Vital is outstanding. Vital actually stands up well against other places paid products.
Thereās a few excellent free synths for sure; I would probably start with Vital and Surge. Those two alone would take you a long way.
Vital is much nicer to use than Surge though.
Oh, and Dexed. Itās outstanding. I keep forgetting it because I have the V collection DX7.
If you want a DX7 and learn the pain of early FM synthesis (but end up with great sounds), Dexed is great. Itās actually much easier than a real DX7 was too.
Thanks, @sshoihet and @howard: more stuff to check out, more choices - hope to dive deeper on these and the Cherry Audio synths (and the Arturia demos) over the weekend
Could be interesting (and sentimental). DX 7 was one of the iconic synths I grew up withā¦ yet, I donāt want to dive too deep in the synthesis part - Iād prefer loads of presets for now
Oh it has a bunch. It might be able to load old DX7 SYSEX files too; this often works on synths modeling older gear. I have all the old ESQ-1 patches I used to love working with SQ80-V now
One of the biggest challenges I face as I try some of these possible solutions is that there are sooooo many crappy sounds that I will never ever use - itās really hard to find the few that sound good.
I realize this is, of course, the power of synths that they can make just about every imaginable sound (and even those unimaginable), but, boy, it means that every bank of presets or patches is bound to have only 2-3 % OK sounds in itā¦
Maybe I should stick with the Alchemy synth in Logic for now (or the ES2) and learn how to tweak the few good sounds to get even better ones
Hm, OK, maybe I found a really cool one - all analog (no FM, no waveforms, ā¦):
An Oberheim OB-X emulator; has a lot of gorgeous leads, pads/strings and bass - quite amazing actually. Itās free to download (and you can donate if you like it; EDIT: apparently, they only expect you to pay if you use the software/sounds commercially - cool!!).
Honestly my favorite synthesis is wavetable, but YMMV.
If you want pure analog, it is very easy to make, for example, a Prophet clone yourself from scratch in any general purpose synth. It took me like five minutes in Phase Plant when I did it. Sounded great too
Pigments could do this easily if you didnāt like the stock Prophet-like patches.
The early analog synths were very simple and constructing them in modern synths is a great way to explore and learn subtractive synthesis. Understanding this actually will go a long way to shaping sounds for other instruments too (like bass).
Potentially, you are underestimating the effort a bit, but you may for sure be overestimating my abilities in this directionā¦ joke aside, this is really what I was hoping to avoid from the get-go.
Anyway, I should be set for now with the OB-Xd. I might miss out on a few nice DX-7 or D-50 sounds, but itās not like I am getting heavily into synth-pop or something like that
There is certainly truth to this, and I hope to pick up knowledge as I goā¦ I donāt think I am ready for a full-on deep-dive, though!
TAL Software (tal-software.com) ā¦ Or if you donāt want to spend money and still want some good analog sound. TAL Noisemaker is quite a staple. It has a basic subtractive two oscillator, filter, and envelope synth design (In my opinion itās the closest to Minimoog in sound and Pro1 in layout) and it sounds great for the price. Well, good enough for quite prominent producers to use it in their major releases.
I presume youāve got a midi controller @joergkutter but when i bought my Arturia MiniLab MKII it comes bundled with āAnalog Lab Liteā with 500 sounds from the V-Collection.
Yep, thanks, I got two actually (a big one and a small, 2-octave job. Sadly, none of them came with a similar goodie pack as the Arturia - thatās a nice deal indeed.
In this particular case, however, it is not about just any analog synth, but probably THE most classic one of them all
Analog Lab has selected patches from all the V Collection synths. In a way itās the best ad for V Collection imaginable, but really for anyone not in to sound design on synths itās enough. You can even tweak the patches a bit (though not as much as if you had the V Collection synth, of course.)
Moog!