 Hello OscillatorSync here. Today we are back with the Almyra 2 because the version 2.2 firmware has just been released and this is a firmware release which has made me feel very happy because I kind of had a wish list of features for the Almyra which I thought would elevate what it could do in my setup at the very least and this update has added all but one of those things on my wish list and the one that it's missed out is kind of a subset of another one that it has added so that's great and has added a bunch of other stuff which I didn't know that I wanted but as it turns out I do. So what I thought we would do today is take a look at these new features but rather than sort of look at them in isolation what I thought we'd do instead is put together a patch which just happened to make use of all of these new features or at least as many of them as it makes sense in the context of the patch I suppose. In the interest of transparency Neutral AppSense crossed the Almyra 2 to me for free and automated videos on it but they haven't asked for nor have they been given any editorial oversight of any of the content they've made on it and frankly I'm passionate about showing off what smaller companies are doing in terms of making cool instruments for us so let's take a look at some of these new features. Before we get into the sounds we should probably address one potential downside of having a device and instrument with a limited interface where you are adding lots of new features and that is that the cheat sheet for the magic codes on Almyra 2 has got quite a lot bigger and certainly probably well past the point where you can commit this to memory. If you aren't aware in order to access a lot of the additional features on Almyra or to modify its default state I should maybe say there are these magic codes where you hold down the mod p button and then you type in the numbers assuming that this is one two three and four and this gives you access to a bunch of different stuff including most of the new features. Yeah this is kind of the sad reality of of adding new interesting stuff which I think is a positive thing to a synth with such a minimalist interface so I will be typing in a lot of these magic codes I will read them out as I do it but I won't keep flashing the cheat sheet up on the screen because I don't think it particularly helps and you can get that from the manual anyway. So we'll start with what is probably the main new feature I guess and it's actually one that doesn't require a magic code which is quite nice and that is that we have a new mod mode for the voices so if you're not aware each of the voices can have a bunch of different mod modes which affects what this knob actually controls so at the moment all the voices on the red mode which is a d-chain but we can hold down one of our voices and tap the mod p button here to get at different mod modes and what we have here on this kind of mint colored led is a chord mode so now one voice can play multiple notes which expands the polyphony of the device quite a lot. You adjust what chord is playing by using the mod control which you could also modulate if you wanted which start from kind of more simple chords some fifth and octave major and so on minor diminished some sus chords some seventh chords minor seventh chords these chords incidentally are just intonated rather than using 12 tone equal temperament for those of you who care about those sorts of things although I don't know what just intonation system is used but it gives me a slightly different flavour I guess than if you were to be playing these chords on a keyboard so yeah this allows us to beef up the overall sound especially for drones quite a lot and I thought what I would do for this patch in particular is maybe dedicate two voices to a chord mode maybe just on the octaves and fifths tune them differently to make a larger chord cluster and then sequence the tuning for these so that you have maybe four chords that play have the sequences of different lengths have them sort of modulate over each other to give a kind of an evolving chordal pattern based around these octaves and fifths this actually brings me to another new feature so at the moment kind of the highest point of the oscillator isn't that high and if you want to kind of put these chords a little bit over the top shimmery kind of things that's kind of not high enough for me and this area down here is not that useful to me so one thing that was definitely on my wish list was the ability to raise the voices by an octave and we now can do that it's done via a magic code actually that's going to be the theme coming on here and it's two three and then the number of the voice that you want to raise up so here is voice four that's its current highest point we're going to do two three four that's now an octave above and I also want this other voice to be an octave above as well so we'll do two three three and now both of these voices are an octave higher which gives us a more usable range for the chords so let's start by finding our sort of complementary chord tones I guess we've used that as our base point hey why not let's let's have a kind of implied major tonality to this often my drone stuff is so negative and minor or worse than minor more discordant so maybe we'll go with that let's just find a slightly less aggressive wave table just for the moment as well yeah let's sequence just going between probably two different pitches and therefore two different chords uh so let's just get this one droning and this one draining we'll hit record for this one we'll have a couple of steps at that pitch one there couple there couple there perhaps back there and then on this other one yeah let's see how that sounds when we hit play get a sync signal yeah that's a good place to start okay probably don't want these draining the entire time however um but that is a nice place for us to start the nice thing about the sequencer on my is that it's playing in the background even if they aren't at gates going on on the voices so let's think about how we can trigger the the gates automatically and this brings me on to the next big thing that has been added in terms of my wish list and that is that we now have stepped and gliding random on the two LFOs so this is one of the things that we're going to need a magic number for and the magic number to get um we'll go with sample and let's try sampling hold glide hold let's try sampling hold on the first LFO here and we're going to hold down mod and we are going to go with two four one one you should see now that the light here on LFO one is doing that classic random vibe just what we wanted now of course we can use the LFO here in its random mode to do all sorts of random modulation but one of the things that is especially exciting to me as someone who is interested in more generative techniques in music is that a stepped random source is like the building block of of generative music and what we can do is we can use this to actually go into the gate of one of our voices and this is going to control the volume essentially of our voice however at the moment most of the voltage that's coming out of our LFO is going to be high enough to trigger the gate so what i have been doing as i've been playing with this firmware is i've actually been taken a just a flying attenuator and sticking it in the way of the signal now obviously we have the attenuators on almyra as well but this feels like a waste of this attenuator because this allows us to molt as well so i'm just going to stick a attenuator just straight in the way here and then i'm going to turn down my attenuator so that only some of these sounds come through and then slow down the LFO by adjusting the envelope we can have it start to self play now i also want this other one to self play as well there's a couple of ways we can approach this actually what might be worth trying is actually taking the envelope output of this voice and putting it into the gate here and setting its envelope a little bit longer and this should then have this voice follow this one however in the same way the voltage that comes out of the envelope is too high for too long so we're sticking another flying attenuator here we have our two voices here playing themselves balancing the envelope control on the second one to get the ramp up and sustain afterwards to fit properly it's probably a good time to bring in the delay now one of the things i said during my last video on the almyra is that the filter comes after the delay what i meant to say is that the trope comes after the delay which you can use as kind of a filter but actually the filter comes before the delay or rather it did on the previous version but we can actually swap the order of the routing so that it's a delay after the filter or delay before the filter and that's kind of relevant on almyra because the filter is so burbly and characterful that it you can kind of use it as more of a voice rather than as a delay now for this patch i'm not sure which way round is going to be most sensible but we can give it a try so magic code time of course and we're looking in the routing section and 133 or 134 is what we're looking for so 134 will reverse it so they can hear that we're actually darkening the delay signal in real time rather than putting a darker signal into it and that's going to be on a per patch then which is going to make more sense it also allows you to add resonance to the filtered signal which is quite yeah i quite like that with the delay before the filter put a choke there a little feedback from the choke there lovely so where do we want to take this patch next so i think maybe as soon as we were just talking about the filter we should talk about some of the new features that have been added to the filter so you could always change the filter mode between various different resonant filter types so you had the default which is kind of a ladder filter inspired design you had some other high pass low pass band pass as well i think sort of state variable style resonant filters but we have on this version added in a couple of two band filters essentially a high pass and a low pass kind of working together so the resonance control stops being a resonance control instead controls one of the two filters so we'll just plug in our LFO again to get these things playing again so magic code time there are a few different modes you have a series high pass and low pass you have a parallel high pass and low pass and then you have a base width filter which is what i love on electron devices where you have sort of a filter you're moving up and down and then you're changing how wide that filter works with the high pass and the low pass and then you have a base width notch which is the same thing in reverse but notching out stuff playing with some stuff last night i found that i really quite liked the high pass low pass parallel mode because it gave you some interesting almost phase alike sounds so i'm going to turn that on so that's magic code we're going to need to do it's three three one two three three one two and now what we have is a high pass and a low pass filter on these two knobs so you have a high pass filter on the resonance knob and a low pass filter on the cutoff knob but they're working in parallel so you can get these really cool phaser sounds that lower down and higher up on these knobs which i think are really really really pretty and i like how you can kind of have a very dull sound and a very bright sound at once which is what parallel filters sound like it's no great surprise there but i think it really suits the character of the instrument perhaps we should get some of these things modulating a little bit um let's maybe um um take the envelope out of this voice and bring it into one of the controls here so that whenever the voice the voice triggers we can kind of get that phaser thing happening perhaps we can mount the output of the other envelope actually and have that going into the other control that might be cool so i'll just use a uh stack cable for that so i'll just unplug that here bring that into here and now along with these voices triggering we get a lot of movement happening more reverb on i think at the stage right let's get a low drone in here so let's um let's make use of our other LFO now and one of the features that we've got in this new version is that the LFO has a bunch of new uh wavetables for its shapes this is on LFO 2 so there are always quite interesting uh shapes that we had on LFO 2 sort of sort of fluttery things going on there but we now have some new ones so let's maybe bring this into the wave control and just get this droning for a second let's have a listen to some of these other wavetables here maybe just unplug the first LFO so the ones triggering just for a second so to cycle the LFOs it's 244 244 that's some really interesting rhythmic ramp things going on that one i mean that's doing so much okay that's cool try 244 again they're so well suited to moving the wave table around because you've got these lovely flutters in them it's got a lovely little glitch dinking it i don't want this to be quite as bright so what i will do is i'll set its mod mode to the low pass filter which is the pink color add a sequence to this one so one thing you can do with the LFO now which adds a bunch of power to LFO 1 is that once you've set something up on LFO 2 you can now via a magic code of course copy it into LFO 1 in its current state so you can find a more complex set of movements in LFO 2 move to LFO 1 and then use LFO 2 for a different set of complex movements because LFO 1 used to only just be able to do triangle but now it can do triangle stepped or gliding random and anything else that LFO 2 can do it's just you can't modify on the fly in the same way once you've copied it there so we've got so much going on here that we don't really need the final voicing i think we've shown most of the new features one way or another nice with the one of these we can plan in a couple of other things like let's take the envelope from one since we're not playing it and stick into the wave here perhaps use that as a performance control actually let's send that into the multiple instead and send each of these into the wave control of both of our chord oscillators having nice i hope that was a a pleasant walk through some of these new features with some nice ambience happening in the background if you enjoyed the video then as always a like on the video and a comment down in the comment section just helps the channel out and is massively appreciated but other than that until next time take care