Quote:
Originally Posted by
zerocrossing
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Judging by a lot of what I see here and on KVR, we are a small but vocal minority. Most people want simple, good sounding instruments, or instruments with a ton of presets, factory and third party. My guess is that 80% of synth users stick to presets and at best, tweak around with them if there are knobs. I’m still really surprised at all the pushback we got from merely suggesting that another LFO or EG would have made the Prologue a much better instrument. That seemed to translate into people’s heads as, “add a eurorack style bank of modulation sources.” It’s funny, I listened (and loved) all the Prologue demos and it seemed to me like there was more modulation than the synth itself seemed to have. I was listening to the videos while making dinner. When I went back and watched them, it was clear that they were just presets where the presenter was just manually tweaking while a note or chord was being held. A totally valid technique, but not my deal.
It’s even worse in the software world. It seems like the flow of constant preset banks is constant. It makes me wonder how many people have actually programmed their own sounds ever. Some developers even make free preset player versions of their software and make money by selling patches.
That's funny, I think there are ton of people that only use presets. However, I have seen some pretty nice tutorials of people showing how they like to synthesis on soft synths. And some of them have more commitment/patience than me on the computer using a mouse no less.
Quote:
Originally Posted by
zerocrossing
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But even for myself, I’m not going to spend the kind of money they’d have to charge to make a knobby ROMpler, because... Omnisphere... Falcon... etc. I don’t feel that issue a lot of people talk about when they complain about using a mouse to make patches. I use a trackball! (Kensington Expert Mouse) I use an iPad Pro (running Lemur) and even the knobs of my trusty Novation Remote 61. I feel my results are as good as any hardware ROMpler (maybe better) and I can make space for the knobby instruments that people are making. I just think the marketing departments at Korg, Roland, Kurzweil, etc, are not going to let the design department design the instrument you crave just because a few hundred people might buy it at the price they’d have to charge to make a profit.
Well, I think the results of those rompler soft synths are pretty fun off the bat, but the problem I have with those is that a lot of soft synth rompler patches are so unique sounding that if you like the presets (not to say you couldn't edit them) and then use them, you'll find other people using those same ones and well it's not flattering. Yeah, people do it all the time without shame, but to me it sounds different when you use a really intersesting patch. This is just me harping about cheesy overuse of unique presets.
You're probably right about no one wanting to make a knobby rompler. It's too bad because there's a lot of potential. But now I'm not really caring about it anyways because the Waldorf Quantum is here to save the day.