Finally got my Octavius Squeezer

[thisnameistaken]

This thing is not for the faint-hearted, but when it's firing nicely it does exactly what it says on the LCD:



I'm still learning to use this thing but I'll post my thoughts and sound clips as I find my way around it. The default firmware is terrible - I can see why so many people were angry when it was first released. The tracking was shocking, and it crashed every five minutes. Flashed it today with the latest version and so far it looks much more stable. I have still had a couple of crashes while editing sounds though, so it's not bomb-proof by any means. The tracking is pretty good but not Micro-POG-stellar - it'll cope with an open E for a second or so. Which is handy because otherwise the tuner would be totally useless. It's still not quite good enough to [i]replace[/i] my tuner though I don't think.

The oscillator sounds good, filter sounds good, fuzz I haven't played with much yet, ADSR settings available on both the filter and the VCA, portamento settings and waveform selection on the oscillator, couple of different mix options between VCO, clean and fuzz signals, it's not really as complicated as it looks if you think of it in terms of synth modules. I'm not going to tell you the interface is "OK" though. Nope. Not even "OK"! It's a pain in the arse.

Biggest downside so far is the triangle and trapezoid waves are a lot quieter than the square and saw, and no amount of filter tweaking seems to sort it out so far. There's plenty of available gain but it can get hissy with too much boost. Maybe they know you can't get unity out of it - the triangle-based octaver default preset is too quiet, surely they'd have sorted that out if they could? I'll probably mail them about that.

Must go, pubs to visit. Impression so far: Sounds very good, bit tricky to play, slightly unreliable, pain in the arse to edit patches.

[EBS_freak]

I'm not overly impressed with it either... especially if you paid big bucks for it. Buggy, pants tracking... and the UI is pretty naff. Compare to the likes of Roland and Boss... Sucked that Chunk closed the door on getting it from Oz...

So much potential... but I hope they sort it out with some proper fixes...

[thisnameistaken]

I think the tracking's pretty good so far, but I'm used to slightly-iffy analogue octavers and stuff. Emailed Chunk yesterday and there are further improvements to the tracking on the way apparently.

Slightly worryingly though, the triangle and trapezoid waves aren't supposed to be as quiet as they are on my box. Hope nothing's broken.

[thisnameistaken]

Got distracted tonight when I accidentally set up a feedback loop inside the Squeezer (it's not in the manual, took me a while to work out what I'd done!) - then used the beat-locked filter stepping to change the pitch of the feedback on the "random" setting, it bleeped away like a '50s sci-fi computer.

Clip below. I got a bit silly with adding both suboctaves on my OC-2 and then cranking up the beat depth (potential pitch range of each bleep), causing some of the higher notes to get too loud for my preamp, so there's some noisy moments after about 20 seconds.

[url="http://teop.org/media/squeezer_robot.mp3"]Bloop[/url]

[velvetkevorkian]

Ha, that's awesome- were you actually playing anything there or was that just it feeding back into itself?

[thisnameistaken]

[quote name='velvetkevorkian' post='416656' date='Feb 22 2009, 03:14 PM']Ha, that's awesome- were you actually playing anything there or was that just it feeding back into itself?[/quote]

It needs an initial input to get going, but you can just touch the tip of the input jack or whatever then sit back and let it go nuts.

I've also found that if you switch on the gate on the fuzz circuit and set the filter to envelope-following, you can do laser noises. And I figure when they release the update that allows an expression pedal to use the aux. jack you could stick a volume pedal after it and you've got a crude theremin. Although it might be tricky to play with both feet.