What the pluck?

[Barnelby]

So after the dust cleared of my initial amazement with the ti2, there are a few things that either I haven't gotten ahold of yet or may be a weak point in the virus (my money is on the former). For the life of me, I can't seem to get a good plucky sound out of it...nothing special, just the typical pluck sound such as this:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i8ECNZL_DJE

Go to around 1:40

Now I know that is probably some huge analog synth; I'm not expecting the TI2 to be the mother of all pluckers, but the thing is I have EASILY created harder, more crisp pluck sounds out of sylenth and the ES2 in logic than I have been able to make with the TI2...every time I try to make something like that it ends up lacking that sharp attack.

Any pluckin tips?

Thanks!

[MBTC]

I found good plucks to be somewhat elusive.. and they are a very important component of the type of trance I like. I had a Virus briefly and I did not hear any mind-blowingly good plucks.

Nexus has some in some of the sound sets, but being a rompler its not that useful because you can only do so much with them.

Gladiator has an amazing Armin Van Buuren Pluck sound that is as good as anything out there, but it uses a weird "HCM" synthesis technique that makes it hard I think to produce other similar plucks.

The good news is that probably the best tool I've seen for this is a little synth called Oresus.. its a VST that only costs $45... The reason it is so good is because it gives you these visual, curved (exponential/logarithmic) filter envelope modifiers that you can tweak with the mouse. It turns out that the exact curve/slope of the filter envelope is fairly critical to putting that trancey "bite" in a pluck that makes it slice through and sound like a trance pluck. That is so much more important than any other aspect of the sound... harmonics dont mean much with such a short decay. Also because you can see what you're doing with the filters visually, it might help make good plucks using other synths. I've had some pretty nice luck with Dune, but the ability to put together plucks with Oresus really blew me away.

One thing I will add, after I listened to the plucks in your vid... part of what makes them nice is the movement with the cutoff filter and the arp.. the arp can be done a million ways, and the cutoff maybe too, to some extent but as far as I can tell, at least in FLS, with the Oresus VST I recommended, the curved filter slope cannot be automated / recorded into the DAW (MIDI signal) which was a little bit of a disappointment.. I have not explored further to see if it can be done. It doesnt mean it would stop you from doing what you want, but with Oresus you might be limited to manipulating cutoff / all or none... its a somewhat limited synth in some ways.

[feedingear]

Originally Posted by MBTC

I had a Virus briefly and I did not hear any mind-blowingly good plucks.

Honestly mate did you even dig through the banks and the extra soundsets?

[MBTC]

Originally Posted by feedingear

Honestly mate did you even dig through the banks and the extra soundsets?

I listened to every default patch that came on the Ti2. Not sure about extra soundsets, do you mean sounds from outside sources? If so, no.. I didn't get that far before I had to return it. Trying to wrestle with the FLS and latency issues consumed the bulk of my 30 day return policy period.

Also with regard to plucks, I think you need near zero latency between the keyboard and the sound to play plucky sounds properly. I was using a Ti2 desktop, which means that if you play a trance pluck or stab sound in FLS you're dealing with something like 1/8th of a second (125ms) latency which completely defeats the purpose of plucks or stabs. I might have had a completely different impressions if I had a Ti2 keyboard or polar, assuming there was the same instantaneous sound response (or likely better) than what I get with a low latency FLS setup (4ms). I think folks that play the virus live, and have more of an interest in live tweaking than DAW workflow and automation are going to have trouble relating to what I'm saying. Also, I know you mentioned cubase and I think someone else said under XP 32-bit a lot of the issues go away? I dunno, not an option for me at the moment.

[Barnelby]

Oh man, I picked up the demo of dune today and holy pluck. My favorite plugin synth to date and I've tried em all...well except nexus... I'm a logic guy so i dont deal with vsts a lot...but i guess i could fire up abe and try it out. But yeah, good pluck sounds with dune is as easy as pressing a key on the keyboard....I haven't lost faith in the ti2 but I have to admit I am definitely disappointed in this glaring blind spot in its sound. Even though the ti2 is a beast in so many areas, this one gimp is a major limitation to my music and considering that I could afford a tetra and all the plugins a kid could ever dream of for the price of a used ti2....Im kinda at a crossroads here

[Roby31]

yay, another one that misses the "GET MAGICAL TALENT" button on his instrument, like MBTC :P

At least you should try not to post bullshit, with FLS it's possible to have 2 to 6ms latency with the TI without any problems and most of the users are the damn proof; the fact you couldn't just means that you didn't do the right things.


I find myself disgusted to say this, but I'm kind of happy there's people wasting their money thinking the Virus and the other hardware synthesizers have the magic "famous, rich and beautiful" buttons then realize they can't even use them. Used market is full of synths that are like new and half the price, bought by noobs who couldn't even do a search.

Any resemblance to real events and/or to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental


I'm sick to goddamn hell of people that can't do something and complain about their instrument instead of their lack of understanding.

BTW, every Virus is probably capable of doing plucks, or retarded people wouldn't call it the "trance" synth and there wouldn't be freaking TEN Nexus2 expansions that are all Virus.

[Barnelby]

pluck you.

[Roby31]

Oh I will. Now, before you go sell your Virus just in time for some lucky guy to get it with 30% discount you might want to:

1) contact support in order to have them give a look to whatever problem/latecy you're facing

and

2) you might want to have a look at:

- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yiUsIRYcMtc
- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rUif508d-gM
- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=owodhSrfc4g
- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HWG8MQrzkcQ
- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nZjvTDrZkxY
- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yn1oZRffcT0
- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ryDxkjm544M

These are an example of soundsets that are filled with dream-trance sounds and amongst them, loads of plucks. I would be surprised if you can't recreate them with the snappy envelopes, filters and hypersaw waves provided by your synth.

The Alan Marcero soundset you can even get it for free or donate as little as 5€ after you tried it, so you can see how certain sounds are made.


I'm sorry to sound so harsh and digital, but I've been facing this bullshit since my Virus-Day-One.
First off I had to buy one new because with all the bitching that goes on on these forums I really didn't want to waste money and buying used would have meant NO REFUNDS and NO WARRANTY, a thing that I couldn't risk. Then, after I set it up properly, I started to realize that are the laziest people, those who look for the magical auto-famous buttons and presets that complain the most. Sure, there are users who were truly unlucky with units that didn't work or set-ups that required a lot of reconfiguration in order for the TI concept to work as supposed. I don't blame these people at all. I'm sorry that they didn't realize that if you want software integration you're willing to deal with the fact that your synth becomes a computer peripheral with all the shortcomings it might imply. I've had my share of USB related troubles and Virus not showing up - every time the official support or other forum members at virus.info helped me out.
I realize just now that for the same money I could have bought 2 used Virus instead of one, I would've had more flexibility, and I have instead spent more because of people not telling the whole story on forums and because of HAPPY users not bragging about how well their setup works (can you blame the latter group?).

I receive 3-4 forum PMs everyday, other facebook messages, at least one e-mail every other day, all by people who didn't even bother to contact the support they PAID for and tell me "the manual is too long to read - listen, how do i do sound X / how do i set up the atomizer / why doesn't it have enough bandwidth, i only use it with 50000 other peripherals sharing the hub ???" What do you want me to say? I'm not paid to do this shit, I do it as a volunteer to repay those who helped me when I had questions. Reading WRONG stuff on forums just angers me. It's like you spent TWO DAMN THOUSAND EUROS on a piece of equipment without even making sure it did what you thought because of whatever reason you didn't have the time to check, but now you have the time to bitch on the Internet about how it doesn't work and it's hyped and overpriced and X does this better and Y costs less and has the same samples.

[feedingear]

Amen mate.. I have had my issues initially with setup and latency and whatnot. I've also had issues with plugins, stability, etc. These are the barriers that electronic producers do have to deal with. A good read of the forums or time spent working out your system setup can resolve these issues.

BTW if your getting latency on your TI, press the D button on VC. That eliminates the latency while you play along live. Once you record your midi, change it back. Done.

As far as scrolling through the entire patchbank - I have had the TI for a few years now, and I am still going through presets and hearing sounds I have never heard before as well as of course designing my own. The quality of sounds, the richness and expression, and the creativity they can spark is second to none on any other synth soft or hardware I have used.

[MBTC]

Originally Posted by Roby31

yay, another one that misses the "GET MAGICAL TALENT" button on his instrument, like MBTC :P

At least you should try not to post bullshit, with FLS it's possible to have 2 to 6ms latency with the TI without any problems and most of the users are the damn proof; the fact you couldn't just means that you didn't do the right things.

I think you should try to be a little less of a douchebag. I've mentioned in almost every post that my problems were specifically with Win7 64 bit and might have been related to the driver for all I know. At the time I bought the Ti2, I scoured the ImageLine forums for someone who was able to get reasonable latency without resorting to delay compensation and other craptastic techniques, and at that time NOBODY was successfully using FLStudio with the Ti2 without major latency issues.

Look at my early posts on this forum and you will see that I tried hard to find someone here with enough knowledge to help me get things working properly in FLS, and it seemed nobody here was using that host, and those with low latency were using something else entirely.

But at least nobody had gone so far as to call me a liar, outright, until today.

Congratulations, you just hit a new all time low for this forum.