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votes
Music Makers: Synth Players and Programmers
I love a good synth sound. How about you? Got a favorite hardware or software synthesizer? Tell us about it.
I love a good synth sound. How about you? Got a favorite hardware or software synthesizer? Tell us about it.
I don't really play keys myself, but I can program just about any synthesizer to get a good sound and compose some MIDI to do the heavy lifting for me. My current favorite is Arturia Pigments because it has a great sound engine and the most modulation options you'll find outside of a large modular system.
Hardware-wise, I have an old Alesis Micron I really like and a Korg MS2000R that I don't really use much anymore. For the last few years, I've been moving away from hardware on the synth side of things. Not that I don't love good ol' analog Moogs and Rolands, but software has advanced so much over the last decade that it's hard to tell the difference when you get down to a final mix. Also, things like instant recall and adding multiple copies of the same instrument within your DAW are way too appealing to pass up.
I love Pianoteq for piano, it's amazing, otherwise I also like the free TAL plugins, they are a bit wonky but sound great :
https://tal-software.com/products
My accordion synth project is using a placeholder sound created by adding four sine oscillators on the fundamental and first three harmonics. It's reasonably pleasant but I'm wondering what software I should use to figure out how to model a real instrument better? (It's not just tweaking dials and coming up with a sound - I need to understand how it works well enough to program it using a different audio library.)