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Looper's Delight
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> On Sun, Dec 30, 2012 at 8:07 PM, Kevin Cheli-Colando > <billowhead@gmail.com> wrote: >> So, with that in mind, anyone have any soft synths they find especially >> fun >> to play via guitar synth? I think the most fun soft synths are those with a built-in arpeggiator. With that the synth becomes an extension of the guitar's playability rather than just another add-on to its sound. There are many arpeggiating soft synths around and I personally have and use Alchemy and Rob Papen Albino. On some occasions I have used the arpeggiator in Ableton Live to juggle around my guitar chord notes into some of Live's synths. Alchemy's arp is a little more fun though, because in one mode it can be set to work similar to "insert" on an EDP/Mobius, meaning adding each new note you play to the loop length of the arpeggio. When playing with an arpeggiator it makes sense to assign an expression pedal to the filter cut-off of the synth, so you can bring it down or up as your music flows. Another soft synth with good arpeggiating at hand is Omnisphere. I have no hands-on experience with it myself though. Given the huge installation it is a typical instrument that I hold off from buying as long as I can do without it ;-) The dozen synths in Logic/Mainstage is hard to beat for the work I do because they are all so well integrated and thus very fast to work with. I know though that you can replicate a lot of Vangelis' classic synth sounds with Omnisphere, so if such a project should up it might be a reason for me to get it. Sampling is also great fun with MIDI guitar! I started with a Roland SE-3000 in 1990 and had each guitar string send over its own MIDI channels so I could load a unique sound for each string in the sampler. At one fret a loop could be triggered while the next fret had a string pad chord going off; I typically set the number of voices for each string so low that a new sound would take over from the previous sound on that string, so the fretboard became a kind of sample/loop trigger grid (like the spreadsheet design of Mobius and Ableton Live session view). With software samplers setting up and editing sampler patches is so much faster. The EXS24 of Logic/Mainstage is my main workhorse both for playing live and producing recordings... oh, I just recalled I uploaded a video with the EXS24 a while back: http://youtu.be/P3pOhBKAC-A: the guitar sound you hear behind the Stick string sound is my Stratocaster that I have sampled and made an EXS24 patch of (You hear that best from 3:39 and out). The cool thing here is that I set the sampler's attack to quite slow, so it won't interfere with the natural string attack but kind of sneak in smoothly. Another good, in fact a lot more advanced, sampler is Kontakt. But for mocking up my own sampler instrument patches I prefer EXS24 because it faster. Kontakt has its own scripting functionality that makes it more suited for situations when you buy maybe a string orchestra library where someone has put in a lot of scripting work to make it sound gorgeous. Greetings from Sweden Per Boysen www.perboysen.com http://www.youtube.com/perboysen