Favorite or go-to software synths?

[bill5]

Me:

 

- Vital (free too!)

- Absynth

- Hive

- Dune

- Diva

- Zebra/Zebralette 

- Full Bucket and Messiah synths for retro (also free) 

 

[Baldwin Funster]

Tal uno lx

Sunrizer

 

Sometimes I mess with-

Zeon

DRC

[Ed A.]

Korg opsix native

Arturia Pigments

Arturia SQ80 V

Arturia Augmented Voices and Augmented Strings

Apple Logic Sculpture and Alchemy

Rhizomatic Plasmonic

Surge XT

 

[DeltaJockey]

Omnisphere.......oh, and did I mention Ominisphere?

Zebra2,

Sonuscore Elysion

Arkhis

Reaktor

Sometimes Alchemy, ( I still have a copy of the original Camel Audio version, and all it's extra libraries!)

[Tusker]

Zebra HZ

Reaktor

[Geoff Grace]

Main Courses
• Spectrasonics Omnisphere, Trilian, and Keyscape Creative
• U-he Diva and Repro
• GForce Oberheim OB-E & SEM
• Softube Model 72 and Model 84

 

Sides
• U-he Zebra 2 and Dark Zebra
• Native Instruments FM8
• New Fangled Audio Generate
• Knif Audio Knifonium
• Kilohearts Phase Plant
• Arturia Buchla Easel V

 

Best,

 

Geoff

[Jose EB5AGV]

Sylenth1

Pigments

Serum

 

Have literally tons of them... Too many really!

[Motif88]

• Omnisphere
• Keyscape
• Diva
• Alchemy

Plenty of others, but these are always in my initial template.

[DeltaJockey]

6 hours ago, bill5 said:

Me:

 

- Vital (free too!)

- Absynth

- Hive

- Dune

- Diva

- Zebra/Zebralette 

- Full Bucket and Messiah synths for retro (also free) 

 

I may be stating the obvious here, but these type of "confessions", I always find very interesting. As it's a way to discover worthy software which you might otherwise never have the fortune to cross paths with. I've ventured into new software, (and hardware) purely from reading about what others talk about

[felis]

Arturia Matrix 12V

Steinberg Halion

GForce OB-E/SEM

[marino]

My most used soft synth is Surge XT.

I will (really) learn Vital when I have the time.

Emergence - a great granulator - is one of my favorites too.

Diva and Dune are very good, but I usually use real analogs for those types of sound.

Oberhausen gets used a bit more.

[CyberGene]

Diva and Re-Pro. Also, the embedded Alchemy in Logic Pro X is unexpectedly good. 

[zukskywalker]

Oh No!!!!! There are more??

I thought that I had ALL of them.

Run away, run away!

(“My god, it’s full of stars!”)

 

[Music Bird]

Kontakt with various 3rd party sample library/ROMpler preset/etc conversions (also Kontakt Factory Library, the whole Spotlight Collection, Analog Dreams, and Retro Machines).

Korg Collection 3 (missing Odyssey, Minikorg, Opsix Native, Wavestate Native, and Prophecy but have the rest) mostly for M1, Triton, Triton Extreme, and Wavestation

Synth1

Dexed

Cherry Audio plugins for retro analog stuff

K1v

Hypersonic 2

Hybrid 3

also Massive, Massive X, Absynth, FM8, Full Bucket plugins, and various others. I have about 400 something VSTs. Speaking of recent gets for me it was the Cherry Audio plugins and a real TR-505.

[Stokely]

Cybergene has my most-used right there:  Diva, Repro and Alchemy.

Alchemy used to sell for quite a lot by itself when owned by Camel, and from what I've read Apple has improved it.   Like the other two, it has a quality setting to be aware of.  Sometimes it's not that noticeable but it can add up.  I usually set all of them to highest before rendering out the track as audio for mixing, or I just freeze the track if need be (setting everything to max quality isn't friendly to my cpu!)

I have many others including those in Komplete 12, but I don't use them near as much as those above.   

My most-used fx are probably Valhalla Delay and Supermassive, and I mention those because fx can pretty radically change the base sound.   I sometimes disable the synth plugin fx, or some of them--it may depend on whether they are being modulated internally in some way.  Repro's fx in particular are very good.  Someone mentioned Dune 3 above, I demoed it and it has very good fx as well.

[bill5]

8 hours ago, DeltaJockey said:

I may be stating the obvious here, but these type of "confessions", I always find very interesting. As it's a way to discover worthy software which you might otherwise never have the fortune to cross paths with. I've ventured into new software, (and hardware) purely from reading about what others talk about

I hear you. Not sure if that's a good or bad thing.  I have tried dozens and I still have synths I haven't begun to explore thoroughly enough...so I'm resisting the urge to try more....but I'm curious about what others are liking these days. 

[David R]

My go-to have already mostly been named — Kontakt, Diva, Repro, Softube Model 84, Arturia OBX.

 

one that I haven’t seen mentioned that I used a lot was Waves Element and Codex, though Codex is quickly getting supplanted by Pigments for my wavetable needs.

[erik_nie]

For live usage I used Mainstage with all internal synths, VB3 and sforzando with all my collected samples.

I had too much stability issues with several VST that I did not want te be afraid with every update and limited those.

I even sampled favorite sounds from VSTs
In the end I went with hardware... 

 

For studio

[David Emm]

I have a few secondary curiousity pieces like Surge XT, but the go-tos:

 

* Logic's Alchemy (At this point, my oldest modern softsynth, with several Camel Audio patch sets)

 

* Logic's Sampler (a small cheat because it holds all of my Korg workstation samples, SFZ libraries and etc.)

 

* Pianoteq 7 (Steinway & Petrof)

 

* Cloud D-50 (A good VA and orchestra support)

 

* Spitfire orchestral anything (I have a bouquet of their subsets, such as Epic Brass)

 

* Cherry Audio Memorymode (All the Moog I personally need now)

 

* AAS Chromaphone (A far easier physical modeler to use than Sculpture, for me)

 

* AAS Strum (Acoustic and e-guitar physical modeler)

 

* G-Force M-Tron Pro (Mellotron, with a couple of their oddball patch sets)

[Justin Havu]

My go-to's are Addictive Keys, Omnisphere, and Arturia V-Collection 8.  I try to use hardware whenever I can, mainly the MODX-7 as well as the Behringer synths I have. 

 

I'm still severly lacking in really good organs.  I've got B3-V and DB-33, as well as a couple of the free ones.  The dry sounds are okay, but the weak point for me are the Leslie sims.  I've yet to see any software instrument get it "right."

[mcgoo]

Anything with the name Spectrasonics in front of it. As a matter of fact, I'm fairly certain they could release a software instrument built on fart noises and I'd buy it without having heard a single demo because I know it'd be brilliant. Not sure if that's blind trust, zealous fandom or just experience, but either way, it's truth. 

[bill5]

2 hours ago, David R said:

My go-to have already mostly been named — Kontakt,

? Kontakt isn't a synth, although some synths require it as a host. You mean Reaktor? 

[David R]

1 hour ago, bill5 said:

? Kontakt isn't a synth, although some synths require it as a host. You mean Reaktor? 

A bunch of other people have listed things that are not, strictly speaking, synths. I don’t use Reaktor live at all because it is such a CPU hog. I do love Monark though. 

[Fleer]

Arturia Collection & Pigments

Spectrasonics Omnisphere

Kilohearts PhasePlant

EW Forbidden Planet

AAS Chromaphone

Dawesome Novum

Dawesome Abyss

Reason Friktion

UVI Falcon

[Tusker]

15 hours ago, DeltaJockey said:

I may be stating the obvious here, but these type of "confessions", I always find very interesting. As it's a way to discover worthy software which you might otherwise never have the fortune to cross paths with. I've ventured into new software, (and hardware) purely from reading about what others talk about

 

Indeed! This conversation has reminded me of really great synths which are still on my system, which used to be top of mind, but which I haven't cracked open in awhile. LOL.

 

Christmas in September!! 👍 👍

[Baldwin Funster]

I must have at least a hundred 32 bit vsti' synths I got from KVR about 5 years ago that are mostly synthedit projects from amateur builders. A few are very good, a couple are useless. I have barely even unzipped maybe 5% of them. I got frustrated with using windows in any music production or live music applications. 

One if my favorite is Dirtbag, the heaviest distortion organ ever. I can still use these in Reaper but I'm heavy into iOS apps at this time.

[Mighty Motif Max]

I don't do a lot with software synths; most of my VI's are for acoustic/orchestral instruments and percussion, with my synth patches coming from hardware keyboards. That said, I do get a good amount of use out of Izotope Iris 2, Brainworx bx_oberhausen (rather cpu heavy though) and the BEAT magazine (monophonic) version of this plugin, Thorn (https://dmitrysches.com/products/thorn). Mostly for synth basses and pads generally. Two of those are very cheap most of the time...bx_oberhausen is definitely an exception but I got it with some sort of promo for free, so that may happen again.

[KuruPrionz]

Some that are currently in my Fishman Triple Play arsenal:

Arturia Analog Lab V

Izotope Iris 2

IK Syntronik 2

Green Oak Software Crystal 

Native Instruments Massive

u-he Podolski, Triple Cheese, Zebralette

Vember Audio Surge

MOK Waverazor

Cherry Audio Lowdown

Brainworx Oberhausen

 

Most of these were free or on sale. I can't say too much about them because Triple Play allows up to 4 simultaneous "splits" and I tend to just choose preset sounds based on different ADSR parameters and see what happens. I just got 2 synths from Noise Engineering, their Freequel bundle. I love the interfaces since they are all sliders and Triple Play has no knobs for adjusting parameters. Sliders are easy to parse visually and easy to adjust using a mouse, handy. Plus they have some great sounds available. 

 

I dabble with an Xkey 25 but I suck at keyboards, again there are no knobs. I have some other Cherry Audio synths, the sounds are good but the idea of adjusting something like the 8 voice with so many knobs is not something I want to do. For that matter, I dabble with synths. Like Mighty Max, I'm more interested in sample banks. 

I just last night explored IK Miroslav Philharmonik 2 and Cinematic Percussion and those are fun, lots of great sounds. IK Clavitube is pretty cool and you can strum it on Triple Play and it responds well. 

 

 

[bill5]

6 hours ago, David R said:

A bunch of other people have listed things that are not, strictly speaking, synths. 

? Like? The Spitfire orchestral mention was one I missed, but some of this stuff I'm not familiar with, so curious. Regardless, Kontakt isn't a synth. The topic isn't "favorite plugins of any kind"

 

I also like ob-xD for a very nice (and free) Oberheim thing.

[Jim Alfredson]

Arturia Pigments
u-he Diva

 

I use hardware for most everything else.