A VST for Me

[jeeves.207]

I've been curious about VST plug-ins for a while. A lot of the onboard sounds in a AL are fantastic, but sometimes they just don't cut it, no matter what I do to them.
I have a couple sounds I want to incorporate into my sessions (such as winds, strings, horns, sirens, etc.) and wondered what people are using for their plugins.
And let's make this more interesting... Explain how you came to the conclusion of which to choose.

[mbird21]

'winds, strings, horns, sirens', to me are universal timbres, if you mean winds as in white noise sweeps etc its noise, noise is noise whatever synth you use so ableton synth would sound so different then any other synth vst in the world, its the modulation envelopes you have and lfo etc that is only difference from synth to synth etc in regards to the 'winds', if you mean however winds as in woodwind instruments well thats different thing, ofc you concentrating on the treble in them instruments so the difference again between them would be how thick you want them to be with regards to how synthetic you want them to sound, obviously 2 waveforms, detuned from each other by couple of cents and out of phase is going to sound obviously not like a real woodwind, so point im making is thats differnece the modulation and designing tools open to you fromn synth to synth and the extras like how many voices you have as a maximum and is it polyphonic or monophonic, in which case only one note can be played at same time, all these things are only difference between them.

Difference is between ableton instruments and vst's IMO is that the vsts come with onboard fx where as for obvious reasons ableton is self contained so you use the effects in house and no need for the ableton synths to have fx with them etc.

Its a tough one like mate, i mean i use sylenth1 mostly and thats just because its what i feel at home with after all the time using it and i can get a sound pretty much of anything pretty quickly now with it, i tend to switch to alchemy for my pads and strings. Like sometimes i dont want the usual synth strings that are just too cliche now and want to create a different textured pad or string, so with Alchemy i can bring in say a vocal and timestrech it out to create a long vocal pad, and then i go to the 2nd section and then import maybe a bell sample from sylenth 1 and then timestrech it out for some treble on the string and then on 3rd use a sine for the bass part of it so give it some bottom and maybe if im really in mood for a real robotic feel then send the midi track to a tal vocoder with a audio track as the modulater and put a vocal on the modulater and then pan left and right cause the tal is a monophonic device and then play the strings and vocal through the vocoder.

Lmao sorry long winded just wanted to say how my workflow goes when im deciding what for what etc

[jeeves.207]

@mbird21

long-winded explanations are what I'm after, so no apology needed. Thanks for all your incite! =)

[mbird21]

thanks mate, i have bad habit of going off on a bible, ofc its just my way of working when im doing me own tracks, so everyone will have different way of seeing things and might think my way is shite and vice versa but good to see what other peoples workflow in that wau is like, thought there would be alot more answers to this post, shame really

[antarktika]

another topic you might want to consider is synthesis vs sampling, as a lot of people who are looking for realistic articulations of orchestral instruments are more likely to opt for the latter. Things like the EastWest libraries, Symphobia, (both fairly pricy) or just NI Kontakt's built in sounds are all options in this regard. I tend to just use the sounds in the Kontakt library, as I don't have many hundreds of dollars to blow on some of the more renowned ones.

[mbird21]

Defo Symphobia is amazing, if you could afford it, aslo just adding from the guy aboves recommendations, if you play the piano, get a hold of demo of truepianos, i use this all the time for writing chords before going near the vsts and synths, really great thing to me at least.