Arturia MicroFreak Reviews

Great digital synth

Has all you need from a digital synth. The keys are something to get used to, but fun new way of control none the less.

Powerful digital synth with analog filter

This is a very powerful digital mono synth (or 4-note poly) in a small form.

The sounds has a slight harshness to it, being digitally generated. But it sounds amazing when combined with other effects, like reverb and delay.

I like the spice and dice features, they enhance inspiration.

A lot of fun and good starting point if you want to get into Synths

Relative cheap but very powerful, and with good sounds. Taken the size and price the feature set is quite incredible.

The keyboard is fun, but can be very fussy about being grounded, so you can experience issues with keys working a bit erratic.

Good place to start if you are getting into synths.

And for me quite inspiring to just have a pair of headphones and a powerbank, and taking it the go and jamming.

A fine synth

Very nicely priced for what it does. I wouldnt say its a beast, but its definitely more than a toy. The weird keyboard is fun and lends itself towards playing it differently than normal keyboards- but also makes it very easy to accidently press the wrong notes...

Powerful, versatile and affordable

MicroFreak is my first hardware synth - before that I was using VST's but I don't feel like I want to go back.

What's great about it is that it let's you to choose what type of oscillation do you want to use and shape the general sound and then real fun begins with matrix mod, that simply put lets you define the relations between the components of the synth. You can create harsh or smooth basslines, drums, ambient pads, arpeggiated sequences - versatility is what makes it worth checking out.

Moreover it has built in sequencer, that lets you to use it either as a step sequencer or record in real time. There's also a possibility of randomising sequences via slice and dice function.

Keyboard might feel a little weird at first, but it has it's pros - it features aftertouch, you can assign it to control other parameters depending on how you use it, it has hold function that comes in handy while playing live or tweaking with sound texture. It's also super responsive.

The amount of functionalities might seem a bit overwhelming for a beginner, but there are a ton of instructional videos on Youtube that will help you to get through the learning process, Arturia is publishing resources as well and they are still supporting the synth - it had free firmware update in January 2021 that introduced new features. Upgrading process is quick and seamless via dedicated software that you can download from their website. Software also allows you to tweak certain functionalities but I didn't feel the need to make the adjustments yet.

Since I'm a fan of digital gear, I'm really fond of MIDI functionalities (works great when paired with a sampler - Elektron Digitakt in my case) and possibility of saving your own presets. If you create an interesting preset but you want to experiment a little bit, you can always save what you adjusted as a new preset, without overwriting the previous one. The OLED screen might seem a bit small at first but it does exactly what it needs to and helps to navigate through the menus without any issues.

The way the MicroFreak is designed is also very well thought out in my opinion - once you get a hold of it (I totally recommend checking instructional videos or reading a manual), the whole interface gives you a lot of information by just looking at it thanks to all the leds it features which comes in handy while playing live or jamming with friends.

I used it both for music production, jamming and on stage and I'm very happy with how it works and how quickly you can apply all the changes to shape the sound depending on circumstances (I love that it features responsive lowpass, bandpass and highpass filter, so you can quickly adjust it depending on your needs). Moreover even if you think that certain sound that you came up with is not satisfying, try pairing it with effect pedals for completely new flavors - I totally recommend using it that way!

Best poly synth for the price at the moment?

13 Oscillator modes and a cycling envelope with an extremely flexible matrix routing system?

The microfreak is my go to drone machine. My one gripe is that the filter is a quiet hard to tame , where I find myself raising the resonance just to achieve a certain sound..

Also, the gain staging seems very low on mine, to a point where im boosting the gain on my mixer by 6db after going thru a compressor just to match other synth levels....

The oscillator modes are so vast and varied in sound, that it makes up for the filter/volume issues.

Also, the I/O capabilities with external analog gear is very useful, to a point that I bought this synth knowing I'd be picking up a Buchla down the road.

So versatile

I bought the Micro Freak to make some ambiant music.

The MF is in fact good for a really large panel of music, and it's sounds is awesome.

It's keyboard is fun too.

For it's price, it's really a winner.

BUT as there are no effects section in it, you have to add some external ones to it. And for this, the MS-70CDR works nicely with it.

inspiration machine

i can not reccomend this synth enough. endless hours of fun. its hard to make a patch that sounds bad. brilliant for the price point as well. 10/10

Awesome synth

This synthesizer is perfect to enter the hardware synth world! It was what I did, and it was the best choice I did. I'm amazed, sounds awesome, easy to work with and very versatile!!! 5/5

A great package for the money

The sounds that can be coaxed out of this small synth are amazing.

Amazing Synth

This is my first synth, but it lets me love synth! I can use this stuff to create various sound, it's also easy to use. I recommend MicroFreak for anyone who wants to play the synth.

Simple but powerful

Simple but powerful synth. Its main power is in its modulation matrix, as well as in its sequencer and the capacitive keybed, which makes creation of evolving interesting sounds on this synth to be real fun.

It is made of plastic so its seems like it is fragile. Other than that I think it is a beautiful synth.

Attaching a reverb or delay effects pedals to it, or applying similar effect plugins in your DAW makes it even greater of course.

Fantastic synth and value.

Best in its Range

Such a powerful machine. Nothing in this price range is close.

The range of sounds is massive, the filter is gorgeous and I was very quickly won over by the keyboard.

A little complicated for newcomers but once you dig deep, there's a lot to do here.

Many great features

Just about worth the money,

The good things are the wide range of sound generating models, the keyboard (suprisingly), the filter, the arpeggiator and the sequencer. The latter two being better than those found on synths costing 10 times the price. Its a lot of fun to play with too. Presets are good.

The bad things are the cheap and nasty plastic case which would have no chance of survival if dropped - the horribly tiny power switch which i think will wear out in time and the slightly flaky firmware which has forced me to reboot a couple of times since i got it.

It also seems to have an issue where it generates noise if I power it down when connected to an active audio channel on my mixer. This is probably an earthing issue which I dont have with any other gear I own. I can live with it - I just remember to deactivate the audio input on my mixer before i power down the microfreak.

A nice, slim, powerful synth.

This is a track started. Just play around with it and you will be flooded with creativity.

The filter sounds great, the mod matrix is simple but quite easy to navigate, the sound engine is very versatile, and there's a surprising amount of modulation.

The only things I wish this little thing had are a stereo out with a unison mode, maybe some simple onboard fx, and the killer one would've been an MPE-like keyboard (for continuos pitch at least).

Great synth for decent prize!

best synth ever

Absolutely amazing, no words to describe it

total fun, quality and inspiration

Wonderful tool for creating crazy sounds. Absolutely love it. Straight of of the box, headphones in and don't look up for a few hours.

Sequencer and arpeggio simple and effective.

Good pre-sets, but you'll not use them after 5mins as so easy to create great sound.

Amazing synth

Everything about it so far (2 weeks) is impressive.

Mapping is straight forward, Sound is really nice, Intuitive layout.

Very hands on & with the combinations between the OSC, Filter & Envelope controls you can achieve a detailed palette in no time.

Very cheap for what it can do.