PG Music Home Forums General Discussion Off-Topic What VSTi's, synths do you use to render your midi tracks ?

OK, right up front... this is NOT a debate about midi vs RealTracks !

Assuming you DO use midi, for at least some things, what plug-ins, synths etc do you find really help your midi tracks sound their best ? I for one, have 4 of the Garritan products that I use for horns, strings, percussion, occassional bass tracks (where I could not find a suitable RealTrack).

I think most of us are familiar with "Notes" and his uses... How 'bout you ?

If you need a good Hammond organ, the best I've found is ORGANised trio. You can Google it or check it out at -

http://www.vstplanet.com/Instruments/Organ.htm

And it's freeware (donation) as well.

ROG

What VSTI to use that is free would also be incredible for those on fixed income or just strapped for cash! I saw this piano Acoustic Piano SFZ free compressed or $3 uncompressed, sounded pretty good for free. http://www.mildonstudios.com/freebie_lite_piano.html and here is a free SFZ player if you need one. http://www.camelaudio.com/SFZ-Player-Editor-Definition-Samples.php

I use TTS1 & Sample Tank.
My horns are all played by me using a VL70m & recording only the audio.

For keyboards or strings I find it's hard to beat the Ketron SD2. Just to jam along with though I'd use the VSC DXi.

For sax I use the free sfz soundfont player from Calkwalk with a good soundfont.

For clean guitars I use sfz and an appropriate soundfont from a half dozen or so free ones. I'd use amplitube for amplification. Ususlly the BBClean preset.

For overdriven lead guitar I'd use sfz and a good sound font with a combination of FX from Camel Crusher, Killapluggies or PGM. For amplification I'd use Juicy77. Links provided in the Tips and Tricks entry for creating Hendrix style guitars.

For vocals I'd use the GComp2 compressor, the Detuna from killapluggies and 10 band EQ from PGM.

Mitch,

Have a copy of Kontakt 5 free player with some voices.
Sounds great, but don't have many voices.

Noel suggested SampleTankFree with a lot of voicing.
Also they have large collection of voicing.

http://www.ikmultimedia.com/sampletankfree/features/

Am very happy with two of their guitars and on of their pianos.

Did get Kontakt working with BIAB, and may have been latency glitches
not sure, didnt work with it long enough.

The SampleTankFree installed and have a very large number of
voices freebies.

I wanted some Midi driven Quality voicing to use with Melodist and Soloist
drivers. Rendering Realtracks and Melody is instant gratification.
Melodist can generate some nice MIDI melodies, so having a nice sounding
VSTi to drive is great.

Good Luck !

Most of my stuff is either old-school electromechanical keyboards, for which Genuine Soundware stuff is tops (Organized Trio, mentioned above, is from this company).

http://www.genuinesoundware.com/?a=products

Organized Trio is a freeware, that will eat a little more CPU than the VB3 product from the same company and doesn't have quite all the bells and whistles, but is still WAY better than a sampled organ sound.

Their Rhodes and Wurly emulations are excellent. Very fun to play.

For ambient, washy type stuff, I use a variety of VSTi, preferring Cygnus by Krakli http://www.krakli.co.uk/cygnus.htm and Chameleon 5000 http://www.camelaudio.com/cameleon5000.php Note: Cameleon has been replaced by Alchemy.

The cool thing about both of those synths is that the late, great Tim Conrardy wrote patches for both of them.

Analog lead synth stuff:
http://glenstegner.com/softsynths.html

Orchestral / Acoustic Instruments:

lately I've been using a cut-down version of Garritan Personal Orchestra that came bundled with Tracktion. There's more there than I'll ever make use of what with individual string parts to make my own string sections, etc. The Steinway is nice. It's a little bright for my ear for ambient music, so I've taken to low pass filtering it pretty heavy and sending to a muffly reverb to make it sound more distant. Recent fiddling around example in 6/8 and 7/8 with this piano:
http://rockstarnot.rekkerd.org/fawm2012/Scott%20Lake%20-%20God%20Almighty%20-%20FAWM2012-1.mp3 (Don't blame the terrible drum parts on any program, that's my two-finger on the keyboard attempt - late at night. Will be replaced, hopefully, by a real drummer with a properly mic'ed kit)

See, the thing is, most of my songs really aren't like others here, where autogenerated parts are the norm. I've kind of approached my music making from a different angle, where I have to be able to play everything that gets recorded. This is, admittedly, a limiting mindset. But it does cause one to peek into different corners than most on this forum. For example: I have yet to write a song that uses a horn part; mainly because I just can't hear it correctly in my head to know when and what would be appropriate.

The one exception I have is drum parts - I simply use loops and when I can get a usable output, I'll let Jamstix jam along and print it's output to audio. Jamstix here: http://www.rayzoon.com/ Note, Jamstix's jam-along function doesn't work with PG products.

I'll also use BFD for drums. The version I have came free on a Computer Music magazine cover DVD a few years ago.

Guitars - I do those myself to within my abilities. With electric guitars, this means that I often do textural things rather than lick-based things; though with practice, I can pull off some country licks. Also includes bass. Means that my bass parts will never be mistaken for Mr. Jamerson, or Ms. Kay, or Misters Wooten or Clarke - but it's fun to try to get there!

I use Guitar Rig 3 LE and Amplitube 1 LE for amp simulation, or my trusty Behringer V-Amp2, but that's not a plugin.

I tend to hide in the land of delay and reverb when it comes to guitar textures. Favorite signal chain is:
Amp sim --> Kjaerhus classic filter or Frohmage filter --> Bionic Delay on a tape delay emulation --> Ariesverb reverb.

Locations for those plugins:
http://www.acoustica.com/plugins/vst-directx.htm
http://www.ohmforce.com/HomePage.do# (note - very dodgy website, doesn't work 1/2 of the visits at least, but Frohmage is very fun to play with so it's worth the effort)
http://www.interruptor.ch/vst_overview.shtml
http://www.ariescode.com/index.php (use the freeware version - note that sometimes this thing can be a resource hog and also go into resonance - you've been warned - but the first preset, temple of the ancients, is heaven for ambient music when used as a bussed effect)

It would take years to learn the finer points of this rather small collection of instruments and effects. Have fun!

I spent a lot of time scouring the internet for good, free sounds. Part of that was because I didn't have the money to purchase a decent library, and another part was just the acquisition syndrome where you "gotta get them all." I finally decided to stop when I noticed that I was spending a huge chunk of time looking for the "perfect" sound, and never making any music with what I had.

Although I can't say that my sounds are professional, but I really like the sound of the Garritan Personal Orchestra - especially the woodwinds. I also like how lightweight the library is, compared to some other stuff.

The main source of disappointment is the solo string instruments. I've heard some people get great sounds out of it, but I've not been able to do that. In particular, I with the solo strings had a more expressive, wider vibrato. I'm hoping that Garritan puts out an inexpensive "Advanced Strings" library at some point.

As a sidebar, I see that the top items being voted on for Garritan's next library are "Advanced Strings" (28.5%) and "Choir" (28.3%). This pretty much matches what people have been asking for from RealTracks as well.

I've got Miroslav Philharmonik, which has some nice solo strings. It may just be my machine, but it seems to take forever to load up, so I usually just bail at that point and rework the orchestration for woodwinds.

Hrm... Looks like Quantum Leap has a fairly inexpensive solo violin. Too bad it uses iLok (and I don't have any money). I'd still prefer to get a Garritan library, partly because they don't have nasty authentication, and partly because I could get it through PG.

I just got JABB, so I haven't formed much opinion about that yet. My initial impression is that it's doesn't feel as playable as I was hoping - it feels more like a SoundFont filled with solid sounds, but not really the sort of expression that you expect sound library. I suspect that I really need to dig deeper into the library, but I'm working with other stuff right now.

JABB actually has a nice arco bass that I've been playing around with - something that's currently lacking in BiaB. Not wonderful, mind you - just nice. I haven't had time to compare it with the one in GPO, though.

For MIDI fingerpicked guitar, I've used the SoniVox Taylor Acoustic Guitar. It's also got sampled up/down/chuck strums, so that's nice, too. Putting in MIDI guitar parts is pretty tedious, because it's got to be done (or at least edited) in piano roll mode so that the strings sustain correctly. And the chords have to be voiced properly, or it sounds stupid. But with a bit of work, simple MIDI guitar parts really can be very good.

There are a lot of pretty good guitar SoundFonts out there.

Keep in mind that a lot of my selection is based on what's affordable, not what sounds best. There are some awesome sound libraries out there, but they're out of my price range.

The most critical to me is a great piano sound. I spent months looking into those and finnaly settled on Native Instruments "Alicias Keys". For $99, I think it is one of the very best piano VSTi's available. Give it a listen.

I downloaded the ORGANized Trio and tried to add the VST in BIAB, but it will not load ? What am I doing wrong ?

I rarely use midi but when I do, I like the Miroslav for strings. The Organized trio sounds good but refused to work right and play nice with my computer so I gave up and deleted it. Otherwise I still use my little Yamaha psr keyboard to render midi.



....edit for spelling - love it but never spelll it right LOL! Miroslav Philharmonik

Now this is a thread worth a sticky in tips and tricks.

It's not a VST, it's a VSTi - make sure you are trying to load it in the rigt slot.

Did you unzip it first?

regarding Garritan Strings:

One of my ongoing frustrations in the quest for realistic MIDI is that in order to achieve all the sounds an instrument can make, it takes more than one patch. Strings especially use a lot of different expressive techniques in any given passage, and no single patch will be right for the whole passage.

I've noticed, however, that the Garritan Solo strings seem to have more built-in intelligence than some other string alternatives. For example, if the soloist plays a series of notes, some of which are held longer than others, after a certain time the soloist automatically introduces vibrato (which is what a real soloist would probably do on a sustained note)

I also like the fact that the Aria engine gives me a lot of options for tweaking the sound without having to resort to piano roll CC adjustments. And the options that are available for tweaking seem to be different depending on the instrument.

If more control is needed, it seems to respond to the continuous controllers too. Especially at the reduced price offered about a month ago, this was a good buy for my use. Like most of these toys, you can go broke pretty quickly if you buy everything that's good at full price.

I'm hoping that people who are on various mailing lists will advise the rest of us when a product that is potentially useful to this crowd goes on sale.

I used Miroslav Philharmonik for the strings melody on this track:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rg6gF9siJeg

I have mostly used Coyote for MIDI parts. With careful layering I have gotten some very good results, as you can hear on my other YouTube videos.

Voice Crystal has some of the best Sound fonts ever:

http://www.voicecrystal.com/sfengine.mv

use Synth Font to play them.

OK, after a very severe senior moment I got ORANized Trio to load...once I applied it to a MIDI track and not a REAL TRACK ! DUH..

LOTS of great info and links here ! Will need to bookmark this for future reference.

Between using it on a MIDI track versus a RealTrack, and the difference between the slots for VSTi versus VST, I wonder if there is an opportunity to improve the mixer so that this confusion could be reduced?

I have a lot of stuff I’ve accumulated over the years. All except Sonar and Pgmusic’s software I bought on sale, never full price.

VSTi’s – all of the software that comes with Sonar (TSS-1, Roland Groovesynth, Dimension lite, Pentagon etc.), NI’s Kontakt 4 with a lot of 3rd party sounds, B4II and FM8, Korg’s M1 and Wavestation (both with all of the available cards), Aria’s J&BB and GPO, AAS’s String Studio and UltraAnalog, a ton of SF2s, Rhino2 and the free version of Alchemy.

Hardware synths – Roland String Ensemble M-SE1, Yamaha TX81Z, Roland JV880 and the Zoom MRT-3 drum machine.

Midi controllers – M-Audio’s MK-449C keyboard, Casio MG510MIDI guitar controller and Akai’s MPD18 compact pad controller.