ummm if you just want choir/stringish sounds you would best be off with a sample cd (like spectrasonics symphony of voices) and a sampler. I dont really think the choirs or acoustic string sounds in atmosphere are all that good and theres not many of them anyway. Its got a fecking awesome number of multisampled classic analogue poly sounds though if thats your cup of tea.

On absynth. I firmly believe that absynth is probably one of the easiest softsynths to program. Once you figure out how its laid out. Theres a reason for the layout and its all to do with workflow and allowing you to go back to any previous point in the design of a sound and re edit it without having to worry about gimping your patch by overtwiddling.

The presets are not a fair reflection of what absynth can do. Alot of the presets are completely off the walls I agree, but I assume that is just to show newcomers the kind of complexity and movement you can put into a sound. I consider most of the presets to be unusable for anything other than ambience or atmospherics.

You can however use absynth just like any virtual analogue and just run with saws and squares (if thats what you want, although you would be wasting a great deal of the synth's power if this is all you use it for). You still have a 3 oscillator synth with the god damn most controllable envelopes of any softsynth, *period* as well as muliple filters and effects processor.

There are 50 bajillion virtual analogue synths (both software and hardware) that can make stock, generic trance sounds zodiac9. Absynth can make those too if you really want them (just dont start from any preset because nearly all of them use sampled waveforms). But man, you can do so much more with absynth than your average 2 oscillator, double saw wave sound + detune + pan spread + unison + low pass resonant filter sweep.

And yea you can synthesize choirs on it. Semi convincing ones if you can pick the right sampled waves and use all the filters. But its a bit time consuming and the filter settings have to be very specific in order to get the vowel sounds right.

...and don't forget Absynth has 'unison' mode on each of it's Oscilators too
which makes each OSC into 8 detunable ones for huge sounds.

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Happy music making!

OK, I believe you guys about Absynth. I just suck at creating my own sounds. Some of us just weren't meant to program synths. Besides, even if I could program my own sounds, I'd rather spend that time composing and producing. I just like VSTs that have a lot of good soundsets that I can tweak. I suppose there are some good free, and for purchase soundsets for Absynth. I won't write it off just yet. I wish there was at least one usable preset, they all are so weird. Seems like a marketing mistake to me, or maybe they are trying to sell Absynth to hardcore sound programmers. Most of us just want to drop a VSTi in the sequencer, and start writing.