This article is going to be a brief review of Spectrasonics Omnisphere. I hope you get something out of it and can make an informed decision on whether or not to get it.
Okay, what is Omnisphere? Well, it’s a soft synth but not just any soft synth. This thing as more bells and whistles than you can possibly imagine. That has its good and bad side. Everything comes with a price.
So let’s start with the price. The suggested retail is $499. I got mine at a slight discount for $479 and change.
It comes in a box with 6 CDs and an installation book with instructions. Installation is where things of this size usually scare the crap out of me, especially when it says each disc takes 1 hour to install and there are 6 discs.
What I discovered is that because of the speed of my machine, which really isn’t that fast by today’s standards (it’s a core 3) the whole process took under 2 hours. So if you have a fast machine, this won’t take you long at all. You will need to be connected to the Internet for registration but to install there is an offline version if you need it.
Under the hood is a 10,000 horse power engine. This thing is massive and probably should have been called that and might have been had the name not been taken by NI’s Massive.
If you look at the menu system both for picking out patches and multipatches, it’s very deep. In many areas, you can pick one parameter and go further into it and tweak the heck out of it.
Speaking of the menu system, the main menu system for choosing patches and/or multis is very well laid out. Everything is categorized and even has a search feature so you can do a search for patches by type of sound or use like “lead synth” and it will give you everything listed under “lead synth” or whatever tag you choose.
What about the sounds themselves? Honestly, some of them don’t do this thing justice. I realize that you have to cater to a variety of musical styles and maybe some of these patches just don’t thrill me because of the particular style they cater to, but some of them just leave me cold. But then there are the ones that really show off what this thing can do and they will blow you away.
You essentially have two sound sources. The first is samples. So in that sense, this thing acts like a sampler. The second is basic raw waveforms like you would find in a traditional analog synth. So this thing can function in either capacity.
At first glance it would appear that there aren’t many waveforms to choose from and technically, there aren’t. Maybe 4 or 5. However, because of the ridiculous number of editing functions that this thing comes with, you can turn any wave into just about anything you want. So don’t be fooled by sawtooth, triangle, sine and noise. What you ultimately end up with is up to you.
There are different modes of play in this thing. You have your regular patch mode where you pull up or create a patch and play it. You have multi mode where you have many patches that you can split across the keyboard and in live mode play any of those patches and even latch them in real time. You can have as many as 8 of these. So by the time you’re done latching, you can have up to 8 different patches playing at the same time all by themselves.
Finally, there is stack mode. This is where you can pull up as many as 8 different patches and have them layered together in a number of ways. In this mode, you can get some really thick, fat sounds, not that you can’t with just one patch because you can thanks to their unison function. So in stack mode, the sounds you can produce with this thing can be downright obnoxious.
But stack mode can be used for more than just stacking one sound on top of the other. You can have them respond to velocity where some patches only sound when played very loud. Or you can stack them by control change to have some come in when you move the mod wheel as an example. This way you can produce some very complex and moving sounds.
And that really is the big selling point of this synth as far as I’m concerned. It can produce textures that would be difficult if not impossible to produce with other synths.
What you’d expect in a synth like this, the ability to modulate any one parameter with multiple modulation sources, is there. Want to modulate the filter cutoff with the mod wheel? No problem. The number of modulation sources you can assign are numerous to say the least.
There is a lot of talk about the Orb that’s a new feature in Omnisphere. This provides real time control over the sound itself and can morph it in a variety of ways so that it almost sounds nothing like the original sound. Don’t ask me how the Orb actually does what it does. It’s too technical for me. All I know is if you move it around it does stuff. Yeah, it’s a little unpredictable but that’s part of the fun. Experiment with it.
And of course there are effects. Tons of them. They can be assigned on the oscillator level and/or overall with as many as 4 effects per level.
So say you have a 2 oscillator patch. You can assign 4 effects to oscillator one, 4 to oscillator two and 4 to the overall patch, if you want.
Yes, it’s pretty obnoxious.
Guess what? I haven’t even scratched the surface of this beast. It has an arpeggiator and lots of other goodies under the hood. And in spite of all the stuff it has, it’s fairly easy to get around in. It has a help manual on the first disc and there are tons of videos that it links to. Plus, there are a ton of YouTube videos with tutorials that you can watch.
Yes, you probably want to have prior synth experience to get the most out of this thing. It can present quite a learning curve to a new synth owner. Having been programming synths since the days of Moog and ARP I didn’t have too much trouble. But even I got a little lost in the architecture. It’s pretty deep.
Is it worth close to 500 clams? For me, it’s a no brainer. Whether or not you need something this deep or could get by with something like Zebra or Synthmaster at half the price, only you can answer that. They’re great synths. I love them and I will still use them. But Omnisphere will definitely be a synth that will regularly be added to my palette of sounds.
For The Love Of Music,
Steven “Wags” Wagenheim