Sonik Synth

Dammit, it looks amateurish to rate solid 10/10 on a product, but there's no way around this. Sonic Synth is a magnificent VSTi. In fact, the only gripe I can come up with is the color of the SampleTank interface, but this is a Sonic Synth review, not a SampleTank review. Retina burn aside (it's REALLY bright), the GUI is easy to get around, and I never even needed to peek at the documentation. I was making music a few minutes after getting Sonic Synth out of the box.

The sound of this thing is just stunning. I trolled through patch after patch, and found nary a clinker. Favorites include the "Brain Damage" and "Lindsay Steelingham" guitar patches, as well as the breathtaking acoustic basses. Are they perfect sounds? Well, no, but neither are the sounds made by real players with real instruments. It's apparent that these sounds are designed by people who PLAY their instruments. Every patch I called up resulted in much extended jamming. That's the highest compliment, in my book. The attention to detail is staggering. The Mellotron voices have surface noise (on purpose) and you can FEEL the bow scraping the violin strings on the string patches.

There is a thorough manual to help you get the most out of the SampleTank engine, surpringly weighing in at 40 pages. That's pretty good for such a dead simple GUI.

Customer support? You're joking, right? I mean, Squids has displayed his dedication to his customers daily since I first visited KVR. Not to mention, he tells great stories an can play Genesis' "Rapids"!

Haven't seen an issue with stability. It's been rock-solid from the moment it was installed.

Is it worth the price? There's no question. I mean, it's got more content than a handful of hardware workstations, but costs a fraction of any one of them. The sound quality makes the most expensive hardware device seem shoddy by comparison, and puts most sample libraries to shame. Know anyone who has any use for my old soundfont discs?Read Review