I had the Minimonsta demo and decided against it. A little too electronic sounding for me. Blue sounded nice especially the pads and arps but again,just not "It".UncleAge wrote:Interesting question really. I had to think about it for a bit. As far as factory presets are concerned there's probably only one synth where I rarely mess with the factory presets and use them as shipped. That would be Minimonsta. Coming in second would be Papen's Blue. I could mess with both but I rarely do.
After that it comes down to 3rd party libraries. And it's a bit of a toss-up for me between Zebra and Alchemy. Both have very good factory presets, no doubt. Both have very impressive efforts from some really good sound designers (3rd party stuff). In addition I find very little (if any) crossover between the 3rd party sounds I get for each synth. As a result they seem to compliment each other nicely. And for the few times that I have worked on some post/prod stuff for video I was happy that I had them both. In that environment the deadline is king and I have no qualms about being a preset whore if it gets the job done
With a gun to my head I guess I would pick Zebra due to the massive number of free presets in the UL. But I find both environments pretty deep in the preset category. Both synths could use a better preset managing system though.
I decided on the Alchemy player and four of the sound packs and will probably get Zebra2. A big factor in choosing Zebra is the number of free presets out there,constant effort to improve it,Great support according to many,and plenty of tutorial videos should I decide to explore it beyond the presets.I'm still not 100% but I'm a good 85% sure.
Between my Omnisphere,Alchemy,Sylenth1,FM8,Absynth5 and Massive,Zebra2 should be a hell of a fine finish for my synth hunting for awhile.
I did try Fab Filter's synth but quickly lost interest though I found it interesting. Volcano actually seemed to offer some good possibilities no matter what synth I chose. Don't know if that would be redundant if I chose Zebra since it seems to have virtually the same thing.
What I really like about Zebra and most of my other synths for that matter over Omnisphere is patch loading time. It's instant. That's why I seldom use Omnisphere. Omnisphere is a great synth but patch loading definitely slows workflow so Zebra would get more use for that reason alone.
