And thanks to the new synth-specific tutorials, playing and learning EII V is extremely intuitive. Not only can you adjust the polyphony from monophonic up to 32 notes, but you can also switch the DAC from Vintage to Modern. The output section of the editor is worthy of special mention, too. You can edit sample start and end points, play direction, filters and LFOs, add effects, assign different samples to different key groups and trig delay. Here, you can quickly build or edit your drum kits and sample instruments. You can access more controls by clicking the monitor above the EII.

It includes several standard modes (up, down, up&down, random, etc.) and rate, sync and octave controls. The arpeggiator is a basic but functional affair. Arturia’s version adds a few front panel functions absent from the original, such as the effects and arpeggiator sections.

The front panel features the most commonly required controls such as filter, LFO and VCA. It includes some patches from the original factory library and some modern sounds to get the creative juices flowing. This emulation (pun intended) recreates that crunchy lo-fi sound. The Emulator II’s 8-bit sampling goodness and factory library were used by too many 80s artists to count. If you’ve ever seen Ferris Bueller’s Day Off or listened to more than 30 minutes of 80s music, you’ve heard this sampling monster. They’ve also added yet another sound bank in the form of PatchWorks: a 700-patch library of sounds for Analog Lab V. However, Arturia gives you all that and adds Emulator II V, Jun-6 V, OB-Xa V and Vocoder V, as well as reworked versions of Jup-8 V, Stage-73 V and Analog Lab. We thought it couldn’t possibly get any better than this staggering collection of vintage instruments (and wealth of patches).

Arturia lab v