Largos wrote: ↑Mon May 29, 2023 11:31 am
To me, the problem is you don't need a synth if you only want to use presets. You need a rompler. I don't mean this in a snobby way, I think commercial decisions (the industry of selling presets) have led to some norm of combining two use cases into one piece of software. It seems crazy to me that people are using resource heavy synths, full of unneeded functionality when they could be using something simpler.
At the same time, preset libraries on synths are made for browsing pre-made libraries when they should be made for the functionality of storing presets that the synth user themselves made. The only one I've found that is good for this is the library view in Yoshimi/Zyn.
SFZ is a pretty much an open source rompler format, so if there is a lack of resources for people who just want a nice set of presets to play with, that's IMO the way to go. You could have presets made with many different synths, available in a single format usable in simple players.
Give me a chance to change your opinion.
A synthesizer, in principle, is generating all aspects of the sound live in realtime. Be it in software or hardware. You know that of course.
However, that includes everything, be it the LFOs, Filters, modulations etc.
This is the very core "unique selling point" of a synthesizer compared to acoustic instruments. Sure, you can press a violin bow harder and that is very much a valid comparison, but a synth has many more of these options, more fine-tunable and also you can cross-wire all these parameters and let them trigger each other in varying degrees.
Long story short: To record all these variations and combinations is not possible, shown by simple math. A synthesizer preset includes these settings. Like linking velocity with LFO speed and filter resonance cutoff point at the same time.
What you get in the end is an instrument, that has a slightly different playstyle compared to the other settings. A synth setup is not only in sound but also must consider playability.
So, you need a) a synthesizer engine to create the sounds in realtime and b) somebody who actually understands all these parameters and the user-player-experience and can combine them in a meaningful way. This is not possible for normal musicians, such as you can maybe finetune your own acoustic instrument a bit but you don't drill holes in the wood to add new strings, without knowing what you are doing. Becoming a synthesizer expert is akin to an instrument builder, not akin to becoming a pianist.
And that is why we need presets, by those experts. They cannot be romplers or samplers, because they are too static, and you cannot expect to get the really good synth sounds from the musicians themselves.
)
Some people don't have use for the presets, except possibly as a starting point, while others of us are kinda lost without them...