MicroFreak : Don't even think about it, just buy it!

I'm a guitar player but I love synths, I had an original plastic 'Wasp' back in the day along with a couple of Roland guitar synths.. More recently I just mess around with software synths in a DAW. I saw on-line videos of the Microfreak and decided to get one and I am super impressed, this thing is a super flexible and powerful beast. The keyboard isn't an issue for me at all but is probably not to everyone's taste - though of course you can play it over MIDI if you prefer. The sound sources are great and varied and the filter and modulation matrix are kinda the icing on the cake.

There isn't much point in me trying to describe the sounds and features here, there are loads of informative videos on youtube but I will say that I find it great fun and simple to use and is capable of making some great sounds. It has CV and gate outs too so now I'm in danger of getting some modular stuff, ha ha!

Out of the box the synth worked great but I did notice a few weird glitches, sometimes filter settings would jump around and the key hold would activate randomly. At first I thought it was just my fat fingers but seemed not. I checked the firmware version and sure enough it was out of date. I downloaded the Arturia MIDI control software and used that to update the firmware and to update the presets to the 1.1 version and all the problems just disappeared, very, very happy. Bear in mind that this is a 4 voice paraphonic synth not just a monosynth, really I don't see how you could do better for the price.