[crickets]
this forum's not very active, is it.
[crickets]
We're all busy making music.
One thing you can do to get closer to a more traditional sound is to treat the signal as you'd treat the signal from a hardware synth. That may sound obvious, but a lot of people don't do it. There's a video on the net of a guy doing a supposed A/B comparison, and he's playing the softsynth(not an Arturia in this case) through what sounds like a cheap soundcard and a cheap set of speakers, and of course it ends up sounding like an 80s video game compared with the hardware synth.
My only hesitation is that you're using Ableton Live. Nothing wrong with that, of course, but I'm not sure how that affects your treatment of the synth signal. Are you able to bring the signal back into the computer after treating it and then run it into Ableton?
Alternaively a software amp simulator, software EQ and so on may be helpful.
To clarify how I'm doing things - and why I'm not clear on how using Ableton will affect things - I have a hardware digital recorder permanently attached to my PC. It serves as an amp, and when I'm ready to record I just arm a couple of tracks and I've got the same sound I've been hearing already. I can insert any additional signal processors into the path between the PC and the recorder. Sometimes I'll run the software in VST mode and add a couple of VST singal processors.
You could experiment with regular instrument amps instead of amp simulators, of course. Using a valve amp to treat the signal from the PC may get you closer to a regular hardware sound.
When I did an A/B test between the Korg MS20 and the Korg Legacy software I found the original analogue synth was `looser' in sound. The software sounded tighter and more focused. Many studios will tighten up a hardware analogue sound anyway, so what you'd hear on record may not be what you'd get from a straight synth signal, but if you wanted to sound more analogue you could look at chorus, a touch of pitch shifting, and of course echo/reverb to soften out the treatments as well as giving the sound presence. Or you could try this:
Similar questions occur in the analogue synth community - surprisingly, perhaps. People find modern analogue synths too stable sometimes, compared with old 70s instruments. There's sometimes quite heated debate over the reasons (it can get very silly and personal
). I have a couple of Mg Voyager patches that simulate the oscillator drift of vintage Mg synths by using the LFO to introduce slight pitch fluctuations that I can control with the mod wheel. The result is in a similiar area to something like the old TONTO synth - a large, slightly imprecise sound with a lot of presence.
I haven't replicated that with the Arturia synths, but it would be easy enough to do. It may help loosen up and enlarge the sound.
Bear in mind that if you're doing a lot of overdubbing you may not want the sound to be too large and thick. A great, rich, thick analogue sound may become too ill-defined in your mix when it's part of something much more complex.
Quite often I find people who made their reputations with the old analogue synths wanting to get away from things that other people are trying to simulate.
Certainly Mg modular players would have preferred a tighter and more focused sound at times. It's good to have the choice between extremes.
