I own the entire Vintage Collection, meaning I have full access to the editing of sounds, but 90% of the time I’m using Analog Lab.

I would say it's Arturia's coolest, most useful software instrument. Analog Lab sets useful boundaries-perfect for those who mainly just want to jam on presets, are looking for ideas/inspiration, or just wanting to compose and make arrangements without getting heavily into sound design. With softsynths, my tendency is to get drawn in-distracted by all the possibilities. Arturia has great products, including *Step series, the FX Collection, the *Brute series… But they make it sound like they take their customers and users for granted as profit centres.Analog Lab is probably my favorite softsynth for precisely the reason that it doesn’t encourage deep editing but instead focuses on just playing or arranging with a minimal set of controls. In the end, we figured it’s best to focus on using the iPad as controller for now, and using a large Yamaha keyboard for performance. Or software versions of MicroFreak engines. Analog Lab could eventually be a factor in such purchase decisions. Just had a whole discussion with a former student who’s just getting into electronic music, A whole part was about Arturia’s controller. Sure, some people who’ve been in this for a while might be fine with this yearly expansion of a few extra emulations of beloved synths. ZEN-Core might not be everyone’s cup of tea but ROLAND now makes it central to a strategy which integrates their hardware (including the just-announced AE-30 Aerophone “Pro”).Īrturia might be paying too little attention to “the room”. Applied Acoustic Systems has a rather solid lineup as well at a reasonable price, though those synths are like Arturia’s in not supporting MPE. The free version of Vital is a worthy alternative to Pigments and the inexpensive Cherry Audio synths also support MPE. At minimum, it’d fit the Buchla emulation. Pigments remains the only Arturia softsynth which supports it.

What I find the most disappointing, though, is that they didn’t expand MPE to other synths in the lineup. But they expect that people pay a significant upgrade price every year, which puts the subscription model in perspective (e.g. Yes, Arturia offers steep discounts twice a year (one of those just ended a few days ago). So pricing remains a key issue to keep in mind.

Not quite a pricewar but $29 is the new $150. Some major shifts in softsynth and plugin pricing have started.

Arturia analog lab intro free