Caltrops - No Stairway to Heaven





	[quote name="FoK"][quote name="Entropy Stew"]After having fucked around with a bunch of synth shit, I have found these three bits of software that give me wood: 1. <a href="http://www.e-officedirect.com/FLStudio/English/frames.html">FL Studios</a> (formerly FruityLoops) Studio-in-a-box with a <b>gorgeous</b> interface. VST host, great sequencer, effects, a few generators, etc. 50$ on the low end to 150$ with all the fixings. 2. <a href="http://www.pluginspot.com/English/frames.html">SimSynth Live</a> Sounds somewhere between a minimoog and an oberheim (at least that's what they say). CHEAP at 35$. I liked this one because my unskilled self could actually get a wide variety of cool sounds to eminate from it, as it had a relatively simple interface. A demo of this comes with FL Studios. 3. <a href="http://www.native-instruments.com/index.php?absynth2_us">Absynth</a> Holy FUCK this thing is amazing. It's orgasm of envelope editing capabilities are something like 2 generations beyond anything else I've played with. Nice interface, but hard to use (mainly due to the 2000lb gorilla fuckton of features and flexibility, and my lack of a manual). Expensivish (like most Native Instruments products) at 150$, but easily worth the price. Also happens to sound amazing. -/ES/-[/quote] Thanks for those pointers. I haven't used Fruity Loops before, but I've heard it's decent at what it does. I just obtained a copy of Ableton Live v2.0 which is supposed to be the bomb... the reviews are saying it's better than Acid, which is the industry standard... it's set up specifically so that you can be the crazy DJ experimenter in a rock band, sampling stuff in real-time and fucking with the loops, also in real-time, with tempo that you can tap in. I'll let you know about that. SimSynth Live sounds interesting... at 35 bucks it may be the first soft-synth I actually, you know, purchase. I actually have Absynth already, but I never use it, because (avert your eyes, SB!) <i>the cracked version is really fucking unstable.</i> I have a hard enough time keeping my VST instruments from dying on me during a session, Absynth seems to need a freshly booted system to even launch... after which it seems to sound great for the 30 seconds it works before crashing. I assume the boxed version is more stable... I've bought software with that theory before, though, and have come away disappointed. Frankly, my system is the ancient live-in grandmother of computers: every morning I walk into the room and wonder if it will still be alive today. For my VST synth sounds lately I've been using <a href="http://www.vintagesynth.org/misc/pro52.shtml">NI's Pro-52</a>, which is pretty flexible and very stable. There's a new version (Pro-53) out now I guess, it probably sounds better. Who can keep up? If you want something that's really fun to use and has pretty much all the capabilities you'd want (except digital audio, argh!) in a synth workstation, let me point you towards <a href="http://www.propellerheads.se/">Reason</a>, which is the neatest toy ever, and comes within inches of being something anyone could use to make finished music. It's got a really nice, intuitive interface, good documentation (in pdf form) and approximately 1 skillion synth and drum sounds available (as well as loop playback, which you can use with ReCycle to get all Fatboy Slim and re-distribute your loop sounds using the onboard sampler). The cons are, unfortunately, that you can't record digital audio on top of what you've got without using <a href="http://www.syntrillium.com/cep/">something else</a>, and, although when you're working you're feeling like everything is just great and you're in beep-and-boop heaven, when you play it back for friends you can't help thinking it sounds a little cheezy somehow. I think it has to do with data compression on their samples. Rebirth is great, too, though it only does one thing (emulate 2 analog synths and 2 analog drum machines - the 808 and 909), but it sounds about perfect. Adding a little Rebirth shit to a mix makes it about 50% better in one step, its stereo delay works miracles. Anyways, thanks again. I've got some new toys lying in my "received" directory, I'll let you know how they go. FoK[/quote]