Reaktor is my go to but everyone seems to love Pigments so I plan to get my hands on that soon. Also a huge plug for Pianoteq especially if you’re into microtonality.
Logic’s Alchemy synth is also excellent but I work pretty exclusively in Ableton these days. Of all the Ableton stock VSTs I use Wavetable the most by a mile.
Yep, I use one of the 70s based sounds on almost all of my songs. I’ll give me has a lot of really great pads in it as well. I’ve never worked in Ableton, but I know a lot of folks who do.
In the last few years I’ve used them less, but I was getting a lot of mileage out of Ableton’s Analog (subtractive) and Operator (FM) for a long time before that.
I may be making a category error in terms of what qualifies as a "synthesizer" or "instrument" but I'm completely into VCV rack as a music-making platform. You also can't beat the price.
Not sure how you’re defining virtual, and it’s been some time since I traded mine in for a non virtual synth, but I really liked the Arturia keylab controller + software situation
I have a couple synths I use on everything: UA PolyMAX Synth and GForce Oberheim SEM. Both are inexpensive and sound amazing! Native Instruments BATTERY 4 is the core of all my percussion along with the vintage heavy compressed kit in EZ Drummer. The NI Analog Dreams and Hybrid Keys are in there too
I have a few that I really enjoy but my current favorite is actually the Korg ER1 from the Korg Collection. I have owned the hardware version a few times, and having it as a VST is absolutely perfect. It’s all over the album I’m working on right now.
I tend to buy a new instrument every like 6 to 8 months or so. And I only buy ones that really seem to have the energy to keep me going for 6 to 8 months, but I have a lot that I love
Same - to me, "gear syndrome" happens for vi's just as much as it does for hardware synths. Software is easier to get tho. In a way, it's good that software is hard, so musically useful vi's don't show up very often.
