Spire Synthesizer

[imrae]

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.

This isn't correct. Unwanted features can still a) complicate the GUI, making the workflow worse; b) turn up in presets, making them harder to study and modify; c) introduce bugs.

[Scrubbing Monkeys]

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

Thanks
Will give it a whirl again today. Simply placing the unzipped folder in that dir didnot work. I saw no import option under user folder bur I have been known ro be blind in the past.

[telecharge]

Thanks
Will give it a whirl again today. Simply placing the unzipped folder in that dir didnot work.

spire-options.png

Check the Workspace Directory under Options, too.

[ChanceB]

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

Thanks
Will give it a whirl again today. Simply placing the unzipped folder in that dir didnot work. I saw no import option under user folder bur I have been known ro be blind in the past.

You also have to rescan from within Spire’s browser after adding the preset folder to your user folder

[Teksonik]

I'm in the room waiting to get called into jury duty so can't faff about on my phone trying to quote every response to my posts here but I'll say: If you're baffled by complexity then the number of features a synth has is not the problem. You can't "learn" a feature that doesn't exist. Maybe you need to expand your horizons beyond simplicity. Unless of course you want to keep making the same stuff year after year, decade after decade. Once again I am reminded of the old saying " simple things amuse simple minds". At any rate jury duty sucks especially in a country with a failed and corrupt "justice" system. FML today....

[Teksonik]

Praise Allah, Jesus, and Buddha I didn't get picked for the jury. It was an interstate drug trafficking case with a defendant that looked like a guy who would put a severed horse head in your bed if you voted to convict him so I dodged a bullet and possibly an ice pick to the base of my skull.

Back on the subject of Spire and I'm not going to address every comment....the bottom line is that it's a product that exists in a market with other products and therefore must compete for the hard earned money of potential buyers.

Since user waveform import has been mentioned by many users going back for quite some time we'll use that feature as an example. If you didn't own either synth would you pick one that does not allow user waveforms or would you buy one that does if the price range and sound quality were equal?

For example if I didn't already own Hive or Spire I would buy Hive because it does allow more than a set number of waveforms. I'm blessed to own both and love them both because each has it's own flavor but if I could only own one.....

So if a developer is keen to sell units those units must give people a reason to buy them over the competition. The point that was unsurprisingly missed is it's not about what other synths one might have in their collection it's about making Spire the best synth it can be and that was the reason for my earlier post when asked for details by the developer. He's under no obligation whatsoever to listen to a single word I typed and that's fine. It doesn't change my opinion in the least bit no matter the results....or lack thereof.

I am someone who has been a fan of synths for more decades than many of you have been alive so I want each one to be as powerful a tool as it can be and I could not care less if that makes them more complicated for those who refuse to put the work in or only view synths as one would view a screwdriver or a hammer, like soulless tools used to bang out yet another project instead of musical instruments that are inspirational, empowering, and feed the soul.

Again I owned simple synths going back a very long time and they have long since lost their appeal. I want something that doesn't limit me when I have an idea. "Oh I'd really love to add this to the patch but can't because this or that feature is missing" and so on. Sure I could reach for another more feature rich synth in my collection but again that's not the point. For someone to say that adding a feature makes it harder for them to back engineer a preset instead of them learning how to make their own tells us all we need to know. If I can make presets, anyone can. It's not rocket science but it is an art form despite what our resident boomer may say ad nauseam to the contrary (I'm older than he is so can use the word boomer). You start with nothing (in this case INIT) and end up with something appealing....Art. Now having said that I'll use a preset made by someone else if I find it inspiring but I always reach for my own first because they're obviously made to my specifications. The point is I am not required to rely on the sound design work of someone else. It is an option not an requirement and I'm all about the options.

Now I understand that the fad these days seems to be about "fast and easy" and those people have my deepest sympathy. All art is about the journey, the trials and tribulations, the periods of growth and discovery along the way. That is where true artistic satisfaction lies. It's not supposed to be easy. Ask anyone who has spent countless hours and years of hard work and practice mastering how to play any musical instrument.

Otherwise you might as well just hit the A.I. button and let it do all the work but that takes the humanity, spirit, and soul out of art. Sadly that appears to be the future with A.I. generated copyright strikes even against music that is 100% original work.

So in the spirit of creativity (which separates us from the other beasts of the earth) I'm going to leave the mosh pits of KVR for a while and spend my time making the musical art that feeds my soul. I highly recommend it.....

[Scrubbing Monkeys]

Thanks
Will give it a whirl again today. Simply placing the unzipped folder in that dir didnot work.

spire-options.png
Check the Workspace Directory under Options, too.

Finally saw the import tab. It was hidden because I needed to scroll down on the gui....duh. Bummer I couldnt get it to keep the presets nestled in there own folder. They just got thrown in with the rest in the user dir.

[telecharge]

Bummer I couldnt get it to keep the presets nestled in there own folder. They just got thrown in with the rest in the user dir.

If you create a new folder and make sure it is selected before you import, the presets should go into it.

[BONES]

Aren't the layers optional though?

Yeah but the problem is they are used all over the place in the presets and the way I work in more complex synths is to find a preset I like and tweak it to suit my needs. I don't mind creating a patch from scratch in a simple synth like GR-8 or Invader 2 but for something like DUNE, I honestly don't have the time or the energy.

If you're baffled by complexity then the number of features a synth has is not the problem.

You are talking as if you think it's hard, like it's an achievement to be able to do it. That's not the issue, the issue is in the time it takes to do it, especially if you are in the middle of a session and you just want a sound to do a job. e.g. Let's say you want a little glitchy sequence to fill out an arrangement that just needs a little bit of "oomph" to get it properly kickin' along. I can go to Thorn, find something that's pretty close to what I need, play around with a few parameters and get what I want before I lose the flow of what 'm doing. OTOH, with DUNE, I can find a promising patch quite quickly but when I start to tweak it a bit to make it work in the context of what I'm doing, I discover that it's done over 4 or 5 layers, requiring 4 or 5 times more tweaking, which is more than enough to disrupt the session and make me lose the momentum I had.

You can't "learn" a feature that doesn't exist. Maybe you need to expand your horizons beyond simplicity.

What's to actually learn? Synths are all pretty much the same, they do the same thigs in the same ways. Mostly you only need to learn the layout and you're away. Rocket science it is not. The last thing I think I had to actually learn was the modulation sequencer thingie in ArcSyn and that was about 7 years ago. Or maybe how sample-based guitar instruments do things. But once I worked how Ujam does it, which involved all of 10 minutes watching a tutorial video on YouTube, I could transfer that knowledge to Kontakt guitars like Shreddage, and use those just as easily.

I dunno, maybe you find it difficult but to me it is just time-consuming. It's a process you have to go through to get good sounds out of any synth but the simpler the synth is, generally the shorter that process is.

Look at all the most popular emulations - they aren't uber synths, they are all fairly basic synths like SEM, MiniMoog and the Junos, that are quick and easy to get great sounds from. A lot of people don't want to get bogged down in patch design, they want to get on with the proper business of producing songs and albums. That's why you hear so many raw presets in commercial productions, things you can pick instantly.

Once again I am reminded of the old saying " simple things amuse simple minds".

Says the guy who, it seems, would rather spend all day with a single instrument than with a complex arrangement.

At any rate jury duty sucks especially in a country with a failed and corrupt "justice" system. FML today....

Yeah, about 30 years ago I got called up twice a year for a couple of years but always managed to wriggle out of it with work commitments. Eventually I ran out of excuses and went in but didn't get empaneled. So I sat around for half a day and then went home, I got called up again, about 6 months later, and got put straight onto a jury but when we went into court, the defendant changed his plea to guilty and we were dismissed. That was sometime in the late 1990s and I've never been called up again.

Anyway, thanks for those presets, I've already tweaked one for something I've been working on for a few days (a cover of Never Let Me Down Again). It sounds way better than the horrible Emulator sounds Depeche Mode were using back then.

[BONES]

Back on the subject of Spire and I'm not going to address every comment....the bottom line is that it's a product that exists in a market with other products and therefore must compete for the hard earned money of potential buyers.

Which it seems to do pretty well, don't you think? In fact, it complements my other uber-synths really well because it isn't trying to be any of them. Thorn, DUNE and Spire all have their distinctive sound that suits different things at different times. The last thing the market needs is for all of them to copy each other and converge into three shades of the same thing. If you do that, you get people deciding that they already have this one so they don't need the other two. Much better for the developers if you can justify buying all three. If I want layers, I'll just add multiple instances, which is way less hassle overall than having to deal with layers 100% of the time.

Since user waveform import has been mentioned by many users going back for quite some time we'll use that feature as an example. If you didn't own either synth would you pick one that does not allow user waveforms or would you buy one that does if the price range and sound quality were equal?

That sort of thing will always come down to how it's implemented. If it was the way Rich has done it in DUNE, then it wouldn't sway me at all. OTOH, if it worked the way Zampler does, then it might (although I already have Zampler so I wouldn't need that functionality in another synth).

To me t seems like you are still thinking in a hardware way, as though there are limitations to the number of instruments you can have or the number of tracks in an arrangement but these things have been virtually limitless for years now. I get that you enjoy patch programming and you're pretty bloody good at it but I don't understand why you can't grasp that a lot of us have better things to do with the limited time we get to spend on music production.

For example if I didn't already own Hive or Spire I would buy Hive because it does allow more than a set number of waveforms.

OTOH, I see no relevance in that when you can do so much with simple sawtooth and pulse waves. I could happily work for 100 years with nothing else and never feel like I was repeating myself. As we work on our 7th album, it is something we have become conscious of, we don't want to stagnate or rest on our laurels, we want to move what we do forward.

... it's about making Spire the best synth it can be

What that means will be different for everyone. For me it would be eliminating any parameters that can't be displayed on a single page. Only being able to see a single oscillator at a time is, for me, Spire's worst trait. Fix that, even if it means removing an oscillator or two, and a few other GUI/workflow issues and it would possibly become my favourite and most used synth. Add in layers and I probably wouldn't bother upgrading, even if it was a free update, just as I haven't upgraded to the latest version with AI. That's the balancing act that developers need to get right. Unfortunately, as I have found with DUNE, developers tend to get patch designers on their beta teams, which means the products end up being great for those people. It tends to give the synths a great sounding set of factory presets, which will sell a lot of units but may or may not turn out to be useful to many of us who just want to make music. e.g. The default patch in DUNE sounds absolutely amazing but no-one will ever find a use for it in a song. That makes it good marketing tool for the developer but useless for the customer.

I am someone who has been a fan of synths for more decades than many of you have been alive so I want each one to be as powerful a tool as it can be

Have you ever stopped to ask yourself why that is? Because up until I started working ITB, I was mostly the same. I was always more interested in sound quality than features but when I was paying thousands of dollars for an instrument, it needed to be able to do a lot of things for me to justify the expense. Simple synths just wouldn't cut it. But that was 20+ years ago. Things have moved on and my attitude has moved on, too. Yours doesn't seem to have and I'm wondering why.

... or only view synths as one would view a screwdriver or a hammer, like soulless tools used to bang out yet another project

That's not how I look at screwdrivers and hammers. A good tool is a joy to use, they let you create real things that you can touch. I am currently re-modelling the galley (kitchen) on my boat and my new galley will be a joyous thing to behold and cook in when it's done. The right tools will make it a simpler, less painful experience. It's the same with music production.

... instead of musical instruments that are inspirational, empowering, and feed the soul.

Those are, for me, 100% the ones that sound the best, not the most complicated ones. In fact, the complicated ones tend to have the opposite effect, they suck the life out of me and take al the joy out of creating.

Music feeds the soul, the instruments are just the tools we use to make it. There are plenty of people who'd tell you that synths are soulless. It's all a matter of perspective.

I want something that doesn't limit me when I have an idea. "Oh I'd really love to add this to the patch but can't because this or that feature is missing" and so on.

Any limitations there are purely down to your hidebound ways, methinks. As I said yesterday, one of the most satisfying aspects of music production fo rme is finding solutions to those kinds of problems, either by using effects or trying a different instrument or whatever. Hell, sometimes I'll even layer two synths to get what I want.

For someone to say that adding a feature makes it harder for them to back engineer a preset instead of them learning how to make their own tells us all we need to know.

The arrogance in that statement is astounding. As I've explained before, collaboration allows us to transcend our own limitations and do things we never dreamed possible. Using patches created by someone who's better at it than we are, or willing to put more effort into it, frees us to focus on other things and make what we do better than it might otherwise be, just like paying someone else to mix and/or master your songs. A fresh perspective is always welcome, I don't want our music to be stifled by my own limitations. The more people we can involve in the process, the better the results will be. e.g. If I was making Spire patches, I wouldn't have come up with the Synthwavey sounds in your little collection, so using your patches expands my palette, which was previously restricted to the kinds of patches I like to make (plus the factory bank, of course). So what I'm doing is better for your participation (annoying as that is). Who wouldn't want people helping them like that?

You start with nothing (in this case INIT) and end up with something appealing....Art.

Or you start with something that's already good and make it even better. As Picasso famously said, "good artists borrow, great artists steal".

The point is I am not required to rely on the sound design work of someone else. It is an option not an requirement and I'm all about the options.

Anyone who has been doing this for more than a year or two will be the same,. It just comes down to how much interest they have in being bothered. 45 years ago, we had no choice. Our instruments didn't have patch memory so the only sounds available were the ones we came up with ourselves.

Now I understand that the fad these days seems to be about "fast and easy" ... All art is about the journey, the trials and tribulations, the periods of growth and discovery along the way.

You're hardly one to talk. I've known you for 20+ years and you've not grown one little bit. We used to agree on most things but I've moved on and you haven't. You may recall there was a time when I thought anyone who had more than a dozen VSTis in their folder was a complete idiot and would never be able to get anything done. On a computer with a single core Pentium CPU, 128MB of RAM and a 500MB HDD that might have been true but as that situation evolved, so did my attitudes. Yours don't seem to have, you still want one synth that can do everything.

That is where true artistic satisfaction lies. It's not supposed to be easy.

If you ever tried writing an actual song, you'd discover that it's not. And the longer you go at it, the harder it becomes to keep it moving forward. e.g. I could still be writing a dozen songs a year about the stupidity of organised religion but I'd done it to death by the 3rd album, so I've consciously put it to one side, which makes coming up with worthwhile lyrical ideas really f**king hard.

Otherwise you might as well just hit the A.I. button and let it do all the work but that takes the humanity, spirit, and soul out of art.

Only if you let it. The skill involved in getting nascent AI to do what you need it to do takes as much practice as learning an new instrument. Some of the shit my bandmate can get AI to do is jaw-droppingly amazing compared to my mostly shit efforts. He's right into it and is able to create incredible art by collaborating with AI. He's currently working with Gemini 2 to write a novel. I've read the first page and the prose is quite beautiful, well above the standard of most of the books I read. By the time AI matures, it will be capable of emotional content as good as the best humanity has ever produced. I'd give it another year or two to reach that level.

So in the spirit of creativity (which separates us from the other beasts of the earth)

I don't feel any need to be separated from the beasts, I am quite happy to be counted among their number. I'd certainly rather live with a pack of dogs than a city full of people.

[imrae]

Slightly distressed to be agreeing this much with BONES, but he's right about a lot here

Praise Allah, Jesus, and Buddha I didn't get picked for the jury. It was an interstate drug trafficking case with a defendant that looked like a guy who would put a severed horse head in your bed if you voted to convict him so I dodged a bullet and possibly an ice pick to the base of my skull.

Oof, glad you avoided that stress!

For someone to say that adding a feature makes it harder for them to back engineer a preset instead of them learning how to make their own tells us all we need to know. If I can make presets, anyone can.

How do you propose that people learn to program synths? Because what really advanced my synth skills was spending time with my Novation X-Station and *devouring* those patches to understand what parameters were most impactful for which sounds. Ground up fundamental study is useful, of course. But at music school one doesn't only learn theory but also analyzes good compositions to understand how it applies.

It's also not quite correct to describe INIT as a blank canvas; while some sections are disabled, others are usually enabled and have default parameter values. It is more like a blank page with some construction lines marked out, and your tools neatly arranged. Typically this is a single active oscillator in polyphonic mode without unison, a low pass filter, and amp/filter EGs.

I don't really do genre stuff, but it is quite reasonable that people would use another starting point if they want to head in a particular direction.

[concealed identity]

I don't know what it is about Spire...I also dislike synths that hide things in tabs and menus, but for some reason the Spire UI just works for me. I love how synths like Serum or Pigments show modulation destinations and other things so easily and wish Spire also did that, but in general I can program and tweak things so quickly in Spire. It's like the one tabbed synth that feels intuitive to me, but I can't explain why.

[vurt]

imagine not knowing how to get out of jury duty.

[Scrubbing Monkeys]

Bummer I couldnt get it to keep the presets nestled in there own folder. They just got thrown in with the rest in the user dir.

If you create a new folder and make sure it is selected before you import, the presets should go into it.

Oooo cool. Ill try that

[Dencheg]

I wish it was possible to download a separate build with the "AI" cut out entirely (or replaced with a randomizer)