Vital - Released

[fisherKing]

I find the GUI design bland and uninspiring myself...

ok. but how does it sound? it's a synth, designed to make sound, and (some-sort of) music...

[Sinisterbr]

I find the GUI design bland and uninspiring myself...

I agree. GUIs are important to me as well, I feel more inspired when I like it (just like any physical instrument, actually). I hope it'll be possible to change it later.

[bmanic]

I bought the early access, and after a few days of playing with it i can only confirm your thoughts. It is a fun synth to program, but soundwise it really doesn't hold up to the synths it's trying to imitate.

Why does everybody think it's trying to "imitate" some specific synth? It's not like Serum is unique or anything. Heck it wasn't even remotely "the first" when it comes to wave tables.

When it's hyped/marketed as being a "Serum killer" you can expect that ppl will compare the two

Yeah, well as far as I can tell it wasn't marketed as such. The community named it that... and now the community seems to use it's own naming scheme/tag as some sort of antagonistic marketing thing to fight against. Just shows how silly people are and how emotionally attached they get to "stuff".

[pdxindy]

I find the GUI design bland and uninspiring myself...

Shows how subjective it is... I find the GUI excellent. Easy on the eyes, easy to see and understand what is active, what is doing what. It doesn't announce itself as a thing unto itself... but rather works effectively to make sound design the focus. Plus it is well thought out and really snappy and fast feeling to work with.

[wombat778]

I find the GUI design bland and uninspiring myself...

Different folks have different tastes obviously. I *love* the GUI design, and its close to my ideal. Clean, simple, limited use of colors, not too contrasty, very visual and smooth, and not skeuomorphic. Only real comments are that I might prefer a tweak to the font rendering and I would be interested to see what the wave shapes might look like without the slight gradients

[bmanic]

What I'm most interested in is how close we can get to Camel Audio Alchemy in terms of modulations flexibility. It's already awfully close! This would be a huge win in my book, to finally have a synth where you can pretty much instantly transform the ideas you have in your head to reality without jumping through hoops and strangely behaving modulation sources (example: Vengeance Avenger).

It's not quite there yet in my opinion but it's already quite close from the start and has a very similar workflow in terms of the modulation routings. I do wish Vital got a per-voice EQ/extra filter module though. That would be extremely handy.

Anyhow, here are two sounds I've been working on today:

Two very different kinds of sounds (MP3, Google Drive link)

First sound is played staccato at first and then the same pattern repeated with held notes which brings in all the "shimmery stuff".

2nd sound is a rather strange harsh yet "soft" pad that would work well for any sci-fi horror movie. What makes it strange is that there is no distortion module present of any kind. All of the buzz and crackle is done with FM. Not sure why I got some clicks in the render but they may be part of the sound.. need to debug it a bit.

[bmanic]

I find the GUI design bland and uninspiring myself...

Shows how subjective it is... I find the GUI excellent. Easy on the eyes, easy to see and understand what is active, what is doing what. It doesn't announce itself as a thing unto itself... but rather works effectively to make sound design the focus. Plus it is well thought out and really snappy and fast feeling to work with.

100% agree! The UI is phenomenal!

[Tricky-Loops]

I like it that it doesn't look 2D or 3D but it's easy to the eyes because the contrasts aren't that extreme!

[audiot]

Man, the folks that can hear a difference between Serum and Vital have better ears than I do. When I load up the same wavetable in both, apply the same filter settings, apply the same LFO to the WT position and filter cutoff, and then level match them, I can't hear any difference between Serum and Vital. Even overlaying them in a spectrum analyzer the traces look the same.

Hmm ... if a dev is calling the filter modes "analog" and "ladder", then Serum shouldnt be the competition, but anyway - the analog models in Serum like "german" and "french" sound better to me. Maybe my HS 80's are to critical, but even on my Focal Alphas and iLouds it's audible. Test against something like Diva or TAL Mod .. i know these are not wavetable synths, but in the end they all work with digital waveforms. And the quality of a filter sometimes gets audible first, when you modulate it, either manally or with a modulation source. As i said, i find the names of the filter categories a bit unfortunate ... and in that category Serum is not that pretentious

[fisherKing]

i still don't get it. i like the GUI, but if someone finds it, say, 'bland and uninspiring'... how does the sound of it seem? i'd rather work on a bland GUI with a great-sounding synth, then a mediocre-sounding one with a great GUI.

but again, i use my synths to make music...

[Mik_lo]

I think they are named that way so you know you the characteristics of that filter. I don't think they are claiming to be one on one emulations. IMO I'm not really upset with the names of the filters, I actually don't care what they're called.

[focusrite]

What I'm most interested in is how close we can get to Camel Audio Alchemy in terms of modulations flexibility. It's already awfully close! This would be a huge win in my book, to finally have a synth where you can pretty much instantly transform the ideas you have in your head to reality without jumping through hoops and strangely behaving modulation sources (example: Vengeance Avenger).

It's not quite there yet in my opinion but it's already quite close from the start and has a very similar workflow in terms of the modulation routings. I do wish Vital got a per-voice EQ/extra filter module though. That would be extremely handy.

Anyhow, here are two sounds I've been working on today:

Two very different kinds of sounds (MP3, Google Drive link)

First sound is played staccato at first and then the same pattern repeated with held notes which brings in all the "shimmery stuff".

2nd sound is a rather strange harsh yet "soft" pad that would work well for any sci-fi horror movie. What makes it strange is that there is no distortion module present of any kind. All of the buzz and crackle is done with FM. Not sure why I got some clicks in the render but they may be part of the sound.. need to debug it a bit.

Love that second pad sound

[MorpherX]

I find the GUI design bland and uninspiring myself...

You are might right, because you are designin GUIs for Hive and know what can be done, but in my view this GUI is great because it is good for the eyes if you work with Vital for many hours. There are no agressiv colours and it's also not a black nightmare.

[THE INTRANCER]

I'm sure there will be Skins in the future or Color choices.
It is a little too slow to open though...

Yeah...who knows, ideally there will be a config file one can use to reskin it like in which you can like U-HE's synths but I have my doubts. There is clearly from my eyes and feelings upon looking it closely that there still needs to be quite a bit of work on the GUI, not only to make it more exciting and visually attractive like in which you get the feeling of "wanting to use" like the revised and beautiful white skin of Dune 3 from Synapse Software, but also in the way the fonts look to have no horizontal breathing room between the bordering of the background sections. Little thought has been given for white space when it comes to labelling and makes the GUI look more squashed together.

I generally get the feeling that it's the case of squashing everything one can into an interface without the forethought of realising the importance of appropriate spacing and sizing of elements, including that of white space with this VST instrument. Things being oversized at the expense of things being smaller than they really should be comparatively. It's much easier to design an interface with less elements than to overindulge with many elements that give you less space and options. Clean cut design of angles and shading, and shadowing would be my preference as many would know from looking at my own GUI designs...

[wombat778]

the analog models in Serum like "german" and "french" sound better to me.

To be clear, I didn’t test against the German or French filters in Serum. My goal wasn’t to try to make Serum or Vital sound the “best” that the given synth could sound, but rather find out whether with the same settings (including the same use of a digital filter) they would sound the same so as to expose any fundamental engine differences between the two.