Jörg Hüttner

Emmy-nominated composer Jörg Hüttner bought his first synth at 15, inspired by Depeche Mode and Jean-Michel Jarre. In the late 90s and 2000s he created lots of sounds for synth manufacturers, before moving to LA in 2007 to pursue a career in film music. He’s worked on “50 Shades of Grey”, “Independence Day: Resurgence” and Netflix’s “How It Ends”, and many more. A few of his latest projects include promo spots for NBC and a new trailer album for 2019.

The main strengths are the strong authentic sound and the addition of new features the original synths didn’t offer, like the modulation slots in the “Mini V3” and “SEM V2”, which allow adding functionality and versatility to sounds that was never possible with the originals. The possibility to add effects is obviously the icing on the cake.

I always start with “init” or template sounds with any synthesizer I get my hands on to see what it can do. I had already used the “SEM V2”, “Jup-8 V3” and “Mini V3” before, so I tried to get new sounds out of it. From there it gave me an idea what type of sound I might go for. I always focus on making sounds very useful in productions and not to “show off” features. Sounds are tools for my compositions.

The sound was not a “lucky accident” per se. I wanted to create a sound with an interesting filter movement and a very low sub in it. Therefore the sub oscillator is two octaves down instead of just 1. However the character changed quite a bit in a very interesting direction once I applied the effects to it, especially the distortion.
The “balls” of the sound come obviously from the low sub oscillator and the overall low Filter frequency, but the character comes from the two sawtooth waveforms and the filter movement created by the 2nd envelope. The overdrive effect then brings the sub oscillator sonically forward and changes the character quite a bit.

Jeremiah Savage

Professional sound designer for 16 years and a musician and composer for longer. Involved in nearly all of Native Instruments synths and samplers on the market including Absynth, FM8, Massive, many Reactor synths and many Kontakt Instruments. He designed and released his own Instruments including Kinetic Metal and Kinetic Toys to mention a few.

Being somewhat new to Arturia’s vintage collection, I was extremely surprised at the level of detail of the modeled versions of these vintage synths. I loved all of them but I really fell in love with the CS-80. The impeccable analog realism of the oscillators and filters combined with the excellent GUI makes this synth more than a great sound tool. It was very tactile and felt like a time machine for me, which has a surreal effect for inspiration when writing music that almost guides your playing. Many great pieces of music came from this synth and to me Arturia have created an evolution that nicely extends into the modern era for how easy it is to make great patches as well as the new powerful modulation capabilities it has.

My favorite preset I created was ‘Cosmos’. I grew up watching the Cosmos series by Carl Sagan and always loved the music created for it. I had set out to create something with a similar mood and tone and ended up with semi-familiar yet unique sound. A sort of small homage to that great series.

You can tell a lot of work went into modeling the dynamics of voltage controls to achieve a realistic analog sound. Even the envelopes have a total analog feel to them which seems to awaken dynamics that can’t be dialed in with a regular digital synth. I really felt that dialing in the envelopes combined with vague meandering pitches of the nice voltage controlled oscillators and the subtle organics of analog noises in other modules give a special patina-like characteristic that allows me to easily create the types of sounds I had in mind for this synth.

Alessandro Cardinale

I'm a classically-trained composer and I’ve always liked electronic sound in its various forms. I started designing sounds over twenty years ago for the earliest soft synths (Seer Systems Reality/Surreal, Bitheadz Retro AS-1…) and developing commercial SoundFont libraries. I devoted much of last year to designing sound content for the six RetroMod instruments by Tracktion.

Synclavier V is great to work with. The 12 layers and timeline provide a lot of flexibility, and I enjoyed the nuance and complexity it makes possible. It’s probably one of the most intriguing instruments in the V Collection.

I like thinking in sounds and imagining sounds in my mind before getting down to the actual instrument. When I work on a synthesizer, I’m usually trying to get close to creating a sound I’ve already dreamed up in my imagination. Sometimes I end up pushing the synthesis capabilities of the synth to the limit, trying to design unusual sounds and create other-worldly colours, rhythms, and textures.