Stop spamming on my property thanks, it's against the rules xD

 

Just somebody with a 25 years head start into music production who put his time in without trying to shortcut by having everything spoon fed to him by creating a forum post looking for "the best everything".

I don't know why you feel entitled to have all this info spoon fed to you, but since you do here's my contribution: spend more time getting to know the tools you have instead of installing every plugin under the sun without actually knowing how they work.

Learn basic principles of music production like sound synthesis, music theory, arrangement, signal flow an mixing (Eqing, compression, saturation, modulation and time-based effects) instead of blindly rushing through plugins randomly to find something that you do not know why and how it's doing what it does.

Giving you specific plugin suggestions at this stage would be like handing over an F1 car to someone who just got his driving license.

 

Last edited: Jun 27, 2020

@shinbeth Thanks for your list and comments about what you've tried already!

Coming from synth sound design I must say that if you're not satisfied with the sound out of the synth, you better get your hands on the synth knobs instead of trying to fix it by some magic plugin afterwards.
It often takes only little changes to make an average sound "fat".
Or layer a few sounds until you're satisfied.

The synths you've listed are all excellent and they would be my choice too for achieving what you're after.
I can see no reason why you would need any additional processing here.

I recommend you to find out what makes you rate a synth sound "crisp, sharp, rich and fat" and sort the synth presets matching these criteria in order to speed up your search in the future.

 

Yes indeed cheers ✌️

 

I like Diva & Legend for kind of analog sound, but u can try to put those free wavetable sounds into Pigments ( https://www.echosoundworks.com/eswcorewavetables) heard it sound pretty cool & analogish, so to speak. I struggle myself to get that particular tone & depht into itb synth. Long way, much too learn, big fun. Good hunting.

 

Last edited: Jun 26, 2020

U-He Diva is one of them for sure!
Also Omnisphere Bob Moog Tribute Library Patches

 

Xils KB-3 is also nice analog sounding, cool lfo filter movement.

 

1. Klanghelm IVGI or SDDR - used as the first plugin in the chain on most of the channels, gives great colour and useful for gain-staging. Great VU-meter. Removes DC offset.
2. TAL-DAC - this one should be put before any other dynamics processing plugin that has no oversampling, especially distortions to remove high frequencies that cause aliasing. Incredibly useful plugin. Of course, you can also use it to dirty things up, but in clean variable mode with filter 1 or 2 it will actually clean up your audio.
3. VladG T-Analog Channel [TAC] - this thing can "3D" your stereo channels like no other, due to extremely non-linear behaviour + add gentle even harmonics saturation, and remove a bit of DC offset. I wish it had a gentle configurable frequency and 1 or 2 stage butterworth LPF.

Honourable mention: Cytomic The Glue, Drop, and Screamer.

edit: damn! I forgot the D16 Devastor and Decimort, and Voxengo Warmifier. HiQ stuff.

 

Last edited: Jun 26, 2020

+1 SDDR, that's really good

 

@SineWave have to try the dac as first insert, cool tip, thx

As someone before said, try to make your synth sounds vivid with synthsettings instead of looking for a magic tool to do all the work. I add , get all the filtering, boosting cleanup work done , also automation, before putting all those fancy stuff on top ( struggle with that myself, those plugs are tempting). talking analog sounding synths, the more exotic ones are the Polynominal one, and the Xhun Audio one , the latter especially for big yet coherent sounding basses is nice too! But dont expect the interface quality of u-he / pigments!
Nowadays i gravitate more towards synths without effects on top, those build in effects cant funk with the best possible plugins in my opinion, and it can make a synth sounds generic from the start. But prove me wrong. Thorn btw is a very good sounding synth with its own twist.

Edit: In Studio 1 , u can use the splitter and make any bus dual mono, which can add up to the tonal quality (have to play with that more myself to really hear what it is doing specifically), u can also use plugins like Vertigo VSC-2 comp in dual mono mode, theres a klanghelm one which is also capable of it.
Last but not least, S1 got the CTC Mixengine, which can add up as well to the sound on a bus when used carefully. I don’t use it, on mixbus, but on synths its a nice thing to play with.Adding subtle crossfeed can be interesting, as its something analog mixers do as well. I try to emulate „old“ analog chains itb, still curious where it might lead. Biggest impact for me was to use severall automation parameters subtlety for movement! Ableton got a LFO tool which can be routed to every parameter, another goodie for vividness!

 

Last edited: Jun 26, 2020

@Retrolize77 Personally, I find Thorn not really that great. Could be depending on the music you make? My ITB VA workhorses are Spire and ANA2. Also u-he Diva, Repro, Hive, Synapse Dune [can't wait to try Obsession :P] and The Legend, and Xfer Serum. That's more than enough of really great ITB VA synths...

 

@SineWave I like thorn for more hifreq pluck sounds in sequences (deep electronic genres), and to change the wavetables and play with phase thru automation can make things sound interesting!

 

Last edited: Jun 26, 2020

@SineWave yeah, obsession will be very interesting indeed. Spire got a nice easy synthish interface, and a special unique underlying tone to it. Just those presets are very edm, too much for me. But we have to tweak on out own, at some place, right?
Dune 3 is cool, i just dislike the heavy effects synths nowadays, but its also a matter of taste.
This one some1 i know made magic chords with this plugin, awesome sounding imho. https://www.plogue.com/products/chipsynth-portafm.html Plus adding valhalla Delay with its build in randomness (ghost mode) is great too.

 

Last edited: Jun 26, 2020

Isn’t it crazy Diva came out 2013, and still one of the best yet?

 

Many of the old's are gold's,

 

@Hooman.Leys GForce impOSCcar 2 got a nice tone too

 

"one of the best" sounds fair, especially after Obsession came out. Personally, my reaction was : Diva who?

 

I think you are like, really high right now, and if you wait until tomorrow it will seem different.

 

If you're looking for the sound right out of the box without having to play around a lot:

1. Arturia software synths that emulate original analog synths are amazing. My favourite so far are ARP2600 V, CS-80 V, Jup-8 V, Mini V, SEM V, Prophet V, Matrix-12 V, OB-Xa V. You can get them in a collection. https://www.arturia.com/products

2. TAL-BassLine-101 This one sounds like my real analog Roland MC-202 (and SH-101) https://tal-software.com/products/tal-bassline-101

3. U-HE Diva probably more flexible than the ones designed to emulate specific hardware synths. https://u-he.com/products/diva/

 

Last edited: Jun 26, 2020

4. Beepstreet Dagger.
http://www.beepstreet.com/plugins/dagger