BT mentioned that Camel Audio’s Alchemy was his favorite soft synth–I went up to their site and they have a lot of sound libraries you can add on–you get to choose one for free when you buy the plugin.
In fact, the marketing on the site has a quote from Danny Elfman that he uses some of Camel’s other plugins with Alchemy (like CamelSpace - which looks like a gated, evolving sequencer)…
I’ve got the Alchemy PLayer from a special offer a few months ago now and even this sounds fantastic. If I had the money I’d definitely upgrade. Have a look on the Camel Audio website - it might still be up. It was the ‘Planet Earth’ promotion.
It is a good synth. It’s not as easy as others to just dive in and start making your own patches with, but it can do loads of different stuff and is really flexible. So as long as you take some time to read thru the manual and spend a couple of days getting to grips with it (something I still havn’t really done yet lol) I’m sure you will find something useful in there. Having said it’s difficult to use, there are loads of presets and each preset has a performance view which makes it really easy to tweak presets, which is how I’ve been using it mostly (the performance view is the screen you get with alchemy player)
In terms of CamelPhat and CamelSpace, I don’t use Space much, just because I find it easier to use the envelopes in ableton to make gating effects, altho the soft saturation distortion on it sounds really nice to me, so I only really use it for that. I use Phat all the time tho, it’s sort of become a standard thing on every channel in ableton just because I like the filter it has on there so I tend to use that instead of abletons auto-filters. And it’s nice to have it there so i can quickly try out distortions, different filters and stuff very quickly in one box, and because I’ve developed a habit for using the LFO on the master volume to create a fake sidechain compression effect, which I just find much quicker than setting up a compressor to do it.
Cool, thanks for the advice. I did go to the site and checked out their special–you get one of their preset bundles for free when you buy it (though you can’t choose any of the presets). I believe “Planet Earth” was on the list but three other ones I liked weren’t (one that was sampled from the the Cameleon 5000, one based on the Virus synth, and one created by Himalaya).
I downloaded the demo but there were no patches in it, so it was hard to get an idea of how good it is for tweaking stuff. I can see your point that it takes some leaning to get it to do backflips 
Ok, I figured out how to install everything after reading a FAQ on Camel Audio’s site. I have to say, OMG, this is a great sounding synth–and compared to DCAM Fusor the CPU usage in my version of Ableton 8 is much lower 30% vs. 70%.
I love that I can bring my own samples into it and apply multiple modulations to them. Btw, I found several helpful tuts on YouTube from Camel.
If you like that, you should seriously check out Razor for Reaktor. ITS AMAZING, and would smoke Alchemy at making bass.
Thanks! 
I’ll definitely check it out on your recommend.