MiniBrute V, a modeled software rendition of Arturia’s baby wonder

Arturia’s virtualization of its instruments continues. Following MiniFreak V, they’ve now turned to the compact analog MiniBrute keyboard, modeling the synth’s analog circuitry and adding polyphony and digital effects.

Arturia could have just phoned this one in, but it seems they really went all out with extras to make a premium software instrument. I’ll look at it more in detail later as I’m behind on testing, but a quick browse through the feature set looks great:

Models the analog circuits and Steiner-Parker filter of the original
The usual ‘Brute features: Ultrasaw, Metalizer, Brute Factor controls
8-voice polyphonic instead of monophonic
New Unison mode (okay, would love a MiniBrute + hardware with this)
Two LFOs – one with 6 waveforms, one with 3 vibrato modes
4 FX slots
17 FX types: Reverb, Delay, Tape Echo, PS Delay, Compressor, Multiband, Multi Filter, Distortion, Bitcrusher, Super Unison, Chorus, Chorus JUN-6, Flanger, BL-20 Flanger, Phaser, Stereo Pan

They’ve also added some tweaks/hacks that – don’t even exist on the real hardware. (Or maybe they do … kudos if someone has been brave enough to mod a Minibrute.)

Of course, what I really want is the MicroFreak V (following up on MiniFreak V), since sample and wavetable loading in software and the ability to sync that to the hardware would be perfect. But this looks nice, especially for those times when you don’t have the hardware handy.

Now that they’ve done this, I humbly submit that the Brute features and modeled filter would be amazing additions to Pigments.

MiniBrute V @ Arturia

MiniBrute is on sale now for an intro of 50% off from Plugin Boutique

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Long-time readers of CDM, get prepared to get creeped out by the idea that this is a synth from “back in the day”. (Wait, 2012 is 14 years ago? Weiiiiiiiird….)