Diva Vs. Real Analog

[zerocrossing]

...My only complaint is that when I first got it the stupid font on the controls was often unreadable in low light, but I know it so well now I just use it without really looking. I kind of really like the button/tweak editing of the thing.

Don't you find this humiliating a bit? 3 times cheaper BS2 has more controls. Sorry, I'm not paying for others coke'n hookers and buying hardware only for hands on features.

Other than that, let's talk about gear on GS. KVR is about VSTs

I don't find it humiliating at all. While I like the BS2, the ATC-X QFS sounds 4 times as expensive, but they only made it three times as expensive by using a simplified interface. I don't mind that trade off at all. Hell, if they made it a little cheaper and made it only editable by software I would have bought it.

As for coke and hookers, considering all the synth design that Studio Electronics does, I can't imagine them having much time for either. Also, the Studio Electronics stuff is made in the US, so you pay for that. It's built like a tank. Moog stuff is too. I don't mind paying a bit more for something that I know is made by people who make a decent wage with some benefits, just as I expect to get paid a decent wage and get some benefits.

...and yeah, let's ditch these computer nerds and go over to Gearslutz! Where men are men and women also appreciate hardware!

[zerocrossing]

But for that matter, the whole industry has changed drastically anyway. I seriously doubt The Beatles would make the splash they did in 1964 today. It's a different world.

This is a sad but probably true statement.

That is only because The Beatles made that different world, or at least got it going.

[IncarnateX]

What album and what band are you talking about?

Probably Human League. They formed in the late 70s but their first monster hit wasn't until "Don't You Want Me" which I think was 1981.

Personally, I consider them an 80s band as I didn't hear of them until the 80s, but certainly as they formed in the 70s, they had to be influenced by 70s music as the 80s didn't exist yet.

Have an idea! What if we just called them a 70s/80s band ?

...or is this too extreme? ....for KVR?

[Tonberry]

Human League still exist, therefore they are clearly 2015s band and 2015s band ONLY.

[Z1202]

Abusing a synth, what is the purpose of that? There was a video of a Japanese guy kind of abusing a Minimoog pages ago, but frankly, most of those sounds had no musical value in my view.
Extreme sounds may be of interest to about 1% of synth users, for the rest stuff from Xils, Tal, GForce, U-he etc. will do.

Musical enough?
http://vk.com/wall161447783_2956

And can't you do that on a good standard soft synth?

I don't know. I came reasonably close trying to do the same on the Syn'X demo, although it was not 100% easy. OTOH, I just accidentally came across this sound fooling around with the square oscillator. That's the point, do you come across interesting sounds by fooling around? With how many softsynths can you go into the extremes? And how rich are those extremes?

I am sure you could get equally good results with quality soft synths if your computer is powerful enough to support Divine and similar modes.
No, I don't belong to that 1% looking for extreme sounds, I already know what sounds I like before I start programming patches. Rarely do I happen to stumble upon a nice sound by accident or playing around.

Does Diva have audio-rate cross-oscillator PWM?

I just had two times experience with Diva. Both times unsatisfactory.

First time I just got Monark, liked it a lot, but didn't like the limited features. Particularly I had created one simple sound (had to do something with selfoscillating filter), which I wanted to apply additional modulatons to. So I thought, maybe I also get a Diva. Quickly downloaded the demo and tried to dial in a similar sound. After quite a lot of fine-tuning hassle with the Shift control mode I didn't get anywhere satisfactory close. I simply didn't like the sound. For a comparison tried ACE, whose full version I do have. Even further away. Then I tried to dial a different sound with Diva, the one I couldn't do with Monark at all because of limited features (IIRC it had to do with PWM). Nothing too fancy, but I had to use a fully open ModWheel as a constant modulation source, which I otherwise couldn't get (don't remember why). Also lots of Shift-tuning. So I gave up.

Next time was quite recently, during the discussion in this thread, when me and my friend wanted to check the MS-20 filter in Diva. One thing we wanted to do is to drive this filter very hot. But we didn't find an option to do so.

@Urs: this is not to bash your products, which are really outstanding and great. It's just to illustrate that they do not fulfill what I'm looking for. Maybe I'm just too stupid to use them

[Z1202]

Oh, and here's another demo example.
http://vk.com/wall161447783_2950
The whistling sound which goes all over the verse after the first chorus (1:35) and the "birds choir" in the chorus at the end of the song (3:04 which is exactly the same sound) is made by simply abusing Monark's filter's "analog" artifacts. Was very easy to create, just by fooling around with controls. Actually the whole song is mostly using Monark with very few exceptions.

[Z1202]

Bottom line: a good synth should behave like a live being, have its own easily observable character. You should be able to explore it as if it were a live being, finding new and new things which you could not even imagine. Needless to say, these things should sound musical. It doesn't help if you have to dial through tons of poorly sounding settings just in order to find some really good sound once in a month, spending hours sifting through useless stuff.

The character should also show itself in automating the settings, so that automation creates a sound that really lives. Basically the synth should do more than you expect it to, surprising yourself in a pleasant way. Most of the softsynths I have tried to work with have an opposite tendency. Rather than "doing more" they simply "did poorly". I had to spend hours trying to dial in something even medium-acceptable. Maybe it's just me though

[Urs]

Next time was quite recently, during the discussion in this thread, when me and my friend wanted to check the MS-20 filter in Diva. One thing we wanted to do is to drive this filter very hot. But we didn't find an option to do so.

Not to be disrespectful, but driving a Sallen-Key filter really hot is useless. Try less drive. Works wonders on a real MS-20, works wonders in Diva too

Other than that, the limits in parameter ranges is exactly what made those synths popular back then, and what has made Diva our best selling plug-in over the past 4 years. You wouldn't get any of those synths to satisfy your needs for extreme settings, you'd get a decent modular synth.

[Z1202]

Not to be disrespectful, but driving a Sallen-Key filter really hot is useless. Try less drive. Works wonders on a real MS-20, works wonders in Diva too

You might be right. I don't remember the details anymore, but I think the resonance was still far from being killed by the input yet, that's why we wanted to increase the drive. But as I said, I don't really remember.

Edit: it might have been the other way round. Maybe we wanted to decrease the load. I vaguely remembering that the oscillators which we used didn't allow us to do change the drive level at all and we had to use Minimoog oscillators.

Other than that, the limits in parameter ranges is exactly what made those synths popular back then, and what has made Diva our best selling plug-in over the past 4 years. You wouldn't get any of those synths to satisfy your needs for extreme settings, you'd get a decent modular synth.

Well, the same should be true for the Minimoog, but the drive knob on Monark is highly useful. Quite often it is very nice to bypass the limits of the analog originals.

[whyterabbyt]

You make things more complicated than they are.

No, they actually are more complicated, in real life. Im just pointing that out; that asinine generalisations are asinine. You do get that there's more than one type of music per decade, dont you? Or that the only common denominator between music over that kind of timeperiod is the timeperiod itself.

Or, like fmr, are you far more concerned about making sure bands get attributed to the 'right' decade than focussing on the point of any other thing some set of bands might have in common. Because that's just sad.

To me Human League were a typical 80's band, sorry.

so, just like U2 and Bon Jovi then. They were typical 80's bands too, right?

[Z1202]

You wouldn't get any of those synths to satisfy your needs for extreme settings, you'd get a decent modular synth.

On one hand you're right. I would, but I'm really reluctant to deal with real hardware OTOH, Monark does extremely well in the extreme ranges (pun intended ) And I don't see why there shouldn't be other softsynths which also do

Edit: there are constant complaints and demands for synths which can produce new types of sounds. People want new synthesis types. The irony is that softsynths are still quite far from covering the analog sound palette and there are lots of new "old" sounds in that domain. By the "analog sound palette" I even do not necessarily mean the sounds which were possible with real analog gear, but also the "new" VA sounds, generated by VA instruments which do not emulate a specific hardware, but rather simply take the same approach for sound creation. A large part of this probably includes new filter topologies, nonlinearities etc.

[whyterabbyt]

Have an idea! What if we just called them a 70s/80s band ?

...or is this too extreme? ....for KVR?

Or perhaps not be a cock when they get called a 70s band, or an 80's band, as its really only a very crude label, and because really, bands basically create music along a continuum that maps so f**king badly onto calender-based decades that, any prissy twatting about of the 'ewww, you should consult teh wiki-peeedia' variety is probably the least accurate thing you could leverage to describe about a band ever.

[fluffy_little_something]

You make things more complicated than they are.

No, they actually are more complicated, in real life. Im just pointing that out; that asinine generalisations are asinine. You do get that there's more than one type of music per decade, dont you? Or that the only common denominator between music over that kind of timeperiod is the timeperiod itself.

Or, like fmr, are you far more concerned about making sure bands get attributed to the 'right' decade than focussing on the point of any other thing some set of bands might have in common. Because that's just sad.

To me Human League were a typical 80's band, sorry.

so, just like U2 and Bon Jovi then. They were typical 80's bands too, right?

Of course there are various waves of music every decade, spread across genres, but that has nothing to do with my point, where I look at the history of any given band.
It is not me branding a band as, for instance, a 70's band. I guess a good indicator is the number of hits they had in a given decade.

Don't know about those two bands, I hate that kind of music and thus don't observe those genres and bands.

[zerocrossing]

I wouldn't substitute Diva for Moog emulations like the Monark, or the Arturia Mini V (okay, let's hear the de rigueur booing for the latter, sorry folks I love that synth). No way. I do think the Jupiter stuff can be astoundingly great, especially Ingo's presets, the latter of which I use consistently.

As far as the Moog sound goes, I mostly liked it on Rainbow Rising and the Return to Forever material. I was a child of the 70s and never cared much for the Prog besides classic King Crimson. I was more in to heavy rock/classic Metal, and the Moog could sound pretty killer in that genre imo, just check out the expressive playing on the aforementioned Rising. It made that album sound more like a place you'd visit than a song or album you'd listen to. At least to my ears.

I was also a big King Crimson fan. I still am. They were mostly Mellotron guys and later Roland ROMpler fans via GR synths. I've talked with Adrian Belew to great length about ways to make a guitar sound like a synthesizer. From Belew I got into Zappa a bit, but most of his stuff was too intellectual for my personal taste. A lot of Belew and Fripp's solo stuff is also amazing, but not too synth orientated except for Belew's love of the Roland ROMpler. For me, the really interesting synth stuff was being done by Laurie Anderson.

I also liked some of the early Todd Rundgren prog stuff. I had a girlfriend who was over the moon for him. A lot of it is pretty cheezy, but some cool synth stuff for sure. Never liked Rush much... hated Dream Theater.

As for cool Moog stuff, check it:

[deastman]

It is not me branding a band as, for instance, a 70's band. I guess a good indicator is the number of hits they had in a given decade.

Again, my point in bringing this up to begin with was just to point out that there were non-prog groups using synths in the 70s. If anyone disagrees with the specific examples I mentioned, fine, I really don't care. All this debate about how many hits in what decade is not relevant to the original point, and certainly not relevant to Diva vs. Hardware.

You know who was a great 70's band? Hall & Oates, that's who.