 Hello, oscillators in here. Artoria have just released the version 3 firmware for the Microfreak and along with some bug fixes they've also expanded the maximum number of presets, they have added a unison mode and I guess the headline feature is that they have added not one not two but three new oscillator types which have been designed by noise engineering. If you're familiar with noise engineering from the modular world you're probably already pretty excited and if you're not you should be. So let's dive in and take a look. So I know you're probably itching to get the oscillator types as am I but we should first quickly take a look at the unison mode because you shouldn't underestimate how useful and powerful a sonic tool that is. So on previous versions of the firmware we had two voicing modes we either had one out where you were playing one voice at a time or we had a paraphonic where you had either four or three depending on which engine you were in. Voices of polyphony articulated through the single filter. So back to Mono. We now also have unison mode and to get to unison mode we hold shift and we tap paraphonic and you'll notice that the paraphonic light starts blinking that tells you they're in unison mode so we go from from that sound to so what we have there is four voices stacked in unison now just a great sound straight away without having to do anything else really and this works on all of the oscillator types at the moment. I'm just on the basic waves but we can go into super wave so you can have a super super wave I guess the wave table is really cool it's pretty pretty cool there yeah so you can do it in any of the any of the oscillator types. When you press shift and paraphonic and if you hold down paraphonic you'll get access to the unison spread amount so by default it's just set as a small fraction of semitone which gives you just a nice bit of spread where you can up that to make it sick but you can also go all the way up into semitone so if we go to somewhere around seven-ish we've got four fifths perfect fifths stacked across each other slightly detuned slightly different vibe than what you would get with the chord mode because we can't detune the individual notes there we can maybe detune it slightly more sound a little bit rougher maybe let's just put that back to a sensible detune like that so you'll notice when you go into unison mode by default you basically get a monophonic performance you've got those four voices stacked on top of each other but you're essentially playing them monophonically but the last little trick that the unison mode has if we go into the menu and we go to preset and down to a unison count here we can drop the unison count from four through three into two which essentially gives you different variations of duophonic performance so now if we have it set to two we've got that unison feeling there it is without unison and here it is with but we've got duophonic voice stacking essentially which may also be useful if you don't want it super thick you know because sometimes you don't want it too thick anyway yeah that's a really really nice addition makes for great leads for great bass sounds so i'm really glad that they have added that in oh just one final thought to turn it off just tap the paraphonic button again okay so let's check out these noise engineering oscillator types so if we come up here the first one here is called simply bass and this is what the default sound sounds like so this oscillator is a quadrature oscillator which means it's made up of two sine waves 90 degrees out of phase essentially they're being combined through a ring modulator and stuff read them out if you want to get more detail though maybe it doesn't give you enough detail anyway so what do we have on the different three controls well the first one is wave and this will saturate one of the two waves which is going to generate more harmonics the next one is for fold which is a wave folder like you would find on many since but the classic the classic west coast paradigm and it generates more harmonics by folding the wave back on itself and these first two controls are super interactive so lots of different ways that we can shape the harmonics the final control shape introduces noise into the algorithm but it's not just mixing noise in with the sound rather than noise is being used to phase modulate the two oscillators in the algorithm and what this does is really quite really quite special i think if we push this up high it sounds noisy but you can even hear at that higher stage there that really there's an animation of the sound and i think that's really the hallmark of these three new oscillators in particular is that they feel really alive and bear in mind you have got all this movement here and there's nothing on the mod matrix at all and of course this can do great basis and get really dirty you know we can even add on some unison which is really really cool but actually having played around with this for a little bit i think this makes some really really pretty sounds as well if we give it a bit more of a longer decay here we're going to paraphonic mode we just dial back some of the extremeness here maybe go to the bandpass filter that noise modulation just constantly animates it maybe if we give it a little bit of filter LFO might be nice slow filter LFO maybe the fold control that could be controlled by the envelope that would be nice so that's in the timbre so envelope the timbre there filter LFO and maybe just get the wave the saturation on the cycling envelope give it some reverb i think that's some really beautiful fragile sounds to be explored in this algorithm okay let's move on to the next one so the next oscillator type is called saw x and it's all based around modulating a um saw sound so um with all the controls down turn down you you get a saw sound um on the wave control we have something called saw mod which kind of sounds like it's doing hard sync on the saw there very cool sound definitely something that maybe you just want to kind of do it let's let's just have that be modulated by the envelope so you kind of get that classic sync sound straight off there the timbre control um basically adds a chorusing effect and the um shape control kind of does the same thing as with the bass oscillating that it introduces noise to phase modulate the um saw wave in this case so let's just um turn off our modulation for a second so we can hear what this is doing independently of all of that so we can hear that it starts to introduce that sort of distortion and movement in the sound which is really really cool makes it feel really unstable and dangerous which i just love um cool so um what i think might be a cool trick to try with this one is because the wave control is kind of doing a sync trick it kind of means that any point on this control you've kind of got a harmonic of the root note that you're playing so if this changes each time you kind of get like an inbuilt arpeggiator to your patch so one trick that i had a little play with was if we send a sample and hold to the wave control so we set our LFO to um step to random and LFO to wave set wave somewhere in the middle and set the depth to max there we get that classic um sample and hold sync sound but one um trick that i think um i haven't seen anyone talk about it but i quite like it on the microphone is we can kind of set up a patch so that that changes each time you hit the the note functionally and the way that we do that is if we set our um rate right the way down now at the moment that LFO is running in the background but if we go into the utility menu into preset and into LFO retrick and turn it on it means that it's going to restart the LFO each time we press a key which means that it's going to choose any random point to start each time so if we turn on the arpeggiator and um just do a single note we kind of get this uh randomized arpeggiator which is really cool let me give it some uh plucky filter so that noise a bit dangerous maybe modulate that shape with the uh psyching envelope that's that psyching envelope timbre slower some delay maybe um hey uh let's uh let's make that unison as well so that's just one note just playing over and over again uh maybe do some spice so we can get some really cool stuff going on that with just a single note maybe let's send uh LFO to the decay time as well just a couple ideas there perhaps we um how about we change the spread as well on the paraphonic oh yeah high spice uh we'll get some higher octaves in there as well anyway anything on to the third one that's cool uh yes that's that's a really characterful call um oscillator so the final oscillator type is called harm and this is a harmonics based oscillator so it's sort of related to the other harmonic oscillator but it does things in kind of a different way so quite a pure sound there to begin with and as we turn up the wave control it's going to change the distribution of the harmonics that are sat on top of the fundamental frequency i'll find some interesting points along here some which are consonant and some which are dissonant over the top we've got an octave but lots of interesting places along the way like there for example where things are ringing off each other just ever so slightly uh so next control timbre is going to control um uh it's rectification of the wave so it's kind of like a fold but only on one side but it introduces additional harmonics on top of the ones that are already playing it's that kind of cool especially with them detuned it's that sort of cool almost Hammond organ vibe that sort of distortion eventually it just starts to bring more of those higher harmonics it becomes a bit more angry but without sacrificing too much to what man which is really cool uh and um finally the shape control does what it does on the other two oscillators which is that it introduces that wonderful destabilizing noise phase modulation i love the way that the noise rings off against the resonance as well just a really big sound it's interesting i like the i like the bass one for like twinkly pads and leads and this harmonic one i think sounds great for like big low sounds just great straight off the bat and that noise just constantly destabilizing the sound giving it grit and movement just that's a really happy place for me okay and because of the detuned harmonics it almost sounds like it's unison already but that doesn't make me wonder and of course we could set our spread here to an octave so we have a bit of glide just some great great great sounds that we can get going on there cool yeah so i like them backwards i like the i like the harmonic one for for bass and i like the the bass one for for twinkly leads but i think all of them are great and i think really the hallmark of all of these um three new oscillators is that noise modulation that adds that animation to the sound without having to do anything else in in the modern matrix and i think that's so important to making um making sounds feel alive and you don't need much in there just a little bit of that sort of destabilizing crinkle just goes a long way and it always sounds good with the resonance turned upon the filter because it kind of just slightly pings up against the the filter and just agitates the filter as well as the the oscillator so yeah um it's frankly a really pleasing update and i think that from my perspective and from the kinds of sounds that i'm into in particular i can just see lots of sort of eerie droney uh stuff that i want to do with with the mic freak now um yeah so uh yeah great update in my eyes anyway anyway i hope that was interesting and or useful if you enjoyed the video please do give it a thumbs up and make sure you're subscribed to the channel so you don't miss out on any upcoming synth fun um this month it's mostly january uh from me um but i will almost certainly be using the mic freak in a couple of jams going forward because there are just some sounds here that i think really fit in with the vibe of what's going on in my january at the moment so um you will definitely be seeing some more of the mic freak before the month is out as always thank you so much for joining me i hope you are keeping well in these weird times until next time take care bye