Arturia V Collection 9 🧻🧻🧻

This is a new page which covers version 9 of this software suite (updated).
For earlier versions go to this page to see the buff smurfs.

I feel a cold wind. The old skeuomorphic days are coming to an end. New instruments with decidedly digital faces are here. Only one old machine has been added since the Ensoniq SQ80 arrived last year. Has Arturia run out of keyboard space in their studio? Are they thinking quality over quantity? Or is Behringer doing the honours in hardware? All of these are likely.

It was inevitable that a Korg MS20 would appear at some point. It’s been a popular choice for a long time, and by the looks of it Korg have blessed this as yet another branch of their fried chicken franchise. There are some changes and additions all of which are useful without being exciting. Korg could have upgraded it themselves but perhaps needed someone else to take the heat. It’s quite different in sound to Cherry Audio’s PS20 which is more of a homage than a replication, but I don’t see that you’d want both.

It must be said that a PS3300 would have been exciting and more in keeping with the traditions of the V Collection. Sure, it had many faults, and sure Korg probably wouldn’t have been so helpful but if you want to lead the pack you need to be braver than this. Including that rare old beast would have made Arturia a talking point – now the talk is more … why the MS20 now?

There are many other exciting things we could have seen. Is Behringer running the chase now? Maybe people want the hardware instead. Perhaps the rights to Cats and Wasps and so on are tied up with The Man From Baden. What about the FIZMO? An OSCar? How about something from another part of the world?

Instead we have Augmented Voices and Augmented Strings. These are quite pleasant and useful but look and sound so Native Instruments that you keep looking for the NI logo. They don’t seem to have any relationship with the rest of the kitty and maybe ended up here because where else? These are the start of a new library … will this be part of the V Collection in future? Or just visiting?

Clicking on the Advanced button opens up a subset of Pigments – Arturia’s wavetable synthesiser. (I’d really like Pigments to have this colour scheme as well please Thank You). The wavetables and samples are limited to the theme of each plug in but still there’s a wide variety of sounds possible. The idea seems to be to confine Pigments to a single role and thus make for easier sound design. But you will eventually end up with quite a lot of instruments this way.

The Arturia smurfs have been very busy in quality control. Some of the older keyboard have been rewritten and improved, including the CS80 and the two Prophets, which have been disconnected – no more hybrid. The Prophet VS now has many sound samples in the oscillators single waveforms in the oscillators which is a little closer to the Ensoniq. I can imagine that this was no easy task and the engineers were hard pressed to revisit these and come up with new keys. Good work! Even so I really think this is an 8.5 release – not a 9. Much effort is evident and all the old goodies are still there. But it’s probably coming now because of Superbooth than any other reason.

Mild to mid enthusiasm.