Will have to test it and see. May do that this evening.
I dunno. The jury is still out on some of this. My first impression is a lot of this is âgood enoughâ for live. I already contend with a mean horn section, too loud guitar, too loud drummer, busy percussion ⌠I get lots of contention live. Now, there are certain things that will never be good enough even with vintage ears. Iâve really fallen for Blue3 with IK Leslie and Klanghelm IVGI. The Arturia B3 with their piano in a layer is better than Korg M1 or B4 (or stupid NI Classic organ), but for that ballad B3 pad underneath a piano or something else, hmmmm OK, this giant pad layer is taxing my CPU, so why not? The rest of my band doesnât understand why I donât just get a cheap Casio keyboard so I donât have to lug around the computer and stuff.
The band Iâm in now is all original material, so Iâm not looking for that exact Floyd sound or whatever. Diva or Zebra will be my go to synths, Blue3, M1 and a few of the Arturia plugins. Just the Analog Lab may have enough classic sound for me. Itâs better than my Kurzweil 2500/2600s and beats my Gen I Receptor.
Now if I start playing in a Classic Rock cover band again or one of my old bands does a reunion, Iâll need that Arp 2600 sound, the Continental Organ, Hohner Clav, etc ⌠Man, Iâd have killed for this set back in the day when I was carting around a Rhodes 88, a UNIVOX MultiMan, a UNIVOX Organizer thru a crappy Leslie 825, and whatever synth I could borrow and hoping the venue had a real B3.
Different horses, different courses. Time marches on.
Richard
Hey Richard
You know how I am about dialing in the right tone, so I also get grief from others about how I get frustrated when a premade layer doesnât work well in a band setting. They canât tell a difference, but when a Bass player knows how to get his one tone, and the Git-Picker knows his normal 4-tones from his 30 pedals, it is useless explaining to them my tones rarely repeat. To them a piano is a piano, and an organ is an organ. Whenever I play Bass or Guitar in other bands, my tones vary per song. I quit one band a few years ago because the guitarist had one setting and it never changed. It was a crappy early 80âs, highly compressed, fuzz tone, reverb driven trainwreck. It didnât sit well in most songs, especially the ballads.
Yeah, Iâm that way about my sax tone. I guess orchestral instruments Iâm pretty nutz-o about. Anything that is exposed. In a cover band, I like to find the sound that makes people think weâre lip syncing to the record. Itâs really only those original multi-layer pads and such that burn a lot of CPU or memory and then nobody but me even hears them. Great at home and in the studio, But for live, I think Iâm learning to compromise. This means a lot on the personal development scale. Shout out to any other INTJs out there (I believe this group has quite a large percentage of INTJs).
I feel this pain. . .
I prefer it. I understand the new Analog Lab is letting users have more control over the instruments in the presets.
Arturia CZ-V is good but for Mono/Portamento is missing Last Note option, anf for Synth Leads solo playng this is an must function, like on hardware Casio Czs.
I hope Arturia will put this in next update.
I finally took the plunge and updated to v7.
Was actually positively suprised by the B3 - the previous version was pretty much unusable; the current one - whilst not up to the discriminating taste of our Hammond connoisseurs - will be âgood enoughâ for live performance in a broad range of use cases. I like the Arturia approach of giving lots of pedal options in their instruments - easy to create pretty crazy presets that would otherwise require a lot of separate plugs plus routing in Cantabile. So definitely a plus for flexibility!
BTW: this is the reason that TH-U is seeing a lot more usage from me currently than S-Gear, even though S-Gear is the better amp. TH-U just makes it so much easier to throw pedals, amps and other effects together in a single preset - my S-Gear rack is just too complicated with all the individual pedal pluginsâŚ
Analog Lab may well be the workhorse all-puropse synth plugin for live use - especially since you can deep-edit all the sound when you own all the individual plugs. No need to have separate racks with all the single plugs - definitely a rig simplifier!
Even the pianos and e-pianos are pretty decent - I wonât get rid of my Addictive Keys and Velvet for them (more playable to me), but definitely good enough for a lot of stuff!
And the number of different synth and keyboard options is just amazing - from mellotron to vox/farfisa across all kinds of classic analog and digital synths - this is definitely a wonderful palette of keyboard sounds to enjoy and be inspired by!
So while I agree that the specialists (Diva, Blue3, Velvet, Piano sample libs) outperform the Arturia kit in their disciplines, the v7 collection as a whole will still outperform a lot of the current hardware workstations in the keyboard sounds category. Combine it with a rompler like Xpand!2 and you have a pretty good collection of bread and butter sounds for most keys requirements - all âin the boxâ with reasonable CPU and memory hit.
Cheers,
Torsten
I think we are in sync 100%. Sometimes âGood Enoughâ is perfect enough. My former boss wrote a book about that. There is something to be said for âsimplerâ with just a few âspecialistsâ, so I took the plunge. Also, their copy protection with 5 Activationsâitâs not perfect, but itâs perfect enough. I detest copy protection, but I understand why vendors do it. At least Arturia makes it reliable. All in all, I have to say fast, cheap, and easy. Itâs hard to find that combination.
Richard
Torsten
I am loving TH-U. I have several of the amp sim plugs, and I migrated many of my songs to TH3, but TH-U is amazing. It is a huge step above TH3 which I prefered anyway. My guitars are âcoming aliveâ and they sound and respond much better. I am also considering STL Tone STL Tonality Howard Benson. Though I rarely do âMetalâ, there are clean and crunch options as well that may actually perform better than TH-U, but the drawback is limited amps and fx, which is where TH-U shines.
After Demoing the new, and the upgraded, I admit, I too took the plunge today. They drew me in like a time-share salesman, but I will not regret this purchase.
This is why I have always liked Analog Lab. Enough presets to get what you need, and very low CPU load.
Iâve been gigging more than I like the last two months, so I am using the extra cash to upgrade my rig and VSTs. That said, I also took the plunge on Session Keys Electric Bundle. I turned a good friend on to Cantabile sometime back, and got a chance to try his rig with E-Instruments. Very low CPU load. I felt like I was sitting at my old Wurly again. A real wow moment. The electric bundle was US $179 and, other than maybe Acoustic Samples Tines, these are really fun to play. They will very possibly replace most of my electricsâŚjust have to test them live first.
Regards
Corky
Isnât that somewhat in conflict with the INTJs norm?
âItâs good enoughâ is our official studio slogan.
Hi
I am missing some acronymsâŚ
INTJs?
TH-U?
STL?
I do like the V collection, whilst I will not use all of it, I will use a fair bit of it, and I am still impressed with the VCS3 and even the CZ emulation . I have built the track for Welcome to the Machine mostly using V instruments, and then I am using the Arturia MINIV to play over it.
Checking out the new V collection last night, I think the Solina sounds better than it used to? Less Harsh.
INTJs is from Richardâs post above. INTJs = Introversion, Intuition, Thinking, Judgment.
TH-UâŚan amp sim by Overloud
STLâŚanother amp sim
HA! quite a variety of acronyms. INTJ is one of the 16 Briggs-Meyer personality types. The one known for picky prickly perfectionism for no particular reason.
Yeah, I had to have it. GAS. BTW, the SYNTHi V has a very convincing âOn The Runâ sequence.
TH3 and TH-U are from Overloud. I really like TH-U. Just tried it in a track and it really âsitsâ well. A lot of amps sound amazing solo and just donât go in a track. STL is new to me. Looks cool.
TH-U really cuts thru a mix and live. The presets require little, if any tweaking. My jaw dropped when I used the same settings from TH-3 onto TH-U. The Marshalls really rock now, and will sustain amazingly well. I donât know how I did it, but a few weekends ago, I actually achieved some feedback on a sustained tone at a gig. The bass player looked at me, and afterwards asked how I did that on an amp sim. Iâve recreated it at home thru in-earsâŚagain, I really donât know how feedback is happening without a loop from cabinet to pickup, but I sure like it.
Oh dear, that is probably me then, other than I think I have a reason - it being that I think I have a place on the autism/aspergers scale (low end), which explains why I hate parties if I do not know people, am a bit of a perfectionist, love order (like the order in music), and am a bit of a tech geek!
It is very good, as I mentioned above , along with the Jarre Oxygene facsimiles, which I think are superb.
I just had a work bonus, so GAS is biting hard! half will go on a holiday to chill with the missus, and the other half will go on musical goodies, including this, which I threw on the old credit card in anticipation!