https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=P ... MEttb_TuVN
After clicking on that video, click on the 'youtube' section on the bottom right to take you to the full playlist and the most recent videos where Rob explains Blue II in more depth. It's a must watch for anyone that has this synth.
I couldn't deal with the copy protection for Falcon, and I nearly bought it a couple of times, but it's just a no go for me. Lost sale. I like it a lot. But I have enough to be getting on with now.
I would suggest that the only real alternative is Halion 6 by Steinberg. It's a monster. Yes, it's expensive, but worth every penny if you have it. I was skint and got a crossgrade for just over a hundred quid. That's dirt cheap for what you get.
There are pros and cons between Falcon and Halion of course, and no one explains them better than the mighty Simon Stockhausen.
Here you will find his playlists for both Halion and Falcon. Both tutorials and reviews and also sound design and patch stuff.
https://www.youtube.com/user/sampleconstruct/playlists
I think any question you might have will have already be answered by this master. And if it isn't, I hear he's a pretty reasonable bloke to shoot a question to if you did your homework.
I came very close to buying Falcon. Halion 6 is not a total replacement for it, though it goes a long way.
Not many people know about Halion 6, even clued in and autistic bods like me that obsess over software. Steinberg f**ked up big time in the marketing for Halion. It's a truly incredible instrument and you dont' even need a dongle.
Very few people realise the power of Halion 6. They wrongly assume it needs a dongle to work. It's also very expensive to buy unless you do a crossgrade. If you have a recent version of Kontakt (and also other samplers which I forget now) you can qualify for the crossgrade. It's still expensive, but if you wait for one of Steinberg's 50% off sales, that gets you it for about a hundred bucks.
It's pretty much the most powerful software available right now if you like to mess about with different forms of synthesis and combine them in to original units. It also is a good medium to make stuff up and sell what you do. If you have a bit of a background in GUI design or just a flare for interesting graphics, you could go a long way with Halion 6. And they don't rape you the way Native Instruments do either (coz they have the monopoly with Kontakt).
Steinberg have been around from way back in the day. When they were the only game in town. And sure they gamed that, and sure they took advantage. But it's a new day. Steinberg have been making inroads to consolidating their various well proven tech and reaching out to the little people like us here on KVR. Still not perfect. But at least they are not so bat shit crazy insane out of touch like NI are.
I'm going to be supporting them all I can. Even to the point of buying hardware. Their moves towards abandoning the dongle are to be applauded. Maybe Cubase will follow suit, who knows...
Halion 6 was the best alternative to Falcon I could find. I don't see that there is anything else that really compares.
It was only the fact that Falcon uses a shitty protection scheme that led me to Halion 6. But I got there in the end, and I now own a copy of it, after jumping through the hoops Steinberg require to get a crossgrade. A hundred bucks is nothing for this state of the art software.
There's a demo of Halion if you want to check it out for yourself.
Things in life come full circle. And I get the feeling that it's Steinberg's time again.
Like Charlie Steinborg says: You will be assimilated!
