 Is it working, can people hear me? I haven't streamed for such a long time. Yes. So, hello chat, hello. It's nice to stream, I haven't done it for such a long time. I think my mic is probably a bit not quite, isn't it? How about now? A bit better? Yeah, basically the same. Okay, so once in particular for this stream, I thought what we could do is use it as an opportunity for chat to tell me what you want to hear, what you want to see, things you want to check out on the Minifreak, because obviously you had the great big bunch of embargo lift videos that came out a few days ago. The reality of most of those is that actually most folks hadn't had the Minifreak that long, about a week maybe. So, well, that's everyone that got videos out. One thing you want to see in particular, just let me know, otherwise I'll just explore it a little bit. But yeah, it's really good. This is a synth that I'm very excited about. Okay, some questions coming through on chat already. So, slow this down a bit. Let's do this. Let's do some slice as well. So, some questions in the chat. I've heard said that the Minifreak is just two microfreaks welded together, but does it have some polybrute goodies? It's loads more than just two microfreaks welded together in terms of the flexibility of the Mod Matrix. You've got three times as many modulation destinations. So, you can do a lot more in terms of rooting your modulation. You don't have the Minifreak had any real lack of that. But then you've also got the two oscillators, of course. I guess the really big thing is that you actually have six full articulated voices now so that you can get a real polyphony if you like, which is a big deal. So, I think it's a lot more than just two of those welded together. What else have we got? I want to hear the modal synth models in poly. I will get to that in just a second. That's a great idea. Good shout. Are the keys the same size as the keystep? As far as I can tell, yes. So, yeah, mini-keys, keystep size. But the keybeds are really nice as far as mini-keys go. So, I'm happy with that. Keyboard feels nice. What are the filter details? Filter details, I don't know for certain, but I will assume this is the SEM filter as it was on the microfreak. It has the same functionality. The resonance sounds the same. So, I'm guessing it's probably the SEM. What else have we got? Would have been cool to have the touch plate keys, yes. I know that I'm probably in the minority, but I loved the touch plate keys on the mini-freak, and I wish this had touch plates. There we go. That's my view on it. That's why it's nice to make cool rhythms. It's an awesome feature. The fact that you can use it on the arpeggiator and on the sequencer is amazing. Is the housing made completely metal? I think there's some plastic in there, but a lot of it's metal. What do the frog buttons do? What do the frog buttons do? I'll show you that right now, and then we'll go on to the modal as requested. So, the frog buttons are related to the arpeggiator. So, if we adjust the octave amount, then you also, depending on how you've got your frog set, you've also got the random octave as well, which will jump the notes in the arpeggiator round. Right, let's get to the... I'll try and do as many questions as I can in the stream. Let's get back to the modal question, because that's a cool question I actually haven't tried it. Back to initialised patch. So, let's go on here, the type here, and we'll go to modal. So, for modal, we're going to want to set the release to full, because it has its own decay. Let's go down octave as well. For some reverb on that, I reckon. Give it some reverb. Turn the horn. Higher octave. That's pretty. Let's put some pitch wobble on that. So, come in here. I'll go to an LFO, a little bit of pitch wobble. Because we're going to add some filter to it. Then we could put maybe the carpola strong behind it. Yeah, that's the modal synth in poly there. Good fun. Let's see. Can I assign how to use those assignable routing options again? Yeah, sure. So, let's go back to an initialised patch. So, say I want to control something in the matrix here that I don't have control of with the default one. So, you've got pitch, wave, one, timbre, one, cutoff by default. So, say I want to modulate the attack based on an LFO, for example. So, that's not something that we have access to. So, all you need to do to assign any knob that's on the control panel to your mod matrix is hold down one of the buttons with all the knob. And now this column with this button is this knob. So, we can now choose what we want to control it with. So, maybe we want to control it with an LFO. Maybe a slow LFO. Turn up the amount, something like that. And then if we're going to do that, actually we need to make sure that this isn't re-triggering, of course. So, let's turn the re-trigger to be free. So, now we've assigned attack to this column here. We've got it modulated with an LFO. So, now our attack knob has been wiggled by the LFO. So, if we did like an arpeggiator. We have the attack sort of fading in and out. And you can do that on the mini-freak with up to nine different parameters now. So, you've got one, two, three, and then you can switch page by pressing shift. And then you've got three more. And then, again, you've got three more. Yes, that's here. That's the signable modulation there. Does unison sound satisfyingly fat? Let's find out. Let's go back to initialised patch. So, I believe... So, this is just with a sawtooth wave. I think in here we can pitch a new voice. Yeah, unison spread and unison count. So, at the moment we've got all six voices. And then we can come out of here and do the spread. Now, what you don't get with unison here is any stereo spread, unfortunately. Which would be amazing. But we can also do spread across like... That is the start of the Ganon fight in Ocarina of Time, isn't it? Amazing. And then you can also stack it as octaves. Yeah, so there's unison. Let's see what else. What is the body composed of? I think it's some metal, some plastic, I believe. Let's see what else. How do I like it in comparison to other synths I own? I like it a lot. I haven't had it for long enough to really say for certain. But the kind of creativity side of it and sort of... I can make it do lots of things that I want to make a synth do. So it's potentially up there with the Opposix for me. And the Opposix is one of my favourite synths that I own. So I like it a lot. So I have some gripes. I wish it had the touch plate keys. And I've had one complaint about the... It's not so much about the sound, but the delays and the reverbs are a little bit safe. I'd like to see something a bit more sort of freaky with those. Yeah, delicious. Is there a feedback parameter on the chorus effect? Let's find out. I think there is, yeah. So let's go back to initialised patch. And come in here, we can choose chorus. So we have rate, depth and dry wet. So no, it would be the answer. Chorus does sound quite nice though. And there are different types. So let's just see whether any of them have a more feedback. Oh, that's got more feedback on it, hasn't it? So some of them have got more feedback in them naturally. But there's not a straight up feedback control in there, unfortunately. But it does sound good, doesn't it? That's a nice wide-sounding range. Nice stuff. Do you, I think it would fit well alongside your trusty blow-filled, mod wave and peak? Yes, I think so. Have I noticed any timbral differences between any of the plaits oscillators from Micro to Mini? I haven't done a side-by-side comparison. What I plan to do in some free time, I might do a video on it, I don't know, but I'm planning to manually transcribe some of my patches from the MicroFreak to the Mini to see whether there's anything particularly different between them. Let's see what else we've got here. I love that it will include a free VST, Me2. Does the MiniFreak send out all MIDI data after touch up? I haven't tested up. I would assume it would send out after touch because the MicroFreak did, but I don't know for certain. Sorry. And Luca asks, does the LFO go into audio rate? Let's crank those LFOs. So we keep going back to a boring initialised patch. We'll build some patches in a minute, perhaps. So let's throw LFO1 into cutoff. That's a good place to do audio rate. So from the low end, this is the lowest. Which is pretty long for someone that likes to do ambient and generative. That's actually genuinely possibly not long enough. So that's the longest, so let's crank that. Audio rate about there. Yeah, 1 into audio rate now. Not high audio rate though. But certainly, we can get some stuff done there. Square. Oh, the exponential sort. Sounds good audio rate. Now I wonder whether or not we can push the LFO to go faster if we modulate its rate. Perhaps if we modulate its rate based on the keyboard, can we make it go faster? So if we go, so we'll assign the rate there on the assign knob, and then do keyboard modulating the rate of the LFO. We might be able to push it faster, I don't know. It might be topping out though. So I think it went faster. I think it goes faster than we had it. But not by much. So this is just the filter now. So we can hear. So that's as fast as it could go. So it's in audio, right? Quite comfortably. So we can do audio rate there. Can you still modulate a mod matrix with a custom mod slot? Yes, you can assign a depth to an assign and have something else modulate something else. Like you could on the Microfreak, that's amazing for generative stuff. That's good. Does it gent? That's a good question, so we find out. I reckon to do gent, we probably want carpless strong. So let's go carpless strong. Then we're going to want to distort that, of course. If we're going to be doing gent. Oh Jesus. Angry at distortion than that. Is that genting yet? I don't know. Three band EQ. Scoot the mids. And it will chug as well. So I'm probably way behind on the questions. Because there's loads coming in. Thanks so much in chat for getting them. I will try and get through to everything. Everyone here is cool, and I love you. I concur. Is there a tape echo delay? There's not a straight up tape mode on the delay. There is, however, a filtered delay, which I guess is what you probably want for tape kind of stuff. The delay. Let's try filtered ping pong. You can do all that kind of stuff. But the delay, the filtered one at least, doesn't go to infinity. And reminder, all of these effects controls are modulatable by the Mod Matrix, which is good news. And also in the macro controls as well, which I showed in the video. Can I make a string sound? Yes. And so can you. There are various different ways to do it. You can actually go for a straight up string sound, because we've got Karpus Strong here. So we can get there pretty quickly. Oh, we could have two Karpus Strong at once now, couldn't we? Have them slightly detuned, and that would be nice. So there's another Karpus Strong there. Oh no, are you sweetie? That's very kind of you. Lovely to see you there. Thank you so much. Yeah, so we can do a string sound, of course. Of course, we could also make this paraphonic if we wanted to get that kind of string synth kind of feel, and if we wanted to use paraphonic correctly. It's still polyphonic. Don't think it's not polyphonic. Mark Doty will be annoyed. Or so that's not paraphonic on the VCA. Yeah, anyway. Could I imagine this being multi-tomboral with an update? I... maybe. I mean, architecturally, you'd have to have everything going through the same effects, but I guess so. I think although you can certainly modulate the type of the the type of the oscillator in the Mod Matrix, so you can... If you used the keyboard modulation, you could put two different sounds on two different parts of the keyboards because you have enough modulation here to have two completely different sounds on different parts of the keyboard, and I think you could even modulate the type. Let's try. Let's not talk about it. Let's try. If we just go in the middle somewhere here, and we assign type to the assign there, and then we modulate that based on the keyboard. Like... Yeah, so... It's actually moving through different oscillator types. So you can make things essentially multi-tomboral within one patch by spreading things out using the keyboard, so we can even change as we're seeing the oscillator types here, but you can fine-tune stuff so much, and you've got nine slots to do it, and that's quite a lot of push-and-pull. It's not quite as much as the Opposix, but it's still plenty. So even if they don't give us multi-tomborality on the firmware, then we can still fake it. Fake it till we make it. What am I drinking? That's a great question. I'm just going to have a bit more of it. It's a whiskey called Kavalan, K-A-V-A-L-A-N, which is a Taiwanese whiskey that my good friend got me for Christmas, I think, possibly on my birthday, and it's delicious. It's genuinely one of the nicest whiskies that I've had incredibly drinkable. It's dangerously smooth, basically. Delicious, though. Effects at this price range since it's a pretty dull, but I think that's a good thing. You can always skip the news. Erring on the side of usability, of course, is good. That said, I would at least like maybe a shimmer reverb, you know, that might be a nice or pitch-shifting delay. Although, you can probably fake a pitch-shifting delay. If we... So if we come into here and we make use of one of the synced delay, that one doesn't smear, though. Do any of these smear? That's a shame. So the synced versions of the delays don't smear, but if we assign an LFO to the time here and we use a stepped LFO like that, so LFO 1, there, gets slower, and we need it free-running as well. Sure. Can you modulate the effects in the... Oh, hang on, I might skip to some there. Can you modulate the effects in the... In the Modmetrix? Yes, certainly can. Can the macros send the LFO further into audio rates? No, because it can only affect the knob position, so it can't push it beyond the knob position. You're setting knob positions on the macros, unfortunately. What would I pair this with for a drum machine? Digitact, sure. Always digitact, or syntax, or digitone, or any of the many wonderful drum machines that we have access to. I've got the... If I had thought to set it up, I could have put the drum log out as well. Can't work out if that's a massive glass or a tiny synth, kind of both. I'm going to be contriving with it. It's a lovely synth, but without the freaky keyboard, is it really a freak? I've made my opinion known for that one. Hi from Belgium, hello. What else? Can you shout to make a delayed LFO with the Modmetrix? Yes, I can. Just checking that there isn't already a delayed LFO. No, fine. So the way you would do this is by rooting the LFO's amount through something else like the cycling envelope. So if we... As a starting point, it's probably easiest to do it with pitch. So if we root D, D, D, LFO to pitch... So if we wanted that to come in over time rather than be there straight away, what we would do is we would modulate the amount of this slot with something like the cycling envelope. So if we set our cycling envelope to be a sort of swoop in, and we set the sustain to full. So what we would do is... First of all, we want to turn this amount down. So turn that back down so we've turned the LFO to pitch off. Then what you do, it's difficult to show because my hand kind of covers things up, no matter what. You hold down one of the assign knobs and then you move this to where you want to go. Like that. And what that's done is now assigned that slot to this column. So now... We can turn that one off altogether. Now that we've come to a sign one, this is now... Have I managed to... Is that right? I think I've done something wrong there. Have I wanted to pitch? Hold that down. Why isn't that working? What am I doing that's dumb? So we're starting in the wrong... Do I have to start outside of this? Why can't I make that work? If I had made it work, I just had the attack set to... That was working. I just had the attack set too short. So we were hearing it straight away. So now... What I showed you the first time was the right thing to do. I just had my cycling envelope set stupidly. So now the LFO fades in instead. Silly, silly, silly. I wish I could backport some of the features in the Mini Freak to the Micro Freak. No idea. I'm afraid. Not like it's Synth Punk. Does it have a power supply that screams when the synth is off like the original? I never did that. And not that I've heard. No. How portable is it? Would it be possible to add a 12-volt bird cord? I don't know what the power requirements are on it. I don't have the full specs yet because I still don't have the manual, I'm afraid. So I don't know. The power supply that came with this, I think, is similar to the one that came with the Micro Freak though. So it can't be pulling much more than that power supply can supply. Will After Touch Route 20 parameter? Yes. So it's assignable inside the Mod Matrix. So anything that you can assign in the Mod Matrix will assign to there. I've nearly caught up. I've been looking for my first hardware synth. Would I recommend this? Yeah, I mean there are lots of good potential first synths. What you get with this potentially is a slightly wider range of oscillator sounds that we do more readily available, I should say, maybe, oscillator sounds than on a lot of other synths because the Digital Oscillator is quite a bit that sort of put behind presses and turns and in the menu there's quite a lot in the menu actually. So from that perspective, there's a bit of menu diving but there's nothing that's particularly difficult. I think it would make a good first synth, but there's a lot of competition for a good first synth. To be honest, there's loads of decent, more knobby per function synths that are out there. Right, I've got to the end of the questions. So I'm going to make a patch. Might try something more generative or, I don't know, let's see. Initialize patch. Let's see what we can do with generative stuff. Should I turn it into a drum machine? No, I'll do that in a video. Oh, one thing that I really like about this. Here's what isn't a good example. I alluded to this in my video, but here's a good example of a little thing that's in here that just is really, really neat. So I'm just going to turn up the other oscillator. So it's got the two oscillators going there. Cool. So obviously what we could do is route an LFO to just one of the pitches of the oscillator. So maybe I'll just do it to just one, rather than one and two here. So we can assign that here. Boop, cool. And now if I put an LFO into it, obviously if I turn it up high, it's going to sweep all over the place. Which maybe isn't exactly the kind of sound that you're going to want. But here in the menu, which you have no hope of seeing on here, we have a way to quantize the pitch mod on here to different things. So we can quantize the pitch mod on the oscillators to chromatic, for example. Turn down. So now the LFO is modulating the pitch of the oscillator, but it's chromatic. Or we can go octaves. Fantastic. Or fifths. Scale. Or major scale. Or a bunch of other scales in here as well. So if we now change that wave into like a random sample and hold, we'll synchronize it. And then we could duplicate that on the... Oops, I didn't actually save it. Ah, that's silly. Sorry. So if you set that to minor pentamonic again. We do the same thing on oscillator 2, but then do it with a different LFO. Then we'll just get it to start making its own melodies. Like that. And then we can do LFO 2 going to the other oscillator pitch, which is also quantized. It's a reverb. So there's an example of just a really nicely thought out feature that's just there to allow you to do something creative without having to... Well, you can't do this on a lot of synths, right? So you kind of get to do self-patching stuff. You can also get stuff... I haven't really checked all of this yet. But you can get the different... Yeah, so if we had the cycling envelope set to an envelope mode instead. Now set the cycling envelope to be triggered by LFO 1, for example. As you can get. So cycling envelope. Can I see it now? Retrigger source LFO 1. So now it's sort of self-playing. This isn't the arpeggiator and this isn't the sequencer. This is just application of... So it's pretty cool from that perspective. Sorry, I got distracted. Now I'll scroll back. Let's have a look. How far can you push the standard shape virtual analog oscillators as far as classic synth sounds go? So you can do your classic poly stuff, of course. So let's try speedrun. This is a classic pad sound. Any percent. Virtual analog. Chorus. Like it on Twitch for synthesizer speedruns, I don't know. Use velocity to adjust the envelope amount. So we should be able to go... Setting LFO... Sorry, setting aftertouch to do... To do more pitch wobble. So we could do... We need to turn off velocity... In there. So... Where is that? Keyboard. Matrix source. Just aftertouch. Now I have a CS 80 or something. One big thing that we've lost with the touch keyboard is that we don't have poly aftertouch anymore. So now I can't do single note... Single note pitch wobbles. Which is a shame. So you can do classic sound stuff. For sure. D, D, D, D, D. Tick-tock keys. To go is amazing. So that's good. Is that in sync? If you're talking about... Way behind now. The LFO stuff, yeah, it was in sync. Do I think it might benefit from a vintage inspired knob? Everything does. The frog is the octaves on the arpeggiator. So that's... Kind of boring but useful. D, D, D, D, D. Cool. Let's make another patch. Let's do something... Let's do something... Let's do something after having your drink first. Oh, I know. I know, I know, I know. So one of the things that... That's really, really neat is that some of the oscillators and oscillator 2 will take the input of oscillator 1 and shape it and abuse it. And my favourite one that I came across. One of my favourites. I like the comb filter as well, but there's this destroy one which is like a decimator and bit reduction and everything. Kind of wave folder, but it's pern note. So we do have a... In here we have a bit crusher mode. Yeah, so we've got bit crusher. But you can hear there that when we do the bit crushing and decimating you're hearing it interact with the different notes that I'm playing. So here what we can do is run oscillator 1 per voice into oscillator 2, which is acting like a decimator which gives you a completely different sound because it's not going to have the different notes interact with each other. Wave folder in here as well. So this is just with the basic waves oscillator as the input. This awesome glassy sort of... like a digital broken recording of like a toy box or something. Love this kind of stuff. Bandpass filter. How cool is that? And we could have like a really slow stepped LFO affecting the timbre control. So assign that in the mod matrix. LFO 1 goes to timbre. It's a different level of messed up. Amazing. Give that like a phase... We could bit crush it again. Should we try that? We could put a phaser on it. So someone asked whether we had feedback on the chorus. We don't but we do on the phaser. Put some quick delay on that. Stereo perhaps. Stereo. See what that needs is the arpeggiator of course. So the custom LFOs really are. It's going to depend on what sort of patch you're creating. For a patch like this probably not a whole lot of use on it. Generative patches or stuff where you're trying to create rhythmic rhythms within the patch that you're playing. Really useful for that kind of thing. If you're trying to make like a drum machine type patch for example. I don't know if the kind of person that would do that kind of thing. But that would be a really useful thing there. I'm not going to use one every patch. I haven't used them at all in the live stream. But for the right kind of patch they'll be really really useful. I think running them really slowly and getting evolving rhythms. Maybe with both of them working in custom mode. That might be really interesting. So these ones do still somewhat suffer from the micro freak issue. On the micro freak a mode with the holding of a shift didn't they? In some modes they take a long time to turn. But they're not as obviously bad as they were on the micro freak I don't think. The sounds coming out of this are like the sounds that FM has to show off to prove why FM get those sounds. That's not true. FM is easy. You just don't know it. Agreed. This is the kind of thing that you might otherwise try to do on an FM synth. Like I'm sure I've made a patch like this on the opposite. That's enough of this. So this is just the arpeggiator by the way. I've got the slice and dice thing happening. Again a bit more sort of rhythmic stuff happening in there. Mutating the arpeggiator which shifts the arp. So you can kind of just leave it. This might be pretty neat. Let's do another patch. Should we do something disgusting? What time are we at? Oh wow, time flies when you're having fun. Yeah, let's do something disgusting. Do you know what? I'm going to save that patch. I like that. I'm going to do an awful thing and not name it though. So do as I say, not as I do. Right, so let's try making something foul. So I reckon we'll use one of the noise engineering ones. Probably the bass one to begin with. Because with that noise... These are such a gift, these noise engineering ones. They are beautiful sounding oscillators. And despite that I'm using this one to do some disgusting sounds. It works wonderfully in really delicate, broken sounds. Well I love it. Okay, mono. Good start. Listen to how much movement is in there already. This is just the noise engineering bass oscillator type. Fantastic stuff. Now I just think it does look great. I've not really used one in any great depth. I did contact ASM asking them if they wanted me to make some videos and they just ignored my email sadly. So... Yeah, need a Euclidean sequencer in there. You need an Euclidean sequencer in everything. Amen to that. I just need PAMs here. And the MIDI expander for PAMs. Right. So we've got that. Let's use the other oscillator to just give us a sub, I think. Probably use the basic way for that. We'll use the same one perhaps. And then just tune it an octave down. Boop, boop. Okay, so I reckon that saturator knob, which is the wave, needs to be controlled by an envelope. We'll use the cycling envelope for that. So, cycling envelope to wave one. It's already in the mod matrix, starting to assign it. Boop, boop, boop. Boop, boop, boop. Can we decouple the envelope from the VCA? Okay, so let's just use the cycling envelope for the cutoff as well. Boop, boop, boop. Sequencer in there. So, spice. That's distorted. So some of the distortion here is absolutely vile. Disgusting, at least. So we've got a folding distortion. So we're watching the cutoff, so we've just got some movement Yes, there's the answer. So slow, synchronized, identified. So it's off. It doesn't sound like it's doing much, it's because it's resetting the envelope. So it sounds frugal. What do you reckon? Some chorus? And then some delay? Oh wait, no, no, no, no. Not chorus, unison. And then some chorus. There's a glitch. Oh, wait, no, no, no, no, no, not chorus. Unicorice. Oh, no, no, chorus. So put some delay on it, right? And then what we do is we can set the top one to quantize its pitch modulation to octave and then send a slow LFO to it so that top line keeps moving whereas the sub stays still. Sick. Or maybe fifths even. We'll see. Uh, what was I going to do? Okay, delay. So, yeah, what we're going to do is I'm going to set the pitch mod quantize for oscillator one to let's try octaves and then send and make it continuous as well. I need to do that. So LFO two can go to tune of oscillator one. Obviously a bit fast. Right, just checking in on any other questions. Does the spice add in random ratchets? Yes. Looks like I need a refill. Yeah, no vocoder. No vocoder at the moment. Hopefully they change that. Now before we go, the question is can I make it do like a bass drum sound? Or have I used the four-way envelopes now, unfortunately? Let's try it. Let's try it. Hang on. Let me think. Sorry. We probably do this for the mod. I've had another envelope. I could do this. It's too late. I wish I left the drum lock out. Anyway, I think I'm going to leave it enough to kill that night there because it's getting a little late over here and I've got a busy day tomorrow. So, yeah, I probably could do it with the mod lane, but it requires me to think about it too much. Yeah, I reckon you could probably... What could you? See, this is what the LFO designer would be good for as well, because you could have four-beat LFO where only the first beat has an indent in it. Yeah, but yeah, thanks everyone for hanging out and thanks for asking all the questions. I hope that it was a useful stream for everybody, and I hope I've managed to show off a couple of different sounds that I wasn't able to show off in my video. If you haven't checked out my video, then it's there. I go through all the features. I build three patches from scratch, a little bit less haphazardly than in the live stream, so if you want to check that out, that's there. But I make a quick custom LFO. I've told people I'm going, so people are leaving the stream now, so I feel bad for then making something else. I do make a custom LFO in the video, so go watch the video if you watch the video, then you can see me make a custom LFO in there. Yeah, otherwise, thanks for hanging out everyone, and I hope you have a wonderful night. Take care. Thank you, Martin. That's really, really kind of you. It was disgusting, wasn't it? It's just what we want. Play you up there then. Take care, everyone. Bye-bye. Have a good evening, or night, or day. Take care. Bye-bye.