Nathanael_I

Composer Charlie Clouser (Saw, etc) wrote an extensive review after playing with the Prophet X for several hours over on VI-Control. Prophet X review If you read down just a post or two further, he compares it to the Waldorf Quantum. From my read, he confirms everything I hoped or suspected was true of the instrument, particularly that it is immediately musical and easy to make great sounds on in typical DSI fashion. If you are interested in the Prophet X, Charlie is a VERY experienced synthesist (originally in Nine-inch-Nails), and this is worth reading.

I have Omnisphere and an OB-6 (one of the supported synths for the new hardware control). After watching the video on the upcoming 2.5 release, I'm not sure what the point is. They used Omnisphere to set up an OB-6 signal path. So now I can use hardware to control software making the kinds of sounds the hardware makes? Why not just play the hardware? I will play with it when it comes out, but there must be more to it, and I'm not getting it yet. Most of the really cool stuff in Omnisphere is not on any hardware synth, so a mouse will be required. Omnisphere has a huge sample set behind it (not as big as Prophet X, though). Furthermore, every Spectrasonics product can be accessed from Omnisphere, including Keyscape. Keyscape comes with sounds that use the Omnisphere library. They sound great. Omnisphere offers far more sample mangling possibilities than the Prophet X, a bigger mod matrix, more polyphony, more FX, etc. The Prophet-X is desirable for the reasons you point out about hardware control vs software, but Omnisphere can definitely do the sort of manipulation that the Prophet X can and a lot more. The filters won't sound the same, the samples will be different, etc. But I find myself just experimenting and programing on my hardware synths regularly. The VST/AUs tend to be preset monsters - find the sound, play it without tweaking. Omnisphere is ridiculously capable - a beast of a synth, and it gets better all the time. But it isn't as fast or direct as hardware.

There's also a lot of other Superbooth videos starting to show up now. It really does make a lot of nice sounds - very nice sounds. Sounds that analog poly's don't make.

Well, a Rev2 is $2000. It has two oscillators (saw, triangle, saw+tri, and pulse) + sub osc and 16 voices, 24db filter, and a smaller mod matrix. The Prophet X also has two DCO's (Sine, saw, pulse, supersaw) adds two sample oscillators and a true stereo signal path. It has a bigger mod matrix, and two real time touch faders over the Rev2. It also has a huge set of samples from a very professional sampling company - I'm sure they were paid something. So, is it 2x a Rev2? Kind of. Double the oscillators, better hardware real-time controls, can do typical analog poly sounds, but lots of extra ground due to samples. The sine wave is more useful with samples than the triangle wave, and I'd rather have supersaw than saw+tri wave in the REV2 - more useful. The sample oscillators could always add most any other wave shape that could be conceived, so the oscillator section is massively better than a REV2. DSI makes other synths for $3k - this is well more powerful than any of them, so $4k it is. I can see how they get there. Still a chunk of $$ but less than a Solaris, a Quantum, or a Modal 002/008 - $4k is the "uber synth" price point apparently - absent the Schmidt or vintage poly's that are 2-5x this cost. Many of the cutting edge sounds for movies and other uses are mangled samples of some kind or another. This puts that in a real-time tweaking package. Novel and will produce sounds not easily had elsewhere.

Any SSD is fine for audio. In the composing rig, I stream thousands of voices of polyphony of of standard SSD's that are several years old. The super high speed ones have no benefit for audio beyond faster load times to fill buffers. When streaming, they are all fast enough.

The thing that gets me is how immediately usable these sounds are. And then there's the immediate ability to alter them. It just seems that it will be immensely useful. I suspect that the "over the top" sampling memory will open a different door to the subject of a live performance synth. I do understand that massive sound sets are on computers. But there is a variety and depth to this set of sounds that far eclipses what we've had in typical gigging boards. And it is simpler than Omnisphere and WAY simpler than Kontakt. The demos all sound really good, and seem to allow one to get away from the purely recognizable sample in a hurry, and then get back. Seems very interesting. I want to like the Quantum more as a pure synthesis device, but I have the feeling this will be far more accessible to create loads of usable sounds.

Markyboard, Nice video! It is instructive how he points out that the simplicity is designed in, and it is the hardest part to get right. "Genius is taking something complex and making it simple" - or something like that. And I am glad that the samples are in there, but not overly configurable. Kontakt is VERY complex - don't need anymore of that. Also interesting that the filter is one of their designs - not a copy. An artist making playable art. It is easy to see why players like his instruments. Thanks for sharing.

What I would love to know that hasn't been discussed yet is how capable is the sample player? I have several 8Dio libraries. They are deeply sampled, many round-robins, are heavily scripted, can have real legato transitions, etc. Their samples are professional media production tools that are well better than what I've heard in a Kronos. So the raw material is certainly going to be good, though it won't be used in a "Kronos way". Those samples were made to play back in Kontakt, likely the most powerful, generally accepted sampler on the market. I can't imagine working a Kontakt-level sampler from a synth front-panel. You want a big monitor for that and a mouse. So details on how they have re-contextualized the samples would be interesting. I know their Kontakt product - what is it in this format? Mysteries yet to be uncovered. I don't expect it to be the same. I'm really curious as to what can be done easily, on the hardware. How much work have 8Dio and DSI put into getting all the sample scripting and programming right so that "it just works magnificently". That is the kind of stuff that can't be expressed on a data sheet. It will take some walkthroughs by experienced sound designers, composers, or synthesists to sort this out. Marc Doty's long-form synth reviews on YouTube are much more useful than most in this . He takes the time explore each section of a synth and you get a sense for how broad/narrow/useful/not-useful each set of controls are. His excitement is fun, but the real service is the expert exploration and discussion of the musicality of the control values. Now that he is at Buchla, I doubt he'll still get to do DSI videos, but I'd love to see him explore the Prophet X (if it isn't too digital for him). I will be tempted to take a flight to Indiana to Sweetwater where I know they'll have both available for side-by-side. Take some compositions, and have my laptop play the notes while twisting knobs. Then play and twist knobs. Then just explore via front panel. Run through the presets - tweak them. How easy/hard is it to get musical texture I want and find playable/expressive? This is something that the internet has not yet figured out about musical electronics. Its the stuff that ISN"T on the spec sheet that makes the biggest difference to whether or not it feels like an instrument, or if it is just a technical gadgety thing. The Minimoog nails this. Simple synth. Limited timbres. Very limited mod matrix/realtime control. Great instrument - a classic. It is also true that not every musical style needs or wants an instrument. There are many advanced users of synths that have never had an interest in playing them live - probably more than that intend to play them live at this point. It is a great time to like synthesizers. We are getting a lot of new hardware after many years of soft synths.

This should be very useful for anyone who wants textures and "things that aren't real, but sound like they could be". Modulation and timbre shaping over time are definite weak points of traditional analog synthesis. ADSR and LFOs are too crude to create the kind of complex timbres we get from traditional acoustic instruments. The promise of this machine is that you can use an already musical, complex,evolving sound (samples of a real instrument) as a way to alter what is happening to another sample or an oscillator. Just using noise to randomly modulate stuff doesn't have the same effect. There is something about how the multiple overtones each have their own decay and resonance that has eluded synthesis so far. An engine like this will be a texture monster. Spitfire Audio (and Omnisphere) have numerous products that generate very excellent and interesting textures and atmospheres. I have no idea if it works for classic rock. I don't play that music, and there are so many synths that can do that world justice. But for someone who plays electronic music and wants/needs new textures and craves more expressive sounds - this is a potential winner. Add MPE for more nuanced control of the mod matrix and this could be a very delightful synthesizer for the kind of gig that wouldn't have a use for a Kronos or a piano or a B3. I get that you can do this in a computer. The computer problem is a UI problem. Yes you can map controllers, but to have an instrument where you can access it natively and at once? It is worth something. I find it interesting. The Quantum is top of my list at present - playable granulation and modal synthesis with a GREAT user interface. The Quantum is a more powerful synth that breaks new ground (in accessible hardware) - the signs of care in the design are everywhere. The Prophet X, however, seems to promise some of the OB-6 goodness. Probably the best thing about the OB-6 is how well thought out the control parameters are. I love the multimode filter, yes, but as others have observed, you can't hardly find a way to make the OB-6 sound bad. It sounds great, and slight adjustments offer musically useful subtlety. I bet the Prophet X makes great sounds, layers, and expressive patches easily. And that is not a trivial thing. Part of the genius of Dave Smith is that he knows how to build an instrument for musicians to play live. When you actually play one, you are many times struck at how right the design is. What you need is right there. Every knob does something musical without trashing the sound. If the Prophet X captures that ability, it matters little if the Kronos can technically do this with pages of menu diving. The elegant simplicity and immediacy will work for some people in a better, faster way. Will that be worth $4k? I don't know, the market will say. But I find it very attractive. If it's a hardware "Omnisphere" it will be great. I totally get it has a fraction of Omnisphere's capability. But it has hardware. How important is that? Important enough that Omnisphere just made control layers for a dozen or so hardware synths. Humans need hardware (until someone invents a direct brain interface). I applaud all who are trying to figure out how to get electronic keyboards to have as expressive a capability as an acoustic instrument. The Hakken Continuum may be there already, but surely we need more. The Prophet X is not a final answer - but it appears to be a step in the right direction. The future of synthesis has to be digital - there are many ways to alter sound that simply can't be done in the analog domain. As yet, few of them produce easily playable results. If sample mangling and convolution approaches get us closer, I'm a fan of the progress. I believe the Quantum is a special, once-every-long-time kind of instrument. The Prophet X is also special, and the 8Dio samples are bound to be quite useful in a mangled context. Spitfire have whole libraries where they mangle their orchestral samples into new and interesting contexts. If this is a live playable version of that, with optimized real-time controls and well-engineered parameters, it may well be a better instrument than the Quantum - even if it is a more capable synth. I will watch with interest as both synths are released. I won't be a first day purchaser of either, but both are welcome and desirable, albeit for different reasons.

This is, in my opinion why higher-quality PA equipment exists. It isn't that it plays louder - it is that everything it plays sounds better. And music is supposed to sound good! An overly loud, muddy mess is not good listening. I know you know, but at living room levels, Fulcrum Acoustics PA sounds "studio monitor good". I have mine set up right beside my Genelecs in the studio - they sound fantastic soft AND loud. There is a coffee shop near our house that my wife I will go to. They often have live music on Friday/Saturday night. All local. The older the musicians, the better chance it will sound good. They all bring their own amps, but play at an appropriate volume, perfectly mixed into the room - acoustic drums are played mostly on the hi-hats, light kick, brush or light sticks on the snare, stopped cymbal crashes - it always sounds great. Discipline, taste, and experience. The jazz guys are usually good. The blues guys? The older they are, the better odds it will sound good. The singer/songwriters are the worst. Loud, crappy amps, horrible vocals through really cheap awful systems. We get our drinks and go. There are some young players that are all ears, and do the same as the old guys - they are lots of fun - not as accomplished, but they are fully all-in on their music and I appreciate that a lot. People hear "CD quality" audio all the time (or at least the streaming approximation). If a band can deliver that quality of sound, only with the emotional involvement of live volumes and real people to interact with, it will always stand out. When I get my IEM mix "just right" it is magical - it happens almost all the time now. We set the gain of all instruments to the same level on sound check, with the drums a little hotter (he needs more gain to overcome the level of acoustic drums when in a booth and playing hard). I start with all the individual channels even, and it is tiny adjustments, and then everything is even. It is easy to tell if I am blending in, poking out, or whatever. When we are "on" it sounds GREAT, and that musician happiness is had regardless of the levels coming out of the mains. That's the FOH job.

This is what your Fulcrums are for. Get high quailty custom molded in ears for you. The audience gets the Fulcrums. Ear candy for all. I currently have 64ears 6 driver, but the 10 driver ones that were stolen sounded even better. I dont use ambient mics, it sounds better to me.

IEMs are great. Way, way better than crummy loud stage monitor mixes. I've used JH Harvey and 64audio custom moulded. I don't personally mind the clean sound without ambient mic, but we have one, and we can all dial in as much or little as we want. I'd highly recommend spending on good custom moulded units from UA, JH Audio or 64audio. The 10 driver JH audio are the best sounding units I've had, but the seal to my ears has been best in the 64 Audio ones. My current set are 6 drivers, and they are certainly good - but they are not exceptional like the 10 driver JH audio. Spend the $$ - get Fulcrum quality sound for your IEMs... its way cheaper....

I have the desktop version - it is a great synth - its hard to make it sound bad, and the multi-mode filter is just great. If you use a computer for music, the SoundTower editor is fantastic and a great help.