Soft Synths Begone!

I have not had any luck with playback soft synths. I am not talking about subtractive synths like the Moog or Z3Ta which work fine.

I have a setup with a DAW for Sonar and a separate machine for soft synths. My soft synth machine has a latency of less that 3 mils. So far so good.

In the past, I tried Gigastudio. In particular, I wanted great piano and violins.

The gigapiano was good on the low notes and the high notes, but had a phase problem on the all important middle range. The violin samples I bought did not cut it.

I continued to use my Korg X2 for all sample playback needs. The piano (2 meg) was just plain better than the gigapiano. Everyone who heard it agreed. It cut though, had more presence, and was just more fulfilling. I never upgraded to gigastudio for XP, and just forgot about my giga licence.

I tried Sampletank but to me it was cheezy.

Next I bought Kontact 2. I never could get it to work right, but from what I could tell, the pianos and strings sounded poor. One of these days I should re-load it and spend a bunch of time to figure it out. I am sure that somewhere out there I could find some samples that would work for me if I spent enough time and money looking for them.

I tried Colossus. It comes on 8 DVDs. The pianos sound like they are recorded from about 30 feet away in a large hall. The reverb is part of the sample. It is weird to play a piano that sounds like it is 30 feet away. Colossus has a couple "brite" pianos that are close mic'ed but are thin sounding. In addition, the velocity curve did not match my controller so notes would be very loud when they shouldn't. The violins are VERY poor. The solo violins have a strange blowing sound like the breath from a flute. I played violin for 6 years and I never heard anything like this. The string sections have a long swell built into the sample. Good for long pads but useless to play melodies. String arrangements from pop songs often have very fast moving melodies. I cover songs that have string sections, and I find the strings on this product to be useless.

Finally, I popped for Dimension Pro. It is clearly better than Colossus, but still no home run. The pianos are usable but not great. The strings swell too slowly. The tenor sax sounds like a tenor sax, but no growl is available. Perhaps Dimension Pro's value is in other kinds of sounds than piano and strings.

All through this I have found my 10 year old Korg X2 to be superior for piano, strings, trumpet, organ, and sax. It has 8 megs of sample memory. I get the impression that Korg would spend huge amounts of time fine honing to get things to sound right, and that software playback manufactuers more or less just sample and go. Huge sample size is not enough.

So I just ordered a Korg Triton Extreme. I hope it sounds like the X2 with some refinements. There was really no way to try it out at guitar center. Whenever I went there some hip hop guy would be playing it.

Perhaps Korg will introduce a soft synth that is a clone of the triton. That would be nice.