Virus good for trance Music?

[MBTC]

Well in short, the Virus is probably the best overall trance synth on the market. If I were playing on stage, its the board I would want under me.

But, what I think you will want to do, ultimately is MAKE TRANCE music.. right? This means in order to get your fix you will have to be able to make an entire MP3, put on your iPod, share with friends or on myspace, etc. If that's not your goal right now, I'm guessing it will be within the first 3 months of your new music making hobby. I could be totally wrong and you just want to play some Armin Van Buuren on your stereo and play a single sound along with it? If that's the case the Virus is overkill for your needs. But even if you start at that level you will probably want to take it to the next level.

As far as terms you were unfamiliar with, DAW = digital audio workstation (music making software package) and VST is simply a software synth standard. You can buy (and download free) a wide variety of software synthesizers and control them with a single MIDI keyboard. The keyboard itself does not need to contain sounds, the sounds can play through your DAW software using your computer as the sound creation engine.

The reason I'm bringing all this up is that at some point you will discover you need drums to do trance, and the Virus or any other synth is not going to give you good drums, you need samples for that. You also need a way to arrange chord progressions. The Virus cannot do that, you need a sequencer for that. There are a number of other reasons why the Virus is an awesome synth to have in the trance making arsenal, but it cannot be your only tool. I think the same would be true if you bought the Roland Gaia, which is probably decent for the price but no where close to being in the league of the Virus.

So, here is my recommendation to you. Take a couple of hundred dollars of your budget and buy a decent MIDI keyboard controller. The one I use is Novation Remote but there are plenty of choices out there. Now, bank the rest of the money and go to http://flstudio.image-line.com/ and download the FLStudio demo. It is full featured, you just won't be able to save projects. Use that to learn how to make music -- there is a lot to learn but its not like school work, the entire journey will be fun. The FLStudio demo has enough synths built in to keep you quite busy. Then, branch out and buy some top quality synths like Zebra, Sylenth1. I highly recommend Oresus because its only $45 and I swear sometimes I get better trance sounds out of it than I did the Ti2 Desktop. At some point you may want to learn another DAW besides FLStudio, like Ableton Live, Cubase or Sonar. Or maybe you are at a point with FLStudio that you want to buy the software -- it's only a few hundred bucks, is probably one of the better DAWs out there for making trance or electro, and you get lifetime upgrades for free which is unbeatable.

Then, at some point start adding hardware synths like a Virus, which will give you a deep appreciation for the workflow simplicity a pure software environment provides, and make you wonder what you did with your spare time now that you're spending all your time trying to get your hardware gear working and in sync

I'm not saying that's the right approach for everyone, I just think what I know about your situation thus far it might be a better path for you to head toward making real trance than spending your budget on a single used Virus.

To answer your original question, yes the Virus is good for trance; it's just that its best added after you've got some of the other essentials covered.

[TechnoTranceRM]

Thanks for clearing that up because i was so confused between samplers and keyboards. Ive used Fl Studio before but didn't really like it due to the fact that im more of a hands on kind of person. As in the piano roll didn't work for me, i need to figure out chords with my hands as apposed to putting them on the roll bar and correcting them so I say i am in the market for a keyboard. Ive been down the road of software and i didn't like it. So that being said there are many models of Virus, The A B C and snow are Samplers from what I know and things like the Indigo, KC, Ti are actual keyboards, which is what im looking for. I am thinking about getting a Virus Indigo 2, which im told is a very good machine and sounds great from watching youtube videos. Then i think theres an updated version of the indigo because it went out of commision and i think its called Ti2. Im not sure, this could all be wrong. But once i get the synth i will mess around with it and create trance sounds. I mean if i buy the soudns off of ebay would i need to get a sampler to transfer them over or can i do it with the machine.

When you get patches is it just a sheet of information liek Oscilater tweeked to 33, LFO down to 22, Appegiator on, and stuff like that you have to program in or is it like a file that you take a flashdrive to. What is the difference between the Old Virus indigo and the new one?

Lastly a desktop is a keyboard right, its just another name fore like a workstation?

Thankyou, this helps tremendously!

[MBTC]

Originally Posted by TechnoTranceRM

Ive used Fl Studio before but didn't really like it due to the fact that im more of a hands on kind of person. As in the piano roll didn't work for me, i need to figure out chords with my hands as apposed to putting them on the roll bar and correcting them so I say i am in the market for a keyboard. Ive been down the road of software and i didn't like it.

...(some stuff clipped)...

I mean if i buy the soudns off of ebay would i need to get a sampler to transfer them over or can i do it with the machine.
Lastly a desktop is a keyboard right, its just another name fore like a workstation?

Sorry I don't think I ever got back to you. The piano roll in FLStudio is very powerful at letting you pencil in notes and such, but make no mistake you can absolutely play using your keyboard and you probably should (thats what I do). That was what my suggestion for a decent MIDI controller was about. I am one of those that likes to play my chords as well. You are going to want quantization (note timing correction) in trance one way or the other, which any sequencer offers, but if you want things to sound live with all the imperfections that go with that, you simply don't quantize. Once you connect any USB midi controller to your DAW (I'm using FLStudio as an example because its so accessible/relatively easy to get started with), its not that much different than a hardware synth, its just that the oscillators, filter algorithms etc are taking place on your PC instead of a dedicated DSP (and your PC is much more powerful than the processor in any hardware synth). With the exception of true analog synths (the Virus is not true analog), the differences between hardware synths and soft synths are surprisingly small. The big difference in the past was that even a weaker, dedicated chip in a hardware synth would generally process algorithms and filters and such faster than a PC which was running a general purpose OS. What has changed recently is that PC chips have gotten so powerful and acquired more cores that allow them to handle the general purpose tasks and still have plenty of punch left over to simulate dedicated hardware level performance.

In terms of a sampler, if you're using software like FLStudio, Live, Cubase etc you don't need a sampler at all. In fact you would probably cringe at the thought of a hardware sampler after you see what can be done with software. Samples are just soundbytes at the end of it all.

As far as a desktop, a keyboard, workstation, laptop etc.

Desktop = on this board often means the Virus Ti2 Desktop, which is a synth without a keyboard... normally it means regular PC (tower or mini-tower, non-portable PC)

Keyboard = usually means your synth/music keyboard or midi controller on forums like these, but some folks mean the PC keyboard you type with.. lol

Workstation = in music circles this can mean an "all in one" synth like Korg Triton, Yamaha Motif, which often have built in screen and are not only a synth engine but a built in sampler, sequencer, mixer etc. When I said Digital Audio Workstation I was referring to the DAW acronym that is usually used to describe a software based host like FLStudio, which is an application that runs on a computer and you connect a (music) keyboard controller to it.