Ableton Forum

the synths from these guys, Time Control Productions, have some nice pads and are kind of fun. I find I usually need to use a compressor with Bizune...

http://www.kvraudio.com/get/1829.html

I'm using D'cota and Hypesonic. Hypersonic has a ton of other instrumentation but I like it quite a bit.

looking at reaktor soon.

I second Cameleon 5000 and Spectrasonics Atmosphere.
Two VERY good synths.

My problem with the Spectrasonics synth is that I can't find the way to assign all the knobs to midi contollers. Which sucks, yet the base sounds are just so good that you can't pass it up!

HG Fortune STS-24. Its a synth edit creation but dont hold that against it. It creates some great evolving dark and droney pads

http://www.kvraudio.com/get/1597.html

Those all are beauties. Atmosphere would be better, if you could tweak the presets a little.
I would vote for Nebula M42 and Absynth. Very nice evolving pads, with a lot of modulation options.
VyrSyn Cube and Tera are also fine. And Rhino...
For me, it's how much you can tweak. I luv to filter a part of a pad on my eletro harmonix bass synth, to get a harsh, subby sound. The old battle man x presets...
best,
Sub

I'm addicted to using the Resonators plugin for pad/string sounds. I feed it pretty much any continuous noise, set it to 100% wet, and automate the pitches (often using envelopes of different length for weird chord progressions.)

Alternately, an 808 kick -> filter delay -> resonators -> reverb sounds sick (more of a plucked-string than bowed-string sound.)

There's a bit of a learning curve writing chords/melodies via envelopes, but the huge advantage is that you can do per-voice glissandos, as well as pitching all of the voices via the "I Note" controller. I wish there were more software instruments that worked this way.

Used this approach a lot in this set: http://rodlogic.com/audio/cne_phoenixfest_2005.mp3

I've got a bug in Crystal in Logic Pro 6: I can get to all the functions on its panel by clicking way LOWER on the screen, eg. to get a bank I have to click in patch.... anyone know what to do?