The Virus is Dead. Long live the Virus.
In news just to hand Access, maker of the Virus synthesiser, has announced that the hardware is no more. The chips are down – in fact the DSP chips that power the machine are done, and besides the company makes more money out of guitar amps these days. It’s been a long run for the keyboard which was last updated in 2009. The Virus is synonymous with EDM music – bearing a major responsibility for that (dare I say) rather boring hall of preset mirrors. RIP, don’t hurry back.
There’s now going to be panic buying of this ‘legendary’ instrument and I’m going to tidy up my Virus TI to get a good sale price on eBay. But I’ve made some (very un-EDM) sounds on it. How can I keep using these?
First of all I sampled them all into PadShop2 which as usual sounds spot on, but that’s a bit too easy.
Then there’s a project to recreate the Virus and other synthesisers that use the same DSP chips by brute emulation. They’ve managed to match the Virus quite well but have not shared the TI version as the hardware is still current and have just released the free emulation. This emulation needs a lot of CPU to get not much music. I’m interested in their efforts but there’s music needed sooner.
Somebody mentioned Viper which is not advertised as a replica of the Virus as such, but somehow has 1 to 1 features mapped to that hardware – to the extent you can export your patches out of a physical machine and load them into Viper getting a damn near replica sounds. Part of that is legally obtained samples and wavetables taken from the Virus (which as part of the deal are available to use in any software, so put them in Vital if you like). There’s been recent updates. It looked lively. I gave it a go.
I’m impressed to find that my oddball sounds (which are the best opposite of EDM I could manage) are perfectly usable, while not absolutely perfect. They will perform the same role in composed music. It’s rather clever, particularly as it’s all created in FlowStone – used by enthusiasts to click together synthesiser modules without programming in WINDOWS ONLY. Look up Adam Szabo you’ll find him high in the church of FL Studio. It all makes sense if you’ve ever been a FL Studio cultist.
The idea that this ‘iconic’ and expensive piece of hardware can be emulated by a DIY software kit is glorious. But then the hardware is rather Porsche. Very svelte. Nice knobs. Will I feel sad not to have these knobs? Will I miss Total Integration? Or will it be nice to have one less box sitting in the studio?
I will spend some more time on the Viper as its own personality very soon…
Osirus (https://dsp56300.wordpress.com/osirus/) is an emulation of the Virus B and C models.
You have to be able to lay hands on a ROM from one or both but that is reasonably achievable in this age of the Internet (although I won’t specify how).
There is next to no documentation, the interface is average at best and cryptic at worst and there is absolutely no installer that I’m aware of. Nonetheless, it can be made to work relatively easily and doesn’t seem to be as hard on the CPU as I was anticipating.
Yeah, I mention the emulation – it’s not a bad stab at the Virus C. But it doesn’t do Virus TI in public. Really keen for them to do the SuperNova a.s.a.p.