UVI - Falcon plus 19 expansions - $199

[MusicMan]

Get 80% off UVI Falcon plus 19 expansions pack.

UVI’s acclaimed hybrid instrument (Falcon) plus 19 Expansions, at a special price, for a limited time

RRP : $1,040
Sale: $199

https://www.image-line.com/specials/uvi-falcon

Edited January 24 by MusicMan

[stony]

"ALL" Expansions is wrong. Included are 19 and available are currently 26.

[MusicMan]

8 minutes ago, stony said:

"ALL" Expansions is wrong. Included are 19 and available are currently 26.

Thanks Stony, I wasn't aware of that! Will update

[Fwrend]

You have to create an image-line account. Here are the expansions included:

Modular Drums / Pulsación / Organic Pads / Voklm / LoFi Dreams / Atmospherics / Fluidity / SubCulture Orchestral / Inner Dimensions / Organic Keys / Ether Fields / Savage / Eternal Funk / Hypnotic Dive / Titanium / Kinetics / Pulsar / Devinity / Digital Motion 

[kitekrazy1]

So tempting.  It would be another rompler that is ignored as a sampler.

Not sure how much space is needed for these. 

 

[MusicMan]

49 minutes ago, kitekrazy1 said:

So tempting.  It would be another rompler that is ignored as a sampler.

Not sure how much space is needed for these. 

It really varies between their expansions. Some are barely a few MB and some are a few GB. Conveniently they state them on the page for each expansion, so you could determine that first if it's a consideration. As a guess, maybe 20GB total, but don't bank on that.. The manual also states what the presets are as well which is handy, so you can see exactly what numbers of each type they include and it's a simple PDF on their site.

Calling it a rompler doesn't even  come close to doing it justice. You could ignore all of the samples and expansions and it's still an amazingly powerful and GREAT sounding synth for programming your own synth presets from scratch with standard oscillators and much more. The built in effects are probably some of the best sounding across a lot of the main players in well known soft synths. But then of course you can still layer any of the samples over them as well.

It's a pretty amazing modular synth. Not perfect. The layout can take a bit to get used to and they could optimize it in terms of CPU. It does appear to have  a few quirky limitations.

But the sound beats a lot of the main synths / romplers / samplers out there.

[JT music]

Falcon's sound is light years below Dune 3, Rapid, Pigments, Diva, Serum, Spire, etc. in synthesis, as a rompler it is also below Nexus 5, as a sampler it is far below Kontakt, its operation is totally crude with an old and complicated interface full of comings and goings more than shortcuts, a very undervalued instrument that had to significantly decline its prices for being very underestimated and will continue to drop, its expansions are really mediocre and it does not have external developers like Kontakt, the only benefit is for those who want to break their heads editing a sound for hours, not to mention how heavy it is for the CPU without having multi-core processing, loading a single instance of some pad expansion consumes a lot, I do not recommend it.

[MusicMan]

23 minutes ago, JT music said:

Falcon's sound is light years below Dune 3, Rapid, Pigments, Diva, Serum, Spire, etc. in synthesis, as a rompler it is also below Nexus 5, as a sampler it is far below Kontakt, its operation is totally crude with an old and complicated interface full of comings and goings more than shortcuts, a very undervalued instrument that had to significantly decline its prices for being very underestimated and will continue to drop, its expansions are really mediocre and it does not have external developers like Kontakt, the only benefit is for those who want to break their heads editing a sound for hours, not to mention how heavy it is for the CPU without having multi-core processing, loading a single instance of some pad expansion consumes a lot, I do not recommend it.

I own all of those synths and wholeheartedly disagree, but of course everyone's opinion and tastes are different. If you listen to any of the professionally made sounds created by it, it easily sounds on par with all of those. You might be very surprised to hear how commonly it's used in cinematic and movies you've likely seen and also the types of high end situations where money is no object and they own all of the synths you mentioned too. None of the ones you mentioned can get as complex a sound without using multiple instances of them. None of them even come remotely close in terms of versatility.  Falcon is completely modular. All of those other synths are very limited in terms of architecture. They sound great, but if you can think it in Falcon, then you can create it.

I personally wouldn't think of it as a primary sampler, but integrating that with building up patches and layering the "rompler' content is great to have in there.

I do think they could work on the interface and UX, but then Kontakt which is probably it's closest competitor I don't think is great in that sense either.

I haven't looked at all their expansions yet, so I can't comment too much there, but the one I did get is really quite interesting. I like that and will get some use. I'm not worried about external developers. I purely want it for sound design. The expansions are also more of a consolation in that sense.

Agreed on CPU and multithreading, that's what I was alluding to.

Back on sound though, I've heard all of those synths in action, created my own presets in them as well as listened to 3rd party ones, seen them in many tutorials and Falcon can easily sound as rich, warm, organic and complex as any of them without a doubt.

Edited January 26 by MusicMan

[Release]

I disagree strongly with most of JT's assessment as well.  Falcon is absolutely amazing once you dig in and do the work to understand the workflow.  It has unlimited possibilities.  It's one of those tool that's only limited by the user.  

Can the workflow be better, sure.  Could they optimize it a bit more, yea, probably.  

But light years below the competition?  Nah, not at all.

Edited January 26 by Release

[Carl Ewing]

16 hours ago, MusicMan said:

Calling it a rompler doesn't even  come close to doing it justice. You could ignore all of the samples and expansions and it's still an amazingly powerful and GREAT sounding synth for programming your own synth presets from scratch with standard oscillators and much more.

This applies to Omnisphere as well - which also gets called a rompler. Both Falcon and Omnisphere are extremely powerful sound design engines. I would argue both are far more powerful than most on the market. Most of Cliff Martinez's electronic scores (Drive, Neon Demon, The Knick, etc.) are Omnisphere. The 'Hardware' preset bank that comes with it blows anything Arturia out of the water, and I'd argue it rivals some U-He synths, although Zebra & Bazille are on another planet in some respects. For example, those drums at the beginning of Dune Part 1 are Zebra, as are almost all the synth sounds in The Dark Knight.

But agreed, I think many people are missing out on some of the best synth software around by thinking these things are romplers.

Edited January 26 by Carl Ewing

[kitekrazy1]

On 1/26/2025 at 5:13 AM, Carl Ewing said:

This applies to Omnisphere as well - which also gets called a rompler. Both Falcon and Omnisphere are extremely powerful sound design engines. I would argue both are far more powerful than most on the market. Most of Cliff Martinez's electronic scores (Drive, Neon Demon, The Knick, etc.) are Omnisphere. The 'Hardware' preset bank that comes with it blows anything Arturia out of the water, and I'd argue it rivals some U-He synths, although Zebra & Bazille are on another planet in some respects. For example, those drums at the beginning of Dune Part 1 are Zebra, as are almost all the synth sounds in The Dark Knight.

But agreed, I think many people are missing out on some of the best synth software around by thinking these things are romplers.

I think the amateur user isn't into sound design as much.  Even with the popular synths they use presets.  A lot has to do with genres of preference.  The EDM person is more into doing a track.  With so many using laptops these days there is the conscious of disk space.  Also devoting time to learn these apps.

Soundpaint is getting popular but the problem is bloat.

Then if one wants to take even more time you could involve yourself in MSound Factory with the zillion options.

I boils down to the type of music you are doing.

Trying to avoid this purchase. If it were $149 that would be the nail in the coffin. 

[JT music]

1 hour ago, kitekrazy1 said:

I think the amateur user isn't into sound design as much.  Even with the popular synths they use presets.  A lot has to do with genres of preference.  The EDM person is more into doing a track.  With so many using laptops these days there is the conscious of disk space.  Also devoting time to learn these apps.

Soundpaint is getting popular but the problem is bloat.

Then if one wants to take even more time you could involve yourself in MSound Factory with the zillion options.

I boils down to the type of music you are doing.

Trying to avoid this purchase. If it were $149 that would be the nail in the coffin. 

I am a professional producer and I use modified presets and also edit my own sounds from scratch, I have more than 320 tracks on Spotify and YouTube for more than a decade and Falcon seems to me a very difficult ecosystem where although it has some good preset sounds and creating them is a real ordeal and waste of time, plus many other very synthetic sounds and of average quality that are really surpassed with other plugins separately, now each to their tastes and ears, what they call sound quality or ways to achieve it, this Falcon for those who want to have an idea is like Steinberg's Halion, not too much, not too much and for sure, given the way UVI's commercial tactics are going, surely for the next BF they will lower it to $100 including expansions...

[Skijumptoes]

Falcon seems to have an almost hipster-like following to it, and it kinda puts me off it, I can't lie.  I've listened and watched demos and I see a lot of people talking about how great it is, but going purely by the sound it creates I just don't hear anything special. 

Whereas, when I turn to NI Komplete, or even the UAD instruments, I get a sense of having much more considerable backbone of instruments which have dynamics and expressions, from which you can do many things with.

But perhaps this is a genre, or age thing - maybe i'm too rooted in classic bread an butter sounds so having solid EP, Piano, Moog and Juno sounds is what's important for me.. From that I can layer and apply fx to suit, as they're clean, pure, playable sounds.

I see many people bring up the word 'sound design' and lauding products like Falcon that do a lot of interesting things - but honestly, what does it even mean in a song production sense -  Is this similar to those who promote modular systems, losing hours coming up with soundscapes but not actually producing songs?!   I get that, as making music is more enjoyable than listening to music for many of us.

Or, Are these 'sound designers' people who are looking to create one standout soundscape as the basis of a track, and then throwing something like a trap beat over the top, sit back and say how dope it is?!

None of that is of interest to me, but maybe it's the core base of Falcon users?!  So maybe I should stop trying to see what it could do for me every time it comes on sale like this! haha.

[Reid Rosefelt]

Falcon is a layering synthesizer.  It includes modules for sampled, analog,  analog stack, FM, Additive, Wavetable, MPE, Vocal Synthesis, Bowed String modeling, Pluck, Noise, Organ (with Drawbars), and drums.  The sampling area has a massive amount of things you can do, like slicing, and stretching, and various kinds of granular.   You can layer all these different kinds of synthesis in any way you want.  The only other product like this, Is HALion,  

lt comes with a massive set of effects, largely drawn from the UVI collection.

If you save a preset you can drag any jpg over the front and give it an image.  Any parameter or parameters can be assigned to knobs and slider.  When you get good at it, you can do this in a few clicks.  

This might seem like a lot of options, but this is a small percentage of what it can do.  It comes with all these scripts, notably a host of arpeggiators.  Most of these are things you would pay $50 to $100 each for, outside the world of Falcon.   They have beautiful GUI.   If all you did f\was to put one falcon sound and mess with all the arps and modulators, you could spend the rest of your life doing it.  And of course you can have different arps for every sound.  

If you happen to own anything by UVI, you can load them into Falcon and make full use of its power. 

Since I've owned it, they've done significant upgrades every year, and all of them were free.  These generally include many new presets to take advantage of the new features. 

I agree with @kitekrazy1  It's a monster with a huge learning curve.  The time investment is probably too big for most people.  But I have a basic understanding of how it works and I can make it do what I want.  It's not the biggest challenge in the world to add a weird arp to a sound or a reverb.  And to layer.  

Is the analog part as "good' as great synths by U-he and others?  Of course not.  That's not the point.  It's the ability to layer many different kinds of synths and sampled sounds.  To me, it is up there with Omnisphere and Kontakt as one of the greatest pieces of music software ever sold.

I disagree about the Falcon expansions.  I think they are extraordinary.  I use them with Freelance Soundlabs templates for NKS.  This gives me automatic access to all the front parameters on each patch.  Until you have had the experience of seeing what happens when you turn all the knobs at once, I don't know how you can say they are bad.  

There is a huge problem with it, though.  It is single-threaded.  It can't take advantage of all the threads on advanced computers.  As many Falcon patches take a huge amount of computer resources, you can crash the program or even your DAW if you load too many.  The solution is to keep things simple or put each layer in something multi-threaded like Unify.   Unify makes Falcon realize its full power.

Normally I would buy this and try to sell my copy of Falcon and my many expansions.  I suspect this deal will flood the resale market with this stuff.  It's a risk in terms of making my money back.   But there are already 2 or 3 I'd like to own, and even with sales, there's  a $100 right there. 

IMHO this is one of the best deals ever to come along.  I'm jealous of people who haven't got into Falcon before.  BUT you'll have to be willing and able to put time in or it will just be another thing taking up space on your hard drive. 

Edited Tuesday at 03:18 PM by Reid Rosefelt

[Carl Ewing]

1 hour ago, Skijumptoes said:

I see many people bring up the word 'sound design' and lauding products like Falcon that do a lot of interesting things - but honestly, what does it even mean in a song production sense -  Is this similar to those who promote modular systems, losing hours coming up with soundscapes but not actually producing songs?!   I get that, as making music is more enjoyable than listening to music for many of us.

Or, Are these 'sound designers' people who are looking to create one standout soundscape as the basis of a track, and then throwing something like a trap beat over the top, sit back and say how dope it is?!

Sound design has been a primary staple of rock, funk, jazz, electronic, pop, hip-hop, etc.  going back 4+ decades. By your saying your "old", did you think The Who, Pink Floyd, Genesis, Michael Jackson, U2, David Bowie, Eurythmics, Prince, etc. were just using presets? Or was there sound the result 100s or 1000s of hours of building these incredible iconic guitar tones, synth tones, drum tones, etc. 

Now - it's great that they did all this work, made it super famous and nostalgic, and you can just copy it thinking "no biggie!", here's my dime-a-dozen Moog patch that was innovative in 1978, that's great. Just don't complain when others aren't satisfied with what's already been done, and trying to build a fan base of people under the age of 65, and are looking for new tools & ideas....which require actual work. And programs like the ones we're discussing are a big part of that work & innovation. 

Edited Tuesday at 03:53 PM by Carl Ewing

[Skijumptoes]

41 minutes ago, Reid Rosefelt said:

Is the analog part as "good' as great synths by U-he and others?  Of course not.  That's not the point.  It's the ability to layer many different kinds of synths and sampled sounds.  To me, it is up there with Omnisphere and Kontakt as one of the greatest pieces of music software ever sold.

What is the advantage having it within a single DAW channel when you could instead layer multiple instruments across multiple DAW channels and have such better routing options and more efficient CPU performance though?  That's the part that I don't get, and this is how the most creative minds have worked in studios for decades before.

Is it really going to give a better end result versus layering an NI piano, over Spitfire strings with a Pigments track triggering an arp in the background which can be independently automated with the DAW, which I can play in realtime via a single MIDI input?

And from a longterm perspective, how do you archive projects with Falcon so that should the plugin not recall ideal that you have editable audio stems or files to work with.  Do you render the Falcon tracks audio into one file, with all the layering and FX in place?

It seems more restrictive to want to put all the eggs into one basket to me.  But the more I read of people saying this is one of the greatest products ever just makes me more interested, and bringing on a greater sense of FOMO!

Edited Tuesday at 03:58 PM by Skijumptoes

[Skijumptoes]

1 hour ago, Carl Ewing said:

By your saying your "old", did you think The Who, Pink Floyd, Genesis, Michael Jackson, U2, David Bowie, Eurythmics, Prince, etc. were just using presets? Or was there sound the result 100s or 1000s of hours of building these incredible iconic guitar tones, synth tones, drum tones, etc. 

Yes bands like that were using presets on gear that supported it - we all know those classic patches, but that's not really relevant as you can do so much with a preset as the starting point.

My point is more that back then it was the sum of individual pieces of gear that they would layer up themselves to create the magic.  Each element going into the mixing desk as it's own entity for the producer to work their magic.  We only call it sound design retrospectively, but for those artists it was more about developing a sound through creative direction and to realise ideas in their head.

Nowadays people aren't referring to those techniques when mentioning sound design.  It's much more about going through a tool, such as Falcon, using the pre-existing blocks, and working in a pre-existing environment to copy pre-existing ideas.  Many just try random ideas and hope for happy accidents, and then once they have something, try to work out what they can actually do with it in a song.

People like these tools as they're quick, which can ultimately create lazy results... Hence (imo) why there's so much of the sound design heavy music out there such as that over-used ambience with a trap beat layered over top.  Personally, i'm just sick of hearing it everywhere... Again, that's probably just an age/genre thing.  But i could not tell you if AI or a human had done it in all honesty.

That's why I ask what people define as sound design, and how Falcon doing so much in a single instance provides better end results versus using a wider range of individual elements.  Surely it's more about convenience than creative freedom, isn't it?

Edited Tuesday at 04:55 PM by Skijumptoes

[JT music]

You're not missing anything, it's just an all-rounder similar to Halion, which also didn't have much recognition due to its complexity in achieving some good sound, and this Falcon devours your CPU plus a handful of expansions of mediocre quality.

Edited Tuesday at 05:01 PM by JT music

[MusicMan]

On 1/26/2025 at 8:13 PM, Carl Ewing said:

This applies to Omnisphere as well - which also gets called a rompler. Both Falcon and Omnisphere are extremely powerful sound design engines. I would argue both are far more powerful than most on the market. Most of Cliff Martinez's electronic scores (Drive, Neon Demon, The Knick, etc.) are Omnisphere. The 'Hardware' preset bank that comes with it blows anything Arturia out of the water, and I'd argue it rivals some U-He synths, although Zebra & Bazille are on another planet in some respects. For example, those drums at the beginning of Dune Part 1 are Zebra, as are almost all the synth sounds in The Dark Knight.

But agreed, I think many people are missing out on some of the best synth software around by thinking these things are romplers.

Some great points Carl and now that you mention it, I do recall Omnisphere being incorrectly referred to as a rompler quite a few times too.

I think a lot of people just don't take the time to fully understand and explore these products and learn how to use them. I would say that the learning curve can be a touch higher if you're creating presets from the ground up, but that's because they allow you to break out from the common rigid design of most synths.

if you just jump in and click on a few presets and go no further, then you really miss out on seeing how powerful and versatile these things can be. I've tried quite a few synths over the years where I fired them up, tried all the presets as that's often a simple way to test the capabilities and thought they were terrible, only to find after creating a few patches that they were really much better than what the presets show.

I own most of u-he and have somewhat had my eye on Zebra. I have been tempted to bite the bullet and just go with the current version, as I know it's very good anyway, but with the new one somewhere on the horizon, I have been holding off so far!

[kitekrazy1]

I'm gonna pass. (4 now)  PRESETS4LIFE is where I'm at on everything.

Meanwhile I'd probably spend close to that amount on another not needed orchestra type library.

No Pay Pal.............saying no just got slightly easier.

Edited Thursday at 10:55 AM by kitekrazy1