Spectrasonics announce Atmosphere replacement

[siriusbliss]

Yamaha and Roland (and maybe even Korg) have become characters of themselves, with variations on the same old sounds using many of the same chips and re-churning them out into the marketplace.

At least with Atmosphere I can totally muck up a sound.

Still, sound-quality-wise, no competition for the Scope-based synths IMO.

Greg

[MD69]

Well, if you see a Motif as a GM player, you have missed the point. It's a bit more.

Don't rely on the factory presets as they are done for showing misceleaneous aspects of the synth. In mine I reprogrammed my user voices and, with a PLG150 AN, I can layer 3 samples based voices (with their effets) and an AN voice taking advantage of the step sequencer and the pattern arpegiator, plus the simpler Fx voices all in one patch.

Each voice have a rather large set on filters to choose (24LP,18Lp, 12LP, 6LP, 24HP, 12HP, 12BP, 6BP, Dual LP,...), and 2 Fx ( 49 types).

Some programmers (pro rec, peter Kritchker) have done some nices presets voices you should listen before to think it is outdated

The fact is that it is easier to find a rompler to do synthetic sound and use your PC for your PIANO and strings, than to find a good rompler for Piano and strings and use your PC for synth sounds.

cheers

[siriusbliss]

Well, if you see a Motif as a GM player, you have missed the point. It's a bit more.

Don't rely on the factory presets as they are done for showing misceleaneous aspects of the synth. In mine I reprogrammed my user voices and, with a PLG150 AN, I can layer 3 samples based voices (with their effets) and an AN voice taking advantage of the step sequencer and the pattern arpegiator, plus the simpler Fx voices all in one patch.

Each voice have a rather large set on filters to choose (24LP,18Lp, 12LP, 6LP, 24HP, 12HP, 12BP, 6BP, Dual LP,...), and 2 Fx ( 49 types).

Some programmers (pro rec, peter Kritchker) have done some nices presets voices you should listen before to think it is outdated

The fact is that it is easier to find a rompler to do synthetic sound and use your PC for your PIANO and strings, than to find a good rompler for Piano and strings and use your PC for synth sounds.

cheers

I don't think of Motif as a GM player obviously, and I know you're a customizer (or else you wouldn't be using Scope ), so my opinions are based on what I hear from other user demos and so-called custom presets. Didn't seem like any of them had really 'pushed the envelope' with re: to customization. I was originally considering the Motif for my synth-guitar rig, but have opted to go with Scope, Atmosphere/Omnisphere, and some others just so that I can run everything with a laptop (eventually using Xite-1) and my guitar.

I'm still digging into Omnisphere, and tweaking layers, filters, arps, etc., so the jury is out on this program.

I will admit that, to my ears, the Omnisphere sounds are a little 'flat', and require seasoning to get the sounds to pop out. This is because I'm used to guitar effects (like Eventide), and Scope synths, which have really good DSP horsepower rather than simply playing back tweaked samples (even with Omni's onboard effects).

Greg

[braincell]

Why do the effects matter when you can run it through external effects?

To the person who said that Scope sounds better, that is apples and oranges. You can not compare these things. All Scope is good for basically is to emulate prehistoric synthesizer sounds. If you like the sound of the Scope mixer, and I do, you can run the Omnisphere through it. I would hate to rely on Scope for all of my synthesizers, in fact I hardly use it for that these days. I have hardware Nord and Waldorf synths and some great romplers. Scope hasn't done much lately, too busy trying to keep their heads above water I guess which ironically is counter productive to the platform.

[MD69]

Why effects?

Mostly in my case I use the motif outs as a summing bus dedicated to synths sounds. The motif have 2 or 3 sound (PAD, lead or Fx) sharing the bus and this reduce the input count as I have another motif and other gears. If I used external Fx, It would affect all sounds coming from the Motif.

Technically, the Motif used in Multi mode, allow you to assign a voice (preset or user) with its associated effects to a part, and you can then layer 4 parts (they can share the same midi channel if you which) as the DSP allow 8 fx only (2 per voice). You can add more parts if they don't use Fx (basic synth Fx or sound effets for example) up to 16 parts. The PLG board are sound engines (Analog, VL, ...) piggybacked in the rack, and they can be layered with the Motif sound engine and use motif rack Fx.

A motif rack is about 300 USD used ... the price of a soft synth.

cheers

[siriusbliss]

Not that it means anything, since it's overkill anyways, but I'm toying with 8 tracks of different patches, with mulitple effects on each track, and routing that out via Omni's internal mixer into Samplitude to record multiple tracks. So, as long as my CPU overhead holds out, then I think there's plenty to work with.

I'd say that I see an industry trend here...

Greg

[braincell]

CPU load doesn't matter because you can record tracks individually, then load more patches.

[MD69]

Hi,

not live!

cheers

[siriusbliss]

Latest impressions with latest Omni update...

It's a tweakers and customizers' dream.
Samples overall are of good quality, but sweetening in Scope improves overall 'flatness' of the samples (my opinion).
It's a CPU hog. Recording and playback of 8 tracks, 8 patches pushes my system to the ceiling - and this is on a system that I've had 6 Atmospheres, Superior 2, a Modular, PsyQ, an Optimaster, and two mixers running with Samplitude at full bore with no problems.

So, short of the CPU drain, Omnisphere is a novel device at most, until you get deeper into it and really add some life to it.

Greg