slightly OT for a moment, but ^ ^, tell that to Waldorf and their 150$ Blofeld Desktop upgrade for 60mb sample ram. which has been sitting inside my blofeld desktop for over 6 months now waiting for the 150$ challenge/response to unlock it. /sigh

I used to be a Reason prodigy, I could make that beast so anything and people loved my music to pieces. New songs made every week for years.... then I switched to hardware. Only now after 4 years of getting in the groove with hardware, have I started to find my new flow. It's tough... but highly rewarding in the end... after so much struggle with, "What the hell happened to me?"

Mono, how do you cope in hardware not being able to pull out your 29th compressor like you can in Reason? :) More seriously, how do you get hardware to sound so 'pro' without the sidechaining and eqing you can do in software? I'm leaning towards hardware, but its tough to ignore so much control in software.

B

This is the main thing I miss when working with hardware. Not the being able to save a whole track (including all patches/settings) as a self contained file, or work on dozens of different tracks at the same time, or even the portability, all of which seem to be common things pros cite as the reason for moving from hardware to software. Unless you're super rich, even if if you have a fairly well equipped studio, you probably don't have several of the same bit of equipment. I like the SH-101, but if I want two different sounds out of it, I can't just open another instance, I need to get one just right, record all the takes of all the different notes on it, record and save that, then change to the other part. If I then want to go back and tweak the first sound, or change the melody on it a bit, I can't. Don't even get me started on recording chords this way. ;)

Same goes for FX units. Say I want to use an RE-201 for a bit of reverb on a snare, some tiny delay on a hh and a big long booming echo on a chord. This means recording all 3 parts seperately and takes about half an hour before I'm happy with it. And as described, I can't then go back and tweak any of the previous parts, if I don't like them, or they don't fit with the new bits, I have to redo them from scratch. Doing the same thing in software takes me under a minute and I can keep altering it after I've done it indefinately.

This means it's vastly slower to work with hardware, the way I make music. At the moment, I am trying to overcome this to some degree by "sketching" tracks in software, then recreating them on hardware for better sound quality and more of an ability to play/improvise around the tracks. I am also going to look at a new mixers with lots of fx send/returns and a switched patch panel to at least increase the speed of this sort of routing (even if it'll never be as fast as software).

One great advantage I've found though is that I finish tracks a lot quicker; when you're forced to either abandon the track or press on with it as it is, with something less than perfect, you often opt for the later. In software, you can just keep on going back and tweaking it indefinately and get a bit caught up in perfectionism that doesn't really matter/come across when you listen to the track a week later.

I was talking to a mate about this a few weeks back and he pointed out that to a certain extent, we'd been spoilt. I started with software (albeit in the early days, when it was quite crude) so always took its strong points for granted. The people who started with hardware and were used to working with old "one patch at a time" synths must have really been blown away once software got good.

Well the only difference between the TI MK 1 and TI MK 2 as far as i can tell is 25% more calculating power a facial makeover and a nice big price tag. I for sure wont be trading my MK 1 for a MK 2. Perhaps Access could give me back 25% more calculating power thus enabling me more polphony by losing things like the atomiser which IMO is an awfull sounding 1 trick pony , also the ability to use the TI as a sound card is a total waste of time IMO how many people realy use this i know of none, and what about the vocoder lol. You see when i buy a synth all i want to buy is a synth, but in terms of synth sounds this is where the virus ti excells it simply sounds fantastic. I think it would be great if access could give us the ability to load only the components we need to use into the TI. I would also like to see a VST only version of this synth that way we could lose the hardware which lets face it is an oversized dongle, there are plenty of surface controllers out there that do a great job these days.

Although I could live without the vocoder and atmoiser, if you couldn't use the TI as a soundcard, I personally wouldn't have gotten one.

I also like the hardware, specifically the negligible cpu-drain of complex synth patches and again wouldn't have bought it without it. I run an EEEPC as a sequencer (and it's more than adequate for this) for the Virus. If I was running comparable softsynths on it, it'd die. That said, I'd like a licence for a VST-only one to be included with every hardware one, so I could run it on my laptop away from my TI (for making patches etc.). Then when back in the studio, I could use the TI to alleviate CPU load.

EDIT: Oh and I don't know for sure, but I imagine that the way the TI works, when Atomiser isn't being used, it's not appreciably eating DSP clock cycles (same way distortion doesn't when it's turned off).

that is correct... only the functions you use create dsp load. there is a whole section of the manual which explains how to squeeze the most polyphony out of the device.

Yes, at the moment it is very puzzling. There was a huge difference between the Virus C and TI, even at the start of the TI's life (before it was updated further OS upgrades), but there is negligable difference between TI and TI2, and for a £700 difference in price it's pure daylight robbery.

That would be a nice feature, but it wouldn't affect polyphony, only ROM storage that could be better used for other features if/when called upon.

I would peronally hate to see a VST version. The reason I like the synth is because it is hardware for tweaking away from the computer, and also that it's not on every warez user's harddrive.

I suspect the main motivation behind the TI2 was that it was getter harder to source some of the original parts. It's not meant to be a big step forward, it's just a hardware refresh.

I work the other way. I sketch out a full track in hardware, then track it into software for detailed mixing, compression etc. This way I spend most of my time away from the computer but still use it for the things it does uniquely well.

This is definitely something I like about working with hardware, actually. It forces you to focus on the things that matter the most and doesn't allow you to reconsider every little detail 100 times.