Does any other VST sound as good as Sylenth?

[tomg]

i'd be comfortable to say in fact that it is impossible to pick that filter out of the 100s of other standard sub-par dsp filters which mind you are probably exactly the same code/function out there in the wild.

It's a very well put together synth and the sum is equal to more than the parts. I objected to to the way it was done. I'm still not real happy but mostly over it, it's none of my business anyway.

I do agree about the filter. The standard SE filters have more character. Most people aren't going to test a filter but I almost always have a closer listen, especially if people go ga-ga over it. Here's what I do.

_cut off all effects.
_shut off everything but one oscillator, adsr(s) and the filter/vca.
_a=0, d=0, s=10, r=0 patched to the vcf and vca use 2 egs if you have to.
_cutoff=10, res=0, env=0, key=0, mode=LP

Now when you press a key you should hear only the single oscillator. The filter should not color the sound at all. This is a really good time to check out the oscillators for upper scale aliasing.

Now check out the filter and you can actually hear it's effect on the single oscillators' sound and have a base point to compare other filters.

When you run this test on Sylenth1 you find out the filters are not all that hot. However, when you put it all together it sounds pretty damn good.

OTOH Superwave and Genesis are as good maybe better for that kind of thing and they're free. So..

[Prevalence]

Well then, as the OP of this thread i thought i should step in and say a few words!

Firstly, this has turned out to be a very interesting and well fought contest of both opinions and facts.

What i have found with Sylenth, more that any other vst synth, is that it really does work 'in your (my) mix'. I often play with sounds/synths that sound great, but just don't seem to 'fit'. This could be for one of two reasons.... either the synth just sounds bad or... it sounds too good... too 'ready'. (i use the terms 'bad' and 'good' quite loosly).

To explain this another way, if i audition a particular synth's presets they may sound awsome in their own right - big, phat, and dynamic etc.... but there is rarely a 'real' use for them in my projects (sadly perhaps).

I am not an advanced programmer or creator of sound synthesis but what i do know, and trust, is my hearing. Sylenth is absolutely Crystal Clear to my ears and very capable of VA as well as digi sounds.

So, whether you like Sylenth or not will depend to some degree on what type of music you produce. And unless you experiment within in your 'Live' environment you will not know for sure if it's worthwhile.

At the end of the day, it's night.

Good night.

Bestest, Paul

[aciddose]

Arksun; i wasn't really worried about the "most analog" comments in the thread, i was just trying to throw those out as the nonsense they are. i know the original poster was just talking about vsts, that is the thread title after all.

as for the param filter stuff yes, most vsts do a horrible job at this and that is one of the issues i've worked on in my software. that's another sort of patch-kiddie/cutoff tweaker/trance issue as well, since most of the chorus pads in that genre are shallow envelope with a really plain sounding filter and some slow tweaking on them.

when i was working out what would be best for my software, i started tweaking analog gear and listening closely to the natural human effect you get when moving a knob or slider. i found the same results in both cases, the finger-thumb movements are always log shaped and at a pretty constant rate. due to that i settled on an adjustable-rate static parameter filter using a simple log shape. i've also designed a dynamic parameter filter but there are issues with this - the input you provide isn't always exactly the output you get when tweaking with a dynamic filter. sylenth might have such a dynamic filter, but i'm certain if you try to tweak it via real-time input you'll find cases where the filter behaves in an unnatural way compared to what you'd expect tweaking a control on an analog synth.

i'm using the term "analog" here, but this has nothing to do with sound. it has everything to do with "analog", that is without quantization, with a smooth movement from one position to another without any steps between.

http://xhip.cjb.net/temp/public/analogknob.mp3

http://xhip.cjb.net/temp/public/digitalmouse.mp3

the software is actually set a bit too fast and also the gui i'm using for the software in this particular instance is a slider, not a circular knob, but you should be able to hear that the start/stop and fast movement, although quite a bit faster in the software, have the same shape.

now that of course depends upon what sort of sound you're looking for. while it's impossible to change the rate that you turn a analog knob with your own hand since your hand is limited due to inertia and other factors, in the software you can adjust it from being instantaneous (and stepped, or just very fast and smooth) to very softly gliding over several seconds.

(actually, the analog synth used in this case has the same param filter rate as in the software, i designed the midi->cv converter with features like envelopes, modulators, glide, parameter filter and dynamic cc/other midi control. but in this case we're discussing "responsive control". i was trying to point out that depending upon what type of input control you're using you might want different types of filtration on the modulation input. in this case, with an analog knob like on a midi cc controller you'd want to model as close as possible to the real analog knob. in this case, my software will produce exactly the same results when you turn a midi knob as when you turn an analog one. that however is just my preference.)

[BONES]

Digital did not 'completely and utterly' replace analog synths in the second half of the 80's. If you'd said that digital largely replaced analog, I would have agreed. The fact is you could still buy a few new analogs - the Oberheim Matrix 1000, for example, was in production from 87 to 94. (Though, admittedly, not one of the best analog polys, but that's beside the point). And people certainly didn't just stop using analog synths.

If they could afford to, they most certainly did. Find a video from the mid-80s to the mid 90s that features anything other than digital synths. If you had a time machine you could go back and try to find an anal ogue synth in a shop during that time. Maybe things were different in other countries but from around 1986 until the end of the 90's, I cannot recall ever seeing any kind of analogue synth in any store anywhere in Australia. At best you might have seen a some kind fo hybrid like a DW6000 but once they worked out how to do resonant filters half-decently in digital, that was teh end of that. Although it almost seemed that people lost interest in that sound during that time because a lot of digital synths didn't bother with a resonant filter at all. That's why I loved my O1R/W so much, it offered the kinds of sounds I wanted but hadn't been able to get from a modern instrument of long time. It didn't have a resonant filter as such, but its wave-shaping allowed me to do the same kind of thing, which is what mattered. In fact, I found it ultimately more expressive than any analogue synth I had owned in the past and until I got my mits on WaspXT, it was something that I really missed in my PC based system.
Same with effects - there may have been some ultra-high end stuff that resisted the lure of digital but pretty much everything on the shelves in stores was digital. But it wasn't an issue back then because the advantages far outweighed any perception of a different sound. Digital technology brought so much convenience to the process - reliable tuning, lots of presets, etc - that it was a complete no-brainer for everyone. Its really only because other technologies have improved so much that analogue synths have become viable again.
I was listening to Men Without Hats first album this morning [finally got it on CD a couple of months ago] and there is not a single synth sound on that disc that anyone would even think of using these days. The basslines are weak and lack much punch and the other synth sounds are pretty basic and tacky. But its a really good album that I've been playing to death since I got the CD. The synths get the job done but the reason you listen is because the songs are great.
When you think about it, its the same for most of the stuff from that time - early Depeche Mode, Fad Gadget, Devo, etc. If you use these guys as an indicator of how good analogue synths were and compare it to what was being done 5 years later, it should be easy to understand why we all went crazy over digital.

Yes, there were many people who were delighted by the thin, cold sound of the DX7 when it first came out

That is just plain stupid. As much as I hated my DX9, it was capable of much fatter sounds than any of my other synths at the time. I could probably have matched it with my mono/Poly in unsion mode but without the ability to save patches it was a fleeting victory for analogue, at best, and in no way justified hanging onto it. "Cold and thin"? That is the stupidest thing I have read on this thread [and that's the 3rd time I said that, so things just get stupider and stupider].

That said, the dramatic rise in the 2nd hand price of analog synths from roughly 87 onwards would seem to indicate that there was a considerable constituency who were far from satisfied with the then available digital synths.

Really? Then how come I couldn't sell any of my stuff at all, at any price? I think it was probably around 92 or 93 that I got $40 for one of my 303s but the reason I still had them then was because for the previous 7 or 8 years, since I'd stopped using them, I hadn't been able to offload them at all. That same year I put someone onto an MC202 that I'd seen in a pawn shop for $50. I think a few years later, 97 or so, he sold it for a fortune and that's about when this frenzy got into full swing, IIRC.

Just a quick reply to Bones here about the 80's synth pop thing. Later 80's was all bloody DX7 (gastly things but good for some sounds)... I was talking more about bands like Yaz/Yazoo or albums like speak and spell by Depeche Mode or early Human league

If you read my response above, where do those bands use any sounds worth recreating? Most of it is quite lame by current standards. And again, as much as I hated my DX9 for its complete lack of predictable programmability, I hung onto it for several years because it was capable of doing much fatter, more impressive sounds than anything else I owned. It wasn't until I got my DSS-1, with its massive unison, that I was able to really outdo it.

... when most of the patches don't even use the filter, the patch programmers are obviously not motivated to use it.

Yeah, it smacks of not understanding what makes a synth great, really. Which is fine if you like to use presets but if you want to make your own sounds, you need each component to be as good as it can be and for it all to work together as well as possible. If you work to an instrument's strengths and all you can come up with is one or two styles of sound, that's usually a good indication of a limited instrument, not a good one.

What "features" do you expect from a filter?

Where I find it falls down is that you cannot modulate it deeply enough. e.g. If you want to get a good, squelchy bassline from it you need to route both modulation controls to the same envelope with maximum depth. anything less doesn't give you enough modulation to get the filter pumping. So if I want that big, squelchy bassline, I can't also have an LFO sweep on the cutoff because I have to use up all my modulation slots to do the one thing. Where that becomes really frustrating, if I recall, is that parts A & B are parallel so you can't use the filter from one to do the bassline and the other to do the sweep. But I could be wrong here, but even if I am it still waters down the effectiveness of the filter section.

Normally a filter has a frequency and a Q to set up .. and I personally don't need more than that. The Sylenth1 filter has a distortion-feature though.

I like being able to access more than one mode at a time. e.g. If you look at my new synths, you can mix Low-Pass and Notch outputs together, so its like having two parallel filters for the CPU price of one. Had I wanted to, I could have also had High and Band Pass outputs as well, but I wanted to keep it usefully simple.

it's a standard, plain sounding filter like any vst plugin which has no real features and doesn't stand out in any way.

I'd agree. Its certainly competent but doesn't stand out in any way. The mod depth issue detracts from that, which gives an overall impression of it not being as good as a lot of other instruments.

i'm the only guy who bothers to post in threads like this, it seems anybody else with any idea of what sounds good or what sounds bad just completely ignores it and passes it off as a fanboy wank.

Almost the only one. Interesting that we both agree, for a change. That can't be good for Sylenth1, can it?

[Arksun]

Arksun; i wasn't really worried about the "most analog" comments in the thread, i was just trying to throw those out as the nonsense they are. i know the original poster was just talking about vsts, that is the thread title after all.


as for the param filter stuff yes, most vsts do a horrible job at this and that is one of the issues i've worked on in my software. that's another sort of patch-kiddie/cutoff tweaker/trance issue as well, since most of the chorus pads in that genre are shallow envelope with a really plain sounding filter and some slow tweaking on them.

when i was working out what would be best for my software, i started tweaking analog gear and listening closely to the natural human effect you get when moving a knob or slider. i found the same results in both cases, the finger-thumb movements are always log shaped and at a pretty constant rate. due to that i settled on an adjustable-rate static parameter filter using a simple log shape. i've also designed a dynamic parameter filter but there are issues with this - the input you provide isn't always exactly the output you get when tweaking with a dynamic filter. sylenth might have such a dynamic filter, but i'm certain if you try to tweak it via real-time input you'll find cases where the filter behaves in an unnatural way compared to what you'd expect tweaking a control on an analog synth.

i'm using the term "analog" here, but this has nothing to do with sound. it has everything to do with "analog", that is without quantization, with a smooth movement from one position to another without any steps between.

http://xhip.cjb.net/temp/public/analogknob.mp3

http://xhip.cjb.net/temp/public/digitalmouse.mp3

the software is actually set a bit too fast and also the gui i'm using for the software in this particular instance is a slider, not a circular knob, but you should be able to hear that the start/stop and fast movement, although quite a bit faster in the software, have the same shape.

now that of course depends upon what sort of sound you're looking for. while it's impossible to change the rate that you turn a analog knob with your own hand since your hand is limited due to inertia and other factors, in the software you can adjust it from being instantaneous (and stepped, or just very fast and smooth) to very softly gliding over several seconds.

Hmmm, using words like 'unnatural' to describe a filter movement that isn't exactly like an analog synth is inherently silly.

Is there some great holy book that says certain analog synths represent the 'best' sound or most natural response?!?. Of course not, just as there's no written rule that says exponential lines MUST be better than linear, or apples MUST be better than oranges. Violin or guitar players might have something to say about how 'natural' an electronic signal device is for making sound waves.

Aren't you actually making the same mistake of spouting nonesense in reference to analog when it comes to whats 'best' too?.

It's like every post is saying if its not like the analog synths I have, it must be bad, or poor sounding, which is complete rubbish. It's just different. All sounds are different. Music either moves you or it doesn't, the same applies to individual sounds themselves.

Understanding how sounds interact in a whole mix is an art in itself and Prevalence nicely points out this fact in terms of Sylenths ability to sit well in a mix.

And then tied in to every post is the sales pitch for xhip.

Almost the only one. Interesting that we both agree, for a change. That can't be good for Sylenth1, can it?

What was agreed on (from that previous thread) was that your personal preference in filters followed a very particular style of reasonance sound. The sylenth1's filter simply isn't to your taste (in the way the classic acid sound isn't either, nothing wrong with that!, but its still purely down to a taste issue, not whether its a good or bad filter).

I'm a fan of both styles, reasonance peaks that seem an integral part of the source, and those more like sylenths that raise up more as a seperate entity (though with the combo of drive knob and/or built in compressor can make some very pleasing mid-way sounds). It's whatever suits your tastes at the end of the day

[aciddose]

i never said "analog" anything was better. i said if you're using an analog controller, either a knob or a slider on your midi controller you'll want to have the movements of that controller transmitted directly and unmodified to the function you're attempting to control if you want the most natural human element in your control.

if you're talking about automation or whatever, drawing lines in a sequencer that's completely different. why are you complaining about steps though, if that is the case, since automation in a host is generally per-sample and has no steps at all. (is pure float, using setparameter)

you're just picking at straws here trying to find something that makes it a good synthesizer. it seems to work fine, i'll say that. it certainly doesn't sound better than anything, though, and there are certainly heaps of other synthesizers that work better even in the areas it is particularly supposed to be useful for.

i also never mentioned xhip, in fact that isn't even xhip.

[jonnyG]

[out on a limb mode]

I think that the lack of "phat" (ugh, horrible word) on pioneering synth-led albums has as much to do with the production techniques of the time as with the raw sounds themselves. Plus a lot of it was pretty shoe-gazey (to use a modern term) and understated. I guess Kraftwerk et al left the whole "modwheel wankery, then compress, overdrive, scoop the EQ, and drench in reverb" malarkey to the rockers.

[aciddose]

if you listen to the american produced versions of kraftwerk's stuff though they use a lot of high end compression and very well tweaked patches. just listen to the german "we are the robots" compared to american and you'll see the difference between some guys messing around in a german studio (not top notch at the time) and then moving into a top end million dollar american studio with very talented producers.

all the smooth, ressy bass sounds and variations (models of flutes, claps and other percussion, brasses and so on) were used in those albums. take another listen to something like walter carlos' productions, again the later works produced in top of the line american studios. again, the same sort of mega-smooth and well tweaked patches and top notch compression and eq/mixing on everything.

yes, those are the types of synthesizers i'm talking about when i think "very analog", or even "great sounding" period. they do sound great. i'm not thinking of the $15 toy keyboard from radio shack in the late 80s that does lame pulse waves and noise similar to what i'm hearing from sylenth. maybe, however, that $15 toy is the only "analog" synth most of you have ever used.

modern versions of the same sort of sounds can be heard in for example BOC - roygbiv and june 9th.

sylenth just can't do any of those sounds, at all, i mean it just can't do them not even poorly.

[BONES]

I think they might have been all over that at the time if it was as usable as it has become in recent years. back then it would have been spring reverbs and only the very best studios would have had more than one or two compressors in their rack. And finding a mixer that could make it all work together would have been a challenge, too.
That is certainly been the case for me. Synths are synths and I'm not fussy about them really. Whilst I might struggle to exactly replicate some great sound or other, I am always confident I can make something to the the same job to the same level, so I don't get anal about which instrument sounds better or worse. But where the biggest improvements have come to what I do is with mixers. Every time I have bought a new mixer it has immediately taken my sound to another level. Less noise, better channel separation, more effective EQ that gets better and better with every new generation. If I could go back to 1985 and only take one piece of 21st century gear with me, it would be a mixer. Even my little Behringer Xenyx is probably better than any studio mixer I could afford to hire through the 80s and 90s.

What was agreed on (from that previous thread) was that your personal preference in filters followed a very particular style of reasonance sound.

That might be fine if you choose to ignore the limitations I described about its modulation capacity. It doesn't matter how the filter sounds if you can't get it to work the way you need it to. Its not a matter of taste, its a matter of usability.

[dover666]

TANGERINE DREAM!!!!!!!!!!!!

[aciddose]

tangerine dream: d-50 rape to your ears

[BFunKu]

Nokenoku, how many filters have you used in your time, in hardware and in software? how many can you say are distinct enough that you could pick out which one you're hearing with JUST THE FILTER and any arbitrary material passing through it?

that's what i expect from a filter, it has to be something, not just "a filter". my description of the filter in sylenth based upon the demos i've heard stands and was exactly what i'm repeating here: it's a standard, plain sounding filter like any vst plugin which has no real features and doesn't stand out in any way. i'd be comfortable to say in fact that it is impossible to pick that filter out of the 100s of other standard sub-par dsp filters which mind you are probably exactly the same code/function out there in the wild.

the same applies to the oscillators and modulation features. the envelopes and modulators don't sound special at all, at least not with the patches i've heard and not from the screenshot of the gui. there are no parameters on that gui which would give you any kind of power not available from the standard vst, aside maybe the "width" parameter in the oscillator.

this thread is "is there any synth that sounds better then sylenth1?", yes, there are heaps of better sounding synths, even in general cases. it doesn't appear that sylenth1 does anything particularly well at all. the only 'feature' it has is a very simple gui and it's easy to use, simplified and limited modulation options with it's very, very simple oscillators, 'stereo width' parameter and featureless filter. this is the perfect synth for when you want a plain, lifeless sound with 'stereo width' as used in many trance productions.

the thread OP asked a question, and this is my answer.

by the way, based upon the name: "silence 1", the synth was designed to 'replace' synth1 and silence the nonsense surrounding it. it hasn't even achieved that goal, but it has quickly become equally as annoying with quite a few reality-oblivious fanboys touting it as the best sounding synth ever.

I take it you Hate all forms of Electronic Dance Music? What kind of music do you make? Just curious that's all. I'm not knocking what your saying or anything. I know you have Extremely Great Knowledge of Synthesis and how it works. I am rather curious of what Scott Solida or Rob Papen think of Sylenth1 though?

[aciddose]

yes, most "dance music" is mindless drivel. the whole "satisfaction" craze for example lasted a year or so. now where is the guy? i hope he made something for himself off that album of 15 tracks all the same with one that got popular and spread across the internet via piracy.

now who can you name in the scene that is really famous, that has lasted and will become something like kraftwerk? that's the sort of stuff i have an appreciation for.

if you're doing that mindless stuff and sylenth is a great synth for that, cool, it just isn't "the best sounding synth", don't be rediculous. what gave "satisfaction" it's 15 minutes of fame? was it just the compressed ressy saw? shouldn't the whole album and all the following clones have been huge then?

it was a combination of factors that pushed that track out and got it air play and play in the clubs. but who, honestly, fondly remembers it and will go out in twenty years to buy a remastered version of the album?

if you're going to get philosophical you'd better make a deeper examination of your arguments before posting them.

[djanthonyw]

yes, most "dance music" is mindless drivel.

Uh... Benny Benassi and his production partner are still going strong. I just saw the future music interview.

Like it or not, electronic dance music still is the most popular world wide.

[Chopper]

but... but... I liked the video...