I've recently been getting rid of most of my hardware synths and gear, to go "soft". Just wondering what recommendations people would come up with for my first two or three soft synths?

I do a lot of pop/musical theatre style but also some "new age", some soundtrack work, and the occasional bit of "light dance" music i.e. clubbing-lite style.

There are SO MANY synths out there now, I'm wondering what I could get to, say, replace my Roland soung modules for "bread and butter", but what else out there is worth the money - there are so many demos out there I'd appreciate some guidance before I go looking

Daniel

Hi Daniel

Korg Legacy possibly.

Tascam GVI (to open up the world of Gigastudio as used by various pros).

Two good suggestions from tft there - I love my Korg Legacy Digital M1 and Wavestation, which sound almost exactly like the original hardware, except that the audio is cleaner. Tascam's GVI is also a stalwart in my setup, and there are LOADS of professional quality Giga libraries from which to choose.

I'd also suggest looking at Spectrasonics's Atmosphere for its huge number of quality pad sounds. Eric Persing (the Spectrasonics founder) is extremely well-known in the music industry for creating many of the most popular sounds in Roland's classic instruments, including the ground breaking D-50. Spectrasonics's Trilogy is also wonderful for its huge array of bass sounds.


Martin

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YewTreeMagic

Bread and Butter would mean East West Quantum Leap Colossus... 8 DVD's, full of everything...

Also NI Bandstand is quite a cool one.

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I still love VAZ+ (now in its 2.0 VST incarnation)

Great sounds, versatile, excellent value.

My current "go to" softsynths are Hypersonic 2 and Atmosphere.

They always make it onto every track.

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Sonar X2 Producer. Q9550 P45 8Gb DDR3, W8 x64, 1296, 2408 MkIII. Cantabile. Lenovo W530 16Gb, W7 x64, 828MkII. Kronos 61, Fusion 6HD, Fantom XR, TR-Rack, E-Synth Ultra, Proteus 2K, JV2080.

My first VSTi synth was Steinberg Hypersonic (1.0), and although I recently bought Cakewalk Dimension Pro, I was not blown away by it, and generally, good old Hypersonic (which is considerably lighter on CPU but still sounds great), is still my immediate go-to VSTi Synth.

I also have Absynth 3 but it is certainly not "Bread and Butter", and only makes it onto a small proportion of my material. (it's also prone to the odd crash which Hyper and DimPro are not - on my system at least).

You can pick up Hypersonic 1.0, used, on eBay for about £30-£50 these days, and even 2.0 tends to sell for a steal.

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What it says on the tin...

http://www.lennardigital.com/modules/sylenth1/ Sylenth1 might be worth a look.

http://www.propellerheads.se/products/reason/index.cfm?fuseaction=mainfram e Reason 3. 4 is in the pipeline i think.

http://www.soniksynth.com/ Sonik Synth 2 8GB of worskstaion sounds.

For bread and butter sounds you can use sample libraries. Many of these come with a dedicated player. Its a bit more indulgent than a 1080 but there are loads more articulations if you need them. Plus you can use modelling based sounds like Mr Ray or Tickyclav to take some weight off your ram. There are also synths like Hypersonic that use a variety of synthesis styles to create a general purpose soundset.

For sound design, Absynth, Tera, Vaz or reaktor offer plenty of modularity plus the ability to use samples with various forms of synthesis. These synths come with large preset banks that purport to be all manner of sounds but theyre not really GM soundsets as such. More important is their ability to assign controllers to many parameters, allowing more control over sounds.

One other style of VSTi is the recreations of classic synths by companies like GMedia and Arturia. Some of these are very accurate copies of the originals. They also sport very nice filters that you can route other sounds through. The limited architecture of these can be constraining sometimes but they are capable of some very rich textures that make them worth having.

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"To upgrade a computer, physically hardwarewise, is easier than making a lego dog kennel." Tex

Make sure you check out albino 3 its great for all round stuff with alot of character. Vanguard is good for fx sounds and some other stuff. V-station has a great arp and is very cheap right now. Get yourself a good drum synth. i use Dr008 its got some great kits with it plus you can build your own.

Hi Daniel, I'm also in the process of, er, "going soft". I got myself a laptop first as I needed a mobile solution as I was away from my studio setup a lot at the time. Found it so bloody excellent I'm in the process of selling a lot of my hardware so I can make the move over to a powerful desktop PC and software.

I got myself an EMU Xboard controller keyboard. This came with Proteus X Le, together with three bundled libraries. I've found this excellent for bread and butter sounds as well as more off the wall stuff, and is very immediate to tweak with the Xboard. Very good value for money, seeing as it was free with the keyboard.

Hope you find it all as liberating as I have!

Cheers.

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