 Hello, Oscillator Sync here. Artoria have just released the version for firmware for the Microfreak and this update brings some nice quality of life upgrades and most importantly an exciting new digital oscillator type which is another wavetable oscillator but we can now import our own wavetables which is superb. Obviously very excited to get to the wavetable side of things but just quickly let's discuss the other little upgrades that we get with this update. So the first update is really easy to explain and it's one that I think a lot of people are going to like if you are doing a lot of sound design on the Microfreak. I've always found, as have a number of other people I'm sure, that the control over these knobs here it takes a long time to go from top to bottom, lots of turning if you want to get to minimum or maximum. So now by default if you hold down shift and turn the knob it moves a lot faster. There we go as simple as that. It makes a hell of a difference when you're building patches. If you would like to have that behaviour as the default, if you come into the utility menu and come down to browsing and then we're going down to Oscillator knob speed here if you come in here and set that to fast I might do that now. Now the default speed is that new fast speed and if you want to have finer control you can hold down shift like that. Excellent. Simple, useful and just general upgrade to the usability of the synths. Thumbs up. So the next upgrade is to do with the chord mode. So a quick refresher if you hold down the paraphonic button and play in a chord you are now in chord mode and as you play notes it will play a chord and send let's choose a minus seven because that sounds good to play everywhere. You can also layer on top of this the scales mode to constrain these chords to scales and so on. So in the previous version of the firmware one of the bugbears really I think if we're honest was that if we were to be in chord mode and come to say record a sequence or something what would happen if I played this sequence in the old version is that you would just get the single notes that I played rather than the chords if I play it now. We actually get the chords so that's a big update for sure. One thing to be aware here with this new functionality is if you obviously if you go back to mono mode then you're just going to get single notes. If you turn paraphonic mode back on you're not getting the chords and if we look inside the sequencer so if we look inside the sequence we look at the different steps here you'll see that you're not actually recording the chords in so if you come out of chord mode you do lose the chords that are in there which can be a disadvantage in some situations but on balance it does allow a couple of interesting creative opportunities so for example we could be playing that chord in the sequence again and we could change that chord for something else during the performance to get something new or to find new tonalities within there. The other thing that this means because the notes aren't actually directly recorded in there is if we come into the scale mode here and start constraining things to scales then we're going to find new sequences as well so yeah so in some situations it may well be that it knocked actually writing the chords into the sequence that might be a disadvantage but on balance I think being able to shift those around so freely without having to rewrite your sequence is probably on balance the better situation I believe now the chords also get transmitted by midi which they weren't previously so let's get on to the main event which surely is the new oscillator type you can find this one right at the end after harm but before the vocoder and it's called wave user and this is a wavetable oscillator and now you might be thinking if you've got a microphone don't we already have a wavetable oscillator and the answer is yes we have the wavetables borrowed from the plats the difference here first is that the shape control gives us a bit crusher rather than a chorus which we get which can give us all sorts of raw or glistening textures on top of what we get from the wavetable itself but more importantly we can import our own wavetables hence the user part of the name so I'll talk a bit more about the ins and outs of this oscillator but first let's just quickly talk about what a wavetable actually is so one way that we can implement a digital oscillator is essentially to have an audio file which contains a single cycle of a waveform now if you were to play back this audio file you'd basically just hear a click if that but if we loop this waveform what we get is the shape of an oscillator and we get the sound that this oscillator makes if we play that audio file back slower we get a lower frequency therefore a lower pitch if we play it back faster then we're going to get a higher frequency and a higher pitch so in a wavetable rather than having an audio file which only contains one wave shape you have an audio file which contains a bunch of different shapes single cycles of an oscillator in sequence and by playing back these wave shapes and scanning through the table when you can scan through the table have you want sequentially randomly you can do it very quickly or very slowly but by moving through the wavetable and looping these different waveforms we will get an evolution of a sound so this is just another way of creating timbral changes by changing the wave shape that we are playing back there are other things that you can do in terms of crossfading and how you morph between the different waves this is a very basic description of what's going on here but essentially that's what a wavetable is it's an audio file with a bunch of different single cycles that we can scan through to get different sounds so in this oscillator the wave control will allow us to select one of 16 different tables and the timbre control allows us to scan through that wavetable so if we hold down a note here and scan through the table we can hear that we are getting all of these different sounds from the wavetable and as we change tables we'll get a different set of timbres so some of these will sound almost like a filter opening because maybe the wavetable was made by recording the sounds of a filter opening you can get different octaves by doubling the wave shapes and let's say we also have a bit crusher here which allows us to get lots of different sounds and by modulating the timbre control in particular we can get various different shapes of the sounds so for example an obvious thing to do would be to send our envelope to the timbre control maybe just go up full give a bit of attack and a bit of decay maybe a bit low sustain and of course moving to different wavetables will get very different sounds but that same movement through the table so the same shape and of course we can modulate this anyway we wanted we could send it to the pressure and allow us to articulate it by how we're holding down the notes and so on so in terms of what you get here in a bank of wavetables is we get 16 different wavetables and within those wavetables there are 32 different wave shapes or cycles as they're called and then the timbre knob allows us to iterate through them and crossfade across them so how do you import your own wavetables so once you have installed the new version of the MIDI control center and updated your microfreak and you come into the microfreak section here with your microfreak connected of course you will have a new tab here called wavetables and this is where we manage our wavetables unsurprisingly so you will have the factory set of wavetables the factory bank of wavetables you can see here that it contains those 16 different wavetables here now if we want to create our own bank of wavetables we can do so we can click new bank give it a name and hit enter there and now we have an empty bank you can only have one bank on the microfreak at once and each bank contains the 16 wavetables so you can create as many banks as you want offline here and then switch them in and out on the synth as you need so you can create a wavetable in quotes properly and the manual has some information about the specification for the wavetable it's a bit like the serum format but it's fewer cycles within each table so i don't know whether they're directly compatible i don't have serum so i can't really comment but what's nice is that they have implemented a system whereby you can import a wave or a file and the MIDI control center will do some magic to it to make it work as a wavetable so you can basically import any audio and it will convert it to a wavetable for you to try out and you just do this by clicking on the wavetable slot that you want to edit go to import and replace wavetable a1 we can choose any way file it doesn't really matter and double click on it and it will be imported in as a wavetable there we go import successful and it will appear in this slot here we're going to move on to the next slot and import something else so i spent quite a lot of time just playing around with various different audio files to see whether they would work as wavetables and the conversion worked fine but ultimately most of them came out sounding very thin sort of a bit a bit weird in the way they transitioned but most importantly they were all pitched way too high like octaves higher than is useful you had to go down to the bottom octave to get like anything approaching a useful bass and sort of octaves two and three were sort of inaudibly high pitched so although you can just throw anything in and then it's nice to experiment with that i took a look again at the specifications to try and work out whether there was a recipe for creating your own wavetables that's going to work in most places if you don't have something like serum if all you've got is even just audacity i've come up with a recipe that works in terms of creating your own wavetables that actually sound right on the microfreak so let's take a look at that i'll show my working and then we'll import a couple of files that i've treated in this way and see how they sound so quickly just a little bit of maths so that if people are interested they can see where these numbers are coming from so in terms of making a wavetable we're just going to make an audio file and i'm going to assume that we're working at 44.1 kHz because generally you are so a couple of facts about the format that the microfreak expects it is 32 cycles or waveforms within a wavetable and each of those waveforms should be 2048 samples long so that means that the whole wavetable is 65536 samples in length okay so if we take that length and we want to work out how long that audio file should be in seconds we can take the number of samples divided by the sample rate which gives us about 1.486 seconds about a second and a half so if we're going to try and create a audio file that the microfreak is going to make the best of when it's turned into a wavetable we're going to want to make sure that it's about a second and a half long give or take we're not being totally accurate here from my testing you get good results as long as you basically stick to a second and a half so within that time there are 32 waveforms so if we divide about 32 each waveform should be 0.04643 seconds in length why do we need to know that well we want to work out from that what frequency or what pitch we should be playing any notes in it so if we take that number and divide one by it we get 21.5533 or thereabouts hertz so that's the frequency of the note that is going to work best within the microfreaks wavetable so assuming a equals for 40 hertz which it does most of the time that's basically the lowest f you can play in most cases about 21 cents flat so the recipe if you don't care about the maths is simply play a low f as low as you can go ideally tuning it a bit flat so 31 cents flat for about 1.5 seconds and in that 1.5 seconds we want to have as much time or change as we want to represent it inside our wavetable so for example if i wanted to create a wavetable from the microfreak itself so let's say i wanted to use say the maybe the sore x sound here and maybe we want to modulate the wave control to get the big part of our sound what i'll do is i will set the wave control to be modulated by the envelope it doesn't really matter whether you set it to work with the envelope or the cycling envelope on the microfreak because the nice thing about the microfreak is it does tell you the length of the segments in the envelope in seconds so i'll just go with the envelope here wave we'll do the full range here and then i'll set my attack to be about 1.5 i'll put the sustain down to the bottom so i can hear it finish sort of dead on there i'll also turn off the amp mod so it stays loud the whole time okay and if i take that patch and i go down as low as i can find and i also want to tune it slightly flat so which you can actually do on the microfreak in the miscellaneous settings i think we have a master no it's not in there my bird oh it's literally called master tuning there yeah master tune they're sent offset we can take that down by 21 22 something like that so if we take that sound there and we record it we chop it so that it starts at the start of it and ends at that drop just there and import it as a wave table that's going to give us the best possible chance to get something that sounds right inside the microfreak when we import it so just coming back to the MIDI control center i've imported two files which sort of adhere to this sort of 1.5 second rule i've left the other one in here as well just for comparison and in order to send this bank across to the microfreak all you have to do is click send to microfreak it takes just a couple of seconds any slot that you leave empty will have a basic wave table that goes from sine or triangle up to like a sawtooth which is the useful sound there so if you do overshoot when you're trying to find the particular wave table that you're looking for you'll at least still get some sounds happening and that's nearly done it doesn't take too long right let's take a listen to how they sound okay so we're just on initialized patch with those wave tables that we've just loaded in there so this is the sort of random file that i loaded in which is i think like a brass loop or something or just even just a sustained brass note from one of the spitfire libraries i think and you can hear it's pretty thin sounding but i mean if we throw the envelope maybe on the timbre so we're scanning using the envelope we certainly there's a vibe going on there right it's thin but it's it's interesting some weirdness right up at the top of the wave table i think i think we gave that some pitch wobble and my kingdom for a reverb pedal right now there's definitely something to it even just literally just thrown into some random audio file we've got something which is at the very least interesting sounding right certainly not a timbre we could have easily coaxed out of the microfreak previously and let's go to that pitch rato let's go to everything i think let's try that next wave table that i brought in which is basically the same thing as that patch that we made to import actually so you can hear that kind of sync sound going on there let's get that moving again by modulating the timbre and it's kind of similar to the patch that we had previously but it's got a different character to it character to it we've got the ability now to add the bit crusher into the mix and it's a bit meatier than the previous one maybe even unison it if we're feeling cheeky so you can see how by importing something that the microfreak is kind of designed to work with if you like we're getting a much more sort of normal synth sound that we can work with something that works a bit more across the whole range and of course if we wanted to make it thinner we could apply a filter to do that whereas with the other one we can't really dial the missing body back in but playing last night i found that just sort of sticking in anything that was of that length could yield some really interesting results so i just kind of made mouth noises for a second and a half if we set this going slowly maybe through the wave table it's pretty cool and it's like if you give me a delay pedal right the second and i will die a happy man again we're just scanning through using the envelope going to the timbre there but we don't just have to use the envelope of course we could use something else maybe we could send the LFO there give it a bit of wobble using a stepped LFO perhaps very send the LFO to the filter as well this is literally me just going awesome thing again this one isn't pitched as sensibly as the one that was a synth sound but it does scan more sensibly give me a reverb pedal i'm literally a pedal and it's very nearly halloween isn't it so you can still just sort of send any audio in you might find gold but certainly sticking to the certainly sticking to the one and a half second rule is going to give you more consistent results results that kind of sound more alike to what you put in and certainly if you're trying to create a synth sound or a sort of obliquely pitched sound then 21 cents lower than the lowest f you can play is going to give you the best results in my testing anyway so that's another cool little addition to the micro freak i think it's it is worth commending Arturia for continuing to support this since two and a half years after it's releasing and continuing to add cool new stuff to it like almost twice a year i think probably my gut feeling is that it's a bit of a passion project for them and they're kind of using it as a platform for just doing cool stuff and the fact that it's such an inexpensive little synth i think is is really really nice so yeah just thumbs up and let's look forward to version five six seven eight nine and ten of the firmware as well fingers crossed anyway if you enjoyed the video and you found it useful then as always it is massively appreciated if you could give the video a thumbs up and make sure you subscribe to the channel uh so you miss out on any upcoming synth fun as always thank you so much for joining me today and until next time take care bye bye