virtual or soft synths pound for pound the best or is hard the way to go?

[diverse379]

Virtual synths are getting better and better the sounds are getting more realistic every month
and the amount of samples and are incredible

last but not least the price of the sounds is down right obsenely cheap

what am i talking about?

I am talking about virtual synths the sound generation comes form you computer and the software you buy
for example a exampl;e of a wordstation type product is reason this program combines sounds and sequencing inot one prpgram

are the sounds any good?
well yeah especially the horns and strings from the sample library
what about pianos
well i have heard two really great pianos the tascam ensemble has excellent horns and pianos
reason has pretty decent electric pianos

and I hear theat bosendorf has the best sampled piano period
tht includes hard keyboards as well,.

M-Audio sells a 88 weighted board as a controller for 367.00 (with your student discount)
and you can pick up reason or sibellius or any number of samples and loops
for 200.00 or less so I ask you what is pound for pound the best way to go?


in terms of price hand s down virtual is the way to go

For 1,000 dollars I can get the best pisnos horns and samples plus reason sequencing software
for a little more I can add protools or cubase or sonar cakewalk and have a recording studion
that will keep growing with every plug in


what about portability
haveing a motif or korg triton 88 weighs 76 pounds so carrying is a bit much for the physically weaker or older musicians
a fantom weighs less but it seems that if you want all the bells and whistles you are gong to be adding on weight

true once you put it in a bag you are good to go

the v synth or soft syhth you can use a lap top you can store hundreds of progarams on this lap top and have an entire rack of synths on this thing all controlled by the m-audio 88 key controller
you can split the board layer yolu can use mixer functions the skys the limit
so with a lap top and a keyboard you have everything you need
the maudio 88 wighs 47 pounds add 3 pounds for the lap top and we are at 50 pounds


playability
this is where the v synth is weakest there is such a thing as latency this is where there is a delay from the time you press the key and ythe sound is generated
the higher you set the bit rate or sample rate the slowere  more pronounced the latencey
i understand that there is a device that eliminates latecny but i do not know about this device
so here is the down side
is the latecy really bad ?
no not terribly bad but for a real piano player no latency can really be acceptable

sound well for soujnd you cant beat the virtual syntsh
yamaha ivory bosendorf tascam gigastudio all contain stellar sounds samples that are not limited byt ehs small wave ram that todays keyboards carry
when you buy a dedicated softsynth like yamaha ivory you are getting over 1000 megabytes dedicated to one instrument

you lose quality when you go with multiple applications like reason
or sample tank which by the way i hate sample tank

today there is a lot to consider when it comes to v synths
it is time to really include these keyboards in our discusions

hope you found this post informative

if you know anything about this topic or own some v synths let us know what you use and what you think

[P_music]

Hello diverse379,

I do not actually own any software synths, but I plan to in the future when my ife and I purchase our first house and I start building my mini home studio. I am the proud owner of the Roland Fantom-S, and this topic has been discussed on Roland Clan's forum.

I agree, soft syths are sounding better and better. With a nice sized hard drive, you have room for numerous samples and multi-samples of very high quality. Another pro of software synths is that it is easier to edit sounds and sequences because of the size of your monitor. Hardware synths in this regard are getting better (I love the larger display of the Fantom-S as opposed to my old Yamaha EX5), but it still does not compare to a computer monitor.

But, as you have stated, the latency issue is a big turn-off for live playing.  Hardware synth manufacturers have found solutions to compress high quality sound into a small amount of memory. Also, the hardware works alot more flurently with the software and memory to the point where there is 'practically' no latency.

One think that hardware synths & workstation have the edge right now is in different types of synthesis. Especially in creating new sounds and being about the coontrol sounds real-time in new ways. Take for instance the new Roland V-Synth GT just anounced. I don't think that you can make a computer and software synths create sounds like the Roland V-Synth. With some of the hardware synths & workstations out now, its not just about playing back a sample from rom. Although, I have heard about some software synths that actually try to model real acoustic instruments and not just play back a collection of samples. I've heard that they sound prettty good, but still not up to the level of some hardware synths.

One thing I will say, the price and seemingly endless expandability factor is very actractive to me for recording stuff.

p_music