Ableton Forum

davec1 wrote: been in the reason 4 beta, then?

Yeah

what synths do you have to compare it to?

I'm primarily a Reason user in terms of synths, although I have the rgcAudio ones (z3ta, Pentagon, etc) and Crystal. Oh, and I have Operator

But during the beta testing I downloaded demos for a pile of other things to make some comparissons - among others, Albino, Camelion 5000, Zebra, NI Massive, Absynth, Spectra, CronoX, Sytrus, and the GMedia ones.

The reason I prefer THOR is really a combination of its amazing sound quality, and its CPU friendiness. It doesn't just use a bit less... it uses ridiculously less than for example Massive. I could run 2 Massives, but more than a dozen THORs without any problem. I think that is useful, and is worth including in any comparisson.

That said, there were some among the VSTs I tested which did impress me enough to consider for future purchase. Especially Albino, Camelion and Zebra.

PS: also the ReMote mapping in Reason 4 works brilliantly with THOR, so as a keyboard player with a good control surface I could play it so easily straight out of the box - another real attraction

i like Automat, Operator, Crystal, and Triple Cheese

I checked out Surge last night, very slick GUI. Was listening through a shitty laptop sound card though, cause I'm still building my music pc. I like Surge and Zebra quite a bit now - I have a feeling I'll get one and then further on down the line, probably the other.

davec1 wrote:how do these synths (zebra, massive, sylenth1) fare in terms of cpu consumption?

N.I.'s synths usually are pretty demanding in this regard, aren't they?

I think there's still a N.I. summer sale going on till august 31st. buy 2 synths (massive, absynth 4, fm8), get one free. if you already have one of those, you can just buy one and get the third one free.

I was considering it, since I already have absynth 4, but the fm8 demo somehow didn't really tickle my fancy...


on a totally different note, I downloaded the zebra2 and surge demos yesterday, and my first impression was that the zebra2 gui was clearer to me than surge's, even though the first is on several pages...personal taste, of course....just as a warning that "more pages/tabs" doesn't necessarily mean it's less clear and more fiddly to use....

Sylenth is PC only so I have not tried it. Zebra is easier on the CPU than Massive. You can put in lots of modules in Zebra and make very CPU hungry patches, but that is not good sound design anyway. Massive has this (to me) odd construction where it initializes 4 voices at a time. So if you have a song with a monophonic bass and lead, Massive is using 8 voices worth of CPU instead of 2. In practice this makes it very heavy on CPU. Freeze is needed for sure.

I didn't really need any new synths, but I just purchased Absynth4, Massive and FM8 together at a ridiculously low price. I like FM8 because it is very low on CPU use. Got little use for Absynth actually. I do like Massive and may find a use for it. None of them please me the way Zebra does but then I think Zebra is the best all around workhorse(zebra) synth available today. I'll give these NI synths a couple months to speak to me and move them along if they don't.

And you are right, the Zebra GUI is superb. At one glance you can see the signal path so easily. I look at someone's presets and I immediately know what is going on. Some modulation could be easier to see at a glance (visual feedback). The synth is so deep that it is not possible to have everything on 1 page. However, you can work with a simple template and stay all on one page when you are learning.

Macintel Sylenth1 is slated for production

nebulae wrote:Macintel Sylenth1 is slated for production

yeah... looking forward to trying it out...

i have my synth list that im sticking to. To learn and another great synth comes along Sylenth

senator adam wrote:+1 for Surge

Raising thread from the dead to put in another +1 for Surge. The new 1.5 update is great.

Here's to keeping a dead thread going:

+1 for Zebra. Hands down the best sounding one to me. Plus Urs just wrote a cool randomizing preset for all his plug ins that you just click on to modify an existing preset (not that I don't have fun designing my own sounds from scratch with it too). Now I can really start to use Zrev!

I just tried Surge for the 1st time and unlike other synths I love how it handles the Lfo section. I can get some good results very quickly. This synth is def going on the list. I'm glad this thread was started, keepum coming.

dbolt wrote:I just tried Surge for the 1st time and unlike other synths I love how it handles the Lfo section. I can get some good results very quickly. This synth is def going on the list. I'm glad this thread was started, keepum coming.

Yeah. The surge LFOs are the best in the business.