I'd appreciate your thoughts. Virta is first VST I purchased, and did so right when it became available. I had played around with Aalto and Kaivo but am more of a hardware guy. Virta could be fed by my hardware and could do synth stuff on it's own when needed. I feel much Virta's components (the vosim oscillators, the audio & formants section) are difficult to replicate in hardware. I'm a sucker for strange oscillator waveforms, FM, and formant filtering, so it was a no brainer for me.
I love this software and use it quite a bit. Both standalone when I am traveling and want to zone out, and with my gear to create new sounds effects.
I don't hear it mentioned in the same sense as Aalto & Kaivo. I believe it's probably a combination of it being an effect plug-in in most DAWs, and during the early days it was somewhat tricky to 'trick' the host software into working with Virta easily. Randy has mostly solved that, and it also runs quite a bit more efficiently than it did at first.
What is your opinion? Did you try the demo and didn't gel with it? Are the presets to fantastical? Does the color not inspire like the 'pop' of Aalto's blue and Kaivo's green? Did you think it was more of a one trick pony with the comb filtering?
Give it a chance again! It really is the case of some seemingly simple building blocks that are more than the sum of their parts!
Good questions! I know I can do a better job of demonstrating Virta. I would love to get some tutorial videos out for it like the ones Josh did for Aalto.
I'm in agreement that a well done video would be great! I'm not sure a tutorial is necessary as much as a compelling demo video. Something that shows it as a sound generator and key effect and vocal effect would be best. I think Virta is now easy enough to get going if you are motivated to do so.
As an aside, I have often wondered about running Virta's output (or various stages of the bottom row) back through to the audio input on the top row. This works in Live with send/return tracks and can lead to some interesting things (or uninteresting, depending on your feelings about atonal stuff).
I used Virta a lot with microphone and voice in a band room that is no more, and in my home studio I don't do voice effects often. It's one of the most interesting audio effects I know.
Just got it today, thanks for the reminder :)
I think it's a great, interesting, deep and awesome sounding sound mangling tool and more.
Have joy and be sound.
I think the power and opportunities of both Virta and Kaivo are hard to understand when you are a beginner, and video demos and some more tutorial oriented patches that demonstrate a key feature and can be easily tweaked interestingly would really help to imagine what one can do. Now many of the presets are very interesting but at the same time very obscure - it is hard for a beginner to understand what has been done and how they work.
I own it and remember it being really good, but i stopped using it due to the fixed looping Noise LFO which tbh got on my nerves, esp. once i realised i couldn't make it 'real' random. Random shape that's not actually random isn't great, and to be so short too.. what use is that to anyone? Apart from that, it's great. I should revisit it soon ;)
@garf The use I have for it is making a very jumpy modulation that does loop as often as you want and plays back the same way every time. A more typical noise gen might be a nice addition.
If you haven't seen the new Virta video demo, check it out on the Virta page.
Randy,
Please consider putting the following health warning on Virta:
" Warning! Routing Aalto through Virta may cause mental instability!"
Best Regards,
Michael
P. S.
Might be a chicken egg thing