I’ve had mine for about a week now. Got it through Musicians Friend in the US. It’s a mixed bag but overall I am really impressed with it’s sonic capabilities. None of the demos I watched come close to what it’s capable of so my expectations were exceeded in that department. It’s also very easy to program and use with a powerful sequencer. I love that the sequencer pattern is saved into the patch.
On the contrary I am really not into the minikeys. They are certainly playable but 90% of the time I am using my ESQ-1 as a MIDI controller for it. They just feel cramped but I guess in context with it’s name it’s a fair design decision. The one thing they really dropped the ball on is having no way to pan the oscillator voices. In fact there is currently no way to pan anything although I was talking an Arturia rep into adding a pan module in the FX section since the hardware won’t permit individual voice panning. Maybe i’m just spoiled by my UDO Super 6? Perhaps… or maybe it’s just a major gaff. And yes as stated the touch strip for the sequencer isn’t very reactive. Hopefully firmware can help that.
Despite these flaws I really do enjoy the instrument a lot. IMO they clearly put a lot of thought into the design and it’s far more bug free than even my Super 6 (which is 2ish years into production). I could never get the fucking LFOs or Arp on that thing to sync with any of my hardware. I guess it just depends on your needs though. Hope this is of some help to prospective buyers.
yeah for the oscillators, I just find everything else straightforward and the oscillator section a mix of straightforward and woefully obscure or random. I don’t recall specifics but there are only three synth parameters so some of them are one specific thing, others seemed to do multiple things with a twist. Other times I felt like with only three parameters it’s rendered kinda useless now that some are ‘Chorus’ or something like that, but that’s just me, I guess there is a difference between chorus at that stage and chorus at the effect stage but still. To hopefully summarize: it seems like they are caught in between OP-1 style obscurity and actual dedicated parameters. It was just weird to me to have that be the only place for that style. For me, creates some mental dissonance in my thought process of interacting with it.
Is there an easy way to clear the whole matrix? maybe in a menu, or a function I didn’t know about but it wasn’t fun undoing all existing modulation on a preset to make my own. I think my feelings here were mostly based around the single knob interface for navigating it and that felt clunky when chugging along through making multiple routings and setting their amount, but really set it when I wanted to make changes. I felt myself (in the hour i spent with it) avoiding the matrix for the most part. I do agree with the things you said though, I like that I can hold the button and assign by turning a knob.
It was just above waist height and tilted at a viewing angle, not so much a playing angle so that might have affected my interaction with those buttons, but the fact that multiple buttons there have the ability to throw off what you’re doing kinda does suck in my opinion. They are very easily pressed on accident, without feedback that you pressed it. They I carried on playing with the synth acting weird and I had to figure out why each time. Again, only spent an hour with it.
Yeah if you press shift and Seq (which is labeled underneath as Erase) you can select mod matrix and it’ll delete everything in the mod matrix
It would be really fucking nice if there was a manual to refer to that’s for sure lol. Like, I’m not a noob but there definitely is obscure shit and functions and my only resource right now is the Loopop video. Really weird that the manual is still not ready as there’s some things in the deeper menu with abbreviations that I’m not sure what they are…
Did you end up trying both of these?
I am trying to decide between Digitone Keys, Hydrasynth Explorer and MiniFreak.
Right now, I am leaning towards the MiniFreak because it looks to be the most ‘playful’ one of the three, lending itself to randomness and character.
The manual is up now fyi (looks like english only so far). Thats good news. I haven’t missed a manual to this point but hopefully some new tricks can be found in there.
Oh man, I feel you with the Microkorg. My first synth as well back in the day, and that matrix was impenetrable to a noob. I stupidly followed it up with my first analog synth, a DSI desktop Evolver. Same thing, impenetrable matrix. It scared me off synths for like two decades. (I wish I had persevered as both are classics in their own right.)
Perhaps this video can shed some light on this. It’s definately self-congratulatory synthfluencer stuff, but you can see the amount of work done in the mix. And what fun stuff it could do. I especially like Jeremy’s entry.
Does somebody know how to modulate a modulation depht slot like the microfreak can do?
Update:
I found a tutorial at arturia.com with lots of good explanations. I think more than written in the manual.
I think midi cc chart is wrong in the manual too. I wasnt able to parameter lock the fx section from my syntakt. hmm maybe its me
The Explorer and the MiniFreak are roughly the same price point. The Explorer sounds great. I would go for the Explorer over the DN Keys. I had the DN Keys, I like the Elektron Sequencer, and the encoders I would use to make more modulations. For me, something about FM, it sounds like background music for a pharmaceutical advertisement, or soundtrack to Will Ferrell’s Eurovision.
The Minifreak V plug is out now. If you’re a registered MF owner and open up the Arturia Software Center software, it should show the MFV as a softsynth you can download, along with any other Arturia softs you own. (At first I was looking for MFV in the list of my software products on Arturia’s site, but it doesn’t show up there—seems like you have to use the Software Center to see and download MFV.)
I had no problems with the install in Windows 10. Just starting to play around, using the onscreen keyboard. It sounds good. No big first impressions, don’t have the synth set up right now to compare the filter sounds. See what you think…
The Minifreak V plug is showing and downloadable for everyone, not just registered hardware owners. However, if you download it, it makes no sound and if you click buy it now it goes to a 404 page! They need to make their mind up what they are doing with it, non hardware owners should get a demo at least I think!
I downloaded the minifreak v software in osx to update firmware. Quite a bit of crackling when using it very basically as a standalone app on my mac. I haven’t done much trouble shooting yet as I rarely use the computer for editing patches on my synths other then as an oscilloscope. I’m also curious if it’ll be usable in Logic as a plug in.
I buckled and bought a demo version of the minifreak and the VST seems poorly optimized. Two instances of the VST will run my performance into the ground.
The second instance will cause a Renoise CPU (mini)freak-out while just trying to link to the synth. Seems a bit unreasonable, personally speaking as I’ve had projects with multiple NI orchestral libraries and plenty of VSTs.
Also, I don’t know if this was covered in the tutorials for the VST(as I was just in love with the concept of the synth), but if you plan to bounce back and forth between VST instances, you have to manually link to the synth if you’re planning on editing patches on the hardware-i guess, for most people, it’s a niche instance. Would have liked some sort of smart connection like a Komplete Kontrol.
I’ll poke around with it a bit more, but if these performance issues are a constant then I’m probably going to return the synth- the VST was the main purpose for acquiring this synth. To have a hands on sound design playground with vast, but shallow, control of the sound would have been perfect to sculpt sounds upon sounds for tracks. But initial impressions are a little disappointing with the performance.
The quality of the synth in and of itself isn’t even on my radar separate from the VST.
It’s quirky, and weird, I like it 
