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Pro Audio

Arturia MicroFreak Update: A Powerful Small Analog Synth Just Got a Huge Overhaul

Arturia’s MircoFreak has a killer update featuring user sample importing, a new sample playback engine, 3 new granular engines, enhanced envelopes, plus more.

One of the most overlooked synths is Arturia’s MicroFreak. Everyone knows about their incredible emulations, but few know how great their hardware synths are. MicroFreak is an experimental hybrid desktop synth. It sounds fantastic, has enough knobs to please the high end synth aficionado, and has a brilliant display that made our stoic in house graphic designer say “wow, that’s cool.”

On May 30th MicroFreak got a firmware update, and a very exciting one at that. You can import samples up to 24 seconds long — with a total of 3.5 mins of storage space, 3 new granular engines, and an update to the presets with over 300 factory presets, and an expanded 512 total preset slots.

It’s been a minute since the firmware for MicroFreak was updated — V4 was dropped late 2021 — and this new V5 update is very welcome.

If you don’t know about MicroFreak, it’s an analog synth with both wavetable and digital oscillators along with analog filters that features a unique poly-aftertouch flat keyboard. It’s got a stunning array of knobs for ease of sound sculpting and live performance, as well as plenty of connections like MIDI I/O, CV and Gate out, Clocking, main output and headphone out, and it ships with its own dedicated power supply.

The unique keybed is pressure sensitive, but also offers poly-aftertouch, as well as that unit having the ability to use the USB, MIDI, and CV outputs to control instruments in your DAW and modular synths. And, there’s a vocoder edition too!

Doing all the right things for a new purchase always feels nice, and I will say Arturia makes this fairly easy. The unit ships with a registration card — once you login to your Arturia account (if you remember your password…) ‘Register New Product’ is right there up the top.

After that, there’s instructions to download the manual, the latest firmware and the ever important MIDI Control Centre, and boom, you are pretty much set. It’s that easy.

So stop reading this and go update your MicroFreak — click here for Firmware Update 5.0 — or go buy yourself one fo these amazing portable and power synths, then update it.

They come in at $759 AUD RRP with a street price of around $589 AUD. For more info head over to Arturia.com