Probably my favorite from that guy !

Obviously Valhalla stuff. With the new Valhalla Plate, I don't even think about it, now, I'm pretty sure one of the Valhallas will do the job. I Also reach for Space Designer from time to time (for Logic users).

Just bought myself a Zoom H5 today. It's not the cheapest but I believe the value for money will be worth it. Looking forward to try it out ! Thee first thing I'm gonna do with it is to turn my mother's kitchen upside down 

Wow, happy to see I've managed to gather some SP fans around here (Though it doesn't really surprise me) ! Those guys are such a gift to the musical landscape !

Also so excited for Family Dinner 2, have you seen the trailer?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ocQyKAj_H4

Yeah, I've seen it and I'm quite excited for it, but it's gonna be hard for them to level up after Sylva with the Metropole Orkest, although these guys have never failed to impress me so far !

I love snarky puppy. Cory Henry's solo in Lingus is easily the greatest improv keyboard solo I have ever heard. I wish I was there for the recordings, they look so fun.

Oh man, that solo used to bring tears to my eyes more than once.

Quik Quak Pitchwheel is pretty good given it's fair price (50£)
http://www.quikquak.com/Prod_Pitchwheel.html
And you can shift the formants of the sound individually if you want to.

I've been finding the Logic's built in Vocal Transformer pretty good on monophonic material. It's actually one the few Logic's stock plug-ins I use quite regularly.

You'll make your life harder trying to make all your drum sounds by synthesizing them from scratch, but nothing is preventing you from layering different drum sounds combined with a bit of synthesis for certain frequency areas of your sound. Using well manipulated and/or layered samples to create one final drum sample will certainly not make your final sound less original or unique in the end, if that's what's your worried about.
If you want to use synthesis for learning purposes, fair enough, it's cool and great fun (though it can be quite frustrating when you find yourself failing at achieving the result you wanted) but I think it's important to realize where it's limit are, in terms where it can or can't (easily) help you achieve your final result (Hope this sentence is understandable). But if I could only work with synthesis for drum sounds, i'd go with FM Synthesis as it's much more flexible in terms of timbre than what a basic subtractive synthesizer could give you. Plus FM is much more convenient for bringing some inharmonic frequencies into your sound, which is often required for synthesizing drum sounds, but it's also more complex than other types of synthesis.

I'll leave that here. Maybe it will help you understanding the concept of FM synthesis for drums. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T5lgDDBdQyk

Also, good EQing and and bit of saturation/distortion in post processing could make quite a big difference in the final sound. 

Quote from: Ocular on January 07, 2016, 03:16:04 am

Paulstretch and Valhalla Shimmer are my go-to methods for making cool ambient pads!

What does Paulstretch do? Can you elaborate on that? I've never heard of that synth before :0

Not really a synth, but more of an extreme time stretcher. You could basically insert a 10 seconds audio file and stretch it into something like 10 minutes or so. You can imagine that it can make some pretty dope ambient/pad texture depending on the kind of audio material you give it to eat. And it's free (Donationware actually) for Windows, Linux & OSX !

Otherwise, I find that granular processing (which is pretty much similar to time stretching anyway...) can lead to very cool pad sounds with pretty much everything. Just a matter of trying different things out and finding what you like and where to use it. Reverb is another thing that can turn pretty  much anything into an instant pad.

Scarbee Mark-I From Native Instruments is my Go-To. And it's pretty cheap too, 69 € if you use it with the free Kontakt Player.

Or watch this video and judge by yourself  : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4DBWhPmogDg