Now Hive is here, is it RIP Sylenth?

[chk071]

FWIW, i don't expect Hive to sound exactly like Sylenth1. Actually, it would be pretty disapointing, and also pretty unoriginal for me, if it would do so. It's just that there's many people who raise the question in the topic title, i've also watched a Youtube video with exactly the same topic. Well, as for the question asked in the topic title, i can't say it is so. Not really. But, as the architecture is very similar, and it's also been marketed as a "supersaw" synth, i don't think it should come as a surprise that there will be comparisons.

[layzer]

Simply because they don't know what it takes for a good supersaw.

[Urs]

About the UI: The UI itself is great, but we should have chosen a less futuristic design. It looks like a synth that tries very hard to be typecast. It's also not really easy on the eyes, yet offers too little contrast. When we started, I thought it should look like the cockpit of an expensive penis extension (even though I have no idea what the dashboard of a Lamborghini looks like), but that probably missed the point - it made Hive look more complex when in reality it was easier.

I think it needs to become more inviting. Less of the "illuminated sheen", more indirect light, softer and nicer colours. That will make it easier to use even if we don't change the number of parameters displayed.

If you do change it, can it be switchable between the old and new skins?

Yes, I'm sure we'll keep upgrading the current skins.

[Urs]

i don't think it should come as a surprise that there will be comparisons.

But, but... where are those comparisons? When did we ever get to *hear* what people say about the synths?

All comparisons I ever saw were Youtube videos that say "Yep, Hive can do that" about whatever Sylenth sound. Whenever there was audio, Hive was as good. Whenever there is no audio, Hive somehow lacks*.


*to be fair, it's also often the other way round

[recursive one]

Here is one of the comparisons for example

[aumordia]

In case my metaphor didn't give it away, I come at this primarily from the perspective of a lifelong guitarist (although I also developed some reasonably popular Linux music software back in the day, FWIW), so take the following cum grano salis, but:

I don't think the presets are the key to Sylenth1's success. Let me go back to guitar amp metaphors: a great amp makes it easy to get a good sound, and hard to get a bad sound, while still letting you sound like "you." Lesser amps can usually still get the job done, it just takes more work.

To me, Sylenth1 knocks that "great amp" criteria out of the park. Now, people might say that "Sylenth1 always sounds like Sylenth1," but that doesn't contradict being able to "sound like you." A distorted guitar sounds like a distorted guitar, after all, and yet, different guitarists usually sound different "enough." Likewise with Sylenth1.

Now, where the metaphor starts breaking down is that, in the guitar world, the solderer and the non-solderer are both buying the same amp. The difference is that, if you want to start swapping out resistors, it's going to take some work and expense, which is a natural barrier to tinkering. With softsynths, it's just a few mouse clicks. But that's a blessing and a curse. I've got a wife, kids, and a relatively demanding career -- producing is just a hobby -- and the temptation to mess around with synths all day can easily overwhelm actually getting any songs done. In the moment, A/B testing between "clean" and "dirty" mode in Hive is fun, but 4 hours of that rabbit hole later, I still don't have a finished track -- bummer. And that's what ultimately drove me to use Sylenth1.

Hive, Sylenth1, and a number of other synths all meet the "great amp" criteria, but the one thing that Sylenth1 has -- and I'm not sure how to phrase this -- is this "absence of rabbit holes." If you're a hobbyist producer with little time who still wants to use his own "from scratch" sounds, this is a huge, huge win. Combine that with low CPU usage and a reasonable pricepoint and the success isn't all that surprising.

Of course, I'm not conclusively proving my thesis here, and I really don't know for certain. It just seems like there are plenty of synths out there with huge swathes of excellent presets -- Omnisphere reigns supreme here, and of course U-he's stuff has thousands of great patches -- so it doesn't seem like much of a differentiator for Sylenth1.

Also, it wouldn't surprise me if Hive winds up being a Sylenth1 killer in certain areas of the professional world. For instance, I know lots of professional composers with deadlines to meet just use presets with a few tweaks; Hive might hit a unique sweet spot that makes it a good choice for the "Omnisphere without the samples" synth that I've heard some people clamoring for. Just a few thousand more presets to go!

Along those lines, enhancements to preset browsing, morphing, layering, etc might be very valuable additions to Hive. But now I'm talking about something that I wouldn't use myself, so again, cum grano salis. What I would buy is something that is ergonomically similar to Sylenth1 in the aforementioned ways -- easy to get good tones, hard to get bad ones, can still sound like "me," but doesn't come with rabbit holes -- that explores a very different sort of sonic landscape. I honestly don't know how one would go about doing that without producing another streamlined subtractive synthesizer (which would just be redundant to Sylenth1), but if anyone can figure this out, it would be the geniuses at U-he.

[chk071]

Here is one of the comparisons for example

Yep, this is the one i meant which i watched on Youtube. Seriously, that guy's close enough is not my close enough, that's for sure. Or rather his "killer" argument, which is none.

[Urs]

Let me go back to guitar amp metaphors: a great amp makes it easy to get a good sound, and hard to get a bad sound, while still letting you sound like "you." Lesser amps can usually still get the job done, it just takes more work.

My stance is - and there you're right about u-he having tinkerers in mind - that it's better to learn fewer tools with more options from the ground up than using many tools that do just one trick. The fewer-but-more-powerful-approach takes a little longer to learn for each tool, but then each single tool will do what other tools can only do in combination. The many-tools-approach means that you have a lot of overlap each with its own concept and design. In the end, with latter approach it takes even longer to learn everything and become proficient. It also takes longer to operate because you sometimes have to swap tools to see which gets the job done.

[Robmobius]

Here is one of the comparisons for example

Yep, this is the one i meant which i watched on Youtube. Seriously, that guy's close enough is not my close enough, that's for sure. Or rather his "killer" argument, which is none.

There's not a lot to go on... It's just one patch. But I do think HIVE sounds better (in the vid).

It's all pretty subjective tho' at the end of the day.

[chk071]

Yes. I'm also sure that Hive can do the analog thing better than Sylenth1. But, can it do the supersaw better? Trance plucks? Filter progressions on plucky sounds? I don't think so. I pretty much heard from the very first sound demo of it, that it rather has a metallic, harsh vibe to it (interestingly something which i also noticed on other u-he synths, Diva e.g. sounds more metallic than Monark). And got that impression confirmed when demoing it. Well, i'm not the one in a million expert on "that" sound, so maybe my opinion won't matter to you. But, frankly, Hive didn't have nearly as much of an impact as Spire among EDM artists (from what i can tell by artist endorsements, which get posted on this site: http://equipboard.com/, or on the artists Facebook pages, or Twitter). Fair enough if that wasn't the intended target audience. It's a u-he synth after all.

[Urs]

Here is one of the comparisons for example

Yep, this is the one i meant which i watched on Youtube. Seriously, that guy's close enough is not my close enough, that's for sure. Or rather his "killer" argument, which is none.

So, because one guy can't match both synths exactly enough for your taste, Hive can't do it?

The funny thing is, the guy remarkably has turned a metallic and mushy sounding Sylenth patch into a lush and cut-through sounding Hive sound. They certainly don't sound the same, but the Hive one IMHO sounds much better. I might be biased though.

[chk071]

Urs, i don't want to argue based on one single sound now. I'm wondering about what exactly we're arguing here anyway. You said yourself that Hive doesn't sound like Sylenth, so why argue that you CAN make Hive sound like Sylenth? Of course you might get there 99% with some sounds. With other sounds, not so. You know that yourself, being much more of a synth geek than i am. Believe me or not, when i say that i throgoughly demo'd Hive. And didn't quite like it for the "typical" Sylenth sounds. And, as i said, it doesn't seem to have quite the impact in the kind of music Sylenth is so popular for, unlike Spire. FWIW.

Again, i believe for analog emulation, it probably beats both of those. But it isn't a Sylenth killer, for me.

[sfxsound3]

I might be biased though.

+1

[aumordia]

My stance is - and there you're right about u-he having tinkerers in mind - that it's better to learn fewer tools with more options from the ground up than using many tools that do just one trick. The fewer-but-more-powerful-approach takes a little longer to learn for each tool, but then each single tool will do what other tools can only do in combination. The many-tools-approach means that you have a lot of overlap each with its own concept and design. In the end, with latter approach it takes even longer to learn everything and become proficient. It also takes longer to operate because you sometimes have to swap tools to see which gets the job done.

I actually agree with this philosophy, but I think it's possible to do that without introducing "rabbit holes" and still get 80% of the results (the rabbit holes all crop up in that last 20%). I look at the longevity of both Sylenth1 and the Marshall JCM800 as proof of that. But it's a very different sort of challenge.

Of course, the longevity of Zebra is proof that "tools for tinkerers" is also a very valuable market segment. It's just different from Sylenth1's target audience.

Really the tl;dr is that what truly sets Sylenth1 apart is this absence of rabbit holes while still offering great sound (and preventing bad sound) and good sonic flexibility.

This video with Tom Morello (the guitarist for Rage Against the Machine) is worth pondering:



For reference, that same guy uses his very barebones setup to make sounds like this:

[Urs]

I'm wondering about what exactly we're arguing here anyway. You said yourself that Hive doesn't sound like Sylenth, so why argue that you CAN make Hive sound like Sylenth?

It's not about same or different. It's about the attributes such as "metallic" and such which imply "worse" when one man's "metallic" is someone else's "in the face".

The thing about Supersaw sounds however is that they don't really lend themselves to objective comparisons. They bury objective differences in a swarm of detuned sawtooths. They are a category of sounds where two synthesizers easily get undistinguishable, if the feature is implemented the same way. And that IMHO is the case with Hive and Sylenth. With Supersaw sounds I think they sound close enough.