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Hello, Ujiie here again!
It's out! The microBRUTE!
This… Just look at how small the body is!
Right?
I've got a miniBRUTE over here.
But the miniBRUTE
I mean, it's small too,
compact, it's called mini for a reason,
but next to the micro it looks like a giant!
Whatever! It's the mini. And here we have the microBRUTE!
It's micro!
So it figures that it's even smaller.
Damn good job, Arturia! Fantastic!
What's so great about it? Indeed.
I'll give you the complete rundown.
First of all,
the keybed.
The miniBRUTE has full-sized keys.
And on the microBRUTE?
Mini keys.
Both of them are two octave.
But with the size being mini,
the whole thing is really compact.
Nice.
And because it uses mini keys,
there are some of you out there who think
"Huh? It's gotta be hard to play."
But that's not the case at all.
Very playable!
So it's got mini keys.
But Arturia's also got the MINILAB,
so if you think of them as similar beasts,
DON'T. They're structurally different. This one is sturdier.
I'm already used to it.
Well, that's me.
On to the panel. Easy to see that
the miniBRUTE uses sliders and knobs
and a whole mess of them at that.
But on the microBRUTE,
there are knobs all over,
but there are only sliders for the ADSR envelope.
It's been highly simplified.
As you can see.
And these are ANALOG synths.
Let's look at the different parts of the microBRUTE.
First and foremost is the oscillator.
The oscillator section here in the top left.
Oscillator.
Next is the filter.
Right here.
Glide, well, portamento, as controllers.
LFO here.
Envelope here.
AND! There's even a sequencer on it!
The sequencer is a major feature.
Not an arpeggiator, a sequencer.
Big point.
Let's dive in a little deeper.
First, the oscillator section.
In this section we have
as you can see, sawtooth, pulse
and triangle waveforms available.
Let's try out just the sawtooth.
Sawtooth.
Octave settings here.
Mm. A truly pure sawtooth wave.
Above the sawtooth *** is the Ultrasaw ***.
Ultrasaw being layered sawtooth waves,
which adds a much greater thickness
to the sound. Let's check it out.
Right? A bit of motion going on there now.
This is only one VCO,
but with this, it seems warmer, like 3 VCOs.
The sound feels fatter now.
Sawtooth. Next, Pulse.
Pulse waveform.
You can adjust the pulse width.
50:50.
That's about a 10:90.
Yep. The Pulse wave sounds good.
And last up, the Triangle wave.
Yep. This one too. Nice.
This Triangle has got some guts to it.
And just like on the miniBRUTE, you can
use the Metalizer.
This is a special kind of modulation.
Kind of adds a metallic quality to the sound.
Hear how it sounds?
In FM synthesis, with modulator and carrier,
if you gave some movement to the modulator
to get a metallic sound? That kind of image.
This too is a powerful weapon.
But that's not all.
Here in the Oscillator section is a *** labelled Overtone.
This too.
while not included on the miniBRUTE,
well, basically it's a sub-oscillator.
Let's turn on just the Overtone.
Now, above that ***, can you see it?
Leftmost it says Sub, rightmost, Fifth.
(explains fifth in Japanese)
Hear it? A fifth.
I'm playing a C.
But you hear the G coming in more and more?
This is fantastic.
If I play that with the sawtooth added in...
I'll gradually increase the Overtone level.
One octave down.
Now when I turn the upper *** to the right...
You end up with a perfect fifth.
You can get different harmonics using this.
This sounds great!
Nice idea! Being able to go from sub to fifths.
And on to the filter.
It's a Steiner-Parker filter,
the same one that got rave reviews on the miniBRUTE.
It's an extraordinarily good sounding filter.
Very good sound.
Now, the Steiner-Parker filter,
aside from sounding great, has resonance
that when closed,
or open,
well, on a Moog, if you crank the resonance, it has a little bit of low frequency,
but the Steiner-Parker filter,
all frequencies from high to low,
with all harmonics left intact,
are there even with full resonance.
It's really good.
And next up is the
Brute Factor.
What Brute Factor does is
route the output back through the filter,
looping the signal,
creating saturation.
Let me get it ready.
Right around this point here.
It's getting saturated.
I'll turn it back down now.
This is super cool.
Great!
Next!
Down here we have the mode switch.
Low pass, band pass, high pass.
The high pass is really sharp!
That's really unique.
Next, bandpass. Bandpass is low and high pass together.
There's a Keyboard Tracking *** too.
The higher you play, the more pronoinced the filter is.
And the Envelope Amount ***.
By using this,
you can adjust the envelope amount,
how much the ADSR affects the filter.
This is really good.
Let's go on to the bottom row. Glide first.
This works on the distance
between two keys, points A and B,
smoothing out the tone.
There's a switch that determines what
the mod wheel does. LFO for example.
The LFO controls are over here.
Or cutoff frequency.
That's what that does.
On to the LFO section.
The LFO adds vibration.
Change the rate.
Or the waveform.
You can set it to Free, controlled by the internal clock.
Or you can have the sequencer here control the clock.
Next is the VCA envelope amount ***.
You can choose to have the VCA use the envelope,
or you can set it to gate, which sounds only when a key is held.
Kind of like how an organ works.
That's that.
Overall, it's really quite simple.
But there's one more big point.
I'll get to the sequencer later.
I'm talking about this section up here.
We have a Modulation Matrix here!
Well it sounds like May-trix in English...
Modulation Matrix!
There's a CV Out column.
Two outputs there.
Envelope on top and LFO on the bottom.
You can route those
to the Metalizer, Sawtooth wave, Sub oscillator,
Pitch, Filter or PWM.
Pulse Width Modulation.
Those are your options.
This is really well thought out.
Good job!
So for example you can take the LFO
which is inactive right now,
the LFO does this,
puts vibrato on the pitch,
you can take that,
if you think you wanna put it on the filter,
well then, here you go.
Well there it is, on the filter!
Or you can do PWM.
You need to have the pulse wave on,
and then the width of the pulse waveform
gets modulated by the LFO.
That's what it does.
There's only one envelope, ok?
When it's not active on anything,
uh, now it's set to filter envelope,
via the Filter Amount ***.
Anyway.
You can always take the envelope and put it on, say,
not the filter but the Metalizer.
Controlling the amount of Metalizer.
The amount of Metalizer,
changing to follow the envelope settings.
The point of all this,
is that the extent to which you can route CV is great.
I'm sure people look at the panel and
get upset that there's only one envelope,
but that's not so.
You've got lots of options.
Another thing about this,
I've only got one hooked up at the moment,
but if you used a Y cable, you can simultaneously
tweak two things with this.
Some kind of adapter cable, ok?
This is really, really good.
I quite like it, to be honest.
Excellent!
And finally, the sequencer.
The sequencer on this thing!
It's awesome!
Right now it's off, I'm just playing the keys.
Turn it on and...
If you look here you'll see that
you have eight patterns to choose from.
Here's number one.
Three.
So how do you go about recording a pattern?
It's really easy.
Put the switch to the Record position,
The LED here lights up,
and it's ready to go. Ok?
That's it. Play.
You can control the tempo via this *** here.
Because it's a sequencer, it works on whatever key you press.
Fantastic.
Pattern two next. Ah, that one has been recorded into pattern one.
Let's try pattern two.
You can put rests in too. You just use this rest
button, the Tap Rest button.
So, here we go.
And that's that.
Number one.
Two.
Numbe three. Let's record another.
And it's in there.
Eight steps.
Eight patterns.
8 X 8 = 64.
64 steps in all.
Very nice!
Hold down a key and tweak some knobs.
This is fantastic.
Nice idea! The sequencer.
You know, an arpeggiator...
The miniBRUTE's arpeggiator is a powerful weapon,
but having a sequencer? Yeah, that's
a whole different kind of useful from the miniBRUTE.
This thing...
It's LIGHT!!
Right? And it's SMALL!!
But even so, it's powerful!
It has Matrix Modulation.
And lots of other features!
Infinite possibilites!
And looking at the rear panel, we find?
MIDI. USB.
A line output.
CV Gate!
It's properly equipped with Gate in and out!
You can hook it up to analog synths
or sequencers and go wild!
And this button extends when pushed for fine tuning.
There's an input too.
You can run vocals or guitar in.
There's an input level control here too.
Yeah, it's pretty awesome.
Of course, it's 100% analog, so
both the microBRUTE and miniBRUTE
have no memory banks.
That's fine! Who needs it anyway?
How it's set is the sound you get.
It's just about perfect.
Absolutely top-notch!
The miniBRUTE too.
I LOVE IT! I use it.
THIS. Mini… Uh..
The miniBRUTE & microBRUTE combination.
Yeah, I plan on putting it to use.
MiniBRUTE & microBRUTE, as you'd expect,
awesome products from Arturia.
As far as analog synths go, they're
just about better than the rest right now.
I can see myself having a long relationship with these,
I'm sure to put them to good use.
The Arturia microBRUTE!!!