 Hello, Oslate Sync here, and this is the Artoria Mini Freak. So as you may have guessed by the look of this thing, and I guess the name of this thing, you've probably guessed that this is the grown-up expanded version of the Micro Freak, and it takes the stuff in the Micro Freak and gives us more of that stuff, expands the feature set, and gives us brand new things to play with as well. There is a lot to talk about with the Mini Freak, so this will not be the final video about it on this channel. Indeed, there's so many interesting corners of the synth that I've been discovering that I want to make a bunch of videos. It's certainly a synth that has got me excited to talk about it. But in this video in particular, what we're going to aim to do is start off with sort of a quick-fire FAQ round to introduce the main features of the synth, and then we're going to make some patches, two, three patches, and in making those patches I'll try and touch on most of the areas of the synth to give you a decent overview of the sounds and the workflow that it's capable of. Before we dive in, in the interest of transparency, Artoria did send me the Mini Freak for free to make some videos on, but they haven't asked for any editorial oversight, nor will they be getting any editorial oversight on any of the videos that I make, having otherwise been paid to make the videos. The other thing is that at the time of making this video, Artoria haven't been able to send me a manual for it, so I have had to kind of learn it hands-on, but given my familiarity with the Micro Freak and other Artoria products, it certainly hasn't been that difficult to get going with it, and I guess exploring it has been a nice way to learn it, even though my preferred method is to read the manual cover to cover first. That's my secret method. The other thing to point out is that as far as I can tell, the firmware that's on this unit is a beta firmware. There is one bug that I've encountered to do with the effects unit, spoiler alert, there are effects, but otherwise it seems pretty stable, but just heads up if something looks weird, it may well be because it's the beta firmware, but who knows at this stage. So let's talk features. So the Mini Freak, the first thing that has been expanded, is that whereas the Micro Freak had one Digital Oscillator, we now have two Digital Oscillators. This Digital Oscillator setup is basically the same as on the Micro Freak. You have various different modes for different kinds of oscillators. Everything that was on the Micro Freak is present on this version of the firmware, except for the vocoder, sadly. Hello, Oscillators, from the future here. I was just doing my due diligence during the edit and I realized that the current firmware is also missing both of the wavetable oscillator types. That's both the one that's derived from Platts and also the user wavetable, which is a shame. Hopefully they'll be coming in a firmware update, but they are currently missing in the firmware on the version I've got anyway. Also, weirdly, the Cords Oscillator type is only available on Oscillator 2 for some reason. I don't know whether that's a bug or intentional, but just for completeness sake, I wanted to make sure I let you know. Back to the synth. I'd love to see the vocoder come back. Hopefully that's something that they intend to add back in. On top of that, something that is new to the Mini Freak is that Oscillator 2, as well as being able to just act like an extra oscillator, is also on some of the algorithms able to process the input coming from Oscillator 1 in various different ways. There's a distortion mode, an AM and FM mode, there's a phaser, there's a comb filter, which is really cool as well, a big fan of a comb filter, which can expand what you are doing in terms of your oscillator per voice. Like the Micro Freak, although the oscillators are digital, the filter and the VCA are analog. Then after the VCA and VCF, we now also have a set of digital effects engines. There are three, they work in stereo, and the effects are freely assignable between the three slots with a caveat that in this firmware there's a bug where you have to select everything in certain slots for them to appear in all of the slots. It's a bit weird. I'll just work around it at the moment. Hopefully that is a bug that will be fixed going forward. I guess the big thing here, we have eight voice polyphony, and this is fully articulated polyphony. Unlike on the Micro Freak where there was only one filter, and although you could play four notes, they all went through one monophonic filter. This is a fully articulated polyphonic setup, so you have a VCF and VCA per voice, which is obviously really good news. However, you can set the behavior back to being monophonic or paraphonic if that's what you need for your patch. I really like the flexibility of being able to go back to a paraphonic articulation. That's a really big deal for certain types of patches. On top of all of that, we also have an audio in and there is an audio in oscillator type if you want to root the audio externally coming in to the Mini Freak. So that's all the things that make the sounds. Let's talk about the things that can wobble those sounds about. So in terms of modulation sources, what do we have? We have an ADSR envelope. As a full ADSR, unlike on the Micro Freak where you had the shared decay and release, we now have separate decay and release. And you have two different curve types for the ADSR. You have a standard ADSR and what's referred to as a percussion mode, which you can select one of the menus to get something a bit sort of snappier. I would presume that makes the envelope shape more exponential. That's generally what that will mean. We have the cycling envelope from the Micro Freak as well. So that's the A, H, HOLD, D, DECAY envelope. And that can be set to be an envelope or that can be set to be cycling and that can be synced with a key press or be free running. You can also now reorder the order of the different sections. So you can do A, D, H, and other things as well. So very, very flexible and a great addition. So you can use it as a secondary envelope or you can use it as an extra LFO, but you probably won't need to use it for a extra LFO on the Mini Freak because unlike on the Micro Freak where we only had one LFO, we now have two completely independent LFOs. We have variable shapes that can be tempo synced and there's this and I can't really explain it without showing to you and we'll do it in one of the patches later on. We have an LFO shape sequencer where you can create custom looping LFO shapes with different ramps, multiple ramps, multiple shapes within that. It's really, really interesting. I will get to that in one of the patches so it's difficult to explain without showing you. So those are our modulation sources. The mod sources are per voice so they are polyphonically articulated but you can set them independently to be triggered monophonically. So if you want an LFO which is doing like a pitch wobble across all played notes like an organ would, you can set one of the LFOs up to do that. You can also have the LFOs be triggered by other LFOs or be set by other LFOs to create other more complex relationships between them. Lots of really interesting stuff you can do from a sound perspective in there. On top of that we also have two macro controls so the pitch and pitch wheel and the mod wheel can be turned into macro modes where each of those can control four parameters each. So you can essentially set up different states within your patches and have them performable as well. If you have the macros enabled you can't have the bend and mod wheel enabled so it's kind of an either or there. But again that's a really really nice addition and although it's not written on the sheet here of course we have the mod matrix up at the top here which gives you access to all of those various different mod sources. It has some preset places that you can send them and then you have nine assignable destinations so you have three in three banks basically and you can switch between those different banks so nine assignable destinations plus the preset ones up at the top there and in the thing about it in the macros there are also some other ones that you can assign that aren't on knobs. Basically any knob that you can turn here can be a mod destination so you can have envelopes modulating the shape of other envelopes and stuff like that really really flexible in that way. So in terms of actually playing the thing okay let's let's address the elephant in the room I couldn't even bring myself to write it on the sheet here. We have a traditional keyboard and not the capacitive keyboard that we had on the micro freak. I recognize that I'm probably in the minority here but I miss the capacitive keyboard. I thought it was a really really interesting way to interact with the instrument. I would have loved to have seen that be expanded upon or made even more weird give me an isomorphic keyboard with capacitive touch sensitivity but I do recognize that for most people this is a net win so velocity and as you would probably expect and it's I think the same key bed as you have on the key step models so it's mini keys but in terms of mini key key beds the atoria ones are to my mind the best ones that I've played so that doesn't bother me too much and mini keys don't really bother me but if you don't like mini keys then it has mini keys live with it it's probably worth it. So beyond actually being able to play the keyboard what do we have we have an arpeggiator with lots of different modes so all of these buttons here give you different directions different octave ranges different modifiers for the arpeggiator we'll play with that a little bit later on. We also have a polyphonic step sequencer it's very similar to what you have on the key step pro it's 64 steps each step can have six notes and each of the notes on each step have their own independent velocity and length so it's really quite flexible in that way and on top of that we have four mod lanes for doing parameter sequencing and you can sequence those either live by turning a knob while you're recording into sequencer or you can step sequence it parameter lock if you like that term per step as well so you can be very precise or you can just be very expressive. We also have slice and dice on the arpeggiator and the step sequencer the same way that we had on the micro freak and what that does essentially is introduce as you turn up this control when you're in this mode it will introduce more variations into the sequence so a little bit of the way up you'll start getting octave jumps and maybe changes in gate lengths and so on and if you go right to the top you'll be getting much more radical modulations and modifications as well I mean like ratchets and the like so really really expressive way to play with your sequences and modify them on the fly without having to literally modify that modify them and turning notes on and off etc so finally before we get to making some patches let's talk about connections so round the back what do we have we have headphone out we have left and right out because this is a stereo device we have the audio in as I have mentioned we also have an analog clock in and out and a sequencer reset output that's a really nice little extra that they've added there which gives you a bunch of flexibility when you are working with other types of sequences which might not be so conventional I can see a bunch of useful things you can do with that in the modular world for resetting stuff getting stuff back into sync within a bar structure we have sustain pedal in which I have not got plugged in and I don't think I even own a sustain pedal but I know that will be good news to a number of people we have usb which is I believe only midi and connection connections to other software but don't quote me on that because as I say I don't have a manual and we also have midi in out and bless you Artoria through makes life so much easier when you're trying to put together a hardware setup to have through on as many devices as possible so that's fantastic to see and again bless you Artoria it's on full size five pin din I try not to be a snob about the mini jack midi but I have more five pin din cables than I have stereo mini jacks I guess and finally I guess this is on the connection side of things there is going to be a virtual instrument that goes alongside the mini freak which mirrors its functionality called mini freak v I think and although that's not going to be available at the release from what I've heard that is coming as soon and the patches should be compatible between the two right I think that's everything we need to talk about in terms of the features everything else hopefully we will encounter when we make some patches so let's make some patches right so it is synth law that when you get a new polysynth the first patch that you need to create is some kind of spacey pad sound so let's do that with our first patch so we've got a initialised patch here which is just the basic waveforms setup let's start by just giving ourselves a paddy kind of envelope over here so give it a bit more of a tack something like that that decay is a little bit sudden probably get quieter by a little bit on our sustain and of course we need a nice luxurious release maybe a little too luxurious somewhere around there okay so let's choose our oscillators next so we have two oscillators to choose from at the moment we're just hearing the one of them because on the initialised patch oscillator two has turned down so we're just hearing oscillator one on the basic waves mode let's try something more interesting let's maybe go with oh yeah maybe the harmonic tax although it sounds like a dull organ at the moment we have all of these things going on in there which could sound really nice when we start modulating them cool yeah that's going to be a fun place to start I think let's add in some second oscillator here maybe go something more basic so we need to turn up first so immediately here's one of the big advantages with the mini-freak over the microfreak we can now layer up these different digital oscillator sounds okay let's choose something um go with FM oh how about over towards the end we have the the noise engineering ones we've got the sore x1 which is a sore oscillator but has all this nice crispy texture we can get from the noise phase mod the different shaping of the sore and on the wave we get kind of like a pseudo sink sound which will be really nice to mix in as well I think so let's start by detuning these two oscillators to get some of that richness going on um so by default when we turn the tune knob it's going to do it by um semi tone but we can click it to go into fine mode and we can just offset it a little bit there incidentally if you hold down shift and turn it we get octaves instead so all nice and easy to tune it in various different ways let's go over to the first one and just tune it down a bit so we get some of that richness cool uh let's maybe darken that little bit with our filter so it's in low pass mode at the moment which is probably what we want maybe want to have the envelope move it a bit a bit of resonance do you get a bit of bass cut with the resonance but not too much resonance is nice though and we probably also want to um have the velocity affect that amount as well so we can come in over here hold shift and turn this up now hopefully if I play quietly we should get a duller sound and harder we should get a brighter sound yeah nice of course we don't have to have the ADSR envelope affecting the analog filter we can have any of our other modulators affecting it instead we can just assign things in the mod matrix speaking of the mod matrix let's assign some things in the mod matrix I think it would be really cool to have that kind of sync sound happening at the start of our sound perhaps this so it kind of goes something like that um so we're going to assign that in the mod matrix that's a different shape to our main envelope so we can use our cycling envelope as an auxiliary envelope instead so we want to create a shape which is that so instant onset and then a long fall we don't need a hold section here so just like that and then we can come over to our mod matrix so we have these predefined destinations the pitch wave one timbre one cut off and if we want to send something else so this is oscillator two so wave two essentially we can assign it in our mod matrix and when we have nine assignable slots not just three we can page through them like that um so let's set up a sign one to be um cycling envelope affecting uh the wave here so hold down here look let's let's assign it to wave two find cycling envelope going to assign one here and turn it up some amount let's try somewhere around 70 cool um I think we probably want that affected by velocity as well because I kind of don't want all of that happening when I when I played lightly um so the way that we do this um in the mod matrix is we're essentially going to assign one of the other assigned slots to control the amount of this assigned slots don't worry or we'll become clear uh so what I will do is I will turn down the amount back to zero so we had about 70 ish we'll just remember that um so back down to zero and what I'm going to say is I want assign two to control the amount of assign one and then I'll control assign two using the velocity easy peasy uh so uh the way you do that is you come back into selection mode you hold down the button here and then you scroll to the thing you want it to control which is that one there and when we check that should be cycle envelope to assign one so assign two is now controlling that dot on the mod matrix uh so if we uh move our selection now to velocity to assign two and turn this up to 70 something if I play lightly we should get not very much of that sync sound basically nothing at all if I play hard super up and usually we get some nice expression here let's get some other wobble going in here um what about the yeah what about the timbre control here shape let's get an LFO going on that uh so assign three can be doing that one and then we can maybe send LFO one two assign three boop and turn it up uh it's bipolar so we'll set this in the middle somewhere and set this fairly high that's all the way to first turn it down and nice things you get these lights here which show you what's going on with the LFO uh let's maybe turn that over to a triangle as well yeah yeah let's get in somewhere right what next okay I know uh let's do something with the um this one the content control on the harmonic envelope I think this sound quite nice if this was pinging it's quite so glassy so maybe let's make use of yes let me show you the LFO designer thing because this is bonkers so what I'm going to do is I'm just going to assign uh the wave control which is just here already on the mod matrix to LFO two so the moment is just going to sound like an LFO spinning it right great so what we can do um on LFO two make sure we've got it selected if we go to the wave shape and go to the wave shaper you can see here it's a straight line on the screen might not be able to see the screen super clearly this is maybe one of the things they might have upgraded uh compared to the microphone it's made the screen a little bit bigger but uh that is what it is so this control isn't currently moving anymore so what we can do is shift and LFO select which puts us into LFO edit mode now what we now have is a sequencer of uh a 16 step sequencer which allows us to sequence the shape of this LFO um we can make it shorter by holding down last step and choosing other amounts and then on each of these steps we're able to put either a ramp up a ramp down a um uh a triangle so both a ramp up and a ramp down or a another shape which can either be a hard step or a number of different shapes in between on each of these steps within the LFO so it's kind of like a shape sequencer it's a bit like what you have on the mini root 2s um kind of a cut down version of that cut down but also more controlled in some ways let's just hold down a note and see what we can do so i will um hold that note there okay so if i touch one of these steps here i can put a little dinking like that and we should hear there we go let's speed up a little bit so you can hear that we've got this little friend happening here on that step so we can put another one on another step so at the moment that's the same uh the same movement right but we can turn it down here right uh we can also change the shape of it in terms of whether it's more flat at the top or more sort of exponential and so you can see here that what we can do is create these rhythmic multi multi shaped LFOs and let's say we can change what shape we're drawing here by selecting a different shape here so we can create these rhythmic ideas within our patches or within the LFO we can also have like a say just straight up steps so if i wanted to put like a and these ones affect the neighboring ones as well so which is really cool so loads of really interesting things we can do with rhythms within our LFOs it's kind of like an extra sequencer which works independently of the main sequencer super cool because we'll have that one controlled by our slow LFO one as well there okay we can also maybe have the filter ping a tiny bit with these ones as well let's do that so LFO to to the filter cutoff cool let's also maybe turn down the octave of one of these oscillates as well maybe oscillator two can go down an octave okay i think this is a great time to add some effects so our effects up here we have three of them they can be set to different things to turn them on and off we tap the type here so there's some chorus and within each of the effects we also have different sub types just hold that for us so in our chorus we have a default one we have a lush version a dark version a shaded version a single version and we have three effects on each of them and what those effects do depend on which effect we're on of course i wonder whether or not just a tiny bit of distortion on this patch might be fun not that much just do a little bit of grit we've got a wet dry control for our distortion as well and a filter it's a bit of grit on there let's add some delay and on the delays here we have various different types including stereo ping pong synced and unsynced so there's a ping pong one synced here and we can change the division here dot date sounds good to me though and we've got a send level here the reverb and delay in the menu here can be set to be either a send effect or a wet dry mix which is really really nice to have that option as well because it's going to depend on the type of the type of patch you're making it's giving us some nice stereo width there let's add some reverb again we have multiple sub types in here so we've got default one long hall echoes room dark room let's try let's try long shall we of course these controls for the effects are also able to be modulated in the mod matrix now there are things we could do with this patch of course like having our sequenced lfo mount be controlled by the mod wheel i think would be a really useful thing to do but as a sort of starting patch for a spacey friend here i think this is a nice place to start so we just had some voice still in there so we hit our polyphonic maximum there because we've got quite a long release obviously in the sound edit menu if we come out of here so it's also holding in here in the voice menu we do have a poly steel mode and we can set this to be various different things here so we have oldest lowest velocity or none which means you can't steal past the maximum amounts you don't get new notes so we had oldest there but we could have maybe had lowest velocity and have that low note be nice and low anyway yeah so there's lots of stuff we can do in in there as well so that's our first patch cool um right let's do something weirder for this patch i want to experiment a little bit with the oscillator one going into oscillator two setup so at the moment initialize patch come on to oscillator two and turn it up and if we go past all of the normal modes so harmonic yes so now we get to the modes where the output of oscillator one is going into oscillator two depending on which one you're working with that's either going to be in parallel so you're here oscillator one and what oscillator two is doing to it or it will require you to turn up the volume of oscillator one for you to hear it so the first one here is we have an FM AM so we can have this one be frequency modulated and ring modulated and we can choose the wave shape here so obviously the frequency relationship between the two oscillators is going to be important here but you can use this to potentially set up a more interesting uh two op synth than you can do with just the one oscillator uh the next one we have here is a multi filter so this is a uh a straight up fully functioned um digital filter that you can use per voice before it goes into the main filter so for example if you wanted to um to have got cut off resonant and a bunch of different high pass low pass um band pass and notch filters here so if you wanted to like notch filter something to get a different general timbre from it before it went into the analog filter you could do that or you could do like big resonant band passes um to get um those sorts of sounds as well that's all possible in there you then have the surgeon filter which is like more of an EQ type filter I think it sounds a little bit resonance but instead of a resonance control what you have is this spread control in certain modes which basically moves the high pass and low pass in the notch and the band pass apart so less characterful less resonance than the multi filter but still useful on some of the more complex sounding oscillators on oscillator one we've got a cone filter which is the one I want to use if we lengthen the release here get all those sort of super short delay reverby echoey springy sounds pseudo kind of carpalus strong stuff going on in there we'll come back to that one because that's the one I think I want to use we also have a phaser filter which gives you that all pass the resonant all pass up to 12 poles the feedback gives you resonance there as well moving the cutoff rapidly with a supplement hold will also give you these awesome sort of resonant clicks and stuff kind of here when you change the poles so some cool stuff that you can be found there and then we have destroy which is a wave folder dirty sounding wave folder a decimator and a bit crusher but the nice thing here is that this is going to be per voice rather than bringing all of your sounds together and then going through the decimator effect on the digital effects which is a very different vibe it allows you to get these crunchy textures which you can then filter this actually gives you a whole new life to the first oscillator loads of different sounds we could find in that just a huge amount of terrible variation that you can get from that destroy oscillator yeah that's that's really cool but the one I want to use as I mentioned is the comb filter and all these springy resonances and what I thought won't be might be cool to go into that is the carplus strongs which is also kind of a springy stringy kind of sound and we can probably use the two to bring lots of different resonances together which we can then do stuff to in the effects so that's my plan so let's grab the carplus strong here there we go so lost a bit volume here turn the master up a little bit so we've got these really clangy feedback times that I think are really cool we can do some stuff with that for sure as we've got this damping control on the comb filter which obviously takes a lot of the top end out of I think we should probably control that um with velocity so we want it to be dark if I'm playing lightly and then as I hit harder I want to turn it down to be a negative amount on the mod matrix so let's assign that there shape on a sine one come down to a velocity after touch on a sine one and we'll go negative if we play lightly it should be dark if we play harder we'll have an attack on that easy now it's darken a little bit just with the filter so the way that the velocity after touch works on the mini freak by the way is that depending how you have it set up in the menu for your particular patch you can either be velocity after touch or both but the after touch can't modulate below what the initial velocity was so if I play lightly and get that sort of dark sound and then apply some after touch I can come up and back down right but if I come in hard initially so it's brighter to begin with I don't really get anything to play with with the after touch so the after touch can't kind of reset where the velocity initially set things so that's just the way it works um I can't really think of a way that would be sensible otherwise except for maybe to have an option to have after touch unlatch the velocity that might be something that you could do anyway that's just the way that that particular bit works um let's add some effects so there's immediately a big part of me that thinks that this kind of sound would sound good if we distorted it but I think we should add some reverb first before the distortion because the distortion works in stereo so you can add some reverb to give it some stereo width and then um have the distortion distort that reverb and then get all that sort of movement in the outer parts of our sound which can be really really cool so that means we want reverb on FX1 probably and this is where the bug that I've encountered comes in because if we look at the moment reverb isn't in there and it might not even be in two either it's only in three yeah there um I think now I've selected it it should turn up again in here no see this is hopefully going to be fixed before the release there'll be a cut now while I fix this okay uh I've got reverb to appear here now there it is um so turn that on that's cool yes uh let's add some distortion on FX2 uh oh it's all your own distortion okay so let's turn that on yes good probably not that much is needed uh also there is a nice different variations obviously uh there's one here called tape which I really like wet dry control there cool and then maybe add like what uh maybe like another just another another reverb can we do that this reverb disappear because I'm using it somewhere else perhaps that's what happens here um yeah let's put a delay one instead so we have a nice echo in here um let's choose something in stereo and maybe the filtered filtered ping-pong a little bit too much distortion just a touch I think maybe let's have that cutoff affected by uh velocity as well as velocity goes to cut off a little bit because I might be not to swell that up let's have resonance on a slow LFO uh so that's a sine resonance to there and we'll get a nice low LFO on LFO one so LFO one goes to a sine two and we'll have some resonance coming in and out making it scream occasionally and of course uh the the aftertouch here is polyphonic so it's only affecting the the filter and damping on that particular note which is fantastic what else can we do here um I liked it when this was moving oops so first and first I'd like to have that as a controllable parameter on the mod wheel so let's do that so let's set it as low as we want it so let's then put wheel goes to uh we haven't got this on the mod matrix yet so sine three there and then a mount we can turn that up and now I have that as a performable there's little movements that kind of stabilizes just tiny little movements on the mod wheel mod strip what a fantastic sound oh man yeah I could I could play with this what a lovely expressive weird synthesizer cool okay I reckon one more patch let's do something a bit more conventional but let's take a look at the arpeggiator and the sequencer to get a feel for those okay let's start by mocking up a quick bass sound so back on the initialized patch let's just get a bit of a snappy envelope something like that uh let's choose some oscillators let's not go with the the basic waves let's maybe go with uh let's go with the wave shape maybe yes go with something like that we can have that modulated by the envelope probably so uh what we've got here we've got the amount which is the timbre on one and we'll have that modulated by our envelope there turn that up there we get the yeah that's cool have the velocity effect our envelope mod the resonance and maybe on oscillator 2 we'll just have something a little bit more sort of straightforward maybe we'll use the analog virtual analog one and go an octave down so that that'll do yeah that'll do it's more about the the rest of what's going on here uh one thing I will just note here over on the envelope at the moment we're in poly mode but we can really easily go into mono mode here or indeed unison here as well which puts the level quite a lot or maybe just stick with mono or poly at the moment um cool uh so uh arpeggiator and sequencer so to turn on the arpeggiator all the things we just need to switch our modes here and if we um maybe just turn on hold mode here so I just need to press uh don't need to hold down the keys so maybe if we do something like uh this okay so we've got an arpeggiator going there there quite happily uh so we have our first playback modes here so we can go up down up and down random order is this the order that I played them in poly um we can't hear it wrong so in mono mode but we'll play everything as a chord uh we have walk which uh does a um it flips the coins to see whether it's going to go up or down or stay where it is at that particular time we have pattern here as well and I don't have the manual so I don't know how to change the patterns uh but I understand they're probably different patterns here but I don't know quite how that works because as I say I don't have the manual that's the one thing I haven't managed to work out uh so beyond the patterns we also have octaves three octaves four octaves and then we have these modifiers here so we've got repeat which plays everything twice and these are momentary you have to hold these ones down ratchet you can hear it better with the cut up up you've got random octave which means that the notes aren't going to go in uh sequence anymore this one you turn on it's not momentary and mutate uh actually changes the order all together and it's different each time so we've gone quite a long way from where we originally were now so now our root note has changed so that's a really nice way to take your arpeggios and turn them into something else the other thing that we have here is um if we turn this on here we have control over the gate lengths and also the uh spice control here which is changing velocity it's changing gate lengths and if we want to get a new variation of that we hold shift and tap the same button up here and the higher we go up here the more weird uh changes we get so we've got gaps in here now you know really different now so the difference between the uh spice here and the mutate is that the mutates um it's going to change things sort of permanently whereas the spice we can bring in and out so if you used the um this the arpeggiator on the micro freak this is um kind of an extended version of that the spice obviously we had on there but we didn't have these uh different modifiers here but the sort of directions and stuff we did already have on the arpeggiator so the sequencer um we can enable that by going uh and touching that button there and uh it's a 64 bit a 64 bit 64 step sequencer uh by default it's going to be 16 steps but we can change the last step by holding down this button going to one of these other page amounts and then choosing where within those pages our last step is but let's just stick with a 16 step just for the moment um so uh ways that we can deal with the sequencer so the first thing we can do is we can do um step recording so uh let's see how that sounds okay so we've got a sequence in there if i want to i can just do that so by default if i turn on the record here i'm going to overwrite what is in there so right um but we can also overdub we won't really be able to hear this if we go in poly mode but if i switch to overdub i can add stuff into the steps that are already there so shift and it goes blue now rather than replacing the step that's in there this will actually just add stuff over the top and then we can have up to six notes per step you can hear that the gate lengths for those notes that i've played in are not the whole gate length of the step so they are completely independent in terms of velocity and gate length we can then also apply uh spice and gate length modifications to the sequence as it's playing let's give that some swing and at the high end there we'll actually start skipping steps as well also disable steps and then we have also got the ability to um sequence uh knob movements as well so we can come in here into our mods here hit record and if we wanted to put a filter sweep in here let's try it and these are done as offsets to the current position so if i want to darken the whole thing i still can if i wanted to affect particular steps in here i can also do that so if i click into that particular mod lane and choose a step i can then affect that step like so um and of course i can build up my sequences entirely using uh just those um sort of step sequencing by touching the steps as well in here in the options in the sequence here we can also turn off smoothing so before it was sort of slowing between the different steps and now it's which will depend on what you're looking for in your um yeah um what other thing i thought i would just show on this patch which i haven't shown yet is the macros so these are um separate to the mod matrix a way for you to control up to four parameters just on uh these two sliders uh four per slider that is and those can be in either direction um so let's uh let's put an effect on here and we'll use these to affect the effect and a couple of other things at once perhaps so let's go with uh a bit crusher on the output here because we get that really cool talking sound there as we turn up the decimator that's uh yeah cool so uh to set up the macros what you do is you shift any touch macros here choose which one you're looking at one of these two and then what i would usually do is set this to full and tweak the knob at its maximum amount yeah and then if i turn this down that's going to turn that down so we're not actually affecting the actual parameter with just setting up the macro so we might also want to give it more resonance when we do that because that gets even more sort of talky so we can control those two parameters on this uh single slide here well this might we do might give it some uh attack on the so we can use that slider now to affect up to four knobs all at once in different directions if we wanted to these are all going up as it happens but they don't have to and we can set up a separate set on here so uh perhaps um uh if we had like a different effect on here just come up here just for a second um perhaps we have a delay on here we'll go for one of the tempo syncs one so we could use this as a sound control for that so we could come into the macro sign here choose this macro slider and because this is a sound effect uh the way it's set up at the moment we just throw a little thing in there to that kind of dub trick I want to go faster than that oops assign that or feedback or maybe on fx3 we can have a reverb and do the same thing again on the macro sign here on this one and we can have that as our send effect single knob or slider for the for the reverb and delay cool yeah yeah good fun okay so I think what we can do with this slide actually just what I'm thinking about it is that at the moment we've got the bit crusher on wet dry kind of percent the whole time so that's well anyway yeah so uh the sequencer is surprisingly powerful the macros make for great performance controls um yeah and there's still so many things that I want to talk about but um I think I'm going to leave it there for this video so there's a lot more I want to talk about with the mini freak and I will do in upcoming videos can't possibly comprehensively cover this since in a single video I don't think there are so many little corners that I keep discovering as I've been playing with it I'm just like oh that's really really useful that's really really cool I can see creative ways to use that I think that's um it's a real testament to the folks that designed it like this is a good synth as far as I'm concerned this is my kind of synth and uh yeah as a result there will be a bunch of videos on the mini freak coming up on my channel because it is a synth that I'm excited to talk about and I haven't really been this excited to go really in depth with a synth um since the opposite and the opposite is one of my favorite synths of all time so that's pretty high praise for me I don't know whether this is going to be a synth that is for everyone um it can do really big classic sounds um but it really likes to be made to do weird stuff interesting stuff misuse of its features um to do interesting things and that's hopefully what I will show off um this patch incidentally there's these little clinks and clanks that say uh sample and hold phaser on the output of the effects which gives it these lovely ringing overtones and every time it switches it gets that cling so little things like that I mean just lovely um it's definitely a synth that is designed to be appealing to people like me sound designers like me people that like synths that can be pushed and pulled into interesting ways I will of course turn it into a drum machine at some point but the really interesting thing about this synth is that there are three or four different ways I can think of doing that even now uh even only having it for um less than a week at this point so um I hope you enjoyed the video and uh that I was able to give you a flavour for the kind of things that the Mini Freak can do um if you did enjoy it then as always a thumbs up on the video is much appreciated drop a comment down below and make sure you subscribe to the channel if you want to see more Mini Freak as I say there will be more Mini Freak on my channel for certain but otherwise thank you so much for watching and until next time take care bye