Hmmm, I've been so busy trying out VSTi plugins these last few months that I seem to have forgotten one important factor...

I actually have hardware synths! lol

Methinks a trip to the electronics shop tommorrow for some brand new leads with gold-plated jack plugs!!! My Korg X5DR still sounds quite good!

I'm also thinking of connecting my Amiga 1200 to Cubase via a MIDI cable. I love Cubase, but the idea of controlling the beast with Music-X has been preying on my mind these last few days. Especially since I've written quite a few Arexx routines which affect MIDI data on my Amiga...

By the way, I found a nice site for the older members of K-V-R who remember the original SoundTracker by Karsten Obarski. Although the text is in German, it is quite easy to navigate.

SoundTracker Tribute Page

This site contains some of the first modules written by demo groups such as Red Sector & those classic SLL tracker mods. You will, however, require DeliPlayer or similar software to be able to hear them on yer PC. Hmmm, a VSTi ProTracker.....

RegPheonix

FOR SALE
========
JV1080 with 4 cards
KORG 05/RW
EMU E4k keyboard sampler 32mb
Roland D-110
Assorted compressors. effects.
Alesis mixer

No reasonable offer refused

This thread reminded me of a synth I have in a corner of my hobby room. Under a thick dust cover I found a completely forgotten Waldorf Q. The last weeks I was playing around with Pentagon I sometimes I thought: What's that ugly, yellow thing over there?

I feel a bit ashamed

Pepe

Yah.

I turned on the EMU Xtreme lead that I bought last year for the first time in about eight months.

It's funny. IMHO Once you get used to the control that you have from the Vsti's, the harware just seems clumsy. (...and the whole "being-able-to-run-through-vst-effects-in-real-time-and-not-have-to-re cord-the-output" thingy is pretty powerful, also....

....but, man, that XL-1 looks cool in my rack...

-Sleek

thing that gets me about hardware things (besides the obvious cableing, signal routing, useless fiddling) is the limited # of onboard patch storage. i think i own a synth or whatever like a month or two before i fill it's banks up. from then on it sucks because i have to prioritize where i save what patches etc that i create, unless i want to dump the whole bank, essentially saying "ok so im not going to use these sounds i've got now, just put them away on disk(or somthing). sure there are removable storage cards, but not every synth has them. In these days of dirt-cheap data backup you'd think the high-end synth manufacturers could make hardware units with say 5,000 patch locations and 1,000 multisets, for the money i mean sheeze.

in a way hardware often offers so much editing capability that you just sit there programming it. yet that can happen with vsti's too. I think that if you have dicipline in how you work that you can utilize the "advanced" capabilites of some hardware units however.. Sometimes hardware is a more visceral experience to work with, seeing it's only usually really a software os tied to .. um.. hardware.
I think the real thing though is that a lot of hardware is just kinda a luxery if you can have cheap (compared to hardware) synths that sound just as good in some cases, and can be fully automated within, and sample-accurate timed to, the internal clock of your sequencer. now that's efficient!

(if you think of it compared to hardware, where instant recall will basically *never* exist, at least as the midi spec exists now it dosent. there's always some flukes it seems to hang up your creative process.. now that can happen with sequencer-integrated software synths, but well, it's usually just something with the software, and gets fixed!)

geez i blab a lot! *looks under dust-covers for petrified synthesizer* hehe once this was a tree! now it's just a rock!.. or maybe not that bad but... eer, ill admit i still long for some hardware, just because it's good to use things you've not used, because everything holds its own capabilites to some extent (unless it's just stuff in that "DJ gear" category, huh? But with hardware the price is somewhat impractical in cases (can you say supernovaIIkb?.. ok so it's a multi-synth but.. ) unless you have a high loose cash ratio ) ok im really shutting up now haha

[ 17 September 2001: Message edited by: exponent ]

For the S+S synths (and if you can spare the time ) why not try multisampling all of the ROM waves on the hardware? Then you could just stick them into a decent vst sampler and get pretty much the same sounds, but with the flexibility (and let's face it, abject sexiness) of a software environment .