Future Music unearth amazing new synth feature
Software update to Arturia’s Minimoog V reveals amazing new soon-to-be-ripped-off-by-everyone uberfeature. Mark our words – this will be big…
Updating your software isn’t the most exciting of pursuits but when the software is Minimoog V – the best-selling emulation of one of the world’s best loved synth – and the company is Arturia – the gallic geniuses who brought you the Jupiter 8V and CS80V among others – then the results are potentially mind-blowing.
We’ll skip by the new presets, new wood colouring and other minor tweaks in Minimoog V 2.0 coming soon from Arturia and first sing the praises of the amazing new Vocal Filter, now revealed on a second fold out control panel behind the famous Minimoog knobset.
It’s a small square upon which are the symbols A, E, I, O and U. Engage it and move the pointer around the square to reveal a powerful new vocal phenome-based treatment to your chosen sound. The result is instant, impossible to categorise (and tricky to make) Daft Punk-style synth leads of the type only possible through a messy talkbox system.
- The A, E, I, O, U-based vocal filter is near the top left.
But the feature that’s got us really exited is the Minimoog V’s amazing new Sound Map. ‘Inovative Sound Browsers’ aren’t a new concept at all but this one gives a remarkable new kink on the idea, eliminating the lists of ‘heavy’ ‘breathy’ and ‘metallic’ patches to dial through in favour of a cosmic cloud filled with star-like dots.
- The new ’starfield’ browser in situ.
Move the pointer to a dot and hear the sound that it represents. Now move it to the dot next door and you’ll hear a sound that’s similar. But move it further away – on the other side of the on-screen ‘galaxy’ and you’ll hear a sound that miles apart. Get it? It’s a difficult concept to explain but so simple in operation. You move the pointer around the screen listening to the sound change and intuitively heading towards your ideal preset. Suddenly lists of categorised patches look complex and boring in comparison.
And there’s a final spin on this. Click more than one dot and the sounds are combined together – the resultant knob parameters being a ‘cross’ of all the settings from the patches you selected. Now move the pointer closer to one ‘star’ and the sound will be increasingly more like that sound, as the knobs magically turn further towards that patch’s settings. And you don’t have to mix up similar patches. Select a bell-like lead and a fat pad and move around to hear the Moog meld between them.
The new Sound Map up close.
It’s an amazing and easy to use idea that – we confidently predict – will be ripped off before the year is out. Nice one, Arturia.
Tags: Future Music, Hi-tech, Synth
This entry was posted on Saturday, January 17th, 2009 at 3:16 am and is filed under Blog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
How much is this going to cost to registered users?
Hopefully its free – LOL!!!!!!!!!!!
; )
Release date?
This won’t be ripped off from Arturia, because that idea had been around already quite a while in Cycling ’74’s Hipno plugin collection for example. So if soemone borrows, they borrow it from elsewhere…;-)
It is cool to do interpolation though, and to have a 2-D space to control as many parameters as you like. I bet this will become standard within a short time. Arturia will make this technique much more common as it was ’til now…