hello again! mr ujiie here. well? the minibrute! right, so just now, i'm sure you could see how i made lots of realtime changes while i was playing. the simple sound i played at first, just a plain old normal sawtooth, but the sound got fatter and fatter, and more and more... man! the end result was extremely different.
wonderful! well done, arturia! the minibrute. this unit, when all is said and done, is 100% analog! and, actually, it has no memory. the sound you hear reflects the position of the sliders and knobs as they are. what can i say about that?
you'd think there would've been something like this. really, how it's set is what you get. seriously, just follow your instinct, and just play it, that's it. the keyboard itself is a sturdy, two-octave affair, now, what really deserves special mention, is that as long as you properly understand the logic of how synthesizers work, you will not
find one as easy to understand and use as this. fantastic. let's take a look, shall we? first of all, the most important thing, well, the knobs + sliders are all here, but take a look here, the oscillator mixer. the way synthesizers are setup, well, i think you all understand already,
but for those who don't, please remember this, oscillator, filter, amplifier. these are the three main elements of analog synthesizers. oscillators produce the tone, they're the sound source. filters deal with the timbre. amplifiers control the level or volume. those are the basics.
now, the oscillator mixer here on this unit, is one really awesome feature. because you've got your sawtooth, square, triangle, noise and audio input, yeah, you can run external audio through it, and the sub-oscillator too, and all of them can be mixed in simultaneously! this is something you'd think would be a normal feature, but is not, usually you have just a selector.
but not here, you can mix the oscillators! this is why the sound i played at the start got fatter and fatter and fatter. it's all controlled right here. ok, i'll raise just the sawtooth slider here. now, sawtooth waveforms, for the most part, sound something like this. incidentally, over here is where you change octave settings.
this section, labelled octave. if you look closer at the oscillator section, the knobs and sliders are grouped together, and just now i was using just the sawtooth. parameters for the sawtooth can be found in this section, located above the sawtooth slider. now, there's a big secret up here! what? you ask... look here, it says ultrasaw.
because it says ultra, you can be sure it's not a normal sawtooth. what's different? here's a normal sawtooth... yep, just a normal sawtooth. incidentally, the minibrute is a 1-vco synth, only one oscillator. but if you raise the ultrasaw amount... raise the rate too. the sound changes, almost as if there were multiple oscillators, and not just one.
you follow me? right? now normal. now ultrasaw. that fattens it right up. it sounds like there are three, maybe four vcos layered + detuned. that alone does not sound like just one single vco.
that's really, really fat. that is the secret of the ultrasaw. next up, square waveform. controls for pulse width up here. 90% at the far right. 50% at the far left. a clarinet-like sound at 50%. and at 90%... ...sounds like an oboe, or so they say.
that fattens it up. that's nice, don't you think? now, this lower knob is for envelope amount, and through this you can route the pulse width to the envelope, over here. the pulse width changes as per the envelope settings. this is a feature that was well-thought out. nice. next,
the triangle waveform, which is just a bit more pointy than a sine wave. the triangle on this sounds good. the great part about the triangle wave here, can you see this? this knob says metalizer. metalizer! metalizer, what's that?! how can i explain this? well, metal-like sounds,
kind of like ring modulation, let's see what it does. there, there! almost like an fm kind of sound, like the modulator being raised against the carrier? that kind of effect. i mean, the normal triangle waveform, which is rather smooth and mellow, drastically changes into this! just great!
a good idea! you can control this via the envelope too. right? that's really nice. and, there's noise too. and last but not least, the sub oscillator. with additional controls up here. you can choose from one octave down, or two octaves down, via this switch. you can also choose the waveform.
square or sine being the choices. how does it sound mixed in? with a square wave, for example. sounds like there's another vco, one octave below. how about 2 octaves down? that's pretty powerful stuff. ok let's take a look at the filter section, which is located right here. when it comes to filters,
there are many types, from moog to arp, but on the minibrute, they used a steiner-parker filter, which is a two-pole, multimode filter. now, the steiner-parker filter's special characteristic is well, with a moog type filter, you've got your cutoff, and if you raise the resonance,
on a moog the sounds gets thinner, but this doesn't. it's a nice filter, this. it's almost unprecedented, this filter, but very useful. you can choose from low-pass, band-pass, high-pass, and notch filters. multimode filters are nice! and you've got envelope controls below.
filter envelope controls at the bottom of the section. really well-done. very nice! and, over here we have the amplifier envelope. your standard vca envelope generator. attack, release... decay... there's one more interesting feature here, can you see this here? "brute factor" up here at the top.
this knob here, brute factor. what the heck is this, you ask? it's another secret weapon! let's give it a spin. you hear that, right? let's open the filter all the way. now, what this is doing, is, uh, ok, i have a minimoog, and the minimoog
routes the output back to the input, which creates a loop, and that's really close to what's happening here. it's an internal collapse, in a good way. analog destruction! of a sort... that kind of thing. this causes dramatic changes, and is really, really cool! brute factor. remember that. and there's the usual tuning, headphones and master volume knobs.
let's look at the lower section now. the big feature being the arpeggiator. a real delight, having an arpeggiator. turn it on, play, and naturally... it has tap tempo. not bad at all. it has up-down mode too, of course. and random as well. you can do lots of things. as you'd expect. there's a swing function too.
the arpeggiator is quite thorough. to the left, the lfo section. they didn't skip out on the lfo. and you can select what gets lfo'd via the mod wheel. for instance, let's put lfo on the filter. you can also lfo the vca. you can sync it to the arpeggiator. that's that. nice! and, vibrato is independent of the lfo.
let's set the vibrato to, what, first, set the mod wheel to vibrato, and this will independently control vibrato. of course, there's glide too. which adds portamento. and of course, a control for pitch bend. you have complete control. another neat thing, it has aftertouch! if you route it to vibrato...
see? or route it to cutoff... it's quite sensitive, so you can play like this. lots of choices for modulation with this unit. another thing... as i said previously, the sound you get is based on the panel settings, but something to be happy about
is that they included overlay sheets! get a load of this. just place one over the controls... set the controls as indicated on the overlay, and you end up with that same sound. the synths of yesteryear used sheets like this... what's this one? funk bass. funk bass. let's give it a go.
ok i've got it all set up. i've followed what's printed on the sheet, so how does it sound? here we go. ah! that's certainly a funk bass isn't it? as i said, these come with the unit. and of course, some blank overlays are included as well, so you can record your own sounds. if you happen to come up with something you really like.
you can write on the sheets with a marker or the like, and record, heh, 'record' your sounds. well... is it recording? what should i say? analog memory! that's what these are. definitely something to be happy about. so, as you can see, the minibrute even though the panel is quite simple, and as i said at the start,
the sound is based on the current panel settings. i'll say it again: no memory! none! who needs memory anyway? this in itself is enough to keep you entertained. let's have a look at the back panel. again, what do we find but more stuff to be happy about!
what's there to be happy about? let's start from the right side. there's a usb port. connect it to a computer, and, well, you can change the triggering, single or multi, and you can change the envelope response curves and so on. it comes with its own editor.
you can also update the firmware. next, midi in and out. next is the gate source switch. there's an audio input over here, which can be controlled by playing the keys, which will open the gate. ok, now, take a good look at this section! cv gate ins and outs!!! it comes with cv gate!
so what's the fuss? well, for example, a minimoog or prophet can be controlled by the minibrute, or vice versa. or, looking at it from another angle, you could use a midi keyboard, route it through here, and control the cv gate. see where i'm going with this? you could control a prophet 5.
you could use this many ways. you could use it as a midi-cv gate converter even. quite well done. it's got cv gate, and and midi and usb control. good job! minibrute. excellent. courtesy of arturia. arturia, manufacturer of things like the spark here, hybrid hardware/software products,
at long last, went and made a real analog synth. it's impressive. they've done their homework, what with all the synth technology they used in the origin, true analog emulation and what not, all that research resulted in a bona-fide analog synthesizer. what a story! magnificent!
captivating. the arturia minibrute! translation + captions by: swcreative japan.
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