[robfosters]

Which synth manufacturer iyo, produces the best real world sounds. Forget electronica, i'm talking about pianos, strings, organs, guitars, bass. Band sounds, if you will.

[Curly99]

Not got much experience here and have not tried Yamaha, but my MicroKorg xl seems or to me has the better realworld sounding patches than my Roland SH-201, maybe I just haven't got round to finding them for the 201.

Curly

[robfosters]

The more I think about this, the more I think a hardware synth would be a little of a false investment.

I have been looking at a soft synth called Omnisphere. It looks absolutely fantastic and does just about any genre you could care to imagine. I could get a nice controller keyboard like the Edirol PCR-800 (can also be used to control ableton) and Omnisphere for a combined total of £529. This is far cheaper than a Motif XS or a Korg M3, and I would hazard it's quite a lot more powerful.

I know Omnisphere needs a beefy PC, but I have a Q6600 with 2GB of ram, which I can easy upgrade to 4GB, so i'm thinking that would'nt be a problem.

Do you think I would be better off going down that route?

[Iaind]

One you might have a look at is Garritan Personal Orchestra or the Jazz and Big Band module(Garritan - World's Leading Provider of Quality Software Instruments)

I am more interested in the Orchestra module, but the sounds that this thing makes are brilliant - I believe that they are all sampled from real instruments. There are demos of both the Band and Orchestra on the site.

Cheers,
Iain