His sounds just work for me, and Atmosphere and Trilogy were my favorite software synths for the longest time. In a way, every Omni review is a work-in-progress, but still, the high price shouldn't necessarily be considered an indication of high quality.ĭisclaimer: I am definitely biased when it comes to Spectrasonics, as its founder Eric Persing was the man responsible for some of Roland’s best sounds in the 1990’s. I haven't even gotten through all of the pads or filters yet. I don't completely regret buying Omni it does have dozens of incredible soundsources and patches I might've otherwise not gotten, but they're lost among 12,000 of them, including garish EDM and film/game junk.Īt a high price with a lot of different features, it's hard to tell whether Omni is a padding- or bang-for-the-buck.
My advice to beginners is to consider using free synths first, or at least one costing a lot less than $479. I've spent more time with lousy presets than with waveforms, LFOs, and filters. I'm not sure how they fare with what mix engineers use ITB (or OTB), so you might wanna leave some of your stems up to them.ĭespite 4 years, I'm not an Omni expert.
Overall, the FX range from professional to peculiar, with many variations on basic needs. I suggest using speakers instead of headphones with the distortion ones they can get extremely loud. Many FX are inferior, such as the guitar sims and distortion.
I've found the EQs really useful for normalizing a lot of the strange, unconventional patches. All the EQs are good, especially the simple Studio EQ. I especially enjoy the Proverb (nice, clean reverb), Innerspace (weird-ass convolution reverb), and the Precision Compressor.
What got me to upgrade to Omni 2 is the FX. In search of conventional instruments like pianos or guitars, you get perverse sounds barely resembling the real thing. Finding a usable sound in Omni (or arguably any synth) by wading through presets and samples is like finding a needle in a haystack. The overwhelming majority of them aren't suitable for most productions. Omni 2 has over 12,000 sounds comprising patches and samples. I've had Omnisphere for four years, and upgraded to Omni 2 when it came out.
It includes a live and stack mode (controllable via iPad or iPhone/iPod Touch as well). Omnisphere acts as a multi-rack instrument, allowing you to load 8 patches per instance. Omnisphere also includes a professional-grade effects rack, easy to use envelope section which can be used as an incredibly rich trance-gate, and arpeggiator, all of which can be used on individual layers or globally for the patch. Omnisphere includes a flexible routing system allowing just about any control to be modulated by anything else.
Even without an iPad, you can use the Orb to create unique sounds from existing patches with no synthesis know-how.
Omnisphere has been a staple of the film and TV scoring, but its wide variety of synth patches cover almost any genre outside of traditional sampled acoustic instruments (you won't find a normal grand piano here), so while Omnisphere can likely fill all of your synthesizer needs, you will still need a sampler to complete your synth rack. An intuitive user interface pulls together just about everything you need to make great music right out of the box, and a set of simple video tutorials walk users through the ins and outs of the most powerful features. Spectrasonics Omnisphere is a rich, powerful sample-based synthesizer loaded with the best sounding presets in the business.