Haha, surely he can afford to pay for VSTs. And Sylenth1 (a classic and still eminently usable soft synth) is reasonably priced and worth paying for. I have a

Haha, surely he can afford to pay for VSTs. And Sylenth1 (a classic and still eminently usable soft synth) is reasonably priced and worth paying for. I have a bit of sympathy though, since managing plugin licensing is a total pain. Licenses seem to break randomly, or after any OS security patch or DAW update/bug fix, and then your project no longer runs properly. Kind of the last thing you want if you are a practicing or performing musician. If I were him I'd consider using the pirate versions for reliability/usability but paying for new licenses yearly in order to support the plugin developers.