im narcissistic that’s why I put my own name on Sylenth. Now we’ve got that out of the way, this is my tribute to the enigmatic Sylenth from Lennar digital. It’s fast on it’s way to becoming a classic.  There are so many good VSTi synths, and yet this one is really a stand out. It’s easy and to use, sounds great, always does the job. It’s a go-to synth. It’s not a hyperbrain like many nowdays but it always delivers niceness. Perfect if you’re making any kind of club music. It’s very popular with all kinds of electro. You might stumble across some sounds you know very well.  Everything kinda came together with this design. If I was only allowed to use one VSTi synth i’m tempted to say it would be this. It’s a producer synth. Many people think the original is ugly and I have to agree. Hence the need for the kevlar and brushed steel camo with alloy knobs facelift. I always liked getting the camo weapon upgrade in call of duty so this is like the Sylenth verson of that. The doctors say I’m the mental age of 9. The current version doesn’t allow reskinning, you have to hack it, but you don’t have far to look for a PC or MAC tutorial. I think the general outcry of the horrible UI has prompted the company to officially support skinning in a later version. I just read that somewhere on the internet, don’t hold me to that one. Anyway you just reedit the resources and make them look how you want. If you can’t be assed doing that, message me if you want a slide with your name on it and I’ll make you one.
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im narcissistic that’s why I put my own name on Sylenth. Now we’ve got that out of the way, this is my tribute to the enigmatic Sylenth from Lennar digital. It’s fast on it’s way to becoming a classic. 

There are so many good VSTi synths, and yet this one is really a stand out. It’s easy and to use, sounds great, always does the job. It’s a go-to synth. It’s not a hyperbrain like many nowdays but it always delivers niceness. Perfect if you’re making any kind of club music. It’s very popular with all kinds of electro. You might stumble across some sounds you know very well.  Everything kinda came together with this design. If I was only allowed to use one VSTi synth i’m tempted to say it would be this. It’s a producer synth.

Many people think the original is ugly and I have to agree. Hence the need for the kevlar and brushed steel camo with alloy knobs facelift. I always liked getting the camo weapon upgrade in call of duty so this is like the Sylenth verson of that. The doctors say I’m the mental age of 9. The current version doesn’t allow reskinning, you have to hack it, but you don’t have far to look for a PC or MAC tutorial. I think the general outcry of the horrible UI has prompted the company to officially support skinning in a later version. I just read that somewhere on the internet, don’t hold me to that one.

Anyway you just reedit the resources and make them look how you want. If you can’t be assed doing that, message me if you want a slide with your name on it and I’ll make you one.

Q:How do you keep up with all the key commands or functions with the different DAWs, won't you get confused? ;p

re-pository

There’s several ways to do this, the sexiest being the optimus maximus which I talked about on page 2 of my blog, you can get a logickeyboard for your chosen DAW or the eco option is stickers like this, short of actually buying blank stickers and writing your commands on them.

The muse receptor. in case you aren’t familiar, is a computer in a 19 inch rack box running a custom version of linux redhat. It makes use of windows VST and VSTis and acts for all intents and puropses as a synth rack, guitar processor rack or drum rack for use in a live situation.  I got one as an alternative to a rack rompler. I found the experience of owning one a rollercoaster of emotions, mainly because I made many assumptions about what it was and the realities of making it work for me, so here’s a checklist of cool things and bad things about it. The cool things, it has massive polophony. You can plank on your keyboard and every note will sound. You can load up several instances of VSTs and has no trouble playing all of them. It has low enough latency for a profesional keyboardist not to notice any lag while playing. You can put all the high quality switches in your software on. It has it’s own version of rewire called uniwire running over ethernet that lets you route midi and audio to and from to your DAW, each with seperate outs and midi channels literally into the thousands. It interacts seamlessly with other win or mac computers. You can mount it’s drive as a remote drive on your desktop and drag your sounds and patches to and from it. It supports up to 1.5TB space on the drive on newer models, will accept ilok protected software. It will even work in “unsupported mode” allowing you to make use of a lot of other windows format VSTs and VSTis. The AD/DAs on the unit itself are fairly respectable. If it crashes, which is not often once it’s set up, it takes under a minute to come back with all 16 VSTs loaded and just a few seconds if you have 1 VSTi in your template. You can view the VSTis on a vga monitor that you can connect to the unit without it being slaved to a computer and connect a usb keyboard & mouse to it for direct input to the VSTs. You can screenshare from a computer over the ethernet cable and see your VSTs that way. You can also access VST patches from the front panel alone. The bad things. It’s really designed to be a VSTi PLAYER for a live event. That is, if you like designing and messing round with your VSTis, switching samples in and out, it becomes slightly more unstable. You have to remember to save your patches frequently because it can spontaneously restart if you’re in your VST messing with it. You have to follow receptor’s patch management system to control patches , making it more difficult to export anything you’ve made in there back to a DAW based VSTi.  Because the OS is so stripped back it’s a miserable affair loading samples for reaktor or battery. Forget searching or any other normal computer services you would expect outside the VST UI.  It doesn’t support most USB music keyboards, only a few cheap lame ones, which kind of goes against the requirements of a professional keyboardist. You may find you can only MIDI your expensive USB stage piano, and thereby experience some of the latency you were hoping to avoid. One version of the receptor comes prepacked with native instruments guitar rig, except it doesn’t support NI’s own USB guitar rig kontroller. You have to use a MIDI guitar controller if you want to do that. Receptor support is a paid service. Uniwire doesnt support multiprocessor on your DAW, so if you have a multicpu PC or mac running your DAW, too bad, you have to use only 1 processor which will force you to run the DAW with massive amounts of latency so your expensive desktop doesnt shit itself trying to make everything in your in DAW work. The Receptor is brilliant but the company’s small development team and lack of vision for what it could be is holding it back a bit. They designed something so you can play your VSTis on the road, it succeeds there but with a bit more support of devices and situations and multiprocesor support it could be a game changer, because it’s not that expensive and it can do such a lot. If you’re on the road a lot and you just want to play VSTis and not do deep reprogramming with them, then it’s definately worth getting. I have a 32bit Nuendo DAW on a 12core mac  and I found it more powerful to have a single processor Nuendo and Uniwired receptor, than to try to do everything in Nuendo alone with multiprocessor on, and I dont care about latency because I program in the sequencer.. Come 64bit (once all the plugin developers finally get round to VST3 64bit  ) I may rethink my situation. What this product needs to be great is to support more devices and situations with other equipment, but I say that with respect that this would allow it to move beyond just being a VST player you can take on the road. I wonder what it’s competitor will be like when it comes out?
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The muse receptor. in case you aren’t familiar, is a computer in a 19 inch rack box running a custom version of linux redhat. It makes use of windows VST and VSTis and acts for all intents and puropses as a synth rack, guitar processor rack or drum rack for use in a live situation.

 I got one as an alternative to a rack rompler. I found the experience of owning one a rollercoaster of emotions, mainly because I made many assumptions about what it was and the realities of making it work for me, so here’s a checklist of cool things and bad things about it.

The cool things, it has massive polophony. You can plank on your keyboard and every note will sound. You can load up several instances of VSTs and has no trouble playing all of them. It has low enough latency for a profesional keyboardist not to notice any lag while playing. You can put all the high quality switches in your software on. It has it’s own version of rewire called uniwire running over ethernet that lets you route midi and audio to and from to your DAW, each with seperate outs and midi channels literally into the thousands. It interacts seamlessly with other win or mac computers. You can mount it’s drive as a remote drive on your desktop and drag your sounds and patches to and from it. It supports up to 1.5TB space on the drive on newer models, will accept ilok protected software. It will even work in “unsupported mode” allowing you to make use of a lot of other windows format VSTs and VSTis. The AD/DAs on the unit itself are fairly respectable. If it crashes, which is not often once it’s set up, it takes under a minute to come back with all 16 VSTs loaded and just a few seconds if you have 1 VSTi in your template. You can view the VSTis on a vga monitor that you can connect to the unit without it being slaved to a computer and connect a usb keyboard & mouse to it for direct input to the VSTs. You can screenshare from a computer over the ethernet cable and see your VSTs that way. You can also access VST patches from the front panel alone.

The bad things. It’s really designed to be a VSTi PLAYER for a live event. That is, if you like designing and messing round with your VSTis, switching samples in and out, it becomes slightly more unstable. You have to remember to save your patches frequently because it can spontaneously restart if you’re in your VST messing with it. You have to follow receptor’s patch management system to control patches , making it more difficult to export anything you’ve made in there back to a DAW based VSTi.  Because the OS is so stripped back it’s a miserable affair loading samples for reaktor or battery. Forget searching or any other normal computer services you would expect outside the VST UI.  It doesn’t support most USB music keyboards, only a few cheap lame ones, which kind of goes against the requirements of a professional keyboardist. You may find you can only MIDI your expensive USB stage piano, and thereby experience some of the latency you were hoping to avoid. One version of the receptor comes prepacked with native instruments guitar rig, except it doesn’t support NI’s own USB guitar rig kontroller. You have to use a MIDI guitar controller if you want to do that. Receptor support is a paid service. Uniwire doesnt support multiprocessor on your DAW, so if you have a multicpu PC or mac running your DAW, too bad, you have to use only 1 processor which will force you to run the DAW with massive amounts of latency so your expensive desktop doesnt shit itself trying to make everything in your in DAW work.

The Receptor is brilliant but the company’s small development team and lack of vision for what it could be is holding it back a bit. They designed something so you can play your VSTis on the road, it succeeds there but with a bit more support of devices and situations and multiprocesor support it could be a game changer, because it’s not that expensive and it can do such a lot. If you’re on the road a lot and you just want to play VSTis and not do deep reprogramming with them, then it’s definately worth getting.

I have a 32bit Nuendo DAW on a 12core mac  and I found it more powerful to have a single processor Nuendo and Uniwired receptor, than to try to do everything in Nuendo alone with multiprocessor on, and I dont care about latency because I program in the sequencer.. Come 64bit (once all the plugin developers finally get round to VST3 64bit  ) I may rethink my situation.

What this product needs to be great is to support more devices and situations with other equipment, but I say that with respect that this would allow it to move beyond just being a VST player you can take on the road.

I wonder what it’s competitor will be like when it comes out?