Ableton Forum

http://www.sequencer.de/pix/access/Virus_Indigo.jpg

http://cachepe.zzounds.com/media/qualit ... 2b4a01.jpg

I am wanting to downsize my footprint. Hate to give up all those wonderful knobs but what's a man to do? These 2 units are similar in value. It looks like there's 5 knobs for realtime expression on the Snow and I assume the pitch and mod will work easily from a controller.

But does it sound better?

I googled some videos and the old indigos sounded better than the TI in all of them (probably a fluke). Is there a better small-footprint synth I could get - perhaps a Blofield? The Dave Smith Evolver was the best sounding but it is monophonic and that will not do. Should I trade in my beloved Indigo and get the Snow? Wondering also if the downloadable patches are as extensive for Snow as for the fullblown TI.

what about the virus c? I always loved that unit.

nowtime wrote:I am wanting to downsize my footprint. Hate to give up all those wonderful knobs but what's a man to do? These 2 units are similar in value. It looks like there's 5 knobs for realtime expression on the Snow and I assume the pitch and mod will work easily from a controller.

But does it sound better?

I googled some videos and the old indigos sounded better than the TI in all of them (probably a fluke). Is there a better small-footprint synth I could get - perhaps a Blofield? The Dave Smith Evolver was the best sounding but it is monophonic and that will not do. Should I trade in my beloved Indigo and get the Snow? Wondering also if the downloadable patches are as extensive for Snow as for the fullblown TI.

I "downsized" from a Virus Classic (B) to the Snow quite recently. I get way more studio use of out it now with the Virus Control plugin - I know some people love knob tweaking in the studio, but I seem to prefer mousing about when creating sounds.

Performance wise, as you say, there are 5 real-time performance knobs. The 3 soft-knobs can control just about anything, and there's the cutoff and resonance controls. Also, you can press the shift key which gives knob access to Part Volume, Transpose, Panorama, Filter Envelope and Amp Envelope - maybe not so handy live if you're keeping one hand on the keyboard.

You do mention controlling pitch and mod from a controller, in which case you are still free to set up other controls for the Virus parameters. Between a decent controller and the soft knobs/cutoff/resonance, you can control just about everything you want.

As far as I know, the TI patches work flawlessly on the Snow, you're just limited in terms of polyphony. As to the Indigo sounding better than the TIs - i really dunno - could be a subjective thing in which case you would be as well getting the same patches onto both synths right in front of you. I've compared and contrasted my Classic and Snow with the same patches - they sounded fairly similar to me, but when I started tweaking with the Snow's extra features they ended up sounding way better there

Hope that helps,

Mo

kind of off topic but if anyone in the Berlin area wants a Virus KB I'll sell it cheap or trade for something cool...

Thanks for your informative response mkelly.

Any other Snow users around care to chime in?

Yea you should

I'll trade you an Evolver desktop for you're Virus