 When I first opened augmented strings intro from Arturia, I used this preset Beautiful swell and then I thought to myself. What does this big morph knob do and that's when it happened Hi folks, I'm Mike and I hope you well. So when I just did that big morph knob I found out what this plug-in is really all about and you're gonna find out what it's all about in this video But first of all, I must let you know that this plug-in is completely free until April the 30th Now this is to celebrate the launch of Arturia's new augmented series But I do urge you to watch this whole video before you go ahead and download it because I'm gonna give you a mini Tutorial, which is really gonna help you to get the best out of this plug-in So watch the video and then follow the link in the description down below now back to that big knob So let's find out what that big morph button does. I'm gonna play those strings again, but I'm gradually gonna turn it up So what you're hearing there is that the heart of what the augmented series is about using acoustic instrument sounds and fusing them with synthesis and expression controls This incredibly free plug-in has a much wider range of sounds than this So let's take a look at some more of the presets So the presets kind of come in three different groups if we go to the menu up here You can see there's the acoustic sounds the hybrid sounds So they're a mixture between the acoustic and the synth and then the synth sounds So it's it's a more of a matter of emphasis than anything else, but you can adjust them all of course yourself We'll talk about that later, but let's just go through a couple of acoustic ones now I'm gonna go over to this one deepening. Okay, let's have a listen to that So you can hear that's the kind of an acoustic bass sound there is a little bit of synthesis in there Actually, the morph buttons just up a little bit there if we turn that all the way down I'll tell you what I'm gonna get rid of some of that delay and that reverb there have a listen now Yeah, much more self-acoustic bass down there if that's what you want, that's great Of course, you can mess around with it. Let's have a listen to another acoustic one. I'm gonna go to I Tried this one earlier a spiccato cloud. This one's really a little bit odd It's definitely acoustic sounding, but there's definitely something else going on have a listen There's these kind of random delays going on or something like that I don't know a bit of fun there. You may be able to make use of something like that Let's go through to some hybrid sounds. I'm gonna go kind of random here to be honest with you Because I don't know any of these orange. Let's try that one out. I Could use that orange now that sounds very sort of synthy to me. It's a hybrid sound So let's just try something else. We'll go harp mutation then Very nice indeed. Okay, let's go then to some synth sounds obviously these ones are designed to you know Be very synthy not very acoustically sets acousticky. Is that a word acousticky sounding dancing bows? Let's try that one Okay, we've kind of had a few sounds a little bit like that, so let's just try something different. Oh Soul pad that sounds like me. I love my pads Hmm Interesting you can hear that there's a really big range of sounds in this free Did I mention it's free this free plug-in and if I just go up here to all presets You can only see some of them because lots of them go off the screen I don't know how many there is probably like I don't have 40 something like that all really kind of useful and Inspiring sounds I found that when I was playing around the presets earlier that it made me want to create music That's a very good thing now. You're probably going to want to make these sounds your own a little bit So you're going to need to know what these knobs do. Let's take a look at that next Okay, so full disclosure at the time of making this video I'm actually using the pre-release version of this plug-in and as such I don't have access to the documentation So I've kind of had to guess at what some of these controls do now I don't mind admitting to you I became a little confused along the way and we'll find out why in a moment Let's start off by looking at the two most obvious controls on the interface I guess the delay and reverb controls these knobs just blend in more or less of those effects to the overall sound Now this is where I started to have a little bit of confusion because I noticed this for example I'm on this preset pop staccato. Okay, I'm just going to play a note without having any delay on a tool just like so Okay, so that's the sound now I'll turn delay up full And you can hear what perhaps five or six repeats there which gradually fade out Okay, so now I'm going to change to another preset which I'm going to go to that deepening one we used earlier I'll do the same again. Here is without any delay Now I'll turn delay up full It's probably only two delays there and their space much further apart Okay So what I learned from this and this applies to some of these other controls if not all of them The the actual underlying sort of fancy stuff, which is happening the more advanced stuff is different depending on which preset you're using Okay, you just have a sort of a more of a macro control that blending those things in as I say Who knows with the full versions of these maybe there'll be you know advanced controls for these But this is fine. You can still do an awful lot with this now We'll say with the delay. However, you can change the timing in the sense that it seems to be linked to the tempo of your door Okay, so if we listen to this one at the moment I'm just going to quickly change the tempo in my door. It's 120 at the moment. I'll change it to say 160 We'll play the note again And you can hear it's a lot faster. So that is kind of you can get a little control over that at least So let's move on. I'm going to go back to that pop staccato and let's look at these top three Controllers up here. Okay, there's a reason why I'm doing it in this way So we've got color time and motion So let's start off with color for most presets or all the presets I've tried at least this seems to be a kind of a filter Controls, so I'll just play a note now Yeah, we'll turn this up And you can hear it's filtering out those high frequencies there So that's quite useful actually, especially if you're sort of moving it while you're playing you can get some really nice effects like that Okay, so that's color. Then we have time. Let's play with this a little bit I'm going to turn it all the way down and play. In fact, I'm going to change to a different preset Let's go to this deepening preset again I'll just play a note with time all the way down Yeah Now you hear that note it's got a decent sort of attack on it when we turn time all the way up It's got a really slow attack on it. So in this case, I thought to myself. Oh time is just attack Not quite because if I change to another preset, let's try this orange one and we'll move time on this one There's time we'll turn up It's not changing the attack It seems to be changing the length of the notes kind of thing within those repeats not really absolutely sure But yeah, you can see that it's just behaving a little differently Okay, so again, if you if you're a little confused when you're messing around with this just bear in mind I think it's just different with different presets the way it behaves But it does relate to time in some ways. That's very appropriately labeled Let's just change again to pop staccato and the same for motion It does appear to change depending on the preset, but it seems to relate to some kind of modulation I'll just play these strings again. Oh staccato pop strings. I just yeah, and then There seems to be some sort of Modulation on the volume there I felt with some others that I try that was just doing some different things. We'll try that Bass again You can hear it's not really doing much on the bass there other other things Look, I don't quote me on this But I felt that maybe it was modulating pitch on some other presets and things but anyway motion makes sense Doesn't it but do bear in mind that they're gonna do different things for different presets I think I've labored that point enough now Now finally the same applies to these two controls affects a and affects b They also seem to have different effects applied from depending on the preset and it's worth just understanding here that this one affects a Is applied to you're sort of more acoustic side of the equation Okay, remember this morph control sort of blended more acoustic sounds and then over all you know with synthesis over on the right-hand side there so Look at this ring which sort of goes around the edge It's more yellow around this side and you'll notice that Effects a is more yellow and that's sort of telling you basically the effects a is applied to the more sort of acoustic sounds and Effects b is applied to the sort of synthesis sounds. Okay, so That's all I've managed to understand about these different knobs on the interface here to be honest with you Although they're kind of macro controls when you use them all together You can really create your own unique sounds with this awesome. Did I mention it's free? Plug-in now, I reckon this plug-in would go really well with another couple of free plugins I reviewed recently those being foundations piano and Micah's choir check out my review for those two in this video Right here and start making some awesome music for free