UVI Falcon - hybrid instrument - version 3.01 released - rumors, ads, praise, mud wrestling and off-topic inside!

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whyterabbyt wrote:
MarlaPodolski wrote:blah.
Please note : do not feed the trolling sockpuppet.
Rabbit, I haven't followed this Falcon phenomenon, but I have done a demo, as someone I know has it. Has Falcon become a sacred cow around here? I'm merely making a case against this software based on my own experience with it. I don't care to bring in the side issue of hurt feelings caused by criticism of anyone's favorite software. The nature of your brief and rather odd response makes me wonder if you would rather make it into some kind of emotional argument, as if I had touched a nerve or something. This is not my purpose. I had some trouble getting certain things to work properly at times also, whether that had much to do or not with the bulk of features. I was just more or less wondering if anyone else questioned the structure and complexity of the thing, how many others saw what I saw, and not attempting to degrade the thread into what I too often find happening within other topics. Feel free to agree or disagree, to share your thoughts on the great Falcon, but try to maintain some illusion of civility.

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I see it differently. I really like that Falcon only shows me what I've configured it to do. I understand that typical subtractive synths have oscillators and envelopes and filters all wired up and ready to go, and you just tweak it. But if I'm only using one oscillator, why should I see three on the page? The modular approach work for me. Falcon feels to me a lot like Zebra, just bigger :)

I get what you're saying about it being big and you can get lost. I just follow a different approach. I'm not going to build a synth while I'm trying to make music. I typically work with it in one of three ways:

* create "templates" – tweakable architectures, like designing my own subtractive synth kinda thing, to make new patches
* create patches
* making music with patches, tweaking / automating sounds using the macros I've set up

So if I'm working on a song and need a bass sound, I'm not going to be like, "Okay I'll start with a blank patch, add an oscillator, etc etc." I'm either going to pull up a bass patch that I like, or my bass-making template, which is sort of a rough-and-ready patch.

And if I write a part and decide I want to change the sound substantially, I can still do it...

I love Falcon, apparently for all the same reasons you think it's a disaster :)

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Charlie Firpo wrote:While creating the initial transient for drum sounds (sine osc, pitch modulated full by mseg. Just a decay line downwards) i cannot get consistent "tick" sounds during playback. Rather It goes like this: tick tick tick TACK. I've checked that nothing is freerunning by modulation. And more strange is that it seems like it happens only while playback in the host. (renoise & studio one). Playing notes on the midi keyboard seems to work as it should. I think it has something to do with the ultrafast pitch modulation, cause the osc phase restart works as it should. Any ideas? I've tried different release times and decay on the amp.
Upload a preset so I can have a look.
Falcon envelope are not audio rate though.
Olivier Tristan
Developer - UVI Team
http://www.uvi.net

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Upload a preset so I can have a look.
Falcon envelope are not audio rate though.[/quote]


Pm:ed sent! Thank you!

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MarlaPodolski wrote:
dangayle wrote:I just wanted to say that I have decided to move in from Falcon. Don’t get me wrong, I really really liked it, but there’s just too much going on in the interface and I end up twiddling knobs instead of getting on with making music.

For instance, say I find a great preset from one of their fantastic expansions and simply want to automate a filter. Every single time, I have to hunt and peck through the patch to find the right knob. I know there was some disscussion about having standardized macro knobs or something, that would surely help a lot.

I still think Falcon is amazing, but the overall sameness of the GUI (a little color would help distinguish modules, etc) and a little more work on making the visual hierarchy a little more self evident would go a long way toward making it a little easier to use.
Falcon is a joke. Better than any other instrument or effect plugin, Falcon demonstrates perfectly what is going horribly wrong with music creation in digital today. And it is certainly not the only example, but considering how much work went into designing this silly beast, it is head and shoulders above the handful of others. What's more, the irony is impossible to ignore -- all that extra effort that went into making Falcon the near-unlimited super-everything instrument is precisely what also ruins it. Old criticisms of SynthMaster or any other popular VSTi being too complicated, 'too much synth' or 'over the top' are laughable after spending any time with Falcon.

I'm not totally sure what dangayle means by writing "moving in" on Falcon -- perhaps it was meant to say "moving on"? But what else we read here pretty well sums up the problem:

"... too much going on in the interface ..."
"... I end up twiddling knobs instead of getting on with making music."
"Every single time, I have to hunt and peck through ..."
"... the overall sameness of the GUI ..."


Making music is usually some degree of challenging and can be hard work at times. But there was a time not so long ago when it was usually also a lot of fun. Spending more of my effort clicking, filing, searching, adding and opening little windows, dragging and dropping, and all the rest in Falcon, up to 4 times more than time spent actually making musical sounds, isn't FUN. It really isn't even musical. It is much closer to staring at an office computer, working a 9 to 5 in a cubicle somewhere.

Somewhere along the way, I suppose in between all those brilliant design moments of what more could be added to this disaster of a synth, somebody forgot what creating art -- here, music -- is really all about. It's not playing a video game, computer file upkeep, or staring and fiddling with a smartphone all day long. You see, because THAT'S what fooling with Falcon has become, whether intended or not.

The guilty party is not solely Falcon's devs. It's us, for tolerating this growing trend. And Falcon isn't the only bad actor. Amid this recent wealth of new and incredible music and production software, we are seeing many of our favorite recording tools and plugins become filled with bloat and grow needlessly over-complicated. We don't even frown anymore over manuals that run into the many hundreds of pages.

So, Falcon isn't alone in this but perhaps the poster boy of what has gone terribly wrong. It may be too much to ask these days that we only need hit the On switch before creating and playing music, but a lot of what we experience today, in just the last couple of years, is just plain wrong. I hope to see this trend go away ... before what fun remains goes too, and modern music creation morphs totally into the realm of geeks, computer key clickers and full-time forum posters.
Falcon is indeed a beast - albeit a complex (at first) modular one. I personally see it as Kontakt on acid.

The way you can layer effortlessly in this thing is paramount.

Need a tuned bass oscillator under your mono kickdrum sample? No probs. Add some attack from another sample? No probs. Add some pitched whitenoise oscillator to your snare sample? Of course sir. (unlike kontakt)

Duplicate that into another program on a different midi channel adding distortion and cabinet impulse on the off beat? please do.... (unlike kontakt)

Take up too much cpu doing so? Never...... (unlike kontakt) :clap:

Use flac? :clap:

Scratching the surface :hihi:

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Actually Falcon overall has higher CPU usage than Kontakt - and as far as sample playback is concerned Kontakt is still much more efficient. It also doesn't support multicore processing, like Kontakt does. But, they're really quite different beasts.

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In my experience Falcon uses way less cpu for heavy use of fx and releases cpu much faster than Kontakt when there's heavy scripting and fx in play too.

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That hasn't been my experience at all. But in any case, FX are not directly comparable since they have quite different code obviously. And also Kontakt has fixed amount of effects whereas it's easy to overboard in Falcon because there's no realistic limitation to what you can load in a chain. And then once that one core falls over, it's game over, whereas Kontakt gets other cores to use. :)

Also Falcon has some gnarly issues in some DAWs with large instruments, where it blocks the DAW's GUI from operating completely until the plugin state chunk is saved. Never happened in Kontakt.

They're just completely different beasts. Kontakt is still overall more CPU efficient when disk streaming and sample playback is concerned (which is just about the most important thing for a virtual sampler).

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I moved my soundbank files around, but my search tab seems to assume their previous locations still exist. I have a bunk of duplicate entries in my search results. Is there a way to flush my search tab? The 'reset database' option does not seem to be doing it, neither is removing/re-adding the bank folders from my preferences.

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I found it!

falcon.db file in C:\Users\(user name)\AppData\Roaming\Falcon

deleting that and re-launching falcon allowed me to refresh the index. Posting it here in hope that it helps others with the same issue.

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I have a question:

If a multi is made in Falcon, can it be opened in UVI Workstation ?

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The other way around is for sure: Anything for Workstation works in Falcon. However, Workstation is free, try it for yourself.

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I tried it and I love it.

It would be great if we could map multiple samples across the keyboard, not just one sample stretched across the keyboard.

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Make a clear & concise list with things that are most important to you and open a support ticket with UVI. Workstation runs (afaik) all sample-based commercial libraries sold by UVI so it's a pretty sophisticated player. If is important to you, worth spending time investigating properly.

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musicartist wrote:I tried it and I love it.

It would be great if we could map multiple samples across the keyboard, not just one sample stretched across the keyboard.
You can already do that?

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