Arturia V Collection X

With the instrument’s image clipped by the sides of the window, the CP‑70 V GUI is a rather plain affair that doesn’t hint at the quality of the sounds that it can produce.

With new and improved instruments, Arturia’s one‑stop synth shop is better value than ever.

The inexorable expansion of Arturia’s V Collection continues unabated, most recently from 2021’s V Collection 8, to 2022’s V Collection 9 and, now V Collection 10... umm, I mean V Collection X, which continues the company’s tradition of including some new instruments, some upgraded ones and, on this occasion, a bunch of new sounds contained within three expansion packs. The new instruments comprise CP‑70 V, MiniFreak V, Acid V, Augmented Brass, Augmented Grand Piano and Augmented Woodwinds. ‘Hang on,’ I hear you say, ‘Wasn’t MiniFreak V reviewed in Sound On Sound in April 2023, and wasn’t Acid V reviewed in November?’ Of course they were, or I wouldn’t have mentioned it. Augmented Brass and Augmented Grand Piano were also released last year, so only two of the instruments in V Collection X are actually new. This doesn’t make the Collection any better or worse value, it’s just that, when Arturia claim that six new instruments have been added, they mean new to the Collection, not new as in... well, new.

New: CP‑70 V

The first of the two new instruments is perhaps the most important addition to the Collection, so let’s start with CP‑70 V, a recreation of the Yamaha CP‑70 piano. You might wonder why Arturia didn’t emulate the Holy Grail of the CP series by sticking an 88‑note keyboard on the GUI and calling it CP‑80 V, but that would be to overlook that the two original pianos are rather different: the CP‑80 has a larger harp with longer strings so its tone is rounder and deeper, and — notwithstanding the extra notes — it feels subtly different to play.

CP‑70 V isn’t physically modelled; the initial sound generation is sample‑based. This wouldn’t have surprised me 10 or 20 years ago but, today, I suspect that might have been a decision made if the company found that they couldn’t get the results they wanted from physical modelling. Nonetheless, modelling was used to emulate the original’s electronics, and Arturia claim that the combination of the two approaches “allows for a truly expressive sound that perfectly recreates this remarkable instrument”.

Of course, no two CP‑70s are the same, so the company have added an Advanced panel to CP‑70 V which offers 14 parameters that allow you to tweak the emulation to obtain the characteristics that you want. Once programmed to taste, the resulting sound — which can be mono or spread across the stereo field with bass notes to the left and treble to the right — passes through an effect section that contains four slots hosting 13 freely assignable effect types, plus two dedicated slots that contain an amp modeller and a reverb.

Creators of CP emulators tend to iron out the worst idiosyncrasies of any specific instrument in order to produce a more polite and well‑behaved sound; this makes the emulation more widely useful, but can reduce its character when compared with an original instrument. So if there’s an immediate difference between CP‑70 V and a vintage CP‑70, it’s that the tuning — even when you dial in a bit of detune — is more accurate than anything other than a recently tuned original. Furthermore, the experience of playing it from your MIDI keyboard is unlikely to be the same, because the original’s keybed is that of a Yamaha acoustic grand piano. Nonetheless, you’ll get very close with a bit of tweaking and, when playing it from an expensive, fully weighted controller, the differences are unlikely to matter unless you’re a true CP‑70 fanatic.

Before moving on, there are two further points to note. The first concerns the GUI. Unlike many previous Arturia soft thingies, the image of the instrument fills the whole window, and is even clipped at the left and right edges. I’ve noted in the past that the company’s GUIs could take up a lot of space, but I don’t think that this is an attractive way to address the issue. The second concerns my single, brief attempt to emulate my CP‑80 using CP‑70 V. In short, I couldn’t. This wasn’t only because the underlying tone is different, but because Arturia have declined to extend the uppermost and lowermost samples beyond the range of the CP‑70. I don’t blame them for this, because I could easily believe that these notes would sound inauthentic.

New: Augmented Woodwinds

Back in 2022, I suggested that the introduction of Augmented Strings and Augmented Voices in V Collection 9 might herald the introduction of further Augmented products, and so it has proved. Augmented Woodwinds is the latest in the series and, in many ways, it’s identical with the others, sharing the same eight controls on its front page, the same four‑source/dual‑layer sound generation, plus the same filtering, modulation, arpeggiation and effects. The difference between the various Augmented products therefore lies in nothing more than the sample libraries that underpin their main sample engines.

The eight controls on the top level of Augmented Woodwinds will look familiar to users of existing Augmented instruments.

Despite its name and a library that focuses on solo and ensemble woodwind instruments, Augmented Woodwinds isn’t an instrument that I would use to create orchestral performances in the way that I might use, say, a Kurzweil or Korg sample library. Instead, I found its floaty leads, airy pads, doom‑laden carpets of sound, sparkling fairy dust and sound effects to be ideal for film and TV soundtracks and general ‘ooh, I didn’t expect that’ sound design. As with previous Augmented instruments, I hadn’t expected too much from it but was again was surprised by what I conjured quickly and easily when I dived in and, the more I used it, the more I respected it. It’s unlikely to be your main soft synth, but I suspect that it will take your initial ideas in unexpected directions, and I’m sure that it will be another useful addition to your armoury.

Revised: Mini V4

Over the years, Minimoog V has evolved from its first, slightly iffy incarnation to the power and flexibility of Mini V3, so it’s perhaps surprising to see Arturia’s designers rein it in for Mini V4. They’ve reduced the maximum polyphony from 32 to six voices, removed pulse‑width modulation and sync from the oscillators, removed the ability to disconnect osc 2 from the keyboard, removed the motion recorder and reduced the modulation capabilities, all of which reduces the range of sounds that you can obtain from it. The company have sought to justify this by saying, “We have stripped back the feature set to try and be as pure as we can to the original synth”, but I doubt that this noble philosophy is the real reason for all of the changes since many additional facilities have been retained or even enhanced. I’m much more inclined to believe that the new algorithms that underpin the oscillators, mixer, filter, contours and feedback are hungrier than those in earlier incarnations, so it was necessary to slim down the feature set to make V4 run reliably on anything but high‑powered and therefore expensive computers.

The Advanced pages of the Mini V4 show that, while simplified, it still offers a lot of sound shaping potential.

Given all of the omissions, is there anything new to shout about? Indeed there is and, while there are too many changes to discuss here, I’ll concentrate on the most important. First, there are the two new types of feedback (which replace the External Input loop of V3) plus overdrive. Next comes a filter Emphasis button, which allows you to replicate the response of the original Minimoog (in which low frequencies are attenuated as you increase the Emphasis) or that of some other vintage synths that don’t suppress the low end when the Emphasis (or ‘resonance’) is increased. The third major improvement is the addition of a Vintage knob and Dispersion, which allow you to determine the amount by which various aspects of the sound generation differ from voice to voice. Finally, the effect section is more flexible than before.

So, what of the underlying sound? Has it improved enough to justify all of the omissions? I think that it has. Even without invoking any Dispersion, V4 is subtly more organic than V3 and (while I dislike the overuse of these terms) it can sound creamier and fatter. Only you can decide whether the compromises represent a step forward or backward, but I don’t need my Minimoog soft synth to offer massive polyphony and oodles of modulation routings; I need it to sound as good as it can. On this basis, I would use V4 in preference to any earlier version. There’s just one additional caveat. The changes mean that earlier Mini V patches are incompatible with the new version. Fortunately, I found nothing to stop me running V3 and V4 alongside each other so, if you have the older version, all of the work that you put into creating your existing patch libraries isn’t wasted. But if Mini V4 is your first Arturia Minimoog, I suspect that you’ll want to start programming right away, especially since the number of factory patches has been reduced from 460 in V3 to 161 in V4.

Revised: Wurli V3

I must admit that I became a bit of a fan when I reviewed Wurli V2 because it barks beautifully in that rather curtailed way that Rhodes pianos just don’t. In addition to its eight underlying models, its advanced controls gave me access to things such as the vibrato circuit, pickups, hammers, dynamics and EQ, making it possible to obtain all manner of variations from what, on the surface, looked like a simple replay instrument. Adding auto‑wah at the start of the effects chain and one of the amplifier/microphone models at the end placed the Wurli world at my fingertips.

The Wurli V3 FX page eschews the ‘stompboxes on the floor’ imagery of the previous version and offers a much clearer (if less evocative) representation.

Behind its revised GUI, the new version embodies many changes. Most noticeably, the Advanced panel offers more parameters to fine‑tune the character of the instrument, and the effects section is again expanded. Arturia also claim that the sound engine that underpins V3 has been updated from its predecessor. But is the new version better? To be honest, it’s hard to tell. The factory sounds (of which there are now just 51 rather than 190) are different and, when I tried to recreate some of my V2 sounds on V3, I failed because the two don’t map from one to the other. For example, while the effects section in V3 is more flexible and its new GUI makes the controls and labels on each stompbox clearer, its three‑band parametric EQ doesn’t allow me to shape the sound in quite the same way as the graphic equaliser in V2. Ultimately, testing Wurli V2 and V3 next to one another was much like playing two EP200s — they’re similar, but individual. Both versions can sound great and can respond as you would want so, if you have V2, I recommend that you hang on to it when you install V3, and then choose whichever works best for you on any given track or recording.

Now containing a staggering total of 39 instruments that cover vintage monosynths, revered polysynths, samplers (including the Emulator II, Fairlight and Synclavier), Mellotrons, pianos, Clavinets, organs and the company’s own sample‑based synths, it’s likely that you’ll be able to obtain almost anything that you want.

Conclusions

As in previous reviews of V Collections, this has by necessity been a whistle‑stop tour of the major changes. So let’s finish by considering the collection as a whole. Now containing a staggering total of 39 instruments that cover vintage monosynths, revered polysynths, samplers (including the Emulator II, Fairlight and Synclavier), Mellotrons, pianos, Clavinets, organs and the company’s own sample‑based synths, it’s likely that you’ll be able to obtain almost anything that you want from it. Well... almost anything, other than state‑of‑the‑art acoustic and electronic drum kits. At a price of around £500$500, that equates to around £13$13 per instrument, which is ridiculously cheap.

So, given the high prices and low reliabilities of many of the vintage instruments that the Collection seeks to emulate, the only questions for many players will be, do the instruments sound good, are they easy to use and — where appropriate — are they accurate? The answers are yes, yes and, despite the protestations of the Analogue Anoraks (who haven’t yet learned that decrying soft synths doesn’t make them sound cleverer than the rest of us), yes. It’s not all‑encompassing, and I’m still hoping for a couple of additions that I requested from Arturia a few years ago, but there’s a valid argument to suggest that, if you can’t get what you want from V Collection X, you must be on esoteric sonic ground indeed. Either that, or you simply haven’t dived in and tried hard enough!