How can I make my Vst's as "full" as hardware?

[Vectorman]

I went through a Virus TI, three Waldorfs, two Moog Little Phattys, and a Juno 60 in the last few years. Let them all go. All that's left here for a hardware synth is a Chroma Polaris that doesn't see a whole lot of use. I found that using hardware didn't have as big of an impact on my sound as I'd expected it might. Which songs I've recorded that I think turned out well vs. those that didn't turn out as well came down to what I did - there was no direct correlation between hardware use and better-sounding mixes.

Personally, I'm not big on workstation keyboards, apart from a few percussion sounds that might be neat and distinctive. My go-to piano sounds were to be found in third party libraries that I use in Kontakt, not hardware presets. I much prefer to choose my sampled sounds a la carte than to have a company pre-select them for me.

[secretkillerofnames]

My reason for wanting to own hardware comes down to the following:

• dedicated controls for hands-on operation
• reliability and stability

It comes back to the "you're picking the wrong synths" comment* but my experience with hardware has been that they are frustrating unreliable. You wait forever for firmware upgrades in comparison to software. When after months you install an update that allows for advertised capabilities to work, then it breaks something else. Cue waiting forever again. I'm talking about the Waldorf Blofeld desktop and M-Audio Venom here*. Seems to me if yr buying hardware these days you need to adopt a system that has lots of technically minded users who are into creating their own editors and modding the firmware.

I still have the Venom because it is worth more to me than I could sell it at the moment. As a MIDI controller it doesn't come close to the Graphite 49 controller I just got. Add in all the virtual modular software i've bought over the last few months (Tassman 4, Karma FX, Vaz Modular 3) and I think the only reason why I wouldn't want a soft-synth based system is not wanting to have a laptop on stage.

[IncarnateX]

How can I make my VST's as full as hardware

1) Turn up their volumes
2) Run them through compressors and limiters
3) Use more voices, detune and/or unison mode if possible
4) layer them with the same sounds but slighty detuned and panned differently.
5) run them the through some good outboard gear and into the PC again
6) Run them through big effects (e.g. a heavy impulse response reverb)
7) 1+ 2 + 3 + 4 + 5 + 6

Mind you that if the question is "how do I make them sound more analog" then this will not necessarily equal a more "full" sound. Lot of classic analog sounds consist of single cycle waveforms that have to be processed with effects to achieve a "full" sound. The juno 60 has a famous chorus for that, the alpha juno has both a chorus and a four split pulze width modulation used in the famous "hoover" sound and Vangalis had to put his CS80 through a good reverb to avoid it's rather thin and dry sound when unprocessed.

Cheers

[danbroad]

How can I make my VST's as full as hardware

1) Turn up their volumes
2) Run them through compressors and limiters
3) Use more voices, detune and/or unison mode if possible
4) layer them with the same sounds but slighty detuned and panned differently.
5) run them the through some good outboard gear and into the PC again
6) Run them through big effects (e.g. a heavy impulse response reverb)
7) 1+ 2 + 3 + 4 + 5 + 6

Mind you that if the question is "how do I make them sound more analog" then this will not necessarily equal a more "full" sound. Lot of classic analog sounds consist of single cycle waveforms that have to be processed with effects to achieve a "full" sound. The juno 60 has a famous chorus for that, the alpha juno has both a chorus and a four split pulze width modulation used in the famous "hoover" sound and Vangalis had to put his CS80 through a good reverb to avoid it's rather thin and dry sound when unprocessed.

Cheers

Funnily enough, I'd suggest almost the opposite!

1. Turn the plug level down but the monitors up, give yourself more headroom for....
2. Less compression and more saturation, aim for a driven (but not overdriven) gain...
3. Use less detune/unison, (if you must "1970's" then consider a little slow osc pitch drift in the order of cents)
4. Don't spread every single sound wide across the stereo field, give each sound room to breathe, try using mono more
5. Don't sweat outboard and use subtleties to give drive (there's plenty of great freeware, even). For that true outboard feel put your track a couple of milliseconds behind sync and add some low level white noise! Don't overlook the humble amp-sim overdrive here, either - even at 5% wet it can add real life to a synth patch!
6. Don't pile frequency-robbing FX (reverb is a perfect example) onto every synth patch: instead, use busses and add at the end of the process.

I think, depending on what you want to do with a synth patch, we're both right in a way!

[IncarnateX]

[


Funnily enough, I'd suggest almost the opposite!

1. Turn the plug level down but the monitors up, give yourself more headroom for....
2. Less compression and more saturation, aim for a driven (but not overdriven) gain...
3. Use less detune/unison, (if you must "1970's" then consider a little slow osc pitch drift in the order of cents)
4. Don't spread every single sound wide across the stereo field, give each sound room to breathe, try using mono more
5. Don't sweat outboard and use subtleties to give drive (there's plenty of great freeware, even). For that true outboard feel put your track a couple of milliseconds behind sync and add some low level white noise! Don't overlook the humble amp-sim overdrive here, either - even at 5% wet it can add real life to a synth patch!
6. Don't pile frequency-robbing FX (reverb is a perfect example) onto every synth patch: instead, use busses and add at the end of the process.

I think, depending on what you want to do with a synth patch, we're both right in a way!

I think I need to know how you define "full"? To me a full sound is what you get when you add a juno 60 chorus to a simple waveform or make a hoover sound on the alpha juno 1 or simply use a supersaw as waveform. Others might label it "phat", so in my terms your advice would make a sound more thin and dry, especially if you turn off any effects (6). Likewise I do not understand what simulating outboard effects with VST rather than using real outboard (5) is good for. To me that is like saying "don' t use real analog synths if you wan't an analog sound, use emulations instead". And about the levels of VSTs and thus compressor and limiters (1) then it is a fact that higher volumes lead to more excitation of the cells in the ear and that subjects reports the sounds as more full or better sounding. That is what the loudness war within mastering is about. Using drive and saturation instead of limiting do not necessarily enhance this effect but it will likely make the sounds more distorted if that is what you mean by "full".

[danbroad]

You're talking about a big, all-frequencies sound from a single synth patch. All very well, but I'm thinking in terms of a mix. The 'loudness war' you mention didn't just come from turning up all the synths/ amps in the studio to 11, you know. Still, if you want to max out the volume, frequency, tuning and stereo spectrae to get your sound, be my guest!

Ah well, we'll agree to differ here. But maybe it'd be worth directing the OP to www.soundonsound.com and reading the many hundreds of tutorials and technique files over there, written by some of the most successful jobbing guys in the trade for the last 25 years. Start with the 'mix rescue' and 'classic tracks' series, and you'll get a great grounding in engineering.

[kritikon]

I'll second Danbroad's comments about mono. I think too many in the DAW age either forget or simply don't realise that back in the day with analogue gear everywhere, and big fat mixes and big sounds being made - that almost everything was recorded or patched through mixers in mono. Then only stereo stuff was FX, and most of those were simple mono input/stereo output (and the stereo output was more often than not really a dual mono output, not true stereo).

And plenty of those big sounds were not made with heaps of unison and panning of voices. There are plenty of classic analogue patches used in classic recordings that are taken for granted as "fat" sounds, that are made with 2-osc synths. We go overboard and unison everything and add voices, just because it's there nowadays and it's easy. I think some patch programming and synth use is downright sloppy and lazy nowadays. 2 voices can give you huge sounds. Even one can. My old MS10 used to make enormous bass sounds with one osc only. I got rid of it because of its tuning instability, but decent filtering and sensible patching got stunningly big sounds that had to be Eq cut to fit into mixes. Using every voice and every parameter on some of the synths around often weakens mixes, not strengthens them.

I'll hark back to classic mixes such as that Joey Beltram one - he used a simple JX3p for the standout sound, and if you listen to the mix properly, it's actually a really sparse mix. Yet it was a big mix, it was a floor filler, it was a landmark tune/mix. It was standout because he gave plenty of room for the JX3p to sound big. It wasn't such a big tune because he used expensive outboard and top engineers, not at all. He'll have mixed with mono channels too.

And as to comments re buying top end pre's and expensive mixers etc - the more expensive the channels, the less noise. You don't spend thousands on mixers to get distortion and noise. All top end mixers will be clean as a whistle unless you deliberately drive the channels, and everybody assumes all engineers drive all mixers - well they don't. I lose track of how many times I tell people I didn't spend thousands on mixers back in the day so that I could get more noise out of them. Every time anybody upgraded their mixer, it was to either get better Eq, more channels or cleaner throughput - usually all three. You really don't go to a studio supplies shop and ask for noisier boards. Expensive = clean signal.

[Jace-BeOS]

It comes back to the "you're picking the wrong synths" comment* but my experience with hardware has been that they are frustrating unreliable. You wait forever for firmware upgrades in comparison to software. When after months you install an update that allows for advertised capabilities to work, then it breaks something else. Cue waiting forever again. I'm talking about the Waldorf Blofeld desktop and M-Audio Venom here*. Seems to me if yr buying hardware these days you need to adopt a system that has lots of technically minded users who are into creating their own editors and modding the firmware.

Yeah, the new hardware has had more bugs because it's been more complex code, created at a faster pace, and intended to be propped up by computer use as a companion tool. The Akai S6000 is a great sampler, maybe the best Akai ever made, but its initial release was buggy as hell. After many revisions, it became what it should have been. Sadly, the damage was done, socially. When they released the Z8, they made the same mistakes, except they also had cheapened the quality of the hardware so they could justify staying in the hardware sampler business. Instead of justifying hardware samplers, they proved the dispensibility of them in the face of computers and software. Fail.

The software and computer world has been eroding hardware synth quality for some time. The market trends push things out prematurely and most hardware companies don't have the business culture of "update it till it works" that's demanded by software (and most software by big corporations never gets fixed either for the same reason: sell the next thing).

But I still hold to my assessment that I have less complexity and less (internal) unreliability with hardware vs computers with all their hundreds of competing functionalities and configurations. But that doesn't mean it's easy to integrate hardware with a DAW or that there aren't problems with hardware. The attempts at DAW integration specifically have met failures (Korg's FireWire interface for the M3 never matured on the driver side because Windows is a fractured landscape and a moving target not actually designed for audio production, and Korg is a hardware company merely dabbling in software to compete). Depending on who you talk to, the Virus TI is more successful here. Also my V-Synth XT recently froze when trying to save a project to compact flash. Turns out there are compatibility issues with off-brand CF cards like the one I was using.

Everything has problems. Nothing works the way I really want or expect, hardware or software. But there's less complexity with dedicated tools and I stand by my assertion that complexity is the primary opponent of reliability. When I power-on my hardware synths, or walk away from them for 12 hours and come back, they make sounds. The same is not true for my Windows setup and I'm tired of being the blame (blame the user) for what essentially is a fundamental design problem. There's no reason why Sonar should stop being capable of producing audio output simply because I walked away for 12 hours. "Close and reopen" is a workaround, ignoring the core problems.

[Jace-BeOS]

I really have to ask the original poster: how are you observing the inferiority of the soft synths and the superiority of the hardware synths? Is it when you're listening to a full mix with other elements going on in a song, or with the synth in question played in isolation? If you're noticing this disparity between hard and soft synths while listening to a full mix, I don't know what to say. But if it's when these synths are in isolation, I think you might be pointing yourself in the wrong direction. Unless a synth is being played for fun, which is totally valid, the purpose of it is to be an instrument in a song with other instruments. Common wisdom in mixing actually demands EQ cuts to remove frequencies from various things so all fit together. What value is there in the extra subtlety of hardware synths if they might need to be EQed out anyway?

What frequencies are we even talking about? Are we talking frequencies at all? Can you describe the perceptual differences in more concrete terms?

I'm pro-hardware but I'm not convinced its much more than personal taste and technical tolerances any more. Everything can sound great depending on how you monitor it and what effects are there (or not there).

[Peter999]

Is this "full" enough?

Listen: OP-X PRO-II - Full Strings
Listen: OP-X PRO-II - Fat Sync Lead
Listen: OP-X PRO-II - Lush Upsweeps
Listen: OP-X PRO-II - Warm Matrix-12 Strings
Listen: OP-X PRO-II - Bombastic Sweep

[hebb]

Is this "full" enough?

Pretty decent, but not full/fat enough...

[tehlord]

Another important thing to realise is that is probably doesn't matter most of the time.

I've tested hardware vs software side by side many time. Hardware sounds different, and to my ears it sounds better.

But...

In a mix, it's almost always likely to be totally irrelevant.

[djanthonyw]

All of the synths mentioned in the first post are digital. They are just software in a dedicated box. I've had a Virus Classic, Virus PoCo, Nord Lead 2x, 2 Mophos, and a Tetra before. They're all gone now. No point in having redundancy since software covers everything they can do, and it sounds just as good now. The only thing left is placebo.

[EvilDragon]

Is this "full" enough?

Pretty decent, but not full/fat enough...

LOL no. It's full and fat, quite enough.

[V0RT3X]

Adding saturation to your synth can give it a bit more presence. Also using a good quality VA synth like DIVA or Synthsquad can give you some "oomph". By good quality I mean something that uses Circuit & Component simulation..

I think the best thing i can suggest for helping here is finding a good filter plugin,saturation plugin and quality VA synth.


My recommendations ...

Filter plugin : Cytomic the drop
Saturation plugin : Fxpansion Maul
Synth Plugin : U-he DIVA

Also your soundcard DAC is important too, since not all DAC's are equal.