Arturia Spark in use

Arturia Spark hybrid drum machine

First few weeks have passed with this new hybrid drum machine. In this case "hybrid" means that basically you're using (or listening to) a software but you also have a dedicated usb-midi controller. To be honest, I haven't yet had that much time to mess with it - I hope this will change now...







In general I am very satisfied with Spark: sound is what I expected to be and even more. Its GUI (Graphical User Interface) is very well thought and intuitive. I also like how it looks on the table and on the screen - Arturia products have always looked nice to my eyes. (They are also close to Apple design.)

But like many earlier Arturia products, Spark was not finished product yet and still they decided to start selling it. In other words, at the present moment it's still quite buggy: some problems are small but others are bigger. I can imagine that some customers aren't very happy about it.  Others, like myself, did have past experiences with Arturia and they did know what to expect. (Think about Origin as another example: Origin has been there since 2008 and still we don't have all those features which was supposed to be there. We are still waiting for some templates and modules. Some customers are obviously very disappointed. Personally I love my Origin that much that I can tolerate the delay of its development.) So I'd advice to wait a little bit for those people who expect to have a finished product with Spark. On the other hand, if you accept small bugs here and there, you'll probably like Spark very much. It works well enough for my purposes - no noticeable latency, no crashes or anything crucial. Well, I must stress out that I am using it with its standalone app (not in DAW), in Mac (not in PC) and with Motu soundcard (which is very liable in Mac environment)! At the moment I don't go to any details about bugs which I or any other user have found (if you wanna know more about problems, just check Arturia Spark forum: http://www.arturia.com/evolution/smf/index.php?board=82.0)

Spark found a nice place in my cellar
(laptop stand under it is made by IKEA)

After my first period with Spark here's my main idea of improving it: Spark can play synth lines with its step sequencer but you should have more tools with synth programming. First entering and editing note values for synth bass line is painfully slow - you should be able to enter them by typing or via MIDI. Also you should have a possibility to transpose some line to another key or with some interval. Spark has physical MIDI out port; it should be possible to send step sequencer MIDI data to external MIDI devices. I have a dream to control Origin with Sparks sequencer or perhaps even synchronize Origin's and Spark's sequencers to each other. So basically I have an idea to use Spark as my performance controller on stage. I have reported these ideas to Arturia and they responded that those are in principal possible to implement. Let 's see what future brings to us...