And as per part for the course, all the popular YouTubers bomb-dropping their own videos all at once as soon as Korg allows it. This… annoys me a lot lately for some reason and I can’t put into words why it bugs me. Other than maybe it’s always the same group of people, who all think whatever it is from whatever company is just so amazing and awesome, etc.
But back to this. Emily wants this updated MiniMe Wavestation badly. This is the sort of synthesis stuff I adore and miss with the saturation of analog. Glorious digital synthesis. But I’ll probably hold out for a module as I contemplate what has to be sold to make room.
There is always the Modal Argo8 too…It appears similar to me at first blush, in that it is a wavetable synth, and it seemed smaller…I am now going to have to decide which one of those two to lust after more…
I keep forgetting about that one. After my experience with the SKULPT I’d need to read reviews and/or touch one myself, though, or find a review that espouses on the great build quality. Modal seemed pretty proud of their knob choice on the SKULPT
I just watched that Sonicstate video and it does sound good, seems to have a huge scope in sound, 4 layers could give you some awesome basses or bass pads…
After watching the Sonicstate demo (They had me sold on it 2 seconds into the video) I realized the opportunity and untapped potential to present its price point. Also, I retract my statement of it being in rack form, 37 full size keys and the dimensions similar to that of Granny Moog…I can live with a footprint of that size in the room of boom.
I realized this morning that for $800 there’s no aftertouch on the keys at all. The synth responds to it, and poly aftertouch, from an external MIDI keyboard, but yeah. That’s kind of annoying to leave out completely for $800. Are my expectations just too high here?
Not that I even use aftertouch a ton and I’m not a “key player” (heck, I got along with a MicroBrute for years without it). But this just seems like a synth that begs for aftertouch modulation and Korg expects you to supply it from elsewhere.
I can understand how that could be a point of contention at that price, But not a deal breaker by any stretch because the solution to that in a theoretical sense could be resolved by sending MIDI from your DAW. Or if in a pinch I personally would open up the release on the amp+mod envelopes and use the vector sorcery to provide the sustain.
I still would only buy it in rack form, since I am quite happy with my controller.
That said, i am most likely going to get another blofeld rack, since it was a good va synth too, as well as wavetable. Not quite the same as this, but it sounded great and was very capable of a wide range of sounds.
My bet is they’re using the same action as in the minilogue to help keep costs down.
For me, it’s not an issue because I have a Rev 2 with a midi out cable hanging out of the back ready to be wired into whatever I want, and I have an Osmose on order when those come out. Those two would be my preferred master keyboards anyways, and I want modules otherwise to save space. This also means I can’t complain about how short keyboards are.
That said, I got the Microfreak last night and had a blast with it. Spent hours on it, made about half a dozen patches while exploring the oscillators. The keys on that are surprsingly fun for me, and way easier to play than normal keys (I learned on a qwerty keyboard for years, so I’m used to not much travel). Something about that form factor is surprisingly musical, I just dropped into a scale I didn’t know and was getting what I wanted in my head to come out of my fingers for once, which doesn’t usually happen. Might have to use the midi outs and try playing some other stuff with it.
Yeah, those oscillators are really different, in a fun way. Like, first thing I made was a supersaw pad driving into the SEM filter, and that was nice once I livened it up with some LFO to filter Res. But it got really good when I got into the FM and additive oscs, where the oscillator didn’t inherently need a filter to shape the sound. Great FM basses and additive bandpassed bells were dialed in in minutes apiece, and they don’t sound bad. Then I got to the actual metallic striking oscillator and the bells were really good.
The biggest surprise though, had to be the mod matrix. I have a Matrixbrute, so I thought that might have me spoiled when it came to front panel matrices. But no, this is really quick and easy to use, even more so than the Matrixbrute because it’s smaller. I hope NAMM somehow brings new oscillators for this thing via firmware, because I would love even more to explore (maybe a speech mode that goes through a vocoder?)
It’s one of my personal favorites, I mean it almost seems criminal that its as low price as it is.
I will back up the rack statement as a space saver in terms of the small area they occupy, Also the amount of CPU resource you save in your daw makes racks an Ubersmexy Utiliy.
^THISSS. It is inexpensive and looks like it crawled out of a toy store…But the modulation matrix when tweaked in paraphonic mode makes for some very, VERY deep sound design.
It was my winner of synths 2019.
I think part of the Microfreak’s cheaper price is that Arturia used a lot of Mutable’s Plaits in the oscillator. Over half the available oscillator types are from Émilie’s open-source code. This isn’t to take away from Arturia; imo it’s smart to use something readily available and that people are already excited about/love/etc, and on top of it, put it in a complete synthesizer for the cost of one Eurorack module. And it looks like it’s essentially a MicroBrute filter, too. It’s like Arturia took a lot of what was already available to keep development costs lower than they might otherwise be, and gave the 'Freak enough of its own thing to stand on its own very well.
I really like it for what it is, I’m just uncertain about the “keys” because I worry it’d feel too much like playing an iPad synth and I hate that feeling >_> I need to find one locally before I can judge its playability, though tbh I’d like just be sequencing it and/or sampling it anyway.
