The Unofficial Access Virus & Virus TI Forum - since 2002

so ive been screwing around with the virus for the past week and ive come to the conclusion that multi mode is severely flawed. is this just me?

ill explain.

when i make kick drums i build them out of synth blips or existing kick drum samples. ill for example, layer a mid rangey 909 kick sample with a sub bass synth blip i made on the zeta demo. then ill tweak the volume so that they are at the desired level in relation to each other. ill tweak the envelope so the kick sustain and release for both sounds are the same. then ill filter out part of the sound i dont need and/or reverse the polarity of one of them to get rid of phasing problems if they occur. i.e. i make 1 kick drum out of these 2 separate kicks which has qualities of both and which i feel is overall a better kick because it has more of the qualities i desire in it. i typically do this with more than 2 and as many as 5 or 6

i also do this with synths.

with vanguard and floops this is easy. just add another vanguard. have them both play the same notes whilst monitoring it and just tweak. only thing i had to worry about was my computer exploding from the cpu load.

with the virus, i have to use multi mode. but its annoying. i dont mind the global reverb/delay. i just turn it off and add SIR reverb afterwards (i think its better too). what gets me is how clumsy multi mode is. saving a multi patch doesnt save any editting made to single patches. if you go into single mode from multi mode though, whatever changes you make are not saved and it reverts back to the saved patch. thats stupid!

i found myself playing 2 sounds simultaneously from the virus through separate midi channels. whilst one plays i like to edit the other. but seeing as leaving multimode to save the changes i make will erase them in the process of going into single mode...what the hell?

i also experience strange...phenomena in multi mode. even if i disable all global effects, my single patches sometimes sound different in multimode. not just a little different. completely different. ive checked this numerous times. checked the control surface is set to the exact settings, disabled all multi effects and made sure all the single patch effects are the same as their single mode equivilents. im confused. because of this, i find building multi timbred instruments on the virus is frustrating. and yet this is where i used build my best synth patches in software. i feel the single patches sound better than any single patch in vanguard. but i can create massive multi timbral monster patches in vanguard. i cant really do it in the virus :cry:

add to this the fact that the more parts i play through the stereo output, the more disorganised it sounds. my virus still plays like its drunk. sometimes if the CPU load is low and i dont move the mouse, it plays in time. other times it just gets drunk. im finding this very frustrating. multi mode is not what i had hoped it would be. im still encountering glitchy little problems that are specific to multi mode and it makes it very difficult to control what im doing when building mult timbral patches.

so i pose the question - how do you create multi timbred instruments on the virus? i know its possible - check out lab4's candyman. just as the song breaks down this absolutely MONSTER virus b patch kicks in and they filter sweep it live. theres no way in hell thats a single virus patch. no way. in HELL. its gigantic.

what im thinking of doing is to work entirely in single mode. get a patch sounding roughly the way i want it. record it to wav audio. play back the wav whilst editting another patch in single mode and get the desired timbre then bounce that down. line them up in soundforge, add effects, normalise and put it into my song. is this how everyone else does it?

the downside to this is that if you hear something that doesnt sit well in the mix you have to go back to stage one and render everything again. what a pain in the arse that'll be.