Best all round soft synth?

[SamDi]

Then you are exactly the kind of person I am talking about. I add effects when the mix needs them and at no other time. If you are adding shit just because, then you are making work for yourself unnecessarily, which is just plain dumb.

For me giving a sound a "finish" via EQ is just my approach for sound design, because I regard control of frequency distribution as an essential part, to make a sound how I want it to be. I would also do it with Dune or Thorn or whatever sounds good in your ears. Might be that it is theoretically unneccesary, because you could do it in one flush in the mix. Nevertheless 2 different stages for me
1.) sounddesign to make a sound, how I intend it to be
2.) mixing to make it fit
Both justify the use of an EQ for me.

No, you just can't and if you think you can, then you don't understand what sound quality is in this context (or we are talking about different things entirely). Because I use Pigments a lot more than I use DUNE and it takes far more work to get it even close to sounding as good as DUNE does.
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I doubt you dislike DUNE's workflow more than I do, just as you probably don't like Pigments' workflow as much as I do, but they are separate issues. I love using Pigments and I hate using DUNE but, at the end of the day, DUNE always sounds great and Pigments never does, so you'll find DUNE all over our songs, you won't find Pigments anywhere. That's just the way it goes.

So you use Pigments a lot more than Dune, but at the end I won't find it in your songs? Sounds like you do some waste at that stage

[Evoider]

I know which is the best softsynth for me.
Your mileage may differ, in fact I am almost certain it will, which brings me to a poignant moment.
But I digress.

[BONES]

For me giving a sound a "finish" via EQ is just my approach for sound design, because I regard control of frequency distribution as an essential part, to make a sound how I want it to be.

Do you think this might be why synths have filters? I EQ vocals and sometimes I EQ drums but if I need more or less bottom or top end in a synth part, I'll fix it in the patch, with the filter(s), as often as I possibly can. Every now and then it might need something more targeted/specific but most of the time it doesn't. I am far more likely to replace the instrument with something else, better suited to what I'm trying to achieve, than I am to EQ it into place. Even just a few years ago, I always EQ'd the shit out of everything but since I stopped doing that, everything has started to work better and with a lot less effort.

1.) sounddesign to make a sound, how I intend it to be
2.) mixing to make it fit

I've never seen it as a series of separate processes. From the time I add a new instrument, everything I do with it is mixing, simply because everything you do affects the mix.

So you use Pigments a lot more than Dune, but at the end I won't find it in your songs? Sounds like you do some waste at that stage

You won't because it always ends up getting replaced with something that sounds better. But for the last couple of years, I have spent a helluva lot of time with Pigments and almost none with DUNE. My bandmate puts DUNE into pretty much everything he works on and it almost always seems to work well enough out of the box, so I don't really have to do much with it. OTOH, because I like working with Pigments, I'll spend hours trying to make it work before admitting defeat and putting something else in. So yeah, I have worked with it a lot but, despite that, it's never ended up in any final mixes so you'll never hear it in any of our songs. I finally worked it out a few months ago and I've stopped torturing myself by ignoring it now.

[werp]

I’d probably recommend VPS Avenger if I could only figure out how to make it go.
It sits on my hard drive taking up space and doing nothing.
I turn on my Pro 2, Polybrute, Hydrasynth and Iridium instead.

[Synthack]

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