Arturia adds proper sound design tools to its AstroLab synths

The AstroLab is very difficult to play in this position. | Image: Terrence O’Brien / The Verge Arturia's AstroLab series was already amongst the best stage keyboards out there. They essentially put the company's AnalogLab suite of vintage synth emulations, sampled pianos, and original instrument plugins into playable hardware. But they were ultimately glorified preset browsers. You could lightly tweak patches using the four macro controls, or dial in some effects, but you couldn't do any real sound design. That's all changed now with the AstroLab 2.0 update. The latest firmware adds a Sound Edit menu that lets you dig into the individual parameters of any instrument. It's not super intuitive to quickly fire up a blank patch from the …

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