The Song Fight Bulletin Board

Ladies and gents, I'm looking for a new synth to toy with and I've heard decent things about Absynth and Sonik. Any takes here? Just need some clean instruments, good options, and an interface that doesn't make me blind. It's that or buy sample cds and that gets tedius and expensive

Are you looking for softsynths or hardware? I think absynth is s/w.
-bill

absynth is awesome, but it's not really traditional in any sense. check out the demo.

-craig

I'm piping up here because I used to be limited to using Reason but a few months ago really got a firm grasp on using midi tracks separately, in combination with VST instruments.

If you're on VST, there is an entourage of free synths out there, some that use samples, others that seem to be pure synth. I've picked up about 10 VST synths in the past couple of months.

Very easy to use, you just enable the synth as a VST instrument, assign the midi track output to the VST instrument, and you're good to go.

There should be a bunch here in this thread, but you can also google some term like "Free VST Instrument" and you'll find a bunch. Esp. for PC, although I'm on Mac and still found a bunch.

I used Kantos on Hostess Mostess' Our Love Violate's Corporate Policy. It kicks in during the second chorus as a descant to the melody. It's me singing oooh's.

I found it really unwieldy and the interface is absolutely horrid (it's a Geiger-inspired maze---literally a maze---of non-standard controllers; apparantly it's more important to look neat than to be usable). It auto-tunes the signal before processing it, and the auto-tune is quirky. I think I actually AutoTune'ed my ooooh's before running them throuh Kantos.

Right at the end there was some serendipitous fusion of the Kantos sound and some guitar feedback that happened to mix together seamlessly, like a single instrument. Which was nice. But if I had a do-over, I would have added more drums and not used the Kantos.

I've been trying out Crystal lately. It's pretty cool I must say. Sytrus is pretty good too, considering getting the license so I can at least save the tracks I'm making. There seem to be a ton of them out there at varying cost and quality. Hard when the synth costs more than anything else you're using