My latest "big" purchase was my Midi synthesizer called the Axiom 61 made by M-Audio ($250), it's a sweet keyboard that has full 2 handed playability. It's not one of those little 29 key "midi toys" (those belong in a nursery) and not an 88 key monster that won't fit in my space. A simple tap on the transpose buttons gives me the extra lower or higher octaves if I want them. There's also lots of extra buttons, pads and knobs that can be synced to the buttons, sliders and knobs onscreen for full hardware control of the software. This means if I twist a knob on the keyboard the sound generating software onscreen changes in real time to add more reverb, distortion, etc. whatever I "teach" the knob to control. Each sound can have a separate program saved in the keyboard so each sound can have the same knob do different functions, depending upon what program is loaded. Using this single keyboard, once all setup, in a live situation would be great.
MIDI is creating music on a computer, so the keyboard itself is "empty" all sounds are created by various software installed in a Toshiba Satellite laptop that I maxed out on RAM (Laptop $400 more Ram $35). This way instead of buying multiple synthesizers to get new sounds, you just buy more software, it's certainly far easier to buy and store a DVD of sound software than another 66+ key keyboard or two. Once in the old days I had 4 synths setup and nowhere to walk!
The only Virtual synthesizer software I've bought so far is the Komplete Synths box set by Native Instruments ($200). It contains Absynth 4, Massive, FM8 and Pro-53. The last two really suck, I am not big on "classic" synth lead sounds. I prefer the dark, ambient and ethereal weird sounds one can get out of an old Korg or Moog synth so Absynth is what I bought the box set for (the box was on sale for the same price as Absynth 4 all by itself) but Massive is pretty cool too even though Massive is more centered on the industrial, techno, house, trance side of things compared to Absynth which is perfect for filmscorish evolving atmospheres that I like to use.
Absynth 4 is an amazing sound creation device. Giving you some 3000 factory sounds for version 4 and all the sounds from version 3 as well, add onto that all the effects you could want to throw at them, the ability to save the altered sound as a new sound name and in a location of your choosing (your own sound directory). And the mother feature of them all the ability to create your own sounds in a number of ways. Using a mouse or pen tablet you can draw your new soundwaves onscreen for the program to translate into "sounds" (oscillation modules), sounds can be generated out of granular synthesis (dots onscreen), you can import .WAV samples and create sounds from those, Absynth can also be used as a stand alone sampler. Given enough time you could essentially create or destroy just about any sort of sound you want with this single piece of software.
Being kind of lazy I don't plan on creating all my own sounds, I want to buy the Virtual Vienna Orchestra software to have some quality symphonic instruments instead of using the synthesized "string ensemble", "woodwinds", "brass" or "violin" which pretty much always suck. I also wanna get Ethno which is a collection of ancient and ethnic instruments such as the Shofar, roman hunting horns, viking drums, african talking drums, gamelans, bag pipes, etc. I dig all that stuff.
But of course I'm still having trouble getting my recording software (Ableton Live 6) to recognize the Axiom and play nice together (the Ableton software even came with the Axiom for god's sake). It says it's sees it but it won't pick up midi info when I play the keys... So until I figure out this strange loop, I can only play with the synths in stand alone or "live" mode, no recording. I can't wait to finally start doing some recording with the amazing film score sounds I can get outta Absynth. My old dark ambient project from the early 1990s (Cernunnos' Woods) is easily put to shame in comparison to the realms of spectral atmosphere I can create with this!