Omnisphere (MHO)

[Gamma-UT]

Not what I'm talking about man. Performance controls are part of sound design. Why would I buy presets if I have to find cool shit to tweak on my own? Just make the patch myself at that point...

Loads of keyboards don't have aftertouch now. Breath controllers aren't exactly commonplace. Personally, I avoid keyboards without aftertouch and a breath input was one reason I got a Kurzweil PC3A in addition to a USB BC interface. But I don't expect sound designers to second guess my personal setup.

Tweaking is part of the experience. They don't make violins with col legno buttons.

[Armagibbon]

Not what I'm talking about man. Performance controls are part of sound design. Why would I buy presets if I have to find cool shit to tweak on my own? Just make the patch myself at that point...

Loads of keyboards don't have aftertouch now. Breath controllers aren't exactly commonplace. Personally, I avoid keyboards without aftertouch and a breath input was one reason I got a Kurzweil PC3A in addition to a USB BC interface. I don't expect sound designers to second guess my personal setup.

Tweaking is part of the experience. They don't make violins with col legno buttons.

Hahaha I know what you mean but a lot of my sampled violins really do have a col legno patch on a key switch so that's like... technically a col legno button... hahah

Point is, if I'm gonna buy some sounds for live performance, I want every basic controller I have to do something to change the sound. So many damn times I buy presets and only one or two have anything assigned to macro controls besides the mod. I can midi learn the macro controls no prob, put it on breath or exp whatever it works. But the patches without anything there? I just don't want to have to dig through the patch and look for shit to tweak. That puts me in sound design mode when I'm trying to be in playing mode you know?

[Gamma-UT]

It would make sense to have a bunch of macros set up, agreed. Some synths encourage that, like Zebra, where the X-Y pads are used as macro-type functions. It makes sense to remap them if you don't have an X-Y pad on the controller but you can at least play with the different controls with a mouse at first.

Maybe I just do it differently, but I'll gravitate to some sounds and then start thinking "I wish had more control over..." and reach for the right-click. I'm with Brian Eno – he argued what you want is comparatively few sounds but loads of articulation possibilities on synths, where what you get most of the time is the opposite. But I can see how sound designers wouldn't make much if they sold you five sounds "but, hey, each one recognises 15 different controllers!"

One handy thing about Omni is that you can get a very quick view of what's modulating what and then use that to gauge where adding a performance controller is going to make sense.

[Cinebient]

Use Omnisphere Orb.....but it´s still far away from Alchemy morph pads.
I wish every synth would have that 8 or more snapshots and the synths morphs smooth between settings.
Otherwise Equator and other MPE ready synths offer the most expressive play.
Omnisphere also offers some good performance tools which most synths lacks and lots of useful modulation sources.

[aMUSEd]

I'd argue presets encourage different playing styles because you are more likely to use the control to make things not sound exactly like what's gone before.

Yea if only every preset designer cared enough to use more than one f*ckin control. Mod wheel does f*ckin everything all the time, just forget breath exp and pedals!

Does MIDI learn not work on your setup?

Not what I'm talking about man. Performance controls are part of sound design. Why would I buy presets if I have to find cool shit to tweak on my own? Just make the patch myself at that point...

Yes I feel the same way, I try to add as many control points as possible to my patches. One reason why I prefer plugins like Kore and Alchemy as they prioritise performance as part of sound design.

[aMUSEd]

Use Omnisphere Orb.....but it´s still far away from Alchemy morph pads.
I wish every synth would have that 8 or more snapshots and the synths morphs smooth between settings.

Every synth can if used inside Kore 2.

[Armagibbon]

Maybe I just do it differently, but I'll gravitate to some sounds and then start thinking "I wish had more control over..." and reach for the right-click. I'm with Brian Eno – he argued what you want is comparatively few sounds but loads of articulation possibilities on synths, where what you get most of the time is the opposite. But I can see how sound designers wouldn't make much if they sold you five sounds "but, hey, each one recognises 15 different controllers!"

Yea but see you're more experienced with the whole sound design thing. I'm all acoustic and samples until recently, trying to do more with synths than how I treated them before. You know, just presets like atmosphere and all those romplers. Only ever tweaked envelopes arps filters and some fx while I play, you know the easy shit right? So I rely on the designers to have all the more complicated and routing shit worked out for me.

Now we got serum and omni with all this awesome shit you can do, you can make anything! But it takes a lot to go through and learn what all does what. Like right now wiggle and reaktor blocks are two big ones I'm trying hard to get with but they're kicking my ass because so damn often I gotta spend like 15 minutes poking around the manual to figure out if what I'm doing is even f*ckin valid. Shit's exhausting. Def would prefer to just leave that up to professionals you know?

[Cinebient]

Use Omnisphere Orb.....but it´s still far away from Alchemy morph pads.
I wish every synth would have that 8 or more snapshots and the synths morphs smooth between settings.

Every synth can if used inside Kore 2.

Kore 2 is dead!

[Synthman2000]

I have had a look at Omnisphere once or twice on the YT videos and I think I would ultimately like it and use it, probably as one or 2 instances per track as a guess. It does a lot and the music I make probably does not call for its many presets. Thus far I never made the purchase.

I think it will have to be a day when I have that cash burning a hole in my pocket.That is not today and I am not really longing for anything that I feel is missing from my sonic palette.

It feels like a highly luxurious purchase for me.

[Cinebient]

I also appreciate that i can tune Omnisphere 2.
I also see it as a host for things like Keyscapes where i can use all it´s sounds sources then too to create my own patches. Omnisphere can be a pretty deep synth sampler hybrid.
It´s not cheap but if it´s not worth.....just don´t buy.
Playing with it makes me happy, so i don´t care about what it costs.....and i´m a poor man.

[Kinh]

5x more presets than others half the price

oh brother...
if you actually learned sound design you wouldn't have 500 presets that sound almost identical
except for a slight filter cutoff adjustment in your 500,000 omni presets.

I have learned sound design but im a producer and we trend to audition sounds rather than make them as we go.

and thats why you all sound the same.... go go preset boi

Sound designers make presets so people can use them not so they can make similar sounds in the same synth...what a waste of time. and unique sound comes from mixing, effects and layering techniques in today's music not from tweaking a couple of oscillators. Get wit the program.

[Gamma-UT]

Yea but see you're more experienced with the whole sound design thing. I'm all acoustic and samples until recently, trying to do more with synths than how I treated them before. You know, just presets like atmosphere and all those romplers. Only ever tweaked envelopes arps filters and some fx while I play, you know the easy shit right? So I rely on the designers to have all the more complicated and routing shit worked out for me.

If I'm tweaking a preset for controllers, most of the time it's just mapping aftertouch and/or breath to the filter and amplitude envelopes to get a bit more expressiveness in and make things behave a bit more "like a real instrument". Later on it might be a wavetable index, cross-modulation or pitch on a hard-synced oscillator, or maybe remapping ModWheel->LFO rate and AT->LFO depth. But some really simple changes will often wake up a preset that sounds a bit sterile.

Breath is often the tricky one to map. Ideally, what I want is an envelope follower on it rather than mapping it straight to a filter, but not many synths give the option to do that.

[Cinebient]

Strange......many pianos sound the same but i heard so many great different pieces.
So again, how many layers are the rule to be a great producer/musician/whatever.
Damn, just go out in the woods, form some steel, create your own instruments, learn DSP, create your own tuning, a new genre, bla bla bla.....it never ends.
You also can look for a patch you like, then change the sound source, lock some parameters or combine parts of different patches or indeed create some from scratch.
Not sure why people think Omnisphere can´t do it. The sounds sources and patches are just on top of that.
I even like to create custom patches to sample them into other synths and vice versa etc.
But some should be happy that people still willing to pay for software, not all developers working for free. Some people don´t want to work, good that there are others to do it for them.

[layzer]

5x more presets than others half the price

oh brother...
if you actually learned sound design you wouldn't have 500 presets that sound almost identical
except for a slight filter cutoff adjustment in your 500,000 omni presets.

I have learned sound design but im a producer and we trend to audition sounds rather than make them as we go.

and thats why you all sound the same.... go go preset boi

Sound designers make presets so people can use them not so they can make similar sounds in the same synth...what a waste of time. and unique sound comes from mixing, effects and layering techniques in today's music not from tweaking a couple of oscillators. Get wit the program.

ok, man whatever you say.... but lets compare:
my track with all custom programmed sounds by me -
https://soundcloud.com/layzerkvr/ramirez-hero

vs. one of your tracks that quit honestly sounds like a bunch of boring typical
omni presets to me. -
https://soundcloud.com/matthewcrowe/gre ... ss-version

whatever works for ya man.

[Gamma-UT]

Although I reckon Future Bass is Schlager for American millennials, all this does is illustrate my earlier point about the illusion of "I programmed the sounds myself" - what you've done is ape the style of Frontline Assembly. I've got more time for FLA than Future Bass, and it's a reasonable track, but fails to advance the point that not using presets means you don't sound like what's gone before. It just means it took longer to get there.