This synth restored my faith in Monosynths!

Hello, Oscillator Sync here. I must confess for the past few years I have felt sort of burned out on what you might term traditional mono synths. Not because of the sound or [music] the utility in electronic music, but because well, I guess the fact that I used the word utility sums it up. It had been a while since I'd come across [music] a mono which felt like more than a means to a musical end. It had been a while since a mono [music] synth felt fun, which is why I was overjoyed at Super Booth this year to come across a number of monos [music] which renewed my faith in the genre. Instruments which did something fresh and exciting in their presentation, features and sound, which iterated on traditional ideas in [music] truly interesting and useful ways, leading to instruments that felt fresh and playful without being unfamiliar. One of those instruments was the Swen 2 from Analog Sweden. Based on their earlier rare and relatively expensive [music] Swenizer synth, which itself was based on an even rarer and much more expensive synth called the Energizer, the Swen 2 manages [music] to both add new features while also moving to a manufacturing process that makes it a lot more affordable. It feels like a lot of synth for the money. At its heart, [music] Swen 2 is a semi-odular subtractive synth, but with so many clever little tweaks to its sounding usability, [music] along with some ideas that I haven't really seen in other instruments, as well as a very fun [music] and jammable generative sequencer. All of which add up to an instrument that is a joy to use and yes, [music] extremely fun. Before we jump into the video proper, in the interest of [music] transparency, Analog Sweden kindly sent me this prototype unit for free after meeting the team at Super Booth, but they haven't had any editorial oversight of this video. And as always, I don't show stuff on the channel that I'm not excited about. And this is an instrument [music] I specifically sort out to share with you. I'll scatter some lowalking sound examples throughout the video, and they'll be marked [music] in the chapters if you want to skip around, but a lot of the fun is in the playing. So, let's get to it. So just a quick caveat before we jump into the video proper. This is a prototype unit and it's running a beat version of the firmware. In terms of the hardware internally, it's all sort of present and correct. So what you're going to be hearing is representative of the production model. Uh what's prototyped about the hardware itself is just some of the labels on the front panel. Um notably the LF1 shape. Uh, this thing will say gen rather than beat, I think, on the final version. And I think the filter modes B and C are backwards, but what you're hearing is the synth as it will be. On the firmware side of things, um, it's sort of feature complete in terms of using it standalone. Uh, however, some of the MIDI stuff hasn't been implemented on the beta firmware that I currently have, and that's why I'm going to be using it standalone for most of the video. Uh some of the sync stuff doesn't work quite as well as it should do. That'll all be fixed in the production model of course, but for the sake of this video, we're going to use it standalone because that's how it operates at its best at the moment. So, we are absolutely going to spend most of the time in this video jamming with the Swen 2 because that's probably the best way to learn how it sounds and also it's a lot of fun. So, I I want to have fun with it. But, I do recognize that some people want to hear that raw quality of the oscillator and the filter um before we get going. So, let's uh address those first. So, I'm going to open up the VCA and set the sequence going so we get a bit more of the range. [music] So, on the main VCO here, the analog VCO, we have a switch which moves us between [music] different wave shapes. So, we have a square wave. [music] [music] We have a triangle. It's kind of a buzzy growly triangle. Some triangles sound a bit fluffy. This one's more sort of growly. Lots of weight. We also have a sine wave. [music] I presume this is not a true sine wave because it's a analog VC. It's difficult to do sine waves. Um but a nice option if we want something darker to mix with something else or if we're doing some uh sort of audio modulation to have something more basic to start with. Let's hear it in a higher register. >> [music] >> And back across the other wave shapes [music] and square again. really [music] buzzy, aggressive loads of harmonics to work with, but weighty strong fundamental. [music] Nice. We then have um a couple of modes here where we can modulate the [music] wave shape. So the first one here is just pulse with modulation of the square wave. [music] And it does go really tight. And indeed all the way to silence which is always nice especially when you start modulating it. Let's [music] put some LFO on there. If we offset that so it's going to silence sometimes and we mix it with say the sub oscillator. [music] you can get some really aggressive sounds. [music] And then we have a sawtooth that blends to a square wave, I think. [music] This sounds really good when you modulate it, especially slightly fast and offset like that. [music] >> [music] >> Yeah, cool. [music] We can also turn it off. Uh we also have down here um our oscillator 2. [music] We'll talk a bit more about oscillator 2, but oscillator 2 is digital and it's trying to follow oscillator one, the VCO [music] with an offset, and it's slightly lags. So, what you get is this kind of [music] sort of moving chorus thing going on with it. [music] Yeah, but we'll come back to that a bit more. It can also be a noise source. with an EQ on the tune knob. Um, we also have two subosscillators. [music] So, we have a standard square wave sub oscillator, [music] a big boy. [music] And then we have uh this [music] um sine wave which is at the same pitch as the VCO. What's [music] interesting about this one, we'll play with it a little bit in a moment, is that it bypasses the filter alto together. It always goes straight to the [music] VCA. So we can use that to replace the fundamental [music] if the filter is taken out. >> [music] >> Hey [music] everybody. >> [music] >> Right, let's take a listen to [music] the filter. So, uh, one thing, um, I should mention is that we have a wet dry mix for the filter. So, um, we were just listening to the VCO there, which is really neat. We'll play with that. So, the [music] filter is based on this sort of 4x3 matrix. This top knob will, generally speaking, select the number [music] of poles in the filter. And then the ABC switch will change [music] the quality of the filter, what type of filter it is, whether it's bandp pass, highpass, notch, or low pass, or a different type of low pass actually. So let's have a listen to the basic low pass sound. So this is the least steep version of the filter. [music] Little bit of resonance. And then as we move up the number of poles, we're going to get a still steeper filter cutff. [music] And the resonance goes [music] nice and Oh, hello. nice and ringy. [music] It's a really characterful resonance. [music] Almost like picking out a sort of um a sort of a counter [music] melody there. There we go. Yeah. It pings really nicely. We'll play with that in a bit. So we then have uh the different modes. As I say, these labels are backwards. Uh so on the uh lowest number of poles here, we go over to B. What we'll get is a notch filter. We won't hear anything unless the resonance is turned up. [music] And then on C, we got a highp pass. [music] And because it can track volts per octave, we can definitely do the [music] beefing things up by finding the fundamental trick. Oh, [music] there we go. On the other sets of poles, B is going to [music] be an alternate version of the low pass. [music] So, here's the original low pass. [music] Here's the alternate version. >> [music] >> So the first one's kind of tamer. This one's a bit more driven, a little bit more bottom end maybe. [music] Yes. sort of less polite. [music] And again, we can just increase the number of poles for the steepness there. [music] Yeah. And then on the C we have a band pass. [music] How cool is that? I love sense little [music] counter melody happening in the filter resonance. This is without tracking. It's just the filter being tickled in the right way. As I mentioned, we have a wet dry mix here. So, if you wanted to let more of the original through to make it more of a counter melody, [music] we certainly can. [music] So cool. Al, as I also mentioned, we can also push through the sine wave here [music] if we don't want to have that sort of buzzy square coming through, but we still want to have the fundamental. Again, just number of poles for our tightness of our band pass. [music] >> [music] >> Right, [music] let's um actually jam some stuff. [music] Hey, [music] hey, hey. [music] [music] >> [music] [music] >> So, let's start the sequencer. We're not going to hear anything just yet because the BCA hasn't been opened up, but we'll we'll in a second. We'll talk about how the sequencer works as well. But first, I want to just mention this design principles when two that I really like, which is these modulation source selector knobs uh scattered about on the VCO, VCF, and VCA. Really, really easy way to quickly assign different modulation sources to the different parts of the synth. [snorts] And they also have on them the CV inputs as well. So you can externally CV things, but it also allows you to self patch if you can't get the combination of modulation sources from the knobs. Pretty cool. Anyway, let's get uh envelope one going into the VCA. Cool. So I've got this triggered by the sequencer, which is why we're hearing it. So uh the sequencer is kind of like a Turing machine plus quantizer setup. um but not quite but similar idea. So um we've got a random sequence here. If you want to inject a different random [music] sequence or a different random step, we just press the beat version. [music] I think it' be called the gen button on the final thing. Hold it down, we just get randomness. Let go and it's [music] locked into what we had. So this is going into a quantizer. We can choose which [music] scale it is based on this knob here. or on the end one here if you have a MIDI controller plugged in you can play a selection of notes and it will pick from those notes. Just come back to one of the scales built in. So uh the range knob is essentially attenuator which sits before the quantizer. So this is always outputting the same voltages, but by turning up the range of those voltages, we get different sequences in the same contour, but different notes because we're going higher. Cool. So probability slight misnomer cuz it's not sort of probability based on sort of randomness. And what this really is is that as well as the note values, there's another accompanying value that's being generated by the sequencer. And this sets the threshold to allow that through. It's kind of the gate level if you like. So if I turn this down, some of the notes aren't getting through anymore, but it's not random. It's fixed based on what the values currently in sequencer are. If we put different values in there, we'll get different [music] rhythms. >> [music] >> So between these even if we never change the sequence we get a bunch of different [music] ways that we can iterate on a sequence for jamming with. Finally we have a steps control which sets the length of the sequence. 5 12 [music] 16 which we had eight all the way down to two. And the other thing we can do uh is change the playback mode. So currently it's going forwards. We can go backwards. Probably my favorite will be ping pong. [music] You kind of get a longer sequence out of it. Call on five. [music] And then we have just a straight up random which is fun. Um, but personally I I like to have some order in the sequencing as we have it. I'm go back to ping pong, I think. [music] Okay, so let's start patching some stuff up. Um, let's bring the filter down a bit and maybe have that going based on the same envelope. Now, one of the cool things about Swint 2 is that we can overdrive in different places. So, we can drive [music] into the filter We can also drive the VCA. Just be careful of the levels here. [music] Get things a bit grittier. We also have a straight up clipping in here which is going to run it into some clipping diodes. It's going to drop the volume [music] quite a bit. But again, another sound quality [music] that we have available to us just without even playing with anything else. I think I'm just going to leave it driving into the VCA [music] cuz that's fun. Cool. Right. Put sub in there. [music] Yeah. Maybe get some uh tempo synced random LFI going to the filter as well. [music] >> [music] [music] >> Yeah. Uh maybe let's bring in oscillators too a little bit. [music] That's a certain octave up at the moment. >> [music] [music] >> So, the cool thing about the oscillator 2, if we just um take off filter a little bit, is that it's trying to [music] track the VCO, but if we bring the the shake down low enough, it can't anymore. It's kind of a threshold [music] where it will sort of [music] and that applies even if you're not on something with pulse with modulation. So we can modulate this [music] uh maybe with um LFO1 [music] So now sometimes oscillator 2 is [music] able to track it but sometimes it can't. So you get the drone instead. [music] [music] >> [music] >> So kind of portimento slooh up to there. Really unique. Very cool. [music] >> [music] >> Yeah, [music] let's try something with sort of that ringing filter thing happening. [music] >> [music] >> So um the two LFOs, LFO one is an analog LFO. LFO 2 is a digital one and it can be um tempo synced. [music] This is why we're able to get the sort of tempo synced uh sample and hold type vibes. [music] >> [music] >> Get properly dirty. Yeah. [music] [music] >> [music] [music] >> So, one of the neat things um is that we can trigger the envelopes based off of the LFOs. So, [music] we can get LFO 2 to trigger envelope 2, but it's based on a threshold. So, it's not happening every time cuz we're on the random mode here. So, we can Let's get rid of the random on the filter for a second. We can use envelope to [music] >> [music] [music] >> So now we've got a patch where it's not hitting on that filter on every step now [music] cuz it's only when it hits the random amount here. Yeah. >> [music] >> Push that sign through. Bring that oscillator two back in. Yeah. [music] >> [music] >> Hey, [music] hey, hey. >> [music] >> So, we've got this patch here where it almost sounds like there's two voices going on paraphonically, but also Oh, [music] heat, heat. Oowat. [music] Heat. [music] [music] Heat. >> [music] [music] >> So, let's try and patch up a kind of defammy drum machiny type patch here. So, uh, let's maybe go [music] triangle wave there. And, um, we want to get that pitch sweep happening. So, I'm going to use the same trick as I had before with the random LFO 2 being tempo synced and triggering envelope 2. And if we send that uh yep envelope 2 up to the [music] And then if we have that also triggering the filter to open a bit Okay. [music] [music] Also [music] [music] maybe have [music] Yeah, let's have envelope one always opening it a bit. And then I'll patch envelope 2 into CV input three so that we can also have that going [music] to also open up on the kick drum a bit more. [music] >> [music] >> Hey. [music] Yeah. >> [music] >> Okay. Five step. [music] Yeah. [music] Get that sine wave going straight out. [music] Cool. Okay. Uh what else? Uh let's Oh, so this is [music] get that tracking open up. [music] And then let's get some noise in for oscillator 2. [music] There we go. [music] Cool. [music] Yeah. Got some pulse with modulation. [music] >> [music] [music] >> Maybe try clipping it. >> [music] >> Yeah. [music] Hey. Hey. [music] Down. [music] Heat. >> [music] [music] >> Let's try something a little bit slower and more mellow. So, um, [music] that's too fast obviously. Um, so we can clock divide down a bit [music] or range. [music] I think I'll use the full ADSR. [music] >> [music] >> Um, the offset here is worth turning up a little bit if you want a long release cuz it doesn't start droning until like halfway, but [music] it just gives you a bit more before it closes. Bit of slide between the notes maybe [music] up octave. [music] Uh give it some pulse with modulation. Maybe [music] that one one. [music] Uh maybe we can use just envel one there. [music] for attack still. Use a flight to [music] >> [music] >> it down a little bit. [music] Put a longer attack on the filter. >> [music] >> Maybe a bit of um pitch modulation uh [music] from LFO 2. [music] >> [music] [music] >> I've felt it. [music] All is well. [music] Get some of that sine wave through. [music] Do we need the sub as well? Oh yeah. [music] Very pleasant. One of the things that's really fun about Swen 2 is how many different ways you can layer up rhythmic ideas within the instrument. So, case in point um on uh LFO 2, the digital LFO, we have these stepped uh shapes, a stepped triangle and a stepped sort of sawtooth thing. And uh because we can tempo sync LFO2, it's a great way to get these sort of more sort of rhythmic ideas into a patch. So if we send LFO2 to the filter for example, [music] we've got this sort of rhythmic stepping triangle thing happening. Now if we compare that to what a normal triangle sounds like, definitely got that wobb wob thing. Whereas with the steps, it's very much on the beat because it can be tempo synced. We could also send this to the um the oscillator uh frequency as well. If we can get it sort of in tune. If I just turn the range for a second [music] about there. [music] It kind of more or less some interesting notes in there. Mixes back in with the uh sequencer as well. Uh, and then taking that further, um, with our tempo synced, get rid of the pitch mod. Yep. [music] bring it back into the it'll take it. [music] Talking about our tempo synced stuff. Um, we can have LFO2 now trigger uh envelope 2 because that's uh pitch synced. It's going to hit the top of the spike each time. We can bring that into the filter to layer up yet another rhythmic idea. Um, now envelope 2 uh is on this already. So, I can't just switch [music] to it here. But what we can just do is take the output of envelope 2 into CV3, which is on this other knob. [music] Kind of balance these two different >> [music] [music] >> And we can get these [music] layers of rhythmic ideas to make these really sort of awesome groovy patches. [music] >> [music] [music] >> Hey, [music] hey, hey. [music] >> [music] >> Yeah. Heat. [music] Heat. Heat. [music] right? Let's do something bongy and weird. [music] So, LFO one has two, actually, so does LFO 2 has two different ranges, high and low. And in high, it goes well into audio rate. So, we can send that into >> [music] [music] >> into the linear FM here to get some bongs on the go [music] to bring some photo resonance as well. [music] Maybe um pass [music] >> [music] >> Nice. Longer [music] [music] longer decay there range that we want. Um, let's bring [music] the the sine wave through a little bit [music] up too. [music] Struggling to follow it. Let's try noise. [music] Uh, we want a bit more of it through. So, we could just change the [music] wet dry mix a bit. [music] Bit of sub oscillator. [music] So, I got some tempo synced here. LFO2. [music] We send that into [music] >> [music] >> Maybe also to the filter. [music] >> [music] [music] >> Let's try a different wave shape. [music] Let's try clipping it. [music] Cool. I'm going to shorten the decay there. Speed up. [music] >> [music] [music] >> Yeah. [music] Here's a fun one involving pinging the filter. So, I've got the resonance set where it's almost going to self resonate. Bring it back a tiny bit and the lovely little plucky pings. And the way I'm pinging this is that I've set the uh the pulse width all the way down on the pulse wave. Basically silencing it. And then I'm sending in an envelope from envelope 2, which has been triggered by LFO 2, to very very briefly bring the pulse width into the middle so that it sort of opens up very very quickly, sending kind of like a pulse into the filter to excite it. [music] And I'm modulating the uh filter cutff using the sample and hold on LFO2 which is also going to be synced to when the envelope is firing because that's what's triggering the envelope. [music] And then what I like to do is just going to be [music] hanging out [music] droning because it's not being able to track. [music] Or could use it to send noise in [music] [music] the subs will still be making noise. [music] So we can send that into the filter or we can bypass the filter. [music] The sine wave. [music] [music] The other thing I've done is patched uh oscillator 2 back into uh CV4 so I can bring it in as a modulation source on the filter. [music] [music] Let's do some FM of the pinged filter. [music] >> [music] [music] >> fun. [music] Let's have a little moment for drone, shall we? Heat. Heat. [music] >> [music] >> Heat. Heat. >> [music] [music] >> Heat. Heat. >> [music] [music] >> So, if you were wondering, could it drone? [music] I don't see us. [music] >> [music] [music] >> Believe it or not, given the length of this video, I try not to attempt to cover every little corner. corner of an instrument, as that way madness and 3-hour long videos lie. As I come to edit this video, though, I'm having [music] to resist the temptation to go and shoot new sections about other little cool and thoughtful features, like [music] how I love that you have three gate inputs that normal to each of the next inputs to trigger each envelope together or separately. and about [music] how well it plays with the larger Euroax system in general given all of the outputs or that I appreciate the flexibility [music] that comes with the VCA offset knob being bipolar. There are [music] some minor things that I wish Swen 2 had like CV control over oscillator 2's tuning and the noise tone. And I think envelope 2 would be more useful if you could switch between attack release [music] and attack decay. But ultimately, Swen 2 comes across as an instrument made by folks who really think about how synths can and should operate and how to make them [music] joyful. Thanks for watching. As always, if you enjoyed the video, a like, share, and subscribe always really helps spread the word. Until next time, take care. Bye-bye. [music] Heat. Heat. Heat. [music] >> [music]