'Like its hardware counterpart, MiniFreak V is an astonishing synth. MusicRadar verdict: A near-perfect copy of the recently released hardware, it fully deserves its place amongst Arturia’s upper echelons.

Pairing the software with the hardware brings advantages of its own, but is in no way necessary to get the most out of this remarkably flexible, phenomenal-sounding synth. The oscillators, algorithms, LFOs, envelopes – everything barring the filter – is translated directly from the hardware, and you’d be very hard pressed to tell the difference in a listening test. Having the built-in effects is so much more convenient than having to constantly add effects plugins every time you use the instrument.īeing based on a hardware instrument that’s almost entirely digital – and entirely of Arturia’s own design – means that there’s no practical difference between MiniFreak V and MiniFreak. This is most welcome, not because MiniFreak V sounds weak without the effects (it doesn’t) but because the synth is otherwise entirely monaural. It also has an arpeggiator mode offering the usual up, down, up & down patterns.Ī three-slot stereo FX section with choice of 10 effect types rounds things off. The sequencer can run its programmed pattern as-is in a constant loop, but it’s more useful when triggered and transposed by the notes you play. This lets you define patterns of up-to 64 steps in length, made up of polyphonic notes and four controller lanes. These provide a few shapes over-and-above the usual suspects – ramped sawtooth waves, for example – but their pièce de résistance is that they allow you to create custom LFO patterns.Īnother source of modulation – and notes – is MiniFreak V’s built-in pattern sequencer. In terms of actual LFOs, MiniFreak V has two for you to play with.

This is a three-stage affair that can be one-shot-triggered in the same way as a standard envelope, or that can cycle in an LFO-like manner. Moving on to modulation, the synth offers a standard ADSR envelope generator, hard-wired as the amp and filter envelope, as well as a so-called “Cycling” envelope.

Few synths can match the shapeshifting abilities of Pigments.īoasts twin wavetable oscillators and 130 foldable wavetables.

Synthi v arturia