5 Reasons SurgeXT is one of the most awesome synth plugins ever
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- Опубликовано: 28 авг 2024
- SurgeXT is one hell of a synth, in this video I try to describe some of the reasons why you should definitely take the time to study it a bit
Here's my gumroad, full of patches for Vital
gumroad.com/pl...
and if you like links, here's a lot more, my music, my social profiles... you know, that stuff
linktr.ee/Platipo
It’s a free mega synth that kicks the ass of every other paid mega synths I’ve tried hands down.
True
really awesome ! thank you for having made me see this beautiful synth under a different light !
and the consideration about the thing to have many plugins and not really learn deeply any of them, a sort of desire to possess of the ego, well, hits hard even if i already recognize that attitude in myself.
It's just a different flavour of ego :D some want more instruments, others want to squeeze every drop out of a few of those, no matter how you put it, it's always a form of arrogance, but I really believe doing any form of art without even just a tinybit of it is basically impossible.
@@platipo I prefer the latter camp.
Getting all that an instrument can be with a solid knowledge of the few VSTs you have truly makes you a force to be reckoned with.
@@BlindLibrary absolutely :)
Thanks for sharing. I've been exploring SurgeXT more recently and it's got a lot going on.
Take your time with this synth.
If you have to, take it in terms of mastering one kind of task at a time,
then as you get more proficient,
start adding more tasks in.
Patches are cool by themselves,
but adding in modulation and effects really takes them new places!
Thank you for the video review! Im going to totally use Surge now as my sound synth! :D
No, seriously.
I think you'll honestly be blownaway by what seems an initially lame-looking UI.
Start messing with sliders, though,
and the popcorn really gets popping!
Don't be fooled.
SurgeXT is Not a Kindergarttener's play toy.
@@BlindLibrary the user interface look really cool actually, it looks customizable. Im going to use Surge to make sounds and music for 3D videos :)
Surge is amazing. Looking forward to tutorials on it. Thanks for your time.
Thank you :) I wish I had the time to do more, and also, I had more ideas on what to talk about :D
Garron's Surge/SurgeXT The Movie series is where the big bite is at.
Trust me,
This is Not a Synth you're going to watch all in one sitting.
There's too much under the hood to torture-rack with...
Something cool and worthwhile to mention is that Surge has become a collection of the "best of" open source synths. Some oscillators/filters are directly taken from other projects (Twist is the famous Mutable Instruments Plaits) and even FX are amazing (it even includes the excellent CHOW FX). So if you like other open source plugins, chances are that plugin is somehow included in Surge XT.
Yep, quite a good way to put it, and it's definitely right :) thanks
thanks man, had no idea!
Not to mention an insanity of AirWindows defense!
@@BlindLibrary that's in fact quite crazy, I couldn't claim I did more than barely scratching the surface there
Feel froggy enough?
How about combining effects into a wall of sound that just slaps people in the face when they walk in the room?
Good video. I have Surge and Vital on my new computer. I had lots of vsts on my old computer, but now I want to focus mainly on Surge and Vital.
good :) Is there anything I can specifically help you with, that I haven't covered in some previous video?
@@platipo At the moment I have no questions, but I will certainly ask if I get hung up on something if you don't mind.
Wise choice.
You'll have too much fun with these...
Good plan. One probably gets more done with one tool one really knows inside out than 10 that are only used for presets. Surge is so powerful it's hard to justify to actually buy any other synth plugin. I will look into Vital though, just out of curiosity.
I love your channel! Learned a lot watching your videos. I'm also using Vital and Surge, and I've had a bunch of epiphanies thanks to you. What I would love to see is more on physical modeling. Keep up the good work.
Thank you for the support :)
About physical modelling, I discussed it in a few videos, actually most of what I did with Surge was specifically about it, I also made a more or less generic video about comb filters; is there anything in particular you would like me to discuss?
@@platipo Yes, and those videos are excellent. I'm not sure what exactly I'm after. Maybe a kind of overview of more types of sounds you can achieve with the technique ; or, if there is a way, how to get better legato transitions while using PM. Anything PM, really, i'll watch it. Twice, minimum.
@@musicalstorytella1487 well... Probably it's me not knowing enough about it, even though I've always had quite a lot of interest on that specific branch of synthesis, but I think you hit the nail on the head. Getting good legato transitions and just as importantly, stable tuning is somehow the big challenge there, which is why in most cases, I end up using PM mostly for simple plucks or mallets, or as part of woodwind or strings sounds, for which it is invaluable; I can, jumping through some hoops make some decent brass, but considering how much easier it is to get an effective brass out of a VA or FM approach, I don't think it's really worth the effort.
Play with the String and Twist osc types.
Or, if you feel like getting dirty with it,
mess with the Alias osc type.
Chip noise at its intended best (or is that worst if you set it right)?.
I love this synth, I can't believe it's simply free, it does sound really really good as you mention.
It also includes a sh*tload of presets which are awesome for newbies to synths like myself.
All hail the ALGORITHM.
Vital should get a design award for its GUI. Surge is a rabbit hole with rabbit holes inside. And I really love Zebra, but rarely use it anymore for the exact same reasons.
About that, there is Zebralette 3 coming, and in all likelyhood, a Zebra3 to follow, I really hope in their nerdy convoluted minds, the folks at Uhe are keeping their eyes on instruments like Vital and looking to improve their GUI game; I'm utterly sure Zebra3 will be sonically brilliant, unfathomably deep and flexible, and I'm also betting, judging from the company record, that it'll be way less CPU demanding than say PhasePlant or the like;
BUT I'm a littlebit afraid its interface might not be as amazing as the architecture and the engine. Yes, I know, these are all pointless speculations.
But yes, you're right, especially the Modremapping feature is such a powerhouse and yet it is so intuitive to use.
@@platipo To be honest, Zebra's GUI is really smart in its own way. I immediately felt at home and I love the 'you only see what you need' paradigm. Also the no dongle, no online, no lock to device one. Uhe are great in that regard.
I think in the end it comes down to : from what angle do you want to look at it..
Anyway, I have really neglected Zebra recently. I am going to dig it up later and play some.
I initially bought it after I had watched a clip about the stranger things intro sounddesign. Also because they promised a discount on Z3.... which was riiight around the corner.... :| ha ha
@@HeiniGurke Uhe is great, Zebra has been my main to-go synth for like a decade, BUT I can't be blind to the fact that despite its power and flexibility, even with more than a bit of experience on it, Vital or Serum are still a lot faster to program and to understand. And while I crave the depth and complexity only a true modular can offer, I also appreciate when such complexity is easy to access and to program.
Awesome videos! You deserve much bigger audience for sure.
Thank you :) I'm working on it, it's a slow, time consuming process, but the audience keeps steadily growing.
1:54 that shit is funky :D
got me over here dancing in the chair xD
Thanks, :) it was striving to be interesting, and if it got you groovin in the chair it probably succeeded
You are spot on with Surge! While I LOVE Vital, I often do find myself reaching for Surge when it comes to laying down lead and pad tracks. It just sounds so, rich, and it does beg you to play for hours and hours. Vital is fun for sure and it’s easy to get lost in the sounds for hours on that synth too, but usually for very different reasons… more for sound design reasons.
SurgeXT lets me totally get lost in the setup of patches and whatnot.
Somehow imitated an LG WaveForce WT series washer agitating and in the spin cycle.
Should do a drain patch, too!
Next I wonder how I'm gonna pull off - a dryer? In SurgeXT?
Uh oh, the LG WaveForce can now drain water;
Just need to set up a filling session and a dryer?
All hail the mighty algorithm
The video I needed! I was going to delve into Diva but I'm lover of free software (as in freedom) and thanks to you and to the fact that you are a professional what has convinced me. Also your advice that it is better to learn few synthesizers than many of them has enchanted me. If you take a Surge XT course, being you sound designer, you have a buyer for me. Here's a fan of yours. Great video!
Glad you liked it, I doubt I'll ever make a proper course, but I'll sure make more surge videos
Without this video, I would have categorized Surge with Zebra and Vital, as "bottomless" synths for getting unexpected outcomes. But it's surprising how similar it can sound to Diva! Gonna check out your Surge tutorials now.
Thank you :) happy you liked it, and yes, it was quite a surprise for me as well, those filters really do an amazing job, and there's lots, types and subtypes.
@@platipo Don't forget the wave shaping, FM linking and ring modding.
@@BlindLibrary I would never :D
@@platipo Don't forget that you can also link the 2 filters on each scene together.?
@@platipo There's some serious crap waiting to be pulled off - with just those?
Excellent video, thanks!
Thank you
Every time I think about buying a compact digital synth like the Modal Skulpt SE, I remember I already rely on SurgeXT, Vital, Odin2 and Cardinal/VCV Rack.
Agreed. I had for quite some time a Waldorf Blofeld on my desk, I really liked it, but in the end, I sold it. That like many other instruments could be amazing, have their own unique sonic and creative possibilities, yet at this time, the fact that you can have powerful software instruments, which are also free, and integrate effortlessly into a DAW makes a desktop module synth kind of a niche thing.
I'm really tempted on the other hand by things that extend my interface; I'm pondering about getting some polyAT or even MPE device for example, you know, things I could not possibly achieve or emulate in a purely software environment.
Amazing synth, complex but powerful. What is missing is real-time process visualisation.
Depending which DAW you use, you can add an oscillator visualizer to your audio chain.
Yes, and that is, in the face of facts, probably one of the reasons it is so light on the CPU. I often wish other synths allowed to turn the visualizations off.
But I really do see your point, in all likelyhood, the reason Serum took the music world by storm in 2014 is the amount and quality of visual feedback, which happened to be both informative and captivating to the users.
@@Hyper5nic not only oscilloscope or analyzer, more interesting to see automations
@@platipo I myself wouldn't care for the eye candy.
As long as the on-screen text tells me correctly what's happening,
I'm so off to the races!
New update has it
I once tried Zebra 2 as a demo and while I think there are a few things that Surge XT cannot do (like the mapping feature), Surge does look similarly capable and beats Zebra any day because it's free. And you'd be hard pressed to find a synth - any synth - with such an abundance of filters. It's amazing and one can only scratch the surface.
Well... when Zebra2 was released Surge was a much less powerful synth, and also, it wasn't free... today yes they are similarly capable, there's more than a few things one of them can do and the other cannot, but it works both ways...
That's probably why Zebra2, today a quite dated synth, now gets sold with all the expansions (which involves an astonishing amount of great sound design work) for a bargain price... SurgeXT is still definitely cheaper, yes.
I don't know really, you have a point, and I really like Surge, but you know... Zebra for me is kinda like a first love 😁
I use to love Surge. I used it all the time.
But it use to crash all the time :(
Obviously I stopped using it & then the paid version was stopped probably because it was torrented to death.
But since the relaunch every time I open it I get reminded of the amount of lost work due to crashes & I close it again.
Hearing you say some solidly positive things about it has made me pic it back us & I will ad it to the synths I use again!
I haven't used it in the past, got to it just a few years ago... Good to know, the Surge I know has always been rock solid.
@@platipo I'm glad it is now solid as I have had a great 2 days playing with it!
Thanks to you
I subscribed. This comment is not only for the algorithm but also to ask you for more surge xt content. How about demonstrating your sound design process in surge xt?
Thank you :) actually as you might see, my newer video is also about Surge and also links to a free pack of patches.
I really wouldn't know how to make a video like the one you ask, I don't think my "process" in Surge has anything that peculiar when compared to that on other synths, I could be making more sounds and explaining that specific process... Or well, if you have any more specific request, if I can, I'll do my best to satisfy it.
@@platipo Well, since I think you are a talented sound designer, my request was along the lines of videos where you build a patch while explaining synthesis ideas specifically within the Surge XT engine (even though these concepts are universal and applicable to any synth). I would be interested to see how deep you can go with modulation and how you leverage any workflow advantage Surge might possess over, say Vital, VCV rack 2 or even U-He stuff.
@@chromofonic Ah.... That is some compliments, and a difficult assignment, I don't know how I could do it in a single video, but definitely it can be an interesting topic to discuss, I'll keep that in mind.
What freaks most people out about SXT is that one parameter basically can be modded (moved) by another unrelated parameter's behavior if you wished.
Twist, as you surely know, has an inharmonic string, and it has a modal resonator mode.
Yes, I was just mentioning it briefly for the sake of that sound, for which I believe the inharmonic string was more interesting than the modal resonator... Actually if I remember correctly I had tried that first, and it was predictably too "modal" :D
@@platipo Set the Material slider to about 81.5% (not totally all the way up)
and you'll have basically your childhood toy piano of yester-year.
salute
Is Surge also easier on the CPU unlike Diva?
Well... Yes, as I mentioned a bit later in the video, a lot less heavy
@@platipo Indeed, you did 🙂 4:45
Should actually be easier on most 'modern' machines.
Older ones may have a tough time with fairly involved patches while playing many notes at a time;
Other than that, SXT should handle well.
Small recommendation for an ASIO 'talker':
FlexAsio.
This wrapper can work in native ASIO behavior (forcing exclusive audio on only one device)
or a non-native tie-back to Windows Audio Session (even in shared processing mode).
Google search it and get+install both the wrapper+gui config tool.
The gui makes it a lot easier to directly configure FlexAsio.
Great video, thanks c:
Thank you :) appreciation is very appreciated
Awesome video
Glad you liked it :)
There are few people who admit that paid plugins ain't special even if it's indirect. It's just a shiny UI because they know how people perceive things. They're more influenced by the looks over anything...
and yet, interestingly enough; shiny UIs and practical UIs aren't always the same thing; Vital is free and kind of shiny itself, but I definitely like that interface over the one of say, Pigments... looks similar, somehow even shinier, and yet way less accessible.
Pretty sad;
considering some of the better plugins don't have to look all shiny to do what they do -
and still deliver an audio performance that may on a random day leave you in tears
(as to how the Hell did I just pull that off - by accident)?
@@BlindLibrary I agree, I just don't understand what makes you sad, when a sound brings you to tears, it's usually not a bad thing is it?
@@platipo
Tears of joy, actually.
If you're interested in making your videos better for people like me i.e. those who choose carefully which plugins to invest time to you could try to explain how well the synth suits different scenarios like playing live, using it as a sort of groovebox, quickly finding a proper lead tone, constructing a complex evolving pad.
Hey man love the video, but I have a question regarding how do I use surge on Logic. I've tried so many different things and I'm confused
I'm afraid I can't help here, not a mac or a logic user, but there is a very active Discord channel about Surge, I guess that might be the place to ask
I download some bass wave tables from the website. I put them in the user data folder like it said but I don't see them anywhere. I don't see them in the eave tables or the menu.
I have no idea what's going on there, I did that too for a few tables and it worked.
I'd suggest you try asking on SurgeXT Discord server, you might find the answers you seek there.
@@platipo I'll give that a try. Thank you.
👍
6:40 True
Surge + VST of Meldaproduction = Best choice
I don't know really, they're imho a very good choice, but I'm not too sure there is such a thing as an objectively and unquestionably best choice.
@@platipo Truth #2. You are absolutely right again.
I allowed myself such a categorical statement just to emphasize my extremely positive attitude towards these tools.
Have you looked at the full bucket music plugins?
No, to my shame, I have not, will do some googling
those are super fun, esp. fb3100
Hi bubbels
@@kubaissen bubbels?
OnLy 263 viewmeans to me that u b doing right, amigomio!LOVE listening/hearing youe explainationa!! will NOT sub ya cos dont wish to be tracked!! you are DEFO THE one m8
Well... it's actually almost 7k views, those are the likes :) thank you anyway, glad you like my video, I wish I had the time to make more
@7:40 don't sell yourself short. I'm sure you could spend literally infinite time talking about surge. Heat death of the universe be damned.
:D :D :D you got me
algo-food
???
@@platipo You called for engagement, even if only to feed the algorithm, so I did. I also enjoyed the video.
Thank you then, sorry, I didn't understand the meaning at first, now it's pretty evident :)