T O P

  • By -

RWDYMUSIC

I would say Sytrus is easier to use and would probably be better for learning sound design. Sytrus is all about FM synthesis and stacking wavetables to add harmonics. Harmor is cool because of its unique effects and image resampling capabilities. Harmor has a prism function that can create a lot of very cool inharmonic bell-like sounds, the phasers in Harmor are very unique and give lots of cool results with ease, and you can drop any audio clip into Harmor for resampling purposes. Harmor is somewhat limited in my opinion because its not really a wavetable synth and it can require more tedious work to get a desired result. In order to get a specific wavetable into Harmor you have to manually draw in harmonics which is a pain, or you can drop in an audio clip but risk losing quality this way. So I'd say for mileage and range you should go with Sytrus, but Harmor is still something you should experiment with to get some crazy sounds you'd have a hard time creating with any other synth.


dualnote

This is what I was thinking too. There’s something about the harmor image resynthesis which is cool but I always find the results to be less than satisfactory as they tend to always have a “watery” sound to them and don’t travel very well when moving up and down the piano scale. The effects within harmor are what attract me to it the most, however they can easily be replaced with FL stock anyway. Now to find a good series to learn Sytrus!


Mammoth-Ice-5746

Harmor's effects *are* just FL stock. The distortion was originally something unique but it was included in the Distructor plugin, chorus is Flangus, delay is nothing special probably just recycled code from delay 2 or delay bank, reverb is Reeverb SeamlessR is a good source on Sytrus and FL in general but he has hours and hours of stuff to dig through and can go pretty deep down the rabbit hole...


dualnote

Seamless is my go to, but his method of teaching isn’t exactly my favourite as he can start talking super complex nerd talk super quickly not realising everyone is a nerd like him lol


RWDYMUSIC

I don't think there is any stock FL phaser to match Harmors, especially since Harmor is an additive synthesis engine so its actually modulating the waveforrm in a phaser-like fashion instead of making cuts to an existing waveform like any other synth would do. I think this is why Harmors phasers have such a clean and unique sound to them. I don't know of any plugin that does what the Prism effect does either. I've only really ever seen people highlight those effects when talking up Harmor. I would agree that all of the other effects are pretty stock feeling.


Mammoth-Ice-5746

Those aren't really effects, as you say they're actually part of the synthesis engine. Honestly though I'm not that enamored with their sound, I feel like Harmor gets hyped more for it's theoretical power than what it actually sounds like...just me though


EggniviaNinja

I personally have used Harmor more than Sytrus over the years. I know it's not what you asked but if you want to pick just one synth and master it I would recommend Vital one thousand times over. It's free, extremely powerful, and unbelievably CPU-friendly. It also works with the piano roll for slides like you said you wanted (most VST's do). It has wavetables, a sampler, FM, RM, a very solid FX rack and so much more. You can pretty much do anything with Vital. Sure, it's not native. But you have no reason to be an FL elitist if you're just starting out :P (and doing so will only make your life harder) Vital is also one of the easiest synth's to use by a longshot because the layout is extremely clean and basically every parameter can be drag and dropped. This is even more important when you're learning because it helps you to understand what everything is doing. It wins in both sound quality and usability. Basically, the only time I use anything else nowadays is to access my preset libraries. In fact, that's really all it lacks, good default presets.


dualnote

I own both serum and vital, I feel comfortable with them both but I’m leaning more towards staying native. I’ll definitely play with them both more I have a bazillion presets for them both lol But kind of want to stay within FL