I'm appearently in a retro-phase of my music-making self. I love making tracks with synths that sounds like they're from the 80's. The problem is that most of the (free) synth I use somehow makes reaper crash and totally destroys my workflow. I use:
SQ8L
Dexxed
Tone2Firebird
Synth1
Poly2106
U-NO-62
I get that plugins made with SynthEdit and SynthMaker doens't behave too well. So.. what do I replace them with? Or: how do I tweak my system for them to not cause any trouble? I mean.. SQ8L sound fantastic, Dexxed are soooo FM'ey, Poly2016 is.. yeah well.. they all just are so awesome!
Sigh..
Please.. what retro (free) synths can I stack two digit numbers of?
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Music is the closest thing to magic I know about
U-he TyrellN6 --> one of the best freeware synths out there. If I remember correctly it is heavily influnced by the Roland Juno-60... This free VST is even better than some pay-ware...
I guess, if you got Dexxed and Tyrell you can probably cover most of the sounds you´re after...
#edit: and of course there is Surge... super amazing synth, also free. (made by an ex-ableton and now bitwig developer)
Also in the upcoming months there will be a new synth that will trend probably quiet a bit: Vital... an amazing open source project that will kick ass...
But you have to be gentle with it. Nowadays it doesn't crash on me, I cannot remember when it last did. I run it as dedicated process with the GUI not embedded. The thing to be careful about is the loading of banks, if I remember correctly.
I have a fully functional ESQ-1, and I managed to download patches from it and load them into SQ8L. It works, not perfectly, but it works.
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I never always did the right thing, but all I did wasn't wrong...
I'm appearently in a retro-phase of my music-making self. I love making tracks with synths that sounds like they're from the 80's. The problem is that most of the (free) synth I use somehow makes reaper crash and totally destroys my workflow. I use:
SQ8L
Dexxed
Tone2Firebird
Synth1
Poly2106
U-NO-62
I get that plugins made with SynthEdit and SynthMaker doens't behave too well. So.. what do I replace them with? Or: how do I tweak my system for them to not cause any trouble? I mean.. SQ8L sound fantastic, Dexxed are soooo FM'ey, Poly2016 is.. yeah well.. they all just are so awesome!
Sigh..
Please.. what retro (free) synths can I stack two digit numbers of?
There was a trick to solve the stability problem with multiple instances of SynthEdit plugs by copying them to files with different names, so you never have a two instances of said plug with the same name. Sounds annoying - I skipped using the crashy plugs alltogether.
Personally I find it hard to believe TAL plugs or Synth1 might be unstable.
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They do, and there's amazing plugins out there. But when you have around 10 or more instances of different SE plugins things starts to get sketchy. But, uhm, sure, it could be me making wrong conclusions.
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Music is the closest thing to magic I know about
Thanks for all the GREAT suggestions! Just what I*m looking for.
Tyrell is totally my to-go synth for everything else, but to me it has a more modern sound (look ma, I didn't say "cold", LOL!). I guess I should rethink this placing all sorts of sound diminishing things like modulators, compressors and weird eq'ing on the master, haha!
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Music is the closest thing to magic I know about
by copying them to files with different names, so you never have a two instances of said plug with the same name.
I didn't know that! Thanks!
Quote:
Personally I find it hard to believe TAL plugs or Synth1 might be unstable.
I use the TAL reverb often and have no problems so far. On the other hand I rarely use more than 2 instances of it. And yeah, Synth1 is just amazing. It's like it reads my thoughts when twisting knobs!
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Music is the closest thing to magic I know about
Personally I find it hard to believe TAL plugs or Synth1 might be unstable.
TAL U-No-62 (the free one) crashes occasionally in Reaper (and FL Studio and Cubase, for that matter).
But then it's free, and the site said (IIRC) that it was kind of left in a 'beta' state, so the occasional crash isn't unexpected, I suppose.
It's very useful for re-creating those Juno sounds - loads of info/examples on the web for hit tunes from the 80s. Track with it then render for keeping.
So far I haven't had any crash issues with Dexed, Synth1 or SQ8L.
If you are not foreign to include x86 plugs check these out. Know that I can't write music for shit. I just play around making weird sounds so I don't do projects with hundreds of tracks or anything but these are fun and has been stable (for me).
The entire collection from ElektroStudio. They all sound great and this is a great set of vintage emulations. ElektroStudio Collection
Two synts from SyntheScience.
A Moog Prodigy emulation called Prodigious.
A Juno 106/60 emulation called Poly2106.
An ARP-2600 and Moog Voyager emulation from Glen Stegner (Voltkitchen).
Tons of fun, sound great. Arppe2600va & MiniMogueVA.
Thanks for all the GREAT suggetsions. Some of them I use and some are new to me. I just found out about the Kawai one too a few days ago, and I guess my next track will be build around this gem!
These days I experience no crashes at all, which I consider one of the biggest workflow enhancements at all :-)
These are the ones I've used for my latest 80's action packed chopper-featuring track - rock solid from start to finish:
A lot of RoughRider 2
A bunch of OrilRiver
TAL-reverb 4
A great number of ReaEQ, ReaGATE
Kotlnikov (2 instances, synthmaker)
Lots of Kjaerhus chorus, delay
Sitala for drums
Lots of synth1
Handfull of PG-8X
2 DJX10
U-NO-62
2 Dexxed
Again, thanks all, I'm looking forward to check all these vst's out!
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Music is the closest thing to magic I know about
Haha, no, I guess it doesn't. I've been told that Hammer did those Miami Vice toms with a Fairlight and a lot of tweakening the knobs.
When you say libraries, is that SF2 or do I have to get the original machines? I mean.. is that even possible these days? :-D
Good luck finding a working Fairlight these days!
The Emax libraries seem to be in SF2 and the Fairlight stuff in wavs. There is a decent emulation for a Fairlight but that's not free. Also there's an Emulator II vst but again, not free.
Edit: And a Kontakt library it seems for the Emulator II.
It's an actual replica without added fluff like the CMI-V from Arturia.
Yeah, like being a VSTi :-D It's very impressive and I'm sure enthusiasts or musicians who operated this in the past (or couldn't afford the III) will welcome this in its final state!
Thanks for the link, it was a good read!
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Music is the closest thing to magic I know about
Yeah, like being a VSTi :-D It's very impressive and I'm sure enthusiasts or musicians who operated this in the past (or couldn't afford the III) will welcome this in its final state!
Thanks for the link, it was a good read!
It's quite a feat to write something like that. Haven't played with it much yet but it's impressive.
But if you feel like trying something else retro-inspired and are not terribly worried about CPU use, can try Yutani. It's a monophonic bass synth. I spent a fair amount of time on the filters in that thing
The only big drawback is the CPU usage, since it's a JSFX, and one that's not terribly well optimized at that. Two digit numbers may be a challenge. Free though
But if you feel like trying something else retro-inspired and are not terribly worried about CPU use, can try Yutani. It's a monophonic bass synth. I spent a fair amount of time on the filters in that thing
The only big drawback is the CPU usage, since it's a JSFX, and one that's not terribly well optimized at that. Two digit numbers may be a challenge. Free though