Virus good for trance Music?

[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.