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Originally Posted by dmacintyre
Any views on overlap with Blue, Reaktor, Zebra 2, etc? I'm sure you'll tell me the Ti will sound better and be zero CPU load but will I be simply duplicating things?
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Don't know about blue or reaktor but zebra 2 and the TI are very different. Zebra 2 is pretty much my favourite synth ever so I probably would take that over the TI, but they are pretty complimentary. Zebra sounds very warm and organic to me; the TI tends to sound more clinical (not in general though -- it sounds quite a bit warmer and much more organic than most other synths). The TI is awesome at dissonant bell tones, harsh noise pads, and shimmery analogish pads. I don't think I could live with a pre-TI Virus, almost every patch I love tends to use either the hypersaw or wavetables. The hypersaw lends itself to same great percussive/bass hit type sounds, the wavetables tend to give delicate, crystalline sounds, so together they really cover a lot of ground. One thing it is not good at is long, evolving sounds, due to the limited modulation. In my opinion both the TI and Zebra suck at velocity-filtered bass sounds, though I'm hoping someone better at patch programming then me eventually proves me wrong.
If you're coming from the software world, editing on the TI will probably be a bit of a shock. Most softsynths have pretty straightforward architectures, but the TI clearly displays its old-school roots with a lot of specialized and hardcoded functions. This is most noticeable with the envelopes and mod matrix. There are currently only 2 envelopes and the matrix is smallish, with only 6 sources. The impact can be seen clearly in the LFOs, they have a 1-shot envelope mode and multiple hardcoded destinations, both of which help overcome these limitations. I really wish access had taken the time with the TI to put in a more general architecture that didn't have all the hacks from the past on top of it.
Anyway, that's a relatively small complaint. In the end, the TI sounds great and is pretty complimentary at least to zebra. There are a lot of great-sounding softsynths, the main TI advantages are a negligible CPU load, a full effects path per channel, and a more intangible benefit that comes from working with hardware: I find with software I tend to keep one eye constantly on the CPU meter to gauge how much more I can lay on, but with hardware I just ignore DSP limits and work away.
opinion over,
eric