drey_andersson's Arturia Synth Setup

Full disclosure. I built over 200 of the factory presets for the Aurora update, so I've lived inside the engine of this synth for six months. Not a neutral take. But I'm not going to oversell it either, and I'll point at the rough edges where they exist.

First, the thing everyone gets wrong. They see the clip launcher and file it as a groovebox, or an MPC. No. The Mayer EMI MD850 is a deep wavetable synth, and it runs that engine four times over. Play it for five minutes and the groovebox idea just dies.

Think Serum 1, in hardware, four parts at once. Each part gives you the XVA engine: wavetable, virtual analog, a resonator model, SFZ. It reads Serum wavetables straight off the drive. And the SFZ side means you can drop a full multisampled instruments into a part and play it like any other oscillator.

Here's the bit that actually got me. It works backwards too. I pulled my old E-MU Proteus sample sets in as SFZ (ConvertWithMoss, free), and ran them through the MD850's filters, waveshaper, envelopes, FX. A thirty year old Rompler patch, suddenly a real synth voice. Resonant filter, proper envelopes, an FX chain, the lot. Not a frozen sample anymore. As a sound designer that's the whole game for me. One box covers wavetable leads, analog basses, sampled textures, resonant percussion, and I never have to leave it. The Prophet X showed people a sample can live inside a synth voice. This goes further. Open SFZ instead of a locked format, four parts instead of two, wavetable at the center instead of bolted on.

The clip launcher ties the four parts together. But it's the front end, not the identity. The identity is the engine underneath. That's why I keep saying four part Synthesizer or SynthStation, not groovebox.

For deeper editing there's VibesConnect. Runs in the browser, nothing to install. Clip launcher, wavetable, preset, performance drag and drop, full automation, and on an iPad you can ride all 19 mixer channels by hand. There's a 14 part drum machine sitting in the same box on top of the four synth parts.

Takes outside controllers too. I run an Akai Fire with full integration (which Mayer programmed into it), and it talks to the Novation Launch Control XL MK3 when I want more knobs under my hands.

Now the honest part. The 2024 release firmware was rough. Genuinely. If you tried one early and walked away, fair enough, I'd have done the same. But this is three people in Austria, not a hundred engineers, and every update has actually closed gaps instead of adding bullet points. Aurora pushes it again. The thing keeps getting better, which I can't say for most gear I own.

Reference points: Hydrasynth, Waldorf Iridium, 3rd Wave, Prophet X. Definitely NOT AN MPC. The four parts, the drum machine, the launcher, the sampling, all of it sits in its own corner. 1,899 euro isn't impulse money. But 24 stereo voices, 14GB of storage, the full XVA engine four times over, it earns it.

What a spec sheet won't tell you is how it feels once you stop reading and start playing. The voices have body. The wavetables move in a way that keeps your hands on the knobs. Vintage Mode for Each Part. Stack four parts and it gets huge without going to mush. To my ear it sits warmer than the Iridium, but that's me playing an Iridium at Superbooth, not a proper side by side, so take it as taste.

Six months in I still sit down to check one preset and look up an hour later with half a track done. If you love wavetable synthesis, the opportunity to tune your old libraries, or you came off Serum wanting that depth in something physical, this one pays you back.

Upgraded from the smaller KeyStep and should've done it sooner. I can voice my own chords just fine, but the chord generator and strum feature are genuinely useful for sketching ideas fast. Strum gives you actual articulation instead of a flat block chord, sounds like a played part rather than five notes hitting at once.

The mini keys feel solid. Real travel, consistent across the bed, best mini-key action I've owned. And aftertouch on mini keys is basically unheard of, so that alone is wild for the price.

Lives in my backpack because it talks to everything. I bring it along when I'm in other studios with my Mayer Vibes MD850, and at home it drives my modular via CV and gate. Pitch, velocity, mod, clock out, all there. Best mini keyboard for a backpack right now. Get it.