to get all of these really, really interesting patterns happening. Let's put a bit of reverb on that just for a second. And of course we could have the filter tweaked a little bit by the main envelope as well if we wanted. Still works. So that's really good fun as well. So we've spoken a lot about the X-end and there is still one trick I want to come back to it with but let's talk about the X-mod instead. So this is where our LFOs plus some other things live. So as a basic example if I wanted to apply a filter sweep we could select our cutoff turn up the amount and as our lovely filter sweep. And by default this is going to be a free running LFO we'll look at some of the other modes in a second and we have various different waves by tapping the wave. Make sure we're actually on our filter again. That's a sine wave instead. You can hear that's free running as well. There's our square wave. We've got our saw and if we want it to go the other way we just invert it. Then we've got sample and hold, random. And this goes really slow at the far end so if we come back to our really slow get the picture and at the high end we do stop just short of audio rate but don't worry about that. We'll get back to that. So we can have various different parameters all wiggling around a little bit so maybe we'll take the filter and their wave shape and we'll bring in oscillator 2 and have oscillator 2 gain staging and have oscillator 2 move separately as well and maybe the filter mode as well that we're going to really slow perhaps and we'll slow down a lot. And we can get loads of movement in here across loads of different parameters. They're all out of sync with each other so you get these constant interactions and we have FM between the two to get some grit. Loads of lovely things. I'll just stick some reverb on that. Just loads of lovely movement. Gorgeous stuff. So that's free running LFOs. We can also tempo sync them to the sequencer as well so if I just make a nice sound there it's just a generally good sounding thing. So there is a sound for us to start working with but perhaps we want to modulate our cutoff with a tempo synced LFO so we can select the cutoff and then if we tap type once it should see it starts pulsing and that's going to tell us that the LFO is now tempo synced. And so we can apply... you should hear that's locking to steps which is a different wave type. And maybe if we just track down some steps. So it's tempo synced but not to like sixteenths so we get these nice sort of... shifting patterns with our LFO there. There we go. It's a nice filter separate hold there. So we can tempo sync them to the sequencer if we want to. So we've seen that we have free running LFOs per knob we have tempo synced LFOs per knob. The final mode however that the export has is probably the most exciting for me actually let me show you. So if I turn the oscillator 2 as well maybe choose some just off triangle waves or something like that. Okay so let's go to the volume of oscillator 2 and we'll tap type twice and it's going to go solid and that means we're in the third mode for our X-mod which is audio rate modulation. So we're now going way past LFO place and we're starting to introduce new harmonics and side bands by modulating things so fast. Now the thing that's really really important about this so we're modulating the volume of oscillator 2 here the thing that's really really important about this is that this modulation amount sorry modulation rate I should say is related to the frequency of oscillator 1 and it will track it as you play across the keyboard which means that we've introduced these new harmonics and they're going to track across the keyboard and obviously the relationship between the pitch of oscillator 2 and oscillator 1 is going to give us different things so if I turn down that amount you can hear that we're introducing these additional harmonics and we can adjust what those harmonics are by changing the rate of the LFO or not LFO anymore, the X-mod and they're going to track across the keyboard and because we have an X-mod per knob essentially we can do this for lots of different controls and have them, although they're related to oscillator 1's pitch have them offset by a different amount to get different flavours so for example we can come to our cutoff here and go into audio rate mode that with some envelope amount careful with the gain staging if you're modulating lots of things to do with volume introduce some actual FM between them here's one, how cool does it sound when you do audio rate modulation of the resonance of a filter really cool as it turns out reverb, band passi so you kind of get to this place with all this audio rate modulation and the fact you can layer it up with different amounts to creating this sort of like I almost describe it as like analog masquerading as digital like you've still got that instability and dirtiness from all the analog stuff going on here but sparkly and harmonically rich and different overtones that you can't usually create just with standard analog waveforms without maybe going into something like wave folding or something I think this is where some of the really really fantastic aspects of this device really come into place and there's one more thing we can do to shape this functionality if you like so I've just for the sake of clarity just come back down to a initialised patch so let's go back to maybe doing audio rate modulation of our cutoff tap type twice creating an extra pitch in there a bit more to work with so obviously a very cool sound so at the moment that additional coolness of that sound is static we've got that additional overtone created by the audio rate modulation of our cutoff but it's kind of just static in the sound so what we can do if we hold down funk and tap I'll make sure we're on our cutoff first hold down funk and tap type and wave together you can see that the amount knob here starts flashing so what that means now is that the X envelope is no longer modulating the cutoff it's going to be modulating the amount of the X mod for the cutoff don't worry so let's just turn this back down back to our bass sound that we can barely hear because we had so much grit with that cutoff and now if I turn up the amount on the X envelope this is now modulating this amount for the cutoff and like how many analogs since have you heard that do that because this sounds like it's coming out of like a DX sound or something right and of course we can still offset the amount we just want a little bit of it I mean this is so far away from what you expect a two oscillator modulator to sound like let's do the same with the resonance shall we let's find a nice so that's creating a load of extra grit at the start there but perhaps we don't want that grit all the way through perhaps we just want a really strong attack so again we can tap those together it starts flashing turn that down just get that attack at the front end now and perhaps we could do the ring mod thing with oscillator 2 again so select oscillator 2 then we'll tap type yes and perhaps we want that one to fade in instead so we could again double tap there put some effort between the two if you ever wanted your analog mono synth to sound like a sound blaster keyboard and I do give it some reverb fantastic and all that while we're getting all of this what feels like digital glistening nastiness but it's still maintaining that sort of inherent analog flavour along with it all and sure we can make it do 303 stuff as well may pass that at this point and I think that's rather special because I don't have another analog mono synth that can do that kind of madness push the sound that far so anyway I hope that was interesting I think this is a fascinating synth especially when you get into this audio rate stuff and the independent triggering of the XM for stuff outside of the note on stuff within the seems to have a bunch of other interesting tricks up its sleeve including parameter locking or parameter offset locking in the case of this which allow you to create really really complex, interesting performable sequences and maybe just maybe you can also turn into a drum machine using some of those features perhaps just maybe that might be a video that I show off in the future but for now that's cool for now I think we will leave the mono to create its interesting sounds and we'll return to another day so thank you so much for watching until next time until next time take care bye bye