Dulcimer especially.
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I agree, the electric pianos and Hammond are bottom of the barrel. I donât know why they bother with so much competition. The collection is a great value without those.
It wasnât a grave disappointment, as I favor my NI A200 and Rhodes deeply. Even the venerable LL doesnât measure up (maybe the wurly), and the XLN Rhodes didnât do it for me. Blue 3 has taken me by storm. I love that B3. Since @Ade stated the CS-80 his one of his focuses when playing, I am checking it out. Maybe I can be famous some day.
I love the CS80 so much⌠
In fact I basically did an entire album with it that will never see the light of day, dang it.
Not about Arturia but on the CS80 front I have been hooked by the ME80 sim from Memorymoon. I have a K2600 so it has aftertouch and the ribbon controller just like the original and makes playing the plugin way fun. I had A CS60 for years and the playing of it was an entirely new art and music skill to learn. But by far I made more conehead music with that synth and an SH101 than anything else. The ring modulator is magic!! The GUI is not as snazzy as CS80V but itâs fine and laid out like the original so itâs easy to find all the controls if you had a CS series type before. Going from memory this synth sounds very good compared to the real deal to me ⌠anyway my 2 cents.
Dave
I like their stuff. It seems like in the long run I did feel like Arturia did sound better but I havenât tried ME80 in a while. And it shouldnât really matter but the fact that the Arturia GUIs look so good is actually a factor- my brain wants to think that things that look good sound good 
The actual MemoryMoon MemoryMoog was pretty cool.
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Hi Have the ME80 too and love it. I use it a lot.
- Paul
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Iâm really digging the voice stacking capabilty. Super fat Bass patches. And something my CS60 didnât have which is the swtchable square/sawtooth option for the PWM controls on each strip for the oscillators and the switchable Sine/Triangle wave in the VCA and it has a really low resource footprint. Itâs appears to be well coded. Lots to play with here ⌠
I agree with many guys here. Arturia Hammond and pianos are not top class.
I hugely love Arturia versions of Minimoog, OBXa (very new one), Mellotron, Fairlight, Matrix12, Jupiter8.
I am not comfortable with CS80 and Buchla but this depends from my low programming skills with these synthesis.
But one big warning: new software synthesizers are much more powerful and interesting than old masterpieces.
Pigments, MassiveX or Diva have much bigger potential than vintage things.
But since I play in cover bands I love to use VST versions of old devices, that were too expensive for me when I was a teenager
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Good summation! I feel much the same way (apart from adoring the CS80V). Itâs been posted here before but this is well worth watching:
I donât use my Arturias as much anymore. I still love the Modular and SEM though.
- Paul
Indeed. Dave Spiers is a great guy. I love his Minimonsta
I gravitate to Diva and The Legend a lot these days, but Iâve used the Arturia Matrix-12 a couple times recently.
I love DIVA and have just purchased The Legend to mess with as it gets very good reviews. Out of Arturia I really like Pigments and the Matrix. My other favourite VTSs are currently DUNE and Falcon. And anything else by U-HE.
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Dune is really good too. I keep hearing great things about Pigments but I just havenât torn into it yet. I think because it has âpigâ in the title.
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I use the Arturia synths a lot. I have V-collection 7, upgraded from my first purchase of 5.
I am totally crazy about the Synclavier-2. What they did there is worth the entire price of the collection. It was developed working arm-in-arm with the original developer and inventor of it. That is one deep piece of kit, as they say!
The new OB-Xa V is astounding if you start with the presets and work out from there. The reason that is so is that the OB-X was never all that great by itself (as evidenced by all the presets taken directly from the original that one can find in the presets list starting with alpha-letters - perhaps one could start with those and coax awesome sounds, but good luck!) No, what Arturiaâs very talented designers did with the base synth(s) (The OB-Xa V is an amalgam of the OB-X and the OB-Xa) plus the amazing inclusions put under the hood really steps up the game for those sounds, adding transitions and effects that would take a boatload of stomp-box effects back in the day! It is an astonishing set of presets, and I have MANY favorites in there!
I started on a Farfisa Mini-Compact as my first keyboard, that I bought with paper-route money after graduating from the Magnus Chord Organ we got one Christmas. (I had a BIG fifteen-mile route!) The Duo-Compact emulated by Arturia is pretty fantastic. So is the VOX Continental and Wurli. I love playing all of those.
I put the B3-V2 through the UVI Rotary and it sounds good to me, but in all my live-streamed performances of 2018-2019, I opted to use the Modular-V as my organ sound source, as it had a fullness I really liked. The Modular-V is a MONSTER!!! (I never even touch the Mini.)
I am very glad they included the Synthi-V. The EMI VCS-3 (âThe Putneyâ) was my first synth (actually had two side-by-side) and I can pull anything out of that I need, as it has continuous frequency dials for all its oscillators. I also have the XILS-4 by Xils-Lab and it is also very powerful, of course. Xils added full-range frequency adjustment knobs in Version 1.5.1. I like both.
The add-ons that Arturia provides amplify the possibilities of all of their reproductions and are important to factor in when looking over their products. I seriously recommend not starting with any âInitâ patches, as - unless you have read the entire manual of each and are completely conversant with the add-ons - the presets provide powerful starting points and act as excellent tutorials by top-notch sound designers what sorts of things may be possible from each of Arturiaâs offerings.
Terry
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I really like the Modular too. The SEM is also great.
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The Synclavier is frickinâ fanastic, and the Fairlight is sweet too. Imagne once you might have paid upwards of a quarter of a million dollors to own both with comically inferior hardware!! It boggles the mind.
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It is so nice to be able play so many synths of the past. Most of them were not accessible to me, especially in my part of the country. A few of the local Recording Studios had one or two at the most. The local music stores rarely had synths, and when they did, they wouldnât let anyone try them. My 1st University did have a huge, Univac looking one with a small keyboard, but limited access. It barely fit in the room it was in, but this was the early 1970âs. I felt very empowered the 1st time I tested a Casio and a DX7.
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I was pretty spoiled in retrospect⌠I lived in Denver when Keyboard Exchange was open. They had everything- they even had one of the super rare DK Synergy synths that Wendy Carlos was such a fan of. They had a Prophet-10, a Prophet T8⌠lots of Hammonds, all the late 70s Moog stuff⌠They didnât have things like a modular system though, or any of the cooler ARPS like a 2500 or 2600. Still⌠it was pretty freaking sweet.
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