Arturia MicroFreak Review

Zzounds has been supplying me with various gear to demo, and one of my first picks was the MicroFreak.
This synth seemed very unique and interesting, and I wanted to start out with something more budget friendly.
MicroFreak combines various digital oscillator modes, including ones from mutable instruments and noise engineering.

A rather simple synth over all, I found it a bit tricky to “sound design” with.
Each osc mode has 3 controls to adjust tonalities, this is then fed into a simple analog filter, after that you get a cycling envelope and LFO.
In some ways MicroFreak reminds me of the Korg EMX with its various synth modes and simplistic voice architecture, as well as step input sequencing and motion recording.
The lack of voice controls is made up for by the sheer number of oscillator modes, and the inclusion of user wavetables

The Build is all plastic and PCB material, but feels surprisingly sturdy, and just has a nice “look” about it. The knobs seem oddly tiny, even though they aren’t any smaller than ones I’ve used on other synths, something about them just feels miniaturized. I appreciate the attention to visual hierarchy, with the osc encoders being orange (the 3 parameter controls feel VERY nice and smooth), detented selection controls being white, and all the potentiometers being black with a white indication line, besides the filter cutoff, because cutoff is always special. It’s just an easy synth to navigate at a glance

Some of my favorite modes were the modal and karplus strong physical modeling algorithms, FM, and the voice synthesizer. They all had a unique clarity and quality often only found in software. It’s worth mentioning the Noise Engineering modes, they aren’t quite my cup of tea, being simple textured noisy buzzes, but they did offer an incredibly unique set of sounds for an entry level synthesizer.

Kraplus Strong: This mode uses a tuned delay to simulate acoustic strings, the “bow” control injects white noise into the delay line to sustain the tone. Position shifts the attack harmonic to simulate plucking from different parts of a string, and Decay changes the feedback depth to give longer or shorter plucks.

Modal: Modal works very similarly to Karplus Strong, but instead uses tuned filters, giving it a rounder and softer over all sound. The inharmonic control spreads the tuned filters away or towards each other to create glassy tones, a position of 25 is tuned to the harmonic series. The timbre control filters the exciter to reduce harmonic complexity, and decay increases the resonant feedback of each filter to ring out longer. This mode is perfect for all sorts of plucks and atonal sounds

Two Op. FM: Fm synthesis, I wont bother explaining it here, but simply this mode is a 2 operator fm engine, with a ratio for the second osc, modulation depth, and feedback. It gets pretty mean and gnarly pretty fast, perfect for harsh basses or metallic percussion

Speech: This mode is really fun, it comes with a bank of words and vowels, and a timbre control for shifting formants. Really just a great tool for injecting robot voices into a track. Words range from the alphabet and numbers, to colors, to synth terms to the NATO phonetic alphabet. I’ve found that some adjustment of the word bank can lead to insane glitchy tones, not sure exactly how to repeat this, but it can be a fun source of sample material.

Noise Engineering: The Noise Engineering algorithms are fun, don’t get me wrong I know I said they weren’t my cup of tea, but they are capable of A LOT. Mostly noisy textural harsh and bright synth sounds. Each engine has its own unique blend of harmonic, distortion, and noise flavored controls

WaveUser: The user wavetable mode is a huge selling point here. You can import up to 16 .wav wavetables into the MicroFreak and use them as you would any other oscillator mode. Importing requires the Artuira MIDI Center software, but is pretty straightforward and simple. I used it to import 16 tables from my wavetable pack, I didn’t do any close inspection or comparison, but they sounded correct, and smooth, and full resolution. Being able to import your own wavetables means you can design sounds in a software synth like vital (even use the resynth to wavetable function), then import it into MicroFreak for use outside of the box. It was so nice hearing my tables come from a piece of hardware for once. 16 is rather limited, but one neat thing you can do in MicroFreak that you can’t in software, is actually modulate between the 16 wavetables, if only it allowed for crossfading between tables…

The step sequencer and mod matrix really make up for Microfreak’s other short comings. Being able to freely assign 3 destinations via turning a knob is a clever UI feature and lets you explore a few more combinations that would otherwise be overlooked in a typical matrix style routing system. Some surprising destinations that MicroFreak allows you to route include: Arp octave range, Arp rate, LFO rate and shape, and even the oscillator type. All of which are fairly uncommon on many synths, so the ability to control these via an LFO or even key pressure is pretty wild.

I also want to talk about the cycling envelope, which can be used as a simple envelope, or as an lfo with some unique shaping controls. It has quite a wide range going pretty far into audio range, and with the shift control you can adjust the rise and fall shape. Playing around with the fall rate when modulating filter cutoff or other controls can lead to some very natural sounding cross modulation, I generally don’t find digital synths to do this type of modulation very well, but perhaps between the filter being analog and the oscs being designed for modular, MicroFreak just happens to allow you to play with those types of sounds more.

The step sequencer can go up to 64 notes, and you can add a little “spice” via the expression controls to keep things interesting. One neat feature to the step sequencer is the ability to swap between two different patterns on the fly, you can record a separate sequence and motion to slots A and B and tapping them hot swaps from one pattern to the next continuing from the next step the last pattern would leave off. This makes for some fun groove swapping and melody combination ideas. I was very impressed that the motion sequencing is not only per variation, but can be assigned to different controls for each part.

Personally I don’t think I’d use this synth all too often, it seems fun for playing into a looper and stacking layers, and for early sound designers, it is an easy way to explore a wide variety of synthesis types, without having to deep dive into all the fancy features and settings you might encounter in a typical wavetable, or fm, or physical modeling synth.
if it were up to me, I’d stick 4 of these in one box, drop the key bed in favor of a tr style step sequencer and add a drum track to call it a groove box. I think it’s a fun engine, that I’d love to explore in the context of beat oriented programming, but as a keyed synth it sorta falls flat

I will say, the touch key bed is rather fun, light taps impose a unique play style that full sized keys or pads don’t quite match, the pressure sensitivity is fun and the surface is significantly larger than the touch bed of a Volca. If you’ve ever been disgruntled with phone or ios synth touchscreens you’ll find this WAY more responsive, the surface is less “slick” compared to a screen, allowing for easier slides, and the textured pads w/ rivets give a nice tactile feel, allowing you to take your focus off of holding the correct position. The only real downside is the black keys are raised with sharp edges, making sliding from white keys up to black keys nearly impossible.

I think this would be an incredible intro synth, especially for anyone looking to dabble in sound design or interesting tones w/o getting too deep into understanding. I really hope they take this “freak” line further, with maybe a more groove oriented machine or something with a higher poly count. While it’s not for me, I would suggest this synth. For anyone looking at grabbing a couple Volcas, consider picking this up instead, you get more synth types, more preset slots, larger keys, and generally more controls than any Volca combination (I love the Volcas too)

if this article helped convince you to purchase the MicroFreak, please consider using one of my affiliate links below. (after you have searched to make sure you can’t get a better deal elsewhere)
MicroFreak: https://bit.ly/3QHftSS
Zzounds: https://www.zzounds.com/a--3979412