Arturia Storm 1.51 Music Creation Studio
7 out of 10 Beat Mode rating. MSRP $199. US

Arturia Storm is a self contained virtual music creation studio in software for both the PC and MAC. We found Storm to be loads of fun and a great tool for making new loops and inspiring creativity.

Storm can be run as a standalone program or as a VST instrument which is kind of cool. Storm provides you with a generous helping of music generators such as synthesizers and drum machines as well as a diverse offering of effects. Storm also offers integration of your loops and samples in wav, aiff or mp3 formats with time stretching and pitch shifting in real time.

Arturia Storm is able to record all manipulations in real time with editing options. Storm has fully configurable MIDI control: Virtual synthesizers playable through a MIDI keyboard and Slave and Master MIDI Sync. Unique to Storm is the Kepler Module which allows chord changes in a unique and original way.

Arturia Storm has 32 bit floating resolution, 44 kHz internal precision and supports ASIO and can export audio.

The Storm Rack - Hip Hop SetUp

Storm presently hosts 13 instrument modules. Build your ideal studio by placing these instruments on your rack.

Shadow is the newest addition to Storm's Instrument Arsenal

1. Shadow is a synthesizer fully designed for creating convincing chords and pads. Thanks to high-quality features (pulse width modulation, no sampling, no aliasing), it provides you with a very pure sound, while emulating an analog sound close to the famous analog synthesizers of the 80's.

2. Orpheus is a polyphonic synthesizer. It has all the qualities of a classic synthesizer.

3. Bass 52 is a bass guitar synthesizer. Sounds are generated by physical modeling. The sounds are much more realistic than the sounds created by sampling: plucking, vibration, and string dampening! You can customize your module, so it can generate various types of sounds: metallic, damped, slapped, hitten and so on...

4. With the EZtrack module, recording sound becomes child's play! EZtrack comes with the following features : Cut/Copy/Paste, Thru mode toggle switch, Punch-in / Punch-out, tempo sync. Record voices, instruments and various sounds to enlarge your personal sample library !

5. The Hork module is a new drum machine producing sounds inherited from rock and hip-hop styles, especially designed for those who love "acoustic" drums sounds. Hork is provided with lots of sounds: Bass, Snare, open hi-hat and closed hi-hat, Rimshot, Clap, a number of Ride and Crash cymbals, 2 Tom cymbals, a Tambourine, ...

6. The Psion drum machine provides you with a percussion kit: cymbals and charleys rendering a light and metallic sound; a bass drum and a tom, giving more of an "electronic" flavor.

7. Scratch: Drag & drop the samples you wish to mix on the deck. The samples are automatically set on the beat. You can then control the pitch of both decks, as well as the fader between them. Click on one of the decks, a hand is displayed and you can scratch while moving the fader.

8. H30+: Four tracks are available on which to place samples to be played in parallel with the synthesis. With the time-stretching and pitch-shifting features, your samples immediately get the proper tonality and follow your piece rhythm. But you may also desynchronize them, change their tonality, or simply duplicate and transpose them. All modifications are made at once, that's the magic of Time Stretching/Pitch Shifting in real time. You can import MP3s, Waves or AIFF, everything is allowed. Moreover, Storm detects automatically the beat of imported samples.

9. Equinoxe: With this, you may create chords to accompany your composition. This module associates three sounds and allows the creation of rich and evolutive background chords. Equinoxe consists of three superimposed oscillators, the wave shapes of which you can choose independently... and a maximum control on all envelope and filter parameters. Programming the chord grid is very simple and is performed, as always, in real time.

10. The Puma drum machine offers a variety of exotic percussion sounds.

Storm's Meteor Drum Machine

11. Meteor: This drum machine offers the sound samples that gave electronic music its place in history (do you know TR-909?). As is the case with Tsunami, it is fairly simple to create a new rhythmic grid with four various dynamic levels for each beat. You may modify the pitch and decay of each sound, everything will be recorded dynamically in your pattern.

12. The Tsunami module is a 100% synthesized drum machine with 8 oscillators all fitted with various controllers: amplitude, frequency envelopes, band-pass filters, panoramic and level of each sound. Each control is recorded dynamically to create your own patterns with astounding sounds !

13. The Arsenic module is a genuine real time bass line synthesizer. It includes 64 programmable presets, several shapes of adjustable waves, a set of different dynamics for each note, and a cutoff frequency modulated low-pass resonance filter.

Arturia Storm 1.51 is a ton of fun to play with and can really open up some new creative possibilities. Despite the fun factor, Arturia Storm is a bit quirky and unorthodox in a few ways. For example clicking step drum patterns can be annoying as the first click is at the quietest velocity setting. Click 3 more times and the STEP is at the loudest velocity. Yes, it is nice to have dynamics available, but the 1st click should be LOUDEST or at the very least have an option that is user selectable (start in the middle?). So in other words if you do a 4 on the floor beat on the bass kick, you'll need to click each step 4 times to get it loud and consistent sounding. That's a lot of clicks.

That minor annoyance aside Arturia Storm offers a lot of unique sound generators to make composing tunes a fun experience. I'd say it is particularly well suited to techno, dance and trance type music, but yes you can squeeze out some rock or jazz too.

Arturia Storm is also unique in that when you first open the program you have to select your components & effects BEFORE you compose music. That feels a bit limiting and forces a decision to take your tune in a certain direction. I'm more used to starting a tune with one element and then building on another, so it is somewhat constraining to have to decide before creating anything. Now that doesn't ruin the experience, it just starts you off by making all those decisions ahead of time.

Also the music generators come preloaded with patterns. It'd be nice if there was an option to create an AUTOLOAD type of song/structure minus the preprogrammed data. As it is now you have to go to each module and CLEAR ALL PATTERNS to get it in a clean state for recording. At the very least there should be a single command to CLEAR ALL PATTERNS ON ALL MODULES.

Arturia Storm is a fun tool to create new and original loops with. The effects make it easy to get loops sounding cool and it is easy to bounce down the audio.

While perhaps not quite as versatile as your main sequencer (Cubase, Logic, Sonar, Performer etc.), Arturia Storm competes well with the Loop Studio crowd like Fruity Loops, Propellerhead Reason and Sonic Syndicate Orion Pro, giving them a run for the money in standalone music generating composing software. Storm is a load of fun to play with and can inspire you to go in new directions.

We like to make loops in Storm and bring them into Cubase to complete songs, but it is possible you'll be content staying within Storm's framework all the way to a completed song. If you're looking to add your own loops to your sample library we highly recommend Storm. You'll be creating fresh new loops in no time! If you are looking for a standalone studio, Storm is more than adequate and may fit the bill. If you are into making music like dance or trance, or other loop based based music you should definitely check out Storm.

Storm was very stable standalone on our Pentium 4 1.7 Ghz machine running Windows 98 SE with 256 MB RAM. It also worked very well within Cubase VST 5.1 as a VST Instrument, however the CPU usage jumped to 50 - 60% which is very unusual for a single VST instrument, but there were no crashes, crackles or side effects. Storm is quite stable.

Arturia Storm gets a 7 out of 10 Beat Mode Rating - VERY GOOD product with many pluses.

Arturia Storm Web Site

TechTV Review of Arturia Storm