FX Collection 5 €499

Arturia's huge bundle of effects gets its regular update and it's still easily as essential as the company's V Collection

- Andy Jones

When it comes to bundles, Arturia is the company to beat. Its multi award-winning V Collection X gathers 39 classic keyboards and synths under one roof, and presents you with an almost overwhelming number of classic and vintage key options. The company's FX Collection - now at v5 - might be its younger bundle sibling, but with a whopping 34 tools, it's almost as fulsome as V Collection, costs €100 less and, arguably, could deliver equally creative results. The regular update is in, and v5 has some great additions which are a lot better than they first appear.

A bunch of fives

Before we look at these, let's give you a quick FX Collection overview. Of the 34 effects, you get four each of reverbs, compressors, filters, distortion/tape, and preamps/EQs. There are also five modulation effects and three delays. Across these you get emulations of classics of the studio world including the EMT 140 plate reverb, Roland Space Echo, Roland Juno-6 chorus, 1176 compressor and Minimoog filter.

While the bulk of the titles are emulations, there are newcomers too, and v4 saw Dist_ Coldfire added, a brilliant distortion multi-effect, although its other additions were emulations of a Lexicon reverb (LX24), Korg filter (MS-20) and Leslie speaker simulator (Rotary CLS-222).