UVI - Falcon plus 19 expansions - $199

[kitekrazy1]

 

[JT music]

1 hour ago, kitekrazy1 said:

 

Far from having several complex tracks with mediocre sounds, at minute 3:10 the CPU consumption touched 90% reaching 100% at the entrance of the second verse, only six days of video to get 5 likes demonstrates how little valued this CPU-devouring Falcon is.

[Release]

Dude, chill.  Nobody is forcing you to use Falcon.  Move on.  

[Doug Rintoul]

2.6K Likes and 400 comments. Wow Falcon must be awesome. 

Actually, your analysis of kitkrazy1's post proves nothing about Falcon. You don't like Falcon. We get it. Lots of people do. Falcon is not for everyone and thats okay. 

I listened to your music and it did not appeal to me at all. But obviously over a million people do like it. And that's okay with me.  I am not going to go around telling people how mediocre your music is and wonder how so many people could have such poor taste. 

Edited yesterday at 02:06 AM by Doug Rintoul

[JT music]

Well congratulations my friend, did you buy and like Falcon? Well use it and have fun, I bought it and uninstalled it and I'm happy just like you 👍

[Doug Rintoul]

2 hours ago, JT music said:

Well congratulations my friend, did you buy and like Falcon? Well use it and have fun, I bought it and uninstalled it and I'm happy just like you 👍

I did buy Falcon and love it I know a lot of people struggle with the interface but somehow it clicked with me. So I do enjoy using it, thank you. BTW, I don't really think your music is mediocre; it is just not what I enjoy listening to.

[kitekrazy1]

5 hours ago, JT music said:

Far from having several complex tracks with mediocre sounds, at minute 3:10 the CPU consumption touched 90% reaching 100% at the entrance of the second verse, only six days of video to get 5 likes demonstrates how little valued this CPU-devouring Falcon is.

I think the highest I seen was 39,

[kitekrazy1]

43 minutes ago, Doug Rintoul said:

I did buy Falcon and love it I know a lot of people struggle with the interface but somehow it clicked with me. So I do enjoy using it, thank you. BTW, I don't really think your music is mediocre; it is just not what I enjoy listening to.

How are the standard expansions that come with it?  From what I understand those are the better ones.

 

[JT music]

39 minutes ago, kitekrazy1 said:

I think the highest I seen was 39,

89 ♨️ and rising..🧐

[kitekrazy1]

1 hour ago, JT music said:

89 ♨️ and rising..🧐

I thought it was a 3 usually FL will crackle after that.  I wonder if he would give out the flp and see if it happens to other users.

[kitekrazy1]

2 hours ago, Doug Rintoul said:

I did buy Falcon and love it I know a lot of people struggle with the interface but somehow it clicked with me. So I do enjoy using it, thank you. BTW, I don't really think your music is mediocre; it is just not what I enjoy listening to.

I accidentally did too many clicks with Amazon pay.  Now it's on one system and soon to be on the other 2.   I guess there's no turning back now. 

[Doug Rintoul]

3 hours ago, JT music said:

89 ♨️ and rising..🧐

That is not all Falcon.  In fact, at 3:43 there are no instances of Falcon playing and CPU is still at 65% or more. It is really hard to tell from the video what is causing the CPU load. I am not denying Falcon can be heavy on the CPU. It often is. But I am not hearing any breakups or crackles in the video. Do you?

Edited yesterday at 06:59 AM by Doug Rintoul

[Doug Rintoul]

3 hours ago, kitekrazy1 said:

How are the standard expansions that come with it?  From what I understand those are the better ones.

 

Are you referring to the factory presets or the expansions avaliable on the UVI site?

[kitekrazy1]

1 hour ago, Doug Rintoul said:

Are you referring to the factory presets or the expansions avaliable on the UVI site?

factory

[Release]

There are amazing presets in the Factory and scattered throughout the Expansions..... and tons and tons that I'll never use.  

My advice is to watch a few tutorials after you get in installed.  I bought a month of SonicPass a while ago and honestly couldn't wait for it to expire.  I didn't love most of the presets, working with Falcon was too much work, and it didn't sound all that great to me.  A few months go by and after watching a few more walkthrough videos I decided to try it for another month.  Suddenly.... after learning how to actually use it... I was FLOORED at what you can do with it.  Really, anything you want can be accomplished.  If you're a preset surfer, I don't think Falcon is the best choice, not by a long shot.  But if you're into editing and creating sounds, it doesn't get more powerful and deep as this.  I've had it for about 5 months now and I still don't feel I've even scratched the surface of what it can do.  

I get where JT is coming from by saying it sucks, but if you really spend the time with it, it'll surprise you every time as the utterly amazing tool that it is.  It's truly as deep and as powerful as you want it to be.

[Skijumptoes]

1 hour ago, Release said:

 But if you're into editing and creating sounds, it doesn't get more powerful and deep as this.

So it's more powerful than what you can do with a DAW and routing/layering existing plugins and fx?  What does it do that excels it beyond?

To me it just looks like an instrument of convenience that ultimately has you with putting all this work into one DAW instance, whereas i prefer a more old school approach of treating each instrument in a layer as it's own entity on the mixing console so you're learning a wider skillset that can be applied across the board.

I've owned HALion for years and I see the same comments about that back in the day, and I question what's the advantage working within a restricted single instance environment, overkilling a channel strip ,when you could instead reach out for a much wider gamut of sounds through the DAW?

I'd love to be interested in it, as it's clearly at a great price, and the countdown clock is ticking.  But I just don't get it, sadly.  And nor do I hear anything special from it. 

It does look great fun though, but i'm trying to prevent proscratination not add to it!

[MusicMan]

11 minutes ago, Skijumptoes said:

So it's more powerful than what you can do with a DAW and routing/layering existing plugins and fx?  What does it do that excels it beyond?

To me it just looks like an instrument of convenience that ultimately has you with putting all this work into one DAW instance, whereas i prefer a more old school approach of treating each instrument in a layer as it's own entity on the mixing console so you're learning a wider skillset that can be applied across the board.

I've owned HALion for years and I see the same comments about that back in the day, and I question what's the advantage working within a restricted single instance environment, overkilling a channel strip ,when you could instead reach out for a much wider gamut of sounds through the DAW?

I'd love to be interested in it, as it's clearly at a great price, and the countdown clock is ticking.  But I just don't get it, sadly.  And nor do I hear anything special from it. 

It does look great fun though, but i'm trying to prevent proscratination not add to it!

You absolutely could do those things separately and that's a completely valid way of working and common.  Buy there's also benefits of the simplicity and direct feedback from trying things all within Falcon and not having to open up multiple other synths, have all that separate routing to worry about. Besides I'm pretty sure you can simply split the outputs out of Falcon and treat them with external FX and their own channel strips anyway. I only just got it recently, so don't bank on that, but I think you do. Something for me to try!

Plus, if you've got any of the UVI libraries, you can get more control and ways to integrate them into your creations and layer them too.

If you use them, it's easier to set up keyboard splits if you ever want to create them, again, all within Falcon.

As for sound, I'm really surprised. Maybe it's just their demos on their site or something. After owning it, some of the sounds I've heard it make sound pretty amazing, rich and warm.

It might depend on what genres you like though. Do you have a preferred style?

I've often found that most of them have an area they do well, but then for another type of sound, I'd reach for another synth. Some excel at pads, some super saws, some basses, etc.

But I could play this thing for hours just purely for the hell of it. For the enjoyment so far, I think I've already got my money's worth! 🙂

[Skijumptoes]

32 minutes ago, MusicMan said:

It might depend on what genres you like though. Do you have a preferred style?

Yes, i'm very much into my classic sounding synths, EPs and pianos.   I really love bread and butter sounds, and building on those.  I don't like anything that sounds too 'in the box', so do all I can to route out an back in as audio tracks and work on that level.   To me a sampler should sound raw and gritty and more like old AKAI hardware, so tend to reach for TAL Sampler and then build on top of that.

And I think that's why NI Komplete and separates such as Arturia and UAD's offerings are more my ball park, and this is perhaps why Falcon doesn't really stand out all that much to me.   All these textured soundscapes are technically wonderful, but I have no desire to listen to an album full of them - they have me bored within 20-30 seconds, let alone 3 minutes plus.

There just seems to be a huge amount of musicians who are deep into the whole 'sound design' trend, and somewhat bypassing the process of learning how to write well constructed music with a vocalist over the top.  But i enjoy writing songs, I think there's a whole other hobby in enjoying noodling with sounds even if there's no final destination for it.

[Doug Rintoul]

2 hours ago, Skijumptoes said:

So it's more powerful than what you can do with a DAW and routing/layering existing plugins and fx?  What does it do that excels it beyond?

To me it just looks like an instrument of convenience that ultimately has you with putting all this work into one DAW instance, whereas i prefer a more old school approach of treating each instrument in a layer as it's own entity on the mixing console so you're learning a wider skillset that can be applied across the board.

I've owned HALion for years and I see the same comments about that back in the day, and I question what's the advantage working within a restricted single instance environment, overkilling a channel strip ,when you could instead reach out for a much wider gamut of sounds through the DAW?

I'd love to be interested in it, as it's clearly at a great price, and the countdown clock is ticking.  But I just don't get it, sadly.  And nor do I hear anything special from it. 

It does look great fun though, but i'm trying to prevent proscratination not add to it!

The same argument holds true for pretty much any supersynth out there: Falcon, Halion, Avenger, Nexus, Omnisphere, Pigments, Synthmaster. From my perspective, the idea is not to create a whole song in Falcon, but to create an instrument that is usable across songs and across DAWs. Different aspects of the instrument can be controlled by macros and MIDI CCs to modify the sound of the instrument within the same MIDI stream. You can create an instrument beyond your bread and butter sounds. I would agree that it would be silly to try to do a whole song using one instance of Falcon. 

However, It does not sound like Falcon would fit into your workflow very well. You will be fine giving it a pass.

[Doug Rintoul]

10 hours ago, kitekrazy1 said:

factory

It really depends on what you are looking for I guess. Falcon comes with 1500+ presets which can be ovewhelming at first if you don't use the browser features. The preset browser in version 3 is greatly improved over previous versions with audio previews and extensive tagging. This helps to filter out what you are not looking for. I think a big complaint people have about having to sift through a ton of presets to find what they want is due to them not using the browser features. The factory presets in Falcon cover a wide range and sound great, at least to my ears. 

One problem with using the preset browser with audio previews to determine the sounds Falcon can produce is that most presets have macros that can greatly modify the sound. If you don't open up a preset and start messing with the macros, you are missing a whole world of what Falcon can do.