Soft Synths?

[ProAudioX]

:w00t:

Who's using these? Have not had much chance to play with this myself except for on a Reason rig but what I did hear lacked the timbre and richness that I am used to in the old HW synths. Maybe things are different now as things always improve and all.

[Synthpopalooza]

These have been making their way into my work. At present, here are my favorites, all freeware:

Minimogue
Hahaha CS331
Purple (which will even load DX-100 patches)
Saros (drum synth)
Synth1
Analogue Warfare

At present my CPU isn't equipped to do MIDI well, so I still use my hardware setup (Yamaha DX-100, Kawai K1, Korg Poly 800 II and Atari ST) and my softsynths get used mainly for percussion sounds, samples, or loops generated by the Minimogue's step sequencer.

And yes, I do still use my Yamaha DX-100 for the trademark kick drum sound which seems to invade most of my music.

[Dusty Chalk]

...what I did hear lacked the timbre and richness that I am used to in the old HW synths. It would always be useful to hack the output and put on a better one. With digital outputs, you can just get an external DAC. My Nord Modular -- basically, a diigtal synthesizer that thinks it's an analog -- sounds sweet, and after doing a little research, I found out it already has a pretty decent output. The first thing to look at is something called the "output stage" (opamps, capacitors, etc.).

[Centurion]

Software synths/samplers have gotten much better in the last few years so I would take another look. Some of the newer stuff like Digidesign's Structure or Propellerhead's NN-XT and Moog's SampleMoog bring sampling and soundbank emulation to a whole new level. Check it out!

[robotrock]

Soft synths have gotten quite good in my opinion, I use several of them on a regular basis now days. Some favorites of mine:

Vanguard
FM-7
Adventus
OP-X