recently come across a bita money and am gunna be buying me 1st hardware synth & have no idea what to look into
i love me tech trance and trance.
any ideas where i should throw me money much appreciated
stretch
donstretchen,
If I came into some cash the first hardware synth I’d bag would be an Access Virus Ti
I’ve listened to some of your good work in the tunes, mixes and podcasts and can hear your style would benifit from a Virus.
I know its a bit pricey but you get a mighty fine synth suitable for a lot of dance oriented genres.
Oh and one good thing about a Virus is it’ll hold its price on the second hand market very well.
Good luck man.
I’m a fan of the virus sound too. I also look the moog synths
If i was to go for a synth armed for trance then it would be Virus C or TI maybe worth looking at the Roland JP8080, Maybe SuperNova 2, Nordlead 2 or 3
I dont care for the Virus. I’m a big fan of Moog and I’ve come to really love the sound of the Nord stuff!
The Virus does have a reasonably nice sound to it but i do think it’s highly over rated and carry’s a huge price tag for something that is essentially software in a box with knobs and wooden ends.
if you’re not much of a programmer then i really think the virus is going to be a disappointing buy, it’s great in the right hands but very mediocre and the hands of a non programmer. i know it comes with 1000’s of patches that sound fantastic, in many case’s though the patches are too big to use in the average production and need to be tamed quite a lot.
but saying all that if i had £2k to throw away i would still have one
id buy a few soft synths and a nice controller.
Cheers for the advice guys much appreciated
in reply to phil why do u suggest against a hardware synth? & what would be some high quality plugins to spend my money on??
cheers StrEtch
[quote]donstretchen (10/24/2009)[hr]Cheers for the advice guys much appreciated
in reply to phil why do u suggest against a hardware synth? & whatwould be some high quality plugins to spend my money on??
cheers StrEtch [/quote]
the main reason i would say are that no one will be able to tell the difference between the sounds created with a softsynth in comparison to hardware once the track has been mixdown and secondly software synths are so much easier to live with.
a good control surface and software synth will still give you that hands on feel.
softsynths i would recommend would be
D.cam
Minimoog V
Sylenth
V-Station (still a phat sounding synth)
Helix
Zebra 2
Circle
Massive
Vanguard (great synth if you spend a lot of time with it)
Genesis (Think this one is free now on pc)
Agreed Jon, in a lot of cases no one would be able to tell the difference aftertweaking and mixdown but that requires a bit of a leap of faith.
I mean str8 out of the box the virus ti for example already sounds the dogs bollocks (imo) So you can spend more time focusing on the arrangement stage.
.
Your list is pretty respectable too.
I am glad you mentioned Vstation coz it really is a very good softsynth but for some reason its often overlooked. Maybe its the default presets? but the expansion stuff I’ve heard is up there with the best of them particulary for trance.
Last time I looked it was selling for less than 40 squid …real bargain.!!!
Krome i get little digs about this from some of my producer friends about loving V-station sooo much but i’ve been using it since i started using VST and imo its still one of the best synths around for creating some sounds. i know that there are some major players that use this synth on almost all of the productions.
you can get some great sounds from it and at its current price under £40 its a no brainer imo.
i would also like to add as well that i’ve had quite a few hardware synths including 2 viruses two nords plus a few others and side by side i couldn’t tell the difference.
in fact i sold my nord lead 2 and got Discovery because the were that close
my virus rack went after getting to know v-station and realizing that most of the sounds from the v-station completely owned the virus.
and my virus C went after i got into programming the ES2 in logic i found those had a very similar sound (waiting for gear sluts to beat me down on this lol)
I would add the Nexus to the soft synth list. Especially if you don’t have much time to fool around with it. The Analog and Stratosphere are my favorite expansion packs.
[quote]impulse714 (10/25/2009)[hr]I would add the Nexus to the soft synth list. Especially if you don’t have much time to fool around with it. The Analog and Stratosphere are my favorite expansion packs.[/quote]
Know thats something i would totally disagree with, Nexus sounds good but thats it everything else about it is not worth having especially at that price. Nexus Complete rolls in at £1.669.99 not the most clever purchase imo
If your using ableton8, don’t overlook what comes on board neither.
I’ve been finding tons of leads, pads, and basses used in pro productions right inside my instrument rack.
The lead line in my new track up on the board is made with Tension for example.
i have ableton suite and there is a ton of presets to go through ive used them on the majority of my songs
thanx for all the advice guys
& after all your advice to buy soft synths i bought a virus ti 
;)
Congrats none-the-less! After ya had a chance to play around with it, post up a review and let us know what you think about it.
Hi Don
How have you got on with the virus? I am also thinking of buying a hardware synth and have been looking at the DSI Prophet 08 and Virus TI2 Polar Synth.
Would be keen to hear how you have got on with yours.
Cheers
Congrats dude 