Are expensive vsts worth it?

Sound quality wise.....no. Ease of use, great fx included in them already, cpu friendly without costing too much, enjoyment of creating sounds with...yes. But in my opinion synths are overpriced if they are more than $50. Something like Kontakt is worth every penny they ask because the people recording those sounds know what they are doing. But synths....especially emulations...are not worth the money some of these companies ask for since so many others can emulate the same hardware synth and offer it free or for a little of nothing. So imagine if you had all of those hardware synths in your studio......would you really even care about virtual instruments? But the flip side of it is you would have to know how to use them.....how they work...becuse there are no presets for them.......(for example).

I think back to when I bought an ESQ from a pawn shop back in 95........those same type of sounds are being used heavy in music today. I spent $400 on the ESQ. Thinking about getting me one this year because I'm used to it plus I wasn't doing the computer thing back then....(hardly anybody else either).

Midi to usb.........is making my imagination run wild right now. Might even get an xr-20 so I feel like my old set up when I had a DR-5.
 
Machfive 3 is worth it, its a synth and a sampler it teaches you synthesis and there are tutorials on groove3.com to get you started,, best investment i ever made better than kontakt in my opinion, gui is less cluttered sound library sounds fuller and warm even though it comes with less content
 
I think software synth prices are kinda all over the place. You can get good stuff for very little and terrible stuff for a lot. For example, Nexus is IMO overpriced crap. Stuff like Albino, ACE, Diva, are really good. NI's synths are solid.

There are some high end things that are definitely worth the money.

If anything the problem is too much choice. Synths have their own character so even synths that are similar in principal are different in practice, but a lot of the processing plugins (and even more so the utility types) you can get all do very similar things. Many of them don't offer anything above what you can do with most DAWs out of the box, they just give them a nice UI and put knobs in one window.

I think you have to just think 'what is missing from my music' and find something that does that job. If nothing is missing you don't need anything.
 
I've never been disapointed with NI products as far as vsts. Spectrasonic has some really good quality plugins as well. As far as "worth it" that's a matter of perspective. They're more cost efficient than buying hardware synths, some argue hardware can't be replaced (debatable) but not everyone can afford some of the price tags attached to hardware synths. Ideally you want to learn how to make sounds work with mixing techniques as opposed to expecting them to be album ready straight out of the box, but for a quick fix id say yes its worth buying aftermarket vsts since most daw's stock plugins are quite limited.
 
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