I find nothing to disagree with you about. Spot on. It has become my favorite as well. Hard to believe it exists. Those U-he folks know something! All their stuff is good, even the freebies.
I like to use Reason as a vst in Reaper, and stack Diva with Hive, (for the wavetables and more digital contemporary sound), and Byome, Nuxx or Tantra as multi fx in a combinator to make some of the biggest Korg style combis this side of 1999. Wrapping it in a combinator has the added advantage of being able to have endless modulation. Because, for me. the only down side to Diva is the lack of a modulation matrix. Other than that, it's pretty much perfect. For more analog vibes, in addition to Diva, you should also check out Strobe 2 and Cypher 2. These are more raw and pretty much sound like Aphex Twin and all that classic Warp records stuff straight out of the box. Awesome what you can do. This is a golden age for electronic music.
Thanks for such an awesome and thoughtful reply. You are absolutely spot on - and using Reason as a plugin is such a cool concept. Strobe and Cypher are indeed two incredible synths. I just want to add my thoughts on a missing modulation matrix. Yes, there are many times when I as a sound designer, miss have a couple of slots for making alternative modulations - BUT with a bit of thinking, you already can. Not freely and not unlimited, but you can. There are many places within Diva where you can make "Eurorack" insert points - and even to this day I am still finding new things you can change the flow of modulations. I made a soundset about a year ago with the focus of getting into Aphex territory - and I never felt in any point that I was limited in what I wanted to do. Just listen to this little demo - ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-K8sWe6SvswE.html - there are so many odd modulations going on in the sounds that you wouldn't normally think Diva were capable of. Golden age of electronic music indeed.
Thank you, Plughugger! Yes, definitely one of the best synths created, and we rely mostly on the sound design work, still very important and reliable is what and how we incorporate, all patches in the music and our final results, so we think everything is collaboration ... Bless you all!
Thanks! I've been meaning to put up more short videos about sound design, but at the moment I'm totally swamped with upcoming soundsets for Diva and Omnisphere. Will try to get to it during the holidays.
I agree with everything in this video. Diva is amazing. While it would be nice to have a distortion effect, who doesn't have a million fav distortions to throw on it? Haha. Can never get enough of different saturation / distortion algorithms. Sequencer, yeah it would be nice to have. Although obviously we also have external capabilities for that. See this is the thing, while it would be undoubtably more convenient to have those things right there in the plugin itself, I think it is easy to forget how monumentally easy we have it these days compared to how people had to deal with this stuff in the past. It is a fantastic time to be creating music. Less time spent messing around, more time spent actually composing. Coming from times before PC's were ever powerful enough to really run much of anything at all, and when they could it was mostly junk compared to now - back when I was 13 (33 now), all I really need is fantastic sounds to be fair about it, and U-He provides. :D.
Exactly its all about the fantastic sounds the Tones, Diva just delivers something deep, and thats all that really matters. The chorused guitar preset is one of my fav sounds ever
I would say that any vst synth that has more functions is good and when it comes to sound quality, you can always use a channel strip to create a warm, deep, clean or dirty sound, depending on what you expect in this case i advise everyone not to limit themselves to just one synthesizer but to be flexible and experiment!
Yep. A good channel strip and with some proper effects can do wonders not just to warm up a signal, but also quickly take it to the stratosphere in a mix. IKs Mixbox is very inspiring. As is the Effectrack from Soundtoys. But limiting yourself to one or two synths - if you are a beginner - works wonders to make you learn synthesis. Too many plugins makes you a master of none. If you are just after presets - then just collect as many plugins as you can.
@@ThePlughugger In my case it depends on the oscillators sine waves and so on and on.There are a lot of sound generators which build your sound from scratch, then you add what you want to create your sound, it's all very simple but time-consuming.I believe that everyone creates what they like, it depends on the artist Cheers
THE LEGEND is the most convincingly analog sounding synth plugin. I've also found much better basses on some other top VST synths... but Diva is (otherwise) quite awesome.
And you can max out a 5950X with a single instance. (Possibly I need to engage multi-core for some patches if pairing them with an arpeggiator.) Diva's quality comes with a price. Often lesser synths are good enough for a fraction of the CPU budget.
@@Chalisque it's the number of voicings that kills CPU. Patches with like 12 voicings are CPU killers. But most of the time you never use 12 voicings. It means using 12 notes at the same time in a chord. Don't know why a lot of presets have this, I always reduce it to 2 if i'm trying to use a bass, or 4/6 for leads/chords.
@@cheekoandtheman I would love to get a Zebra vs Diva vs Hive comparaison. I think for Trance music I prefer Hive but since they are on sale right now I am open to get this kind of video to influence my choice as which one to buy next... all of them would be great of course but lots of money... haha Vital is free and I got it recently. It seems very cool and capable even if I'm a neebie to synths. I also have Synthmaster One and it is great! I really love Omnisphere too! Lots of great synths out there for sure. Great times to make music! :-)
@@jonathanbougie-lauzon4583 how does Hive compare to Serum or the other synths you mentioned, after Zebra I'm looking to master Hive, what makes Zebra special is the Spectral Fx and the comb filters, they allow for some incredibly realistic and at the same time other worldly sounds. If wave tables are your thing, look up Galbanum wave forms they are a collection of 10 thousand single wave forms made to mathematical precision. I've made 100s of crazy wave tables with them
@@cheekoandtheman I don't have Serum but one that could answer you well with his tutorials is Demis Hellen. He said to me that he likes Hive best for pads. Each synths have their own strengths for sure. For the price, Synthmaster One when on sale is a no brainer. Arround $30 or so on sale. Sounds very good. I am no expert yet so I cannot tel all the difference between each but the presets do sound great.
Thanks. Couldn't agree more about TAL. Great sounding stuff. Their 101 is actually one of my favourites of all 101 emulations. It just has that feel to it that makes you want to do stuff. Love it.
Zebra is a beast! I've been trying to find time to learn it - but there are too many cool synths from U-he I want to go deeper with. Bazille for example.
I've had a quick look at them all and Zebra is truly the all-rounder, especially if organic cinematic sounds are your thing, however all it can smash out all the traditional synth stuff no problem. the spectral Fx are the most magical part amongst many amazing features
Totally agree, I made a lot of comparisons before buying my VST synths and I got spire and some other ones, dismissed diva because it sounded just too generic to me. I personally don’t care about how many functions it has or how it works if at the end I don’t like the sound it creates
I underutilize Diva... Great video, makes me all enthusiastic again! Btw, the sounds from the demo's, did you program them yourself or were they presets?
Diva is a fantastic synthesizer to make sounds on. There are so many ways you can approach making sounds. Yes, the sounds are made by me - it's from a soundset called Twilight 3 I released a couple of years back - www.plughugger.com/diva-twilight-3.html
@@DEADLINETV I'm actually planning a big sale of Diva/U-he stuff early next year. Missed out on doing something this Black Friday. But sign up to the mailing list so you won't miss it.
I got this bad boy for half thanks to Native Instruments. I'm all about retro sounds and this does sound analog and creamy. It's my go-to bass plugin. Before it used to be Mini V. Excellent presets especially pads. I wish I can design custom skins for it though.
Me too. Jumped on that promo like a flash. I grabbed Diva, Hive, Color Copy and Twangstrom from it. I already have Bazille (got it for free when I bought Bitwig 1), and Zebra was the start of my enduring addiction to software synthesisers. (And then I have Uhbik and MFM2 to round out the collection. Pressworks and Satin are too subtle for me, and I already have too many synths to justify getting ACE.)
If this video was uploaded 10 years ago I wouldn't say anything, but have you guys heard of Phase Plant? :-)) And btw fun fact regarding #1 - while people weren't able to hear the difference between Diva and analog oscillators in the blind tests, I personally most likely wouldn't be able to hear the difference even between the analog and plain digital ones :-D
Using LFOs you mean? Sure. But that technique is extremely limited. I meant something like in Hive or Repro-1 where you can sequence notes as well as modulation values.
Still, did not get why Diva is the best. In fact from the presentation seems to me it is missing things. Like the sequencer which I also agree with. Omnisphere has been always on top of my list.
Yes, it is missing a lot of things. But still, depending on my mood and what I want to achieve, Diva is one hell of a synthesizer. I agree with Omnisphere - fantastic. But they do cover somewhat different territories.
@@ThePlughugger Serum is great for EDM stuff, but for Rock, Soul, Synthwave/Darksynth and other non-Dance genres, nothing comes close to Diva, in my experience.
I haven't used Falcon to be honest - well, I did use it a bit when it was MOTU Mach Five - but that was a long long time ago. But I have heard lots of good things about it.
after WW2 when all the scientists got picked up by Americans, English and Russians did they just leave all the Radar guys behind? Its like every german is born knowing what an Oscillator is. I dont mean this in a bad way at all it is really just interesting to me.
I tested it a while ago. It sounded really great and has some cool features. The problem though and why I didn't buy so far was that it does not seem to have a "spread" option, where you just turn a knob and it spreads to stereo. For when you want a sound just at the sides and not in the center. Did I miss something here or is the only option really using the chorus? I think this still is a major problem of Synths today. Mostly they do not seem to give this option and thus make it difficult to meet requirements of modern production, resulting in very narrow mixes or just the lack of having a mid-ranging synth far out like electric guitars are recorded for example . But I have the feeling on this one I just didn't know how to do it 🤔 The u-he Tyrell didn't have this option either and I had to "trick" it out of the synth to use it properly. Don't know why they didn't do this by themselves because it was very easy and made it a really decent synth. But in the end of the day it lacks a reverb 😆
@@arcticfoxstudios2018 heard many good things about Falcon and yes, some do have this option. People hate on Massive for example but it's Stereotools worked well all the time 😉
I think that the reason behind this is that u-he want to keep Diva close to its "analog" roots and not go too far with too many options and parameters. What I love about Diva is that while it looks limited on the surface, there are often alternative ways to do something. Let's say you have an envelope and and LFO on the filter. If you assigned them to the filter knobs directly, you have now used up all your modulation slots for the filter. But you could use one of the modifiers, such as "add" to create a combined LFO/Envelope modulator. Or if you just want to hardwire filter cutoff you can create a modulator where you control Filter FM with the modulation wheel, which sometimes gives more or less the same result. I'm still discovering the depth of Diva.
You could do 10 reasons why it isn't. Diva does one thing, namely emulate certain pieces of old hardware, very well, provided you have the CPU to power it and it can do what you want. If you like emulations of analogy synths, then Diva is a must have. (I have it.)
Enabling the 'Multicore' option within Diva can make it a lot more usable on under-powered computers that struggle to handle its CPU demands. Certain Diva patches I tested on an old PC went from being practically unusable to not that much more CPU intensive than an average Hive preset. Sure, Diva is still more resource hungry, but the difference between when 'Multicore' is enabled or not can be like night and day. Another CPU saver is to reduce the excess polyphony count (if you don't need extra voices, reducing them really cuts down the CPU demands).
@@roboxrobox123 number 1 mistake is to seek others to demo the sound for you when you can and always should get the demo and fiddle with it yourself. Watching videos to decide is what is pointless. This is a cool view of someone and is only for people who already went and touched the synth not the lazy ones
@@MrFree-vj8qj the number 1 mistake is to presume that someone hasn't been using this already for the past few years , Ive got the vst. I just wanted to see what others made it sound like , not have someone talking all over the top of the video. Did I ask for your opinion on this ? 😂 No.
@@bengsynthmusic Sketchy ?? The page is full of demos made with tranzistow The guy is a professional coder and has worked for john bown coding algoritms for the solaris synth. And there is a huge topic about tranzistow over at gearslutz Tranzistow is one of the deepest software instruments ever ceated , it's not for the simple minded , that's for sure But yeah , seems you're afraid of green text LOL
@@WARDISWARD When I went there my browser showed a huge exclamation mark up top (not https secure). The website is unprofessional and cluttered. I'd like to see what the thing looks like and sounds.
Diva eats CPU on breakfast. PC Master race needed. That's the only drawback aspect. It's easier to stack several instances of Omnisphere. Diva is too much.
Hm! That's pretty interesting actually. I kind of agree with you that it doesn't add anything new. It just does a bunch of old tricks. But from where I see it, it does it very good. Just out of personal curiosity. What would you prefer?
@@ThePlughugger I think it’s just a matter of tastes at the end, of course it all depends on what type of sound are you looking for and since my preference goes in a less traditional direction I usually go for more modern and digital sounds, some of my favorite synths are Spire, ANA2, Dune 3, Serum... and the ones I use for more retro sounds are the Korg Odyssey and Polysix, which surely aren’t as versatile as Diva but I really feel more like they bring me back to the 80s sounds than Diva does. But as I said, it all will depend on which type of sound you’re looking for and I don’t doubt Diva is a great synth, it just didn’t fit my preferences
