very interesting thread. I do not say anything here to disagree with anyone or to try to prove a point--I speak from personal experience and being a producer with clients and deadlines for years. Believe me, Roland, Yamaha, and Korg have bigger fish to fry.-plus they'd be shooting themselves in the foot at the moment to make a softsynth that competes with their keyboards that all cost over $2000. They still sell a lot of keyboards while most of the American/European makers have kind of drifted off into the past. I think they might possibly do something hardware--I mean look how the UAD1/Powercore took the world by storm. I always thought it would be nice to have a PCI card--hence hardware--that gives you the best of your bread and butter sounds, pads, strings--I think EMU tried it but you have to have their sound card to make it work I think from the research I did at the time. Plus, who wants an EMU module anyway? I sold my P2000 2 years ago for only a few hundred dollars--I never liked the sound of it anyway. Great for making pretend and copying, but no emulative sounds. I did like the EMU Ultra Series Sampler (which was actually an Ensoniq engine after the companies merged--an I used mostly Akai sounds) and I loved Ensoniqs ZR76 for the tones. Ditched my Roland XV-5080 as well-some nice stuff--but hey, music changed--people don't use those tones anymore. Plus, you can't really say that Yamaha and Roland are sitting on their laurels--they bought Steinberg and Cakewalk so in a sense they are developing softsynths--but they are Japanese--it's not so important for them to put their name on the label--they want the market, go home and sit on the floor of their tatami rooms overlooking their ponds andgardens and eat sashimi with their friends and family:)
What I do have is a Korg Karma which does thing I can't imagine a computer ever doing--but it is definitely much better as a live machine. So complex--amazing axe--I take it to all of my live gigs now because I can create long grooves on the spot that rock (if I rock that particular night:)
Back to soft synths--I don't miss external modules. I'll tell you what I use--but it's not cheap. First of all I'll tell you what I have bought that I don't use--Hypersonic 2--I was hoping it was the all in all solution to the big 3 keyboards but I was wrong. What I look for are sounds that you would emulate and the best of each is what I seek after. I would imagine sampletank is the same--came with my pro-tools system but I never even tried it out--I will someday--just need to finish some deadlines first. But actually, it was the same problem when buying keyboards. Ensonic had the best drums/strings....Yamaha had the best pianos/ELP, Korg had great pads/drums/elps (horrible pianos--I hated the M1 because I was more into making music sound like real instruments) but I do see why it became so popular--you could produce a whole song on the thing that sounded great----at the time. Try it now!!!!!
Kurzweil (young chang) had some delicious sounding pads ELP's and other things. I had to have about 5 modules and 5 keyboards to do what I wanted to do until I finally sold everything while I could still get something for them--I have a colleague that is going to have to pay to get rid of his gear--and it ain't cheap over here to get rid of metal. So here is what I use now and if I had time I would put it up against any of the external modules for a comparison.
Pads--Atmosphere. I thought nothing could ever touch the Roland D-70 Ghosties patch and some of the Triton string pads/bells/textures. But this synth is absolutely a must have. It is really rich.
Piano--Ni Akoustik Piano/PMI Bosendorfer 290/Giga Steinway/290. I still use my hardware P120 for composition and working out parts--can't beat the latency of a hardware piece--I am very sensitive even at 2.9ms.
Rhodes-NI Elektrik piano/Emagic EVP 73. Lounge Lizard is ok but a little harsh for me.
Organ-B4 v.II
Drums-I use a real drummer but have a lot of sample libraries for demos.
Bass-real bass or Bass Legends Library--Giga or Akai
Guitars-I use a real guitarist but have used patches for playing arpeggios from Yellow Tools Guitars--Giga.
Strings-Sonic Implants Symphonic Strings--and sometimes Atmosphere to fill them out. If I was doing symphonies I would be forced to hire out, but my genre doesn't really demand it--though it would definitely be nicer.
Wurlitzer-Karma--hardware. Haven't found anything I can stand yet that is a softsynth.
If I want to do something RNB, then I dig out one of my loop libraries and hook up the Karma.
Wow, I was supposed to be working!!!!! Thanks for the thread.
Michael