Arturia has long been known for its realistic emulations of classic analog synthesizers. So is Analog Factory, which repackages its existing emulations in a stripped-down virtual instrument a good deal for digital musicians, or just old wine in a new bottle?
The package contains 2000 presets, taken from Arturia’s ARP 2600V, CS80V, MiniMoog V Moog Modular V, and Prophet V emulations, all of which use Arturia’s acclaimed TAE (True Analog Emulation) technology to accurately reproduce the sound (if not the interface) of the original hardware. The bundle gives you a simplified bundle of the favorite sounds of all the larger, more editable libraries, in an approach along the same lines as Native Instruments’ Xpress Keyboards. Analog Factory rationalizes the sometimes complex interfaces found in the full packages with a simple display that puts everything upfront on a single screen. There’s a 2-1/2 octave virtual keyboard with pitch and mod wheels, master volume control, eight snapshot buttons for saving favorite patches, and a series of controls for controlling the basic parameters found in all analog synths (more on these later).
Browsing Sounds
Central to the Analog Factory experience is its preset browser, which is reminiscent of the one first seen in Apple’s GarageBand and Sony’s ACID and now found in a variety of virtual instruments including NI’s KORE. The sounds in Analog Factory have all been tagged with specific attributes ahead of time so that you can zero in on the exact sound you want. The tags include instrument, type (bass, brass, sfx, fm, guitar, lead, organ, pad, percussive, piano, sequence, or strings), and characteristics (acid, aggressive, ambient, bizarre, bright, digital, ensemble, funky, hard, long, noise, quiet, short, simple, soft, or soundtrack). As you click on the tags, the list narrows, presenting only those sounds that meet your criteria.
Analog Factory, like KORE, focuses on the sounds themselves as opposed to the instruments that created those sounds, an approach that is sure to streamline music creation. Most listeners aren’t going to say, “Wow, what a killer MiniMoog bass!”; they’re just going to get off on a catchy bassline. Analog Factory doesn’t use the KOREsound format employed by Native Instruments. That’s bad news for NI; as one of the major developers of virtual instrument plug-ins, Arturia’s acceptance of the format would have been a strong show of support for the fledgling format. Instead, the categorization was done by Arturia’s resident Sound Designer Jean-Michael Blanchet. Unfortunately, you’re stuck with his tags; Analog Factory, unlike KORE, doesn’t allow you to define your own attributes. Arturia says that using the KORE format would have required that the user have all of the individual emulations installed, which would have worked against its intention to provide a low-cost all-in-one program. Development cycles may have also played a role, as KORE wasn’t announced until NAMM in January.
Control and Expression
Just because Analog Factory is largely designed for someone who just wants to get up and running quickly with some great sounds doesn’t mean you can’t add expressiveness to your performance. Arturia has provided a set of knobs and sliders, which can be mapped to those in your controller along with pitch and mod wheels. Again, like KORE, Analog Factory brings the most common parameters to the fore. By default, the knobs are assigned to level, cutoff filter, resonance, LFO rate, and LFO amount. There are also two knobs assigned to the built-in FX (chorus and delay) and a single set of envelope sliders in a standard ADSR configuration. I’ve always preferred sliders for this because they provide a visual representation of the envelope, unlike the knobs used on say, the MiniMoog. By breaking from a strict representation of the original synths, Arturia has greatly increased the usefulness of these sounds, particularly in the context of live performance.
So, while you can’t get under the hood and create sounds from scratch, you can at least modify the existing sounds somewhat to suit your needs. Your tweaked presets can be saved in the user library for later recall and assigned to the snapshot buttons for quick changes when performing.
Conclusions
Analog Factory is a fantastic bargain for the computer musician who doesn’t require all the bells and whistles of the full emulations and may even inspire a new way of working for the gear obsessed among us (raise your hands). DJs and live performers will find Analog Factory’s low overhead, streamlined operation, and performance-oriented features to be a fine companion for their laptop. Analog compulsives will be better served by the individual emulations with their sometimes-idiosyncratic interfaces. For everyone else, Analog Factory cuts the crap and delivers what truly made these instruments great, the killer sounds.
Analog Factory Product Page [Arturia]
Compatibility: Analog Factory runs on Mac OS X and Windows XP as either a standalone instrument or as a VST, AU, or RTAS plug-in. Intel Mac owners take note: the software is already available as a Universal Binary, in advance of the more full-featured instruments in Arturia’s line-up.
Ndew
[…] What is it? It’s a hardware controller for Arturia’s Analog Factory plugin, which emulates 7 classic vintage synths (Arp 2600, Mini Moog, Moog Modular, Prophet 5, Prophet VS, Jupiter 8, CS 80). £229 / $349. LINK What’s good? I love the idea – a piece of software made real.It’s a great looking, great feeling little keyboard made in China by CME. The design ticks all the Music Thing boxes – it’s (off) white, it has real wood end cheeks, a nice semi-weighted keyboard, really solid, heavy, all-metal chassis, 11 continuous knobs, 4 ADSR sliders (NICE TOUCH!) and a snapshot system pinched from the Nord G2. I like the idea of a tweakable preset machine, like a modern day Matrix 1000, but with 3,500 patches. On each preset, you can change the volume envelope (slightly frustrating if the filter envelope is fixed), the filter cutoff & resonance, LFO rate & amount, and four other pre-selected parameters. Arturia’s emulations sound fantastic, though I’m not qualified enough to judge how accurate they are. The Arp sounds raw and clunky with a boingy spring reverb. The Prophet VS sounds gritty and digital. The Moog Modular sounds huge, etc. If you want to know about the software, Create Digital Music and Sound on Sound can help. What’s bad? Aaaaagh! It’s software. Installing it had me typing a 32 digit number four or five times until it took. I installed it on my laptop, and it’s now impossible to move to another PC, without (at least) contacting customer support and buying a Syncrosoft key for €14. Yes, if I’d paid £229 for it, rather than borrowing one to review, I’d have thought harder about where I installed it. But why should I have to? It’s lame. For £250 you can buy a new XioSynth, MicroKorg, or Alesis Micron or a used Juno 6 or JP8000. If you’re a professional musician, or you’re trying to get great sounds in a hurry, or you enjoy tidiness and efficiency, then Analog Factory is perfect. It’s quick to use, far better sounding than those cheap hardware synths, and all your settings are saved automatically. If, like me, you’re a no-talent tinkerer, who enjoys fiddling with gear and recording bits of music, then the Analog Factory Experience might be a disappointment. But that’s just me. If you enjoy software synths, then there are a few relatively minor niggles. The keyboard will output midi, but the controller numbers are all fixed, so you’ll have to teach other synths to understand it, rather than vice versa. And there’s very audible stepping when you’re tweaking some knobs, i.e when tweaking the cutoff frequency on a resonant filter. So… If you get on with software synths, and you want a fantastically sexy little controller for a huge collection of great synth sounds, buy this now. If you want a sexy little synth, don’t. […]
So is this more of a rompler with some adjustable parameters?
[…] What is it? It’s a hardware controller for Arturia’s Analog Factory plugin, which emulates 7 classic vintage synths (Arp 2600, Mini Moog, Moog Modular, Prophet 5, Prophet VS, Jupiter 8, CS 80). £229 / $349. LINK What’s good? I love the idea – a piece of software made real.It’s a great looking, great feeling little keyboard made in China by CME. The design ticks all the Music Thing boxes – it’s (off) white, it has real wood end cheeks, a nice semi-weighted keyboard, really solid, heavy, all-metal chassis, 11 continuous knobs, 4 ADSR sliders (NICE TOUCH!) and a snapshot system pinched from the Nord G2. I like the idea of a tweakable preset machine, like a modern day Matrix 1000, but with 3,500 patches. On each preset, you can change the volume envelope (slightly frustrating if the filter envelope is fixed), the filter cutoff & resonance, LFO rate & amount, and four other pre-selected parameters. Arturia’s emulations sound fantastic, though I’m not qualified enough to judge how accurate they are. The Arp sounds raw and clunky with a boingy spring reverb. The Prophet VS sounds gritty and digital. The Moog Modular sounds huge, etc. If you want to know about the software, Create Digital Music and Sound on Sound can help. What’s bad? Aaaaagh! It’s software. Installing it had me typing a 32 digit number four or five times until it took. I installed it on my laptop, and it’s now impossible to move to another PC, without (at least) contacting customer support and buying a Syncrosoft key for €14. Yes, if I’d paid £229 for it, rather than borrowing one to review, I’d have thought harder about where I installed it. But why should I have to? It’s lame. For £250 you can buy a new XioSynth, MicroKorg, or Alesis Micron or a used Juno 6 or JP8000. If you’re a professional musician, or you’re trying to get great sounds in a hurry, or you enjoy tidiness and efficiency, then Analog Factory is perfect. It’s quick to use, far better sounding than those cheap hardware synths, and all your settings are saved automatically. If, like me, you’re a no-talent tinkerer, who enjoys fiddling with gear and recording bits of music, then the Analog Factory Experience might be a disappointment. But that’s just me. If you enjoy software synths, then there are a few relatively minor niggles. The keyboard will output midi, but the controller numbers are all fixed, so you’ll have to teach other synths to understand it, rather than vice versa. And there’s very audible stepping when you’re tweaking some knobs, i.e when tweaking the cutoff frequency on a resonant filter. So… If you get on with software synths, and you want a fantastically sexy little controller for a huge collection of great synth sounds, buy this now. If you want a sexy little synth, don’t. […]
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