PURE SUB Review
Arturia sent me an early copy of their new Pure Sub for review. Pure Sub is a monophonic bass focused synth with a sub oscillator, modulation, and effects. I dig the Marathon style UI with modern neon green highlights and neuomorphic controls. The over all UI is typical Arturia, who seem to have locked in on many design choices. You have all your modulators near the bottom like in Pigments and en effects section with most of the Arturia insert effects.
It’s a solid design, but in some ways it can kinda feel a bit like a re-skinned Pigments. That said, there are a few things unique to Pure Sub, and the tightened focus is a workflow improvement that I can appreciate.
The main engine consists of a sub oscillator with a harmonics editor, a noise generator, a filter, and a sub processor. The sub engine harmonic editor has two modes: a wavetable style editor and a “reese” mode. The wavetable style editor has some interesting limitations. For one, it only has 32 partials that can be edited, but you can only utilize 16 of those partials for the entire table. Secondly you only get 8 frames for the entire table. These limitations have a purpose though, as the internal engine is actually additive, which allows the detune control to work “per-partial”. This pushes the partials out of tune from one another, something that isn’t possible with a normal wavetable.
The core synthesis is pretty simple, it’s enough to get some nice overtones and the real magic comes from further processing. A texture sections allows you to add noise to the signal. This section also has ring mod, AM, and distortion which glue the texture to the sub. The filter is just a collection of the various Arturia filters you’d find in Pigments. Loads of cool options in here like the rage filters, reverb filter, and even a lofi bit crusher. I do think they could have added filter fm, this would have been a really nice touch.
Up top is the main “sub processor” engine, which adds some final texture on top of everything else. Unfortunately, there’s not much detail about the sub processor, and there’s no advanced panel for it either. There’s a collection of different presets that all do different things, but no way to access the controls under the hood. From what I can tell, the six controls are all macros for whatever effects are tucked into this section. I like the idea of this, a fun easy to use interface for well crafted effects, but I’d also like a way to get in and make my own. No need to clutter the main UI with these under-the-hood controls, but also don’t lock us out from them.
As for effects, you get 12 fx slots that run in series, with over 16 effects to chose from. These are all effects that show up in other Arturia products. The multi band compressor is always a nice touch, really glad to see these and EQs in more plugins, letting you dial in a pre-mixed tone. The distortion offers all the various distortion curves and is really great to add even more texture with. Also nice to have super unison and a trance gate here. Finally, the filter actually has ALL of the filter curves, not just a stripped down set. Since Pure Sub is monophonic anyways, you can really do a lot of complex filter and distortion stacking.
Pure Sub is by no means the deepest synth out there, but I do like focused tools like this. It’s interesting to see another bass centric synthesizer come out so shortly after Rumble. Perhaps there’s some sort of market research both companies were looking at? I find these focused tools to be great to work with, they tend to minimize decision fatigue and let you get straight into your workflow, though there is also an argument to be made for just using your main synth for everything instead of purpose driven tools. I think the most interesting feature of Pure Sub is the harmonics editor, I’d actually love to have this in pigments, especially if they could flesh it out as a full wavetable editor, would be a nice addition for a future update.