So I have been playing with Spire for a couple of months now, and I am really starting to get into it. I have been looking for a more modern (and 64bit) replacement for the ubiquitous Sylenth1. I think I may have found it in Spire. It seems to run pretty well. I can run about 5 or 6 of them before I need to up my buffers (although I am hoping that will improve to sylenth like proportions). And I haven't had any crashes or other weird things occur while using it. The oscillators and unison density are what seem to keep me coming back to Spire.

Anyone else feeling the love, or have any tips on the use of Spire that they would like to share? Thanks guys! Poor musicians are the best kind of musicians!

PS - My pro-tip for newcomers to Spire would be to play with the density function. You can emulate supersaws, hypersaws, etc with it. Extremely useful and one of those features that makes Spire something special indeed. Definitely something that it does substantially better than Sylenth (along with the number of waveform variations).

 

Yeah i am literally in the same boat as you guys, it is my second go to synth after sylenth1, but i havent learnt as much about its martix functions or the rest of its stuff, the sound however on the presets is so clear and crisp! I havent found it to hog cpu at all and im on v1.0.8. Still cant use x64 spire because of FL's retarded bridging function

 

Yeah, but only a little cpu hungry. It isn't like Diva, Massive, or the lovely LuSH-101 in that regard. I am hopeful that this will be addressed in future updates. *yes*

Yeah, my main gripe with Sylenth was the lack of waveforms. Even my little Roland SH-32 puts it to shame in sheer number of waveform variations. The reverb was crap, but I could forgive that as I tend to use dedicated verbs for all synths. I'm waiting for a good sale on Spire and I will likely jump on board the legit train as well. I really like the interface of Spire--very friendly. It just begs you to tweak it. And when you do, you feel as though you can do no wrong as your sound just continues to get more complex and cooler. Very fun synth.

Yeah, it takes a bit of time to get accustomed to a new synth--even if the functions of most subtractive synths are pretty much interchangeable. It hogs a fair bit of cpu when you are doing substantial layering of tones and create about 8 instances of the plugin. However, it isn't unreasonable considering the newness of the plug and the sound quality it generates. I am confident that the performance will only improve from here! Most of the time, I am not running enough instances of the plugin to cause substantial system load and between it and sylenth can generally flesh out a song that doesn't require freezing or bouncing and can run in realtime without considerable latency (realtime input of midi is still low enough to be totally playable). Good stuff.

 

should use the VSTi sampling capability of DirectWave (AFAIK its method is the easiest and the fastest one) instead of freezing, in this case u can still edit the MIDI parts , created small video about:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oLPiW94650c

you m8s have a nice evening

 

I used spire for a while, but then because it had a large savestate, it jacked up the size of my project file (0.5-1MB), and the savestate seemed to increase with newer versions, and the CPU usage was a bit high (up to 8% of 1 2.9Ghz core), so I switched to Future Audio Workshop Circle instead (1KB? savestate, similar/lower CPU).

 

Can i ask you something about Spire, guys? (of course, if the topic owner allows me).
Did you ever heard on some presets (the mono leads, basses and some plucks seems fine), like "SY", some plucks, pads and polyphonic leads, not all of them... but randomly to face some kind of subtle distortion? (like the digital ugly distortion, not tube emulation or something because i deactivated the drive/saturation function but the distortion is still there).
I usually detect by myself why one of my softsynths is distorting, but with Spire is different, because the distortion doesn't overlap the sound, it's kinda subtle but somehow annoying on the "surgical" studio monitors. I can live with it, but i just don't understand why with other synths like ANA, Zebra2, Sylenth1, Massive, etc. I never faced this kind of strange distortion but only with Spire, which i really love to use on my recent projects.(and no, i don't have problems with my CPU, because the levels are normal and the buffer is set on the "mixing" mode (which is higher).

Oh.. i forgot..(but i'm not in the studio right now).
Maybe if i try to deactivate experimentally each effect (like delay, chorus, rvrb etc.) to see which fx, trigger the damn distortion? Anyway, i'll try to do this after i'll get some answers with your thoughts. Thanks!

 

dunno which DAW do u use, but in AL freezing isn't an option in many cases : using side-chaining or envelope shapers/envelope followers/LFOs or some multi-mapped devices from an other midi track, so when u use an M4L controll device from an other midi track u lose freezing instantly, actually I never use freezing in my projects (just for creating risers/downers/effects) dunno it's like dancing in shackles for me

ofc. DirectWave isn't the best option, but it can be very handy for CPU hungry VSTis like Diva,Spire, if u have zillions of time u can sample the raw sound of the oscillators like in

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pPR41fERPKc

for Virus, but in this case u lose the effect section of the target hard/soft-ware, so yepp using the original one is always the best (if u can)

 

If you tried Studio One (from V2 above) you'll love the cool freezing option (called track transform, it's like a editable freezing which is damn sexy for the cpu-hungry plugs and also endlessly freezable, so each time you add new FXs or etc. you can re-freeze it each time, but that's handy only when you're mixing, but for cpu-hog softsynths is enough to transform it just one time and revert it only when you need to change automation or tweaking the synth/plugs.)

 

That's what I'd recommend too.

Hmm. This is a cool sounding feature. I may have to go back to Studio One and check it out some more.

 

Good to know, one more reason I love Spire.