What is it about Sylenth1 ?

[Russell Grand]

pervert.

[Russell Grand]

That's something I really dislike about Sylenth1's filter as well. I also think there are filters with a more pleasing character. The sound of the raw oscillators, and the supersaw I vastly prefer to Dune's, though. And I also think all of Dune 2's filters sound a bit harsh and cold.

Read that somewhere, did you? DUNE has something like 30 different filters to choose from and even the worst of those are better than anything S1 has to offer. If you can't hear that, you probably don't know what you're doing.

Lol, I didn't have to read it anywhere to know that I agree with chk071. In fact I'll take it even further: I think DUNE is an extremely overrated synth; it's one of the most difficult to get to sit in the mix. It tends to overpower everything else I try to put with it; all of the Synapse synths are the same. Go ahead and attack me over my opinion, tell me that I don't know what I'm doing, etc etc etc. I could use a good laugh this morning.

I am the DUNE Russel.. how dare you try to sit me IN the mix... I sit ON the mix.. I am the dominant synth..
Like a domatrix, I sit on you and slather you in my (hmmm... imagination ) you obey my sounds... mere musician/producer!
Sit me IN the mix>>> pfffffff.
Good day... having a coffee?

Yikes, that was...graphic.
But your post gave me a laugh so thank you!
And yes, I've already had 2 coffees this morning and I'm still half asleep...

[recursive one]

I think DUNE is an extremely overrated synth; it's one of the most difficult to get to sit in the mix. It tends to overpower everything else I try to put with it

Sitting in a mix depends on many factors, the most improtant one being the mix itself. As far as Dune goes though, the factory presets are overloaded with layers and drenched in FX, so yes, there is hardly any space left for anything else when you put it into yoour tracks. But once you strip it all down, the base sound is what some would describe as soft and some would describe as weak. It somehow lacks the raw power some other synths may have.

IMO Sylenth is totally the opposite, the FX are quite poor (though they can sometimes nicely integrate into the sound) but teh naked sound stands on its own without any FX.

Anyway, both have their place. I find Dune's FM oscillator souning unique and pretty good, combined with its filters it can make some really interesting textures. Also it can make some cool 303-ish acid sequences, but overall it's not my first choice synth of choice for VA and wavetable stuff

[Teksonik]

tell me that I don't know what I'm doing

Ok you don't know what you're doing.

Dune sits perfectly well in my mixes right alongside Sylenth and Hive and Avenger and Ana 2 and Z3ta+2 and so on and so forth.

[Teksonik]

But seriously we all have our own personal preferences. Our music is different our tastes are different.

Some people love the Fender Stratocaster but I think they are best used for firewood. Personal preference but if someone makes the ridiculous statement that a Stratocaster can't be used in Heavy Metal or Hard Rock then I'll just point them to Mick Mars of Mötley Crüe. There is opinion and there is fact.

So many times people confuse "It Can't" with "I can't".........

[parricide]

But seriously we all have our own personal preferences. Our music is different our tastes are different.

Some people love the Fender Stratocaster but I think they are best used for firewood. Personal preference but if someone makes the ridiculous statement that a Stratocaster can't be used in Heavy Metal or Hard Rock then I'll just point them to Mick Mars of Mötley Crüe. There is opinion and there is fact.

So many times people confuse "It Can't" with "I can't".........

/thread

its okay for people to like different synths. i dont know why some people in this thread are getting so upset that people disagree with them when it is just a matter of taste.
personally i find sylenth1 limited, but others might get everything they need from it. its good that all our opinions vary, otherwise we would all be making the same music

[wagtunes]

But seriously we all have our own personal preferences. Our music is different our tastes are different.

Some people love the Fender Stratocaster but I think they are best used for firewood. Personal preference but if someone makes the ridiculous statement that a Stratocaster can't be used in Heavy Metal or Hard Rock then I'll just point them to Mick Mars of Mötley Crüe. There is opinion and there is fact.

So many time people confuse "It Can't" with "I can't".........

Yeah, I've been down this road with this place more times than I can count. What I've been told is, it gets tiresome having to start each sentence with "In my opinion" so people don't do it. Still, the tone that comes across is one of "My way is right and you're all a bunch of idiots." But I've come to expect that from this place so I've finally gotten to the point where I just tune it out.

In fact, I'm making a New Year's resolution that I'm done with the drama in this place altogether. 2019 is going to be a very different year for me around KVR. I bought one synth in 2018 and I'll probably buy zero synths in 2019. I have everything I need to make music and it's time I did more of that and less arguing around here.

The only synths I can't understand people using are synths that don't work, period. Other than that, I can see a use for anything out there, even if I don't personally find the synth useful.

Sylenth1 is more than capable of making sound suitable for making music. So is Dune 2. So is anything else. If we all had the same tastes everything we did would sound the same. How boring would that be?

Anyway, I'm enjoying my popcorn here and all the opinions thrown around as facts.

After all, it is good entertainment.

[fluffy_little_something]

Tek admitted when he said he thought the order in my audio was the other way round).

If by Tek you mean me I don't remember hearing any audio from you let alone "admitting" your audio "was the other way around" whatever that means.

You are late to the party. As you should have read, it has long been clarified by Examigan, who I confused you with...

Oh, sorry, mea culpa

[fluffy_little_something]

I think DUNE is an extremely overrated synth; it's one of the most difficult to get to sit in the mix. It tends to overpower everything else I try to put with it

Sitting in a mix depends on many factors, the most improtant one being the mix itself. As far as Dune goes though, the factory presets are overloaded with layers and drenched in FX, so yes, there is hardly any space left for anything else when you put it into yoour tracks. But once you strip it all down, the base sound is what some would describe as soft and some would describe as weak. It somehow lacks the raw power some other synths may have.

IMO Sylenth is totally the opposite, the FX are quite poor (though they can sometimes nicely integrate into the sound) but teh naked sound stands on its own without any FX.

Anyway, both have their place. I find Dune's FM oscillator souning unique and pretty good, combined with its filters it can make some really interesting textures. Also it can make some cool 303-ish acid sequences, but overall it's not my first choice synth of choice for VA and wavetable stuff

That is also my perception of its sound.
I am not impressed by the reverb, but I have come to change my expectations. A reverb built into a synth is not meant for mixing the whole track or song even, but merely for sound design. So I do use the reverb for adding a little body to the sound, but I always turn the damp to max so that the metallic tail is not audible, even though I keep tails very short, anyway.
The other effects are pretty good actually, at least in my opinion. The delay is fine, the distortion is fine (if used sparsely, similar to the reverb), the phaser is fine (also when used as an eq), the chorus is fine, the EQ is fine (albeit it a bit basic, a third band in between would be nice), and the compressor is fine as well.

A couple of days ago I had the SynthMaster One demo on my computer and was kind of shocked about how poor the chorus sounds, especially for a synth that is just one year old or so.
Similar thing with Spire, it has several choruses, but none sounds right to me, they have that EDM touch to them, not the lush old-skool Juno sound like Sylenth1's.

[fluffy_little_something]

its ok, but the filter doesnt have that pleasing character that tickles the ear to orgasm as chikn71 mentioned

I have not heard that from any synth so far. But yes, some synths do sound more impressive or pleasant than others...

[fluffy_little_something]

That's not how it works. In fact, in the example you made, I thought they both sounded awful, so being able to recreate something awful doesn't mean anything. If you want something to recreate, I'll find a really good DUNE or Thorn preset for you, something within the limited capabilities of S1, and we'll see how you go. In fact, I'll make it easy and find a nice Vacuum Pro sound, which is a synth I think is much more in line with what S1 is/does (both are two part, two oscillator synths).

Usability is excellent. You don't have to click and drag hardly anything or anywhere, the mouse over and mouse wheel are your best friends, even with on-off switches

Not very discoverable, which is poor GUI design. Orion does this for changing patterns and it's actually a nightmare because you do it unintentionally. That wouldn't happen here but I still tend to keep away from the scroll wheel when I'm working. But that's my problem, I actually like the click/drag thing better, it's more intuitive and works well enough. It was the inconsistency I was pointing out.

Resizing is as easy as it gets, just grab the lower right corner and set it to any size you want

I tried that, it didn't seem to want to work. It was killing my eyes after half-an-hour on my 12" screen so I was kind of desperate but couldn't do anything. Again, probably my fault but Arcade and others work in Orion.

The amp envelopes are part of the layers, thus they are at the top. The mod envelopes can be freely assigned, just like the LFO's, thus they are next to them further down.

I understand why it is the way it is, but understanding doesn't make it suddenly more usable.

Unlike you, I like the sound most with just 1 or 2 waves per oscillator, and set almost to mono.

When I did that it just sounded like the most bog-standard of SynthEdit set-ups - usable, nothing more. If you compare it to something like Wasp in Orion, it is actually extremely weak. I'll give you a Wasp patch to try and match (but you'll have to do it from an mp3, so I'll give you a screen-shot of the settings).

The resonance behavior was similar on hardware synths if I am not mistaken.

On ladder filters, yes, which is why I never understood why everyone loved the MiniMoog. I always liked Korg's filters myself and my ARP Axxe's filter was quite impressive, too.

While some people complain about that double cutoff system, I find it more flexible than the usual one. And in combination with two mod slots per filter env, you can go beyond what most synths can do, very snappy and punchy.

That's just rubbish because you need both slots just to get what you can from one slot in any other synth. And other synths with a mod matrix give you way more slots than S1, so you don't run out as quickly. And properly usable synths, like Thorn, only use the matrix as an extra, they also provide dedicated controls in the relevant sections so you don't have to jump all over the place.

You want to be spoon-fed as you are unwilling to familiarize yourself with the way Sylenth1 works. So you expect everything to work like on every other synth. And when it doesn't, you think it's wrong.

I'm just comparing it to other experiences with synths that are far more unfamiliar and strange, yet somehow easier to work with. I keep banging on about Thorn, because it's something I only bought last week, but if I think back to how easily I got my head around TRK-01, which is a completely weird, off the wall experience, or Substance, and compare it with all these little annoying quirks I had to work through last night, it's chalk and cheese. OK, it's not as bad as DUNE or Massive but neither is it in any way easy to work out. Maybe that's because it looks like it should be easy to use so the bumps are unexpected.

Also, ask yourself whether your complaint has any musical relevance.

I'm not doing music at the moment, I'm doing production and it is all extremely relevant to production. That said, buying Thorn last week has kind of thrown me back into music because every time I load it up, I end up writing a new riff or sequence or something that I have to force myself to put aside so I can get back to work.

BTW, don't feel under any pressure/duress to recreate that stuff, or to post it if you do. I am providing it purely for your own edification and I'm not going to call you out on it if you don't bother (because I don't know if I 'd bother if I was in your shoes). That said, I'll be very impressed if you can manage it, given the limited tool you'll be using and the fact I am not going to make it easy (because what would be the fun in that?).

Just because you find a sound awful does not mean it is awful. It is a funky synth brass sound. Maybe you are simply not into the kind of music such sounds are used in.

Also, when you say, Dune sounds better, that is your preception. And as you might have noticed from many posts, there are people who just don't agree with you. You don't own the truth, nobody does. A sound detail that you find positive someone else might find negative, and vice versa.
Just like with music as a whole. Some people love EDM, while it makes me vomit.

There is no inconsistency. It amkes sense to have the drop down menu for the waveforms as not everybody likes to cycle through half a dozen or more waveforms with the mouse wheel. The user interface was made by humans for humans.

Without resizing I would not use Sylenth1, either, it would be too small. But if it does not work in your case, tell Lennard in his sub-forum and he will fix it. But frankly, if it did not work properly, lots of people would already have mentioned it and there would have been a fix.

I started out with SynthEdit synths, and I surely hear a difference between SE oscillators/filters and Sylenth1's.

Since with high resonance there can be quite a powerful low-frequency bump at low cutoff frequencies, I don't mind the resonance behavior on Sylenth1. It is a kind of protection for my speakers.
Nor do I agree that the sound falls apart with high resonance.

I surely don't need two env mod slots for cutoff. Again, that is why asked about the musicality. I rarely come across a situation where one slot is not enough. I usually don't make sounds that include both a completely closed and a completely open filter.

Where are those sound challenges you mentioned?! And yes, include a screenshot of the GUI for each sound because I don't feel like experimenting for hours

[Teksonik]

i dont know why some people in this thread are getting so upset that people disagree with them when it is just a matter of taste.....its good that all our opinions vary, otherwise we would all be making the same music

I don't get upset when people express their opinions it's when they spread disinformation about a synth due to their own lack of experience or inabilities that upsets me.

Like the analogy I posted if someone says you can't make Metal with a Strat it's quite obvious they are wrong. There is proof that you can....again fact vs opinion.

Like I said "it can't" is a whole lot different than "I can't".....

[Teksonik]

You are late to the party. As you should have read, it has long been clarified by Examigan, who I confused you with...

Oh I read it and also saw the fact that you didn't correct your error. Perhaps be a bit more careful when posting in the future.

[recursive one]

Like the analogy I posted if someone says you can't make Metal with a Strat it's quite obvious they are wrong. There is proof that you can....again fact vs opinion.

Well, some people made metal with Ural guitars made in Soviet Union



which are officially the worst guitars ever. You can arguably make anything with anything if you have enough patience.

[Teksonik]

The thing I've never understood is if someone doesn't like a particular synth then why bother even reading let alone replying to threads about that synth ?

If you don't like Sylenth 1 why are you here ? Like it ? Then buy it. Don't like it ? Then pass on it and move on. It's not like the sound of Sylenth is going to drastically change in the future if at all....

Some people just like to constantly bitch about a synth while others are happily using it to make music.

I wonder how many commercial releases Sylenth 1 has been on over the years ?