Quote:
Originally Posted by tenorjazz
Thanks for the information!!!
All the sites look very interesting, but I particularly like the http://noisesculpture.com site. I plan on ordering a couple of books later tonight.
The site with the "soft" analog synth looks real interesting too, but at this point in time I have pretty much spent my "music money" for a while and I know if I start looking at some really cool product, I will probably want to buy it. I don't even want to try it till I get a little money saved, I figure I should probably be able to work through my learning curve with all my current synths.
But I do have a question about the Zebra 2... I was watching the tutorial on MacProvideo and noticed the soft synth he is using makes "stepped" sounds as he makes knob adjustments. I was reading somewhere that this was a common problem with virtual and soft synth, but also read that the Virus doesn't have this kind of problem, which I have found to be true so far. Can you tell me if the Zebra 2 makes notched or stepped sounds when you turn the knobs or is it smooth like a real analog synth or the Virus?
I've also been eyeing a couple of other virtual synths for the future, the Arturia and the Korg MS2000 and was wondering if anybody had one of these and had problems like I'm talking about?
Anyway, thanks again for the information and it looks like I'm going to be real busy learning a lot of new things. |
In short, knob adjustments are as analog as they are on the Virus -- by that I mean softsynths are "virtual analog" and so is the Virus (in other words they are really digital emulating analog properties). I'm not quite sure what you mean by "stepped"... if you point me to the particular video you watched and let me know the time in minutes/seconds I will take a look, but basically you can make adjustments to any parameter at such fine granularity that you would not be able to distinguish it from analog.
Now, how easily the control surface you use (the Virus, or other MIDI controller etc) supports this, I'm not sure. For example I'm a long time FLStudio user that is recently playing with Logic on the Mac. In so many ways Logic seems flawed (as does the Mac itself), but there are some things it does out of the box with AU synths that I don't think FL does, at least I've never seen it. For example on the Crimson Flute default patch on Zebra2, aftertouch from my MIDI controller adds vibrato without me having to do anything. In FL I think I need to specifically map a knob to aftertouch for it to do that. I read somewhere (KVR probably) that Urs, the author of Zebra2 said there was something with the VST standard itself that accounted for this. But if you're talking about the numeric increment that a knob on the software plugin increases when you turn it, with most synths there is a "large value / small value" option, like holding down shift while you move the mouse, like increasing a parameter by 1.0 versus .01 increments. As far as the physical knob on the control surface and mapping to the plug-in, that has more to do with how your DAW handles it (or in some cases utilities that come with certain MIDI controllers, like Automap for Novation controllers).
Hope that answers your question. The only Korg plug-ins I have are M1 and MS-20 and they are both very good, the MS-20 being the one you want for a more analog feel (the M1 is a very good representation of the original, probably even identical, but is a waveform based synth with an 80s sound).
Pretty much every soft synth offers a demo that lets you get accustomed to it before buying. I think the only limitation in Zebra is that it starts changing octaves on you after 20 minutes or something, you can easily delete the instance and start over to keep playing.
Shoot me the vid link and I'll take a look and see if I can see what you're referring to.