arturia minifreak In the Lab: Arturia MiniFreak V (and MiniFreak redux)

[Dr Mike Metlay]

Hello, everyone! With the recent release of Arturia's MiniFreak V software to the general public – it had previously been released only as free companion software to the MiniFreak hardware synth – I've decided to focus some attention on it for those who might now be tempted to dive in. I also plan to cover some elements of the MiniFreak synth along the way, wrapping up the description/discussion of the MF begun by our esteemed Brother Steve F.

 

I recommend that you start with the original GearLab discussion. Once you've done that, please return here, where I will continue to elaborate upon this amazing platform in detail, and smother you with my eccentric and contentious personal opinions!

 

Many thanks in advance for your attention,

 

mike

[AnotherScott]

I just checked out the hardware review...

 

On 10/29/2022 at 3:03 PM, Stephen Fortner said:

this thing is the new MicroKorg

 

From that perspective, I'm also curious about the pros and cons of the MiniFreak vs. the Hydrasynth Explorer... and vs. the Hydrasynth Explorer augmented with this MiniFreak V software, taking advantage of the VST controller features as discussed here... 

 

 

[Dr Mike Metlay]

Those are very good questions, and I will address them if I can! I have an Explorer, and my current plan is to use it with MiniFreak V as you'd mentioned. That will be later in the review, though. Thanks in advance for your patience!

 

mike

[Dr Mike Metlay]

In this thread, I will differentiate when necessary between:

 

- the hardware MiniFreak keyboard synthesizer (which I will abbreviate as MFS or 'the synth')

and

- the MiniFreak V software plug-in (which I will abbreviate as MF V or 'the plug-in').

 

Here's the thing: "When necessary" really translates to "very rarely". I will nearly always be discussing the architecture, features, and philosophy behind the synth and the plug-in simultaneously, as if they were the same thing.

 

I can get away with that because they pretty much are the same thing.

 

In terms of learning how this thing works and what makes it cool, you sacrifice practically nothing by treating them as one device. Whenever I want to illustrate a concept, I'll use the plug-in and take a screenshot. If you have the synth in front of you, it should be pretty straightforward to make the mental connection, and when I feel it isn't, I'll help you.

 

Of course the synth and plug-in have very different user interface experiences, and digging around will reveal places in the architecture that are different – the most obvious example being the Analog Filter circuit in the synth vs. its digital model in the plug-in.

 

There will be places where it's appropriate to discuss one vs. the other, for example in how the Arpeggiator and Sequencer are implemented. There is also an entire section of the plug-in that is only useful when the synth is attached. But again, that's almost entirely UI stuff. 

 

For the purposes of learning what makes these things special and wrapping your head around how to work with them, you will almost never fall down if you start with the assumption that they are identical. That's how I'll proceed because that's what I want to teach. What makes a GearLab review valuable is its interactive nature, its deliberately opinionated slant, and deep dives into the guts that you usually won't get in a YouTube video, of which there are plenty now.

 

If you really do want all of the nitty gritty details of how to turn a knob, navigate a menu, or when you have to hover, click, drag, right-click, Option/ALT-click, Cmd/CTRL-click, or Shift-click, you should read the MiniFreak manual and the MiniFreak V manual, which are free to download on the Arturia website. Arturia trusted the same idiot to write them both, and anything having to do with the sound architecture, he pretty much plagiarized what he wrote for the synth when he did the manual for the plug-in. Arturia was cool with this, because as I said, there's effectively no difference.

 

Next up: the whole story on the Oscillators. See you then!

 

mike

 

 

 

[Dr Mike Metlay]

Digital Oscillators

 

The Oscillators (Osc) on the MiniFreak are its most distinctive feature, and are really the center of its sound. Everything else is pretty much window dressing. Because of that, it’s important to understand everything they can do. So!:

 

The MicroFreak gained attention for its single Oscillator. Personally I found its sound fairly unconvincing; no matter how powerful that one oscillator was, it was – well – one oscillator. I have rarely found the sound of a synth with only one oscillator per voice to be compelling; there’s too much missing in the form of modulation and expanded tonality.

 

The MiniFreak, on the other hand, is a totally different beast. Not only does it have two Digital Oscillators, but the second one does a hell of a lot more cool stuff than the first one does.

 

An Osc, as briefly discussed by Bro Steve, has multiple Types, each with three specific parameters, controlled by the orange encoders. It’s important to note that not only are all three parameters available to be modulated, but so is the Type! You can morph between Osc Types in mid-note… which pretty much qualifies this as one of the freakiest synths ever made, even before you do anything else.

 

On the MFS, obviously the names on the front panel can’t change – the three knobs are labeled Wave, Timbre, and Shape. This can be tremendously confusing, because several of the Osc Types use those words but assign them to different knobs… so you control the Shape with the Timbre knob. Yikes. (The OLED displays the proper names for the parameters, with the mad scientist beakers are bar graph indicators.)

 

On MF V, of course, the knob labels change with the Type, and the Type itself is shown above the display on the “file tab”.

 

OSC 1

 

The first Osc is nearly identical to the MicroFreak’s. It offers 15 different Types.

 

Basic Waves

…is not all that basic, to be honest. You can do a lot with this Type, not only emulating analog VCOs but doing some neat tricks they can’t easily do.

Parameters:

Morph changes the waveform: Square at 0, sawtooth at 50, double saw an octave up at 100.

Sym changes pulse width when Morph is below 50 and does some interesting phasing stuff above 50. Modulate it and you get everything from basic PWM to unusual evolving timbres. Very slick!

Sub adds a sine wave oscillator one octave down, for that low end girth that makes you smile.

 

SuperWave

We all remember the Super Saw on the Roland JP-8000 and how it conquered the known universe for a while, right? Multiple copies of a single sawtooth wave created by delays, then modulated for thick detuning. Well, that’s what this Type does, but with a lot more options. This is one of my favorites, because it’s so damn juicy.

Parameters:

Wave lets you choose between four starter waveforms: sawtooth, square, triangle, or sine.

Detune spreads the tuning of the copies, from too little to too much, season to taste.

Volume sets the relative volume of the copies vs. the original wave. The next knob over is also labeled Volume, but that controls the overall Osc level, not the mix.

 

Harmo

Additive synthesis for dummies – or at least for people who don’t have the saintly patience to add up partials for the rest of their lives. Up to eight partials are presented in a preset “table” of harmonic relationships, and there are a bunch of tables to choose from.

Parameters:

Content chooses the table. Higher numbers have more harmonics = brighter sound.

Sculpting morphs each harmonic from a sine to a triangle wave, which basically turns every harmonic into a set of several harmonics. Thick!

Chorus adds chorus. Thicker!

 

KarplusStr

You've probably heard about the Karplus-Strong physical model, which uses an exciter and a resonator to create the behavior of bowed strings or struck drumheads. This Type gives you both Bow and Strike sounds, and lets you mix and tweak them a little bit. Very simple, surprisingly effective.

Parameters:

Bow sets how much Bow sound there is.

Position controls the drumhead impact position (and therefore harmonic content) of the Strike.

Decay controls the damping of the resonators.

 

VAnalog

This goes in a different direction than the Basic Waves Type. It generates a combined pulse and sawtooth, with individually tweakable waveshapes.

Parameters:

Detune changes the pitch of the saw vs. the pulse, which stays fixed. ±2 octave range but with pretty fine tuning available if need be.

Shape messes with the pulse width and can generate hard-sync gnarl when cranked up.

Wave messes with the saw shape from triangle up to gritty saw with extra harmonics.

 

Waveshaper

Waveshaping is a cheap and cheerful way to generate some pretty cool waveforms. The example in the manual is: start with a triangle wave, speed up the rise time of the cycle while holding the fall time steady, and the triangle becomes a sawtooth. This Osc also has a wavefolder, which “folds down” tops and bottoms of waveforms to create new harmonic relationships. This is a huge fave of mine – modulate all three parameters with different-rate LFOs, press a key, and we’ll see you next week when you come back to reality.

Parameters:

Wave changes the waveshaper output. With Amount and Asym at 0, you get a smooth sweep from a sort of rounded square wave to a sine wave to a sine an octave higher, with really cool waveforms in between.

Amount adds in the wavefolder. Harmonics appear rapidly as the wave is folded, then the folds are folded…

Asym tweaks the waveform’s asymmetry, as described above. Waveforms start to look and sound more like sawtooth waves than sines.

 

Two Op. FM

For those of us cavemen who never really got the whole FM thing, here’s an easy version with only two sine wave operators – one carrier and one modulator that can feed back into itself. This isn’t the place for a tutorial on FM, but suffice to say that you can get simple versions of the piano, bell, and organ sounds FM is famous for with relative ease. If you set both Oscs to this Type, you have a pair of these chains, which basically is the same as one of the more popular 4-op FM algorithms but with two feedback loops rather than just one. You too can sound like a Yamaha DX9. Yaaaay ’n stuff!

Parameters:

Ratio sets the ratio of the two operator frequencies. Simple ratios (e.g. 2:1 or 1.5:1) create clean harmonic sets, other ratios create inharmonic frequencies that sound like ring modulation.

Amount adds bright inharmonic color by changing the modulation index. Anyone who asks me to explain what a modulation index is will be ignored, as I have no freakin’ idea. (Caveman, remember?) Just futz with the knob and hear it for yourself.

Feedback creates overtones and detuning effects when you crank it up.

 

Formant

So what’s a formant? It’s a frequency that stays fixed even when the pitch changes. (Formants created by the vocal tract are why men and women sound like, well, men and women.) This oscillator pushes a waveform through two adjustable formant filters – and for an extra cheap thrill, the waveform itself is created by (brace for the buzzword, kids) granular synthesis. Modulating these parameters creates sounds that imitate vocalized vowels and dipthongs like aaa, ooo, oeeee, aiii, and so forth. There are some cool sounds to be found in here, but they’re wedged in between a lot of not-cool sounds. Hopefully some of you have more patience for this than I do.

Parameters:

Interval sets the ratio between the upper formant and the base formant: an octave, a fifth, etc.

Formant sets the base formant’s frequency.

Shape tweaks the width and overall shape of the formant; think of a Q control on an EQ peak.

 

Speech

Remember the Speak and Spell? Now you can play one. What’s cool about this version is that you’re provided with a number of libraries of premade sounds, and all you have to do is dial in the library you want and then modulate it to index different sound types. Naturally the first preset I created with this Type was one that sang “Alpha, Bravo, Charlie… X-Ray, Yankee, Zulu” depending on various modulation settings. Whisky Tango Foxtrot?

Parameters:

Type chooses the basic library. These include formant vowels and dipthongs, names of colors, numbers, letters, radio call signs, and of course a nice selection of Kraftwerk-style techy words like “synthesizer” and “waveform”. Why? Because why the hell not?

Timbre futzes with the formants to change the tonal quality of the voice.

Word selects particular sounds within a library. Because there are dozens of words per library, this can be very fiddly and requires careful modulation setting to get controllable results, but when you get it dialed in, it’s a blast.

 

Modal

If you want to try a different direction in physical modeling than KarplusStr (see above), the Modal oscillator gives you a way to create percussive sounds from a modeled exciter and resonator with damping capability included. Looks and sounds simple – but this is one of those “sleeper” Types that is super-easy to get great sounds out of. If you dig percussion modeling a la AAS Chromaphone, Modal gives you that with less fine control but gorgeous results – and it rewards those big “turn the knob all the way and see what happens” gestures with some real surprises.

Parameters:

Inharm controls the amount of inharmonic excitation: to quote that old Monty Python sketch, it goes from woody to tinny.

Timbre is basically a tone tilt control like you’d find on an old car radio. Here it causes changes in harmonic excitation in order to give you more bass or treble.

Decay controls how quickly resonances get damped. This is a great parameter to modulate using a dynamic per-note source such as velocity.

 

Noise

This noise generator is surprisingly effed up (in a good way). To get perfectly ordinary white noise out of it is actually non-trivial, but  the other kinds of noise it creates are pretty badass – and all very, very digital sounding. This is not a bad thing. You want analog noise? Go play a Minimoog.

Parameters:

Type sets the character of the noise. White (ish) noise is around 50. Below that, there’s what Arturia calls ‘particle noise’, which is made of of grains of sampled noise at lowered sample rates. Above it is ‘metallic noise’, which is high-pitched noise based on mangled square waves.

Rate either reduces particle noise’s sample rate or controls the pitch of the square waves in metallic noise.

Balance lets the Noise Osc do double duty! Turning it up gradually, you go from pure noise to noise mixed with a sine, triangle, or square wave, so the Osc gives you tonal elements to work with in addition to noise – so, for example, using this Osc plus Basic Waves on the other Osc would give you two basic analog waveforms and noise, all at once.

 

Bass

This is the first of three algorithms brought over from the Noise Engineering family of modules. It models a fairly simple circuit: a sine wave and a cosine wave (90º out of phase with the sine) fed through a balanced modulator and quadrature oscillator. This does in fact produce some pretty heavy bass tones – it feels to me like the lower drawbars or bass pedals on a Hammond organ, before you start screwing with the sound in nasty ways…

Parameters:

Saturate overdrives the cosine wave, creating more harmonic content for you to work with.

Fold turns up a 2-stage asymmetric wavefolder, adding different rich harmonics.

Noise shoves some noise into the signal after the first wavefolder stage but before the second. This produces real grit and grime of a sort that you’d hear from an old tube radio warming up.

 

SawX

Noise Engineering’s take on the Super Saw idea – modulate the phase of a sawtooth wave with sample-rate-reduced white noise, thicken it with some chorus, and the result is a pretty surprising range of sounds from basic to barfworthy.

Parameters:

SawMod sets the modulation gain. What does this mean? Really messed-up and aggressive shifts in harmonics (and perceived octave), kind of like hard oscillator sync waking up with a hangover.

Shape sets the chorus amount, which actually is quite a dramatic change to the basic tone.

Noise tweaks how much noise modulation the sawtooth wave’s phase gets. All the way down, you’re working with a basic chorused saw wave; crank it up, and subtle randomness creeps in. Add some chorus, and formerly hard-to-hear changes in timbre leap out of the speakers and punch you in the mouth.

 

Harm

Nothing at all confusing about the naming conventions here, nope! Harm has nothing to do with the Harmo type; it’s a different way to build harmonic structure, that Noise Engineering came up with – complete with nice ways to mess it all up.

Parameters:

Spread controls how the harmonics are related to the fundamental. 0 puts them one octave lower; 50 puts them in unison; 100 puts them one octave higher… and everything in between sounds like a smooth balanced modulator effect.

Rectify simulates the action of a rectifier on the waveform. Lots more harmonics that get nicely crunchy when you move the Spread away from a nice even number.

Noise adds phase modulated noise and clipping to take the whole sound in a sort of sizzly old radio noise direction, with a bit more high-end grunge than what the Bass type gives you.

 

Audio In

Oh, cool, a nice audio input to process my string quartet with a subtle sheen of analog filter warmth! Right? Wrong! This is the MiniFreak we’re talking about, kids. No audio gets through this machine and stays pristine – anything you feed in here gets digitized (badly), shoved through a wavefolder, and then ground to scrap with a decimator. What does a decimator do, you ask? It decimates! Ten samples go marching in – one sample crawls out the other end, covered in blood.

Parameters:

Fold sets the amount of wavefolding.

Decimate controls the amount of decimation. If this control is set to 0, the wavefolder is effectively taken offline, and the Fold knob simply controls input level.

BitCrush adds quantization noise.

 

Okay, that’s a whole lot of typing and a whole lot of information and a whole lot of pretty pictures – but guess what? We’re only about 2/3 done. Osc 1 has all 15 of these types, but Osc 2 has 14 of the same ones plus 7 more… and that’s where things start to get way beyond MicroFreaky and into MiniFreaky!

 

Stay tuned for our next exciting chapter: When is an Oscillator not an Oscillator?

 

mike

[Dr Mike Metlay]

When is an Oscillator not an Oscillator?

 

Last time we covered the 15 different Oscillator Types available for Osc 1 on the MiniFreak. Now it’s time to look at Osc 2, which has 7 more Types – most of which aren’t actually oscillators.

 

Whisky Tango Foxtrot? as the Speech Osc would say. What’s the point of an oscillator that isn’t an oscillator?

 

Many years ago, before the World Wide Web existed and nobody used the Internet but nerds who were okay with text emails and no graphics, a little keyboard came along called the Kurzweil 2000. It introduced a concept called Variable Architecture Synthesis Technology (VAST), which was all based around a very simple idea: if a digital synthesizer is nothing but a computer for creating and processing audio, and you can run blocks of code within it to do a lot of different stuff, why limit yourself to oscillators, filters, and amplifiers?

 

VAST let you design and connect bits and pieces of all kinds: bro Dave will likely correct me on this, but I believe that by the time the K2600 came along in 2001-ish, there were over a hundred different function blocks to choose from.

 

Now, the MiniFreak is no VAST workstation, but it does use a tiny sliver of the VAST concept (or if you really want to be a purist you could go back to Kyma or CSound or well screw it let’s not lose the thread here): if you’ve got the computer cycles to run code that’s useful, who says it has to be limited to what it says on the label?

 

OSC 2

 

Osc 2 can be a second Oscillator if that’s what you want. Of the 15 Types we talked about last time, it can run 14 of them – everything but Audio In, which is Osc 1 only. But of the 7 new Types, only one makes sounds of its own:

 

Chords

You can always play “chords” on a monophonic synthesizer by setting oscillators to different pitches – that is, if you’re cool with strictly parallel harmonies that ignore your key and scale. The Chords Type puts some intelligence into the process, letting single-note lines become chord progressions that actually make sense within a song.

Parameters:

Interval sets the chord type, with the note played as the root (at least at first – see below). There are currently 11 choices for extra voices played above the root.: octave, 5th, sus4, minor triad (m), m7, m9, m11, 6th+9th (69), Major triad (M), M7, and M9.

Inv/Trsp handles transposition rules and inversions: with the control set at 0, the lowest note played is the root and other other voices appear above it. Turn it up, and the note range moves upward… and voices disappear from the bottom of the chord and appear at the top as inversions. This can be modulated, of course. Woohoo!

Waveform sets the oscillator’s waveform. Oh yes, with all the other controls handling the harmonies, we still have to decide what the chords sound like, don’t we? You get a nice set of modeled waveforms to choose from. From 0 to 50, you get divide-down organ and string-ensemble waveforms from something like a Roland RS-09 or Solina; above 50, there’s a set of 16 smoothly morphing waveforms in a mini-wavetable. This can also be modulated. Double woohoo!

 

What about the other six? They take whatever is coming out of Osc 1 and process it further before sending it on to the Filter, essentially letting the MiniFreak act like a MicroFreak on a nasty cocktail of steroids and bad acid. Check this out:

 

FM/RM

Frequency Modulation and Ring Modulation – two of the joyous things you can do with a synthesizer that has two fully controllable and independent oscillators (none of this sub osc crap), and perhaps the main reason why your illustrious Author considers one-oscillator synths to be an inferior sort of creature, fit not for battle but only for cooking in soup. Even better, this Type uses Osc 2 as the carrier – with its selection of waveforms being modulated by whatever hellish delights are coming out of Osc 1. Stupidly fun to futz with and highly recommended.

Parameters:

Wave selects Osc 2’s carrier waveform. This works the same way that the Basic Waves Morph knob works: it morphs from square to sawtooth to double saw as you turn the knob.

FreqMod controls the amount of FM

RingMod controls the amount of RM.

 

Multi Filter

The MiniFreak has an analog filter! Yay! It has three modes! Yay! It has only one filter slope. Yay. It can’t do very many cool tricks, but at least it sounds sorta okay… yay…? Screw it, I want a filter that has multiple slopes and modes the analog one can’t give me! What? Yes, I’m willing to give up an Oscillator to do that if I have to! THANK you!

Parameters:

Cutoff controls the cutoff (no, really?)

Resonance controls the resonance (alert the media!)

Mode is where the fun happens, because there are 14 different combinations of mode and slope to choose from! And they’re not only practical but quite musical as well; they don’t suffer, at least to my non-Poindextrous ears, for being digital filters, whether in the synth or the plug-in. You get Lowpass, Highpass, Bandpass, and Notch, each at 12, 24, or 36 dB/octave slope, plus lowpass and highpass filters with a nice gentle 6 dB/octave slope (and no resonance).

 

Surgeon Filter

This one puzzles me a bit. I understand what it does and what it’s for, but its uses inside a synthesizer’s audio path are a bit less clear to me. Feel free to write in with suggestions for creative uses for what is effectively nothing more than one band of a parametric equalizer…

Parameters:

Cutoff sets the corner or center frequency.

Spread sets the peak/dip width from broad to surgically narrow (get it?).

Mode lets you use the Surgeon Filter as a lowpass or highpass filter like you often get at the far ends of a parametric EQ’s set of bands, or as a bandpass (peak) or notch (dip).

 

Comb Filter

This one’s a lot more interesting to me, because you can create cool comb-filtering effects even before you get to the FX processors. Take a signal, copy and delay it, mix them, you get notches like the teeth of a comb with that distinct hollow sound.

Parameters:

Cutoff varies the frequency balance of the output based on the length of the delay. This corresponds to what would often be labeled as the Manual knob on a flanger pedal. Modulate this with an LFO and you’ve just built your own flanger.

Gain is the mix level of the delayed signal. Turning it down effectively turns it off.

Damping controls how much ringing the filter does – it’s equivalent to a flanger’s Feedback control.

 

Phaser Filter

Using a set of allpass filters to change the phase of a signal, a phaser can create the sort of swirling effect that a flanger does, but with a distinctive tonal character that comes from its filter notches being fewer in number, wider, and unevenly spaced. This filter Type actually makes a pretty good phaser sound, and all the ways you can modulate it give you some seriously cool sound options.

Parameters:

Cutoff controls the frequency range of the notches. This is what you modulate with an LFO for the traditional phaser pedal sound.

Feedback runs filtered content through the filters again for a more intense effect.

Poles are the number of allpass filters in place: every two poles produces another notch. The range here is 2 poles (one notch) to 12 poles (six notches).

 

Destroy

Owners of the MiniFreak will have noted by now that when you select a new Osc Type, you get a little animation on the OLED that tells you what it is. In the case of Destroy, the animation is of a frog swelling up huge and then exploding in a gory mess, leaving gobs of blood and body parts dripping down the screen. One of the few real disadvantages of MiniFreak V is that it doesn’t have any place to show the horror of that animation… but the audio horror that is Destroy is still there in all its vile glory. Wavefolder and decimator and bit crusher, oh my!

Parameters:

Fold controls the amount of wavefolding, and the range is pretty extreme. I personally like the sound of wavefolding over putting conventional overdrive/clipping on a waveform; the new harmonics, resonances, and other crud are way more interesting to my ears.

Decimate increases the amount of decimation, throwing away more and more samples from the data stream. Crackles, nasty digital artifacts, and other unpleasantness, all massively magnified by higher Fold settings.

BitCrush determines the bit depth of the output signal. 16 bits is conventional, 12 bits is nostalgic, 8 bits is really nostalgic, 6 bits is gnarly, 4 bits is actually kind of horrifying. But fun! Don’tcha love it?

 

Next time we’ll talk about the MiniFreak Filter (the one that isn’t in Osc 2). It will be a very short discussion by comparison, mainly pointing out the reasoning behind why the circuit was built (or modeled) as it was. See you then!

 

[Dr Mike Metlay]

The Filter: Analog or Digital? Who Cares?

 

There’s not a whole lot to say about the Filter in the MiniFreak. In the synth, it’s an analog filter circuit (proudly proclaimed as Analog Filter on the front panel), and in the plug-in, it’s a digital model of that filter. And said model, by the way, is near enough spot on that you can play the same patch on both hardware and software at once and be hard pressed to tell which voices are which.

 

It’s multimode, with lowpass, highpass, and bandpass options, and has a fixed 12 dB/octave slope. You have knobs for Cutoff, Resonance, and Envelope Amount. On the synth you can dial in velocity sensitivity for the envelope by Shift-turning the knob; on the plug-in it’s a conventional mod routing. The end.

 

So what’s left to say about the Filter, once the tech details are out of the way? Mostly some random observations about how the design choices made here affect – or more importantly, don’t affect – the overall sonic landscape of the MiniFreak.

 

 

Look, Ma, no Brute

 

When Arturia started building analog synths, the designers made a very interesting choice when putting a filter in them. Rather than do “their own take” on a classic filter design, ensuring some familiarity with users but inviting comparisons, they elected to head in a totally different direction.

 

An Arturia engineer named Yves Usson had rediscovered a nearly forgotten filter architecture that had until then only been used in one synthesizer and a few specialty Eurorack modules. It was called a Sallen-Key circuit, and had been perfected for musical use by Nyle Steiner in the Steiner-Parker Synthacon. The Sallen-Key filter didn’t behave like other filters – it distorted when overdriven, but with grit and snarl rather than smooth heat, and more importantly, it didn’t lose power in the bass when run at high resonance. It could be bassy, ballsy, and even – come on, you all knew this was coming – brutal.

 

Yves successfully argued that this unique filter design would instantly set Arturia’s analog synths apart from everyone else. He reached out to Nyle Steiner, who was pleased to lend his ears and opinions to the design of a new circuit based on the original Synthacon filter. The result was the now-famous Brute filter, known for its harsh, hard-hitting power and a feature on every Arturia analog synth

 

…until the MicroFreak and MiniFreak. No Brutishness here, folks… just a very nice, conservative, sweet-sounding state variable filter that wouldn’t be out of place on one of Tom Oberheim’s little white building blocks in 1975.

 

Whisky Tango Foxtrot? Of all the synths that would seem to stand to benefit most from the Brute filter, wouldn’t the Freaks be the best choice? I mean, they’re already packing so much freakdom under the hood, right?

 

Right. And I would argue that that’s exactly why Arturia didn’t do it.

 

An analog filter in a digital world

 

The MiniFreak is an unashamedly digital synth. Digital oscillators, digital FX, digital control and modulation, digital digital digital. In my opinion, neither sales nor sound quality would have been adversely affected if the synth had just been sold with a modeled filter like the one in the plug-in. In fact, stuffing in some other topologies like those in the Osc 2 Multi Filter would have been par for the course, welcomed, even expected.

 

This begs the question: why put in an analog filter at all?

 

I wouldn’t have bothered, but I’m not Arturia. The company had made its hardware reputation with analog synths, and the Freaks were only the second and third digital-based synths they’d ever made (anyone remember the Origin?). Putting an analog VCF at the center of the architecture, followed by an analog VCA and a set of digital effects that could be hard bypassed (to avoid an extra stage of A/D and DA conversion if you didn’t want the effects to screw with your tone), meant that the Freaks could follow in the footsteps of any number of famous “nifty digital oscillators through good solid analog filters and amps” synths like the Sequential Prophet VS, PPG Wave 2.x, Korg DSS-1, and others.

 

This choice put the MF synth directly in the same class as those designs, and Arturia knew that  synth geeks would judge it as such. Having a partly analog signal path would reassure buyers that Arturia was breaking new ground, but only while respecting and leveraging its expertise in analog circuitry. Gotta love that warm analog tone, right?

 

So then: why not a Brute filter?

 

I am going with my gut on this, but if I were an Arturia designer wanting to showcase a new way to create oscillator waveforms – especially with so many weird options to choose from – I wouldn’t want to shove it all through a filter that was notorious for putting its sonic stamp all over everything all the time.

 

No, what I’d want was a filter that imparted warmth and smoothness without an overbearing character. No overdriven slam, no high-resonance shriek, just silky sound. To me personally, when I hear that formula, I don’t think Moog or Sequential or Roland or Korg. I think Oberheim.

 

Tom Oberheim’s venerable, often underrated design has recently made a triumphant comeback in the OB-X8, and a whole new generation of synth lovers are being bowled over by its magic. For adding just the right sort of character to a synth like the MiniFreak, I can’t think of a better choice.

 

But that brings us right back around to where we started. This filter, whether analog or modeled, is not why anyone would buy a MiniFreak if they had their head screwed on straight. Analog purists declaiming about “the beating analog heart of a synthesizer” be hanged! The plug-in sounds great and it doesn’t have an analog filter, and I don’t think the synth needed one either. But the tone quality is excellent either way, and now folks have a nice filter to tweak.

 

Next time, we leave the analog realm (if we were even there at all), go through those evil converters, and finish out the audio path with the three Digital Effects (FX) processors. See you then!

 

mike

 

***

 

 

[Dr Mike Metlay]

Effects or FX? Same difference.

 

The end of the MiniFreak’s audio path is the set of three Digital Effects, called FX on the plug-in. I’m pretty sure you all know what all these effects are, so I’m not going to show screenshots or write up parameters in fine detail. I want to talk about generalities: how these FX are meant to fit within the bigger picture.

 

 

FX Types

 

There are ten Types available for the three FX processors, each with three controls:

 

Chorus: Rate, Depth, Dry/Wet

Phaser: Rate, Feedback, Dry/Wet

Flanger: Rate, Feedback, Dry/Wet

Reverb: Decay, Damping, Level

Delay: Time, Feedback, Level

Distortion: Gain, HPF/LPF, Dry/Wet

Bit Crusher: Decimate, BitDepth, Dry/Wet

3 Bands EQ: Low, Mid, High

Peak EQ: Freq, Gain, Width

Multi Comp: Time, Tone, Amount

 

Three of these Types can only be used in one of the FX at a time: the Multi Comp (which is just too processor hungry for multiple instances) and the Reverb and Delay, which are restricted to one each because they can be set up as either Insert or Send FX. You can either have a simple pedal-chain of three FX in a row, or split them into effectively three parallel Aux sends, or some combination of the above.

 

Then there’s the matter of what the knobs do.

 

Arturia had to make a hard choice in the design of the MiniFreak: “How deep do we want to make someone dive into menus, just to tweak a part of the architecture that’s honestly peripheral to the main focus of the design?” I think they made the right call. There will always be people complaining that they aren’t given enough control… but the odds are good that there will be a lot more people complaining that they can’t get a good sound in a hurry and they wish they didn’t have to do so much fiddling around in submenus.

 

With only three knobs, it should be bleeping obvious that these effects are not designed for a wide variety of finely tweakable tonalities. They’re designed to put a final polish on your sound, and to do so quickly and sound good. You can always slap a big complex effect algorithm on the output of the MiniFreak! Don’t expect an Eventide H9000 and you’ll be fine.

 

Subtypes / Presets

 

However, I still bet that some of you are scratching your heads and asking a pretty obvious (and fair) question: “Okay, maybe I can see how you could do this with a distortion or chorus, but how the hell do you get anything useful out of a multi-band compressor with only three controls?”

 

Answer: you let Arturia make a whole lot of the choices for you, through a feature called Subtypes (in the synth) or Presets (in the plug-in).

 

You either Shift-turn the Type knob or pop open the drop-down Preset menu, and choose from a set of Subtypes/Presets, which set up an entire range of parameters for a particular application.

 

For example, there are four Flanger Presets: Default, Default Sync, Silly, and Silly Sync. These are two different sounds – Default and Silly – with the option of free-running LFO modulation or sync to the synth’s or DAW’s master tempo. On the other hand, the Delay has free-running and Sync versions of several distinctly different modes: Mono, Stereo, Ping-Pong, Filtered, etc. Choose the right Preset and turn the knobs, and you can get close to the sound in your head pretty quickly.

 

However, this approach has its limits.

 

 

The Multi Comp has something like 35 adjustable/switchable parameters under the hood: thresholds, ratios, knee settlings, attack and release, etc., for up to three different frequency bands, not to mention global stuff like crossover frequency ranges. (How do I know this? Because when you have to write the manual, you get a much closer look at what the coders are doing than most other folks.)  A Preset fixes the precise value or operating mode of all of these, and gives you three macro controls for the whole effect.

 

So how is that a problem? It wouldn’t be, if the Subtype/Preset selection was a pop-up menu of several dozen different sounds, each tweaked for a specific purpose with macro parameters on a couple of knobs doing exactly the right thing for any given Preset (thank you very much, Toontrack EZmix). But instead, you get anywhere from twelve down to maybe three Presets per FX – and a couple don’t have any Presets at all.

 

The Multi Comp teases you with the sort of graphical control display you might be familiar with from other Arturia plug-ins like CS-80 V (rev4), but there’s no click/drag control, turning the knobs doesn’t change the UI (although selecting a different Preset does), and you have a whopping five Presets to choose from, with deeply informative names like OPP, All Up, and Tighter.

 

I hold out hope that this capability will be deepened and given a lot more options in future revisions of the plug-in… with the obvious caveat that the firmware in the synth must keep pace with it in order for the tight sync to be retained. In the meantime, while the FX won’t sell the MiniFreak on their own, they sound good, they’re easy to use, and they come off really well in comparison to what you get on the MicroFreak… which is, in case you didn’t know it, no FX at all.

 

There’s the audio path taken care of. Next time, we’ll move over into control and modulation, and handle (in no particular order) the LFOs, Envelope and Cycling Envelope, and Modulation Matrix.

 

See you soon!

 

mike

[Dr Mike Metlay]

Modulation, Macros, MIDI, and Miscellany – Part 1

 

(Spoiler alert: There isn’t a whole lot of miscellany in this post, but the Dr. does love him some alliteration.)

 

The MiniFreak has a nice variety of ways to control your sounds.

 

1. The front panel gives you controls for two LFOs, an ADSR Envelope, and the Cycling Envelope
2. The Modulation Matrix can route any of seven sources to any of 13 destinations
3. The two Macros allow for combined modulations separate from the Matrix
4. MIDI Learn allows all kinds of CC routings to do this, that, and (especially) the other thing
5. A hardware/software sync connection opens up some very worthwhile avenues of control

 

We’ll go through them over the next few posts, focusing detail on stuff that’s unique to the MiniFreak… and sometimes, by “unique” I mean “bizarre in a pretty much proprietary way”….

 

Front Panel Modulation Sources

 

LFOs and Shaper Waves

 

The LFOs have nine available waveforms and can have their rates set in Hz or in fractions of a bar or beat. Most of them – sine, triangle, sawtooth, square, sample & hold, and S&H with a little bit of slew (lag) on the voltage changes for each step – are bipolar. There are also Exponential Saw and Ramp waveforms that are unipolar. Easy enough… until we get to the last LFO type: Shaper.

 

 

The easiest way to describe a Shaper Wave is to think of it as a bipolar waveform of up to 16 parts, with its behavior set by a sort of step sequencer. (This is a pretty logical way to do things, since it allows the hardware MiniFreak’s sequencer controls to create Shaper Waves.)

 

For each step of the Shaper, you can define the Amplitude of the step, its Curve from exponential to logarithmic, and its Slope. Slope is a vital part of the Shaper process, but guess what? It has nothing to do with the slope of the waveform at any particular point. Nothing. (I don’t know why Arturia picked that word… and I wrote the manual. But hey, we’ll run with it….)

 

There are four types of Slopes:

 

Rise: the value starts at 0 and moves to the set Amplitude for the step.

Fall: the value starts at the set Amplitude for the step and moves to 0.

Triangle: the value starts at 0, moves to the set Amplitude, and back to 0 again.

Join: connects the set Amplitudes of the previous and following steps.

 

They look like this, in that order:

 

 

Note, however, that “Rise” and “Fall” define moving away from or toward 0. They rise and fall if the step has a positive modulation (above 0). If the step has a negative modulation (below 0), as shown in the second step of the Shaper wave shown above, then a Rise falls and a Fall rises. (buh.)

 

You can join multiple steps together to make longer Segments, as long as the total adds up to 16 (or less, a Shaper Wave can have any length from 1 to 16). In this example, the 16 steps have been tied together into a total of six Segments, three of which are only a single step long.

 

 

This lets you create some really funky-ass waveshapes… if you’re careful, you can easily design a Shaper wave to work as a sort of modulation sequence.

 

This is one of the places where where you really benefit from the hybrid nature of the synth and plug-in working together. In MiniFreak V, creating a Shaper Wave is done in a special UI window with pencil, eraser, and “joiner” tools –

 

 

...along with visual feedback on setting Amplitude and Curve for each step, and being able to set the Slope for each step with your mouse’s scroll wheel. Being able to quickly change Slope is super important, because spinning through Slopes makes it much easier to get to the waveshape you can see in your mind’s eye.

 

You can do all of this on the MiniFreak synth – selecting steps of the Shaper Wave with the Sequence Step buttons, Slopes with four other buttons, and using the Touch Strips to set Amplitude and Curve. In the process of working with the synth as I wrote the manual, I got decently quick at the process. However, it was never very exact, there was a lot more fiddling to get each step set the way I wanted, and the tiny OLED display showed the full shape in teeny weeny pixels… once I started creating Shaper Waves in the plug-in and downloading them to the synth, I never went back.

 

The Cycling Envelope

 

Is it an envelope that cycles, or a cycling function that can work as an envelope? ¿Porque no los dos?

 

 

The Cycling Envelope is a nifty little multi-function device that can be used in three different modes:

 

Env: it’s a 3-stage envelope, with attack, hold, and decay times, as seen on synths like the EMS Synthi. Arturia calls these stages Rise, Hold, and Fall.

 

Loop: it’s a simple LFO with a waveshape defined by the Rise, Fall, and Hold times.

 

Run: it’s a Loop that doesn’t loop – a single ‘blip’ that you can trigger at the start of a note.

 

You can also choose which stage the Cycling Envelope triggers at: Rise, Hold, or Fall.

 

Would I also have liked an actual ADSR for the Filter? Yes. Can I get a lot of the basics of what I need from this thing, plus some other cool effects? Also yes.

 

The Envelope

 

ADSR with separately routable velocity control of amplitude, cutoff, envelope amount, and attack time. Hard wired to the VCA, which has no other controls. The end.

 

Throwing one last curve

 

Both the Cycling Envelope and the Envelope have the ability to tweak the Curve of the Attack/Rise, Decay/Fall, and Release. You can set a default curve or an alternative “Quick” or “Percussive” curve. That said:  for the vast majority of the patches I’ve programmed, I can’t hear the difference. Okay? There, I admit it. I’d love to hear an example patch where you can hear the difference clearly. Please?

 

Next time, we will actually get to all the stuff mentioned in the title (I should have just called this one "Modulators"). We'll cover:

 

• the Modulation Matrix – fast, fun, functional, and only occasionally frustrating.
• Macros - cheap and cheerful chains of changes. 
• MIDI Learn and Miscellany - marvelously modern methods for maintaining maximum motivation with minimum misery.

 

See you soon!

 

mike

[Dr Mike Metlay]

 

Modulation, Macros, MIDI, and Miscellany – Part 2

 

Okay, so in Part 1 we covered the modulation options in the MiniFreak in terms of front-panel "modules", with a special deep dive into LFO Shaper waves and a bit about the Cycling Envelope. Now I'm moving on to everything else in that list, including that tiny bit of miscellany I promised y'all.

 

The Modulation Matrix

 

The Modulation Matrix is a signature element of the MiniFreak, as it was on the MicroFreak. Setting up modulation routings is as easy as selecting an intersection of a row (source) and column (destination) and dialing in the amount, positive or negative.

 

 

On the plug-in, this is very straightforward: click, drag (or double click to reset to 0), done.

 

On the synth, you scroll through the Modulation Matrix by turning the Matrix knob, watching the white LED scroll along from point to point… finding the right spot barely takes two seconds. Then click-turn the Matrix knob to set the amount. On the hardware, seeing the actual amount of modulation involves watching that teeny weeny OLED while you turn the knob, and there’s no quick way to zero out the modulation – two small but survivable drags.

 

The Matrix has the following seven sources:

• CycEnv (the Cycling Envelope)
• Envelope
• LFO 1
• LFO 2
• Velo/AT
• Wheel
• Keyboard, which is actually a choice of four different modulation signals derived from playing the keys:
  • Kbd (Lin): a linear signal – lower for low notes on the keyboard, higher for higher notes
  • Kbd (S): as above, but with more sensitivity to differences between notes in the center of the keyboard range and less at the extremes
  • Kbd (Rand): a random value sent every time you press a key
  • Kbd (Voice): a value that's tied to whichever voice on the synth/plug-in is being triggered, to create differences between voices

 

It has 13 possible destinations:

• Pitch 1 + 2 (at once; you can set them separately using assignable modulations – this is just for overall pitch changes)
• Wave 1
• Timbre 1
• Cutoff
• …plus up to nine assignable ones, selected from a very large list:

 

 

Setting up and using the Assign destinations is one place where the plug-in beats the hardware hands down, and having the ability to edit patches on a screen and download them to the hardware becomes critical. Why?

 

First: visibility. On the synth’s front panel, the nine Assign destinations are squeezed onto three Pages of three columns each; they’re all independent of one another and you can have all nine working at once, but to actually see and edit them, you have to do some Shift clicking of the Page buttons to make a particular Page visible. If you’re currently looking at the three columns on Page 1, the Matrix can’t show you what’s set up for the six columns on pages 2 and 3... so you can be cranking away on a modulation routing, cursing and trying to figure out why it’s not doing anything, while the actual sound you’re hearing is from a routing on a currently hidden page. Meh. However, on the plug-in, all nine columns are right there on the screen, and they all have specific labels as soon as you set them up.

 

Second: accessibility. The MiniFreak synth can display and perform all of the possible modulation routings on that big list in the graphic – once it downloads a Preset from the plug-in. However, some of those routings are either difficult or impossible to create without the plug-in. If you want to have the Wheel open the Filter, that’s a one-knob setup. However, if you want to set up sidechaining so the Wheel controls LFO amount, that’s actually buried a couple of layers deep in the display… and if you want to do more esoteric stuff like directly assigning something to a knob or having one Matrix routing control another, that’s only available on the plug-in.

 

Note that neither of these is a showstopper! Having the free plug-in synced to the synth makes it all pretty easy. You just have to know that sometimes you’ll want (or need) to work within the plug-in.

 

As a final note, there’s one Matrix design choice that I’ve found kind of weird, that’s in both the plug-in and the synth: you can use the Velo/AT source to be velocity, aftertouch, or both at the same time… but you can’t assign velocity and aftertouch separately to different destinations, unless the only velocity modulation you want to use is stuff you can set up in the Envelope menu. This isn’t a crippling limitation, but I have run into a few cases where I wished I had a bit more flexibility. Has this been an issue for anyone else?

 

Macros

 

Macros aren’t a brand-new idea. Many hardware and software synths have made it possible to simultaneously change multiple parameters with one control movement – the Nords being a popular example. On the MiniFreak, they’re implemented in a very cool way, which has a couple of very handy advantages in terms of actual use in performance.

 

Macros have exactly the same possible destinations as Modulation Matrix assignments; the popup menu that you get when you right-click on one is identical to the one shown above. Each Macro can hold up to four such routings, with a positive or negative amount. These are offsets applied directly to whatever value the parameter is currently set at, and moving one of the Touch Strips (when in Macro mode) sends all parameters to the full range of their offsets.

 

(Note that both Touch Strips are unipolar in Macro mode – in fact, Touch Strip 1 is only bipolar when it's used for pitch bend.)

 

 

Setting up Macros on the hardware is actually non-painful; the process uses a very well-designed display that makes it easy to tweak amounts and routings, but the parameter choices are limited in much the same way as those for the Modulation Matrix, and the OLED can only show you one Macro at a time. The plug-in gives you the full range of possible destinations, which are reflected in the OLED when the hardware syncs to the software.

 

Because Macros are a totally separate thing from the Matrix, you can set up multiple potential layers of timbre change that are easy to get to as you play. This is a large part of why the MiniFreak is so much fun to play with in a live setting!

 

MIDI and Miscellany

 

Not a lot to say here other than that MIDI Learn is trivially easy to set up in the plug-in. Just note that you don’t have to make a specific assignment for any of the knobs on the front panel of the plug-in if you’re synced to the synth – that’s all done for you.

 

And what is this ‘miscellany’ I speak of? It’s a pop-out side panel tab in the plug-in called Settings. If you are working with the plug-in as a utility to set up the synth with patches before taking it out on the road, you should be well aware of everything this tab can do! Check this out:

 

 

I know, you’re thinking: “Yeah, yeah, just the usual options… sync, control curves, blah blah. So what?”

(Hopefully you're at least thinking about that, rather than wondering why the three sections of the screenshot aren't all the same width... but you never know with this crowd...)

 

Well, it might not be obvious to you at first glance, but these functions have nothing to do with the plug-in: they’re here specifically so you can set up all the Sound Edit and Utility Menu functions in the hardware synth, without layers upon layers of deep diving through nested menus in that little OLED! Seems simple, but it saves time and stress in a huge way, and makes working with the MiniFreak under the hood a lot clearer, with less chance of a missed menu click causing a faulty setting that will trip you up in the middle of your encore. Serious, serious stuff.

 

And that brings us to the end of the runthrough, with one exception: the Arpeggiator and Sequencer, about which I will have a fairly short and pithy (pissy? both) post later today. See you then!

 

mike

[Dr Mike Metlay]

The Arpeggiator and Sequencer and… stuff

 

As I promised earlier today, this last “official” post on the MiniFreak synth and MiniFreak V plug-in is going to be relatively short (HAH!) and pithy… or pissy… or both.

 

We all have our pain points when it comes to working with new keyboard tech. As many of you already know, mine often center around user interface and user experience, with a heavy focus on my own particular set of performance quirks. Because I do a lot of Berlin School electronic music that eases into EDM in places, how an arpeggiator or step sequencer works with my hands and mind is critically important.

 

I have had good and bad experiences over the last 40+ years, and I’ve long since built up a reputation as someone who really thinks about this stuff… one company abandoned its plans for a standalone arpeggiator after making the mistake of asking me what sorts of tech issues they had to watch out for. (If you’re reading this, Dave A. – sorry not sorry.)

 

I expect to run across features I adore and features I hate, that’s par for the course. But worst of all is the stuff that wasn’t implemented properly, or didn’t go far enough, or left out one critical element, just enough to make me want to scream and flip tables. I’d rather have no arp or stepseq at all than one that works in a way that makes me want to stick a finger deep into my eye socket and stir.

 

My problem with the MiniFreak’s Arpeggiator, and with the Sequencers in the synth and the plug-in (which, weirdly enough, have a couple of critical differences, and bad ones at that) is that they have a fair bit of representation in each of these categories… and for me, 1/3 Yay! + 1/6 Yuck! + 1/2 Yaaargh! = 100% YAAARGH!

 

So: herewith, the Yay!, Yuck!, and Yaaargh! of the MiniFreak’s Arpeggiator and Sequencer.

 

But first, something the Arpeggiator and Sequencer have in common:

 

 

I think that the concepts of Spice and Dice are genius. They’re fun, funky ways to make Arturia’s Freaks stand out from the crowd, and the underlying principles are brilliantly simple (most good ideas are). If arpeggiations or sequences are too samey, offer the user an easy-to-use and scalable way to ‘spice them up’ by easing up on the rules for how tightly certain parameters lock to what they’re programmed to do – and when in doubt, offer a way to ‘roll the dice’ and come up with something entirely new. Yay!

 

With Spice, you can vary velocity, octave (±1 up or down), gate length, whether a step sounds or not, and the Decay and/or Release of the Envelope… the higher you turn up the Spice, the more variation you allow in these parameters. Dice randomizes everything in one shot, boom! Yay!

 

On the MiniFreak, that idea has been taken even farther by the option to turn the Touch Strips into controls for Spice and the one parameter everybody loves to screw with when using these tools – Gate length (thank you very much Korg Electribes!). Intuitive, effortless, musical. YAY!

 

Hold those YAY!s close to your hearts, my friends… you’ll need them for what comes next.

 

The Arpeggiator

 

 

The Arpeggiator on the synth and in the plug-in are virtually identical. The 16 touchplates on the synth and their corresponding buttons in the plug-in let you access eight different arpeggio orders, four choices of octave range, and four different ways to screw with the arp to add variation.

 

Two of the arp order modes are amazing: Walk, a simple ‘random walk’ algorithm that causes notes to ‘wander’ away from the playing order for the arpeggiator, with weightings to make sure things aren’t just random, and Pattern, a constantly re-randomizing ‘mini sequencer’ that doesn’t lose track of your root note. Double Yay!, which doesn’t mitigate the Yuck! of only one up/down mode – holding a C Major triad gives you CEGECEGEC but not CEGGECCEGGEC.

 

Octave range – a precious four out of 16 buttons dedicated to it? YUCK! Only upward ranges, so if you start in a reasonably playable section of the note range, you head into the supersonic? YAAARGH! No way to shift octave range downward without throwing out the baby with the bathwater and using the Random Octave function? YAAARGH! (Oh, and by the way, said function is labeled with a pair of dice, which has nothing to do with Dice YAAARGH! while the actual Dice operation doesn’t even have a button, it requires the Shift key YAAARGH!).

 

Real time performance effects triggered with momentary switches! Yay!, right? Oh, probably – let’s see what we’ve got here! There’s Repeat, which… plays each step twice…? YAAARGH!… and Ratchet, oh we love Ratchet, it plays each step twice and twice as fast, yeah, yeah, and where’s the 4x and 8x? There isn’t any? YAAAAAARGH! And what’s this? Ooooh, Mutate! That sounds cool… so you press the button, and it, uh… changes the note being played or swaps notes around and doesn’t keep in mind what key you’re in and there are percentages for different mutations and if you hit the button again it mutates the mutation and adds the chance to really go out of mode and if you go too far you can kinda sorta revert one note but otherwise you have to start over and YAAAAAAAAAAAARGH!.

 

Moving on.

 

The Sequencer

 

After the steaming paper bag full of frustration that was the Arpeggiator, I found the Sequencer on the MiniFreak hardware synth to be quite well implemented. This was very good for reducing my blood pressure. Phew!

 

Each Sequence (which is stored with a Preset) can have a maximum of 64 steps length, which you  work on in blocks of 16 steps at a time. Each step can hold up to six notes, which can be played as single notes or chords, and you can overdub as well. Yay!

 

There’s a very straightforward Step Recording mode, which inputs notes with fixed lengths and lets you easily add rests with the Hold/Rest button. You can jump to any step and rerecord it, either overdubbing or replacing the existing contents. Yay!

 

If you prefer to do Real-Time Recording, that’s an option as well. You do have to keep in mind where the step boundaries are or you can overdub/clear notes by accident (YUCK!) but in this mode, data for note length and velocity are stored with the note number itself (YAY!).

 

And then there are four available lanes for parameter modulation. Select a parameter from a list on the teeny weeny OLED (YAAARGH!) and then select specific steps directly and tweak each step’s value to taste, with a teeny weeny (YAAARGH!) but accurate and easy to read (YAY!) bar graph shown on the display. You can also turn knobs to record parameter movements (YAY!) in step or real-time modes (YAY!), although the values thus recorded are offsets to where the knob was set before the sequence started (YAAARGH!).

 

Modulations can be copied, pasted, and erased (YAY!) via a fairly arcane set of “with this mode ON, shift click and then select steps and press this button” instructions (YUCK!). You can also erase an entire modulation track at once (YAY!) by pressing the wrong button at the wrong time (YAAARGH!).

 

Well! That wasn’t so bad, honestly… it’s a very quick-to-program implementation, great for live work. Overall a solid Yay! if not a YAY!. And if previous experience is any indication, then the plug-in’s implementation of the Sequencer should be even better, right?

 

(right…?)

 

Up to 64 steps visible at once! YAY! Piano roll data entry, pretty straightforward. Yay! Click to move notes. Yay!

 

 

Click-drag to select multiple notes... which lets you move them or lengthen them together, but nothing else. Yay?

 

 

Grab the top edge of a note to alter the velocity… which makes the shade change ever so slightly… yuck.

 

 

Grab end of a note to change length… to either 50% gate length or 100% gate length/tie, but nothing else. Yuck! That “50%” length means that the step will respond to the Gate Touch Strip, but that data isn’t saved and can’t be displayed. YUCK!

 

 

Velocity and four modulation lanes can be edited, step sequencer style. Yay! Mod destinations are set up similarly to how you set up Macros. Yay!

 

 

You can drag across them to set values on multiple steps… if you don’t mind an incredibly rough curve. Yuck. They’re normally displayed at the bottom of the screen, very small and hard to adjust. Yuck!

 

 

You can temporarily move the four modulation lanes on the main display to give you more drag resolution

 

 

...but you can’t do that with the velocity lane YARGH!, which (if there’s more than one note in a step) has all of the note velocities overlapping so you can’t edit them this way YAARGH! except by that upper edge note drag thing happening YAAARGH!

 

 

You can record, sloppily, in real time, or click in notes one at a time on the piano roll grid… but

 

There is no step recording mode.

 

There is no step recording mode.

 

There. IS. NO. STEP. RECORDING. MODE!

 

YAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAARRRRRRRRRRRRGGGGGGGGGGHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!

 

Pardon me while I go hyperventilate into a paper bag for a while…

 

This is frankly a stunning reversal. The hardware synth’s Sequencer is a bit clunky in places but decently usable… while the plug-in’s Sequencer is, well, I’d be hard pressed to think of any DAW you’d use it with that couldn’t provide better step sequencing and parameter automation right out of the starting gate with what comes in the DAW.

 

And, to quote the famed Mr. F. Gump, that's all I have to say about that.

 

Because of my relatively opinionated (cough cough) coverage on this subtopic, I’m going to encourage people who make heavy use of the Arpeggiator and Sequencer in either format to jump in here and leave their own thoughts about the workflow and strengths/weaknesses in the synth or the plug-in. Feel free to tell me I’m wrong and demonstrate how, or just tell me I’m wrong and I’ll deal with it.

 

Final thoughts (for the nonce)

 

And that encouragement is hereby extended to everything else concerning these two MiniFreak products, especially future deep discussions of the hardware synth. As soon as I have clicked Submit for this post, I will be disconnecting the MiniFreak prototype I’ve used to write the manuals (and this GearLab thread), packing it up, and sending it back to Arturia at long last – and I may have to rely upon MiniFreak owners out there to answer quirky questions that I can’t answer without the hardware in hand.

 

Why am I not keeping it? Simple answer: I almost did… or, more accurately, I almost sent it back to France and bought a new factory-fresh one to keep. But as I said in another thread, it’s time for me to really focus my creative energies on a smaller set of tools, and having MiniFreak V in hand is an appropriate amount of Freakishness in my life for those moments when I need it. I will now be able to unbox and set up the Hydrasynth Explorer that has been patiently waiting for me to finish with the MF for three months…

 

It’s hard for me to judge whether this revived thread has garnered any continued interest among forumites, but I guess I shouldn’t be too surprised, considering that there was a 3-month gap and a new thread launch between where it was started and where it has been finished. If it has, I’d love to hear from folks, so I can focus on bringing people what else they might want to know about this cool little beastie.

 

Thanks for all your attention up to now. Your turn!

 

mike

[AnotherScott]

15 hours ago, Dr Mike Metlay said:

I will now be able to unbox and set up the Hydrasynth Explorer that has been patiently waiting for me to finish with the MF for three months…

When you do, I hope you may be able to update this from the perspective of  the scenario I brought up at the start of this thread... using the Hydrasynth Explorer to control the Minifreak V. :-)

[AnotherScott]

On 1/30/2023 at 11:25 PM, Dr Mike Metlay said:

The Filter: Analog or Digital? Who Cares?

 

There’s not a whole lot to say about the Filter in the MiniFreak. In the synth, it’s an analog filter circuit (proudly proclaimed as Analog Filter on the front panel), and in the plug-in, it’s a digital model of that filter. And said model, by the way, is near enough spot on that you can play the same patch on both hardware and software at once and be hard pressed to tell which voices are which.

...

In my opinion, neither sales nor sound quality would have been adversely affected if the synth had just been sold with a modeled filter like the one in the plug-in.

...

This begs the question: why put in an analog filter at all?

 

I wouldn’t have bothered

That's quite an endorsement of the plug-in's digital emulation!

 

Coincidentally, I just came across this bank of downloadable free patches which are designed very specifically to emulate the sounds of classic analog synths. So now I'm thinking, even if you can almost never tell the difference between the two implementations of the filter, if the difference between the real analog filter and the emulated one would be noticeable anywhere, it should be noticeable in patches like these. If you haven't sent that hardware unit back yet, I wonder if you might have the opportunity to load these patches into both the hardware and software versions, and see whether or not the difference becomes more noticeable. Maybe you could even post an audio A/B comparison and we could hear for ourselves! 

 

 

[David Emm]

Mike, I couldn't ask for more. Nicely done. I'll have to lean in and sweat a bit to decide if the Minifreak plug fills a real need for me, but I'm certainly equipped with ample information, including the warts. I'm glad I don't need an onboard sequencer, as this one has too many of those. OTOH, the engines and filters are worthy of careful consideration. Arturia should have a link to your review.  

[Dave Bryce]

41 minutes ago, David Emm said:

Arturia should have a link to your review.  

              

 

dB

[Dr Mike Metlay]

On 2/10/2023 at 6:27 PM, AnotherScott said:

When you do, I hope you may be able to update this from the perspective of  the scenario I brought up at the start of this thread... using the Hydrasynth Explorer to control the Minifreak V. 🙂

That’s the plan!

[Dr Mike Metlay]

On 2/11/2023 at 7:42 AM, AnotherScott said:

That's quite an endorsement of the plug-in's digital emulation!

 

Coincidentally, I just came across this bank of downloadable free patches which are designed very specifically to emulate the sounds of classic analog synths. So now I'm thinking, even if you can almost never tell the difference between the two implementations of the filter, if the difference between the real analog filter and the emulated one would be noticeable anywhere, it should be noticeable in patches like these. If you haven't sent that hardware unit back yet, I wonder if you might have the opportunity to load these patches into both the hardware and software versions, and see whether or not the difference becomes more noticeable. Maybe you could even post an audio A/B comparison and we could hear for ourselves! 

 

 

hi Scott, I did some listening on identical patches to reach the conclusion I did. Like those in the video, my test patches stayed away from the stuff where digital shenanigans could hide the basics of what we are trying to hear from the filters. I am fully expecting some Poindexter to come along and tell me I’m deaf, but that’s my experience. 

 

However, for now you’re just going to have to go with my word on that. Like an idiot, I didn’t record any of my tests, and hopefully my keyboard is halfway back to France by now.

 

If it really is something that people are insanely curious about, I will talk to one of my local friends who bought the hardware and I will see if I can borrow it back long enough to do something like that. 

 

mike

[Dr Mike Metlay]

On 2/11/2023 at 11:22 AM, David Emm said:

Arturia should have a link to your review.  

I’ll figure out a way to ask them about it, once I get past this potential problem:

 

“Mike, pouvez-vous me dire ce que signifie ce mot: ‘YAAARGH!’?”

 

mike

[David Emm]

1 hour ago, Dr Mike Metlay said:

I’ll figure out a way to ask them about it, once I get past this potential problem:

“Mike, pouvez-vous me dire ce que signifie ce mot: ‘YAAARGH!’?”

 

HAH! I felt that I'd jumped the gun, since you wrote part of the manual. I'm not sure how they might take to your critiques where the synth missed a few marks, but all-in-all, I think its an excellent motivator to buy it. Its offers many pluses and only minor negatives. 

[jerrythek]

Dr. Mike:

 

Just wanted to say how much I enjoyed reading your review. Informative, stylish, and it had a good beat. I give a 9!

 

Jerry

[Dr Mike Metlay]

On 2/13/2023 at 6:15 PM, jerrythek said:

Dr. Mike:

 

Just wanted to say how much I enjoyed reading your review. Informative, stylish, and it had a good beat. I give a 9!

 

Jerry

Thanks, Jerry. Sorry I didn't earn a 10, but Arturia came down hard on me for giving away free MiniFreaks stolen from my local Guitar Center, so bribery for that last point is pretty much off the table for now. 

 

mike

 

[Dr Mike Metlay]

On 2/12/2023 at 5:13 PM, David Emm said:

 

HAH! I felt that I'd jumped the gun, since you wrote part of the manual. I'm not sure how they might take to your critiques where the synth missed a few marks, but all-in-all, I think its an excellent motivator to buy it. Its offers many pluses and only minor negatives. 

I am not sure how they'd receive it. The language barrier can cause major issues when it comes to humorous subtleties, and the team I work with there aren't the best English speakers – a fact that I ran into, hard, during the MF hardware manual writing process.

 

mike