Usually nothing interests me less than distribution deals, but this one caught my eye. Yamaha, the only synth and instrument maker I know of that also makes jetskis, has partnered with our favorite French synth geek-gurus, Arturia. Arturia’s products, from its Moog-endorsed analog emulations to the Storm synth studio, will now be distributed here in the U.S. It’s a natural fit for at least one product: Arturia’s CS-80V is a terrific emulation of Yamaha’s classic CS-80 keyboard.
This announcement tells us two things: one is, Yamaha is serious about software; their purchase of Steinberg wasn’t just a fluke. Second, if you want to distribute music software, you need a big distributor; this announcement follows a rash of soft synths going under the M-Audio/Digidesign umbrella.
So is that bad; is this just the growing power of The Man? I don’t think so. All in all, I think it’s good news — small software houses rarely have the resources to get their stuff into users’ hands. I hope the big companies will market these products aggressively. (Need any tips, just give me a call!)
I've been extremely impressed with the increasing quality of these analog recreations. I downloaded the impOSCar demo the other night and was blow away by the warmth and 'fat-ness' of it…
But truth be told I'm still waiting for one of three things:
Buchla Modular Softsynth (Series 200)
Oberheim XPander Softsynth
Prophet 5 Softsynth (Yes, NI has one, but it needs an update to compete with current technology)
The first company to come close to recreating one of those three has my money.
-b