Reply To: Arturia – Black Friday Deals 50% off

[MagicRuss]

Despite saying I wouldn’t in the Black Friday thread, I picked up the upgrade (9 to 11 in my case).  I haven’t had time to do much more than create track templates for the synths and check out a handful of random patches, but here’s my initial thoughts.

Acid sounds pretty serious.  I typically don’t like most of the types of music the 303 was played on, but there’s a certain level of depth and presence to it.

The Augmented series all seem to have potential.  I only played the default patches and maybe a couple of random patches.

I haven’t played with MiniFreak or MiniBrute to get a sense of where they fit as opposed to other synths.  Same with SynthX.

Jup-8000 doesn’t seem for me.

Pure LoFi is the gem here, at least for me.  There are a few lo-fi libraries in the NI Play series, which sound like someone just ran a few instruments through Trash and where most of the presets have comic levels of vibrato, background noise, or distortion.

Pure LoFi is not like those NI libraries.  You start with two layers which can be either realistic instruments or waveforms and one layer which can apply either sustained noise or transient noise (such as blips, drum hits, etc).  The instrument/waveform layer let you choose from several modes which emulate lo-fi sound sources such as old samplers.  It all goes through a master Lo-Fi effect which is like a toned down version of RC-20.

The end result is that you get sounds that may not be pretty, but aren’t completely trashy either (although you could do that if you wanted).  I think the factory sounds tend towards being a bit more washed out and “liminal” but it doesn’t have to go that way.  For example last night I ended up making a hollow thumping bass patch which would have been appropriate on a late 80s track.

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