what screws up bass in VSTi?

[kensuguro]

One thing that really bugs me about going native is that the bass frequency range doesn't seem quite right in my mixes. I mean, they used to be fine in Scope. The difference is apparent when comparing side by side. Hehe, either I lost my mixing juice, or something about native plugs screws up the bass region. It's subtle, but it seems like the the gutsy bass sound that wasn't too hard to achieve in scope is much harder to get right in native.

Anyone have similar experience? I guess that's why you'd stick to Scope, which really isn't an option for me at the moment.. but I don't get where the difference comes from tho.. it's all the same dsp in the digital domain right? eh, maybe just difference in the quality of the FX algo...

[dante]

Yep or your converters. If you cant use Scope, what're you goin to do with the cards ?

[dawman]

As they say in Vegas......
You can polish a turd, but it's still a piece of Shit.
Ankyu..

[kensuguro]

Im not sure what im going to do with the cards.. Im having a hard time justifying buildinng an old school box just to house my scope cards.

I really miss mixing on scope, the native stuff is good for what it is. Portable, lots to choose from, and some of them, cheap. But inguess if the sound is meh..

[dawman]

I think in time when prices come down and portability becomes even more desirable, an XITE-1 w/ a new SDK and laptop using USB 3.0 Raid Sticks for samples will be the Rig du Jour.

[garyb]

Im not sure what im going to do with the cards.. Im having a hard time justifying buildinng an old school box just to house my scope cards.

I really miss mixing on scope, the native stuff is good for what it is. Portable, lots to choose from, and some of them, cheap. But inguess if the sound is meh..

i'm not sure what you mean. i just built a DUAL 1366 XEON machine with 12gb of triple channel ram 6gb per processor to house a pulsar1. that's anything but an old-school machine.

if you dump the cards and get an XITE-D, i bought a very nice core2 laptop that only cost me $250 and works very well with an XITE.

life's to short for crappy sounding gear and crappy food. stay away from burger king.

damn, old men get curmudgeondly...

[dante]

Well the last 2 daws I bought were just to house Scope. Its all a question of visualisation. When you have DAW lust dreams at night, what do you see ?

1) A shiny new DAW with a slick case and snazzy fast memory, with an old creamware soundcard in it

OR

2) A smooth, hi-tech PCI card bristling with Sharcs and all the devices it runs pouring out of it in vivid 3D like something from TRON, housed in a old grey box.

[garyb]

both?

the above mentioned machine has 3pci slots...

[ChrisWerner]

I had the same dreams as Ken. Thinking about putting a very old card in a new shiny PC gave me a strange feeling.
Then there was luck and Sonic Core upload the 5.1 drivers in the same time I had my dreams and decisions were made.
The new PC gives me breath for all the native things for the next five years and three PCI slots can hold my Pulsar 1 + SRB. Costs me all in all 700 Euro plus Scope 5.1 and win7 64. Next in future a xite will follow.

I cannot believe that I was thinking about giving up scope, age or not, for me scope is the best solution for an audio environment and that for some decades now.

Strange about you bass prob, is it that bad? Native things always need a special attention but they get better and better, XILS for an example.

BTW: When I look under my desk a blue light from the graphic card shines through the air grid of the PC, a bit of TRON, yeah. I agree with you though a disappointing movie.

[kensuguro]

all in good time I guess. I'm done with desktops for the time being.. They're just too big. And very.. stationary. And with cards, my projects get locked to the cards.

I'm waiting for the Sandy Bridge fix to get a notebook... we'll see if I succumb to xite. What bugs me about either cards or xite (since it's expresscard) is that it's one more dependency that I have to maintain over the years.. with cards - at some point PCI gets phased out, and I'm screwed. With xite-1 at some point expresscards gets phased out and I'm screwed. And I have no control over these things. (BTW, the new sandybridge notebooks don't have expresscard slots) I really really don't appreciate that.

So, the sound of native bothers me a lot.. but my rationale at the moment is that it's better than having ALL my projects locked away. I mean, all my scope related projects are currently really locked away in my desktop. So it's hard for me to imagine adding any more to that.

[dante]

Yeah Im not big on desktops. My DAW with the Scope cards is a rack mount, 2 years old, which replaced the previous rackmount which was 6 years old. I figure that gives me at least 4 years to go on current one, or after that if you cant get PCI motherboards Ill just run it until the cards or mobo burn out, in which case Ill still have the option of running the cards in the older rackmount which I kept

You could run a dual system - just get another old PC to run Scope and treat it like a MIDI module for the synths ( incl. fat bass synths )

http://www.hitfoundry.com/issue_04/dualmast.htm

[garyb]

it's all about the tool to do a job.

while a great craftsman can do a complicated job with inferior tools, the pain of using those tools outwieghs the inconvienience of using the proper tools, at least for me. i'd rather be locked to my scope cards than to be locked to garbage sound.

[garyb]

well, i like a lighter, myself.

[dawman]

FWIW We were taught to widdle down the stick with our knives then use twine from the woods, or cheat by bringing a string along...
The 2 twig trick was an appreciated Neandrathal conception.

[kensuguro]

Heh, bright rationale.. Ya, if the tools im forcing myself to use sound like crap.... Well, ya, i guess it defeats the purpose. Native sounds like crap, theres no denying that.

Xite-d is worth killing for, i just hope theres a way to get them running on the sandy bridges.. The new scope stuff is fully backwards compatible right?

[garyb]

right.
you'll likely have to partially rebuild some parts of your old projects, because of things like different i/o...

sandybridge will work fine with XITEs as long as sandy bridge itself works.

look, if this motherboard works with a p1, then really there's no excuse for any current or soon to be current chipsets/processors not to work except because of poorly made or defective products(cough-sandy bridge-cough). the pci-e bus is the pci-e bus. it all depends on what you really expect from a machine. i mean, you can't expect a laptop to do all that a desktop will do. it just won't happen.

a laptop can do a heck of a lot of good work these days though, especially with the XITE. even with moderate performance, you should be able to have enough pci-e bandwidth for every track in the sequencer to have it's own asio channel and run a couple of reverbs. you shouldn't see a single pci-e overflow in any well desinged laptop. you saw the masterverb test i did with my $250 dell, right? that dell easily runs all the vstis i would need, but you're more into those than i am. anyway, that dell, while not capable of the track count that my desktop is capable of though using multiple hard drives, can easily handle a high level production with the XITE.

sorry, Ken... you know i'm with the company now, right?

and really, i wouldn't say that all native sounds like crap, but there's never enough resources to use only good sounding stuff, plus the cost of using only good sounding native, is WAY more expensive than just buying an XITE and a few 3rd party plugins, or that's my take on it. so, i guess i'd say that (using) all native sounds like crap.

[kensuguro]

Whaaa.. Youre officialy with soniccore now?? Thats way cool!! Me too me too! Oh, maybe i should start using one first. Lol

[garyb]

butane, but solar is cool, too....

[dawman]

My son actually gets great little compositions using Autotune and FL Studio. Him and his friends fear the mighty Analogs in thier mixes. It comprimises the sound of the digital synths and ticky tacky percussion..
But there's no reason not to use Native IMHO.
I use DSP, Native and Analog. Just don't use Native for anything trying to emulate Analog.
Omnisphere is a great sounding application and compliments Analog in a mix or live.
But it just doesn't warm up SPL's on speakers very well.

I learned about this from using large mid-fields and PA cabs live. The Scope synths and Analog are just ballsy and Native cuts through really nice but I could never see using it for an entire mix by itself.

Just to get the speakers to move and pump out some SPL's requires boosting it and then the real low end qualities are muffly, so why polish a turd.....?? Just
Keep Native in the E2 and above ranges and let Analog pick up the heavier stuff.

But there is one thing Native does in a low end mix that rivals Analog.
Take any sound and then use a HPF to trim off the high end content and reveal the SubFreq's only. This is great when you want really low end content and the Analog is just too Boomy...


http://www.synthschool.com/free-filter-seminar.html

Try this trick with Assafs free filter. It works better on DSP stuff but the free filter is your basic synthmaker stuff that can be made quickly. Just add some pretty pictures and you could sell it to toy collectors at KVR.
I wanted to make a reverb on my day off where a picture of the Grand Canyon was used for the largest space, and when you want smaller spaces by moving the decay knob counter clockwise it would trigger newer pictures of smaller canyons, and eventually work your way down to sewers and bathtubs. The kids would love it and I could scam them like other developers do.

[dante]