You're welcome. I take it that being Part 5, that the sum total of all the Deep Blue parts add up to an album?

They will do, once I'm finished. An edited version of part 2 can be found here...

http://soundcloud.com/looneyjetman/deep-blue-part-2-remix

Also nice track. Looking forward to the album.

Really nice work. Thanks for sharing the track.

It's a shame this thread will probably be taken over by those who seem to hate Arturia, but from what I've seen there are plenty of people out there making amazing music with the terrific emulations Arturia has put out there. I know I enjoy using them.

Keep up the great work.

I agree - the synths on that track sounded really good as emulations of the classic synths of the 70s and 80s to me, and the A-B in the video of the SEM V with the hardware SEM sounded pretty damn close to me too. I will definitely consider getting Arturia's VA collection (then again I'll probably go for Diva like everyone else instead). Then again I'm no expert on this topic so I should probably shut up.

It seems that some people don't have a problem with the very small interface eg. from the CS 80? If I would only judge because of the interface and how I can see elements, SEM would be the best followed from the Minimoog
CS80, Jupiter8 are for me too hard to read on a 24".

I don't think so at all. I only own CS80v, but I've demoed them all and the ones that stand out as ones I'd want include the new SEMv and the 2600v. I though all of those sounded pretty different. Maybe the "they all sound alike" stance came from before they did V2 revisions?

Most of them didn't change the sound at all in V2. CS-80 has some minor tweaks but most were the same exact engine.

I have to say that I also think they sound very similar. Slight different of course but a very "Arturia sound", which is why I feel quite fine having just one (which is the minimoog original now). What I would love though, would be an Origin VST, where it is a more generic Arturia synth having some interchangeable modules.

I'm still shocked the SEM V doesn't have mono legato. If it did, I'd probably own it.

They stated that some of this improvements will come... later Unison would also be fine.... later

I tend to feel most analog style synths of any brand sound the same. Subtractive synths sound like subtractive synths. There's variation, but I've yet to ever play anything that emulates analog and say "Wow, that's unique." There's a tendency for most software and hardware subtractive synths to be programmed with mostly the same sounds, based on basses and leads that have been popularized over decades. I'm not looking to emulate prior music.

Presets inform me of a synth's capabilities. Then when I attempt to program them from scratch, I'm looking to get something that doesn't sound like a mere derivative of the presets. I don't find the architecture of subtractive to be all that encouraging of variety. The easier it is to get sounds that are different from the historical emulations, the higher I rate the synth. Best successes are found with the crazy synths in Reaktor User Library and some independent developers who focus on unique sounds rather than "here's my version of the Hoover sound," etc.

Having one of Arturia's Analog collection instruments (factory?), I've found that, no matter the engine, there's a uniformity to the presets. That left me unimpressed.

Yes, I agree. Minimonsta sounds closer to a Minimoog....if a Minimoog sounded like sh*t. The aliasing on the Minimonsta is a dead giveaway. Diva, I agree, is better.

All in all, Arturia's products sound a hell of a lot more realistic than any NI synth, but for some reason we don't hear constant bitching about how their synths sound like absolute hell. Of course, a lot of people are going for the hellish sound, so I guess it's somewhat of a moot point.

At the end of the day, the software sounding a little "different" is an acceptable drawback. Diva does sound much better, but for my particular system, it kicks the living sh*t out of my CPU, and I'm on a Quad 2.66 i7 MBP w/ 8GB Ram. For me, the Arturia emulations are an acceptable compromise between sound quality and CPU hogging. Either way, I've never hit a key and thought "oh my god, I couldn't possibly work with this!" I DID think that when I played the Pro-53, however. That actually made me feel nauseous.

-Sam

I like the Moog Modular and the CS-80V the most.
Sadly those GUIs are really killing me. I wish, they'd be a BIT less photo-realistic and therefor easier to use.
Especially the captions are totally blurry and hard to read. It really is a pain in my opinion.

This makes them unusable for me, because I love making my own presets, but hate getting my eyes fu**ed by bad GUIs.

it's a loaded question really;; "best emulation" as opposed to what i feel is a better way of looking at it "best sounding synth". sure they are patently based on classic synths, it's just {almost impressively} pedantic imo to cast these synths aside because they're not a faithful enough recreation of the real thing

arturia synths sound great
i like the moog modular sound best but it takes longer than the others to learn because of the vast amount of cabling options
love the sound of the prophet, would probably recommend that first as it's easier to patch
cs80 and oberheim also knock out lovely sounds


if you want a real analog, buy one

Big guys here in Germany like Schiller (Christopher von Deylen) using Arturia plug-ins (he used the Minimoog/Moog Modular), so it's not really a thing about "most accurate" or "best emulation".
At the end of the day a song is great or not. Nobody will sit in front of the speakers and will say "oh what a bad sounding song, this is only 90% of a real Moog!!".

But interesting which are the most preferred emulations. I'm a bit surprised about the CS80 V

I've tested the Moog Modular and SEM so far, and I'm really liking the SEM. It's not going to set the world on fire, and I can already make these kinds of sounds, but the 8x keyfollow mod curves and mod matrix really open it up.

It may not have a 0df filter ( ) but I really like the sound of it, and the way it blends modes (will it blend? yes!) creates a lot of subtle nuances (more so than certain other filter blend implimentations...). Besides that it has a certain pleasing flavour. It's no Diva, but it works well alongside (under? ) her.

Yeah, no mono legato, what's up with that? Seriously... Fix it plox Arturia!

The Moog Modular V was quite impressive overall, but that GUI... gah! I'm not crazy over the workflow, either. It'd take some while to get used to, and the cables seem even more fiddly-hellish than they could have been. I get enough modular action from ACE and Bazille and my semi-modulars (and I also just bought Aalto!). The unique modules in Arturia's modular are sweet, but I have equivalents that are easy enough to incorporate into my music already (including the fixed filter bank). The cutoff was very steppy with manual adjustment, too. That's always a huge turnoff even when it responds fine to control signals. If I can't whale on the knob and have it sound good what is the point?