 V Collection 9 from Arturia is here and as we've come to expect it's full of analog synths, digital synths, organs, electric pianos and acoustic pianos but it's what's new in this massive collection which has me really excited. Hi folks, I'm Mike and I hope you're well. I don't think I've ever been as excited about a new V Collection as V Collection 9 from Arturia. Not only have they added some new instruments but they've also added a new category of instruments which I'm absolutely loving. Now whilst I do want to focus in this video on what's new in this collection just give me one minute to recap what was included in previous versions. What you're seeing now are some of the incredible analog synths contained in the V Collection mostly classic and revered instruments from the 70s and 80s often even buying one of the originals would now cost you thousands of dollars but now not only can you have these iconic synths at your fingertips but Arturia like to give them a little twist that was not in the original as if that were not enough there's also a fine collection of digital synths which dare I say it maybe even better than the originals given that you now have the benefit of Arturia's well thought out interfaces to program them. Now I personally have a soft spot for the beautifully recreated vintage organs and pianos. Many of these can be found on classic recordings from the 60s and 70s and I regularly make use of these on my tracks. They are faithful and have depth but at the same time always contain a new trickle to and finally whilst piano V is classed as one instrument it actually contains a number of grand upright and quirky acoustic pianos. Now amongst these existing instruments there's been some important rebuilds for version 9. The CS80V has had both a brand new sound engine and rebuilt DSP modeling. Piano V has had its modeling engine for its 12 acoustic pianos rebuilt and what was previously a hybrid instrument the Prophet V has been split into two new instruments the Prophet 5V and the Prophet VSV both built from scratch. Now I'm gonna leave my two favorite new instruments to the end of this video but first of all I want to take a quick look at two new synths which have been added to this version. When I was a teenager back in the mid 1980s I was very fortunate that my high school music department had a couple of synthesizers that we were allowed to muck around on. Now one of those was the Yamaha DX9. I don't have such great memories of that but the other one was the Korg MS20 which I thought was a whole load of fun. So I'm so nostalgically pleased that Arturia have added their version of this to the V Collection 9. Now I'll talk about why I think it was so much fun in a moment but first of all I want to let you know that when I played around with this for the first time yesterday I played a sequence of notes on the keyboard and this came out. To be fair to you very quickly afterwards I just had to add this to it as well. Yes I incidentally started to write an 80s classic 40 years too late but it does reek doesn't it of 80sness which I really actually love. Now why was it so much fun to play with well I think compared to the DX9 which had all these menus hidden away with that LCD screen and a big thick manual. With this you had knobs to play with and the great thing about knobs is you can just get an immediate change to the sound or usually you can sometimes you can't. So for example if I was just to play that little sequence again and mess around with this high-pass filter you know you can hear that change in sound right away it's very sort of organic okay. So I think there's a UI term for this when there's sort of one knob per feature or something. Let me know in the comments down below if you know what that clever term is. Now added to that on this particular synth we also had these sort of patch cables so you could reroute the audio to different parts of the synth and you can see that here I can grab a cable and I can move it around and plug it in. Now what's great about this is that when they remake something like this and I think they're kind of faithful to the sound of it they can also add some things to it which were not there in the original in my memory at least. For example there's a sequencer here and then there's also we've got a whole bunch of effects this is really one of the major advantages of having you know a software synth like this and not only to mention that you know old synths maybe breaking down they may take some maintenance you've got to plug them in etc you do have these extra advantages. Now I will talk about another one of those advantages as I play another patch here I'm just going to go to this one sorry a patch preset. Ancient wind okay now have a listen to this and let me know if you spotted what I was able to do with this that you couldn't do with an original MS-20. Did you spot it? Well the thing about this was there was many notes at one time it's polyphonic so I was able to play some chords. The original MS-20 was a was a monophonic synthesizer which probably one of the only advantages that had over the poor old DX9 I'm giving the DX9 a bad name here I did have some fun with it but yeah so you know we get the advantages now of being able we've got the advantage of being able to have these things that the original instrument didn't have which I think is just fantastic but there's a certain sound to this instrument which does take me back and the strange thing was at the time I wasn't really into that kind of music but now when I hear it just warms my heart and I enjoy it immensely so the last thing I want to mention is this is quite intimidating isn't it to be fair as a teenager I just messed around with these knobs never read a manual and if I'd wanted to create a specific sounds that I had in my head I would have probably struggled with that I was just making random sounds but what's great about this instrument and I have to say I think all of the arterial instruments in this collection are there is the tutorial section so I'll just open it up now just have to click on this cog up here and you there's a bunch of different settings but over there on the right we can go to tutorial now when you start to open it up it's going to give you a warning that you're going to lose your settings that's fine I'm just going to go to sound generators though for example and you can see it's very interactive in what it does it loads up a particular sound for you to experiment with it walks you through you know how all of the different things work here and highlights the areas of the interface that it's teaching you about at the moment I've found a number of their tutorials for a non synth guy like me very very helpful indeed you can see I'll go for example to the amplifier section here click on that and you can see it's highlighted that section it's really worth taking a little bit of time at working through these if you're not up to scratch with you know sort of soundscaping and things I think they're really really good and as I say it's not just on this instrument this is kind of across the board now and actually I think they do it with their effects as well I think it's one of the hidden treasures check it out you know if you get this whole of this collection it's really going to speed up your learning process but this is not the only new synth in the lineup now in the interest of time I'm just going to quickly go over this new addition to the collection this is the sq-80v which is based upon a synthesizer from the late 80s from Ensoniq which was the sq-80 which in itself was a souped-up version of the ESQ-1 listen to me sounding all knowledgeable after I hit Wikipedia this morning what I love after I've played around with this instrument is the fact that although it's from the 80s now it doesn't sound dated it doesn't have me sounding feeling so nostalgic but I think this is sort of more useful for modern soundscaping in my opinion at least anyway it's very rich in sound I'm just going to go through three of the many many let's have a look this the many many presets that you have in here just going to go through three which I have liked the first one sounds like this just to demonstrate something a bit different this one bouncy ball bell bouncy balls bouncy bells I love this kind of stuff you know and then finally something called ooze I could find uses for that all the time now interestingly what they've done here with the interface in terms of you know creating your own sounds or adjusting these presets is the kind of main macro controls they have right on the front here so you've got access to them right away so you can make changes they're just using your mouse okay or you can get more in depth of course if you go over to this synthesis tab here and I've got to say I just love the way Arturia design these interfaces even for a noob like me to any kind of soundscaping there are a lot of fun to play around with and I think it's very important to keep fun in your music production and finally over here we also have some effects as well the usual kind of fare with that kind of thing so look I think a very nice addition to the collection I'm sure some of for some of you this is actually famous for me it's not I'm afraid sorry about that but I'm sure you're gonna love playing around with it now a few weeks ago I told you about a plugin called augmented strings intro which was free at the time to celebrate the launch of the new augmented series from Arturia and I guessed at the time that it would be a simplified version of a much better plugin where you had more customization through advanced controls and I'm pleased to say I guessed right augmented strings from Arturia has all the great sounds that we heard previously but you really get to customize them to your own taste now for those of you who did see my previous video about the free intro version of this plugin you'll be looking at this and thinking how long has anything changed here I can promise you a lot has changed I mean there's a whole bunch more presets for it for example but that's not really where it's at it's the amount of control you have over this instrument which has really changed but before we get into that let's just do a quick recap of the main controls on this front page okay I think they call this the play page and the most prominent of those controls is the morph control and this reveals the true nature of these augmented instruments I'm just gonna play the piece of music that I use right in the intro of this video and I'm just gonna push this morph control up here so you can hear what's happening so for those of you who haven't heard this instrument before what's happening there is we started off didn't we with sort of a pretty basic string sound there and then as I push this morph control over we started here this sort of synthesized sound and this is the sort of basis of these instruments they are made up of two layers of sounds each of those layers has two parts or two possible parts by the way and we're morphing them together we're not mixing them together this is not a mixed control it's not just blending the audio together this is actually morphing the values as we as we move this control over very very organic when you get to use it and I think it's something is one of those instruments you'll definitely be moving these controls around during a performance to get the best out of them I reckon now I quickly want to go over three of the other controls here not all of them but three and this will give you a sort of an understanding of what's really going on what's really clever about this instrument the top three controls color time and motion also affect the sound but not in the same way with every single instrument or with every single preset we'll get on to why that is later when we delve deep but first of all let's just recap on what these do color affects the harmonic content of the sound we'll just use that time affects anything to do with time so that's going to be things like attack and release for example and then motion affects anything to do with modulation now being a little bit vague about exactly what they do affect and as I say I'm going to get to that later it's just one of the best features or best parts of this instrument but in order to start to understand how we now can make our own sounds because we couldn't really do that in the free version we have to go to the advanced tab it's always the advanced tab which gets me really excited with Arturo click on that and here is revealed those two layers layer A layer B those are the two things that we're morphing and as I say each has two parts you can see one here you can see another one over here now they can be made up of samples they can be made up of synthesis okay so they can vary from one sound to another and obviously once you see loaded up a sound I'll just load up a cello sound here okay then you can start to make changes using the controls here and then also the filters at the bottom here as well I'm not going to go into all the details of all these controls but you can see from this page basically how the controls are made up we also have a modulation page here LFOs functions etc etc I love the interface here I have to say I just want to play with these interfaces I just want to use them organic intuitive really really fun even for a non synthesis guy like me then we have an arpeggiator page this is different to the intro version although it's the same in the sense that we can arpeggiate the velocity and the gate we're going to come back to this one I think later then we have an effects page where we can add a couple of effects to each of the layers there lots and lots of you know effects that we can add in there and then finally I think this is a really really important page it ties back to the play page and this is the macro page this is where we actually control I'll just go to the sound section of this this is where we actually control what's happening when we adjust those controls on the front page or the play page if we go back to that remember there's morph there's color there's time there's motion and you can see at the top of this macros page color morph time and motion what's happening here for example with morph where we're morphing between the two layers we get a lot of control about what actually happens there so we can control what the actual volume change is with each of those layers with each part within those layers and then we can also control kind of how that happens with a curve here so it's happening in a linear fashion by default but as you can see I'm just pushing the curve around there so it's very intuitive it's a lot of fun to do and you can really make these sounds your own the controls your own if you like on the front page there the play page and as I was saying you quickly saw it there we also have a section for those effects controls which we also saw I'll remind you and the bottom half of that play page so much control in this instrument but if you don't fancy getting into all of that and I don't really see why you wouldn't because it is so much fun but if you don't fancy that there is so many presets I'll just go to explore here there's just so many presets which make use of both very natural sounding instruments so almost almost sort of natural acoustic sounding instruments and some stuff which is kind of out of this world not acoustic sounding at all I do have four liked ones already like the first one you've already heard was beautiful swell I also have deepening liked here I think this just demonstrates how sort of acoustic you can be you perhaps just need to say something like that an acoustic bass sound we have another one here which is very acoustic pop staccato okay and then finally I'm just going to go to orange here because this one doesn't sound particularly acoustic it does make good use of that arpeggiator I kind of want to mention the arpeggio a little bit again I've just really enjoyed messing around with it I'll go to it here simple controls you can understand this in just a couple of minutes okay you can see we are peggiating velocity and gate here okay we can extend the steps in the arpeggio just by dragging out like this I'll just change that to say eight steps mess around with some of the values of the steps yeah quickly like so we'll just play that again yeah just really easy to use like that we can see that we can actually have a different number of steps for the gate and for the velocity so that really mixes things up and makes things sound natural and if you really want to mix things up again for example you could go to this randomized feature where we can control how much sort of random variation there is in this case on the velocity love that and then at the top we've got these controls which is the chord control so on that step if that selected the actual full chord that you're playing is going to be played whereas on the other sort of steps it's going to play individual notes of that chord yeah like what I'm trying to demonstrate here is just how well they've done in my opinion with the intuitive nature of the interface here and it also you know really encourages you to make things sound a little bit more random a little bit more organic I love that about this instrument and this is not the only augmented instrument that we have new to this collection now this has been kind of a long video so thank you so much for making it this far with me perhaps you'll consider liking and subscribing thank you now this next section is much quicker to explain you'll be glad to hear this is augmented voices and it's quicker to explain because it's almost identical to augmented strings except it's voice based the front page or the play page is just the same controls and if we go over to advance we've got those same two layers with two parts we've got modulation arpeggiator effects and also those macro controls as well so there's not much else for me to explain except for the fact there's a whole bunch of presets for you to play with and I've got it down to my four favorites in my liked section here let's start off with bouncing vowels and see how that sounds and as I play these presets I will be messing around with the morph and some of the other controls because that's really the heart of these augmented instruments how you blend these two layers together there's so many uses for those kinds of sounds over so many genres of music I reckon the next one that I sort of earmarked was this one coming storm let's have a listen to that I reckon that's really lending itself to some dance or electronic music there let's have a listen to something quite different which is a voiced piano I mean this is just to demonstrate there's not just those sort of ethereal sort of sounds but I have to say those ethereal kind of moody sounds are my favorites let's finish off with something called what's this one called again a soul to borrow okay let's have a listen to this I love this now what I love about what Arturia have done here is they've added instruments that when I load them up I'm immediately inspired to make music with them that's a good sign of a great virtual instrument now I did kind of skip over all of the other instruments which are in this collection they're from the previous versions if you want to find out more about those then do check out my previous videos which I've made about version 8 of this collection click just here to do that and enjoy yourself