What were your go-to synths for 2018?

[LooFoX]

Mostly using Bitwig's internal synths for a few years now.

Built an EP with it and some U-He ACE sounds and Battery 4 samples.

Bought U-He Repro in the end of last summer because I love Prophet's sounds and trying things with it since then .

Bought in the past years lots of synths during sales (Komplete 10, AIEP 3, Synthmaster, U-He ACE), but in the end mainly using Bitwig's synths because I know them the most

[kelvyn]

Synthmaster
Hive
Kontakt
Aparillo
Obscurium
Omnisphere
Diva
Zebra 2
Stylus RMX
Da Hornet

[sacer]

diva
omnisphere2
dune3
lush101
legend
repro

[Saukar30]

Tal Sampler
Vacuum Pro
Dune 2
Thorn CM
Kontakt
Sampletank 3
UVI Workstation

[Lotuzia]

Spent most of the year with Togu Audio Line Tal-Mod & Xils-Lab PolyM and Xils 4, and was more than happy with the results. NI Fm8, Waldorf Largo, Kontakt & StiX still see a lot of use here. As well as all the other synths I've worked on, because I know them well.

[BONES]

What I most notably have been ignoring are the ones where the company has effectively made them not worth the hassle. Those include the Cakewalk synths, IK plugins and Native Instruments. None of them work right on my single v3 Xeon and both have managers that kill any desire to even have them. And the companies themselves have become "indifferent" at best to deal with.

How does NI make things a hassle? If anything, I think they make things much easier. e.g. This morning I got an email telling me about their Xmas freebie so I fired up Native Access and there it was waiting for me to install. Three minutes later it's all downloaded, installed and ready to use. What could be easier? And there stuff all runs brilliantly on my lowly Core i5 machine so I can't imagine they don't absolutely scream on a Xeon.

[BONES]

Finally, I got Korg Legacy collection. Great plugins, ridiculous interface in a tiny window. Fantastic presets, impossible to use in a retina display. I don't know what to do with this pack.

You are not supposed to use a Retina display at 100% scaling. That is not why it has all those pixels. Up your scaling to 150% or 200% and it will be fine.

[jancivil]

If Kontakt be a synth (and any soft instrument is technically a synthesizer at the end of the day), I have used SonicCouture's Glassworks in almost everything in 2017 and 2018. Using the filters and envelopes, and applying velocity depth and env depth to either/both can amount to creation of whole new instrument character, has been a huge sound design feature here for a while.

[BONES]

It's been a huge year of upheaval for me. Moving from 32 bit to 64 bit has meant leaving all my go-to SynthEdit plugins behind and having to spend more money than I've ever spent on music software to find decent replacements for them. It's been worth it all, though. As a couple of other people have mentioned, the sound quality of synths has gone through the roof in the last few years so all this new stuff sounds amazing. From most used to least used, I think my list is probably -

DUNE 2-3 (I've had the beta for months)
Arcade (gets a run in almost every song)
Battery (we use it a lot but I think it slows down song loading way too much so we may revert to Orion's own Drumrack in future)
Thorn (only got it recently but I use the hell out of it)
Vacuum Pro (I'm the only person in the world who paid full price for it!)
Wasp 5 (Native to Orion and still my go-to after nearly 20 years)
Substance (Kontakt instrument from Output)
TRK-01 (Reaktor instrument from NI)
ARP Odyssey (ridiculous CPU usage but it sounds great)
Go2 (good value with a different sound)
Legend (used it a bit early in the year, haven't really touched it for ages)

It's been a big year, generally. We've written 18 new songs and chosen 12 for a new album. It's the first time we've been so focused - I decided in January that I'd finish one song per month, with a view to having an album ready by the end of the year. By the end of July we had 10 or 11 things in good shape, with lyrics, when my band-mate hit a purple patch and came up with a few killer pieces that will be the real showcase tracks. Just this week we've recorded all the vocals, which I will drop in over the Xmas break. In the new year I will do the mastering and we'll be ready to rock whenever the label wants to release it (probably not until mid-year).

After that I can focus more on another project we are involved in, Damage Control, and maybe put a bit of effort into boat maintenance and other household chores that I've been neglecting all year.

[sureno]

Synths used in releases and/or to be released tracks:

Soft:

Diva
Serum
ABL3
Arturia v3

Hard:

Subsequent 37
Perfourmer

[mholloway]

TAL-Sampler by Togu Audio Line I like to use it with a titanic sample pack of all the samples ever released for the old Ensoniq ASR-10

Where would one find this comprehensive ASR-10 sample pack you speak of?

[sleepcircle]

Where would one find this comprehensive ASR-10 sample pack you speak of?

https://www.digitalsoundfactory.com/pro ... soniq-asr/

officially licensed, no less.
1.4 gigs. can you imagine the pain it must've been to copy that all off floppies?

[BONES]

I imagine most ASR-10 owners did what I did - bought the SCSI board and used an external hard-drive. I had all my stuff on 240MB Syquest removable disks (yes, that's megabytes). Does this library include the most amazing heavy metal guitar samples of all time? The local distributor's rep gave me a floppy with them on, back in the day, and they were amazing. I once tried to translate them to something I could use on my PC but they got all mangled and I gave up. I'd happily pay $100 to be able to use them again.

[BBFG#]

What I most notably have been ignoring are the ones where the company has effectively made them not worth the hassle. Those include IK plugins and Native Instruments. Both have managers that kill any desire to even have them. And the companies themselves have become "indifferent" at best to deal with.

How does NI make things a hassle? If anything, I think they make things much easier. e.g. This morning I got an email telling me about their Xmas freebie so I fired up Native Access and there it was waiting for me to install. Three minutes later it's all downloaded, installed and ready to use. What could be easier? And there stuff all runs brilliantly on my lowly Core i5 machine so I can't imagine they don't absolutely scream on a Xeon.

The single 4 core Xeon comment was about two synths that I edited out of the post. I regularly use them on the double 16 core machine and love them, so I had forgot to rewrite that part which concerned them.

However, one of those companies did say their 64 bit plugins didn't work on my system because of the Xeons, which of course was nonsense, but enough for them to be done with me and visa versa.

The NI thing repeatedly comes down to one thing... Native Access. I know it works for quite a few, but it doesn't for all of us, and they've done everything they can to make it the only option. They just need to put the direct downloads from our accounts back. But they're quite indifferent to it working for everyone.

[wagtunes]

You know, let's be honest guys. There's just too many synths out there. And if you're OCD and compulsive, like I am, you can end up with almost every single one of them. I've reached the point where I almost have brain freeze when trying to decide if I'm going to use a synth that I may not have used in a while. What do I turn to? Many, in all honesty, I don't even remember how they sound.

It was easier back in the 70s and 80s because synths cost a fortune and you couldn't buy 100 of them unless you were stupidly wealthy or didn't mind going into debt up to your eyeballs. So I never had more than maybe 4 or 5 synths at one time.

In fact, the most synths I ever owned at one time was this collection:

Yamaha Motif Rack
Korg Triton Rack
Emu Vintage Keys Rack
Korg Wavestation
Yamaha DX 7
Kurzweil K 1000 Rack
Oberheim Matrix 6R

And that was a lot of synths.

Now I have over 100 and it's insane.

In some ways the wealth of riches is a curse.