+1
Wow---be prepared to be amazed. DM60 gave you a great place to start. You're bound to find something for free that you like and suits your needs. For example, on the page he links to (30 of 38), there is a synth with a real Boards Of Canada vibe (AD-Endorphin), useful orchestral sounds (Sonatina), and a richly featured, good-lookin' 3-oscillator synth (X-Jupitae Flexoid), not to mention the "editors' picks off to the side. Be prepared to be amazed, hour after hour, day after day. I've been checking this stuff out for years and I'm still amazed at what comes out on a regular basis. A great time to be alive!
YouTube videos provide varying amounts of information. I check them out all the time but there's no substitute for having and using the actual VI---not to mention the fact that you can then tweak, alter and create patches.
As far as purchasing VIs goes, and as someone who has thou$and$ invested:
(1) Spend some serious time with the stuff that DM60 pointed you to. Do continue to read up on or YouTube info on what's available, how it sounds, what it does, what other users think and have experienced.
(2) Download the following freebies, along with their demo/sample libraries: Kontakt Player, UVI Workstation, Elastik2, SampleTank Free Custom Shop
(3) Get on the following commercial mailing lists for good bargains and sale offerings: PluginBoutique, AudioDeluxe, KVR, VSTbuzz, BestService
(4) Some of the best sale prices of the year are coming up around Thanksgiving: Black Friday and Cyber Monday sales.
(5) In retrospect, these were some of the best and best "bang-for-the-buck" purchases of VIs that I made:
(5a) Komplete Elements ($20)-->Upgrade offer from NI to full version of Kontakt ($80)-->Komplete Ultimate 10 crossgrade ($400). The amount of stuff from NI that I now have is amazing, and the third-party stuff that is available to go along with the NI instruments is, again, mind-boggling. You will have to pry Kontakt from my cold, dying fingers.
(5b) SynthMaster Player ($7 during a Black Friday sale). Over a thousand, well-organized, tweakable (not programmable) patches from a top-rated VI.
(5c) AIR Music Tech Hybrid3 (came with hardware)-->AEIP3 Complete ($120---lately offered for $75). These are great sounding, full-featured instruments (including Strike for dums/percussion), ported over from ProTools, well-supported and documented (Groove3 has tutorials on virtually every VI in this package), with thousands and thousands of patches/presets, included third-party libraries, and now includes all of the long-standing AIR plugins ported from ProTools (20) along with (8) new ones. Almost 80GB of content. Some people took advantage of a PluginBoutique offer of Xpand!2 for $1 to open up this upgrade path. Check out some of the postings below relating to this package. It's offered periodically, so keep your eyes open for this one. BTW, owning AEIP3 will also open the way to the SONNiVOX Complete crossgrade, which will add orchestral strings, brass, reeds, cinematic percussion and other percussion/drum packages, and more synths and keys to your arsenal for about $110).
(5d) Titan2 (and Engine2, $90)---almost 13000 well-organized sampled presets, with the ability to layer, tweak, and reprogram
(5e) Xchange Instrument Bundle ($150): Contained a lot of good instruments, like Z3ta-2 (beautiful sounds and unusually flexible arpeggiator---snap this up when Cakewalk offers it for $30-40), Arturia Analog Lab and Spark EDM, UVI Synths Anthology & Tines Anthology, two Addictive Keys packages, SSD4, and more, and cost less WAY than the combined individual prices. Took days and days to download updates and register and authorize the included packages but well worth it in the end. Provided the opportunity for a number of bargain upgrades.
(5f) Those iZotope instruments and bundles that get offered for $40-50 from time to time, Like IRIS (freakin' amazing, with 9GB of patches) and BreakTweaker.
(6) Once you have the full version of Kontakt, a ridiculous amount of synths, orchestrals, world instruments and percussion, found instruments and percussion, mutated instruments and percussion, artist drums and instruments, vocalists, choirs, brass, cinematics, efx, etc, become available in both sample and phrase formats. Go to any of the vendors in (3), above, or to Sampleism, or KontaktHub (or many others), and do a "Kontakt" search. From free to pricey, just a load of available Kontakt libraries that cover just about everything---including things you never thought about or imagined (e.g., a sound library based on samples of Galapagos tortoises). Also, another bargain I got through eSoundz was something called InfinitePlayer, a Kontakt instrument that has its own series of bargain libraries, which eSoundz often bundles and offers at bargain prices. These libraries cover a lot of territory, from the types of things that Sampletank libraries would cover, to HipHop/EDM construction kits, to artist drum/percussion packages.
It's it good thing you caught me on a rare slow day---I hope this helps, and I hope others jump in.
Good luck,
Paj
8^)
