I just bought the Arturia V Collection 9 on a crossgrade special for a mere $249, and at that price, it’s a no brainer… IF you like old fashioned classic synths. Which I do.
I’m sure I’ll be making a bunch of videos about the various synths in the collection, including a shootout between Dexxed and the Arturia DX 7, but in the meantime I just wanted to post my first impressions.
First, this thing took all night to download. Actually, I don’t know how long it took. I started it around 10 pm and went to bed at 11. When I got up, my Dell monitor was blank, so I hit the space bar and my M1 Mac Mini came to life and lit up the screen. I then discovered it stopped with three keyboards (out of 33) left to download. My Mac is set to never go to sleep, never go to screen saver, and never “sleep the hard drives” when not in use. So what happened? I have no idea. Could the monitor be to blame? It’s a Dell 27 inch 4K monitor that, quite frankly, sucks. One day I’ll buy something better.
Ahem. Anyway, I’ve owned Analog Lab V for a few years now, so I’m familiar with most of the best patches to these keyboards already… but I really wanted full access to these synths. And it’s pretty damn cool. I went through all of them today and played about 10-15 patches each. I hearted a bunch of cool patches.
I also had a play with Acid V, which is a 303 clone. That’s the little bass box that bombed on the market until some clever young people figured out how to make it an extremely funky bass synth. The problem is that in order to get those acid bass lines, you need to master the clever hacks that have been invented to make it funky. The good news is that the presets have already done that for you, and the expanded interface makes it a breeze. It’s pretty great.
And while I thought the Prophet 5 would be my favorite, it’s actually the Jun-6 V that I ended up playing with the most. It’s a Juno 60, basically, and the interface is as simple as it gets, which is perfect for someone who doesn’t want to spend forever dialing in a sound. It’s got some amazing sounds in it and it’s super simple to tweak.
Everything sounds great, except for… well, except for the copies of mechanical instruments. I’m not much of a fan of any of the piano sounds, or the Wurlitzer sounds, or the Rhodes sounds. To me, those are the weak spots. They’d sound find in an electronic music track, but there are better options for these to be found elsewhere.
Fortunately I already own the better options.
Anyway, this is an amazing collection of classic synths and I’ll be exploring and playing these for years. At $600, I wasn’t sure if it was worth the money. But at $249, it was definitely a fantastic budget purchase.
Do they sound 95% as good as the originals? Pretty much. And that’s more than good enough for me.