While free VSTi's are great if that's all you can afford (and I could end up in that boat), the best VSTi synths are Spectrasonics Omnisphere 2, UVI Falcon, MOTU MachFive ver 3 (which uses a custom UI of the UVI Player), Native Instruments Komplete 11, and the Aturia collection. If you can wait until the weeks around Black Friday, The Aturia, UVI and Native Instrument's software are half price. I can't remember if MOTU's MacFive is half on Black Friday... Omnisphere 2 is never discounted. All of those would be tremendous bargains at half price. I have Komplete 10, and MachFive Ver 3. If I only concentrated on Synths, The Omnisphere 2 is considered the best of all, and I would have gotten it. I can't afford it since it's not a priority, though I have their Trillian Bass, and Keyscape. I focus more on real instruments including sampled ones. I have plenty of Synths. Komplete 11 is the best bargain at half price (On Black Friday)... $300.00. I have Komplete 10 and Una Corda Piano. You get a huge amount of bread and butter sounds, like Hammond, Farfasia and Vox Organs, Scarbee Rhodes, Wurlitzer piano, and Electric Bass, Acoustic pianos, Una Corda FX piano, 8 gigs of Vienna Instruments orchestral instruments plus some of Native Instrument's own. It comes with dozens of synths including Monark (Mini Moog), FM, Absinth, Battery, Retro Machines (Vintage Synths) collection, Reaktor 6, and many more. It also includes excellent FX including Reflektor, Replica, the excellent sounding Solid Compressor, Solid Dynamics, and Solid EQ (modeled on API) and more. Those are as good as the Waves Compressors which I also have. Also included is Guitar Rig 5. Komplete includes 155 gigabytes of sounds and instruments including Session Horns, The Grandeur Acoustic Piano (Not nearly as good as the Garritan CFX Lite piano, but a bargain included here). The included drums are not that good. Having the Kontakt 5 also allows you to buy third party instruments and FX that require Kontakt to run. Some are high priced (I have Session Horns Pro, and Soundiron Requium, Venius and Mercury Choirs, Traveller Pump Organ and Italian Pipe Organ, while some great ones are free. Spitfire Audio recently had 40 different Instruments... each for $3. in their Labs series. Some were awful, but some were very nice. They've discontinued them but will soon make most free. Sign up to learn when. They require full Kontakt 5. The Cheapest version of Komplete doesn't include the full Kontakt, so those libraries won't work with it. If I lost everything and had to start over (and that's a possibility) I would try to save up for Komplete 11 at half price. That would get me back in the game in every area except drums. The Aturia V collection 6 is $500. now, but should be $250. around Black Friday. It's also a tremendous bargain for synths. Their Modular Moog is expecially realistic... I know, because I used to own a Moog Prodigy. Aturia Analog Lab is $89. and on Black Friday would be $45. A very inexpensive bargain. The Sampletank synths wouldn't be as good as the above, but if priced on sale low enough would also be an excellent option for rock bottom price. On a budget, the cheapest (and still maybe the 2nd most awesomely powerful in this list) is UVI Falcon which is $350. now, but on Black Friday for a week or two, it would be $175. I would like to own Omnisphere 2 and UVI Falcon but can't afford them. As I mostly use "real" sampled instruments (and have huge numbers of synths) I have other priorities. On an absolute low budget, you could make some excellent songs with the included synths in Sonar Platinum and Producer X3. From what I hear from you, I think you'd be happiest with UVI Falcon when It's half price. They may run a half price sale on it before Black Friday, so register on the UVI site. It would probably do the best for the Gary Numan type synth sounds. If you register with UVI, MOTU, Native Instruments and Aturia they will constantly send you promotions of sales they have going on. I get promotions for UVI every week. The same for other Music Software companies. Spectrasonics doesn't ever send promotions. P.S. Everyone should look at the Waves site. They have the best emulation of the famous 1176 (on sale from $250. to only $39.) and LA 2 and 3 compressors ($29. each). The LA 3 is solid state. They have the best API compressors on sale for $50.)They are very cheap and if you don't have one of the excellent ones by Softtube (including the ones they made for Cakewalk Pro channel), Overloud or the Native Instruments Solid Compressors, the Waves are as good as the real hardware. Having one of that type of compressor is essential to running a Pro studio. $29. would give you a state of the art professional compressor as good as in any recording studio in the world. _____________________________________________________ My YouTube channel...
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCz9R0AoPFTn4A3iAFTSqVvQ I only posted two temp demos of songs using my new recording equipment and VSTi's, so far. Most are 30 or 40 years old. My YouTube playlist of Software instruments shows most of the best, but doesn't concentrate on Software Synths. I have 70% percent of them.
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLH50mMkPNp3vwfUJy-slmolzwuqbSyY8j post edited by Musicers - 4 minutes ago