Softsynths & FX Thread

#369

Well they’ve thought of everything now haven’t they? Very cool. Thanks!

#370

That looks like a rabbit hole! I’ve been wanting that type of feature set in Abletons FX racks for years now, looks like a dubmixing WEAPON.

#371

Bluecat has a couple of secret weapons in that vein, they also have MB7 which lets you multiband process anything with the same hosting capabilities as late replies:

https://www.bluecataudio.com/Products/Product_MB7Mixer/

and brand new is Connector, which would have solved many problems for me when I was trying to do video tutorials a few years ago (windows by default has trouble routing audio from a daw into something like OBS). Think I’m going to pick this up just to have in case I need it for something weird down the line. Tons of stuff out there in this vein for Mac, but this is the first time I’ve seen a program like this on the PC side.

https://www.bluecataudio.com/Products/Product_Connector/

This mostly isn’t stuff I need, but it’s powerful and I haven’t seen elsewhere. I keep it in the back of my mind for when this stuff does come up.

#372

If someone is looking for a fun glitchy multieffect, Stutteredit 2 is on sale for around 10 bucks (94% off) at Pluginboutique until end of this month. Izo is pushing out lots of updates you don’t necessarily need imho, but this was a good one imho. The only thing I didn’t like about it is that the pattern/sequence length is still extremely limited, but it’s meant to be controlled with MIDI input. A really versatile thingy, one of my fav multieffects beside Shaperbox.

#373

I’ve got that, yeh its quite good fun.

#374

Anyone who has Rob Papen’s Predator 3, there’s a patch from a few days ago that makes it more stable.

I found this out the hard way so you don’t have to :rofl:

#375

If you have softsynths or effects that you like, don’t update Ableton to 11.1.1 - it’s a complete trainwreck.

  1. you have do update manually
  2. your VST library gets broken somehow, rescanning might take longer than expected and it does not necessarily help with all plugins - this is confirmed by posts in the Ableton forums, some Admin says it will be fixed with the next update, but…
  3. …now I get the error “Live failed to update. Restart Live to try again” everytime I open Live…

So if you like your VSTs and VSTis and/or your time, you probably want to skip this one…

#376

I haven’t gotten anything since Black Friday, but I had to break down and pick up Baby Audio Crystalline. I was basically interested in it for two things:

  1. Both pre-delay and decay times can be set tempo-synced in beat divisions to your track, which I’m curious about.

  2. It has a reverse button built in. Not a envelope to make it sound like a reversed reverb, it can reverse the buffer. Has a freeze mode too, which is why I’m pretty sure they’re actually messing with the buffer.

Sound quality seems fine for the $50 intro price. It’s not SP2016, but at $50 I’m OK with that. Don’t think I would want it to be my only reverb, or that I would be as satisfied at $100, but as a creative addition to my reverb toolset at the intro/sale price, it seems fine. I’ve also only been playing with it on a single synth stab 20 minutes before bed, so I could be way more impressed if I spend more time with it.

#377

@White_Noise - I seem to remember you like to put reverb on your reverb, with a side of reverb :slight_smile:

Which one is your favorite, if any?

In my case, I tend to somehow stick to Replika XT, Protoverb and MorphVerb, despite having quite a few other good ones, that maybe I should care more about.

#378

I think A.M is still the king of reverb, but that said I know my way around them.

The long Answer

I like Valhalla vintage verb most of the time. You might have to process it going in and out with EQ to get exactly what you want, or indeed send one instance into another to soften it up as much as I want, but I have been able to get everywhere I wanted when that was the only reverb I had.

If you have more money to throw at the problem, I find that I can pretty much just take Eventide SP2016 and throw it on anything and it sounds good. I really like the position slider that lets you slide from the front of the “room” to the back. It just adds an extra layer of control and that is exactly what I need to get my reverb where I want it sometimes.

There’s a lot of effects-type reverbs that can be done out there (shimmer, gating, reverse, ducking, etc). Crystalline covers a lot of that ground and has the bonus of timing pre-delay and decay to beat divisions, which I’ve been playing with and is definitely fun (though it doesn’t have shimmer in the traditional sense, but I’m not really a fan of shimmer so that’s OK with me). Audiority Xenoverb also covers a lot of effects-reverb ground and does have a regular shimmer mode for a lot cheaper.

In the free realm, I like the old version of Tal-reverb 4 (there’s a newer version with an updated sound engine but I liked the OG fine). It might be difficult to find, but Glaceverb 2 was a good option as well. I haven’t used that one in a while, but I remember it being really good about control of the reflections, it would actually let you tune the reflections and absorptions of the walls in your virtual room. Valhalla has Supermassive which is great if you need something super massive, but honestly I’ve only used it once or twice in actual songs. Supermassive is just too long to be useful a lot of the time. I still use Ambience sometimes, it also has pretty detailed control - I haven’t really dived deep into that one, I usually just find a close preset and tweak. There’s also epicVerb, which last I heard is still only 32-bit, though I think VOS is updating some of their old plugins so hopefully that one gets the upgrade - I used to really like the large/cathedral settings in that one.

Back when I was still a pirate, I used the Lexicon native collection. For the price and the fact that I don’t see any major updates in years, I can’t recommend it. But the one thing I do miss is that every reverb type had it’s own plugin (plate, hall, chamber, etc) and when you loaded each plugin there were only one dozen presets - small, medium, large, XL room size with dark, neutral, or bright filters, and then maybe one or two other variations. I still haven’t used anything else that was that fast to get to the sound I wanted. And before anyone gets worried I haven’t been a pirate since I graduated college and unlocked disposable income. The PCM native collection is the only thing I haven’t re-bought since then, and I still miss it but $700 for those reverbs is a tough sell.

The Short answer: Valhalla vintage verb about 90% of the time. But there’s a lot of great free stuff out there if you want to experiment.

#379

NI Raum is an unexpectedly good reverb. When they threw it in with Komplete I was like oh right, another crapp… oh. This is good.

#380

Cool, I’ll have to check this one.

#381

Yep I got that one when I updated Komplete but I don’t think I’ve ever used it.

#382

Anyone here tried out the new Twin 3 by Fabfilter? I usually love Fabfilter stuff but Twin isn’t really my fav synth (even though I’m using v2 from time to time) and I haven’t tried the new version so far. It kinda looks like the last version with a few small updated aspects (which I find kinda strange since it has been a long time since the last update and it’s their only synth apart from a slimmed down version I think), but I can’t help myself to wonder if it’s worth trying out at least?

#383

I haven’t used any of the fabfilter stuff, but Twin looks like the least interesting thing they do to me. I think compared to other synths you can get from $100 to $150, the modulation is fine but nothing groundbreaking, the sounds are average, and the UI looks like one of their FX with a synth shoved into it.

I’m not usually this harsh on products so I want to say that I don’t mean to belittle all the work that I’m sure has gone into it behind the scenes, but it just doesn’t seem like it’s worth the asking price compared to the competition, unless it’s being included in their bundles. Like, as a non-electronic producer/mix engineer who uses the Fabfilter stuff for all their mixing and occasionally needs to drop a synth part into a track or use something that isn’t a piano to do some placeholder writing, I think it’s fine. But I think most of the people on this forum would feel limited by it.

#384

Yeah, v2 is very limited compared to bigger synths, but I liked that one could make simple nice sounding presets in a few seconds with it without stressing out the CPU at all, I sometimes used it when a project was already bringing my PC to its knees so I didn’t have to bounce anything down - but I mostly use Tone2 Warlock for that since it is out and low CPU use is less important for me since upgrading to a 16 core thingy.

I would say Twin v2 is a lightweight basic subtractive synth with good modulation, filters and nice high frequencies. I kinda expected that they introduce some tricks after all that time for v3, but not so sure about it after watching a few pics of it - it seems like they mostly added some basic effects for whatever reason. Gonna try out v3 at some point though. The price is more like 45 bucks for people who already own some Fabfilter stuff, but it’s still kinda expensive if one only gets it for the nice UI…

#385

I considered it but as it’s been said, nothing really exciting about it…

In terms of taste (so that’s entirely subjective), I think the new interface is fugly. This is something that would bother me if I had planned on using it.

#386

Another “meh” update… HALion 7.

I’ve been wanting to like it but from what I’ve seen/heard so far on Steinberg’s website, this looks rather behind the times, compared to a UVI Falcon, for example. I had zero “wow factor” when watching their vids.

Thoughts…?

#387

I want to want UVI Falcon. But every time I watch a video/read a review on it I hear something along the lines of “this is a great powersynth but I don’t recommend you get in there and tweak it too much unless you’re trying to be a sound designer” (which isn’t my goal, my goal is to do good mixes and masters and occasionally squeeze some music in there). Just a glance at the feature set of Halion, the spectral osc looks interesting if it does stuff along the lines of Izotope Iris, since IIRC Iris isn’t available anymore. Not $350 interesting, but the upgrade price isn’t bad.

Not sure how to feel about any of the $300 softsynths really (I’m throwing Omnisphere into this ring too), I guess they just don’t fit my workflow great. And I feel like a lot of the ancillary products/libraries are focused on tv/cinematic ready sounds, which I suspect wouldn’t serve my music very well. For instance, I see they’re touting the FM engine in Halion, but I have Sytrus if I want to dig into that. For spectral stuff I know my way around Iris. For wavetable I’d go to Vital or Pigments. I know all these other synths so if I’m going to learn another one I need it to do something they don’t, and I don’t think the wavetable module inside of Halion/Falcon is going to be as deep as a dedicated wavetable synth.

I suppose the strength of these really big VSTs is being able to layer up a wavetable sound with a sample and FM and so on.

#388

I like Falcon, but I don’t use it much. But I also don’t sell it. It has some nice tricks, but it’s kinda cumbersome to use imho. I don’t know another VST synth that needs that many clicks for a simple modulation assignment or go through a browser to add an oscillator (Even in an environment like Metasounds it feels 5x faster to do). I also don’t like that the FM oscillator is just that - one among many oscillators that can only be layered but not combined/crossmodulated with other oscillators such as the wavetable osc last I checked (I haven’t opened it in a while so I might be wrong). I like the look of Falcon but imho it’s just dark and simple like the dark Ableton skin. But in general, Falcon is in a completely different league than the subtractive-only Twin. If you want to sell patches or want to make use of many nice effects or synth layers without opening additional plugins or using racks in your DAW, Falcon is great imho.

Yeah, I made a comparison of wavetable synths featuring Falcon, Pigments, Vital and others for my youtube channel a while ago :wink: It’s long an unscripted though, so here is my takeaway for three of the synths you listed: the Falcon wavetable module is not bad but Vital has some nice WT painting, editing and morphing options that both Pigments and Falcon do not include (second only to Serum and Icarus imho), and Pigments has basic morphing options but more “slots” for parallel morphing of waveforms, which is very nice imho (second only to Avenger).