Bought this beauty just before New Year, and now rabidly stack new patches for it.

While it can read (with limitations) patches and soundbanks from Access Virus TI, it goes way further: aside from VA oscillators there are Multisaw, Wavetable, Grain and Formant oscillators, and you are not limited to Virus’ hardwired selection of waveforms, as it is capable of reading the custom ones. I’ve made some already, but not too many yet.

The waveforms are expected to be: mono, 16-bit, 2048 samples long (single-cycle).

Vital synthesizer is the perfect tool to generate a custom-shape waveform. It can be exported then to .wav (apparently as a wavetable).

Then enters Audacity which is used to cut, resize and export the single-cycle waveform. The latter is ready for Viper then: it only takes to save it to the right folder.

What is totally amazing, though, is that these custom waveforms can be used for LFOs as well, and LFOs, in turn, can work in the Envelope mode. Handy, given that by default there are only four Envelopes offered.

Wiring a full patch for Viper is relatively time-consuming. It’s not Massive or Surge XT, where you can drag-n-drop modulations. Quite unfortunately. Still it’s rather a nuissance than a game-stopper.

The only probable bug I’ve run in so far is that copying ‘n pasting presets doesn’t seem to work. There is a workaround (via saving individual presets then loading them up to the custom bank), but methink this is not the right behaviour.

Factory presets are heavy on Trance-like stuff (which I’m no big fan of), but Viper’s capabilities are vast, so it’s definitely not a one-trick pony. My patches will be more ambient/industrial inclined. Well, as freakin’ usual.

In fact I’ve already used Viper in a track of mine, and plan to do more.

Thank you, mr. Szabo!

P.s. As of limitations, well, it is not shipped with all waveforms provided by Access in their Virus synths, hence not every patch from TI can be actually replanted to Viper.

However, it is entirely possible these waveforms can be founds online somewhere… or reproduced from this chart.

Anyway, unless you’re clamouring for ‘that very sound’, making custom waveforms is more fun, no?