What are you guy's top 5 (or however many) pick for best vsti's with natural sounding sounds, i.e. good pianos, strings, rhodes, horns, etc?

I'm doing some researching

Here's a few suggestions for each seperate category.


For orchestral sounds, if you have lot's of cash I would recommned the Vienna Orchestra Stuff,it quite expensive and I don't own a copy, but it is absoulutely amazing. For good orchestral stuff that
fits into a mix quite well, I would recommned Edirol
Orchestral, I use it to handle all my orchestral duties, it only has a couple piano's and it really limited to it's original design purpose, orchestral
work.

For Piano's and Keyboards, Plugsound Vol.1 is amazing, it offers slighly a tweakable sample pallette that ranges from acoustic grands, to rhodes,
to funky clav's. PLus, it relatively cheap, i would reccommend getting the whole box, as all the volumes
are really good and chocked full of natural (acoustic) instruments.

for organ NIB4, now they released eletik piano which shows promise...both are pricey but very good sounding.....for synths I like sytrus. For soundfonts and samplers vsampler3 is very nice...

Best? Maybe HALion. But the best natural sounds are in sample libraries that are not attached to VSTi's.

Devon

thanks!

hink wrote:

for organ NIB4...

I know B4 is very popular, but I really can't understand why. I personally don't think it's nearly accurate enough to justify anything like the price they charge for it. I would honestly rather use one of the free organ VSTis.

For example, Nubi is an excellent organ VSTi.

I disagree ... the NI B4 holds its own against any clonewheel I have heard and is probably the most use VTSi live. IMO, it single handedly made software instruments legit in many peoples eyes. Sure it ain't the original, but nothing is. Use the B4 with a good Leslie, and you are in good shape (the internal leslie ain't bad, but a real leslie is a real leslie)

progfusion74 wrote:

Sure it ain't the original, but nothing is.

I think you meant to say "nothing else is." Otherwise, not even a Hammond is an original.

That said, perhaps you were actually correct in a philosphical sense, because everyone keeps a mental concept in their mind of what a "real Hammond" actually sounds like. The trouble is, most people's memory tends to get slightly clouded, or perhaps biased by what they want the perfect Hammond to sound like. In the end, no actual organ exactly matches their mental concept of the perfect Hammond. So, perhaps you were right after all:

There really is no original.

__________________________

Little-known deleted scene from the movie "the Matrix", where a gifted youngster tells the character Neo:

"Don't try to perfectly emulate the Hammond organ, for that would be impossible. The thing to remember is, there is no Hammond organ."

Hmmm.... I think vurt lost his organ around these parts... vurt, you seen it?

Devon

I’ll jump in here briefly to make a couple of philosophical observations ...

When I first heard the B4 (I bought it seconds after it was first available) I could not believe they actually included tone wheel bleed-through and “motor” noise. To me, this was never part of the “tone wheel” sound – and yet one of the most frequent early requests for NuBi was to include a “bleed through” parameter. I realized even before this request that I would not be able to please everybody… and no emulation of a piece of hardware as mythical as the Hammond Organ will be emulated perfectly for exactly the reason given in McLilith’s post above: each person remembers the thing just a bit differently.

The second thing is that, for some people, there is absolutely no value to having a phase coherent tone wheel system. The very thing that took quite a while to work out in NuBi is probably not really important for the majority of tone wheel organ users. Hey, the “Charley” demos I listened to do sound great – I am hard pressed to find fault with the intent there.

Trying to find the best of anything seems to be a moving target. Sorry for the rant ….

peace,
pj geerlings

McLilith wrote:

hink wrote: for organ NIB4... I know B4 is very popular, but I really can't understand why. I personally don't think it's nearly accurate enough to justify anything like the price they charge for it. I would honestly rather use one of the free organ VSTis. For example, Nubi is an excellent organ VSTi.

I guess it's just a matter of preference, I think it emulates the B3 extremely well. If you get the tonewheel set you can "age" it as well. Also with the tone wheel comes emulation of the vox, farfisa and continental. I like the fact I can automate it's settings, I like the sound very much. But remember I'm an old rocker...gi-tar player and I don't mind paying for what I like...
BTW ORGANized is another excellent freebie, complete with midi implementation chart...I don't have the link but that's the precise spelling. It's a little too much like B4 but it's pretty nice.

hink wrote:

If you get the tonewheel set you can "age" it as well. Also with the tone wheel comes emulation of the vox, farfisa and continental.

Since you mentioned the Vox, I have to say that it was a worse emulation than the Hammond emulation. It sounded very little like the Vox SuperContintal I have sitting next to me.

hink wrote:

But remember I'm an old rocker...gi-tar player and I don't mind paying for what I like...

This gives me the impression that you might have misunderstood what I wanted to convey. It's not primarily a complaint about price, it's primarily a complaint about the actual quailty vs the product's reputation. Given that I think the extra quality isn't there, I would rather play a free organ VSTi.

Also for whatever it's worth to you, I do own an actual Hammond organ. So please don't think my previous comments were all about getting something for nothing, or that good VSTi isntruments shouldn't cost good money, or whatever.

DevonB wrote:

Hmmm.... I think vurt lost his pet organ around these parts... vurt, you seen it? Devon

no devon ive lost my pet DRAGON,but carry on

it probably didn't come out right...but for me I got use to it while working at Mars, so when I came into some money it was high on my wishlist....I sounded like I was a little eletist there, not my intent. In fact the exact opposite. I have been playing guitar since 1971. I have never paid more then 500 bux for a guitar (purchased) I will admit when you add in the emg's, sweet body, ultra thin neck and hardware my Warmouth hardtail strat probably cost more then 500 though, but that was kinda over time and my schallers I already had...

Stone, back to your question before this thread got JACKED...you did not specify price, because if you want to buy a dedicated library for each category of sounds you will end up spending thousands easily. If you want a good GM type soundset with lots of good real instruments the one I would recommend is Sampletank 2 over Plugsound Box. I have both. Sampletank 2 (ST2) has a very good piano...much better than Plugsound. The Brass and Winds patches are overall better. You get a full orchestral section as well where those patches are pretty crappy in Plugsound. It has good Clarinets and usable Saxophones. Overall as a starting point I can't imagine you will find better for the price. The synths are crap mostly, but you are not looking for that anyway!

Plugsound is no slouch though and I prefer some patches on it due to its crisp clean sound. The Keyboards Plugsound volume 2 is great, and for $100 you will be hard pressed to find better. I love the Synth Keyboards on there. Also a good Vibes patch on it. I also like Vol 5, the synth volume. However, for another $200 on top of those 2 plugsound modules, you can get ST2 XL, which I would have to recommend for versatility. Depends on what you want.

If you pick and choose VSTs dedicated to a genre, you will end up with better sounding stuff overall, but obviously spend a lot more. I keep hearing great things about Garritan Personal Orchestra. Many brass and winds in there, and a great value at $250 compared to the really expensive symphonic stuff like EastWest. If you are an EP freak that new NI Elecktrik Piano might be a good one for $200. If you like Bass, Spectrasonics' Trilogy is the one to get for $320. I can't pull myself to spend that much just for bass, but to each his own. For Saxophone, Yellow Tools has one called Candy coming out, but at 9 GB per module I think their stuff is overkill. Sonic Reality/IK has a module called Studiophonik coming this summer that is dedicated to live instruments like bass, guitar, keyboards, piano, brass, and drums. Personally, this is the one I am waiting for to get a good collection of live instruments for a decent overall price.

Pete

Hello Stone, you just had to start another thread about which 5 are the best vsti's, didn't you?? And, okay, I'll bite. First, my 2 caveats: 1, I have only free synths, and 2, my computer is very old and slow, so low cpu usage required for me. That being said:
Electric piano: MDA's EPiano
Acoustic piano: MDA's Piano and EVM's Grand Piano
Strings: CelloFan, and CheeseMachine
Dual pickup electric clavinet: Tickyclav
Electric fretted bass: Steinburg's VB-1
Organ: OrganizedTrio, and with a lot of sweat and several days of time I was able to get some very real organs with rotary speakers, including a good "chiff organ" from FreeAlpha. It has a nice modulation matrix.

And the best TB 303 emulator: Oh never mind on that one. The last time that topic came up there were some tempers flaring.

RogerPerrin

Try the sFz from RGCAudio it is straight forward. The SFz+ is not as good, as it has some annoying problems with handling the soundfonts. Any sample playback VSTi is good for natural sounds as there are few real emulators out in VSTi land. The Sampletank is good but does not support Soundfonts which are the most convenient method for stringing together samples.I.e. You download them from the web and you are playing them within a minute.

A good guitar simulator is Plucked String.

http://www.synapse-audio.com/plucked.php

Also the Arturia CS80v is very good at doing acoustic synthetic sounds. At times you don't believe it is a standard VCO/VCF/VCA subtractive synthesis architechture. However it does take a lot of tweaking to get the sounds. But i have managed to get the most realistic flute, trombone, guitar and organ from it. It's secret is the interaction between the Sine and main Oscillators which have a psyc-acoustic effect then the filters are great for tweaking the tone. And the playing responses are very subtle and controllable.
If you know your Vangelis music you will realise that he uses the CS80 a lot in his synthetic/orchestral arrangments (Doesn't Chariots of Fire Opening Brass sound sort of real but you know it's a Synth). Many of his "acoustic sounds" have eminated from the keyboard. Arturia have captured the essence of the CS80 very well.

Hi Guys

About Organ Sounds, I'll recommend you Charlie made by the plugsound team.

http://www.usbsounds.com/jsp/vi/charlie/audiodemo.jsp

Far better that the B4 from NI.

Take a look, you ll be surprised by the first real sounds of Leslie.