Virus A,B & C for rave?????

[TeenGirlLust]

I have been thinking about getting a Virus......My question is..........I am really trying to do the Rave-Trance stuff .......like Sasha's Xpander- Paul Van Dyk's 'Tell me why (the riddle) (Club mix)'.....I already own a nord 2x & a MPC 1000......would a Virus A or B help.....Let me know

[Timo]

Virus is great for rave/techno. I have a B (Indigo).

[TeenGirlLust]

Ok....the Nord lead 2 X is really graet for techno....but too harsh for trance.....I need to get that soft round bass sound that is typical in most trance/house......also I need to get some dance floor pads.........so what do you think is the virus the way to go?????

[Wandering Kid]

you can use a NL for trance. it just requires doing things a little differently. its excellent for uk hardcore style stuff, very hard, bright hard trance leads. to make softer pluck type sounds you need to put a bit more effort in but its very doable. extremely versatile synth in my humble opinion.

virus? virus is a different beast. getting bright, hard sounds out of it requires alot more effort since it is characteristically dark. it is also alot more difficult to program than a NL. you can make quite satisfying plucks and lush pad like trance saw type sounds. then again you can make most sounds on it, but it depends very much on your ability to program it and how long you are willing to stick with it.

for example, the virus isnt the type of synth where you just tweak some knobs and hey presto! you get a great sound. it doesnt work like that. you have to do alot of meticulous fine tuning in the mod matrix during and after building a patch. use the mod matrix to change envelope curves to give a sound different attack and transients and decays (envelopes on the virus are linear by default i think but can be changed with recursive modulation in the mod matrix). to brighten up sounds you need to painstakingly adjust ring modulation and filter saturation in conjunction with key follow in this delicate balancing act to get everything right.

if you are ok with all that and dont mind spending a load of time learning how to do it then you will probably like the virus. in my opinion, it sacrifices immediacy, instant playability and gratuity in favour of complexity. at first its extremely underwhelming and somewhat awkward to get anything good sounding out of it. but give it a year of fiddling every day and learning the manual inside out and you start to see some of the possibilities.

i like the NL though and i do believe it is capable of a great variety of sounds, all types of trance sounds amongst them but there are very subtle movements and random elements you cannot put into the sound of NL which you can with a virus. its very subtle and it all comes down to modulation options. and the virus has these in spades. whereas the NL doesnt have quite so much.

then again, the NL sounds absolutely amazing very quickly, sounds incredibly bright and cutting and it sounds great without any fx. which should be a testament to how good those raw oscillator waveforms are.

[Mister Orange]

Originally Posted by Wandering Kid

in my opinion, it sacrifices immediacy, instant playability and gratuity in favour of complexity. at first its extremely underwhelming and somewhat awkward to get anything good sounding out of it. but give it a year of fiddling every day and learning the manual inside out and you start to see some of the possibilities.

Underwhelming? Awkward? But the Virus comes with 2176 pre-programmed sounds! How much more instant playability you want? These sounds are infinitely varied, (sometimes phenomenal), and which can also be used as templates for new sounds.

I have just got my first Virus and have found it to be both immediate and gratuitous. I just dial up another preset, grab a couple of knobs and tweak merrily away. No fiddling or learning the manual. And I've never had any need to go near the mod matrix to get a good sound.

It's also a perfect machine for trance, if indeed that's what you want. Some might even say it's 'the' definintive trance synth.

Mr O

[Wandering Kid]

i kind of meant in programming terms. you can load up presets on any synth but i tend to think of most presets as templates or sources of ideas. i rarely find a preset fits into anything i write. especially some of the virus ones, the bulk of which are very very strange. interesting but strange. and i wouldnt rely on the presets for trance sounds - the best ones are the ones you build yourself.

programming a virus is the first brick wall alot of people seem to run into. i did too. you get it and you start turning some rotaries and you find that its difficult to coax really good sounds out of it straight away.

i think the mod matrix and the modulation options on the virus are key to what makes it such a beautiful instrument. but it takes time to learn and familiarise yourself with them. when i first got it, i wasnt thinking in those terms. and from the posts on some forums regarding the virus, it wasnt what they were thinking either.

these days i prefer to build my own sounds from scratch. lately ive just been mixing wavetables to get really interesting sounds. heres a few i made from scratch recently:

(note: no keyboard and therefore no pitch wheel and mod wheel unfortunately. no effects or post processing used except for SIR reverb [its free and awesome] and fruity delay 2. the 3rd sound is a preset on the synth called '7thheaven' the others are made by moi)

http://www.soundclick.com/util/downl...key=D488CA11-1

i have to update some of these because they are old and stick on some of my newer better ones. will update shortly.

[Doc Jones]

wk, those are some fantastic sounds (love that last one, it's right up my alley). I am still learning how to create sounds from scratch and was wondering if you could give some pointers on how you created that second (trancelike evolving) sound? thanks.

[Wandering Kid]

oh that one is easy. all oscillators on, oscillators 1 and 2 set to saw. 3rd oscillator set to slave. mix them all in equally. adjust the envelope shape to taste. using both LFOs modulate the oscillator pulse width of oscillator 1 and oscillator 2 in opposite directions. and max it out. i.e. +63 for osc 1 and -63 for osc 2. set the LFO rate of osc 1 about double the speed of osc 2. (about 90 and 45). the LFO shape for both is set to triangle. set the detune around 40 to 50. enough so that you start to hear a prominant fifth. now turn up the punch intensity up to max (127) and turn on unison. i usually never go over unison x4 because it starts to sound messy beyond that. set unison detune to 90.

you now have the rough shape of that sound. set up the filter as series 4 and adjust the keyfollow to get just the right amount of brightness out of it. i have both filters selected and the resonance fairly low (i used 28 for that patch) because it sounds very odd with high resonance. i configured filter 2 so that when filter 1 is fully closed you can still hear the fundamental. both low pass. both filters are mixed in 50/50 (i.e. filter balance is set to 0). env amount is maxed out at 127.

i also tend to add a tiny tiny bit of noise (4) and noise colour (2) just to fuzz it up a bit. to make it brighter add filter saturation. either soft or rectified but use it sparingly. similarly you can use this in conjunction with a bit of ring modulation to harden up the sound in an attempt to make it more 'JP' like' but i tend to like my trance sounds darker and more subtle. i also mixed the sub oscillator in a tiny bit (15) to give it just a little weight of bass and make it sound moodier.

use chorus to fatten and fuzz it up a bit and an external ping pong delay and you are nearly there.

lastly, its the mod matrix. use this to add more movement to the sound. i typically have the slower LFO (in this case LFO 2) modulating the pitch of oscillator 1. i have LFO 3 randomly modulating osc3 detune for some random, alive movement. then in that patch i used the filter envelope to recursively modulate filter envelope attack to take the edge of the punch intensity.

hope that helped.

the key thing is that the sound from a virus doesnt start to sound alive until you are modulating parts of the sound 7 ways till sunday. its sometimes disconcerting when you work on building a sound for an hour and it still sounds crap up until you get to the mod matrix adjustments and the LFOs and everything starts to come together.

for those interested in making string sounds, the patch i used makes use of wavetables 19 (osc1) and 32 (osc2), 3rd oscllator slaved with oscillator balance set to -25.

and i filled up all the mod matrix slots on my virus b using that one. if you listen out you can detect many elements moving but ill save you the trouble of trying to figure them out and tell you what they are:

LFO1 is modulating the pulse width of osc1 positively along a triangle wave.
LFO 2 is modulating the pulse width of osc2 negatively along a triangle wave.
LFO 2 is also set to control left/right pan.
contr9 is the first source in the mod matrix and its destination is osc1plswdh
the second source is filtenv and that is controlling filter attack and decay
assign 3 has LFO1 set as the source and is modulating osc1shpvel, patch volume and osc3 detune.

i would need a virus c in order to assign controls to mod wheels and pedals (just for the extra assign slots im beginning to think its worth the difference in price). that patch seriously needs a pitch bend in it too.

[Doc Jones]

fantastic post. Thanks for sharing that information wandering kid.

[merlyn]

Wandering: I have to agree that the previous Virus series weren't the easiest to model sounds on, but I think that the TI has overcome that problem. That's probably the most important change for me in the TI series. The bigger screen combined with the three value knob control and reduction of menu pages has made modeling so much easier. Are you using a TI?