Arturia Pure SUB: Get Ready for Some Serious Bass Face
Pure SUB from Arturia is a new bass-focused soft synth for whipping up 808s, Reeses and other low-end theories. How low can you go?
Arturia Pure SUB
Although we may tend to think of Arturia as a company that makes emulations of classic synths, it’s so much more than that. They also do hardware synths, audio interfaces, software effects and modern-style soft synths like Pigments. Their most recent release is also definitely not a classic recreation. Called Pure SUB, it’s a low-end-focused bass synth aimed at producers of genres like dubstep, drum & bass and UK garage. Music that provokes bass face, in other words.
All About That Bass
Part of the same Pure series that also gave us Pure LoFi, Pure SUB is all about that bass. The monophonic soft synth splits the signal into three stages, with Sub, Harmonics and Texture each getting its own section.
The sub makes up the fundamental, and you can not only process it independently from the other sections, you can also control how it routes through the synth, letting you alter it with the other stages or keep it clean for maximum weight.
Next comes Harmonics, which gives you two engines to choose from: additive or wavetable. These are bass-focused, with presets aimed at 808s, Reeses, and other modern-style bass tones. You can additionally morph, detune and widen the harmonics, with control for how much to send to the pitch envelope.
Lastly, there’s Texture for adding noise. Modern bass music is all about fuzzy fizzy bass, and Pure SUB lets you rough it up with samples of noise, environmental sounds and others, with additional processing to dial in the right amount of fuzz.
Filter and Modulation
With its massive back catalog, Arturia has a lot of DSP to pull from, and it seems like a lot of it has ended up in Pure SUB. For starters, you get 40-plus filter types, many of which look like they came from Pigments.
Speaking of Pigments, Pure SUB also offers a modulation section with the same drag-and-drop assignment style as Arturia’s flagship soft synth. You’ll recognize the animated visuals too. It includes three envelopes, six customizable modulators, plus MPE expressivity.
Effects and the Sub Processor
The new synth is packed to bursting with effects for tweaking and shaping the bass. This starts with the Sub Processor, a dedicated section with set drive, frequency, color, width, presence and space knobs. This is separate from the FX section, which lets you build up chains from among a wide selection of Arturia algorithms, including a new distortion with built-in EQ. This is finished off with a maximiser.
Four macros let you pull it all together.
Pricing and Availability
I’ve been playing with Pure SUB for a week and it really is a fantastic synth if big and bad bass is part of your music-making process. As a bass music producer myself, I’m loving this new wave of subby synths, like UVI’s Rumble.
Pure SUB is available now from Thomann* for €45.
More Information
- Arturia homepage
- More about Arturia
- More about synthesizers
- Buy synthesizers at Thomann*
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