Best place to lose your VST virginity with 200 bucks?

[fluffy_little_something]

You could get Air's complete bundle, to which you can upgrade from any single instrument for 150 bucks. You might get for instance Hybrid cheaply on the market place, 20 bucks or so.

[shonky]

For you to save:

Komplete select: 200 USD

Every Summer NI has a sale on upgrades and updates to Komplete or Ultimate, 50% off

Komplete upgrade from Select: 400, 50% off: 200 USD

Komplete Ultimate upgrade from Select: 1,000 USD, 50% off: 500 USD

SO you can get Komplete for 400USD or ultimate for 700, but you will have to wait for next year. You can also look for a second hand version here in the Sell and buy subforum.

Another option is to try and nab a freebie Kontakt Player instrument (or two in my case) on Black Friday, these make you eligible for the crossgrade offer, which is 1/2 price in summer and gets you Kontakt for around 1/4 of the full price. This in turn gets you the Komplete crossgrade offer, which again will be half price in the summer sale, meaning that you can pick up Komplete for around £260 in total if you play the (very) long game (about 18 months if I figure correctly).

Or, if they do the half price sale again during November, you can get it for £30 cheaper again (not sure if that was an anniversary sale or a regular ting with NI).

[Daags]

For a guy who likes to squeeze every morsel of value out of what he's got .... I don't think you could possibly go wrong by going with Native Instruments Reaktor 6, there's a life-time worth of quality ensembles in the user community. Are there quality electric piano ensembles ? Hmm, don't know off the top of my head ... but see what you think of this free reaktor ensemble: http://boscomac.free.fr/?p=wurlitsar

as others have suggested, if you're sold on Native Instruments products ... you could make some 50% savings by waiting until Black Friday or one of their Seasonal Sales (next one due is Winter/Christmas). There may also be strategic ways of buying a base product and upgrading to Komplete .... it used to be the case that Reaktor was a qualifying base product for a Komplete upgrade, but I'm not sure Reaktor 6 qualifies for the current Komplete, but may for the next ?

If $200 was my absolute budget though, I'd wait for the season sale period (or black friday) and get Reaktor 6 for 50% off ($99), and AAS Lounge Lizard during the same sale period for the same 50% discount to cover your electric piano needs. $2 change.

[OreoSplitter]

I've never used reaktor but like the idea of it having so much mileage (if it really does) which why I love zerbra2. How much space does it require and do the user created stuff add even more samples/less space or are just presets for the existing database?

[Apratim]

ok to loose your virginity i would say
1.mpowersynth grab it now for 100 pounds(it is cpu efficient for me but dont know about others)
1.5.get serum (189$)
(if you chose option 1 then)
2.spend the rest on directwave(99$ but is a bit cpu heavy) or tal sampler (60$)
(if none of the above suits you then)
3.wait for some time for wusik 8008 (multilayer modular synth)(cud have a bit of cpu hit but wusik provides disabling oversampling)

[WilliamK]

Be sure to check out the current promo on the Wusik.com site. (sorry, shameless plug)

http://www.wusik.com/w/index.php/purchase

Cheers, WilliamK

[Schmidi]

I'll second AIR complete bundle. Excellent set of instruments that would definitely work for Pop and dance.

I don't recommend it if you're running at resolutions above 1080p, however.

[D-Fusion]

Korg Legacy Collection is great
http://www.korguser.net/shop/software/

[D-Fusion]

You can get XPand2! for free here + 74.99$ to upgrade to AIR Instrument Expansion Pack 3 Complete.
http://www.dontcrack.com/news/2017/10/g ... clusive-2/

[Mathematics]

To make pop music...you really need a workhorse synth IMHO. You can get samples for drums and kits...and that's cheap. A good synth should be a popular one that has a huge library of presets that you can download for free and has the ability to customize the sounds. For under $200, what comes to mind in terms of easy to use, plentiful presets, versatile, popular, tweakable, and practical are Sylenth and Xpand2 (It is free right now...normally it's $100). If this is for pop...Sylenth or Xpand2 could easily be two of my top choices for a synth. Since you'd be stupid not to get Xpand, now you can spend your money on something else in addition to it. You have a lot of suggestions but I'm adding a vote for Sylenth and Xpand2 only because Sylenth has been around for ages and there are literally, tens of thousands of presets online for free and Xpand was free but it has a really inexpensive upgrade path.

If you can save up a little more money, I would highly suggest Omnisphere 2. I have created complete songs using only that synth with great results. It's also great for movie post production and symphonic mock ups. It literally, has everything you need and then some but it is $480 retail. It does sound awesome though. I think it's the best sounding synth-based pseudo-rompler out there.

Honestly, research the following: FM8, Sylenth, Omnisphere 2, Komplete 10 (used), HG Fortune (free but 32-bit), and Zebra 2.

I would try demo versions of each of these and try to make an 8 bar loop of something catchy. See which one does it the best. The only problem is that Omnisphere 2 has no demo.

[Zexila]

2. Constant advice (or.. warnings) from producers/engineers/distributors/fans:

you won't get anywhere like this. You definitely need to get some instruments at some point.

BS, you can even do more knowing your tools inside out, especially stuff that comes with Logic, that's the beauty of it, you are really covered.

[mrj1nx]

Download demos of u-he main synths: Zebra, Diva, Bazille and Hive and play around with them. Very good demos, you can keep playing with them, there will be noise and crackles from time to time.