The Microfreak showed up this afternoon and I’ve spent enough time with it to get solid first and second impressions.
While many of the oscillator modes are directly taken from the open-source code for Mutable Instruments Plaits, for the most part it doesn’t sound like “Plaits in a keyboard.” It’s its own weird little thing.
A lot of people think it’s kind of ugly, but some have said to reserve judgement until you see it in person. I think the only real sin is the graphic strip with the Arturia logo, which is a needlessly busy pattern right next to the already necessarily busy-looking textured touch keyboard. I’m just going to cover that with some gaffer tape.
The touch keyboard itself felt a bit awkward at first but I got used to it relatively quickly. It’s very sensitive, in a good and expressive way once you get to know it. There is a useful Hold button which works for drones as well as the arpeggiator, and the arp can be saved into the sequencer for further editing and manipulation. The “spice and dice” buttons can trigger either permanent or temporary random variations to the sequence which always seem to be musically compatible, if not necessarily brilliant.
There’s a modulation matrix that is cleverly implemented, and modulation amounts can be modulated by other modulators. As in, the touch pressure can increase the amount of vibrato, or an LFO can affect how much the cycling envelope affects the timbre. Circular and self-modulation patches are also possible and quite spiffy.
It’s paraphonic, in that there can be multiple oscillator voices playing simultaneously (with their digital envelope and VCAs) but there is a single analog filter, and a single cycling envelope. Many of the oscillator models are pretty complete without the filter anyway. One particular strength of this setup is that drones or arpeggios going through a single resonant filter can use it to glue the sound together and to emphasize particular harmonics. In fact, the moment I discovered this is when the last doubt about keeping this synth evaporated — I expect this to be one of the major ways in which this synth will fit into my music. I’ve been enjoying drones for hours today already 🙂
Like its predecessor, I have it running through the Elektron Analog Drive. It can add a nice bit of warmth and solidity, or dirty it up beautifully.