Softsynth / Sampler suggestion for Sonar 2.2

P

pennylink

New member
I'm looking to compliment my acoustic/electric guitar and bass guitar tracks with midi for strings, pads, and any other sounds that might fit into my blues/rock/world music. I'm presently using acidized loops for drums and percussion.

What softsynth or sampler would you recommend that would interact seemlessly with Sonar 2.2? (Stick with DXi?) I'm looking for an organic-type of sound, not Techno or Dance, and I'm no keyboard player, so I would like to keep it simple! Are any of the free synths, like Triangle II, any good?

I'm running Windows 98SE on a PIII/800 with 512 RAM and dual hard drives with an Aarvark Q10 soundcard/interface. I think my PC is probably too slow to upgrade to Sonar 3, and a faster PC isn't an option at this time...

Also, what would the advantages of sampler vs. softsynth be, I'm not totally clear on which would be best for me. Thanks!
 
pennylink said:
Also, what would the advantages of sampler vs. softsynth be, I'm not totally clear on which would be best for me.
Click to expand...
Depends on what sound you want. There are alot of samples of a Hammond B3, but the best sollution is (IMHO) the Native Instruments B4 softsynth. But for piano for example, I would use samples and not softsynths.

The line between softsynths and samplers is very thin these days. Many softsynths takes advantage of sampling. ;)



How to decide what to use? Can't help you there. If you need a sampler, then get one ;) Is Triangle II any good? Well, it's free so why not download it and test it?

:)
 
are soundfonts basically samples? When we're talking about an analog recorded piano soundfont?

Just checking. I think they would be like samples, even if played in a softsynth dxi player or whatever. Is that the kind of line blurring you're talking about?

October's issue of Music Tech magazine has a Giga piano (Bosendoerfer) demo on the cd. And, it's smaller than the original, but it seems to work pretty well. It comes in several formats for different programs to use.

I didn't have any of the samplers they made it available for, but I was able to use my Awave Audio that I purchased recently to make it a soundfont. Which may be bad. But, I did it, and that's why I paid $100 for that kick ass Awave conversion program.

I find tons of piano soundfonts that sound okay. that Giga piano is 145 mb of piano soundfont. And, it sounds pretty good, but there are three versions...one of them has a wrongly mapped note. It took me awhile to figure out that my keyboard wasn't broken, but that one of the files has two keys mapped to the same note. Still, it's a piano sound I didn't have!
-Kirstin
 
Also, lots of people like the Vsampler...but I noticed while using it that when I play the keyboard as the trigger, the sustain pedal doesn't work for me. Everything is staccato as can be. When I use livesynth pro to play the same soundfonts...it works. Not really related, and I'm sure there's a fix, I just can't figure it out based upon the documentation. It's over my little head.

Some people are liking Kompakt...the lite version of Kontakt. There are tons of things that will work well within Sonar 2.2.
 
Thanks for the replies. I think I'm starting to make a little more sense of it all...

Does anyone else here use Vsampler? I noticed they just came out with version 3 and the price seems right. Any likes or dislikes?
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top