why buy synth plugins?

is it because you feel better about a product's quality if you spend a lot of money on it?
in my moderate experience, there are few things if any that you absolutely need to do that you can't do with P8



or synth 1



both of which are free and awesome.

is there any indispensable vst that you think would change my mind?

i kind of feel like all you're paying for most of the time appears to be a fancy, resource hogging, humongous VSTi and intrusive copy protection.

Aren't all VSTs free??

Nah, I think with some of the bigger synths you're paying a premium for the sound design and flashy GUI, or maybe the closer modelling of classic gear that some care about.

Sometimes it takes hearing a Moog filter in person to realise how terrible 99% of digital filters are, but that's another discussion...

here you can find tons of free vst plugins and instruments
http://www.vst4free.com/
softwares like Massive or Minimoog and ARP 2600 by arturia (which are not free, but you can download cracked versions via P2P networks) got better quality in my opinion
but of course you can do great sounds with the free VSTI

My friend recently got a copy of Komplete by NI and now I'm pretty much sold, It will be a long time coming as I have other things to take care of, but the effects are incredible.

One reason I buy synths is because there's not much good freeware on the mac side. Another consideration is because I'm a preset tweaker, and payware tends to have more and better presets.

When I did have a PC, I tried both those synths. Didn't really care for either of them; well Synth1 was okay, hated Superwave, but thn again I'm not a fan of the synth it tries to emulate. I did like ASynth, daHornet, SQ8L, and Polyiblit however. There's so many out there that it really becomes a matter of separating the wheat from the chaff.

Coz wrote:Sometimes it takes hearing a Moog filter in person to realise how terrible 99% of digital filters are, but that's another discussion...

Yeah no doubt, but at the end of the day, the only thing that matters is if the sound helps to make the song dope. Running plugins through high quality outboard hardware helps tremendously.

Different-sounding synths are different.

I'm not much a fan of any ITB synths except for maybe Waldorf's PPG Wave. I keep meaning to bang some soft-synths through my desk and outboard to try and find some synth-plugin love. I'm sure I will.

mp3 wrote:

Coz wrote:Sometimes it takes hearing a Moog filter in person to realise how terrible 99% of digital filters are, but that's another discussion...

Yeah no doubt, but at the end of the day, the only thing that matters is if the sound helps to make the song dope. Running plugins through high quality outboard hardware helps tremendously.

I agree.

I sold my Andromeda because it was so tricky to balance in a mix. With my setup at the time it was like living in a rundown one bedroom flat and having a Ferrari on the drive!

The problem comes (in my case) when you downgrade to a Ford Fiesta and wish you still had the Ferrari...

Coz wrote:Aren't all VSTs free??

i spent all day searching for a NI vst for mac n said **** it n paid for it

then today i found it but i absolutely cannot find a mac version for prism

it's **** killing me i want it so bad but just can't afford to spend money on some thing that'll pop up for free at some point. plus it's only about 5MB & i don't wanna pay $80 for it

anyone that can find me a hookup for this http://www.native-instruments.com/#/en/ ... tor-prism/

let me know

From my experience you get what you pay for

i don't think the get what you pay for thing really applies with (some types of) software.
look at reaper compared to protools or SAW studio, for instance.
or reaplugs, which are a free plugin bundle that are versatile and utterly professional.
the elektrostudio pack rivals any pay-for synth that i've demoed.

the nice thing about many free synths in my opinion is that they don't try to do as much as the megalodon pay-for synths
and thusly you can combine them to get the desired effect. the smaller the synth the better it works modularly.
also you don't often have to deal with an overly humongous/graphic intensive GUI.
that said i do want to demo absynth

but in the meantime have any of you tried crossfade loop by expert sleepers?
deceptively simple concept, awesome sound.

Nym wrote:

that's one of my fave soft synths ever...


NYM you are giving out gold without making people dig for it...

Lol ^^^wurdd!!
One of my faves too

sometimes i use the Chainer vst host to test softsynths and create synth chains
do you know some good free vst host (Chainer is not free)
thankx

Jeskola Buzz is free and actually one of the best VST hosts out there, via Polac Loaders.

Steep initial learning curve (you'll get over it), and how fun it is to count in hex!

^
thanks for the infos