Tips for moving from keyboards to GP4 - I don't have plugins

I can fully agree with this… I probably drive some developers crazy sometimes, and they keep giving me insights, best practices etc. I never bought software or a product with so much support.

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As others have said, Arturia V-Collection is pretty good value when first purchased… upgrades tend to be less good value. To dip your toe in Arturia’s waters for less, consider getting Analog Lab which uses the engines of all the synths in V-Collection, but with limited tweakability.

In terms of what VSTs are worth considering as good choices to cover various bread and butter requirements at reasonable prices (that’s the camp I’m in too with my covers band), have a look at:

  • Modartt PianoTeq Stage - Modelled acoustic and electric pianos
  • Any Cherry Audio synths - cheaper alternative to Arturia’s V-Collection… 95% of the quality for 20% of the price
  • IK Multimedia B-3X - for Hammond B3. Keep your eyes open for their Group Buy deals (SampleTank has some great sounds too), otherwise GSi VB3 may be better value
  • Numa Player by StudioLogic - great pianos, e-pianos, Clavs, Vibes and Strings/pads for free
  • Plugin Alliance - they have a few nice synth VSTs and often have sale offers
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Great tip, thanks Dave … I even own two StudioLogic’s but didn’t find this free VST yet and it sounds really good.

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MacBookPro is for me a safer choice. I lived both experiences. With a new windows notebook you will have to tune many OS parameters, and sometimes this can be very frustrating and not rewarding.
MS has for me too many limits. I tested it for one week. A simple concert with 20 songs and a dozen VSTs exceeded RAM quantity (I have 16 gigabytes too). This turned to a nightmare: error messages for every mouse click I could do to improve the situation.
Currently I use a concert file with 60 songs on GigPerformer with unlimited rackspaces. Not a single glitch. Every preset a rack. Never had a problem in two years and dozens of gigs.
If you check on YouTube you will see dozens of guys suggesting how to save RAM on MS. Simple reason is that this is very poorly managed by the program itself.
Big difference is that MS uses all Apple library that it’s not open for other software packages, this is due to idiot strategy that I want to boycott.
With external libraries you will get more and freely.

Very helpful hints, thanks all.

The Numa Player really has great sounds. Not so many, but hey - they are all free.

Are there other free great sounding VSTs, like guitar, brass, strings, pads etc. to get a wider range of „standard“ Instruments? Since I’m playing in a Coverband I do not need so many Synth type of sounds.

This community is great!

It’s not free sadly… But check regularly if there are discounts. For all my cover sounds I use Korg Triton Extreme. One of the best workstation ever in pure software. The full Korg collection is great.
Sampletank is not bad too, but again, not free.

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Another hidden champion is the free/donationware Nils‘ K1v – Kawai K1 Emulation Plugin VSTi/AU – nilsschneider.de
Depending on your cover program this may also help :wink:

There are many free plugins (even bundles) that you can find easily → see this thread: Top websites for free audio plugins

There is a link to the blog article + many useful community posts/suggestions that I indexed the other day.

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As pianopaul said, I think that if you need a midi controller you should buy any Arturia Midicontroller that comes with free Analog Lab, so thousands of sounds for almost free !

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@frankenrieder Maybe you should start by telling us which synths or keyboards you already have - maybe you won’t need a new master-keyboard at all? Who knows? :slight_smile:
Then, when it comes to recommending a master-keyboard, i consider it important to know which kind of keybed/how many keys you prefer (depending on what music you play or how much weight you are willing to carry :wink: )
I also would recommend that you have an eye on the upcoming black friday / cyber XYZ deals, you might make quite a bargain!
The already mentioned plugins/collections are the ones i would also recommend… Arturia, NI Komplete, Korg Triton/M1, where a software/hardware bundle like it comes with Arturia’s Keylab or NI’s Komplete keyboards might give you the biggest bang for the buck.

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If you are not in a hurry (meaning have no gigs for the upcoming time), you could consider using only free VSTs, check them out, and see what you are missing.

Personally I bought initially NI Komplete because I thought that free VSTs wouldn’t be good anyway, but now I checked NI Komplete, I tend to combine it a lot with free VSTs… I will not say that using free VSTs only is a good solution, but it gives you something to start with and find out what you need more, although bundles are typically cheaper relatively, especially if you don’t have anything yet.

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We are coming up to a period where many really good plugins will be on sale for BlackFriday, etc.

While we at Deskew don’t participate in these things, the plugin companies reduce their prices really significantly, sometimes to absurd lengths.

You might consider making a list of things you like and then wait for those sales. Your timing is perfect

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First of all: Discussion of plugins is a never ending story and depends on your taste and budget :wink:

I’ve started with Arturia some years ago, but I was not really happy with these plugins, too much effect on the default presets for my taste, and after removing effects I didn’t like it neither. After a while I changed to u-he synths and Keyscape for piano and e-piano sounds: way more expensive, but as I’m spending quite some time with these, it is worth the money for me.
You can initially just continue using the keyboard you already have. If you play piano or e-piano sounds, you may want weighted keys. I have then added another keyboard from Arturia, but changed to a NI keyboard that has better keys.