Arturia is a name most readers are probably familiar with. The company offers an impressive line-up of synthesizers, including the hardware Mini and Micro Brutes, the Origin Modular, the Spark drum machine and a whole host of soft-synthesizers. The synthesizers are all remakes of analog classics, starting back in 2003 with the Moog Modular V. Arturia claims that their emulations are very close to the originals and in any case they certainly closely resemble the features of the original instruments.

There are thirteen soft-synths in the new Arturia V Collection Classics collection. Some of these instruments have been around for over a decade, while some others are quite recent. I’ll cover them in chronological order, from the oldest ones to the newest.

Moog Modular V

This emulation offered by Arturia was produced in partnership with Bob Moog. It’s a beast of a synthesizer, offering 9 oscillators, 3 filter slots (with various filter types to chose from), 2 LFO’s, 6 envelopes, a bode shifter and a formant filter, as well as VCAs, effects and a 2×3 step sequencer. It can also run in polyphonic and unison modes.

The synth can be divided up by vertical layers. The top layer houses the step sequencer and some effects modules, as well as the preset management system, effects activation, some icons to help you jump to different panels, and other utilities. The next panel down houses the filters and envelopes and here the modules can be swapped between different styles of filters, envelopes and S&H modules. They can also be left empty, which is useful in that it helps to keep things clean and organized.

The detail of emulation is meticulous, which means if you don’t know how to program a modular you’re in for a bit of a learning curve. Even if it does look complicated, the concept of a modular synthesizer is quite simple. You get to choose what processes are applied to the signal by patching one module into the other. There is a sound source, the oscillator, then each module after that will alter the sound in some way. So, an oscillator may be patched into a filter, which is then fed into the VCA. You could then patch another oscillator into the first oscillator’s modulation input. You would then be able to modulate the first oscillator with the output signal of the second. This is basic FM.

Usefully, Arturia has included a number of template presets which are bare-bones patches offer increasing amounts of complexity as you go through them. It only took me maybe 20 minutes to get comfortable with how the synth works, although there were times when I had to consult the manual. I’d say that overall most of it is fairly straight forward if you’re used to synthesizers in general and have a bit of knowledge about modulars.

When the modules are used as modulation sources, the amount of modulation is controlled by a small rivet around the patch jack at the receiving end. In practice this is fairly fiddly, but it does save space where a lot of rather tiny knobs would have been. It all gets a bit crowded when you have a number of cables patched in to other inputs in the module, but there is a nice feature which causes the cables to move out of the way of the cursor.

Advantages of the software are put to use though, so you don’t have to patch the sequencer into anything in order to use it right away, as there are selector switches on the oscillator controls. Another really nice touch is that you can right-click on any jack input and choose the source or destination module from a drop-down menu, so you don’t need to fuss with dragging cables around if you don’t want to.

A patch can be as simple or as complex as you like. Since this is a soft-synth, you can save your patches and recall them with a click, making it a lot less time consuming than a real modular. This is the kind of synth that you really can spend hours with though, and for a curious mind there is no shortage of new combinations to try out. The step sequencer is quite a complex module in itself, capable of some very elaborate configurations. Each step can repeat up to eight times, or rest instead of repeating. You can tie steps together, jump to steps via another clock (such as an LFO) and rather than have 3×8 step sequences, you can choose to have a single sequence of up to 32 steps.

I love step sequencers like this. Sure, I have a sequencer in my DAW, but this brings about results I never would have thought of programming in the usual manner.

This synth could easily keep an enthusiast busy for a long time. Just mastering the step sequencer module alone would yield a lot of fascinating musical phrases. The process of programming a modular is not something everybody will enjoy though, and this one in particular has its own share of problems. The GUI looks small by today’s standards and the text is aliased. It’s also fairly tiring having to scroll up and down to edit the different panels, although the quick-jump panel icons on the top bar do help here. The preset system is also a bit lacking, there is no browser, just a drop-down box. But It’s fairly easy to navigate.

I’ve never had a chance to play with a real Moog Modular, but I am fairly familiar with the Voyager and Phatty synths. There is definitely a similarity in tone here, but I wouldn’t say that Moog Modular V stands out as an extremely authentic analog emulation among today’s offerings. What it does have going for it, though, is a sweet and warm tone and the fact that it handles copious amounts of modulation very well without any nasty artifacts. The filter isn’t up to today’s standards either. It steps (actually all the parameters step) and has a somewhat harsh high end. However, it does have a definite Moog quality to it and altogether this synth makes some beautiful sounds. If you want a sonic playground in your DAW, and you have the patience to put the effort in, I highly recommend you give it a fair shake.

If you think that this synth is good just for nostalgia, I encourage you to think again. Thanks to its organic tone and musical sequencer, it’s able to breath new life into modern styles of music.

CS80V

The Yamaha CS80 is a legendary instrument, famously used by Vangelis in Blade Runner. When it comes to Arturia’s virtual recreation of this classic synthesizer, the first things that struck me were the tiny controls and the colors. The colors are great, the GUI is quite clean, and better than the the one in Moog Modular V, but it’s still small for today’s standards.

The instrument itself has an unusual layout and it will probably take a minute or two to get used to it, if you’ve never used it before. Again, the template presets come in very handy here. Arturia has also included a 10-slot modulation matrix, as well as an arpeggiator and a set of built-in effects, allowing you to take the core sound to new places.

The basic tone of this synth is sweet and organic and the bass is deep. The filter is warm and smooth and with high resonance it has a very soft character, perfect for brass. There is a lot to like about this emulation. One of my favorite things to do with it is to put the arpeggiator on hold and tweak the parameters until I get a nice hypnotizing pattern. There is a top panel that opens up and allows for detailed alteration of every virtual voice. You can control the tuning, volume and panning on each voice.

A new feature in the bundle shows up here, the sound map, which lays out all the presets as small shapes, arranged relative to their sound properties. With the sound map active, you can click in-between these presets and CS80V will generate a new sound, one with similar properties to the surrounding sounds. As a sort of a quick preset generator, it does work very well. You can also create four snapshots of these sounds and morph between them with an XY control. It’s easy to use but it didn’t sound quite like I expected.

Another very powerful feature is the ability to have different sounds assigned to each voice. There are a number of way voices can be triggered, too, including random, rotate, re-assign and unison. You can also split voices across zones. Each voice also has volume, detune, pan, transpose and FX bypass controls. In effect, you can create some complicated 8-step sequences with this system, or stereo unison patches. It’s a very powerful addition that greatly extends the sonic scope of what was already impressive and goes a long way to make the CS80 sound more modern if that happens to be what you’re looking for.

Mini V

And now for the classic, the Minimoog Model D. It’s great to see this one get the Arturia treatment, as you get a full meticulous emulation of the original synth with 3 oscillators, a filter, feedback, a noise source, 2 envelopes, plus a whole host of additional features like polyphony, unison and SoundMap. Hidden behind the back panel is the modulation matrix along with a chorus, a delay, and a couple of extras such as the motion recorder and vocal filter.

The core sound is fantastic and has a similarity in tone to the original. The sound is huge and very articulate. It’s pretty easy to get into some really heavy FM and filter overdrive or a singing self resonant filter.

The motion recorder gives you a blank canvas and some drawing tools such as straight lines, noise, sines, squares and others, and allows you to draw in your own shapes to be used as a modulation source. The shape can be looped, quantized and adjusted to different speeds. You could think of it as a multi-stage envelope, but I’m impressed with the draw tools as they really allow you to create some complex shapes and patterns.

The Vocal filter is a formant filter with five vowels which can be freely moved around in a circle or modulated by an LFO. There is also a Q control, which (when adjusted to a high setting) turns so narrow that the vocal filter changes from the usual formant sound I am familiar with into some very interesting morphing sine-line tones.

The Minimoog V does still suffer from a lack of parameter smoothing and its GUI is arguably still too low in resolution for modern monitors. I also found that its sound quality is better when the sound engine is running at 96 kHz as opposed to 44.1 kHz. The instrument also has a slightly odd way of accessing the hidden panel. The GUI retains an empty space above the synth, so when you open the panel it pulls out to fill this empty space, but also causes the front panel of the Minimoog to tilt forward. When you’re not using this panel, there is lot of wasted space which just filled in with black. The second problem is the fact that when the panel is open it becomes difficult to edit the front of the synth as its tilted forward and the angle is thrown off-perspective.

In contrast, there is something excellent about the Mini V’s tone. It can be dirty and gritty, or sweet and smooth. It’s very capable of fitting into modern music and it is of course ideal for anything vintage. The simplicity of the synth, the aggressive sound, coupled with the nice modern additions of a mod-matrix, make it one of my favorites from the bundle.

Arp 2600 V

The ARP 2600 is a semi-modular instrument. While you can patch away to your heart’s content, it also has some hardwired connections. This means that you don’t need to do any patching to get a basic patch with FM and the filter involved. There are some amazing ways to patch things together, but you do need to be careful of potentially nasty feedback loops.

The interface can be divided into three panels. The bulk of the synthesizer modules are at the top, with the sequencer below it and the keyboard and keyboard controls below that. It’s much more of a fixed architecture than the Moog Modular V, so you can’t freely choose which modules you want. Much of what I said about the Moog Modular V applies to the Arp 2600 V. It can also be put in polyphonic or unison modes.

It also shares some of the same problems with the Moog Modular V, such as a small GUI and the same preset management system (although as the synthesizer has less modules, so it’s easier to navigate). The same problems exist as well with a not so convincing filter emulation and audible parameter stepping.

Overall, I find myself a little bit less impressed with the the Arp 2600 V. The patches are great, but I feel somewhat less inclined to get lost in tweaking and patching for hours like I can with the Moog Modular V. This is probably just a personal preference of mine, others may find the ARP 2600V more inviting to program and prefer its sound.

I have heard that Arturia is planning to update the GUIs for all of their older synths and I hope that they do. All of the synths we’ve covered so far really need it. Hopefully, they can take the audio quality just a notch higher too, considering how powerful modern CPUs are. Parameter smoothing is also a must nowadays.

Prophet V2

The Prophet 5 is a polyphonic analog synth famed for its Curtis filter. You immediately get a sense of how different this synth sounds to the ones we’ve covered above. It’s a more precise and focused sound, and as such it might be easier to fit in busier mixes. The Prophet VS was another legendary synth that used digital waveforms and an analog filter, and while the Prophet V2 has a low-pass filter only, the VS has high-pass, band-pass and band reject modes.

What is really great about Arturia’s virtual version is how you can combine both of these synths into one. You can mix your analog waveforms with the digital ones and send them through either the Pro-5 or VS’s filters, or both. It really is a match made in heaven as far as sound goes, since the waveforms of the Prophet VS are a true classic. As per usual, Prophet V2 features a mod-matrix, unison mode, and some nice basic chorus and delay effects to expand the potential.

This is the first instrument in the series where the GUI feels like its perfectly fine for today’s resolutions. We get nice big graphic displays of the envelopes in the VS as well. Furthermore, the parameter changes are very smooth, so finally we’re up to modern standards here.

There are still a couple of issues for me, though. While the Prophet 5’s GUI looks good, switching to VS or Hybrid modes changes the front panel with a slow and jerky animation, and it opens and closes depending on the preset, so flicking through presets triggers the animation. Not a big problem, but still not great.

The mod matrix is based on a pin-style system. The VS has looping envelopes, but it becomes very difficult to edit the envelopes on a precise level because you can’t zoom in. Also, it’s not possible to modulate the decay time in order to really take advantage of this feature.

There are a lot of analog emulations out there, but the hybrid aspect of this one really grabbed my attention. There is so much scope in mixing the waveforms together and the filters are quite lively.

To me, this one is a gem.

Arturia Jupiter 8V

I’ve never used the real one personally and I am familiar with its sounds through demos only. However, upon loading up the Jupiter 8V and playing a chord, it immediately becomes obvious why the original achieved such a highly respected status. The tone is just beautiful, the way the voices interact when stacking chords, the smoothness of the filter. It’s a great synth for pads, great for basses, leads and special FX.

For the core synthesis, we get a choice between 12 dB and 24 dB low-pass filters and a secondary high-pass filter, two (very fat) oscillators, two envelopes and a single LFO (sort of, I’ll explain this shortly). We also have PWM and cross modulation for the oscillators, an arpeggiator and a sequencer.

Things are also spicier in the effects department, with new additions such as distortion, phaser, parametric EQ, ring modulation and reverb, as well as more tone shaping control over the delay and chorus. Some of these effects allow for extensive modulation. Unfortunately, not the delay though, which has a lovely Doppler effect going on when you change the delay time. As a sound designer, I can’t stress enough how great it is to have a decent EQ, and in this case even the EQ bands can be modulated, which is fantastic. I have to commend Arturia for this inclusion. My only disappointment is the distortion, which I find to be very basic and not all that exciting. Later instruments in the Arturia range have a cool stomp box distortion emulation, which I would have liked to see here.

The preset system has also had an overhaul with the Jupiter 8V. It’s clearly more functional now, with added characteristics, descriptions and filters when searching. As for the GUI, the open panel animation is much better than on the previous synths, but the front panel is still a bit smaller with a more cramped layout than I’d prefer. It’s by no means hard to use, but there is less travel in the controls and therefore high-precision parameter tweaking is more difficult to achieve.

Another cool feature is the Galaxy module, which generates a complex LFO using two LFO modules on a rotating axis. The modulation source is shown as a dot on an XY grid, whereas the two LFOs animate this dot. They are assigned a shape and a rate and one LFO controls the movement of the dot along the X axis, while the other one controls the movement along the Y axis. The third LFO rotates the XY grid itself, causing our source dot to move in complex patterns. We then have three destination slots for the X and Y axis to modulate. All of this is quite intuitive in use and useful as a modulation source. I would have liked the ability to modulate the rates of these LFOs but none is given.

Finally, there’s a very well featured sequencer with swing, accent, glide and direction controls, re-triggering and the ability to quantize values to pitch. The display will even show the pitch values if you’re not quantizing.

So, my hats off to Arturia for this one. The sound quality is sublime, the GUI is just fine even for today’s machines and it has enough extras to increase the fun factor without distracting from the immediacy of the instrument. If there was one more thing I’d ask for, it would be stereo unison, as it would make the instrument’s sound even more modern.

Arturia describes this instrument’s sound as “crystal clear phatness”. I agree.

Keyboards (Wurlitzer V, VOX Continental V & Solina V)

Next up for review are the keyboards, which won’t be covered in too much detail as these kinds of instruments are not my forte.

I’m no expert with emulations of this sort, but the Wurlitzer V definitely sounds spot on the money to me. It’s a bold and warm sound, but it also lends well to processing through effects. To begin with, you have three different output options: direct, Leslie and guitar amp.

In this case, opening the panel fades an additional set of controls onto the front panel, so there are no awkward movements involved. There is a lot of control on offer here. You get a 10-band equalizer, a vibrato control, pick up options, hammer options, harmonic variation (variations on the Wurli sound) and of course velocity curves.

The user interface is a lovely design to look at, but again the controls are a bit small on my display. It’s also quite sluggish to respond on my Mac for some reason, which makes the experience somewhat less enjoyable.

The FX selection is great, but applying the actual effects is a bit annoying, as (yep, you guessed it right) clicking the FX button triggers an animation. The plugin’s GUI changes size to make room for a suitcase of FX pedals to slide out from underneath the Wurli. Once you’ve waited for it to open, you can choose to insert up to five effects. The virtual suitcase offers a good line up of effects, including a flanger, a chorus, a great overdrive, a phaser, a vocal filter and an analog delay. I really wish the effects on all the synths were as good as these. It’s a bit of a form over substance design here though, especially when choosing the amp as the output. The amp is in sort of a 3D perspective, so the controls are all shown at an angle. In practice, you still edit them the same way, dragging the mouse up or down, but it’s just a bit off-putting to see. In the end though, it’s not that hard to get used to.

Thankfully, the FX and open panel modes don’t change per preset. They are global, so you don’t have to look at the constantly changing GUI as you flip through presets. It seems to me that I am not the only one who thought that the changing GUI was a bad design choice, as each instrument Arturia makes has a different way to refine this aspect.

The VOX Continental is very similar to the Wurlitzer V in terms of design. You’re presented with the instrument as though looking down, and everything is in this 3D view which again I find off-putting. I much prefer a flat design. But again, it doesn’t take long to get used to. The controls in this case are still fairly small and the whole GUI seems a little bit blurry. The off-axis perspective of the effects section is even worse this time around.

The keyboard has lovely inverted colors, where the black keys are white and visa-versa. And yes, it does sound fantastic! I feel like this instrument responds to effects even better than the Wurlitzer V, though curiously there is only one effect slot here. On an instrument like this, I am more likely to rely on presets, so I’m pleased to see that there are loads of them, and they are very good ones too.

The instrument I am most interested with in, when it comes to this particular category, is the Solina V. This is a beautiful string machine from the 1970s. It’s a staple for funky disco, as it simulates an orchestra section with strings, trumpets, horns and human choirs.

The design here is a fairly minimal one, with a number of tone buttons for the different spectrums of sound on offer. Once you’ve opened the panel, you get one LFO, a bass section, a resonator section, two FX insert slots and a reverb. The reverb appears to be based on impulse responses of various classic models.

The are no problems with wasted GUI space of jerky animations in this case, but I do have to point out that the interface is still a bit blurry.

There isn’t a whole lot I feel I can say about the Solina V. It fits the bill for me perfectly. Some of the preset sounds are impressively deep and haunting. It’s easy to see why it’s such a revered instrument. It’s not at all relegated to just recreating music of the past.

SEM V

The SEM (short for Synthesizer Expander Module) is a fine instrument from the 1970s, designed and manifactured by Oberheim. It has a smooth and warm sound. This is a plugin I am more familiar with, as I’ve owned the SEM V for quite a while now.

The design is fully modern in this case. The GUI is nice and large, the controls are very easy to use and the parameters are very smooth. The control panel is fairly sparse, as it is in the original, but Arturia have crammed in plenty of extra features to expand the instruments potential in the “back panel” section. They’ve added an extensive customizable key follow source, an 8-voice programmer an 8-slot mod-matrix and three different effects.

The keyboard follow module allows you to customize the response of the synth depending on which section of the keyboard you are playing. For example, the lower notes can be set up to open the filter more than higher notes.

The 8-voice programmer is a very powerful module. It allows you to modify the settings of each voice individually. As is typically the case in polyphonic synths, each note triggers an individual voice and the 8-voice programmer lets you reach into the circuitry (so to speak) and tweak each of these voices, so that each one could have a different setting for the filter, pan, or pitch for example. You can also specify the order in which the voices are triggered. For example, it could trigger a random voice whenever I press a key. This means that each time I hit a note, I could get slightly different pitch, pan or envelope decay time, but it would be completely random, breathing life into the riff. When playing a chord, each voice can have its own panning and detune, resulting in a rich stereo spread. Since you can also program pitch per voice, this can also substitute for an onboard sequencer. The voices can also be triggered in different sequences, for example forward, backward, forward then backward, or random. Add to this the arpeggiator, and there is a lot of fun to be had.

The plugin also includes a 10-slot modulation matrix, which really adds a lot of flexibility to this synth, even allowing for the modulation of LFO speed and amounts. Generally speaking, the SEM is minimal and yet once you open up the panel it can get quite deep.

Matrix 12V

Matrix 12 is another synth from Oberheim and it was used a lot in the 80s. It has a bold sound and is 12-voice polyphonic. Matrix 12V is Arturia’s latest plugin and it has all the modern touches you’d expect, including a nice big GUI and parameter smoothing.

This is a monster of a synth, with two oscillators per voice, five envelopes, five LFO modules, four ramp generators, fifteen different filter types (yes, fifteen!), oscillator FM, filter FM, all of this per voice. Each envelope and LFO has extensive controls and each of the twelve voices is laid out on the voice page where they can have their own tuning, keyboard zone, volume and pan settings.

So, with all of these options at disposal, what is it like to program Matrix 12V? Actually, very easy. Arturia has simplified modulation assignments by quite a lot. There is a simple modulation setup page located in the center of the GUI.

When you click on a destination which you’d like to modulate, the display shows the six available slots below it, where you can assign a source and amount of modulation. When you click on the source slot, a menu pops up with icons and text, helping you to quickly find the LFO or envelope, or whatever else you’re using as the source. You are also given the option to quantize the modulation source, creating a stepped effect which I believe is a characteristic of the original. Once a destination, say the filter, has a modulation source assigned to it, a small green light shines to let you know that it’s being modulated. It’s really quite a breeze to use and I think that Arturia should be commended for this design.

While using the Matrix 12V, I tend to get totally lost in the synth engine for ages. The Matrix 12V goes far beyond the sonic territory of most subtractive synths I’ve used so far. I own several synths which meet this level of flexibility when it comes to the amount of available modulation sources and destinations, but they don’t seem to have this sonic range. In particular, the FM combined with the esoteric filter modes at high resonance settings provide textures that I’d have thought would require digital waveforms to generate.

The filter sounds very good and very analog. I definitely hear textures that remind me of some of my favorite electronic music from the late 90s early 2000s.

I’d been wishing for updated effects in some of the instruments covered above, and we get them in Matrix 12V. The effects section includes an analog delay, a standard delay, analog phaser, flanger, chorus and a reverb module. These are all very good effects, but you only get two FX slots per patch. Still, it’s great to have so many effects to choose from.

The Matrix 12V is also multi-timbral, so each of the twelve voices can load its own preset and be split across the keyboard if desired. All of the voices can also be played at once, or in rotation.

The first thing I tried was to randomly assign a different chord preset to each voice and to make the voices rotate, so that each new note triggers a new voice. This was an eye opening experience for me, as the musical complexity was great and it took me only 15 seconds to set it up. Some of the presets have the same sound loaded on each voice, but with a different transposition, effectively resulting in a sequence when played.

This assignment feature also allows for 12-voice unison, and you can pan the voices separately so you can have stereo unison. Very nice!

I think that the Matrix 12V is possibly my favorite synth of the lot. I found it very inspiring to use and the sounds it makes are quite impressive. As good as it is though, I think that you need to have a fairly decent grasp on synthesis in order to find your way around easily. That said, the presets are pretty great and the original sounds from the hardware version of the instrument are also included.

Analog Lab

Analog Lab is pretty straight forward. It’s ideally paired with the hardware keyboard from Arturia, but it’s still great as a software plugin. When looking for inspiration, having to load up each synth to browse its presets is time consuming, so with Analog Lab you do not need to load up and browse any of these synths individually. Almost 6,000 presets are accessible from its preset browser, spanning all of the aforementioned synths. Extensive data filters allow you to narrow down your search easily.

You can also create new multi-instruments, combine patches from different synths, as well as customize a program change list for planned preset changes in a live performance situation. You can also drag presets to a snapshots panel, so that they’re kept close at hand for quick switching.

Once a preset is loaded, the ten rotary controls and nine faders will be assigned to the most relevant controls for that particular patch. The keyboard also includes a set of pads which can be used to trigger chords which are selected from a menu. You can very quickly and easily set up a good performance this way, or quickly find inspiration for writing new songs altogether.

Analog Lab is as simple as I’d hoped, yet offers a very sensible way of maximizing the usability of so many synths.

Spark 2

Arturia Spark 2 is a drum machine, a drum library, a drum synthesizer and a sequencer. It has a comprehensive mixer and FX selection and even a modular engine for drum synthesis. There are around 180 kits that ship with it (along with the expansions which you can buy from Arturia), so it’s got a lot going for it right out of the box, so to speak. I wish I could have paired it with the hardware controller, but since I don’t have one, this review deals with the software only.

The layout will likely be familiar to anyone who’s used a groove box before. We’re presented with 16 pads, whereas each pad has a sound assigned to it (the sounds can also be layered). Above that is a row of pattern selection buttons. There are 16 patterns, but four banks of patterns, making 64 patterns available in total.

Above this is the mode selection panel which allows us to edit the pattern’s sequence and transpose it up or down by two octaves. Song mode allows us to chain the patterns together in order to create a song.

We then have some performance controls, including a slicer, a filter and a roller, which is akin to AKAI’s beat repeat. When selecting 1/32 notes for example, holding down a pad will trigger notes at 1/32. Slicer actually causes a slice of the entire pattern to repeat in whatever step size you’ve selected. It ranges from 1/4 to 1/64 note measures, so a great way to make fills is to just roll the cursor over the different values. Three assignable quick controls are to the right, tied to each instrument, and a global tempo and shuffle controls are at the top.

The next page reveals the sequencer panel in full detail. There is a nifty function here to export the sequence as MIDI, or even as rendered audio, by simply dragging an icon from the Spark plugin to the DAW project area.

You can also make the all-important micro edits to your sequence here, with a shift amount per note, as well as a host of other potential parameters at your disposal including aux send amount (there are two auxiliary channels for effects). The only problem I have here is that the grid is a little bit dark, and while it does have highlights to help you see the downbeats, they are not quite bright enough.

The next page is the “studio” page in which you can change up your drum parts. A drop-down menu allows you to select a sound from the library, organized by bank and category. Building your own kit is easy, especially if you are loading all of your drums from the factory content. If you want to load your own samples, there is a browser in which you can preview the sounds and load them to an instrument of your choice.

I have to add at this point that the quality of the library you get with Spark 2 is fantastic. I have a lot of drum samples, but with the Spark 2 factory content I was very quickly able to make something interesting that sounded great. There are so many effects to choose from and all of them are very high quality, making it fairly easy to get creative. The equalizers and compressors are fantastic. The only thing missing here is side-chaining compression, but choke groups can be a decent substitute sometimes. You also have sixteen assignable outputs which can be used for processing the sounds individually in your DAW. When you use the direct outputs, the master channel in the Spark mixer is bypassed, but if you like your insert effects, you can keep them active.

If you really want to get your hands dirty, you can get into the modular page and modify existing instruments, or create your own. There are some neat physical modeling modules available here. Everything can be patched together as you’d expect, with LFOs and envelopes for modulation. Even an oscillator can be used as a modulation source.

As much fun as I thought I’d have with this section, I didn’t really want to spend a whole lot of time in it. It’s a lot of fun working on grooves with this plugin, so I didn’t really feel like slowing down my workflow in order to program any sounds from scratch. Nevertheless, it’s good to know that this section is there for those who want to dig deeper.

I’ve not touched on everything here, but my overall impression of Spark 2 is that it’s a very high quality instrument. It has a lot of options and it helps with creativity. Although it has a lot of features, they don’t get in the way when you just want simplicity and that’s a sign of good user interface design. Getting to know this drum machine makes me interested in trying out the hardware combination. I get the sense that it has a great workflow.

The Verdict

Arturia V Collection Classics is definitely an impressive instrument bundle. Although some of the instruments are in need of a GUI update, at least half of the instruments in this collection are perfectly modern by most people’s standards. The value is great, as each instrument has its special tonal characteristics and abilities, and the Analog Lab allows you to browse through the entire collection with ease.