Hive 2.1: new sonic territory

[Urs]

Too many presets... Howie, Viktor (TUC) and myself did the ground work on this one

Are these presets you are refering to Urs in the factory sounds of Hive 2.1?

Nope, none of the Matrix presets are in the 2.1 factory set. They do contain a few rejects from the Matrix project though, e.g. my obsessive Cellists did not end up in the movie.

The work for Matrix contains about 300 presets (including XY variations and minor edits). When the time comes, we'll post the whole backstory of this project.

Just glad they dropped the secrecy about the composers, even though somehow only Tom Tykwer made it onto the IMDB page yet. We mostly worked with Johnny Klimek while they were still doing layouts.

[surreal]

Ok cool!! Looking to hear tye rest of the presets. . Hope its not to pricey though

[Dirtgrain]

Well, I wouldn't expect 300 presets to be cheap.

[Urs]

I don't think all of these presets will end up in a themed soundset - e.g. some may just be slightly edited factory presets -, and because it won't require a "HiveJK+TT" or something, it won't be overly expensive.

[Urs]

I think, Hive has just somehow emerged to be something we're super happy with, and we had this opportunity to pitch it instead of Zebra2 and get deeply involved and hopefully gaining a nice boost of street cred for how good it has become.

[VitaminD]

I think, Hive has just somehow emerged to be something we're super happy with, and we had this opportunity to pitch it instead of Zebra2 and get deeply involved and hopefully gaining a nice boost of street cred for how good it has become.

I'm amazed how it has turned out. I remember suggesting to you the synth design originally as a competitor to certain synths, and it has gone beyond! Kudos to you and your team, Urs.

[Funkybot's Evil Twin]

Is it weird that I'm only interested in watching Matrix 4 now because Hive will feature prominently in it? Congrats Urs and everyone at U-he! I hope this helps sell a bazillion Hive licenses and the corresponding presets!

[Shiek927]

My gosh! congratulations, Urs and co! this will definitely be Hive's "The Dark Knight" moment and really help make it a household name

[MitchK1989]

If you want to continue the trend of "not filters" in the filter section a polyphonic distortion and/or sample rate reducer would be super fun.

[Bombadil]

I'm late to this thread. The spring was long and a trial. Anyways, thanks for the M1 native capability! I wish other developers, including the big concerns, were as consciencious in how it treats its customers.

[pdxindy]

With 2.1, Hive has become one of my favorite synths... I use it all the time now. It's nearly effortless to get sounds that really please my ears.

[SeeingInMidi]

Sorry if this has been asked but, will Msegs be implemented in a future update?

[Urs]

Sorry if this has been asked but, will Msegs be implemented in a future update?

Yeah, people had asked for them often. Our answer to that are the Shape Sequencers, which cover most use cases of MSEGs that we found - in a much faster workflow. While they don't offer as free sculpting of envelopes as MSEGs, they have an abundantly wider range of usefulness.

If we talk about future updates and options, here's a starting point: Currently the Shape Sequencers share a rather minimal selection of shapes. We're happy to add more in the future, if people come up with strong arguments for musically useful geometry.

[Shiek927]

I feel iffy about the idea of MSEG's in Hive tbh. It's not completely unheard of in a 'fixed' subtractive-synth given that Dune3 has them, but it feels like it might be leaning too much into Zebra2 territory and stretching what was supposed to be a simple synth. I don't want Hive to become Zebra-Lite and Hive2 might already be as feature rich as can be. Compared to Hive 1.0, It's practically bursting at the seams haha.

I think it might be better, rather than adding features, to focus on workflow-improvements or exploring the question of "how can we create new and interesting sounds with the current palette and without adding more stuff". The Shape Sequencers are great in that regard.

That's really the road Hive2 should go moving forward: not so much adding something just for the sake of expanding it's sonic palette which is already very wide, but more-so "how could I make achieving X easier without adding something new?". This could take the form of workflow improvements, streamlining in certain places, further CPU improvements, or simply more tutorials and guides to show what could be cleverly done with what's available.

It might be an unpopular opinion, but I think Hive has been taken as far as it reasonably could go given it's original mandate as a fast CPU-friendly Sylenth1-esque synth. I think it would be better to keep it at it's current feature-set and explore interesting places with it, rather than adding anything else .

[Urs]

Yes, more tutorials are definitely on our list!