 Hello, Oslade Sync here. Artoria have just released the version 5 firmware for the MicroFreak and let's not beat around the bush here. This update introduces sample playback. Hello, Oslade Sync here. Hello, Oslade Sync here. Hello, Oslade Sync. Hello, Oslade Sync. But not only that, it also introduces three different additional modes where we can do a granular processing of these samples. And this is all extremely exciting, and we are going to dive in in detail about this in terms of getting the samples on, how we can deal with the three different machines and the basic sample playback, we will get into all of that in depth. But first, this update does also introduce two other nice new pieces of functionality that I feel like are going to get overshadowed if I don't talk about them first. So just briefly, we're going to talk about these two additional features and their good ones, and then we're going to get in with the samples in depth. So this first one is a really easy one to talk about. It's really, really simple, but basically it's a new mode for the envelope. So I've just got a basic little bass patch going on here and I've got the envelope set up as I've got it set up. What we have in this new update, if we come into the utility menu and into preset and then into modulations and into envelope snap, is we have a new mode for the envelope which makes it snappier. So this is what it sounds like normally and switching on snap mode. And you can hear that it's definitely snappier. So listen carefully, it's not shorter. It's just that initial part of the movement of the envelope is a lot more sudden. I think this is basically just what you would consider an exponential envelope mode on other synths. It's great for sort of pluckier snappier sounds. And yeah, it's very, very welcome. Is that snappy? So I think it has a more even longer ones, slightly more acoustic sound to it. Yeah, so that's an easy one. We now have this snap mode for the envelope and I'm going to leave on most of the time because I like the sound of exponential envelopes. The second new feature is related to the key arp routing in the mod matrix. Now this by default essentially allows you to do keyboard tracking. So a common thing to do would be to route that to the cutoff so that lower notes are darker and higher notes are brighter. Essentially, notes down near the bottom are going to give you a low value in the routing and notes up near the top of the keyboard will give you a higher value. Keyboard tracking, very useful in a lot of different situations. So what we now have is an alternate mode for that routing which disables the keyboard tracking and instead if we come into preset into modulations and down to key arp mode here and switch this into random, what we now have on this here will be a random value per note played, essentially giving us a sample and hold per note. Now, just before we get into that, that's different to the sample and hold on the LFO. A, because it's not going to change once you've played a note but also the LFO is monophonic on the microfreak whereas this is going to be polyphonic if we turn on the paraphonic mode up at the top here. So let's have a listen to that. So I've got the wave table oscillates here. And what I'll do is I will send, and I'll put this in the middle first. So I'll set that to about 50 and then I'll send the new random key arp to the timbre here by 50 or so. So now, every time I play a note, that position in the wave table has been modulated randomly. And if we turn on the paraphonic mode here, each one of those notes is a different place in the wave table, even though they're playing concurrently. Obviously this sounds pretty cool if we turn on an arpeggiator. Yeah, so this basically gives us a per note random value, which we can send anywhere on the mod matrix, which is really, really great for getting movement into sounds, especially if you're going to do something in the arpeggiator or something like that, but useful in lots of different places. Yeah, great stuff. But no more stalling, let's get to the main event. So moving the type knob up past the wave user, we will get to sample. And now we have some sample playback. So first let's do a little bit of the vital statistics. The samples are of course mono, because the microfreak is mono. I don't have the exact specs, but it sounds like the samples are being down sampled when you import them. And we'll get to importing in just a little moment. And it appears that within a bank of samples, which is all of the samples that you can load all at once on the microfreak, you have about 210 seconds, which for one shot is probably fine. The microfreak comes with a set of factory samples, which will get loaded when you upgrade the firmware, but you can load your own samples in as well. And you do that through the MIDI control center. So let's take a quick look at that now. So here we are in MIDI control center. In order to work with the samples, you need to make sure that you are running the most up-to-date version, which I think is 1.16 as of the recording of this video. But to make sure that you've got the most up-to-date version, head over to our tourist websites and just download the newest version. It's probably the easiest thing to do to make sure you've got the right version. And once you have connected your microfreak over USB and launched the software, make sure you've selected it from the dropdown here. You'll be presented with this familiar interface here, which is where we usually manage which presets are on the device. What's new in this version, however, of course, is we've got a samples tab up at the top here. The important thing to note when it comes to managing the samples on the microfreak is that you don't work sample by sample. You have to collate an entire bank of samples and then send that entire bank over to the microfreak. So at the moment, if you look here on the right-hand side, this is the bank that is loaded onto the microfreak, my microfreak right at the moment, which is a slightly modified version of the factory bank. Here on the right, we have the banks that we could send over to the microfreak. And at the moment, I've deleted the ones I was messing with earlier and we've just got the factory bank here. So the thing I was immediately tempted to do was, well, can I just add something to the factory bank because this is a decent bank and it's got space left in it. You can see here that we've still got 84 odd seconds of sample space left in the bank. So I thought, well, I'll just add some other stuff onto the end here and no, you're not allowed to modify the factory bank at all. In fact, you tried to delete something. For example, it goes, no. So what I suggest you do if you want to start with the factory bank and add some stuff onto it is actually export the factory bank first. So go to export, export to bank factory and call it new factory or something. And I'll export that. Just takes a couple of seconds. And then once that's done, we can import that bank back in as a non-right protected version of the factory bank. So I can come here, import new bank, new factory. And again, that'll just take a couple of seconds. And once this is imported into, once this is imported into the MIDI control center, I can now come in here and I can click on import and replace a sample from inside here. And we can replace it with the microfreak sample format. I don't know what that format is. I haven't looked into that yet. I'll probably have a poke around at that at a later date. But you can also just import any wave or a file that you might want to. So in this case, I could come in here and that's probably too long. But if I come here and grab that there. Now I've added this additional sample. I'll put it into this sort of recreated factory bank and then I can send it over to the microfreak by clicking this button, which I'm not going to do because it takes forever. It's very, very, very slow. So just be aware that when you are all excited to get playing with this new feature and you want to upload the new samples, actually sending the samples over takes forever. So go make a cup of coffee or something while you're sending them over. It is literally that long. Let's jump back over to the microfreak and actually play with these samples, shall we? So once you've loaded the bank of samples that you want to use, once you're in one of the four different sample modes here, you can hold down shift and turn the type knob in order to select the sample that you want. So here I've got basically the samples, the factory samples, and I've also got the one extra down at the end here. Which I've loaded in as well. And one of the first questions that I asked myself when I got to this sample select knob is can it be modulated in the mod matrix? And the answer is yes. So as long as you are in sample select mode, you can choose an assignable slot. We call the type knob, and that's going to set that to be sample. So now we can modulate which sample we currently have selected, which for certain types of things is going to work really, really nicely with the key up random mode. So if I come in here and I put a random amount about that much in here. Make it a bit pluckier. I mean, how can you not love that? Yeah, so it absolutely can be modulated, which is insanely good news. So let's just set the envelope nice and long again just for the purposes of showing this off and choose a... Let's just go with the piano lo-fi to begin with. To come out of the sample select, you hold shift and then just turn the type knob again. Just turn the filter off. So we've got a sample loaded in here and we're currently on the basic sample mode here. And in this mode, the controls are basically the same as you have in like most sample playback devices, I guess. So wave is going to affect the start time. So for example, if you've got a plucky sound like this and you want to shave that off, like that, we can do that. Tower is going to affect the length so we can have a hard stop on our sample rather than let it decay to nothing if we want it. Of course we could affect that with our envelope as well. And then shape is going to affect the loop. So when it's all the way down, we get no looping happening. But as we turn it up even a tiny bit, we start to get looping. And the way that the loop parameter works is as you turn it up, it's going to get closer to the length that you've currently got set. So if you imagine you've got start here and you've got the length, which is the end of your sample. If it loops off, obviously it just plays it one shot. If you turn the loop on to like 0.1, it's going to put the loop point just after start. So you'll get the whole sample and then basically the whole sample again and again and again. And as you turn the loop control up, that loop point is going to get closer to the length. So now you're going to get the start of the sample to the end and it's going to go back to this loop point and loop and loop and loop. And if you have the loop point up here, it's going to go all the way through the sample and then it's just going to loop the last bit over and over again and get kind of tonal sounds out of it. So in this example here, as I turn it up just a little bit, we're just getting the whole sample again and again and again. As I turn it up, we're just looping the bit at the end and if we're careful with our end point, we can bring that back a little bit when we've got more of a timbrel part of the sound. And we've got kind of a lo-fi way to sustain the note forever. There's lots of other nice interesting places in there as well and just before I forget, this of course works polyphonically as well. Oops, bad note choice there. And that kind of looping thing on the decay portion of our notes doesn't sound quite as sort of unreal and unusual. So yeah, this first mode is basically just a standard sample playback mode. One thing that I forgot to mention, let me just turn the loop off for a second. The length is zero in the middle and as you take it further back, it's going to go negative. Now if your start is at zero, you can't go backwards from zero, but if you put your start further up, we can get reverse instead. And you can still work the... And reversing any sample is always a good idea. Yeah. So it's a basic sample playback mode, but remember you've got the rest of the synth to play with as well and you can start modulating stuff too. So one thing that you might want to do is with the pressure or the velocity, maybe modulate the start point slightly on a plucky sound like this so that when you play lighter, it starts to take the start of the sample off. So let's give that a listen. I'm just going to utility, set my pressure mode to velocity. There we go. And then in here, pressure. So we want to set wave somewhere around there perhaps. And in here, pressure, wave. As we play harder, we want it to go down so it goes back towards the start. So minus 18 or so, slightly over that. Now if I play with not a lot of pressure, we get a sort of dull start and with more pressure or more finger on the note. So that moves the start of the sample towards where the pluck is. Cool. So that's the basic sample playback. Let's move on to the three granular modes as well. So the first granular mode here is called scan grains and to introduce it, I'm just going to go back to the sample playback first and I want you to listen to what happens to this sample as I play it at different pitches. In particular, I want you to listen to the length of the sample. So play the sample low. It's fairly long. As we increase the pitch of the sample, we're doing that increase in the pitch by literally playing it back faster. And that note lasted half the time of the previous one. And if I play high, that notes over very fast go even higher. Over very, very fast indeed. Now, if I come across into scan grains here and I do the same experiment, you can hear that there's some sort of tonal change happening there, but each of those notes lasted the same length. So what's happening in this mode is that the sample is being broken down into smaller sub-samples, grains of the sample. And each of those grains are being looped and looped and looped and then moved through the different grains at a rate that you set with one of the controls. What this does essentially is time-stretching. And we'll look at that with one of the loops that are in the factory samples as well in just a second. But let's take a look at the three controls first. So the first control on wave is the scan rate. I've got this set to one times, so it's going through what it considers at middle C, I think, the normal length of the sample. Now, if I want to make this sample go for longer, I can reduce the scan time to maybe 0.25, and now it should last four times as long because it's going a quarter of the speed. But you can also start to hear those individual grains in there, that sort of looping within the sound, which gives you a really interesting texture. And as we push that lower and lower to its extremes, you hear more and more of those grains. So if I go right down to the bottom, which is 0 and then just up a tiny bit, you get what is perceptively a piano, but it's weird. And you can hear it looping and looping and looping, and the texture and timbre is changing very, very slowly. Speed it up just a little bit. Up at the other end, when we make it go very, very fast, this is going to do time compression without changing the pitch, which on plucky sounds like a piano is really cool. You've kind of got the whole movement in terms of the timbre will change over time of the piano, but compress down very, very fast. Let's try a different sample here. I'm going to grab one of the loops in here. So here I've grabbed a drum break that is in the factory library, and if I set this at one times again, like that, you can hear it at different pitches. We're still getting the same length of loop. Again, if we contrast that with the standard sample playback, an octave down is half the speed, and an octave up is twice the speed. And again, taking this to the extremes gets us to some really, really interesting places. So if we take this down to like a quarter speed, those grains are very evident inside these percussive sounds, and we start to get that classic time stretching. Now, this is a great time to address the next control across, which is the tower control, which is going to control the density of the grain. So I've got it sort of in the middle at the moment. If I turn this all the way down, you can hear that the grains have got very, very big, and we can definitely hear each of the grains individually repeating in this quite interesting rhythmic way. It's actually really cool. Taking it the other way, the grains get much smaller, and we should be able to hear them less, obviously, but because they're getting so much smaller, we lose the fine detail. And we get that real classic time stretch sound. At high grain density, because the grains are so small, they start imparting a sort of ringing frequency to the sound as they loop around, because they're so small that they're looping at audio rate. Taking something like this loop all the way down to the very, very slow side of things. We get this super spooky... I don't know how to describe it, but the reverb in the room of the loop sort of becomes stretched out and ethereal in really, really interesting ways. Crazy stuff. The grain density at the low end means that the grains are much bigger, so you can hear things almost like individual delays within the sound. At the very, very high end, the grains become so small that they start to impart tonal qualities to the sound, as well as stretching things out for loops. For most things, somewhere between 50 and 75 tends to be the sort of most natural sound of things, but we don't always want natural sounding, do we, with this kind of thing. Let's talk about this final control here, shape. Shape is a control called chaos, and what this does is it starts to introduce inconsistencies in the grains, both in terms of their size, how they overlap, and also their pitch. We'll try it with this drum loop, first of all. That's minimum chaos. You can hear now that some of those grains aren't overlapping properly. Some of them start to drop out. Some of them are running far too fast as we turn it up. I'm going higher. I think some of them are starting to run backwards, as well. And right at the top for this loop, the sound is basically gone. Let's try that with a different sample. Let's try it maybe with the me saying hello one. So here I am saying hello with chaos at zero. Hello, oscillating here. Sounding a bit spooky, but not totally weird. Turning it up. Hello, oscillating here. Sounding sound glitchy. Hello, oscillating here. Sound to get sort of like beat repeat kind of CD skipping things happening there. Hello, oscillating here. Hello, oscillating here. Yeah, now it's skipping out altogether. Hello, oscillating here. And as we change the grain density as well. Hello, oscillating here. Hello, oscillating here. Things get weird in different ways. Hello, oscillating here. Hello, oscillating here. Hello, oscillating here. Hello, oscillating here. Hello, oscillating here. Hello, oscillating here. Hello, oscillating here. Yeah, so. Hello, oscillating here. That can introduce all sorts of interesting new time will changes in here. Let's choose one kind of harp here, I'll do. So I'm more sort of straight up timbre sounds at low chaos. We just get the kind of time stretch, but as we turn it up, starts to introduce almost like a broken tape quality. It sounds like something that's Trent Resner wouldn't mind too much. That's not how it goes, but you can get the idea. Give it some filtering and then maybe set that density to be affected randomly per note. So we can use our key up there again on the timbre. It's so cool. I've got a delay pedal just off the side here. Let's give it a little bit of a stereo delay. Gorgeous. Really cool. Really cool. Yes, there's lots of stuff that can be done there. But let's move on to the next mode. The next mode here is called cloud grains and it is basically working the same way as the scan mode did. In fact, the timbre and shape controls to exactly the same thing in terms of chaos and density. The difference with cloud grains is that whereas the previous mode would scan through the sound for us automatically here, instead the wave control is going to move around the grains manually. Now this becomes really, really interesting when we make use of more complex samples. So let's just find one of those now. So I've just chosen the harp up sample from the factory and that sounds like this. It sounds like a harp arpeggio. And if we move into the cloud grains, we can move through those grains manually now and obviously changing the density. Some really, really beautiful things happening there. In fact, we could modulate the wave here so that each note is different. Again, we can use that random on the key up. Having that there is a thing that we can do. So we can set the wave in the middle there and have this start to modulate it. Yeah, so that's really, really cool. Of course, we don't need to modulate that randomly by any means. And one thing that we can do with the cloud grains that we can't do with the scan one is we actually use tempo synced loops if we want to. So if I choose again that drum loop, so I've got that drum loop in here again and I can scan through it manually if I want. But if I want to do a tempo synced scan of this now, if I set my wave to 50 and I choose an LFO, which is a sawtooth or a ramp up, so it's going to go from minus one up to one. Make sure it's not running too fast. And then if I set the wave control to be controlled by the LFO and I set that to 50, so it's going to start at 50 in the middle, drop down to zero and then go up to 100. It's maximum. I'm sure that's set at 50 to begin with. I should now get a drum loop, which is tempo synced to the LFO, which is then tempo synced to MIDI. Mess with it in other ways. Add some chaos. And of course, we don't need to have it always moving in this direction. If we set this to a triangle instead, it should go forwards and backwards. So you can use the mini freak to mess with loops in interesting ways now, which is really, really cool. The third and final granular mode is called hit grains. And again, it kind of follows on quite naturally from the previous one. So wave does the same thing, sets the start point for the way that we are scanning our grains. So we can again use this to scan through a sample manually. Tambra here is also doing basically the same thing as before. It's setting the density sort of more tonal at the top and more obviously chunky as we go further down. What's different on this one is what the shape knob is doing. And what the shape knob here is doing is literally shaping the grain. So if I turn this all the way down, we should hear that the grains are quite sort of soft sounding. You know, sort of shaped like a triangle envelope, a tactic A. As we turn it up, it will hear that it gets sharper and more percussive, more like a sawtooth envelope. And once we go past the midway point, it stays sharp but it also gets shorter until it's basically just clicks. Those clicks will change as we move through the sample. And of course, the density is also going to make a difference here. And indeed, also shorten and lengthen them still the same way it was before. As we go up to the top here with our very, very clicky ones, we get quite a vocal scan through the sounds as we soften it. Having access to these different grain shapes is quite interesting. If you don't want the chaos happening as you have in the grains, for the cloud grains rather, just allow for some quite interesting differences. And of course, down near the bottom, you've literally kind of got like a delay almost, a shaped delay. So one really fun thing you can do with this one is the kind of the bouncing ball sound. So for this, we want the ball to start bouncing high as the sound fades out. It starts to bounce closer and closer to the ground. So what this means is that our sort of starting point as far as our timbre goes is high. And then we want it to go negative as it follows our envelope. So we can do in the mod matrix, envelope goes to timbre, negative, and what I just said is a 70-something. So we can try that. And now each note, send it, goes into delay, try a different sample. And then maybe have that start point there being modulated by our random per note. Something like that. As I hold it down, I'm bouncing the ball. Cool. Yeah, loads of interesting things we can do here, both in terms of treating it rhythmically, but also making use of the much tighter densities and changing the shape as well. Yeah, lots of stuff to explore. I think that every time that one of the microfreaks updates came out, I've talked about how much of a big deal it is. Obviously, adding the vocoder was amazing. The wavetables, the noise engineering oscillators are some of my favorites and remain my favorites on the minifreak as well. But this update fundamentally changes what the microfreak can do. And it's huge. This has breathed a whole new life into a synth which is already pretty vibrant. Now, I am a little bit jealous that we don't have this on the minifreak yet. We still don't have the wavetables on the minifreak either. And I certainly live in hope that this mode is going to come to the minifreak because the stuff that you could do with the full polyphony and potentially combining the samples with some of the other modes as well would be just incredible. But I have no insider information there. So I can only just hope that that's going to be the case. And just use my microfreak a bit more again because I wasn't using it because I had the minifreak. So thanks Utteria for continuing to support this little synth. It's fantastic to see this sort of support, ongoing support for a piece of hardware. It is pretty unusual in the synth world for that to happen. I think that's enough talk though. You need to go and have a play with this. So I hope you enjoy the video. It went a little longer than I intended because I just enjoyed exploring some of these modes. So if you did enjoy the video then please do leave a like. Make sure you're subscribed to the channel. It's very much appreciated. Sorry, I lost myself in the filter resonance there. And until next time, take care. Bye bye.