What are your favourite instruments, that are surprisingly low on CPU?

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Igro wrote:Retrologue 2. One of the finest VA synth. Still have 29 days to demo it, but don't like the protection scheme.
V2 demo crashes Cubase Elements 8 :dog: and Reaper 5. It also doesn't appear in Bitwig!
I have version 1 and it is a problematic (sudden freezing). It might be related to Win 10 because with Win 7 and 8 it worked great.

Very little cpu usage with great sound though. It was one of my top favourite.

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Logic 9 stock ones. :tu:
This entire forum is wading through predictions, opinions, barely formed thoughts, drama, and whining. If you don't enjoy that, why are you here? :D ShawnG

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I think the only ones that have truly surpised me in how light they are on CPU would be u-he Zebra 2, Native Instruments FM8 and Vember Audio Surge. All three great for what they do, and all three have something I find hard to replace in character and functionality for programming my own sounds from scratch.

u-he Zebra 2 is mindblowingly light on CPU given how good it sounds, and it remains low even when throwing in the XMF filter and using audiorate modulation (filter FM). Love how I can have most of what I'd want from a scannable wavetable synth with its "graintables" and even make those waveforms within the synth itself with no need for external software. Once I adjusted to it "only" being semimodular and lacking a lot of modular functionality I was acustomed to from Vaz Modular, and eventually clicked with the way things are done I´ve had plenty mileage from the good old "workhorse with stripes". And years on there'll be other routings and ideas to explore. :D

Vember Audio Surge loads my homegrown wavetables and thus remains forever expandable at oscillator level. I can purposefully make it sound "bad" in a way I enjoy, where something like Zebra 2 would tend to have a certain smoothness almost no matter what. There are some things with the "SH Noise" oscillator mode, possibilities for unison and all the modulation madness I haven't found any full replacement for. Not even u-he nor MeldaProduction offers any proper replacement, and possibly never will. And yet it all remains surprisingly userfriendly, how come in all these years no one has catched up? :? :(

Native Instruments FM8 gets the least use these days, but I get the results I'm after surprisingly quick. All that hassle programming sounds from scratch on a second hand Yamaha TX81-Z via sub menu hell a bunch of years ago probably helped, and FM8 makes so much more sense than all that hassle with being limited to "algorithm" number this or that for routing the "operators". And some of the effects I find fairly decent and really good for onboard FX in a synth plugin, though I wish I could alter the order of them.

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Zebralette, also.
Free, awesome, light. :tu:
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U-he Hive. Requires so little cpu its ridiculous.

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Microtonic
Duh

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Ohlson_M wrote:U-he Hive. Requires so little cpu its ridiculous.
Definitely Hive
Bitwig Certified Trainer

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Ohlson_M wrote:U-he Hive. Requires so little cpu its ridiculous.
While it's running effortlessly on my desktop pc, some single patches of Hive are still able to kill my quadcore laptop CPU really fast as opposed to Sylenth1, so it doesn't seem that light on the CPU. I admit my laptop doesn't have the fastest CPU, but low-end hardware really "helps" you realizing which synths really are the most light weight. To me those are especially Sylenth1 and Helix. Helix probably still has the best sound quality vs cpu consumption ratio.

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Pianoteq Model B.

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Diva! :lol:
Nobody, Ever wrote:I have enough plugins.

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Edirol Super Quartet
Steinberg hypersonic 2
Korg Wavestation
Genuine Soundware VB3 organ
Air Xpand 2
Acoustica Pianissimo

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fischkopf wrote:low-end hardware really "helps" you realizing which synths really are the most light weight.
Absolute truth, it's hard to judge it on quad desktop, but when one instance of actually low CPU synth is enough to push somewhere around 20-30% of CPU, you kinda start getting in "right" mindset about it. :)
fischkopf wrote:To me those are especially Sylenth1 and Helix. Helix probably still has the best sound quality vs cpu consumption ratio.
Yeah, Sylenth definitely, only thing that use less here with similar quality is ES2, gonna check Helix now again. :tu:

Just checked, ohh yeah, forgot, that GUI, and I'm on 13" laptop, go figure. :ud:
This entire forum is wading through predictions, opinions, barely formed thoughts, drama, and whining. If you don't enjoy that, why are you here? :D ShawnG

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