Is the Cherry Audio Mercury-4 synth worth it? (Full Demo!) | In the Box | Gear4music Synths & Tech

hi my name is milo melodies and i'm here today at gear for music gif music of course being a wonderful website where you can pick up pretty much any musical equipment you could possibly imagine including software and with that in mind today i'd like to show you cherry audio's brand new mercury 4 synth plugin [Music] [Music] so [Music] one [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] so the mercury iv is a software recreation of a somewhat lesser known synthesizer from a legendary japanese music equipment manufacturer and the original thing that this is based on was released in 1978 and it had the honor of being one of the first synthesizers that had programmable memory there were basically eight buttons on the front and you could store the sound that you'd come up with into computer memory and recall it later which was just amazing at the time you know in many senses it's a very simple machine and to me personally that just makes it really useful it's the kind of workhorse synth that you can use on everything you quickly learn your way around it and i'll talk you through the feature set in a second and so it can become a go-to i really do think so i mean some of my most favorite synthesizers made by that legendary company are very similar to this architecture so if i just get like a simple kind of like you know basic synth sound without too much going on [Music] wow how good is that [Music] hmm that's really great just to sort of blast you through the interface here um at breakneck speed and then we'll go in more detail you've got one oscillator with a sub oscillator we can adjust the mode noise a nice low pass filter and a high pass as well a keyboard follow so that you can track the filter you've got modulation of the filter here by both the lfo and there is an lfo that can go slow and very fast in fact and has different modes it also has a onset so you can have it fade in and then you've got a filter envelope and a amplitude envelope to control the shape of the sound over time and then there is also this kind of um trigger here it's like a sort of clock that can clock an arpeggiator which is down here or sample and hold which can be applied to the filter [Music] which is nice um and then down here you've got tuning control so you can slightly detune the synth drift to make it go analog drifty arpeggiator and then voice controls to control how the keyboard makes the voice work chord mode hold and then very nicely and obviously not present on the original are space echo inspired tape echoes and sort of springy reverb as well which just sound really nice so let me take you into the voice and i will just sort of zero this [Music] out so what you're hearing there's like a stereo effect and that's this ensemble which if i turn it off it's like this kind of animated effect and it was present on the original and it was really i think because it was technically one oscillator and so i think that the designers thought we'll add this ensemble effect to kind of fatten up that one oscillator sound which it definitely does it creates its own kind of character [Music] know it sounds very 80s although it was the 70s now by the way there you actually are kind of hearing two oscillators because i've got the sub octave generator on this is just literally a one switch and what it does is it just mixes in a sub oscillator that is one octave below the note you're playing and it's always a square wave so that's off so there's not like a level slider it's dead simple it's just on or off could not be easier you can adjust the range so depending on the register you want to be in i actually did map this [Music] you can bit more a bass register oh that's very busy very very bassy [Music] i love those kind of sing-song harmonic things that you get uh it most certainly does do them and so yeah you've got a range dial but the other thing that we have is different waveforms so i've also got those mapped that's a saw wave square wave and then a square wave but where we can pulse width modulate change the width of the square wave and in this mode i had mod enabled and that was meaning that the lfo was controlling that pulse width modulation and this can just create really wonderful sort of kind of evocative pad sounds basically i always find [Music] by turning up this little mod fader what i'm doing is i'm applying the lfo to the pitch so i'm also creating vibrato sounds really good doesn't it and of course you've got the ensemble if you want to add more width and kind of 80s personality and then if i move down these sliders the a and the s we'll get a more plucky sound it just sounds super 80s but i like that so then the filter [Music] these kind of like owl sort of sing-song thing which is just so typical [Music] of this type of synth [Music] and we can get some more kind of modulation in the filter we've got the envelope modulation here which is this envelope which is dedicated for the filter we can turn that up [Music] and if you sort of play around with the interplay of the cutoff frequency how high you have the envelope mod you can make the cutoff kind of pew pew through the range that you want also depending of course on the shape [Music] that's a technical tip and then with this velocity you're controlling how much [Music] depending on how hard i hit the keys is how high it goes on the envelope [Music] yeah i like a lot of kind of woozy like modulation on the vco as well you can hear there was a delay there that's the delay time on the lfo and so just to play with the lfo quickly because i can turn up lfo mod here so now the lfo is a low frequency oscillator it's like a slow control signal i can modulate stuff with and by just turning up these sliders you apply modulation to the sort of blocks as it were so that's the one to let me modulate the filter the lfo goes super fast and in fact it goes much faster too if i hit wide it goes up to 800 hertz so you can get some really whacked out things [Music] and then there's different shapes as well so we had sine wave here but i can have a square wave you can use to sort of usually make kind of telephone sounds there you go there's the telephone very very nearly got the sound from uh is that minimum maximum by craft work i might have that wrong might not be minimum maximum but i think you know the one i mean but very wide-ranging lfo in short with oh that's the police sorry that's the other phone police there [Music] [Laughter] wow yeah yeah there you go i've been called and by the way there is a sync button and the sync button will let you synchronize it to your host tempo something that is not possible of course on the original device by the way there is also noise that i forgot to mention so if i turn off the sub oscillator and turn off the waveform here then we just hear noise which can be useful for doing kind of percussion sounds like this kind of thing good also for doing graphic impressions and of course adding kind of like fluff and sort of vintage vibe to other sounds so [Music] nice and then over here you've got this trigger section and the trigger controls an arpeggiator and sampling hole clock and so we can use this if we use the arpeggiator but quickly i'll show you this vcf snh this is a sample and hull which if i turn this up depending on the rate that is here is going to affect the filter and makes that kind of sound which is cool and is also a perfect opportunity to introduce you to the effects tape echo and reverb listen to this [Music] and the other thing is you can synchronize that trigger you can synchronize these effects as well so they're really fun like the effects become absolutely a part of the sound they're super vibey and interesting so they are absolutely not an afterthought or something you don't think that you would use like i've been using these extensively they're great and then coming down here you've got kind of the arpeggio assignment controls and then these sort of performance controls kind of more about how we address the the voice in different ways and so just to draw your attention to one of them which is unison if i put it in mono it's just monophonic but unison takes lots of voices and then lets you detune them [Music] oh [Music] [Music] wow [Music] that's pretty intense and just so you can hear the reverb and maybe the taper in a little bit more detail that's the spring nice kind of burn kind of spraying the plate [Music] nicer dense and haul if you want a kind of like epic synth reverb i think the plate with the longest decay setting kind of does it [Music] getting very quickly into newman territory there [Music] sounds great up there [Music] and then finally just to mention is the arpeggio which is just a wonderful thing uh for poly synth if you engage this through different modes up down up down random and an ability to constrain the top note of what it can play but what's nice is it will play in the order that you lay the notes down and it will move up and down octaves depending on the button that you've got picked so [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] down [Applause] [Music] while we're doing this let's just quickly make another few sounds like just so you can get a sense of the kind of things that the oscillator and filter together can do so get nice and low add sub-octave generators we should be able to make a really soft really like tough base turn up the vca really drive it turn off the ensemble [Music] really mean actually i'll get a little bit of lfo modulation of that going on and then if we put in unison [Music] [Applause] [Music] nasty wow wow [Music] [Music] [Laughter] yes uh yeah [Music] yeah great so i think that kind of is a bit of a whistle-stop tour by the way there is a preset manager an excellent one where you've just got lots and lots of presets there's like over 300 presets included so if you're not a person who twiddles a great deal but just want to find sounds they're organized quite well chords you know keys bells basses arpeggios very straightforward you quickly find your sound and mess around by the way it's also really easy to kind of change the size you can hit control and plus and minus and sort of zoom the interface up and down so you can just make it neatly fill the screen as you kind of see here and so that's kind of the interface and obviously i've been sort of playing around and teaching myself this synth what i've done i've been just making some music or trying to at least make music um and so what i'm going to do is i'm going to load up a session that i've made let's have a listen to kind of mercury 4 being used as the tool to create a whole track so one sec and i'll load this up so we're back and now i've loaded up my tune that i've been making this consists of four instances of mercury four each doing different things and then two drum machines nifonat which is d16 sort of 606 drum machine going through decimate which makes for this a very sort of tough burnt sort of sound which i like very much reinforced with a bit of drummers on 909 style for a little bit of extra kick and basically this is a sort of um kind of italo sort of inspired thing i think you could say and so the four instances mercury four let's play with them first one is doing this sort of enormous base i've made them little here so that we can actually sort of fit them on the screen now i've cheated a little bit here because i've got a huge unison sound but i've put arpeggiator on ableton [Music] because you can't unfortunately arpeggiate you with the building and by jata with unison enabled so using ableton's arpeggiator is a good hack and basically i've got this bass line still midi mapped by the way whatever i've got kind of live here whichever instance i can control and then there are more instances of mercury but what i'll do is add the beating and we'll just kind of play along and talk [Music] next instance of mercury [Music] nice and that is saw waves just a classic sort of paddy sound [Music] that kind of twinkly sort of sound in the background that is sampling hold so that sample and hole to the filter [Music] and then the fourth sound is this kind of like softer sort of bright sound coming down [Music] classic [Music] [Music] [Music] laughs [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] wow [Music] so [Music] spirit so there you have it why fun thing this is the mess with um and i hope it's giving you a flavor of the kinds of things that mercury 4 can do i mentioned of course and we're here in the gear for music channel and world and so if you do want to pick up mercury 4 it is for sale there are links in the description you can pick it up directly from gear for music it is in a crazy price i mean like really for what this is i will be using it so check it out links below thank you very much for watching please subscribe there will be more videos by myself and others so thanks very much and we'll see you next time bye

Channel: Gear4music Synths & Tech

Views: 14,256

Keywords: roland, jupiter, plug-in, synthesizer, demo, review, best, jupiter-4, plug

Id: 1dUWlZrlCNw

Length: 26min 4sec (1564 seconds)

Published: Thu Sep 16 2021