It has so much variety of synths and acoustic/electric instruments too. In fact, you can combine different elements to make hybrid real/synthetic sounds, vocal blends, weaving orchestral soundscapes and even rock guitars and basses with amp cabs and fx... practically everything you need to build up a track in almost any style AND.... from almost any era! If you know what you're looking for you can pull up sounds of all different kinds of flavors of classic rock, funk, pop, dance, movie soundtracks, hip hop, country... A lot of it has to do with your knowledge of production instrumentation of whatever you are going for. That and having an ear for what you want and how to get there but the TOOLS are there between the massive sound set and built-in fx and easy multi-timbral/layering combi architecture.
Just for fun, this evening I took about an hour to whip up a quicky demo showing how one could pull up the instrumentation of a band like YES and mess around. This is an obvious tribute to the band in "composition" but you can see how authentic the sounds can be with a little built-in production combining the sounds with fx.
This was all done in one instance of Sonik Synth 2 (not SS2 free, the real thing).
Piano- compressed
Acoustic Steel - chorus, compressed
Ricky 4001 through amp cab and tremolo
I-Map Acoustic Kit with some Bruford/White-esque tweaks - pitch, compression
A Minimoog patch for that Wakeman lead sound (close to the edge-ish)
The vox are layered ahhs (actually from the full version of "Don't Cry" - which also works as a 10CC pad deluxe!- and a Dah element layered over with a sort of Anderson-esque head voice timbre, all run through compression, panned and with a slapback delay)
Finally there is a pipe organ that I sampled a year or so ago that is one of the 10 largest pipe organs in the world. There are a bunch of great acoustic and electric organs on Sonik Synth 2 as well as a lot of vintage keyboards like Rhodes, RMI, Pianet, Wurlies, Clavs... plus zillions of synths, great trons... it's chock full of useful sought after instruments. So get it!
It's actually available for pre-order from some places already. You'll see an announcement at AES today about it. Pretty exciting to finally be coming out after so many years of work making it. If you liked the first Sonic Synth then you'll FREAK out on this one especially since it is about 4X the size and full of great new features and fx. Plus, there's a discounted upgrade for a limted time (that upgrade is only available from Sonic Reality and www.esoundz.com though).
I hope you enjoy it. Here's the link to the tune:
www.sonicreality.com/squidscorner/YeSS2.mp3
