Gilmano's review on UVI Falcon with a summary on software

Software Instruments

Thanks for sharing the details on this part of Falcon and all other reviews you made on UVI Falcon for KVR audio, Peter. Very much appreciated. Me and my studio team on REQQORD music and StudioAtlierNord are late adopters and long time distant but interested watchers of Falcons evolution over the time. Since it is now part of Pro Tools Ultimate (the go-to professional DAW for film music and international production workflows) I started to look at its usability closer. We cannot "toy" around here much in this professional enviroment and need to know if it can be added in a daily workflow chain, can be used in regular studio processes and in production backups, reissued for later reference. Especially regarding the UI, where we all had so many wishes over the last decades from other companies with no luck yet, was interesting to look at on UVI Falcons innovations.

Again, very much appreciated, your reviews, Peter, and please forgive me to choose your videos as source of a long evolved thought to comment about more in detail and more general regarding the topic software instruments. It has to do with the circumstance, that UVI Falcon brings software instruments on its limits. Positively meant. Again: Falcon = much better UI than most others. +1for this.

But - Like with all this big players, multilayer-, multi-instrument plugin synth and sample monsters out there: Very impressive features with so much knobs, tweak layers, options, preferences, etc. on all this  levels - which is great, don't get me wrong - but on the end: they all still lack of one important thing in my ears:

A real alive "body" of sound.

Sure: The developers concentrate on "features" they can control in code. And some developers thankfully more on usability than others. Like Falcon's UI, which is top! Finally one out there! Thanks for this much better usability here. But then we hit the limit and many other priorities come upfront: the important market share in conjunction with their user base and wanted sounds or libraries to sell. And it is important that you can tell every year that another feature or option to be tweakable has been added. Which is all great. And again: UVI at its best, beats them all. And it is what users await on computer based instruments, sure. And it is finally something where developers can do something about, right? Do we have reached the limit?

Too bad that they can't do much about how the semi-"body" of sound finally behaves out of a computer. Sure you can "code" to get 99% rid off computer flaws. But in most cases, if the sound is upfront, you can tell if it is generated in a computer or with an analog synth. No matter what high or low profile analog synth it is. It will always put more "life" and "body" in its output. Call it harmonics or the signal noise, or the electricity a real synth needs. Whatever it causes it. You feel it.

I can't fade out that for me most computer generated synths sound a little bit too much like computer game sounds with a stressed upper end (like CDs). Thin and flirry. Let's call it "quantized" in bits. Could be interesting for certain productions, sure. And mostly undetectable for sure. But I haven't been satisfied with any of our or others tweaking results in the last 20 years for our purposes here: Mostly Jazz, Funk and Downtempo influenced music if synths come into play (we do a lot more other of course).

Falcon became interesting for me more and more over the years, since other (I don't want to call names) rare and legendary Drum and Sample slice tools, I often used, lost momentum in development, updates and will possibly fade soon regarding their small userbase. And I need a workstation, where I can create a workflow straight in the moment when I "hear" something in mind. Mostly regarding chopping of old Vinyl samples to add retro life into mixes. Interesting enough that UVI beats NI here immediately. Since the Kontakt UI is too small and tiny for a daily long work on this slicing parts. Falcon is far better on this. Can't tell much about how the UVI own envelope ADR filters, LFOs etc "feel" used on sample controls yet. Not tested yet. But this will be an important part to decide too.

On the end I think UVI Falcon could become a go to software sampler for my use cases if we can make sure that the update philosophy do not break workflows and that the overall sound "acting" of the plugin feels a little bit more "alive" than others. That's all what you can get out of software. And the UVI Falcon user interface is already a winner.

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