Great read fellas, here's my Virus TI love story
I was a software-only guy, started with trackers (Fast Tracker / Impulse Tracker / Buzz) then moved to Reason, then moved to Cubase with Reason ReWired. I was pretty happy with the sounds I was getting out of Reason and VSTis like Zebra2. I had been hearing everywhere that the Virus was an awesome synth for electronic music which sparked my interest.
I started to fall in love with the Virus sound when I heard the demos of Vengeance presets on their site. I spent hours trying to reproduce even one of the sounds but fell short, I simply couldn't get any software synth to sound as aggressive as the Virus yet still stay musical. Furthermore, in certain tunes, where I heard a sound that really stood out, I could never reproduce it. I actually checked out these artists' sites and even got in contact with a few to see what their secret was ... the answer was almost always, "oh, that's the Virus".
For over a year, I attempted to decide what to buy. I couldn't afford the Virus TI so I was considering the Virus Powercore. Due to all the forum posts on how terrible it was, I never went ahead with the purchase though.
So 2009 came and I said, enough is enough, this is going to be the year I get my TI!! Several days into January, I checked eBay as I usually did, and found a Buy It Now TI desktop in my state for a very good price! It took me 15 minutes to convince myself before I pressed the button.
I must admit that I thought the TI would indeed replace all my softsynths but instead, it has ended up being an excellent compliment to them. I still love Thor and Zebra2 as much as I ever did, in fact some sounds that I need are better produced by these synths. But, the TI brings such a different flavor to the table, it's almost a different breed of synth. I find myself using it for all bassline duties and hard sweeps / fx. It is indeed an amazing synth and I don't think I could be without it again!
Excuse me while I cuddle with it ...