Sonicware LIVEN 8bit warps

I bought this little synth to add a somewhat eccentric weird lofi sound to my music. I love how much it is easy to use and to achieve interesting sounds. The morph and fm engines are great to create pads and ambient sounds. The attack engine is great for creating that typical 8bit NES games sounds.
On the ergonomics side, the main functions are directly accessible via the knobs (wave types, filter, lfo, envelope attack and release). Unfortunately, some other interesting features must be accessed adding the shift button, like the fx parameters. It can be a bit tricky to play, hold shift and turn knobs at the same time. That's were the arpeggiator and sequencer become handy. Or you might control the device via its midi interface. I don't like this kind of keybed, so being able to control from another keyboard adds much more fun to it. Clock can be synched from midi data, which is a good point too.
The manipulation needed to save a patch or sequence is weird and I can't count the number of times I lost a patch because I couldn't remember the right steps to do it. So read carefully the manual.
In the end, I really like this lofi kind of sound and use it often on my music. It's simple to get a nice sound of it, a unique kind of sound.

1. This synth can be a nice synth for you if this is the only synth you have. But i have more than one. The main problem of the synth is its weird approach to user interface. The synth has many functions but not many buttons and not many knobs, and no screen, therefore big chunk of the functions are done through different combinations of the buttons, which are not intuitive, hard to remember and if you didn’t work with the synth for a week you will forget how to do this or that and you’ll have to go back to the manuals and tutorials. For example this knobs means that, but if you clicked this combo before touching the knob the knob turns into some other function. I wish the synth had a small screen and more buttons and knobs with more intuitive controls.
2. Keys are very loud and feel very cheap, when you press the keys, they shift left or right. Overall comparing to many other modern synths I have this one feels like a toy for kids.
3. The fact that it doesn’t include a power supply was surprising, and unlike many others I have no volcas and had no power supply which fits the synth, so I had to order one and wait for a month for it, this is not some standard power supply and none of my local music stores had it in stock.

Pros:
I like it has built in speakers. It makes the synth easy for quick setup.

Conclusion: if you’re okay with the mentioned above, you can find this synth fun to play with.