Virus snow review

And the load on your computer's CPU? Nothing, of course, or at least next to nothing. But what if you're not a computer-based DAW user, or you want to gig with your Virus as well? In this case, you can forget the Total Integration and regard the Virus TI Snow as a normal synth — like the other models in the range, the Snow has conventional audio outputs and MIDI sockets, and includes suitable modes for working with single patches or 'multi' setups.

In a word, it's glorious. It doesn't take much auditioning and tweaking of patches to make you wonder why you should ever bother with any other synth, especially flaky soft synths or temperamental hardware analogues. Everything you could want is here: warmth, weight, power, presence, but also subtlety, delicacy, and expressiveness.

It jumps between styles with the greatest of ease, knocking out brash Kylie-pop blips, vast trance pads and leads, ambient drones and washes, worrying glitchy hisses, weird Boards Of Canada lines, and, except for anything that sounds much like an acoustic instrument, everything else besides. The supplied patches are excellent, and for the most part are immediately usable in a musical context, avoiding the superficiality of those 'wow' patches that some synths use to sound good during the two minute in-shop demo but are no good for anything else.

As I put the Snow through its paces I found it an almost constant source of inspiration, for both live playing and writing. You can't really say fairer than that. The Snow's synth architecture is exactly the same as that of the more expensive TI models, so all the additional sound-sets available from www.

It's basically a three-oscillator, two-filter, three-LFO and two-envelope arrangement, which sounds simple enough, but, partly thanks to a very flexible modulation matrix, offers phenomenal power, especially since the introduction of the version 2 firmware at the beginning of A Hypersaw oscillator can sound like as many as nine individual sawtooth oscillators, detuned if necessary, while the new grain modes resample pitch-shifted wavetables to derive completely new waveform spectra.

The formant modes, on the other hand, essentially produce filter-bank effects, with playback pitch independent of a fixed harmonic spectrum, again generated by the Virus's wavetables. Predictably, the filters are multi-mode, and include a Moog emulation with variable cutoff steepness. An associated saturation module provides various kinds of distortion at the voice level, and can also operate as an additional low-pass filter.

The filters are all you'd hope for, and can do smooth and silky as well as fat, with high resonance amounts capable of producing tweeter-roasting or room-shaking energy. Importantly, all the Snow's effects are completely independent, and are provided on a per-part basis. So it's perfectly possible though in practice polyphony-sapping to use four independent reverbs, and the more CPU-efficient delay, phaser, distortion, chorus and EQ are seriously good.

Should you want to treat audio from elsewhere in your studio with the Snow's filters and effects, there are the rear-panel audio inputs. A per-patch setting lets you choose whether this audio input will be permanently audible, or if it'll only be heard when you trigger the envelope generators by pressing a key. Input signals can be pressed into service for other tasks, too — they can either become a modulation source, thanks to an 'Input Follower' that tracks level; provide one of the feeds to the ring modulator; or be the modulator component in the vocoder.

The inputs' sensitivity is switchable in the Config menu, and you can even dial in a skewed frequency response so that a turntable can be connected without having to pass its output through an RIAA preamp first. Part of the TI OS 2. It's essentially a looping and beat-slicing tool and it only really makes sense for live use. Atomizer takes the signal appearing at the Snow's hardware inputs and analyses it for tempo and beat structure. It can then be manipulated in real time by playing notes on a MIDI controller, moving mod and pitch-bend wheels, and pressing front-panel buttons.

The effect is to temporarily loop, reverse or gate short, rhythmically anchored sections of the signal in a overtly glitchy, breakcore sort of way. It's fun, if somewhat limited in scope, and a bonus to have in addition to the usual synth functions. You can even run one Atomizer part alongside three normal synth parts on the Snow, and further treat the Atomizer sound with the usual part effects. Getting started with the system requires you to install the drivers, Virus Control plug-in and associated documentation on to your system, and Mac OS I ran into conflicting instructions about how to do this on my Macs and the result was initially a bit messy.

The Quickstart guide says to only attach the Snow via USB when instructed, but it turns out that for the Mac it should be attached before you run the installer, so that the unit's firmware can be checked and, if necessary, automatically updated. A re-install did the trick, but the initial confusion took the shine off my first steps with the TI experience.

The tabbed interface of Virus Control spreads the synth's parameters and settings over 10 editing pages, but it's very clearly laid out. Shown in these screenshots are pages for editing the oscillators, filters and effects. Happily, when you're up and running, TI is great. After instantiating the special Snow-specific Virus Control plug-in, the Snow's LCD reports that it's running in Sequencer mode, while the plug-in gives access to all the part settings and synth parameters, as well as an enhanced patch-management system.

It takes 10 tabbed pages of the roughly x pixel plug-in window to present all this info, but the resulting screen real-estate means that parameters can be presented in an attractive, graphically-oriented manner, as with most soft synths.

As you'd expect, tweaking a parameter on screen and perhaps recording that into your DAW as automation data results in the Snow instantly responding. What's nice, though, is that this works the other way round too — you can continue to work with the Snow's physical controls as if it were in Multi mode, selecting and editing patches in any part using the soft knobs, easy edit or the 'full monty' edit mode.

Then it's the plug-in that updates, and you've effectively got a highly specific control surface. There are a few things that can only be achieved with the Virus Control plug-in, though. One is searching for patches by name — there's a text field and associated search button on the Browser page for this. Another is graphical editing of the arpeggiator. And there's another really neat feature — Section Lock.

This allows you to basically freeze the parameters for one or more parts of the synth architecture as you switch patches. So if you had loaded up a slowly evolving pad sound and wanted to try that same basic 'shape' with different timbres you can lock just its envelope generators while you load up some other patches. This is done with just a few right-clicks of the mouse, and some section lock presets are even provided. Now, generally this is no worse than with any other soft synth, and can normally be reduced to unnoticeable levels by setting your DAW buffer size to or samples.

If you need a crisper response, there's a work-around built into the Virus: Direct mode. This can be engaged for one part at a time by clicking the 'Direct' button nestled in amongst the part's parameters in Virus Control. That part is then muted from the USB audio feed into the DAW and instead emerges from the Virus's hardware audio output pair, which you'll need to be monitoring through a mixer or zero-latency audio interface.

While any reliance on additional hardware seems a little inelegant in the light of TI's fundamental ethos, Direct mode does at least ensure near zero-latency recording, regardless of DAW buffer size. Virus OS 2. Playback of recorded parts is completely straightforward, and is sample accurate in the 'official' host DAWs. You're not obliged to send all four parts down the same USB-based output pair either — an additional stereo pair is always available, and you can choose to have up to three independent audio pairs feeding your DAW if you're willing to sacrifice the Snow's input channels.

These additional stereo USB channels allow you to route Virus parts individually into your DAW, and treat them with your favourite plug-ins. The TI2 can crank out up to 90 voices. Having this many voices will fatten up any sound that you decide to make with ease. A common trend in reviews I read was that there is no shortage of wavetables with the TI2. This is true because you get such a wide selection to choose from! Another commonly mentioned feature of the Virus was its warm filters. All of them have a nice smooth sound to them.

I also heard some reviewers talk about how there is a plethora of effects included. There are 25 distortions and saturators. For that reason, everyone found it easy to get going with the Virus TI2. If you run into any issues, there are plenty of tutorials and articles put out about the Virus TI.

This shows how much they care about their products and improving the user experience. It will for very well whether you plan to create leads, basses, pads, noise, or FX. The TI2 can make pretty much any type of sound imaginable without struggling. If you can only have one synthesizer in your studio, you will want an Access Virus TI2. Without a doubt, it has endless sonic possibilities.

Home Blog Contact. Written by Doug Beney on April 26, Here then, is a chance to modify effects parameters, frequency modulation amounts, envelope lengths… anything you like, really. As ever, once you've got used to them, lots can be achieved with the dials, but this is where Access has taken its gamble. If you want more hands-on control, you'll need to fork out for the Desktop TI; if you're happy having the sound engine and full software integration, the Snow's for you.

We think the provision of the three dials is possibly with live tweakers in mind - there are just about enough to ensure you can significantly modify sounds in real-time and little danger that you'll get lost searching for the right dial at the critical moment.

And as the current parameters are displayed on screen directly above the knob to which they're assigned, working in low-light conditions won't be a problem either.

It's clear that the Snow is aimed primarily at those who are excited at the prospect of being able to integrate the stunning Virus sound engine into their DAW setup and are willing to sacrifice some of the Desktop TI's hands-on immediacy. Access has worked hard to make sure that all the sound-shaping functions are available with a minimum of key-presses, but it also knows that nothing beats being able to reach out for a dedicated dial and give it a good tweak.

The Snow still isn't exactly cheap, but that's because the core Virus TI synth engine remains intact. The fact is that you can now add the Access sound to your setup for hundreds of pounds less than before, and that's got to be something worth celebrating.

MusicRadar is the number 1 website for music makers of all kinds, be they guitarists, drummers, keyboard players, djs or producers MusicRadar The No. Home Reviews. Our Verdict.

Pros Compact size but enormous sound. Cons Not as much hands-on control as its big brothers. Still fairly pricey. MusicRadar Verdict. Cons - Not as much hands-on control as its big brothers.

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