Hooyah.
Yipes. I have stay away… I’ll likely give it a good look over, drool over it a bit, and then keep using lowly Reason synths. I am curious what the updates are. The previous version is a monster of a thing.
Yeah, I have Omnisphere 1 and 2 (plus several external libraries that are integrated). It’s more addictive than crack cocaine, lol. The sounds you can create are literally limitless.
I’ll probably buy it the day it comes out, I can’t help myself.
Glad to see that efforts to make the ultimate Roland D-50 continue unabated.
Say what?
Omnisphere is a very long way evolved since 80’s digital synths. It’s good to see that they have improved analog emulation (still probably far behind the best of VA today), and I like that they made the effects available as a plugin. Omnisphere is largely about a crap ton of well done preset patches though, which I’m sure is great for someone working in industry, but that’s less attractive for hobbyists looking to cook up sounds for personal projects.
Omnisphere is great for just tinkering around. The presets are awesome indeed but if you use those again and again you run the risk of sounding just like everyone else.
That said, Omnisphere’s effects and parameters allow you to tweak the sounds to infinity and beyond so you really can make them your own.
I see the D-50 as the origin of the cover all bases in one package type of thing, able to recreate synth sounds, and real instruments, for people doing everything themselves in synth land.
Before that it was mostly all synth, or the early samplers with very limited synth capabilities.
First real experience I had with synths, other than mucking around with the SID chip in my C64, was in high school, where we had a Roland D-10, and an Atari ST running C-Lab Notator.
I didn’t really play guitar or bass at the time (although I did get started before I left school), and didn’t have or knew anyone who had a portastudio, so that rig was my first experience of a system where I could actually sit down and put a complete song together myself. Or a soundtrack for a video.
I guess it depends on what you consider to be an ‘all in one package’. The Fairlight CMI was doing synthesis, sampling, and sequencing in the late 70’s and early 80’s, albeit very expensive and out of reach for most people. Looks like it was even doing wavetable morphing.
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/-rxN_y5K9vA
I would have loved tinkering with something like this, 20 years ago.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UDqyskj-VbQ
I guess I have gotten old and boring, and I would rather just have something pretty simple that fits on one page and that I can easily wrap my head around shaping sounds with. Omnisphere for me would be a big waste. I actually like tinkering with Reason’s Thor quite a bit, although I definitely wouldn’t complain about improved sound quality.
The fairlight was advanced, but unobtainable for most, and only came with 22 sampled sounds, all orchestral. Very powerful in some ways, but far less of a box of pre-made instruments than the D-50, or Omnisphere. That’s why I look at Omnisphere as the distant decendant of things like the D-50.