Anyone using their synth to patch Omnisphere? Your verdict?

[Richard deHove]

I'm considering my first hardware synth purchase in years - but its main job will be as a controller for Omni. (Specifically looking at the Novation Bass Station II).

I'm hoping there may be a few people who have been using the hardware integration feature with Omni already and could share their experience. How has it worked out? Is it a big help in programming or not that useful? What's your verdict?

[Richard deHove]

So I'm guessing that although most people thought this was a great feature, very few are actually using it.

[aMUSEd]

Not surprised really

[cfanyc]

I am an omni owner and user and happen to believe that it is a most amazing synth.
Easily in top 10 ever, imho.

No matter how many spectrasonics cool aid drinkers swear by it however,
hardware integration is the most nonsensical feature of all time imo.

Have the real thing but instead of having it produce the
real sound, get a fake sound from a software pretending that it is the real thing.

Using the hardware to patch omnisphere takes it to the next level of absurdity:
program the fake sound using the real thing.

What is next? a special feature that detects real analog sound in a mix, extracts it
and replaces it with an emulated sound? Or maybe a morphing module that morphs
the analog sound into the emulated.

[Richard deHove]

I get your point but look at things a bit differently. I started in hardware many years ago and owned dozens of synths. As PCs got more powerful (and I stopped playing live) I gradually eliminated all my hardware.

There's no doubt that software gives incredible power and control but I do miss tweaking physical knobs and sliders. I've tried some other solutions like big controller keyboards with generic control grids, little devices like the NanoKontrol2 and the BCR2000. As a way to program synths I found them all to be worse than useless, incredibly tedious and certainly less enjoyable.

The issue remains that I love VSTi synths, have no desire to spend $2500+ on a comparable hardware synth, yet still want to use knobs and sliders to program like I used to.

So the ready-made Omni hardware profiles seem like a reasonable idea. No messy setup, no remembering which knob is for what. I couldn't care less what the hardware synth sounds like, I'm just after the interface. The idea being that the guts of the patch could be very quickly dialled in: envelopes, filter, res, env, basic lfo, perhaps some effects etc and then go back to the mouse to get into the detail, swap out the waveforms for samples etc.

That's the theory. What I'd really like is a dedicated Omni hardware controller but until then maybe spending a few hundred on a little synth is a decent compromise. However, since I've been burned before on useless controllers I thought someone out there may know whether this gives true hardware programming satisfaction, or is just another half-assed controller idea which fails in the real world.

[cfanyc]

The issue remains that I love VSTi synths, have no desire to spend $2500+ on a comparable hardware synth, yet still want to use knobs and sliders to program like I used to.

I get it and there is no hardware synth that is equivalent to omni anyway.
Related to the need for good hardware control however,
and the real missed opportunity that should not be lost to anyone,
is that spectrasonics could have
created a custom omni/trillian/keyscape hardware controller (and maybe even an optional
dsp vst box for those who do not wish to be tied to a computer) and that would have been
really useful and usable.

Having 50 different hardware synths potentially acting as hardware controllers
NONE of which match omnisphere's strengths/architecture but having omni
pretending it is the whatever hardware synth is connected to it at that time point,
all the while any of these controllers does not cover even 10% of the full spectrum of
what omni can do, is the equivalent of a "multiple personality disorder" for synths.

All the development time and effort that went into this lunacy could have
improved many other parts of the synth instead (non-traditional content,
granular engine, multisamples, wavetables,
routing of fx, more advanced supersaws, converter modeling,
circuit level modeling for filters, distortion, etc., etc.)
and that is a big loss and a setback in the evolution of the synth, imo.

[wagtunes]

Short and to the point. No hardware controller is going to give you what you're looking for with Omni. As another user pointed out, ridiculous feature that still has me scratching my head. And I am an Omnisphere fanboi whose made 3 libraries for this amazing piece of software. But this hardware integration is a joke.

Save your money. Nothing is going to give you the experience you're looking for.

[goldenanalog]

Have the real thing but instead of having it produce the
real sound, get a fake sound from a software pretending that it is the real thing.

Oh, boy - the videos showing Omni in-use with the designated hardware really present a compelling argument, tho - maybe the decision to go this way was as simple as trying to answer the question of: what do you do with a distinctive, world-class rompler to grab people's attention? It almost feels like a cross-marketing ploy for keyscape, which I'm assuming is a deeper super-set of the hardware emulations presented in 2.5 -

- Maybe going in the direction of Falcon was just too much of a jump for Eric -

[Funkybot's Evil Twin]

The hardware integration works great at turning Omnisphere into a fixed architecture synth that matches up feature-wise with the hardware synth you're using as a controller. It doesn't necessarily turn your hardware into the be all end all Omnisphere controller but rather changes Omnisphere itself so it becomes a second version of your hardware synth. If that sounds appealing, it works great.

I find a good hardware VA is a great controller for most VST VA synths. Love my System-8 for that task. Maps very well to most of my plugin synths and keeps me off the mouse a lot.

[Echoes in the Attic]

The only way I would use this feature is if I had a Prophet X. In that case it really would be useful, since you'd have a setup capable of controlling Omni's 4 layers (2 dsp oscs and 2 granular sources), plus a couple filters. It would actually be pretty powerful and pretty different to the synth in the hardware. However it would be too expensive to buy just for that.

I would them to make hardware profiles similar to the prophet x set up, but for generic controllers like the Novation SL or the Nektar keyboards. Should be doable. Actually I'd like to see if I can set up a prophet X like template on m Novation SL and then use that with Omnisphere.

For example:
https://www.native-instruments.com/en/r ... show/7427/

[acYm]

omnisphere's new midi integration protocol is still just plain old midi... no instant recall, and shallow programability.

does omnisphere offer 100% automation*? for what they charge, it really should... in which case you could just forget about midi and enjoy the good life with a high-end, automation-based control surface.

(*: everything, the buttons, the knobs, the sliders, the tabs, the menus, the selectors - everything, if it can move on the GUI it needs a parameter)

[layzer]

i think it would make more sense to control a HW synth with 1:1 graphical interface provided by Omnibloat.

[zerocrossing]

Buy a Bass Station 2, but not to control Omnisphere. Buy it and feed the headphone out into the audio in and get one of the craziest synth feedback sounds I’ve ever heard. (Make sure the gain parameter is high) Oh, and it’s a pretty damn good synth too.

[Dasheesh]

i ain't tried it, but dave smith's boards are pretty much built to double as controllers. just saying.

[noiseboyuk]

Just limiting myself to a single post per KVR Omni thread these days as they always go south into their inevitable black holes.

Having 50 different hardware synths potentially acting as hardware controllers NONE of which match omnisphere's strengths/architecture...

This comment is the crux of it for me. The entire point of the Hardware Integration is not to provide hardware to control the whole of Omni. It is essentially the opposite - to restrict Omni to a particular synth's sound and architecture. And that isn't as daft as it sounds - you create different sounding patches this way. One obvious benefit of this for everyone is that there are now 1,000 new patches that are all old school analogue in nature, since they were all created using this method. Technically it would have been possible before 2.5 to do this in the majority of cases, but programming doesn't really work that way, they spring from the architecture and synth-specific sonics and layouts. And the good news is we all got that benefit with the new library.

I get that there are a few more plusses for those who own the hardware itself - limitations such as polyphony are easily overcome while retaining the feel for the synth, and you can use it as a starting point and then cheat with Omni to take things in different directions. But overall, imo its a curiosity for hardware owners more than a big thing.

As it is, it feels like a halfway house to me. Delighted to get 1,000 new analogue patches, nice to get some new analogue filters and wavetables. What I was working on with Lemur would have come close to making sense of it all, I created 7 or 8 hardware profiles on an Android tablet, and it was great to program Omni using these discrete architectures. The problem here was all at Lemur's end - it was incredibly flaky and kept dropping connection on Windows, and in the end I (re)discovered that life's too short for any DAW work with a tablet.

Surely one day that universal hardware controller will come to market. All the tech is there already, cheap and good to go, its just nobody has ever put it together in one coherant package. Touchscreens for the gui, overlaid with transluscent strips with physical controls able to send Midi CCs and NPRN. Add a USB socket, and that's all it needs. Then finally the hardware integration would make complete sense. For now, imo it doesn't make enough sense to buy a hardware model just for Omni integration.