Let’s get started on Arturia’s new release by putting things into perspective. The original Moog is more than forty years old; it’s creator Bob Moog turned 75 this year. In that time the brand has turned up in a huge number of releases, in any number of styles. New instruments are still in production and you’ll see the Little Phatty and Voyager synths on stages and in studios worldwide. Moog – and especially 1968s Switched On Bach, which saw Wendy Carlos playing Bach on a Moog – is often credited as bringing electronic music to the masses. Arturia is a software and hardware company founded in France. They make the acclaimed Origin series of synthesizers, and a suite of slick virtual instruments. They are especially well known for their software-based conversions of classic (and now often wildly expensive and difficult to find) hardware synths including The Prophet, CS-80, ARP-2600 and of course, the Minimoog. The roster of artists using these two brands is mind-blowing: *Martin Solveig, Laurent Garnier, Junkie XL, DJ Spooky, Herbie Hancock, Mogwai, Nine Inch Nails, The Neptunes, Hans Zimmer, Radiohead, Dr Dre, Portishead*… The list goes on and on.

Arturia’s Minimoog V 2.0 is an update to their already wildly popular Minimoog V software: if you’re a registered user, you can download it for free from Arturia’s website. It builds on the familiar, established interface, modeled on the hardware, and adds some exciting new features. The first we’ll look at is called SoundMap. Opening in a separate window, SoundMap shows all your stored sounds as colour-coded dots in a two dimensional space. You can toggle the categories you’re working with, so if you’re designing a bass patch you just switch off the pads and leads and other sounds. Now, clicking on a single dot will select that preset – simple enough. But click on an empty space between the patches and the Minimoog will load its parameters according to the values encoded in the presets that are nearest by. The closer you are to a given patch, the more its characteristics are represented in the resulting sound. Then, you can take snapshots or your favourite SoundMap scenes for instant recall, and entering Compass mode displays up to four of these in a new 360 degree radar screen, giving you finer control over the relationship of your patch to the sounds it draws from. Suddenly your preset library has increased a thousand per cent. It’s a simple and powerful concept, that has been well realised.

Next up is the new Motion Recorder. Enabling this opens up a curve editor inside the existing window, with four coloured lines representing parameter value versus time. So you pick the default red line and assign it to a parameter, let’s say the filter cutoff. Now you draw in an envelope with the tools in your palette: pencil, line, sine, noise and so on. You can apply loop braces to your curve and change the start and end points, and by tweaking a couple of knobs below the screen, the speed of the playhead and amplitude settings too. Voila! Your own mini-automation envelope, built right into the instrument, leaving you free to refine arrangement-level automation as usual in your DAW.

The final new feature we’ll focus on is the new vocal formant matrix. You’re presented a red dot in the centre of a small screen and surrounded by a circle of vowel sounds in boxes, with dry/wet, resonance and LFO controls below the screen. Dragging the red dot around creates a ring that’s anchored at the centre and whose diameter determines the amplitude of the effect. This circle is the path the red dot will follow clockwise, if motion is activated with the LFO. You can then move the vowel sounds around into any configuration that suits, so that they’re visited by the playhead in different orders and affect the output to different degrees. A very slow LFO value is an easy way to provide a bit of dynamism to sounds that threaten otherwise to grow stale over time, and the playhead is continuous – it doesn’t retrigger at note on/off signals – meaning the tool is equally handy for varying stabs and percussive sounds as it is for those with long decays like pads and leads. Add to this that parameters from the vocal formant are available to assign with the Motion Recorder and the standard modulation matrix and what you have is an impressively powerful way to control the nasality of your sounds.

These are great tools and tasty enticements, but so far I’ve skipped over Minimoog V 2.0’s best feature. If you’re already a user, or if you’re familiar with the hardware, the new tools are a good reason to update (did I mention it’s free?) but if you’re not, then the reason you’ll buy Minimoog is not because of its fun interface but because it’s capable of some of the most powerful and versatile audio synthesis available today. Arturia’s proprietary TAE (True Analogue Emulation) technology really lives up to its name: the Minimoog, like Arturia’s other great hardware emulations, produces warmth and fatness unmatched in software synths. From monophonic, shimmering leads to bowel-quivering bass sounds, this brute does it all and it sounds amazing. Given the quality of Arturia’s conversion, it comes as no surprise that Bob Moog has put his signature to the software.

Add to that the standard features inherited from earlier versions of Minimoog V 2.0 like very tastefully handled chorus, delay and unison effects, an arpeggio lifted straight from the original hardware instrument and a flexible modulation matrix built-in and you’ve got a wonderful synthesizer that offers far more functionality than its hardware namesake at a fraction of the price.