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I'm guessing the answer might be "not that much", but maybe enough to bump the perception of its cost into another category? For me, 269€ (the current price in Europe) feels right on the high edge of "budget synth", and bumping it to 300€ makes it start to feel not so budget-y. But that's speculation and extrapolating from a sample size of 1....

@@SonicCartography i think you’re 100% correct, it may be just a bit too much. I wonder if some clever bugger would workout how to retrofit a USB, may be it’s rev2 some time in the future. I love these synths and the quality for cost is extremely good, I have the granular device and when I run them through a small mixer, and a x4 ditto looper you can do a whole gig on them. I do use a few effects as well which does make them sound totally magical. Having a stereo output for each of the 4 voices on the ambient would be a monster. I could imagine two ambients (8 total voices) built into a small keyboard and a small screen……..I’m over thinking this now.

@@christopherbuck7679 That would be a beast of a device, if something like that ever came out! But in the meantime, I think having a multi-track looper puts you way ahead of most synth players in terms of being able to quickly generate ideas and music. Everyone should have one of those, and not enough do; I think they should be way higher on the priority list of things to buy than another synth. (Not that it's any of my business how people spend their money...)

I'm not sure if I understand what you mean, but it produces sound that can be played through a small internal speaker, and it also has jacks that allow it to be connected to external speakers, an audio recorder, an audio interface, headphones, etc.

Thank you! I appreciate the nice feedback. I hope to take this approach again, if/when I have another burst of inspiration for it...

Nice! Thanks for sharing!

I'd go back to that era if I could!

Thank you! I'm glad you're finding the synth useful. It sounds like you're doing much different things with it than me, and I suppose that shows its versatility. I should try doing Jamauary next year. I've been reluctant because my creativity tends to come in big ebbs and flows, with sudden bursts of output followed by long dry spells, but I suppose part of the point of it is to at least try to come up with something every day.

Thanks for watching! Hope you enjoy it!

You're welcome and thank you for the nice words! Re: drum samples, if you scroll down to the very end of the list of links in the video description, I put a link to the drum sample I showed in the video!

@@SonicCartography awesome thank you!

Ooh, thank you! This is an important thing I forgot to talk about, so I'm going to pin this comment. I have mine set to tab as well (I think mine might have come that way, because I didn't even notice the switch at first) , and I never installed any driver.

Hope you enjoy it!

Thank you! 🙂

No no, they are unaffected!

Thank you! The sound is all from the Ambient by itself, directly recorded from the synth to an audio recorder. I don't know if there's anything that special about most of the individual sounds I'm making in and of themselves. Rather, I think a lot of the magic of the synth (and most of what is unique, if anything, about what I'm doing with it) comes down to the ability to layer sound and arrange music with four separate layers, each with its own sequencer track, and each of the three synth layers (layer four is a sample-based noise layer) able to have its own synth engine structure, wave table, parameter values, LFOs, etc. That creates a lot of possibilities for layering and juxtaposition of complementary or contrasting notes and sounds, where the outcome can be more than the sum of its parts.

It depends on what you're wanting to do with it. Run sound from the model:samples into the Ambient? Line in. Trigger notes? MIDI. Just make them play in sync with each other? MiDI sync.

Thank you kindly, sir! Always nice to have you stop by, late or otherwise!

To be honest, I can’t remember this video well enough to know exactly what you’re referring to here, but I’m assuming it’s me recording a live-performed drum loop into the 8bit Warps’ internal looper? If so, then the reason I'm doing it the way I'm doing it is the biggest limitation of the looper, which is that it doesn’t allow overdubs. Zooming out from that, this and some of the other “hack” videos aren’t necessarily meant to show the most practical uses of the devices; they’re more about showing how to exploit certain features to make them do unintended and/or unobvious things. I think most people would rather just sequence a drum part than live loop it, and sequencing drum parts is relatively simple and does allow for live/quantized recording in a continuous loop where you can add elements bit by bit. I show this a bit at the beginning of this video: th-cam.com/video/CKyyuodbxwQ/w-d-xo.html

@@SonicCartography Thanks. Yeah, I was wondering why you couldn't overdub any missed notes. I realize it's a year old and I do appreciate the response.

@@jeffoff7795 No problem! Thanks for stopping by!

Nice, I hadn't thought of that option either!

Nice! That thing looks like it has a good combination of features!

@@SonicCartography I've been really happy with the Minifuse since getting it a few years ago; both the hardware and software.

Nice!

To be fair, faxes were kind of cool...

No complaints from me! It's nice to keep useful old tech around.

The firmware updates and backups are not something you have to do often (or at all), and with samples, you can just directly record audio via the line in, so I don't think this aspect of it is that much of a drawback

Thank you! I appreciate you saying that!

You're welcome! And yeah, haha, the bin is where it belongs

Thanks for the suggestion! Seems hard to find where I am, but maybe it's still available elsewhere!

Thank you! I think the main things going on with that are (1) use one of the grittier wavetables, like saw or 27.ps, (2) legato or mono with lots of glide between the notes, (3) heavy tremolo (LFO assigned to level with depth all the way up, rate adjusted to match the rhythm you want it to have, and an aggressive shape, like square or reverse saw).

Thank you, Frog! I appreciate you stopping by and saying that!

Thanks! I'm guessing it's possible, but I don't really know. You need to be able to transfer files to its SD card. If you can do that with a phone (and I gather you can with an adapter, but I've never done it myself), then I can't see why you couldn't.

Thankyou so much for your reply, yes I suppose it's worth a try and I could always buy a computer if not thanks again 👍

@@johnwynne-qx6br Now I'm curious as to how and why you're getting by without a computer in this day and age!

Hi yes I just use my mobile phone not ideal but does everything I need apart from ???updating the smpltrek..??. 👍

@@johnwynne-qx6br More power to you! I wish I didn't need mine for work!

Hm, I don't know... If you pitch it up +12 cents, which I think is the original pitch of the sample, it really sounds like a siren, with some wind and what sounds like maybe some water or fire in the background. Very far from a flute... The only thing I can think of is the german word "flut", which means flood...maybe a siren during a flood? That feels like a stretch as well, though

Thank you! That was one of my favorites from this collection, and no one else has mentioned it, so I appreciate you saying that!

Thank you! All this time later, I am still surprised by how much I was able to do with just this one sample! Happy near year to you too!

Thank you!

Thank you!

I'm not sure what you're referring to here-plugging in a MIDI keyboard to the Ambient and then wanting to connect the keyboard to a DAW simultaneously? In any case, USB would certainly be nice for other things as well, like transferring samples, presets, etc.!

Love your instructions and seeing them come to use here. I have learned the power of this machine quickly thanks to you! Would be nice to hear your thoughts on using it together with other gear. Eg something that generate drum sounds

​@@DavidRinnan Thank you! Glad to hear that! To answer your quesiton, I've used it in a very non-ambient way with my SmplTrek, just using the latter as a simple drum machine (any sampler or drum synth could serve the same purpose-the SmplTrek was just what I had around), and I've played my guitar with it a bit, but that's about it so far. To be honest, my favorite thing about it is being able to use it as a standalone device. I like the simplicity and portability of it by itself, and although there are limitations to it, I think there's a lot you can do within those limitations (not to mention limitations are usually a good thing to have for spurring creativity).

@ yeah I agree with the stand alone thing. It’s easy to get lost for a couple of hours ;) without drums

A microphone (Zoom H4N Pro) plugged into the line in of the Texture Lab

Haha, thanks-that might take a while!

@@SonicCartography It will bring more ideas to my generative ambient music app project! th-cam.com/video/ENdBqmJ5RjM/w-d-xo.htmlsi=pBvoHVCml8erqPTD I think I will program my own version of this awesome device!

@@SonicCartography It will bring more ideas to my generative ambient music app project! th-cam.com/video/ENdBqmJ5RjM/w-d-xo.htmlsi=pBvoHVCml8erqPTD I think I will program my own version of this awesome device!

Thanks! Do you mean why didn't I use the patterning chaining feature within individual songs? If so, that's because it's useful for creating more complex, multi-section songs, and I've only started doing that recently; I've been keeping things more simple and focusing more on vertical layering than horizontal movement/development-but I'd like to start doing more of the second thing on this synth as my next focal point, now that I feel like I've gotten a handle on the first thing!

@@SonicCartography Oh, okay, I get it. I have to say, your tracks already feel luxurious in terms of development even without it! I was asking because, in my experience, using pattern chaining on the Ambient Zero has been quite difficult. Honestly, I thought that might be why people tend to avoid it. But now I’m wondering if it’s just a glitch with my synthesizer. The thing is, when I try to chain patterns, they don’t play in the selected order seamlessly. Instead, each pattern repeats multiple times before switching to the next. For example, a pattern might play 2, 4, or more times before moving on, depending on the note length and the number of steps I set. It seems like the synth assumes that each pattern is 16 beats long, and this is hardcoded. So, if I use 64 steps, I need to set the note length to 1/4 for the patterns to chain properly. If I use 32 steps, I have to use 1/2 notes, and so on. But this makes it impossible to use smaller note lengths like 1/8 because this would require 128 steps long pattern. Have you ever experienced anything like this?

@@vitaly6772 Thank you! I think the main stumbling block with the pattern chaining is that the synth moves on to the next pattern in the chain after completing one cycle of the current pattern, but it considers one cycle of the pattern to be whatever the slowest/longest (in terms of time it takes to complete) sequence track happens to be. So, for example, if you have one track (say the drone or noise layer) set to the default 16 steps with the default note value of 1/1, all of the other tracks can be shorter, but it will still wait 16 steps * 1/1 per step = 16 bars to consider one cycle of the pattern complete. I don't know if you already know this or have already taken into into account, but if not, could this explain the behavior you're seeing?

Thanks so much for the reply, this makes a lot of sense! 🙏 At some point, I had a feeling that all layers could somehow affect playback, but I didn’t realize that the default settings of unused layers would matter too. That really clears things up!

@@vitaly6772 You're welcome-glad to hear that clarified things!

I suppose you could use it as an external keyboard, but as for the knobs, I honestly have no idea how the CC outputs of the Texture Lab would map to the inputs of the SmplTrek-if you want to take a look, here are the MIDI charts: Texture Lab: www.sonicware.co.jp/DL/LIVEN_TextureLab/DOC/TextureLab_manual_MIDI_en.pdf SmplTrek: www.sonicware.co.jp/DL/SmplTrek/DOC/SmplTrek_v2_manual_MIDI_en.pdf

@ thanks ✌️

Thank you! I think it's a good choice of first synth! Is there a specific aspect of the MIDI you're wondering about? What are you wanting to do with it? (I'm asking because MIDI encompasses a very wide range of things!)

@SonicCartography I was thinking of pairing it with the arturia keystep yet don't know if I should buy it to use as a midi controller for the liven 8bit and other gear I may use to add.

@@user-fk5nb4vo7j ah, I see. I'll see if I can make a video on things like that at some point. I have a Keystep myself (the most basic model). To be honest, I've only used it with the Warps and other Sonicware Livens a couple of times. The Keystep seems more useful if you have a synth without a sequencer or arpeggiator, but the Livens have both already. I guess the main advantage is just having a more "proper" keyboard to play on, if that's important to you (personally it's not to me)-that and having a chord mode, which the Livens don't have.

@@SonicCartography ah ok thanks👍

Thank you! 🙂

Good question! I don't know why they aren't showing for this video. I'm going to look into it. Thanks for letting me know, and thanks for the support!

Well, I changed some setting that seems to have added automatically generated captions to at least a couple of videos that didn't have them, but there's still one that doesn't have it, which I don't seem to be able to do anything about. Apparently the system just gives up on trying to transcribe some videos for a variety of factors, like audio quality, background noise, etc.

Thank you!

Thanks! Do you mean coud I share a .syx file of the drum loop I used in the video?

@@SonicCartography yes

I'm hoping to put out a video in a few days on how to import presets and samples, and I'll try to include that one with some files I share with it!

@@SonicCartography GREAT!

@ Top!

I wouldn't say the reverbs on the SmplTrek are on the same level as a standalone, premium reverb pedal like those. They're more utilitarian, comparable to the more basic reverbs on something like the Zoom Multistomp, I'd say.

@@SonicCartography Thank you for your reply :) !

@@Mahenounet you're welcome!

Yeah, the screen is small. Nintendo used to make a big magnifying glass accessory for the Game Boy. Somebody should make one for the SmplTrek.

You’re welcome and thanks for watching them! This answer always feels like a cop-out, but it feels unavoidable in this case: it depends… Specifically, it depends on how much and how often and in how many layers you’re wanting to switch things up manually (I mean through live playing of the keys). The more you do, the harder it becomes to accomplish, because the more you have to switch back and forth between layers to do it. Conversely, the less you do, the more doable it becomes, thanks to the hold function and arpeggiator (which can be combined with the hold function). I may cover some aspects of this in one of the upcoming videos I’m planning for my channel.

@@SonicCartography Thank you so much for your reply and your work in general <3

Thank you-I hope it helped!