Dear synth developers: no more cross delay on presets!

[zircon]

To build on my previous point, for those of you saying there is something wrong with synths, or even patches, that rely on built in effects to sound good... do you make the same criticisms of most classic hardware workstations? Or hell, even more recent hardware workstations? I'd be pretty shocked for anyone to say the Korg M1, for example, was a "bad" device or that there was "something wrong" - even though it was almost entirely reliant on effects. It was a great machine w/ great sounds, that are still useful today.

[Debutante]

I say keep everything. Firstly, stop depending on presets The objective of a preset is completely apart from the objective of the artist. Presets are merely there to audition sounds, and that's exactly what I want. Just show me what the synth can do in all its mother----ing glory! SHOW ME THE MONEY!!!! Preset designers do not know how you intend to use you intend to use their sounds/synths. I don't know how to say this temperately, but it's not up to them to try and fit the synths into your music.

I find it's also really important to see just how much processing power synths at full blast. Sometimes they're are not optimized to reduce CPU usage even with effects turned off. Sometimes synths can have unique FX that I'd also like to hear. Look at HG's stuff for example, do you want delays turned off of them? Or how about Oatmeal's funny reverb? I like to hear all their funny bits when I'm trying a synth.

Sound design is a professional discipline in it's own right. IMO - Learn It - at least to the point you need to. It takes time and patience for good reason, and the quicker you get cracking, the less you'll have to depend on other peoples' output.

My two cents... in good humor of course

[ouroboros]

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[moonlite]

I mean this in the most light hearted constructive way: please stop loading up every single synth preset with cross delay by default! I don't know why you do it. Maybe to make a good first impression? It gets annoying very quickly. I know I should be a good synthesist (sp?) and build every sound from scratch, but I like to tweak presets instead very often. And it's so funny/frustrating that every time the first step is to go in and disable the cross delay fx!

+1

[w1nt3rmut3]

Wow I didn't know this topic would become such a discussion! I do of course realize that many patches use FX as integral to the sound, and that's a good thing! I was talking about how some synths (it was Wusikstation I was noticing in particular) load every patch up with EXACTLY the same kind of heavy cross delay, so that every time you tap a note you get excessive ping pong ping back and forth across your ears. Even on patches where such a delay makes no sense, such as a bass drum synth!

[The Chase]

You are all much too tame. After all, the filter is (by definition) also an effect. Let's remove it and let a dedicated filter-plugin (which is better anyway, no doubt about it, it must be, it's external) do the work.

Let's also remove all volume and panning controls. That what the hosts mixer is for.

Get out the pitchforks. The witches are are to blame. Burn them.

To all you narrow-minded 'experts' out there: have you ever considered that some synths might be able to actually modulate some of their effect parameters and that it really might be an integral part of the sound?

Massive amounts of delay can not only drown out the synth but can be annoying for the same reason putting a ridiulously long release on every patch can be...

[aciddose]

i dont even remember most of the stuff i've tried... i remember specifically trying out NI's stuff back several years ago. fm7 sounded pretty terrible and dry when the chorus/delay/unison was disabled. making some of my own patches i found the dry oscillators sounded really bad. the filter sounded horrible, the envelopes didnt behave as typical envelopes do.. i wouldnt mind if you needed to go to some extra work to make them behave in a specific way, my problem here was that it wasnt possible to do so at all.

after that i did some more experimentation comparing it to a dx7. it failed baddly on most patches other than the ones included with fm7. i realized what i was looking at was pretty much a fairly generic phm synthesizer with a filter tacked on, feeding into a send effect unit.

that is important.. there is a difference between a filter or something else in the signal path. an insert applied to individual voices before the final amplitude scaling stage is nothing like a send effect. trying to dismiss the statement "built in effects suck" (refering to built in send effects) after claiming they're "the same" as a filter or whatever else is just retarded. come on, give me a break. if you can not see the obvious differences between the way those two completely different things work, well.. save the world, kill yourself.

i moved on to trying absynth and here i actually found a fairly good synthesizer. i was disappointed with the fact it did poorly with anything other than pad sounds though.

NI gets one positive point here.

pro5, it sounded fairly good but once again, send effects (mostly delays, some chorus) applied to everything. try to use that in a mix, you get pure muddyness. turn off the effects and suddenly the synth doesnt sound so great anymore.

i'll make another point about this. yeah, maybe the sound is based on the effects being there. maybe a send effect could even by a stretch of the imagination be considered a part of the signal path..

as a sounding board is for a piano ...almost. in a piano the board has influence upon the decay of harmonics in the strings, and creates interferance between different strings. so it isnt acting as a "send" at all, it is tried into the whole instrument. in a piano, it is more like the entire instrument acts as one "voice" in which you pick specific harmonics out of to produce different notes.

..on with my point. maybe you can stretch your imagination that far. the problem is though, there is no interaction with the components of the sound placed before the effect. so, how ca you explain that the entire sound is much worse without the effect in place, as if the effect does a masking of the negative components in the sound? someone mentioned "oh, remove the filter and suddenly the subtractive doesnt sound good anymore"... no that is total bullshit as well.

remove the filter on a typical software subtractive and you'll have a terrible sound. this is because the filter was masking out how bad the oscillators were. once you remove the filter, you can hear the oscillators by themselves, suddenly thier quality becomes very relivant!

if you remove the filter on most good subtractives, you'll end up with an unfiltered sound. it wont sound any better, it wont sound any worse, it'll just be unfiltered. the quality will remain the same.

it is much different when you're talking about removing the delay effect on a lot of software out there.. the quality does not remain the same. the piss poor level of quality becomes obvious.

i then tried kontact. maybe back then i was high on drugs, or who knows. it seemed to me though that kontact is nothing but a sample player with some effects processing. it seemed like it was 95% effects and 5% sampler. this just really pissed me off and i decided not to buy anything from NI. i went into it thinking NI was great, i was listening to the hype.

do you think i got so harshly bitter about NI for no reason? do i just make this stuff up, like i've never actually used the software i call shit?

no, i tried them back in the day and i was sorely disappointed. NI didnt make a dime off me.

i'm not trying to insult anyone who uses NI software here, and i dont want people claiming "no, you're wrong about what YOU feel for NI's instruments". just think about what you're saying there. i'm sure i must be wrong concerning my own emotions after trying some software. you know me better than i do, right? there isnt any point in you saying "I like NI stuff", which is basically all anything you might say would equate to.

i'm saying all this just as an example of a collection of software which i found was highly dependant upon effects. i found i couldnt use the software with the effects enabled in any tracks, and i found when disabling the effects the quality of the instruments dropped to near zero.

- with some exceptions!.. pro5 is fine, i just really dont like the bad oscillator tuning. fm7 is ok, i just dont like the poor quality of the oscillators or filter. absynth is very good... at pads. i rarely use pads.

i've tried plenty of other software over the years and had the same experiances as well. i just remember the NI collection quite specifically because i was turned off to an extreme with it. just offering examples like i was asked to do, i'm not making shit up as you seem to imply in the way you ask the question.

[zircon]

The power of Kontakt 2 is it's scripting engine and all of the stuff it supports with complex libraries. The fact that it's preset library relies a lot on effects (not really true, given that 50% of the default library is VSL which has no built-in effects) has no bearing, imo. Your criticism of fm7/Pro-53 is more accurate, though I disagree with you on both counts.

[aciddose]

i've never used kontakt 2. i was talking about kontakt, trying to make some of my own sampler patches. i found it had hardly any features at all, yet had a very large collection of effects that could be applied. it seemed like just a dull sample replayer that could be used to apply effects to the samples being played, like i said.

my point was, if it didnt have all the effects in it, wouldnt it have to contain actual sampler features? imagine how much better the sampler components would be without all the developer's time being spent on the effects.

maybe i didnt know how to use it.. but i couldnt find any of the basic features of a sampler. it had the uh.. beat detection or whatever for loops, but that didnt work very well. was it possible to set up individual keys to trigger different sections of a single sample? maybe it was, i dont know. i remember trying to set up a looped breakbeat with 64 divisions. i wanted to be able to trigger each division from a seperate key. from my point of view now, it would have been nice to be able to select to either loop the section or not depending upon if velocity <64, and have it play through the rest of the sample if not looping.

i consider them basic features. loop point selection, reversing, frequency modulation, start point offsets, end point offsets.. i couldnt see any of those features. (i'm talking for individual keys, mapping different parameters. playing in reverse for one key, forward for another, not just reversing the whole sample in some built in sample editor, etc)

seems simple.. i bet it must be possible in current versions. back then i couldnt find any way to get even close to doing that. afterward i was trying to do some very simple layers and splits, and i had way too much trouble with the layout/interface. the effects were fairly good, but i thought it was supposed to be a sampler! :P

[puffer]

Yeah, I'm definitely becoming a curmudgeon .

The premise of this thread is absurd. Might as well ask "Why are women such bad drivers?"

Uh. Some synths/sound designers depend on internal effects to mask dodgy sounds. Some use the effects as part of the patch. Some have really top effects that integrate into the plugin; some have some bog-standard DSP strapped on the output. If you need an initialization patch, make one. You only need to do it once. If your talking about a plugin that is built around a large amount of sample content where this doesn't work, well, then that's between you and that plugin, isn't it? If some designer thought his little kick sounded cooler bouncing around the stereo field, it's hardly endemic of every developer or sound designer.

Presets are both to give a jumping off point for design/composition and to show the user "Hey, look at what our synth can do!" Some do both very well, some do one more than the other, some don't do either.

And, seriously, how hard is it to save presets with the effects turned off?

[Mike from reFX]

Wow I didn't know this topic would become such a discussion! I do of course realize that many patches use FX as integral to the sound, and that's a good thing! I was talking about how some synths (it was Wusikstation I was noticing in particular) load every patch up with EXACTLY the same kind of heavy cross delay, so that every time you tap a note you get excessive ping pong ping back and forth across your ears. Even on patches where such a delay makes no sense, such as a bass drum synth!

Then why didn't you name Wusikstation? You could have saved a lot of people of a lot of grief.

[Teksonik]

[fred-hal]

He DID name Wusikstation. See the quote in your own post.

Uhm.. He didn't mention it until now (fourth page)..

[Teksonik]

He DID name Wusikstation. See the quote in your own post.

Uhm.. He didn't mention it until now (fourth page)..

Uhmmm but he Didn't Mention Vanguard.

[fred-hal]

No, someone else did..