 Hello, Oscillator Sync here. Arturia have just released the new 2.0 firmware for their wonderful esoteric, strange, and beautiful microfreak synthesizer. Along with some bug fixes and general maintenance, this new 2.0 firmware brings with it a couple of really cool new features, and I think probably most excitingly for most people, a new oscillator type. So in this video I'm going to show off some of the key new features, and then once we've done that we'll move on to taking a look at and exploring the new oscillator type. So the first feature I want to talk about is the chord mode. So by default the microfreak is a monophonic synth, but we can press the paraphonic button here to turn it into a polyphonic synth. Shout out to Mark Doty and we can play chords. This is a feature that really appeals to me because I'm not a very good keyboardist. Chords mode is really easy to make use of. All we need to do is hold down the paraphonic button and we can play in a chord shape, and now when we play any one note we get that chord shape moved across the keyboard, which is a great way for coming up with ideas. Now at the moment this chord shape has literally been moved around so I played in like a minor seventh chord, and we're getting a minor seventh chord across the keyboard, but hold that thought while we just move over and talk about the second feature because we'll come back to the chord mode in a moment because there is an impact of the second feature on the chord mode, which is really really neat. So the next feature I want to talk about is the scale quantization mode, and what the scale quantization mode basically means is that it makes it impossible for you to play a wrong note, and let's explore how that works. So this can be set either on a global setup so that it's across every single patch, or you do it per preset. I'll show you how to do it per preset. The global one is the same, but going into the global menu instead. So if we hit utility to get the utility menu up and we go into preset and scroll down here, we can see that we now got this option called scale, and actually just a note related to it is root note. If we go into scale at the moment, it's set to global, which means that if I've set a global scale, it will be adhering to that. We can also turn it off so that it doesn't adhere to the global scale and doesn't do any of the scale quantization feature. But we want to talk about actually what the feature does. So if we go up one more, we get to major. So what this will do is it will make sure that the white notes across the keyboard all fall within the major scale, obviously for C, it would anyway. But let's just move that across to minor, for example. And now if I play across the white notes, we can hear that I get a minor scale. I'm not having to go to the black notes to get a minor scale out of my C key. Of course, if I want to change the root note of the scale I'm working on, I can go click the preset button to go back to the utility presets, go to the root note, I can change that. So if I want to get a D minor scale instead, there it is, modes and stuff happening on C. But anyway, let's move back to C as I write new root note for the moment. So we have minor scales, we have our minor scale, lovely. We have the Dorian mode. We have a Mixolydian mode, a flat seventh, brightening up the sound. We have a blues scale. What you'll see here is that because the blues scale is sort of based off the pentatonic, some of our white notes are now the same notes. You can't play the wrong note as long as you're playing the white notes, but that does mean that some of the notes will repeat. We've got a pentatonic scale as well, and that's your lot. So I mentioned that this kind of feeds back into the chords modes. Let's just switch this back to global for a second and just think about our chords mode for just a second. I'll play in a major chord here, and because it's moving the shape around, every single note that I play on will be a major chord. However, if we turn that off for a second, if we go into one of our scales, so maybe I'll pick harmonic minor for some spice, perhaps. Let's see how this sounds. So if we go into our harmonic minor scale, so we've got that there. Now if we're going to paraphonic mode and hold it down, and I play in a chord shape like that, because the quantization is happening, I don't get that chord happening everywhere else. I get that chord shape squeezed into the scale, which is really cool. Minor chord there, major chord there, some spicy notes in there, minor chord, spicy notes, heavily minor chord, major chord there. And you can see how you can come up with these chord ideas really, really quickly, and it's super fun. So having that chord mode and that scale quantization mode happening together is just a one-for-one thing, and I think for my money, I'll probably use them together most of the time. I don't think I'll probably use the chord mode that much without turning on a scale, because just get these ideas happening really easily, which I love. Okay, so getting on to the main event, the new oscillator type. So if we scroll all the way to the right on our digital oscillator type selector, we get to this new noise oscillator. I understand that this was a request from a lot of users, but the way it's been implemented I think is really neat and kind of interesting. So I'm just going to set this up into a kind of a default display, because I'm going to turn the shape all the way down, I'm going to have the timbre all the way up, and we'll turn the wave all the way down. So what have we got here on the noise oscillator, and what do the different controls do? So that's where we're starting. So the wave knob will blend between three different types of noise. So we start out with this kind of particle noise, move away into white noise about there, and you can kind of hear just on the edge of that, as I scroll further up, we get into this kind of metallic noise, which is really cool. Okay, so I'll just put it in the, somewhere in the middle there, so sort of white and metallic in there. So the timbre knob kind of does a sample rate reduction on the sound sort of. It sounds like there's something else going on in there as well, I'm not entirely sure, precisely what's happening on technically, but as we turn the timbre down, it kind of sounds like a bit crush and sample rate reduction. So on our metallic noise, it's adjusting the pitch of essentially loads of aliasing in there, which you know, is a good thing, as far as I'm concerned, with a noise source, I want weirdness happening in there. On the white noise here, it's a digital noise source, and you get this just that's like eight bit noise kind of arcade machine, Nintendo Entertainment System. That's a great sound, especially when you start to hear it. Anyway, and then on the particle noise, kind of here it gets sort of almost squeezed, and then right down at the bottom, we get our vinyl noise. So anyone out there creating your lo-fi hip-hop, you're welcome, because now you've got some vinyl noise, you can quickly get to hold off. So on the shape control, this blends in and then changes the timbre of a sort of standard tonal oscillator as well. So kind of coming in, sounding a bit siney, a bit triangle-y, and ending up kind of pretty square-wavy. Notice that the noise doesn't disappear there, even when you've got all of the oscillator part of the oscillator in there, you're not getting rid of the noise. Also worth noting that the oscillator part is not getting decimated in the same way that the noise is. So this is kind of like a blending in of an oscillator that's kind of independent of your noise source altogether. Okay, to finish off, let's try and make a patch just quickly using this new oscillator type. So the first thing I've got to say is that I'm going to go to the metallic noise, with a tiny bit maybe of the white noise behind it, because I think the metallic sound is just ace. And we'll just take our oscillator bit out for a minute. What you'll notice is that the pitch of the noise, if that's even a concept that makes any sense, does not change with playing across the keyboard. But we could get something happening there in our mod matrix, because if we were adjusting the rate control along with the position of the keys, that would be a great way to get some tracking of the pitch on there, if you like. So if we go down to the key up and we want to adjust the timbre, and we'll just crank this up to full for the moment. So now as we play different notes, we're hearing different pitches. Now, unfortunately, you cannot get the metallic noise to keyboard track properly, tonally, which is a shame. But what you end up with if we bring in the oscillator, it's kind of these cool overtones, which I still kind of quite like. The other thing I should point out is if we were dealing with our white noise source, take out the shape here, we can get our eight bit noise playable, which is pretty cool. Maybe we'll have a bit more of a noise in there. So one way that we can kind of force some pitch on to the noise sources by using the filter resonance, which I think is quite a neat idea. So let's use our high pass so we don't constantly take out all of the bottom, sorry, all of the noise or the top end of the noise. Oops, I apologize for those of you on headphones. Let's try and tune it. Cool. And then if we go back to our modern matrix here and we have it track the cutoff, it takes them with the, let's back out. Let's just stick with the eight bit noise there. Just kind of a cool sound. It adds loads and loads of bottom end, which is a cool sound. And we can bring some of the oscillator back in now. Cool. And this kind of feels like I want to get some randomness into here a little bit. So maybe if we use our random source, on our LFO, we'll have it synchronized sixteenths. And maybe we can send that to the wave. So we're changing the type of the noise. Go around to our LFO here. Sorry. I reckon if we apply that from our peggater, give it some spice. So yeah, as you can tell from the fact that I just lost myself in a jam there, I think there's loads of potential in the noise oscillator for doing loads of corny things. And it very much speaks to the character of the synth already and that it it's quirky and it's noisy and it's got these weird harmonic things that it can do. And I just think it's it's a great addition. And I am super excited at the idea that Arturo might add some more oscillators. And I'm really stoked to see what they might come up with. So anyway, I hope that was interesting and useful if you're a microfreak user or maybe if you're not and you're just checking out what the new firmware has brought to the device. If you did enjoy the video, please do give it a thumbs up and make sure you are subscribed to the channel because there'll be lots more stuff coming up. I've got an idea for this new oscillator, something that I do on a lot of synths, but I haven't yet done on the microfreak and now I'm quite excited to get going with. So we'll see if that's something that appears on the channel fairly soon. I think you'll also be seeing the microfreak on a jambuari jam pretty soon, for certain, I think possibly even tonight. Anyway, thank you so much for joining me as always. Take care and I will see you again soon. Bye bye.