A Perfect Partnership
It may seem unusual for Arturia to release a software product that appears to be competing against its own hardware, but it may actually be a stroke of marketing genius. You see, the two versions can be tightly synchronised when they’re used together: the hardware provides a bespoke control surface for the software, whilst the software provides high resolution visual feedback of waveforms, envelopes, etc, as well as easy mouse-driven editing of things that aren’t so easy to do on the hardware, such as programming sequences. Better still, you can have an instance of MiniFreak V pass-off its work to the hardware to take full advantage of its analogue filter stage – which is perfect when bouncing/ freezing instrument tracks. No doubt, then, that Arturia will be hoping that MiniFreak V users will aspire to own the hardware too, whilst owners of the hardware would be daft not to grab the software for their own part.
The power of Arturia’s Freak range of synths comes from the algorithmic oscillator that was developed for the series. These oscillators can load different synthesis engines – ie algorithms – allowing them to completely change their sound and character. Cleverly, Arturia has arranged things so that each algorithm has just three editable parameters, and these always have a certain similarity of function, no matter what the algorithm is.