Spire Synthesizer

[kenny saunders]

Where do you put Noise OSC Samples, as I have bought some presets and they have them?

edit: sorry nevm, they were serum preset packs !

[HcDoom]

Who is "we"?

There are already a million simple synths but only a handful of super synths.

Every complex synth can be simple but no simple synth can be complex.

I got bored with simple synths more decades ago than I care to admit so bring on the super synths.

Don't dumb Spire down to beginner's level....

So, you want Spire to be exact same as Avenger or Synthmaster?

[joshuaveldman]

I like Spire the way it is but a freely resizable UI would be nice,100% is a little too small and 150% is too big for my little computer screen.

200% is too small for me

Agreed. I have 4k, 17" inch screens because of eye issues and the 200% one is barely useable. At least up to 450 might be ideal for the people moving into 6k and 8k displays.

[Teksonik]

So, you want Spire to be exact same as Avenger or Synthmaster?

No, what I said was.....

Anything that expands the range and complexity of sounds Spire can make gets my vote.

I also said.....

Spire is a great synth now but it's missing a lot of features that I find useful so I very often reach for other more feature rich synths instead.

So again I tend to reach for more feature rich synths because they don't have the same sound design limitations.

There are two factors with any synth, the quality and range of sounds they can make and the quality and range of sounds the competition can make. If someone considers the feature set when deciding to reach for their credit card when purchasing a synth then obviously that could affect sales.

If you love the core sound a synth has it seems logical (to me) that you'd want to expand the range of sounds that synth can make.

So again while I do love the core sound of Spire I tend to use other synths in my collection due to the wider range of sounds they can make and because they are at least equal in quality of sound.

At any rate the developer asked for my opinion and I gave it to him. The one thing I didn't do is use the word "we" since I don't claim to speak for anyone else as your first post did which led to my response.....

[HcDoom]

So, you want Spire to be exact same as Avenger or Synthmaster?

No, what I said was.....

Anything that expands the range and complexity of sounds Spire can make gets my vote.

I also said.....

Spire is a great synth now but it's missing a lot of features that I find useful so I very often reach for other more feature rich synths instead.

So again I tend to reach for more feature rich synths because they don't have the same sound design limitations.

There are two factors with any synth, the quality and range of sounds they can make and the quality and range of sounds the competition can make. If someone considers the feature set when deciding to reach for their credit card when purchasing a synth then obviously that could affect sales.

If you love the core sound a synth has it seems logical (to me) that you'd want to expand the range of sounds that synth can make.

So again while I do love the core sound of Spire I tend to use other synths in my collection due to the wider range of sounds they can make and because they are at least equal in quality of sound.

At any rate the developer asked for my opinion and I gave it to him. The one thing I didn't do is use the word "we" since I don't claim to speak for anyone else as your first post did which led to my response.....

Long story short - you want another Synthmaster and Avenger as presumed. Which is fine, but lets agree to disagree. Carry on.

[Gam456]

Some idea

I would love to have a delay per OSC with sync. But it work better with independent env/vcf/vca per OSC

The idea it's to start OSC1, then OSC 2 with a delay like 1/8, OSC3 with a delay of 1/4 etc.

Advance drift (osc, vcf, env, lfo, vca).

Better arp/seq with import/export midi, preset, hold/slide/gate/ etc...

UI scaling more than 200% (250, 300, 350 etc...)

A pre and post vcf saturation

Alternate source mod for span spread
fine OSC destination mod

[Teksonik]

Long story short - you want another Synthmaster and Avenger as presumed.

No, again I'm simply trying to make Spire a better synth. Just like you were when you posted this:

Import of additional wavetables and couple of more skins would be enough for me.

The difference is that your position of:

Simplicity is something we need.

Limits me while while my position would not affect you at all since you could simply ignore any new features that you don't want or need. If a feature is added it doesn't mean you have to use it but if a feature is not added then no one can use it. Not everyone needs simplicity, you are not "we" so do you see the point?

At any rate here are 46 free presets for Spire. Nothing that's going to win a blue ribbon at the county patching fair but perhaps someone might find them pleasing or useful. They're not the aggressive EDM style patches that Spire does so well but some analog filter sweeps etc.

Spire 011225.png

Spire Teksonik Free 01

[Scrubbing Monkeys]

@teksonik
Cool....thanks. I will carry on the good will myself. Not ecactly sure What I have but ill share what I got.

[BONES]

There are two factors with any synth, the quality and range of sounds they can make and the quality and range of sounds the competition can make.

Is the range of sounds still a factor when working ITB? I mean, if you can have 100+ synths, why does any individual instrument need to be good at more than just one thing? e.g. I use ANA 2 in almost every 80s cover I've made, as in probably 60 out of 70, and I always use the same patch, based on the default preset, A Beautiful Dread Lead. If I never use ANA 2 for anything else, it will still have been a bargain buy in my book. AX-73 is another. I use it quite a lot but it is always, everywhere I use it, doing strings. I found one thing it does well and that's enough to justify having it.

Even synths that I really love, I love for one or two things they do really well. There are only two patches I ever reach for with bx_oberhausen, for example - a bass patch I made for a Killing Joke cover and another I made, based on the Huge Swells preset. Those two sounds are so good that I love that synth and I don't need it to do anything else for me.

That speeds up the whole process for me. I don't waste time trying to get blood from a stone, I know very accurately which synth to use for each part. Of course, it doesn't always work out and sometimes I have to spend an hour or two finding or making the right timbre for a part, but mostly it works a treat. You might think that would make our music sound samey over time but it doesn't because a) Having a distinctive sound of your own is not a bad things and b) there are always new things being added to the mix, and old things being put out to pasture, to keep things fresh and evolving. e.g. Aparillo is all over our 2020 album but it doesn't feature at all on last year's offering. The album we're working on at the moment feature Heavyocity's Oblivion and/or NI's SCHEMA:Dark on every song, instruments we didn't have for the last album and will likely tire of before the next one.

If someone considers the feature set when deciding to reach for their credit card when purchasing a synth then obviously that could affect sales.

That might be true if OnePingOnly was $50 but I don't think it's a problem with Spire. It may be lacking something for you but to me it is an incredibly feature-rich instrument that is hugely capable. If it doesn't work for you, I'd suggest that is more about your needs versus those of its target audience.

If you love the core sound a synth has it seems logical (to me) that you'd want to expand the range of sounds that synth can make.

Why? Every instrument has sweet spots, I think it makes at least as much sense to double-down on those, rather than try and extend into territory where it may or may not shine. And nobody who goes through Spire's patch library is going to suggest it is not capable of a very broad range of timbres.

So again while I do love the core sound of Spire I tend to use other synths in my collection due to the wider range of sounds they can make and because they are at least equal in quality of sound.

Maybe you just need to learn how to use Spire better? I use it for all sorts of things, from lush analogue sounding pads, through all kinds of strings, great bass patches and those amazing glitchy sequenced patches it does so well. Honestly, it covers the whole gamut of my needs, easily and with minimal effort. I mean, this thread has 50 more pages than the DUNE 3 thread for a reason (and it's not because everyone hates it). OK, sure, the thread is 6 years older but my point is that if a lot of other people didn't find it as useful to them as DUNE is to you, it wouldn't have 270 pages.

[BONES]

I have to agree about the AI thing. That was a huge detractor to me. Just the term is a negative but also the feature itself.

Why? We've embraced AI in our process and I'm confident it makes what we do better than it would be without it.

For the most part I like the synth as it is, feature wise. There is a risk that too many oscillators or filters or envelopes or arps and it is just going to become convoluted. Bloated.

Yep. I wouldn't care if it became abandonware tomorrow, it does everything I need it to do really, really well exactly as it is. I really hate this idea that every instrument needs to be constantly upgraded all the f**king time. It's tedious. I'd much rather see developers rule a line under their old products so they can branch out and make something brand new and exciting. Nobody needs one synth to do everything any more, that's thinking left over from hardware days. It makes a lot more sense to me to have 10 synths that can each do one thing really wells. Even if that one synth can do them to the same standard, it will inevitably make the process more complex and convoluted than it needs to be.

For Spire I'd rather just see continually improved/extra Fx models to what Effects modules are already present. If you want to add a new Osc type, I'd like something that takes wav samples and could run them through the envelope and loop/reverse it.

Why does that have to be in Spire, though? Why can't it be a new product, building on all the great things about Spire, but created in a way that better supports working with sampled sound sources? You know, it could have a granular mode, wave sequencing and other ways to manipulate samples and multi-sampled soundsets. Basically a sampler version of Spire. And if you already own Spire, you get it for the upgrade price, so they aren't forcing you to buy a whole new product. The Multi-Sample Oscillators in ANA-2, for example, just take up valuable screen real estate to me, I'd never even think to use them. If I want to work with samples, I'll load up Studio One's sample player or Zampler. If I need real heft, I might use Kontakt.

Ultimately, I'd use Spire a lot more if it was simpler, if I could see everything on one page, like I can with Thorn. My four "uber" synths are Thorn, Spire, ANA-2 and DUNE and I will always reach for them in that order. That, of course, means that 90% of the time I end up using Thorn, because it almost always gives me what I want. At the other end of the list is DUNE, which I pretty much never use any more. I used it a bit when it got a patch browser, as that made it a lot more user-friendly, but it still has those f**king layers that I hate so it is my tool of last resort these days. But if Synapse made a "light" version of DUNE with half the filters, half the modulation sources, half the effects and no f**king layers, I can almost guarantee it would be my most used synth because it sounds so good. I find it very frustrating that it is the way it is.

[BONES]

There are already a million simple synths but only a handful of super synths.

The thing with that is that a number of simple synths is handy but you really don't need more than one complex synth if you choose wisely.

Every complex synth can be simple but no simple synth can be complex.

Thank Dog!

I got bored with simple synths more decades ago than I care to admit so bring on the super synths.

I get bored with complex synths way more quickly than with simple synths, because of the effort involved. To me they are things I have to put up with because they do have their uses but none of them are as much fun to work with as something like GR-8, Invader 2 or any of the SEMulations. The immediacy of a simple synth is invigorating.

If your basic building blocks are good, there is no end to the palette of sounds available to work with. Think of it like a painter's palette - if a painter wants purple, he doesn't need a tube of purple paint, he can combine red and blue to get exactly the shade he's after. If he wants green, he combines blue and yellow on his palette and mixes, maybe with a bit of black or dark blue, to get exactly the right colour(s) for his forest. You can combine simple synths in a similar fashion to create those complex timbres you'd rather make in a complex synth. You always see it as an either/or situation but it's not. We all have our own ways of working and where you see limitations, a lot of other people see possibilities.

I have 4k, 17" inch screens because of eye issues and the 200% one is barely useable.

If you have eye issues, you need a bigger screen, not more pixels. A 17" 4k display makes zero sense.

At least up to 450 might be ideal for the people moving into 6k and 8k displays.

People should use their f**king brans and not be sheeple who fall for every marketing con. If you are not running your OS at 100% scaling, then you have more pixels than you need and you have wasted your money on a high-res screen. My monitor, for example, is a 2.5k 27" jobbie, which is the perfect pixel density for that size screen, given how far away it is from my eyes. It's exactly the same as the workstations at the office, where we do serious graphics work. We tried 4k screens about 10 years ago and they were f**king useless, they just sucked up GPU power for zero benefit.

Bottom line - it should not be up to developers to cover for your poor purchasing decisions. If you have the right screen at the right pixel-density for the work you want to do, everything will work perfectly at 100%. If it doesn't, maybe you should have gone to Specsavers?

The difference is that your position of:

Simplicity is something we need.

Limits me while while my position would not affect you at all since you could simply ignore any new features that you don't want or need.

That's not true at all and you know it. The only thing limiting you is your blinkered vision (a song from my 1989 album, Transmission). Adding more shit to an already over-endowed instrument is only going to make it harder to work with, just as it has done with DUNE. Now, we all know that doesn't affect you, personally, but a lot of us work in different ways where things like layers have a huge impact on how usable an instrument is. You can't say that it won't impact anyone because it absolutely will.

If a feature is added it doesn't mean you have to use it but if a feature is not added then no one can use it.

Which might lead a normal person to look for another solution. It should stimulate your brain into thinking about things in a different way, finding workarounds and coming up with novel solutions that might make things even better. e.g. If your synth doesn't have a sequencer, try using something like Gatekeeper on it and see what crazy things you might come up with that way. That, to me, is what creativity is all about, not the kind of tedious work in an overly complex instrument that you seem to prefer.

Not everyone needs simplicity, you are not "we" so do you see the point?

I think he is speaking for plenty of people, though, given the support he's received in this thread (he has more thumbs up than you do).

At any rate here are 46 free presets for Spire. Nothing that's going to win a blue ribbon at the county patching fair but perhaps someone might find them pleasing or useful. They're not the aggressive EDM style patches that Spire does so well but some analog filter sweeps etc.

Very generous, thanks.

[joshuaveldman]

Ahhhh Bones. Always quick to respond to everything. I can't use large screens because my eye condition will cause me to basically get vertigo from trying to move around the screens.

I've got prisms in my lenses to help me actually function daily and I had to take off work for 8 months when my eyes crapped out. The only solution for me screen wise was high PPI screens. So yes, with normal eyes, I'd agree with you but I'm an edge case. 

I do agree that the synth is in a sweet spot where I don't want it to become hopelessly more complex.

[Scrubbing Monkeys]

What is the best way to import the presets Teksonik shared?

[telecharge]

What is the best way to import the presets Teksonik shared?

Click Library > User Library > Import

Also, on Windows you can just drop the (unzipped) folder in

Code: Select all

C:\Users\%USERNAME%\AppData\Roaming\RevealSound\Banks

[Echoes in the Attic]

I used it a bit when it got a patch browser, as that made it a lot more user-friendly, but it still has those f**king layers that I hate so it is my tool of last resort these days. But if Synapse made a "light" version of DUNE with half the filters, half the modulation sources, half the effects and no f**king layers, I can almost guarantee it would be my most used synth because it sounds so good. I find it very frustrating that it is the way it is.

Aren't the layers optional though? I've had the demo for a quite a while and check it out every so often. I don't like the layer implementation in Obsession at all. I wish there was just an easy layer spread like in OB-Xtreme, or parameter charts for spread like in Arturia. But isn't useage of the layers in Dune totally optional though? Doesn't everything work normally if you just leave it to always edit all layers?