You Probably Already Have It
I don't know if they do it anymore, but Arturia used to produce really great manuals for their soft synths. Hopefully I've got them saved somewhere if they don't.
One of the first things I bought when I got really deep into electronic music composition in the early teens was whatever they're calling the big collection, the X or whatever. Everything sounded really cool.
My goal at the time was how do I do the Rio arpeggiator? I didn't understand. Actually had 2 goals: first goal was how do I get the opening sound of Don't Stand So Close to Me? Figured that one out through purchasing gear.--Minitaur.
#2 was the Duran Duran's "Rio" arp. I thought it was synth specific. Turns out it's just any random arpeggiator. Jupiter type thing. I think it was the Jupiter 4.
That's when I really fell in love with the Roland synths again. Re-in-love, because the first synth I fell in love with, the JX-3P, of course, covered here in prior posts.
But somewhere along the way my love of the Arturia collection soured a little bit. Not entirely sure why or what happened. I think at the end of the day I just thought they didn't sound very good. Also I was having clicking and popping issues trying to use them live. Didn't work. So various issues, and I look back at stuff like that and my guess is it was pretty heavily operator error.
Because I opened the collection the other day and made a track and everything just sounded great. I've also sharpened my ear.
One thing I've realized lately is I'm not a very good synth programmer, but I'm a really good picker of patches and then adjusting them. Trying to do better with that.
I'm going through Lisa Bella Donna's moog notebook or cookbook or whatever it's called. Going one by one. It's fascinating. I'll go deep on a patch for a few days, maybe a week, and try to understand everything that's going on.
The first one is called chocolate something, whatever. The noises it makes and the chocolate association is kind of gross, but it is such a, it's revelatory. Just really interesting.
All of this is to say what an amazing thing it is to have that V collection, to have all these synths.
I went through a preset pack I bought a long time ago that was Kraftwerk and the modular system and the Arturia pack is worth the price of admission there. You could learn so much just reverse engineering those packs.
I've been doing the same thing going through all my old F9 stuff. Demo sets. It's huge. It's instructional.
And the point for today is, you probably got it on your computer. No need buy or do videos.