Odyssey

hyena wrote:i continually read people complaining about Tubesynth, saying its crap and useless.
i am a sound designer, ableton live certified trainer and i teach synthesis as my main job. i'm a synthesizer enthusiast, now my hardware gear is a bit reduced but i have the mpc live mk1, a 12u x 104hp eurorack modular synth and a bunch of other stuff. just to point out that im not exactly a newbie...of course my opinion is as good as anyone else.

i'm surprised by the hate towards tubesynth as i always found it a great virtual synth! while i agree on Bassline being too basic and a bit uninspiring, i find tubesynth great for many reasons:
-its a classic virtual analog with some unusual twists
-continually sweepable waveforms on both vco's
-waveforms modulatable by lfo and envelopes
-ringmod and suboscillator
-the unusual boost\cut sweepable eq on oscillator 2!
-all the detuning\doubling effects both on oscillator 1 and global
-hard sync
-many gain stage points with very nice saturation
-the great third auxiliary envelope!!! usually it defaults as pitch envelope but can be routed to other stuff as well
-the overall big fat gritty sound of it.

presets are "meh" as usual,but if you spend some time on it i think you'll end up appreciating it a bit more!

thanks for ur insight; from my perspective the issue with tubesynth is not in its technical features or specs, its all to do with the tonal quality of the sound, it had cold and glassy tone that does not mesh well with sampled content.

It also suffers from the flatness that i often hear in most vst synths, where the sounds dont have the same 3d sound dynamics that i get from hardware synths.

so the issue is it almost to perfect in producing the sound which gives it a lifeless quality; for instance when i use the filter cut off and the resonance, there is not much interplay between the resonance and the cutoff, while if u do the same on the microkorg there is a marvelous interaction between the two parameter that adds character to the sound, but even the raw oscillators on the microkorg sound better and more impactful, as far as weightiness and vibrancy of the tone.

yah i get what you say.
while i agree about the filter being a bit uninspiring, i find the general sound of tubesynth really pleasant to my ears, especially when in distorted\saturated territory.
but of course it's a matter of taste!
i personally don't like the sound of the microkorg that much but have friends who love it!

As far as “musical” filters are concerned, again, one persons meat is another persons poison.
It’s utterly subjective.
I for one, HATE, flabby filters with their dreadful old “warm” even-harmonic driven crapness.
I like my filters, cold, neutral, like grey razor blades.
I want cold, computer hardness, soulless math-driven icy distance.
You can all chase your sad EDM/Bored of Canada leaky filter nonsense lol.

Neurone wrote:As far as “musical” filters are concerned, again, one persons meat is another persons poison.
It’s utterly subjective.
I for one, HATE, flabby filters with their dreadful old “warm” even-harmonic driven crapness.
I like my filters, cold, neutral, like grey razor blades.
I want cold, computer hardness, soulless math-driven icy distance.
You can all chase your sad EDM/Bored of Canada leaky filter nonsense lol.

You have a filter on odyssey (or Tubesynth), Akai insert filters and Air insert filters to choose from.
And if you like none of them, you can route the synth out and use your favourite hardware filter.
So that's not a big issue at the end.

Straker wrote:You have a filter on odyssey (or Tubesynth), Akai insert filters and Air insert filters to choose from.
And if you like none of them, you can route the synth out and use your favourite hardware filter.
So that's not a big issue at the end.

Lol, I’m fine with the whatever Akai have provided, I can adapt as necessary.

Neurone wrote:

Straker wrote:You have a filter on odyssey (or Tubesynth), Akai insert filters and Air insert filters to choose from.
And if you like none of them, you can route the synth out and use your favourite hardware filter.
So that's not a big issue at the end.

Lol, I’m fine with the whatever Akai have provided, I can adapt as necessary.

Yeah I am also fine.
I don't like Air filter much, both the insert and the one on synths, but sometimes they are good to tame high frequencies and darken sounds.
Odissey filter is quite weird and I am still trying to understand how to use it and if I want to use it.
Anyway I like Akai insert filters, so I can akways use them as last chance.
All good.

Neurone wrote:You can all chase your sad EDM/Bored of Canada leaky filter nonsense lol.

Listen now - "Music Has the Right to Children" is one of the greatest electronic albums of the late 90's.

EnochLight wrote:

Neurone wrote:You can all chase your sad EDM/Bored of Canada leaky filter nonsense lol.

Listen now - "Music Has the Right to Children" is one of the greatest electronic albums of the late 90's.

Absolutely.
And still a lot to learn from BOC in 2021.
They were using a fraction of what we have now.

EnochLight wrote:

Neurone wrote:You can all chase your sad EDM/Bored of Canada leaky filter nonsense lol.

Listen now - "Music Has the Right to Children" is one of the greatest electronic albums of the late 90's.

I bought it on the day it came out.

EDM and BOC in the same sentence

Found something strange in the odyssey..

You can assign the S&H to the VCF and to the FM of VCO2 to make scifi noises, kind of the way R2D2 and C3PO talk.. bliip bliip.
The S&H is based on the LFO. When I switch the LFO to tempo sync, the S&H no longer works.. Having this tempo synced would be fun, but I can't get it to work..

Is that based on the behaviour of the original? Or just a bug? Workarounds? Sampling and timestretching should work, but there might be easier ways?

example of this type of sounds is in the FX presets: controlled arpeggios e.g.

One 'solution' I found: 1hz = 60bpm, so calculating is quite easy. Unfortunately you cannot enter exact values for the LFO, you can only use the slider..

So after 4 years I can say that I didn't use Odissey anymore.
It has some good sounds but the UI is really painful.
And I also stopped using the other synths as well, I just go for some autosampled keygroups or Opx4 when I need those kind of sounds.

Straker wrote:So after 4 years I can say that I didn't use Odissey anymore.
It has some good sounds but the UI is really painful.
And I also stopped using the other synths as well, I just go for some autosampled keygroups or Opx4 when I need those kind of sounds.

The layout of Odyssey is horrible but it sounds great. This topic came up on another forum today so this is 2nd time I'm posting this video. Jorb has the best breakdown of Odyssey I've seen. Starts at 18:33.

B-Wise wrote:

Straker wrote:So after 4 years I can say that I didn't use Odissey anymore.
It has some good sounds but the UI is really painful.
And I also stopped using the other synths as well, I just go for some autosampled keygroups or Opx4 when I need those kind of sounds.

The layout of Odyssey is horrible but it sounds great. This topic came up on another forum today so this is 2nd time I'm posting this video. Jorb has the best breakdown of Odyssey I've seen. Starts at 18:33.

Very nice video, thanks a lot.
Yes, Odissey definitely sounds good, the problem with these kind of synths is that they don't work good on a small touchscreen, they become very uncomfortable.
If you have all controls at hand, you can play them for hours, and they are really creative and funny.
But on a touchscreen, they should change the UI completely to adapt it to a different way of working.
I mean, they should keep the core and all parameters but organize them in a "touchcreen" way of working.
Air Opx4 is good at that, for example, it's an FM synth but laid out in an intuitive way, you have macros, to tweak it, you have the operators with formants, you have the submixes of the operators, the noise sample, each one clear enough and assignable to qlinks.
It is customed to an MPC.
Odissey is just a "photographic" copy of the original hardware into a small screen, it's very confusing.