View Single Post
  #6  
Old 08.11.2011, 06:42 PM
MBTC MBTC is offline
This forum member lives here
This forum member lives here
 
Join Date: 16.04.2010
Posts: 1,082
Default

How much polyphony is enough is a time-tested debate, and it really depends on what kind of music you make, the specifics of the track, etc. The old saying its not the synth or the sounds, its what you do with them holds as true as ever.

Regarding Endorphins and the Virus C demo.. I personally think these sound like great single synth demos, with non-processing intensive things like stabby arps combined with basslines that give a partly fullfilling sense, but I think they sound extremely thin compared to what I consider a "real" track I would want on my MP3 player... in fact the Virus C demo, with the exception of the hardstyle lead, sounds a little like 80's video game music to my ear. You said your needs aren't too ambitious, so maybe the sound you want does not require a lot of polyphony? I personally feel very limited by monophonic leads, I often play in chords and I sometimes find the warmth of those chords often depends on much osc power are fundamentally behind them. Reverb and other FX demands a lot of juice, and I'm not sure those old Virus demos use this at all (some of them used external loops which leaves much less for the Virus to do). Just remember those demos are meant to sell the synth, so they are meant to be shining examples and not necessarily typical of what you may create.

Anyway I don't want to discourage you. If you've used a single synth as your one stop shop for music and have been happy in the past, I suppose you're not in for any major disappointments here, again depending on what you want to do musically. My personal opinion is that # of voices and # of parts is almost irrelevant these days, and that music that comes from a single synth is always going to be very limited. I've heard from both folks who say a single Ti2 is powerful enough, and folks who say it's vastly underpowered. Unofficially my observations are that the latter group outnumbers the former by a factor of about 5 to 1.
Reply With Quote