arturia oberheim sem-v
This is guest post by Steven Williams, from Dawsons, who was kind enough to offer to write about the Arturia Oberheim SEM V. Here’s what he says about himself: “I originally played keyboard about 10 years and then started DJing aswell as few years later. It then only seemed logical to try Synths and I fell in love with software synthesizers and have been playing them ever since. I also love writing, so I like nothing more than sharing my passion.”
What follows is his opinion on the SEM-V, I have not had the chance to test the SEM-V for myself.
From the software developer that brought you the Minimoog, Jupiter 8 and ARP2600,
the Arturia Oberheim SEM-V is yet another reincarnation of a classic hardware synth, giving it a new lease of life in software form. The original Oberheim SEM has been a firm favourite of a variety of players and producers thanks to its unique smooth tone and warm filter. The SEM-V picks up where its ancestor left off and gives us a
few new additional features.
The Arturia Oberheim SEMs’ high quality, unique sound is due to its famous filter circuit inherited from the original Expander, which at the time was considered unbelievable, offering high-pass, low-pass, band-pass and Notch options, all having a 12dB/octave slope. As well as this it also keeps the Expanders twin envelopes giving attack, sustain and decay parameters.
Like other synthesisers in the Arturia range the SEM-V features their proprietary TAE modelling engine, which gives you a precise mathematical model of the synthesiser’s oscillators and signal path.
The original SEM featured a dual oscillator design, and the TAE engine allows these to be reproduced with no noticeable downfalls. A completely new addition to the SEM-V is the LFO section, which offers two modules with sine, sawtooth and square waves which can be put into both oscillator and filter section. It also recreates the slight ‘drifts’ in pitch, which is synonymous with the character you find in analogue synthesisers. The resulting synthesiser is one that has character and appears dynamic yet clear which is a rare breed in virtual analogue synthesisers.
If you’re interested in synthesizers then its no probably no secret to you that Arturia has a reputation for being fairly poor at punchy sounds, and unfortunately the Oberheim SEM-V is no exception. If they perfected that as well then they might create an almost perfect software synthesizer.
On the other hand they’re reputation remains perfectly in tact for excelling at producing lush, smooth tones. I would go as far as saying it’s by a distance the most impressive software synthesizer you can buy. When you use the SEM-V its clear that Arturia have only improved on what they needed to by adding features that will only make it better. In my opinion it is better all-rounder than the (hardware) Expander, but maybe that’s just because I love software synthesizers.
The features really do go on so have a more in-depth look at the features or watch the
demo and see what you think.
