Have a question about what synth - soft or hard - you should buy? Ask here! At least give us an idea about what kind of music you want to make and an inkling of how you want to do it.
Sorry to spoil the one man show, but I’m joining in.
This is a good but complicated question. And depends on where you are in your synth journey.
Let’s start with “my first synth”
My recommendation is mostly just a from personal experience.
I had played quite a lot with software synthesizers in reason over the years, but my recommendation for those starting out is my first hardware synth: Arturia Mini Freak. It’s a very flexible synth that i still use and enjoy today, but it has a pretty logical layout, and the display will also help with grasping some of the concepts better.
Getting a hardware synthesizer is in my opinion a great way to learn, as the immediacy of “turn a knob, hear what happens” is very satisfying.
There are many synths out there, but I say start with something simple with a relatively easy layout is a good start.
Also, while menu diving is not a huge problem (but still annoying and “boring”) once you know enough to know what to look for, in a first synth I would recommend something with all or most functions exposed to you.
I recently bought a Microfreak, and I agree it would make a great first synth for a beginner. It’s very easy to get decent sounds out of it very quickly, but it also has a lot of depth if you dig. Very importantly, the modulation matrix is easily accessible and intuitive to use. Lots of synthesizers fail at that aspect.
The only big problem I can imagine would be that it doesn’t have any effects and can sound a bit dry without them. If any beginners are reading this and are wondering why they can’t get their Microfreak to sound like most demos, it’s because everyone on YouTube is running it through at least some reverb, if not a bunch of other effects, too.
Yes.
The microfreak loooves some delay and/or reverb.
Im convinced a lot of the presets are made with that in mind as they instantly sound lush and lively when you give them some room to work with.
My second hardware device was a circuit tracks, and the microfreak really revels in the built in effects. They are a really brilliant pairing, the sounds really work well together.
What makes the microfreak still one of my favourites is that sound design on it is so fun, and it’s a real happy accident machine.
I am just getting back into synthesizers (been 30 years) and am eyeing an Arturia Keylab Essential 49/61 as the price is right and it comes with many synths and other instruments plus effects and everything you need. The advantage here is that the 9 knobs and 9 sliders all automatically map to the most common settings in whatever instrument you select. It is not perfect as a hardware synth as they have way more knobs and such, but this method still gives you 18 controls which is more than enough for most instruments and the ones you hardly ever touch are a mouse click away or can be manually assigned to a knob. There are other keyboards that do this too and even better like the Komplete Kontrol, but they are more money and aimed at more professional users it seems.
That catch with the Essential keyboard is that the synths only allow your to tweak the top 9-18 settings. If you want more control, you have to upgrade the software to really be able to get under the hood with each synth, which apparently is cheaper once you are in the eco system and upgrade/wait for sales (like right now). The software is called _analog V.
This keyboard allows you to have a full virtual studio and some hardware synth like control.
I’ve got a Keystep 37 and a Microfreak. Arturia makes good things. I don’t know about their bigger MIDI controllers, but I imagine they’re also good. I also don’t use plugins (at least very few), so I can’t speak to the quality of those, but Arturia seems to be pretty commonly regarded as one of the best in that regard. I always hear people raving about Pigments and their emulations of older hardware.
