KVR Audio

quantum7 · Post by **quantum7** » Fri Oct 30, 2015 1:54 am

I just bought Falcon and thought I'd start a new thread since the other one got a little side-tracked. Let's use this thread to post user comments. Please no, "synth X made my DAW blow up" comments here. Let's just mention what you think of Falcon so far.

OK, I downloaded and had it installed on my DAW in about 10 minutes from when I made the purchase on the UVI website. Everything went smoothly and it installed no problemo. First off, I love how that it can run outside the DAW, which is something that I really wish that Omni 2 and others would incorporate more often. I've only browsed through 10 or so of the first over 400 presets, but the sound clarity is VERY nice and the FX sound fantastic- above average IMO. More to come after I go through all the presets and start poking around.

Hopefully others who took the Falcon plunge will also chime in here.

quantum7 · Post by **quantum7** » Fri Oct 30, 2015 2:23 am

-Love the resizable GUI and I find it very easy on the eyes.

-I have to say that so far this doesn't feel like a 1.0 instrument.

-I wish it had a FAVORITES tag system, but it is super-easy to save each favorite patch in a FAVORITES folder that I created for Falcon.

-Some of the factory patches are a bit too hot, so you may want to bring down Falcon's mixer down -5db.

-Some of the presets utilize aftertouch- YES! A lot of synths do not utilize AT for some reason.

-Very good use of the Modwheel on every preset, making all the patches even more interesting.

woodsdenis · Post by **woodsdenis** » Fri Oct 30, 2015 2:27 am

quantum7 wrote:-Love the resizable GUI and I find it very easy on the eyes.

-I have to say that so far this doesn't feel like a 1.0 instrument.

-I wish it had a FAVORITES tag system, but it is super-easy to save each favorite patch in a FAVORITES folder that I created for Falcon.

Yes for the favourites, or some kind of tagging.

quantum7 · Post by **quantum7** » Fri Oct 30, 2015 5:03 am

OK, I went through all the presets. I probably won't be using any on the New Age album I am writing now, but for EDM, experimental, and electronic soundtrack it should be great. As a whole, the presets were good, but IMO a lot of them were more about showing off what Falcon can do....and man, can it do a lot! I have a good feeling that 3rd-party stuff is going to be really nice once sound-designers start creating for this. To be fair, I rarely like the presets that come with anything....Omnisphere 2 being the exception. I loved Alchemy, but HATED 95% of the factory presets. I love Zebra, but really like very little of the factory presets. The 3rd-party offerings is what makes these both shine, and I have a feeling that it will be like that for me with Falcon. I'm just picky, I guess.

I used it for over 3 hours without incident and everything loaded and felt very snappy. I really don't think anyone should worry about this running correctly on your system if you have a modern DAW. Falcon also loaded my other libs from UVI, Virharmonic, and VI Labs without a hitch.

Seriously, Falcon can be something special and long lasting, such as Omnisphere, if UVI does it correctly....and especially if sound-designers get on board......which they should I would think.

Good job UVI!

secretkillerofnames · Post by **secretkillerofnames** » Fri Oct 30, 2015 5:11 am

I've played with some of the presets. They seem nice but, as with Mach Five 3, I find it much more fun to construct my own things.

What I particularly like about it is how I can fuse elements together to get a sound.
I usually start with some field recording or sample in one of the Granular samplers, add some modulation on the wave position (drunk is a nice addition to MF4 uh.. sorry.. Falcon.. but Chaos Lorentz LFO smoothed was also good) then add FX to taste.
So now i've got a nice variable background texture I can start adding synthesis.
Used to use the additive and FM more than analog oscillators but now there is wavetable also!!!
Layer Layer Layer - then when I have a cool dense morphing block of sound I record it.
Repeat.

whyterabbyt · Post by **whyterabbyt** » Fri Oct 30, 2015 9:44 am

Question which may have been buried in the silly elsewhere; I know you can load existing UVI libraries, but can you save modified versions? (ie not just presets, but changes to the synth/sound structure etc)

EvilDragon · Post by **EvilDragon** » Fri Oct 30, 2015 10:22 am

whyterabbyt · Post by **whyterabbyt** » Fri Oct 30, 2015 10:26 am

EvilDragon wrote:Yes.

Bought, then. Cheers!

Liero · Post by **Liero** » Fri Oct 30, 2015 10:45 am

Just bought it.

First impressions, especially compared to my other main synths, Serum and Omnisphere 2:

1) Bare oscillators sound almost or as good in Falcon as in Serum, I was afraid it wasn't going to be so but thankfully I was wrong. I prefer the basic analog oscillators of Falcon to those in Omnisphere 2.

2) Unison in Falcon is as good sounding as in Serum - Serum can go up to 16 voices, Falcon can do 8 but has more flexible controls.

3) Sample interpolation sounds similar to Kontakt 5 when comparing Falcon's "best" to Kontakt's "perfect" modes. The quick detune range in Kontakt is 36 semitones (altho this can be further widened if you edit a patch), in Falcon it's 48 which is nice. The drag and drop functionality in falcon is great and fast. I will much rather do sample mangling and sound design stuff in Falcon now, when I previously used Kontakt - which has a GUI that I absolutely hate but I've been using it for 10 years because it's still the sampler to beat.

4) The effects are generally of good quality. Sparkverb is very good. The fft analyser is a bit ugly and I wish the EQ had it built-in, but all in all the sheer breadth of effects is very impressive.

5) The GUI could probably not be better when taking into account just how complex and flexible this synth is. Maybe some small color coding could be useful but overall very usable and intuitive - haven't needed the manual for anything yet.

6) Load times and general feel of stability is VERY good. I'm using REAPER and win 64. No stutters, glitches, weirdness at all.

All in all - seems like this will become my number one synth to go to once I get to grips with it more, if nothing terrible comes up.

woodsdenis · Post by **woodsdenis** » Fri Oct 30, 2015 10:55 am

I would vote for a draft mode for the very CPU intensive osc (Wavetable etc) ala Serum.

HcDoom · Post by **HcDoom** » Fri Oct 30, 2015 11:25 am

Hows cpu?

woodsdenis · Post by **woodsdenis** » Fri Oct 30, 2015 11:29 am

HcDoom wrote:Hows cpu?

Totally dependant on patches of course, the wavetable patches can be very taxing ( like Serum) but overall I would say no better or worse than whats out there, as Evil Dragon said it does NOT run multithreaded like Kontakt which is a shame.

wagtunes · Post by **wagtunes** » Fri Oct 30, 2015 3:31 pm

Downloaded, installed and just doing a quick run through the presets to get an idea of what this thing sounds like and what it's capable of.

Sound Quality: Excellent!

Modulation Potential: Virtually Unlimited

Ease Of Use: For a synth this complex, not too bad. No worse than Omnisphere. Obviously a slight learning curve.

Programming Potential: A sound designer's wet dream. Closest thing to my "ultimate" synth that I've seen yet maybe next to MUX which doesn't have this sound quality.

In short, I am really looking forward to diving into this thing in depth.

EvilDragon · Post by **EvilDragon** » Fri Oct 30, 2015 3:44 pm

...and it didn't crash on you

coincidental · Post by **coincidental** » Fri Oct 30, 2015 4:24 pm

Quick question for anyone who has this (don't have time to dig into this properly right now): are the modulation depth parameters (the ratio sliders) themselves modulatable?

UVI FALCON - My comments on it & to those who actually OWN it, what do you think of it so far?