Why? Because I had read in a few forum threads that the sounds were thin, uninspiring and partially unusable. I have to say I was bracing myself for disappointment when I first opened Lab.

But what I do want to talk about quickly is the sound itself. Now, I’m not going to review all these instruments here, especially since Analog Lab is a sound collection, not an instrument collection. You’ll find airy Mellotron pads next to dirty Arp 2600 sequences next to legendary Jupiter-8 leads. This mix makes browsing through the presets fun and exciting. What makes this synth collection so interesting is that it includes widely used and legendary synths just as much as more obscure and rare synths. The “V” in the names refers to the fact that these presets are taken from Arturia’s synth emulations (they are not sampled from the actual instruments). Presets from the following synths, keyboard and organs are included in Analog Lab: This means Analog Lab is not meant for synth enthusiasts who want to create all their patches from scratch, it’s made for composers and producers who are looking for sounds to add to their production quickly and are okay with having less control over the individual sounds. Here’s how they differ: While V Collection is a “regular” VST collection and comes with 24 synths and keyboards, Analog Lab is an interface with 6500 presets from those synths.Īnalog Lab allows you to play with all those presets and even gives you the option to modify those sounds, but it doesn’t give you full access to those instruments. Both seemed to be vintage synth bundles of some sort. When I first looked into Arturia’s product line I was confused about the difference between Arturia Analog Lab and the Arturia V Collection. Analog Lab is made exactly for that: Look for a sound, find a sound, start writing. How often do you find yourself browsing presets to look for that one sound to inspire you? Even though I’ve become more and more independent from presets since I’ve started producing music, I still often rely on fresh sounds to kick off my creative process – especially when I’m in the mood to write something instead of fiddling around with sound design.

Analog lab 4