If you could have only one synth, what would you choose?

[whyterabbyt]

The honor of the last word. And stuff. Otherwise, you'll obviously never stop.

Oh the f**king irony.

[chk071]

Really, I gotta give you one thing, I haven't laughed that hard about what someone wrote here for a very long time.

[whyterabbyt]

Really, I gotta give you one thing, I haven't laughed that hard about what someone wrote here for a very long time.

Oh the f**king irony.

[gaggle of hermits]

No, you've omitted the sentence with "strive to appear continous", by which I meant the theorem. It's right there, justr read it.

how does software (or indeed hardware) strive to do anything? does it have agency?

however, even if we accept this is a possibility for software, i fear you have undermined your own argument, which has already folded in on itself at least once. because all sound generators with the possible exception of insert piz here's venerable Mr Alias (which as the name implies didn't have much truck with attempts to make things seem continuous) do exactly this.

you might want to acquaint yourself with the concept of interpolation which synths (aside from Mr Alias, possibly) do. they use techniques like mipmapping to reduce overly high-frequency elements and will map a model of the sound, defined using discretised values into an output of arbitrary sample rate. not only that, the reconstruction filter on the final dac output will enhance that continuity.

now, i know what your're thinking: what about this mythical synth engine that uses splines to define a waveform. yeah about that. remember the bit about mipmapping? at some point in the signal chain, the y-value of the spline at some sample x will be, ahem, sampled, and discretised whereupon it goes into an interpolation algorithm of some kind to map it to the target sample stream that is finally fed to the dac. even if you were magically able to convert the continuous spline to some digital output you have the issue in a digital synth of any sharp turns in that spline causing aliasing, so you still need some process analogous to mipmapping to reduce the slew. so no matter how much that spline "strives" to be heard, it can't without making the synth sound like ass. so, congratulations, you've invented a crap-sounding synth in order to avoid sampled wavetables. good job.

so, i'm afraid you're back to square one: either synths are in the set that include wavetables or the only synths allowed in your definition, no matter how much they might strive to do anything, are full-hardware analogue circuits.

oh, if you want to get onto modelled synths like diva, they use numeric models, so will generate, again, a discretised stream of samples before those are converted at the dac. again, all that happens is that the sampling stage moves around. it doesn't get removed.

[zerocrossing]

I think you can draw the line between synth and sampler based on if the plugin/device has inherent oscillators/operators/waveforms, etc. A sampler requires you to load a sample/waveform to function. A ROMpler is kind of a mixed bag since some of them also have waveforms/wavetables.

Decent starting point for a line, but Im not sure some people would start calling Kontakt a synth if eg NI baked some single-cycle wavetables into it as 'inherent.'

Which is the case of TAL Sampler, BTW. So, according to the current "definition", TAL Sampler is actually a synth

And it even has filters, envelopes and LFOs... which any of the "big three" also have. Go figure.

Oh, and both Falcon and HALion have oscillators too, which blurs the picture even more. I suppose these cannot be called samplers either.

One of the things I like to do with TAL Sampler is to load a wavetable and create a small loop area and modulate the loop points. It’s my compromise for Ensoniq Transwave style wavetable synthesis. How actually different is that than a wavetable synthesizer? The results sure aren’t different. Not on some core level.

So I have two points. If the results of your instruments engine produce something that’s indistinguishable from something that’s considered a synthesizer, does the actual technology type mean anything? I mean, outside forums like this where we like to pick apart things down to a quark level. By that I mean, if you want to talk about what Massive X is doing vs. TAL Sampler being used as I described it, sure, but deciding someone’s favorite synth can’t use digital waveform memory as an oscillator seems petty at best.

My second point is, this whole thread is a hypothetical exercise that produces nothing really useful, other than wasting some time. I’d be surprised if anyone has a single synth in their plugin folder. Even someone who’s never purchased a plugin surely must have at least a handful of freebies.

If you can call PadShopPro or Quanta “granular synthesizers,” surely Kontakt and TAL can be called synthesizers. They clearly go farther than just simply playing back a sample through filters and effects.

[syntonica]

As long as we are playing the semantic game, ALL VSTis are "samplers" as they playback discrete "samples", whether they are mathematically generated as needed or read and/or interpolated from a precalculated table. The samples are then fed through a DAC to produce a continuous electrical signal, i.e. waveform.

Oh, wait! that describes almost every frigging FM, rompler, sampler, PM hardware keyboard ever made. No, wait--not "alomst" but EVERY.

Checkmate.

Oh, and Kontakt is still a lame choice...

[cthonophonic]

Oh hey, so I looked in the dictionary and it says that a synthesizer is "An electronic instrument, often played with a keyboard, that people get mad about for no reason."

QED: they're all synthesizers!

[Dencheg]

No, you've omitted the sentence with "strive to appear continous", by which I meant the theorem. It's right there, justr read it.

how does software (or indeed hardware) strive to do anything? does it have agency?

however, even if we accept this is a possibility for software, i fear you have undermined your own argument, which has already folded in on itself at least once. because all sound generators with the possible exception of insert piz here's venerable Mr Alias (which as the name implies didn't have much truck with attempts to make things seem continuous) do exactly this.

you might want to acquaint yourself with the concept of interpolation which synths (aside from Mr Alias, possibly) do. they use techniques like mipmapping to reduce overly high-frequency elements and will map a model of the sound, defined using discretised values into an output of arbitrary sample rate. not only that, the reconstruction filter on the final dac output will enhance that continuity.

now, i know what your're thinking: what about this mythical synth engine that uses splines to define a waveform. yeah about that. remember the bit about mipmapping? at some point in the signal chain, the y-value of the spline at some sample x will be, ahem, sampled, and discretised whereupon it goes into an interpolation algorithm of some kind to map it to the target sample stream that is finally fed to the dac. even if you were magically able to convert the continuous spline to some digital output you have the issue in a digital synth of any sharp turns in that spline causing aliasing, so you still need some process analogous to mipmapping to reduce the slew. so no matter how much that spline "strives" to be heard, it can't without making the synth sound like ass. so, congratulations, you've invented a crap-sounding synth in order to avoid sampled wavetables. good job.

so, i'm afraid you're back to square one: either synths are in the set that include wavetables or the only synths allowed in your definition, no matter how much they might strive to do anything, are full-hardware analogue circuits.

oh, if you want to get onto modelled synths like diva, they use numeric models, so will generate, again, a discretised stream of samples before those are converted at the dac. again, all that happens is that the sampling stage moves around. it doesn't get removed.

So from this long and very smart text I took that you've actually got a glimpse of understanding about the difference between a very short generated one-cycle waveform and prerecorded not very short sound (even though they both are effectively "samples" when they sound). Good for you, way to go!

[Uncle E]

So, is Kontakt a synth?

If you wouldn't call it a synth, which term would you use to describe what it does?

Kontakt was born as a synth (when it was Generator).
When Generator split into Reaktor and Kontakt (I think also one other thing), Kontakt became strictly a sample player.
As of Version 6, Kontakt became a synth again.

We pretty much all agree that Falcon and Halion are synths. To me, as of Version 6, Kontakt fits into the same category.

If Spectrasonics hadn't renamed Atmosphere to Omnisphere when they added synthesis capabilities, I wonder if we'd be having a similar discussion.

[HAL76]

Same here as at work. I always say it again: it´s not that important how you call things. It´s about what you do with them - and one would be a fool to claim that a sampler covers most of the ground a synth does these days plus a lot of special timbes that no synth can ever generate without samples.

What would Absynth be without samples... not much more tha a Serum without wavetables. And a big part of them are experimental cuts from what ever kind of samples.

[Uncle E]

one would be a fool to claim that a sampler covers most of the ground a synth does these days plus a lot of special timbes that no synth can ever generate without samples.

But what ground does DCO-106, Model 84, and U-NO-LX cover that Klassik-106 doesn't cover?

[LFO8]

Jesus wept... smh

[gaggle of hermits]

one would be a fool to claim that a sampler covers most of the ground a synth does these days plus a lot of special timbes that no synth can ever generate without samples.

But what ground does DCO-106, Model 84, and U-NO-LX cover that Klassik-106 doesn't cover?

why that as an example? A Juno emulation seems a bizarre choice anywhere on a “one synth only” thread in the first place.

there’s a bunch of wave-modulation functions, particularly PM and FM that you wouldn’t expect a sampler to have (though something like falcon does have modules for FM). once you get to more exotic synths like waverazor or wiggle, I don’t think there’s anything typically classed as a sampler that handles what they do. whether you want that kind of wave manipulation ofc is up to you.

[chk071]

nevermind

[Uncle E]

why that as an example? A Juno emulation seems a bizarre choice anywhere on a “one synth only” thread in the first place.

Because Klassik-106 is the only Kontakt wavetable recreation of a synth I know of.

there’s a bunch of wave-modulation functions, particularly PM and FM that you wouldn’t expect a sampler to have (though something like falcon does have modules for FM). once you get to more exotic synths like waverazor or wiggle, I don’t think there’s anything typically classed as a sampler that handles what they do. whether you want that kind of wave manipulation ofc is up to you.

Few analog-style synths, either hardware and software, have those features. If we're staying on topic and someone wants those kinds of sounds, you have a perfect point, but we've veered completely OT now and my answer pertains to the question "Is Kontakt a synth?"