Sonicware are a Japanese company that takes pre-orders and ships out their Liven keyboards once orders reach a set goal. It’s not exactly playing hard-to-get but more like hard-to-test these little performance machines. I’ve not seen them in shops in Australia, but I did find a listing on eBay Australia for the Ambient0 – the only version that really appealed to my imagination. The owner didn’t like it and put it back in the box (I wish I could make a decision that quickly) so I ended up with not a bad price without the anxiety of shipping. https://sonicware.jp/pages/liven-ambient
Even though it’s ‘ambient’ it’s driven by a performance step sequencer – four channels of synthesis in bars and beats – with parameter ‘locks’ on each note of the type introduced by Elektron’s Octatrak et al. – but being vastly cheaper you can forgive the quirks a lot faster.
It’s not a drum machine, rather a wafty pads machine. The basic waveforms are wavetables, which are then subjected to FM, AM, Harmonic distortions etc. as part of ‘blendwave’ modulation which quite frankly I don’t fully understand given that the tiny diagrams on the machine are a bit 1970’s EPCOT.
Tones are a little rough at the edges (like you get from most wavetable synthesisers) but respond well to multiple format filters and a big old shimmer reverb at the end. The demo sequences are very promising but daunting – it may be some time before I reach that level.
There’s four sequencer/audio channels, by default sent to Drone, Pad, Atmos and Noise, which can be reassigned. Here’s the EPCOT picture.
Noise is a set of built in samples – rain, water, wind and other vague things – the noise can also be your own 8s stereo sample.
Although they promise that you have room to use both hands at once it’s still quite a busy little thing. There’s a simplistic musical keyboard, kind of OK, many buttons and knobs which have both SHIFT and FUNCTION alternatives, so yes, you are going to be lost for the first few sessions. You won’t know what’s going where, which waveform you’re using, the ‘blendwave’ will be kind of random and all the usual joys of a musical Hewlett Packard calculator.
The size and weight is good for table top performers but I’m more interested in trying it as a module, with a better keyboard, hopefully with MIDI running each of the channels. (That puts me at odds with most synthesists these days who like to have a lot of boxes everywhere on the table – I wore that out in about 1980-something.) Still I reckon I could get away with this as my whole hippy park set.