MusicRadar

The Kraftzwerg's semi-modular design means that it can make a sound without a single patch cable being plugged in.

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• Review

MFB is the brainchild of Manfred Fricke, boutique analogue designer who has been running out of his Berlin HQ for many years now. This is his latest and greatest synth design, and it follows the MFB tradition of offering powerful but tiny synths for a very reasonable price.

Its small footprint is significant and, as far as analogues go, this might have highest feature to size ratio of any semi-modular synth out there. To give you an idea, the case is a couple of inches smaller than a copy of FM.

Inside you get a triple VCO, dual LFO, 24dB low-pass filter, VCA and dual ADHSR modules. Add 34 knobs, 13 switches and 37 patch points to the surface and a MIDI-CV converter to the back and you get a synth with loads of sonic potential.

Getting started

One of the main reasons for the Kraftzwerg's small size is its smaller 1/8-inch mini-jacks for patch points, and smaller than average (but still perfectly formed) knobs and miniature toggle switches.

On the subject of build, it does have a bit of a project feel to it, which might be to do with the off-the-shelf knobs and switches. The screen-printing is nice and clear, and overall, construction good enough for us not to complain about it (especially at this price point).

The unit arrived with half a dozen patch leads which are just long enough to span the furthest patch points, a special PSU and a two page printed manual in German. We downloaded the UK version from the MFB website, and it was about as concise as any synth manual of this nature can be.

The MIDI channel for the CV converter is set using dipswitches at the back of the unit, and there's also a little heat-sink which can kick out a bit of heat once it warms up.

When the unit powers up, the oscillators are tuned up and stabilise automatically. It seems to hold its tuning quite well, and we didn't notice any drift in pitch.

Architecture

As the name suggests, in a semi-modular synth all the modules are connected internally, and it should be able to make noises without the need to do any patching. The patch points provide the opportunity to explore and experiment with the signal path and combine different modulation sources.

The modules are laid out from left to right. Dual LFOs are on the left, followed by the triple VCO and the low-pass filter in the middle. Next we have the VCA and on the far right is the dual ADHSR section.

To understand the normal signal flow, all you need to do is examine the patch points and their associated knobs up close. MIDI note messages are automatically converted to CV and Gate values. These are wired in to the oscillators and envelope sections so there is indeed no need to patch up anything to get a sound going.