Another Brute in the Cave

Arturia Matrixbrute

I dreamed of it, now it's a reality: I purchased a Matrixbrute from Arturia. Used of course, as nearly all my instruments, but in a glorious state, still in its original box. First of all, the case is solid, with luxurious material: plain wood and aluminium. I love the aluminium wheels! The front panel raises à la Minimoog or Waldorf Wave. Four positions, the most vertical one is angled like a MS20. Yep! I compared side to side!

The back panel is impressive: stereo output, input, 3 MIDI, USB, 3 pedals, tons of CV in & out, gate in & out, sync in & out, nothing is missing. The headphone socket is on the front panel, which is the place all the headphone sockets should reside.

For a so powerful machine, it is really easy to use - as far as you know a minimum in analog synthesis, of course. The overall layout is neat and familiar: one button per function. The knobs are the same as on the other members of the brute family: grey with a white line for the potentiometers, white for the encoders. Almost all the switches have a white led to indicate the current status; not too bright, perfect for the studio. There are 3 displays: two are LED, the third is electronic paper. I don't really understand the choice of electronic paper: the refresh rate is rather slow, which is annoying when browsing the patches. The advantages of electronic paper is the low electric consumption (useless as the unit cannot run on batteries) and to keep the display after power is off. Which is again useless, as the Matrix always goes back to patch A1 on power on. Clearly, the point is missed here, an OLED display would have been a better choice.

Three oscillators, a comprehensive audio routing with hard sync and FM, 2 multi-mode filters that can be set in series or parallel, 3 envelopes, 2 LFO (the third osc can be switch as an LFO as well) and a noise generator. Oscillators 1 and 2 are similar to the Minibrute, with 3 waveforms and a sub oscillator. However, unlike the MB, the sub-oscillator cannot be set two octaves down. The Steiner filter is similar to the MB, but switchable to 24 dB/oct (12 db/oct only on the Mini). The ladder filter is smooth and creamy, but to my ears, sounds more like ARP than Moog. Each filter has its own Brute factor.

At first, I though the massive matrix was nothing more than a gadget. I was wrong! The matrix actually serves 4 roles: patch selection (256 patches directly available), modulation matrix (16 sources and 16 destinations - 12 fixed and 4 programmable), sequencer and arpeggiator. Easy to use, it provides a very good visual feedback.

The effect section is small but efficient: delay, stereo delay, chorus, flanger and analog reverb. Syncable with the global sync source (MIDI, USB MIDI or Sync In).

The only drawback I've found so far is the total absence of menus; this means you need a computer to set up some important things like MIDI channel and sync source.

[EDIT] Less than 2 months after my purchase, Arturia released an update (2.0) which allows, among other things, to change the MIDI channel and sync source from the front panel!