Soft Synths!

Sober · Post by **Sober** » Fri Dec 10, 2004 3:31 pm

I rarely use MIDI or synths. This is pretty much common knowledge. To me, crappily-played live instruments soudn way better than perfectly-orchestrated MIDI.

BUT, VSTi's and soft synths, or whatever you want to call them, can sound pretty damn cool.

Basically, this thread is for posting links to your favorite synths, discussing proper use of synths (optimal eq settings, etc.), and all that.

I'm going to try to snag a questionably legal copy of B4 - supposedly a really good Hammond B3 organ synth. I just listened to this demo of the product, and I'm quite impressed at the Leslie speaker simulation. Donald Leslie speakers were a huge part of the signature Hammond sound, and from the demo, it seems to have been captured pretty well.

Yeah, I'm definitely gonna have to give this one a go.

c hack · Post by **c hack** » Fri Dec 10, 2004 3:50 pm

yeah, b4 sounds great.

Reason is full of good softsynths. And they just released a refill, electromechanical, that sounds really really great, and it's free to owners of Reason 2.5.

I agree that real insruments are always better, but most of us can't afford them.

starfinger · Post by **starfinger** » Fri Dec 10, 2004 3:51 pm

i don't get the start of your post.. are you talking about crappy general midi sounds? Think of MIDI as robotic hands playing the piano.

anyway, all the native instrument stuff is sweet. i like B4 a lot. I use that and pro-53 a lot.

-craig

joshw · Post by **joshw** » Fri Dec 10, 2004 4:08 pm

Here's some discussion on the topic from the old board. B4 rocks. NI has also come out with a great product called "Elektrik Piano" that uses sampled Rhodes and Wurlys that sound amazing.

thehipcola · Post by **thehipcola** » Fri Dec 10, 2004 4:10 pm

there are so many wickedass VSTI's now...

Sober, if you want a great faithful electric piano emulation, Lounge Lizard 2 kicks ass. It's got great tonal quality with just the right amount of grit when you wanna get dirty...and it's surprisingly easy to mangle that sweet sound into something totally not electric pianoish.

As for eq, I've really not needed to do much to it when used, it just seems to fit with minimal fuss.

I'm pretty stoked about acquiring the M-Tron this weekend though...what I've heard is really impressive.

Sober · Post by **Sober** » Fri Dec 10, 2004 4:27 pm

I have a pretty damn nice keyboard, but it's only got like 7 voices. But the sound quality from it is great, and the keys are weighted so well that it feels like a real piano.

Hooray for parents.

Adam! · Post by **Adam!** » Fri Dec 10, 2004 4:55 pm

I strongly pimp Native Instruments. Kontakt is just an amazing sampler. It's got a bit of a learning curve (for a VSTi), but it's worth it. Every sound in my Brown Boxes was played through Kontakt, as well as the strings in my coverfight entry and all the drums on all my songs. If you ever hear any instrument I obviously don't own (oboe, trumpet [actually, I do have a trumpet. But I can't play it], piano [Again, I own one. Damn, these are bad examples], etc...) then it came out of Kontakt.

Also Absynth, though it's never made it into one of my songs, is the sweetest semi-modular synth I've heard. If you're looking for a nice subtractive synth Absynth has the best low-pass filter I've found: it makes everything sound like warm plastic. Challenging to get the sound you want, however.

If you just want a good workhorse synth I like the V-Station. It does 99 percent of what I need from a synth, it's quick, it doesn't hog the CPU, and it sounds great. It's got a novel filter overdrive that will make you play with the cutoff knob for about an hour every time you turn it on. It has a fat lowpass filter and a salty highpass filter.

Lastly, if you want to lose six months of your life, learn how to use Reaktor. If you ever liked Lego as a kid this thing will appeal to you. Literally limitless possibilities.

obscurity · Post by **obscurity** » Fri Dec 10, 2004 5:51 pm

Yeah, another voice for the native instruments pimpage. Battery and Reaktor, in particular, have been extremely useful.

For samplers I prefer Halion to Kontakt, though - it does all I want from a sampler and has a much smaller memory footprint, so I can have many more instances of it in the mix.

And where would I be without Virtual Guitarist?

deshead · Post by **deshead** » Fri Dec 10, 2004 7:15 pm

Tough to beat Steinberg's The Grand for an acoustic piano synth.

I'm also a fan of Drumagog, with FXpansion's BFD. Saves a lot of time setting up the drum mics

And ya, add my voice to the Native Instruments chorus

c hack · Post by **c hack** » Sat Dec 11, 2004 9:29 am

obscurity wrote:And where would I be without Virtual Guitarist?

There's no reason to use virtual guitarist when you've got half a billion guitarists here who'd be happy to lay down tracks for you when you need it. Me, for one.

the Jazz · Post by **the Jazz** » Sun Dec 12, 2004 1:05 am

That B4 demo is sweet with a capital SWEE. I wish I had money.

Puce wrote:Every sound in my Brown Boxes was played through Kontakt, as well as the strings in my coverfight entry and all the drums on all my songs.

Hot damn. I've been putting off getting the OSX upgrade for Kontakt for a while (so I can use it with DP), but you just convinced me to bump it to the top of my to-do list.

starfinger · Post by **starfinger** » Sun Dec 12, 2004 8:32 am

puce,
are you using the strings from the kontakt library? or something else.

-craig

Adam! · Post by **Adam!** » Sun Dec 12, 2004 3:07 pm

starfinger wrote:puce,
are you using the strings from the kontakt library? or something else.

The strings were from about four different soundfonts that I ripped apart and turned into one Kontakt Instrument. I've got a harddrive full of samples in about 5 different formats, and Kontakt opens them all (I'm still in the middle of the long, arduous process of converting all these gigs of samples to *.NKI files). Another thing I love about Kontakt is the loop mode in the sampler window which lets you trigger different parts of a long sample from different MIDI notes. I don't know how many times I've saved bad guitar or vocal takes by loading them into Kontakt and using this.

I haven't used Halion, but I think it's just a straight-up sampler: does it have Kontakt’s time-machine / tone-machine modes?

Sober · Post by **Sober** » Sun Dec 12, 2004 4:52 pm

The B4 sounds incredible. If only I could find my midi cables...