Glide, Hold and four voices
Slide between notes, keep a note ringing without your finger, and switch from one voice to four.
Three controls change how you play. Glide slides the pitch from one note to the next. Hold keeps notes sounding after you let go. Paraphonic lets the MicroFreak play four notes together instead of one.
- What Glide does and how to turn it off
- How Hold keeps notes sounding
- The difference between mono and paraphonic playing
- Why four paraphonic voices still share one filter
The steps7 steps
- Turn Glide up a little (about a quarter), then play two different notes in turn. The pitch slides from the first to the second.
Stuck?
Glide is the large knob at the far left. Turn it up a bit, then play two keys one after the other.
- Turn Glide all the way down. Fully counter-clockwise is off: notes jump straight to pitch again.
Stuck?
Turn the Glide knob fully down.
- Touch Hold, the leftmost icon on the strip just above the keys, play a note and let go. It keeps sounding with no finger on it. Hold is how you play with both hands free.
Stuck?
Press Hold first, then play a key and release it.
- Touch Hold again to let the note go. Then press Paraphonic: it lights, and the MicroFreak is ready for four voices.
Stuck?
Press Hold to turn it off, then press Paraphonic.
- Play a chord: hold three keys together (use computer keys A D G). All three sound at once.
Stuck?
Press three keys at the same time. The computer keys A, D and G make a chord.
- Turn Cutoff while the chord rings: all four notes move together, because they share one analog filter. That is the difference between paraphonic and polyphonic.
Stuck?
Hold the chord and move Cutoff.
- Press Paraphonic again to go back to mono (one note at a time).
Stuck?
Press the Paraphonic button once more.
Glide for slides, Hold for free hands, and Paraphonic for chords. The catch is that all four voices share one filter, so Cutoff moves them together. With Amp Mod on, each voice still gets its own envelope for volume.
On the real MicroFreak
Glide at the far left is off and runs up to about 10 seconds. Glide mode in the Utility menu (Time, Sync or Rate) changes how the time is measured. Hold is not saved with a preset and does not hold notes from an external MIDI keyboard, which should use the sustain pedal message instead. In paraphonic mode a note you hold on the keyboard takes a voice from the sequencer.
Questions2
Is paraphonic the same as polyphonic?
Not quite. A paraphonic synth plays several notes at once but sends them all through one filter, so moving the cutoff changes all the notes together. A polyphonic synth has a separate filter for each voice.
Why is my chord thinner than I expected?
Chords can sound thin on a simple wave. Open Cutoff a little and use an engine with a fuller sound, like Superwave.