I was reading the differing opinions here and held my tongue.
I should have believed loopop or whatever, but I couldn’t help and believe the random online gent, @mrisney when he said it was plastic.
I couldn’t believe people were denying him straight up even though he physically had the minifreak and they didn’t.
Well this weekend I popped into guitar center and it’s DEFINITELY plastic lol. maybe some early runs were metal, maybe everyone is right. but the take away is: it’s plastic just like the MICROfreak except this has a metal sheet bottom like a keystep 37.
also wasn’t really impressed with the minifreak overall.
aftertouch on the keybed was inconsistent by key (but this Guitar Center demo could be fucked up, that said, it can’t be that old) and man I forgot how mini the mini keys are, they just weren’t that great. I think I’d settle for mid size keys, but the minis are just tiny and I have thin fingers, two hand playing felt like that donald trump thing he does while talking (palms close together, facing outward and fingers out in each direction, lol) just in general I’m glad I played before I paid because even though it’s a really great product conceptually, I never liked a lot of the microfreak’s work flow.
having obscure synth parameters feels weird when everything else is clear and straightforward. The matrix is convoluted and cumbersome to me. Adding effects is great, but they fall into the same weird workflow issues, and I just wasn’t having a lot of fun with it.
also, the touch sensitive buttons right above the keybed were the final killer for me, idk it’s obviously just my playing style, but a stray finger seemed to catch those buttons all the time and click on the sequencer and other stuff up there. maybe it was just the angle the demo was displayed at but they were too close and sensitive for comfort.
my vote would be for digitone keys! pull more out of that beast sound engine, and you get full size keys, very little compromise in that box! except with such a good sound engine you might start dreaming of a Digitone Key 61, which would probably need an entirely different layout haha