VSTs - What you use and why?

[mostapha]

Discovery Pro
Dune
TAL Bassline
Arturia Minimoog V Original

And I really need to do the Maschine 1.8 update and play around with Massive again. I didn't like it enough to pay for it, but it might be fun free.

I'm very close to going in to play with a Minibrute, though. But, if I do, there's a good chance I'll be hooked on hardware and either buy one or go start trying to find a Nord.

Edit: Totally forgot the reasons. I chose them because they were affordable (or free) and supposed to work like hardware synths that I want………and the minimoog was free and kind of iconic.

[diezdiazgiant]

u-he ace, ohm force ohmicide, u-he uhbiks, and softtubes vintage amp. oh and audio damage kombinant.

ace is my go to synth. a lot of bullshit is said about "analog sound" but i feel like ace really has the old filth i would get out of a jx3p or sc 6 trak and best of all - you can tailor just how much you want (an osc cap failure knob, crosstalk knob and even a "circuit bending" knob. more u-he, uhbiks is a bundle, love the eq and the grainshifter. enough parameters to really explore, but not at all limited.. ohmicide and vintage amp i love the dimension they can add to an instrument, just filthy, they can just add a lot of life to sterile sounds.

[rukkus]

ratshack reverb. it makes it big but can be a bit of a harsh mistress

[Connekted]

My 2 favs atm are Omnisphere and Trilian they can be super easy or super in depth to use and they sound fantastic. I also use FM8, but not really into Massive anymore. I like throwing Camelphat and Izotope Ozone on alot of stuff. Been looking into getting the Soundtoys Native pack, stuff looks nasty...in a good way!

[TCMuc]

My go to plug-ins at the moment are:

NI Kontakt, especially Vintage Organs and Vintage Keys, as I just like using "organic" (vs. synthesized) sounds, and they are really good for that

NI Vintage Compressors, I really like the simplicity of their interfaces and even though I have control over less parameters it feels like it's much easier to get the results that I want than with ableton's compressor

Arturia Minimoog - first of all it was for free (thanks again, arturia..) and second for me as a sound design newbie the reduced options with basically 3 oscillators, filter- and amp-envelop it's really great to work with, as it keeps you from getting lost in a gazillion of routing and modulation options. And last but not least the analog-ish sound is really great

I use Maschine for all of my drums right now, but I just discovered the "humanize" feature on Battery which seems great to add a more organic feel to your drums. Then, after watching this:
I feel tempted to try that out myself, as right now I regularly end up loading different versions of e.g. kickdrums into ableton, and as I usually export the drum patterns from maschine to ableton as audio clips, changing the sound of a certain element is a pain in the a..


So if any software developer, maybe from NI, should be reading along: having a "sound select" feature like in the drum rack/sampler trick inside battery while having full control over the sounds through maschines pads and step sequencer would be a REALLY cool feature...

[Nicky H]

Got this a while ago:
http://www.u-he.com/cms/diva

Amazing, but it makes my computer cry when I use it...

[Coldfuzion]

O/T: I was just about to post a similar thread and saw this . I am actually stuck between getting Omnisphere or the new Alchemy. I know Omnisphere is double the price, but I was wondering if any of you guys had thoughts on the matter?

M/T: I own Sylenth1, Wobble (Which I don't really use) and the Komplete Ultimate 8 package, and I really do use almost everything it came with! Just to add different variations and what not to my sound!

[Connekted]

O/T: I was just about to post a similar thread and saw this . I am actually stuck between getting Omnisphere or the new Alchemy. I know Omnisphere is double the price, but I was wondering if any of you guys had thoughts on the matter?

M/T: I own Sylenth1, Wobble (Which I don't really use) and the Komplete Ultimate 8 package, and I really do use almost everything it came with! Just to add different variations and what not to my sound!

Omnisphere/Trilian are amazing, period. I never used Alchemy and I hear its pretty good and camel audio makes dope products, but I think Omni is worth the extra money. Diva's also another great one. The classic analog hardware emulations are worth its weight in gold imo in Omni. I mean imagine having basically every great piece of classic kit from Roland, Moog, etc to work with and manipulate. Obviously its not as cool as having the real thing but that would cost you 10's of 1000's to own and maintain. The sound is amazing, you can go deep or fiddle with presets. Spectrasonics make some really killer stuff and have great tech support to back it up.

Cons: The install is a bitch or at least it can be, you'd think "oh just pop in the dvd's" but my install made some alias folders that i had to go in a manually delete. Not a big deal, but kinda lame. Not really a con but to kinda be expected, you need a beast of a computer to run it. I mean you can layer patches in multi mode if you want, so you need a pretty heavy duty processor and a hefty amount of RAM. I run mine on an I7 quad core with 16gb of RAM, no issues. Also hard drive space, we're talking over 80gb of stuff with Omni and Trilian, Omni is like 55gb itself. So i have 2 1TB harddrives with one dedicated to all my music stuff.

Anyways hope that kinda helps, Omni/Trilian are definitely worth the extra money imo and are just plain fun to use, which is kinda the main point for me...having fun

[Coldfuzion]

Thanks for the info Connekted, you can install all the extra patches and what not on an external hard drive right? My only issue with my current computer (MacBook Pro 15' Retina) is the hard drive space itself - only 256gb. I have a 2TB external USB 3.0 drive I use to save all my samples & banks in.

[Connekted]

Thanks for the info Connekted, you can install all the extra patches and what not on an external hard drive right? My only issue with my current computer (MacBook Pro 15' Retina) is the hard drive space itself - only 256gb. I have a 2TB external USB 3.0 drive I use to save all my samples & banks in.

Yep, you just copy your Steam folder in the Omni folder after the intial install, then delete it. Then paste the Steam folder in your external. Then when Omni loads it will ask for the new location of the Steam folder and just set up the file path to the Steam folder on your external.