Bitley finally caved: WBF R2 in the shop.
Posted: 07 Nov 2019
I think something like Arturia V Collection Fairlight but for Reason also it’s like a Rompler now but without a case so one can deeply tweak it. I have his far beyond Fairlight and I must say he does a great job and I would hope he would port all his refills to the shop. Still as big as the refill is it deserves to be a RE. A combinator is to small for such a project.
No it doesn't. Most patches work just fine.
This has just inspired me to re-discover my Bitley Refills. Good on you, sir!bitley wrote: ↑19 Nov 2019Cool! Arturia's V-Collection is both a competitor and a different thing, of course, but if you basically want to browse for inspiring patches the products are not too different really. Their serving definitely gives you another (several other) GUI(s) to work with and their virtual gear is very cool indeed although not always entirely convincing; a real Prophet VS is a whole other world than their virtual version for instance – if you ask me – but some of the other ones are better. All of them are stunningly beautiful with scalable graphics, so Reason certainly can not compete so much with that of course.
The patches I contributed with (to Arturia) were programmed for their interface and functionality and they are not the same ones as the content in WBF R2. Arturia focused much more on bringing you the "lofi" sound of the real Fairlight as it sounds when you sit in front of it – I've focused more on giving you the Fairlight sounds as they turned up on famous records (Art Of Noise, Yello et al), where effects and filtering was used cleverly to often actually mask that lofi character; at least that's how many of the Combinator patches were designed; naturally, the NNXT patches are closer to the real Fairlight.
I think the products does and does not compete at the same time; Arturia's sound designers including myself were asked to try being very adventurous and creative – perhaps to try creating "tomorrow's sounds" with "yesterday's equipment" – not always of course but it strikes me as if Arturia were aiming for that.
It's a matter of taste of course but if I compare say the (new hardware synth) Behringer DeepMind 12 to the JP-8V I feel that those "presets" are somewhat similar in that they often won't give you the kind of vibes you will get from browsing sounds on a Juno 60, Alpha-Juno 2, JX-8P or Jupiter 8 "right off the bat" in real life; these modern day presets from both Behringer and Arturia have often been designed to present something very different than that. Perhaps more in line with today's industrial and dark ambient genres and so on.
I personally get inspired by the more "classic" kind of sounds from these machines (including the Prophet 5 and more) so that's what I did with them – I guess it weighs up to a balance where the products combined can paint a more colorful picture. I would gladly hear more about this from users as it's very interesting to know what people actually like, and use.
I have Omnisphere 2 as well, and it's a similar feeling there as well; I generally find more useful and playable sounds there though if compared with V Collection 7 – and more "natural" sounds as well (absolutely stunning guitars, truly real choirs, oriental sounds, amazing lifelike strings etc). In those sound "genres" I was mainly going for the "samply" sounds with R2 – although you can find pretty convincing strings there as well.
I guess it all boils down to the taste of the programmers behind all products like this; I am fairly rooted in the 1980s and 1990s myself and I simply love sounds like that. You can take R2 to totally different worlds as well of course. Something common for all these products is that all of us basically have tried our best programming sounds, relentlessly trying to try to satisfy every thinkable musical taste.
From my own experiences with all three I'd say character wise that WBF R2 is like a Roland JD-990 in a very simplified overall "mood"; Omnisphere is like a Korg Kronos; Arturia V7 is like a solid collection of really vintage gear; so if seen like that they all can be married to each other.