Some newbie Virus questions

[hagmanma]

there is such a big community of virus owners and there are thousands of patches out there (not hard to find). you wanna do trance with this machine? - you will be happy... for sure.

but the real thing comes when you tweak the shit out of this synth. and this has nothing to do with inventing the wheel twice. it's more the question if you like to drive or just wanna watch catalogues of nice cars.

[simonharris]

Great, it also depends if you want to just drive the car or customize it first I suppose.

[hvyen]

There are over 3000 preset sound on the TI. The TI synth is best for producing trance and dance music. Believe me, you won't regret it. The preset sounds are really awesome. Although tweaking is much more interesting, you'll find very useful preset sound and sometimes you'll get sounds you never herad before. In my opinion, it's the best synth ever made.

[simonharris]

Great! One question, when the preset memory is full how do you fill it with more presets? does it overwrite the ones that are in there and do you load them via USB from the computer in the same way that you load banks of presets in a software synth? I am considering the Snow, so less preset memory than the TI2 but it does have 3 assignable button and cutoff/resonance as well so I think it could be good. Many Thanks!

[hvyen]

You have a few empty banks which you can use for your own sounds.
The TI has 26 banks, 128 sounds each. The first 4 are RAM banks. So you can save your sounds there. The other banks are ROM banks where you can't save your sounds, but you can flash these ROM banks with other sounds, so they are "burned" in the TI and always there. If you change the ROM sounds using the Virus Control Plug In, the changed sounds will be saved with your arrangement. The Snow has less banks. I don't know how much it is.

[simonharris]

Thanks for the advice, so on your TI can you fill those ROM banks by choosing which patches to load or do you have to fill them all and can you delete patches individually? Just wondering if it is possible to fill those banks only with my favorite patches? The RAM banks sound good, for sounds that I have created and tweaked.

[hvyen]

You don't have to fill the whole bank, you can choose between your favorite sounds. But be careful: If you load new sounds in the ROM banks, your sounds will be lost, if you turn off you virus (not in the RAM banks). After loading your sounds into the virus, you have to save your arrangement in Logic, Cubase, Live etc. while the Virus Control Plug In is opened. The next time you open your saved arrangement, all sounds will be recovered, so it loads the status you saved with your arrangemnt last time. This feature is called "Total Recall". It works like a soft synth and has nothing to do with Arnold Schwarzenegger

[gtrance]

Simonharris, you do not understand latency at all and Hvyen has been little help to you in this respect.

Do you use a midi keyboard when playing softsynths like Sylenth or Gladiator? If you do then there will be latency. You may not be able to hear it but no setup can give 0 latency. There will be a slight delay from when you press a key on your midi keyboard and to when you hear the sound from your speakers.

Using the Virus in TI mode (usb) there will be a small amount of latency when you press the keys, just the same as with a soft synth. However if you have a decent soundcard with good drivers, the delay will be tiny and likely unnoticeable - the same as your soft synths.

In regards to your comments about using presets and not wanting to have to tweak them - If this is how you approach your productions (which is fine, each to our own), then I would suggest that the Virus, or any other synth would be a waste of your money. Especially a synth that costs what the virus does.

You would be better with Romplers like Nexus and Omnisphere. These have huge librarys of built in sounds ready to go that sound very high quality. Omnisphere is actually a synth as well so you can really tweak and create new sounds where as Nexus is a lot more limited in what you can do to the sound other than basic filter and FX stuff. But either way, a rompler like Nexus is aimed at those who just want ready to go, high quality sounds with little to no tweaking required.

The Virus does have thousands of presets, some of them very good, but if you don't want to do any tweaking then you will likely be spending all your time browsing through presets trying to find one that fits your track.

SYNTHS ARE MEANT TO BE TWEAKED!!!

[simonharris]

Thanks sincerely Hvyen, you have been very helpful. It's basically like a softsynth where you save the DAW arrangement and it saves whatever set up was on a particular channel. That could mean the Snow could be a good bet for me because it's not totally dependent on the ROM banks being the same on each channel.

Also thanks for your comments Gtrance, I know what latency delay sounds like thanks and I am happy to report that with my setup, a powerful quad core mac with 8GB ram I can detect no latency delay to any of the softsynths via midi when rapidly hitting the keys on my attached USB keyboard and none on my attached VI Maschine, it plays absolutely tightly onto the Logic metronome. If there is latency I cannot detect it and like I said I have been an audio engineer for 25+ years and heard horrible latency on many DAW's in the past caused by the sounds cards slow processing of external instruments.

Yes synths are great when tweaked but it should be an option nowadays, one expects great patches which you can customize as an option, I am sure the Virus will have great patches and I look forward to using some of them untouched and others to tweak, what i don't want to do is create sounds from scratch, that is for the hardcore fanboys who and not for a producer with a deadline who has complete songs to produce and mix. I am a producer looking for great sounds, some of them I will tweak and some I won't.

[hvyen]

Yes, I do it the same way. For example: If I need a pad sound, I check the pad category on my TI and browse through the patches. If I find something useful and the sound is good enough, the sound stays untouched. But often I have to tweak a little bit, some filter and envelope changes etc.
When there is nothing useful to find, I have to tweak the whole sound.
I think it's not the best way to create every sound from the beginning. Browsing through the patches can safe much work and give you good ideas what is possible with the Virus.
But I agree with gtrance: "Synths are meant to be tweaked" and not ONLY for using preset sounds!!!
This is for all guys who want to understand how to tweak:

http://www.dvd-lernkurs.de/audiobear...tml?Itemid=169

Sorry, but this DVD is only in german. I couldn't find any english versions.