Using hardware controllers with software instruments is often a disappointing experience. The immediacy of hands-on control is disrupted by the mental gymnastics required to remember which controls are linked to which parameters. The solution offered by various recent products is to present a unified hardware and software interface, with the physical controls laid out in the same positions as their software counterparts. Thus Novation's Automap 2.0, NI's Kore, and now Arturia's Analog Factory Experience, constrain and organise controls within an on-screen layout that is mirrored in the accompanying hardware.

With the Analog Factory Experience, Arturia have taken their Analog Factory plug-in and built a keyboard that replicates the on-screen controls almost exactly, providing the clearest possible integration between the physical and virtual worlds. Does the scheme work? And does it leave the keyboard suitable for other applications?

The software-only version of Analog Factory was reviewed in SOS in January last year. John Walden praised the instrument's simplicity and wealth of fabulous analogue sounds, while cautioning that this is not a plug-in for those who prefer to program their own sounds from scratch. Analog Factory is a huge library of sounds from Arturia's 'V' series synths: ARP 2600V, Minimoog V, Moog Modular V, Prophet V and VS, CS80V and Jupiter 8V. In a similar way to NI's Kore 2 (reviewed in the March 2008 issue of SOS), Analog Factory's sounds are generated by the original synth engines, but the full interfaces are unavailable.

To use Analog Factory, you pick one of the 3500 presets and then tweak the sound using the available controls. Dedicated knobs are provided for filter cutoff and resonance, LFO rate and amount, master level, and chorus and delay mix. Four extra knobs are pre-assigned to key parameters in each patch. In addition, four sliders are dedicated to controlling the amplitude envelope.

Unveiling the keyboard was a...