u-he Hive 1.2 - free update - adds wavetables and more

[spunkmuffin]

What I hope for is, swapping meticulous control for instant variety, and thus tediousness for fun.

Fun yeah Whatever you do, keep it fun.

[Gregorius]

It's really nice to switch through presets in Nexus, Avenger, Rapid, ... and turn off each individual layer until I find the sound I'm after... ...not.

[Stokely]

I guess I fall on the side of liking simpler presets. The more complex ones sound great by themselves, but they kind of fill up the sonic space...and as mentioned, now you are automating and mixing inside the synth more than the DAW, which is fine but I'd prefer to do it where I would do non-synth instruments. Plus I have more freedom to apply different fx that aren't built-in to each part of the layering.

There's also the factor that I feel a bit cheap using a complex "already done" preset lol! So I go in to tweak it, to make it mine, and invariably turn it into something horrible! That one is on me, I need to get much better at sound design. I managed to mangle the presets of my old hardware synths decades ago too.... Alchemy was mentioned and that's a great example...the patches can be so complex that it's really hard to know where to begin tweaking them.

[PieBerger]

Regarding layers, u-he has already given us the opportunity to create complex layered presets by including two independent VCAs in Hive, ACE and Bazille and four VCAs in Zebra. Shoehorning DUNE, Omnisphere et al style layering, not only goes against the design philosophies of the developer, they are surplus to requirement and therefore any development time spent working it in to their synths would be wasteful imo. Developers are in the business of making money, there's no doubt about that, but they want to make money selling your their vision, not someone else's. I personally think that the difference's in the many great synths that are available to us should be celebrated and their feature sets expanded in such a way that further further exploits/supports/emboldens those differences. The constant requests than synth A be more like B, which is implicit when any such request completely ignores or undermines the fundamental architecture of a synth, are simply creating the conditions for the development of homogeneous, uninspired, carbon-copy synths. This is not a good thing imo, it stifles innovation/evolution as companies attempt to remain competitive by copying each other, instead of developing novel/unique ideas to give themselves the advantage in the market place. The former ultimately leads to a race to the bottom, as developers try to undercut each other trying to sell us their version of the same synth. I appreciate that I've taken the ball and run with it some distance, but that's just how I see things panning it.

In other news, yay to upcoming novel features, that will gamify an already super fun synth to use, increasing it's usability without fundamentally changing it's identity

[plugmon]

There is nothing inherently wrong with layers. Plenty of synths have them (Dune 2/3, Synthmaster, Omnisphere, Parawave Rapid, LuSH101, etc.) And you are free to use them or not.

The notion that "Adding features can't go wrong because you have the choice not to use it" does not apply when it comes to editing existing presets.

I like Hive's compact design in which you can see almost all parameters at a time. Modifying presets is so fast and easy.
In other synths like Serum or ANA2, I have hard time switching many tabs and finding which part does what job

Hive has its own business. I rather learned from current Hive that such a simple synth can create so much versatile sounds! It's as precious as what I can learn from complex presets.

[Ploki]

I like Hive's compact design in which you can see almost all parameters at a time. Modifying presets is so fast and easy.
In other synths like Serum or ANA2, I have hard time switching many tabs and finding which part does what job

exactly!
very hard to use a preset as a starting point for "on-the-fly" sound design.
i much prefer finding a sound that "somewhat fits" and push it to perfection than endlessly surfing presets or doing it from scratch. (i do like from scratch)

[tony10000]

I think that the same features can be implemented in a unique way that plays to a particular developer's strengths and style. It does not have to be cookie cutter at all. For example, both Ace and Bazille implement layers in a way that makes them extremely useful in a musical context. That said, instead of layers, I would welcome integral preset dyad support for each oscillator a la Spire and Antidote.

[PieBerger]

I like Hive's compact design in which you can see almost all parameters at a time.

As it happens, this is what I dig most about your Eclipse skin. You have built upon this principle and further increase visibility in a good way!

[Urs]

That said, instead of layers, I would welcome integral preset dyad support for each oscillator a la Spire and Antidote.

What's that?

[tony10000]

That said, instead of layers, I would welcome integral preset dyad support for each oscillator a la Spire and Antidote.

What's that?

The ability for an oscillator to produce musically useful intervals like 4ths, 5ths, 7th, 9ths, etc. These would be really useful as presets rather than having to spin knobs as you have to do in Ace, Bazille, and Zebra.

[pdxindy]

I'm very sceptical towards complex modulators, particularly evolving ones, because they have so much potential for frustration.

The reason it can lead to frustration is because they are not actually very controllable over time... and once the level of complexity goes above a certain point, almost nobody will actually make much use of it.

There is such a relentless push for more features... yet when I listen to what is done with the synths of today, we (the collective user base of said synths) have not come even remotely close to fully using what is already there.

I would say that todays synths have reached a level of complexity where adding additional complexity will be of pretty much zero use.

[pdxindy]

The ability for an oscillator to produce musically useful intervals like 4ths, 5ths, 7th, 9ths, etc. These would be really useful as presets rather than having to spin knobs as you have to do in Ace, Bazille, and Zebra.

The semitone knob in Bazille steps in semitones... it is easy to make a 4th or 7th.

[Ploki]

That said, instead of layers, I would welcome integral preset dyad support for each oscillator a la Spire and Antidote.

What's that?

The ability for an oscillator to produce musically useful intervals like 4ths, 5ths, 7th, 9ths, etc. These would be really useful as presets rather than having to spin knobs as you have to do in Ace, Bazille, and Zebra.

as far as i see, DYAD is a "detuned unison"?
I sometimes do that via Logic's scripter, but it only works with polyphonic patches, not for mono patches.
For mono patches I do a track-stack on DAW level.
Sometimes in Hive, tuning sub OSC up is enough.

[Urs]

Well, Hive has effectively 4 oscillators, so I don't see why it's difficult to do chords...?

Additionally, some of the wavetables have some pure chords, and we can easily make a wavetable which adds lots of chord varieties in various waveforms. Those wavetables might not be tuned to the fundamental, i.e. the oscillator might need to get tuned down until the base note of the wavetable hist the fundamental of the note played.

And also, I'm going to experiment with scale-based quantization on "side level", i.e. a choice of scale in the tune section (probably right on the keyboard) and modulation targets for KeyFollow 1/2 (Osc1/VCF1 <-> Osc2/VCF2), chromatic or diatonic before the quantizer. This would enable interval-based presets and sequences which are always in tune. (Arturia beat me to it in Pigments, but I did have this planned for a long time)

[sacer]

What would be also cool is something like prism, which combines all rob papen products in 4 layers with effects. The same idea for u-he would be really cool, so that you can layer all u-he synths, effects and maybe later his drumcat

At the moment, there is no cpu to handle such unique task

I bought a second hand i7 5960x overclocked to 4500mhz for less than 300€.
No problem with 20 instances of repro-5 polyphone. So cpu issue would be only on notebooks