I just approach making sounds a bit old-school way. I mean, I rarely jump on the "new synth" bandwagon for other than business consideration. For me Virus is a perfect fit for most of my music work, I know it inside-out to its last detail and that's enough for me.Stefken wrote:The guy who wrote this is obviously a fanboy. And his statement that vst's are without character is not true. We have come a long way and while that may have been true at some point and is still true for some synths ( for me e.g. the avenger has no character); if you look at the market today there is a lot of character to go round in the vst world. PolyM, Repro, Xils3, Korg Odeyssey, DX7 V, Legend, Easel Buchla.. are all very different beasts.Roman Wisniak wrote:
Just read this article taking into account Virus comparision to modern vsti's:
https://synthmorph.com/blogs/news/acces ... synthmorph
But the point you're still missing for me: Spire, Icarus, Sylenth, Viper, .. are all very much in the ballpark of that Trance sound and the guy listening to his ipod won't know the difference or care about it.
In my view modulations are much more important to create new, interesting and organic sounds than sound generation attributes. As Virus is a complete instrument with full MIDI implementation (no need for MIDI learn as with most sw synths), it is multitimbral with program change capabilities, for me these alone provide a very instinctive and fast layer creation workflow. I am not saying it is not possible with soft synths, but requires much more manual preparation - creating midi learn setup, setting up multiple instances, and only a few supports program changes. Not to say, good sounding layers are prone to kill cpu. In Virus, it is all there out of the box and fits the best to my personal workflow.
Regarding the character - you can over emphasize hence make its character clear some instruments easier than others. Older Virus models have even worse audio quality than new line of VSTi's but the overall character, its living, dynamic, moving character together with its imperfections is still hard to match. The same is true e.g. for a Nord Lead 2 - no effects, lame factory presets, heavy aliasing everywhere - BUT try it with 2-3 presets layered, played monophonically and each morphed mildly at 13-15 parameters at once using its built-in modwheel morph - you'll have an super unique sound noone else has, because it is too clumsy to setup on that bad UI, hence nobody cares (a product showcasing this kind of method is in work...)
The point is, you can get exceptional results with nearly any instruments if you approach it thinking outside of the box or try to misuse it.
Avenger is on the other side - the most intuitive UI, totally flexible engine, top sound, and with its modifiers like effects and osc tools it can be totally unique... not mentioning the armada of synthesis methods, etc, it is hard to find any limitation there actually, that makes it a bit hard to use sometimes, can be overwhelming, unless this is your only synth.
You can turn to different synths for different characters or just learn how to get the character out of one or two synths. I prefer the latter, but this is just for me.
