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Crystal

Semi-Modular Synth Plugin by Green Oak
MyKVRFAVORITE516WANT148

Crystal has an average user rating of 4.42 from 26 reviews

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User Reviews by KVR Members for Crystal

Crystal

Reviewed By bluedad [all]
September 27th, 2003
Version reviewed: 98se on Windows

I know this looks insane, giving such a high rating, but since crystals' debut, I have used it more than any other synth.
The gui looks daunting on first look, but after spending time with it (and you do have to spend time with it) everything IS rather logical (and it is a modular by the way!)
What does it sound like? you ask..well it bleeps, gurgles and blurps, thick bass, squelchy leads and nicely padded pads.
But is there more? Yes! You can add motion like crazy to your sounds..wave sequencing, arp the envelopes, draw the envelopes, modulate anything and everything on the page!
So, how did I learn all this? I did something uncharacteristic of me and read the manual - it's there on the crystal web site. It's worth the read, and necessary to understand how it works. But it is clear and concise. Tutorials are available as well. Also, with the yahoo news group there is a direct line to the author. Questions are always answered quickly, usually by Glen, but sometimes
the more knowledgable users chime in. So customer support, while I've never needed it, I have witnessed it in action.
Crystal comes with quite a number of presets, which kept me content for a year. then tim conrardy came up with two new sets which set a new standard and inspired me to tweak and learn this synth even more.
Crystal is pretty heavy on the cpu, but when you're modulating everything in sight and throwing the built in fx on, that's to be expected. Besides, that seems to be the trend with many of the newer synths coming out these days. Stability is a non issue, it's never crashed on me, even in Orion it's stable.
It's amazing that Glen has chosen to give us this synth, as I know many would gladly pay for it.
This is one synth that deserves a high rating.
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Comments & Discussion for Green Oak Crystal

Discussion
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THIS POST HAS BEEN REMOVED

Mmmr
Mmmr
27 August 2021 at 9:32am

Can't import Crystal's effects banks or contact the developer (Grrr at Facebook).

Hi. Bit of a story. Back in the day, I got Crystal from a ComputerMusic CD and messed around with it a bit. Time has moved on and last year sometime I bought Jbridge to use a different VST. Recently, I went through the old discs from ComputerMusic and started bridging the old 32-bit plugins (God this was fun). I made a project in Ableton Live yesterday where a spreadsheet I have that lists all installed VSTs and VSTis throws up random plugins for me to use in whatever project I'm working in. It threw up the bridged version of Crystal. I was totally confused on how to use it (as it's been a lot of years since I did use it) but got it working. After the project was finished, mixed and exported I thought I'd see if there were any tutorials. There were so I spent some time last night watching videos. It then occurred to me that there may be a current version. And, Hey Presto, there was. I downloaded and installed this and it seems to work fine apart from one thing. From the Greenoaks website for Crystal there are a load of banks to download and so, download them I did. I followed the instructions on the site to install them but they appear to be uninstallable. I've googled this and it seems to be something to do with Windows 10 security features (I'm not a hundred percent sure though). Anyway, I thought "Hey, I'll contact the developers and tell them about this". The only contact is via Facebook. As an old man of 53 I seriously don't ever want a Facebook account. I've had friends promote it to me on so many occasions not realizing that all the points they're making about how good it is are all the points that make me NEVER to want to have it. So, as a last resort, I thought I'd post on here and see if anyone has any ideas about working around the problem of importing the preset banks as the drop in the application doesn't work at all.

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