Vengeance Avenger

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Vengeance have released Avenger, in a pretty overhyped fashion and with a lot of bugs, but I still delved into it and made some patches and videos today. While it's in no way a substitute for hybrid monsters like Falcon, it shines at wavetabling and re-synthesizing samples to wavetables. The sample implementation is very basic/poor, modulations system is good, filters and FX are decent.

Here is a playlist with vids.

[arachnaut]

I always follow Simon's taste, so I bought this out a few hours ago.

Here are my first impressions after about an hour of twiddling.

1) It is expensive for what it does.
2) The web site is not user friendly. Getting it started is a bit weird. Registration is crazy.
3) All the sounds I tried so far use a lot of effects. If you turn off Reverb and Delay to hear the raw sound, it is just OK. Usually, I pick my own external effects so I turn these off.
4) I have not tried to anything original yet, but it has a lot of possibilities.
5) CPU is not an issue for me, but it is a bit on the high side of utilization.
6) GUI is resizable, so it is easy to find a good size, but at the size I like, the text is a bit too small.
7) The library is huge, so the browser helps find stuff.

This has promise, but it is still in the early days of development. Buy if you like the discount, otherwise wait for Rev 2.0.

Sorry is this comes across as negative, but I found too many issues to give a high recommendation at this stage of development.

Simon compares this to Falcon at almost twice the price, but the comparison is valid, and the price difference justified.

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Here is a video with an Avenger patch using 4 different harmonic plastic tube samples in oscillators 1-4 with FM modulation which can be dialed in with Macro 1 and a drone in OSC5 derived from one of the samples via wavetable re-synthesis. Macro automation and modwheel action, made in LogicX.
Avenger -> soundscape machine.

[Sampleconstruct]

I always follow Simon's taste, so I bought this out a few hours ago.

Here are my first impressions after about an hour of twiddling.

1) It is expensive for what it does.
2) The web site is not user friendly. Getting it started is a bit weird. Registration is crazy.
3) All the sounds I tried so far use a lot of effects. If you turn off Reverb and Delay to hear the raw sound, it is just OK. Usually, I pick my own external effects so I turn these off.
4) I have not tried to anything original yet, but it has a lot of possibilities.
5) CPU is not an issue for me, but it is a bit on the high side of utilization.
6) GUI is resizable, so it is easy to find a good size, but at the size I like, the text is a bit too small.
7) The library is huge, so the browser helps find stuff.

This has promise, but it is still in the early days of development. Buy if you like the discount, otherwise wait for Rev 2.0.

Sorry is this comes across as negative, but I found too many issues to give a high recommendation at this stage of development.

Simon compares this to Falcon at almost twice the price, but the comparison is valid, and the price difference justified.

Well, releasing it in this state was a bit ambitious maybe, still lot's of little bugs, large bugs and niggles, but the potential it has is promising, in combination with other hybrids and synths Avenger certainly adds something new to the electronic table.

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A custom patch made with Avenger, using a wavetable of a piano string in Osc1 and two FFTs in Osc 2/3, FM and audio rate modulation is automated via Macros, so is the volume of the sub-octave (via chorders), MW adds detuning/stereo spreading.

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Avenger does produce beautiful sounds for sure, this patch uses 3 oscillators, 2 with a re-synthesized wavetable and an FFT osc.

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Re-synthesizing some vocal samples (my own voice) in Avenger and morphing the sound with various Macros and the modulation wheel. Some CPU overloads occurred during the video recording, it's just all too much for my laptop - [rant]I want my big Mac Pro ashtray back (but if I'm fucked it needs a new motherboard and it's only 1.5 years old, great product quality Apple!) [/rant]

[arachnaut]

I posted an early, first impression, but I feel obliged to update it after using it a bit more.

While the current version has a few bugs and new versions come out frequently, we can expect this to become pretty stable soon.

There is one alarmingly loud pop that can happen now and then, maybe related to the Comb filter, so I recommend always using a brickwall limiter in a DAW when you edit presets.

This an all-in-one synth that is practically a DAW. It has so many performance modes, busses, drum channels, etc.

There are a great many presets in each section - waves, effects, envelopes, etc. The factory library has over 14,000 objects - huge!

I would recommend this without reservation with the current price discount before year-end, assuming you want to go through a bunch of updates.

I imagine it will be really stable shortly, so you might want to follow the 'epic' KVR thread if that is a concern; the bugs are reported there (and there are not so many at the moment):

http://www.kvraudio.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=467127

Some have found the CPU load to be high, I don't see any problems given what it does.

There are a lot of video tutorials on YouTube, the manual is OK, but missing a few things - you probably won't have too many problems finding your way around. The only real problem I had was saving presets (Hint: Memory).