Access Virus TI Snow V2 Synthesizer

Say goodbye to your family and friends. You won't see them for a while. I haven't felt this way about a bit of kit since I got my first synth, (a MC-505 in 1998). Access has bought the Virus sound to people who would get divorced if they spent $4500 on a TI 2 keyboard.

The price drop comes at a cost, but nothing that should deter you. Polyphony is rated at ’50 voices per average use’, (but this varies greatly depending on patch complexity and FX) vs its bigger brothers' 100. The Snow is 4-part multitimbral, compared to 16 part, (which makes the polyphony count a non-issue).
Switching patches in mid-song is easy in ableton live, and 4 parts is usually more than enough for me at any one time, (bass, pad, arpeggio, lead)

The snow only has 5 knobs for parameter editing, but the ‘Soft-Knobs’ can be assigned to control 3 parameters at once, (actually up to 9 with a little routing trickery). The Virus TI software runs as a VSTi within your host, (too much to describe here!), and works a treat in Ableton Live.

[ I tried to use in FL Studio, and it is totally unusable. If you use FL Studio, you’ll encounter unsolvable problems with latency, no matter how much you tweak buffer sizes and delay compensation.]

The quality of sound is breath-taking, and the flexibility in patch creation is breath-taking. The total integration software makes life infinitely easier by allowing you to create and edit patches on your PC or Mac, rather than scrolling through billions of parameters on the unit itself.

I have my Snow hooked up to a Novation X-Station keyboard, which has an Access Virus control template for earlier models of the Virus. It works fine and controls all of the most important performance parameters, and this compensates for the lack of knobs on the Snow. If you don’t have a MIDI controller, all of the parameters are easily automated via the software within your DAW software.

This is one bit of kit where you’ll want to study the manuals and tutorials exhaustively. The possibilities of this bad boy are limitless once you understand how the mod-sources and parameters can be routed. You get the feeling that this was designed and built by people who care passionately about what they do, there are no short cuts, and it’s all quality. If that’s not enough, it comes with a snazzy little bag for gigging, and stickers!

I have no reservations in recommending this to anyone, (unless they insist on using FL studio.)

10/10