I bought a thing
I worked a ton of overtime last month with the intention of spending it on some home studio upgrades.
My first purchase was a new midi controller keyboard. It has a load more knobs, faders and pads than my last one so I've spent the past week or so live tweaking synth parameters with it and having a ball, so decided I may as well jump in and buy a cheap entry level hardware synth.
I opted for the Arturia MicroFreak in the end. Has a load of sound engines from basic waves, ultrasaw/squres, wavetables, granular, FM etc. and a rather warm sounding analogue filter and self resonating res knob
The built in keyboard is a trip. They are touch sensitive circuits rather than keys that you press down, so you cant rest your fingers on the keys, which takes a bit of getting used to. Applying more of the surface of your finger to the circuits triggers the after-touch which can be set by the simple but easy to use mod matrix.
I've got more software synths than I can count, but have neglected to seriously deep dive any of them, so I figure actually having a physical control surface there will encourage me to explore it inside and out properly!
Just need to upgrade my shitty Behringer audio interface now as the latency is horrendous unless I set it to direct monitor