Getting Omnisphere 2... or not?

[chk071]

Lol.

[egbert101]

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[wagtunes]

Well, I don't know that I entirely agree with that but I respect your opinion.

I'd like to think that I make music for music's sake and not to "sell out" especially since I've been doing this for 40 years with almost nothing to show for it on a financial scale. And the music I make, the vision I have for my music, can't be made to my satisfaction by tooting on a kazoo. Because if what you're saying is true, then the instrument doesn't matter. Nothing matters but the actual notes. But we know that isn't true. We know certain styles of music are played on certain kinds of instruments because we associate those styles with those instruments. And I'm not talking about electronic music here.

If I were to do my prog rock project without synths, without a B3 organ, without a mellotron, without electric and acoustic guitar libraries, without all those things that I used, things we associated with the prog rock sound of the 70s, would it have sounded as good? Would it have even sounded like prog rock?

So like I said, I can't entirely agree with you. Sound does matter. It's not just about playing the notes.

I hope you can differentiate between the sound of the artist and the sound of an instrument. But yeah, thanks for being civil, it make a change on the internet.

Well that's just my point. At what point can you no longer tell a composer's style if you're playing everything on a kazoo? Imagine the soundtrack of Pirates Of The Caribbean played on kazoos. Would it have the same majestic, grand sound? Would we be as inspired by it? Why do we even have symphonies written for full orchestras in the first place? Why didn't Mozart just save all that effort in determining what instruments should play what parts and just write one part for just piano?

Essentially, you're discounting arrangement. And yes, part of arrangement is deciding what instruments, or in the case of synths, what sounds are going to play what part.

Replace the horn sounds from ELP's "Fanfare For The Common Man" with a kazoo and tell me it sounds the same.

Sound matters. Whether we want to admit it, accept it, or not, sound matters.

Synth1 can't sound like Omnisphere. Not without a crap ton of FX and a master behind the controls. And even then, it's arguable how close you'll come.

[deastman]

I prefer Aaron Copland's "Fanfare for the Common Man".

[Cinebient]

Don´t ask this in such a forum.
As you see, you get very different answers and some people think that there is only their way to do things.
You can make good music with free tools, even with smartphones alone and a few good apps these days if you like.
But for me Omnisphere is f.e. a great tool for performence. It offers some things i don´t get with other tools.
The sound sources are great for me and in version 2 there are some interesting things added like tons of phrases and other stuff.
You get a lot of updates, free patches and stuff too from Spectrasonics over the years.
Then if you add things like Keyscape you have great stuff to work with (if you need this stuff).
For synth sounds only i never would use Omnisphere, since there are better options. But that is of course only my opinion and some people would disagree.
But don´t trust anyone here on KVR.....everyone tells you the only truth.
I f.e.don´t find Spire good and think Dune 2 smokes it.
I have Falcon and think Omnisphere 2 is the better value for the content. But i like both.
But as someone mentioned here already, you will see the same people say the same things again and again (me included, yay).
Why do we have so many subtractive synths? They sound all the same like the Omnisphere patches/sound sources (...sarcasm).
Good musicians have no time to bother about such useless things in forums.
People getting emotional because of different plug-ins they like, use and recommend......strange world!
And yes, i´m guilty too! But at least i know that!

[noiseboyuk]

I think it's less the fact that it takes up 60 gigs then the fact that you're tasked with navigating 60 gigs of content. Hans Zimmer has some interesting remarks about how un-creative it is to have to troll through all of that in search of a sound, you can find him discussing this on vi-control.net, he posts as Rctec. I can't say I'm much of a Zimmer fan, but I think he has a point.

I haven't read his comments (I do know he was enthusiastic about Omni 2 on release and has always been less so about Omni 1). In theory it's not really a problem because of tagging. You don't start at patch 00001 and end at patch 15,683 in search of a sound - you can very quickly drill down using the tags, then sound lock or sound match to find other similar patches keeping certain parameters if you wish. This is one of Omni's greatest strengths. As I mentioned in the previous post though, this has been made more difficult than it should be because the tagging itself is massively over-complicated, duplicating terms, confusing nouns and adjectives within the same category, basic errors of omission etc, so I have a degree of sympathy. Still mind-boggling to me that it apparently represented 3 years worth of work to redo, with a markedly worse end result, and unlike as promised it hasn't noticeably improved since Omni 2's release either.

What has little credence though is the idea that 60gb somehow resembles bloat. Really that term should be used for when content is poor quality.

[egbert101]

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[wagtunes]

Well that's just my point. At what point can you no longer tell a composer's style if you're playing everything on a kazoo? Imagine the soundtrack of Pirates Of The Caribbean played on kazoos. Would it have the same majestic, grand sound? Would we be as inspired by it? Why do we even have symphonies written for full orchestras in the first place? Why didn't Mozart just save all that effort in determining what instruments should play what parts and just write one part for just piano?

Essentially, you're discounting arrangement. And yes, part of arrangement is deciding what instruments, or in the case of synths, what sounds are going to play what part.

Replace the horn sounds from ELP's "Fanfare For The Common Man" with a kazoo and tell me it sounds the same.

Sound matters. Whether we want to admit it, accept it, or not, sound matters.

Synth1 can't sound like Omnisphere. Not without a crap ton of FX and a master behind the controls. And even then, it's arguable how close you'll come.

Here we go into art theory. And yes, you might tell that I am annoyed (from someone else) so that may come across in my grumpy comments today, they aren't aimed at you personally.

Sound matters in terms of the style of music you're trying to create. But an artist has their own style, and that has an effect on the sound they're making. Essentially what I mean by artistic sound is artistic style, so they're different meanings of the word "sound".

Can someone play Tchaikovsky on the Kazoo? Sure. Can someone paint like Picasso in Photoshop? Sure.

Can Hanz Zimmer compose classical music using software instruments? Sure. Could Steve Vai create a guitar album using a MIDI guitar? Sure.

Hopefully you understand my point. An artist is not restricted to any instrument, although an art form and art style may have such restrictions.

Okay, then I think we actually are in agreement. Sure, I can use anything I want to do anything I want. But if I want to do something a certain way having a certain sound, I sure as hell better use the tools that get me that sound as simply as possible or I'm just making things unnecessarily difficult for myself.

[Synthbuilder]

I find it's a jack of all trades and master of none. That said, I do often have use for it and some things it does very well. I'm glad I got it - although very thankful I managed to get it in sale.

I do find most presets, and I mean 90% of them, are not what I'm looking for at all. However, dig deeper into the ugly UI and you can make sound great sounds. I find stripping back a lot of the presets to discover their source samples and re-starting from there is a good way to make more usable patches.

It does seem to have the all too common problem of 'return to zero' envelopes in monophonic mode which is a shame. It'll be nice if they would correct that at some point.

[aumordia]

What has little credence though is the idea that 60gb somehow resembles bloat. Really that term should be used for when content is poor quality.

I suppose the umpteen guitar samples were cutting edge in the nineties, but I would have a hard time praising their quality with a straight face in the 21st century.

On the other hand, Omnisphere 2 probably does have the best-ever recordings of a grown adult literally beating a double bass with a stick, so there's that...

With age I grow in the conviction that good taste is an objective reality -- a sort of index of timelessness. Good taste is what prevents you from wearing clothes that you will come to regret in subsequent decades. It's why Cary Grant's suit in North by Northwest is still considered a sartorial marvel 50+ years hence, whereas John Travolta's in Saturday Night Fever is hilariously nauseating.

Omnisphere 2 is very much cut from the Saturday Night Fever sort of cloth (polyester). Now, if you want to go to a 70's disco, you have to dress the (horrendous) part -- likewise, writing e.g. modern television underscore is probably nigh impossible without Omnisphere. But I consider both of these endeavors specious, and I think time is on my side.

Exhibit A:

https://vimeo.com/17333975

"How much does hair gel cost in The Matrix?"

Now, this video is about Stylus RMX, not Omnisphere 2, but the general point holds: this sort of thing does not age well. And I'm happy to wait a decade to be proved right about this.

[egbert101]

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[wagtunes]

Surprisingly, this video is not a parody.

That actually ended up being really cool.

A door stop. Who'd a thunk it?

[noiseboyuk]

I think I know how the rest of the thread will play out, we all do this every three months or so after all. It gets kind of boring to address the same canards, straw men, sweeping generalisations, wild tangents, posturing, posing, personal grievances, confirmation bias, hyperbole and non-sequiturs though (the KVR meat and drink I guess), so as I usually do I'll leave you all to it from here. I think I really summarised the main points from the perspective of someone who uses it routinely professionally, find it pretty much always delivers but recognises its flaws too.

Good luck to the OP in wading through the endless contradictory advice - I find these threads are usually started in good faith by folks with honest questions, but it tends to go downhill by page 3 (if you're lucky).

[wagtunes]

I think I know how the rest of the thread will play out, we all do this every three months or so after all. It gets kind of boring to address the same canards, straw men, sweeping generalisations, wild tangents, posturing, posing, personal grievances, confirmation bias, hyperbole and non-sequiturs though (the KVR meat and drink I guess), so as I usually do I'll leave you all to it from here. I think I really summarised the main points from the perspective of someone who uses it routinely professionally, find it pretty much always delivers but recognises its flaws too.

Good luck to the OP in wading through the endless contradictory advice - I find these threads are usually started in good faith by folks with honest questions, but it tends to go downhill by page 3 (if you're lucky).

Just like every other thread here asking for advice.

[aumordia]

Lol what did I just watch.

I'm convinced that Omnisphere scratches the same sort of itch for old men that dubstep wub-wubs scratch for the young.

Anyway, stuttering appositives are more a gauge of perturbation than anything else. Just because something is done professionally -- i.e., for money -- does not make it noble. There is an entire industry dedicated to airbrushing photos of celebrity faces after all. Professional dreck is still dreck.

That said, there's a lot of money in dreck, and from a sober return-on-investment perspective, Omnisphere 2 might be unbeatable. And I'll certainly not begrudge a man his living -- feeding your wife and children through call center hold music (or whatever) is as worthy a pursuit as just about anything in contemporary life.

But while it's one thing to earn one's keep through the production of cultural ephemera, its quite another to fetishize the tools of production.

The OP specifically asked "especially acoustic and non-traditional instruments, but also a good stop for some vintage sounds and the odd sound in between." Disheartening though it may be to the Spectrasonics legionnaires, my advice is eminently useful. Omnisphere 2 is a terrible source of acoustic instruments, a good source of absurdly non-traditional instruments (WE LIT A PIANO ON FIRE *guzzles mountain dew* EXTREMELY RADICAL DUDE), and a passable source of vintage sounds and odds-n-ends.

I despise Native Instruments as a company, but for the OP's requirements, Kontakt is probably hard to beat. You could go for Halion, Falcon, or the IK and BestService stuff if you feel like being contrarian but, really though, why bother.