Beginners advice on moving away from VST's

[danbroad]

HW is truly plug & play.. And total recall.. and perfect timing.. and easy automation.

Software is hours and hours of installing and debugging and crashing.. And problems getting old projects to load.
Ask anyone who's installed Komplete.. or bought a new HD.. or used bridging.. or updated their OS for security reasons.. or has a Mac..

I've had the opposite experience. Granted, I stopped being hardware-centric in the early 90s.

I do not miss dealing with bad cables and bad jacks, arrays of power strips and boxes of batteries, controllers that fail partially or completely, terrible tiny displays, limited instances and polyphony, needing more cables and mixer channels to do more stuff, and trying to find space to put everything.

Software = far more convenient and cost-effective than hardware, by far. "Hours of debugging and crashing" rarely happens. The couple of hours every couple of years or so to install a new Komplete version takes practically zero effort.

I used hardware for ~5 years and software for about three times that, and I've had a lot less trouble with software and can do far more with it, faster and cheaper.

Yeah, that first sentence is total bollocks compared to software. You can level many criticisms or debates about sound, tactility, general analog-ness of software etc etc etc but to suggest hardware beats it for total recall, perfect timing (with anything other than other hardware) and easy automation is exactly the opposite experience of most of us. Delay compensation and sysex strings are the stuff of nightmares, compared to the save/open commands in a DAW!

Disclosure; hardware fan, owner and user here!

[rodan]

Somebody in this thread probably said this already, but I'd be wary of moving to hardware if your goal is to avoid problems.

Personally I found that hardware is much more fun and intuitive to use than a soft synth, but I spend much more time with maintenance and other issues.

I'm constantly trying to find the perfect balance so that my hardware midi notes trigger in time with my computer software.

Notes will freeze occasionally and i have to reset the synth (often losing my work). Patches can be a pain if your DAW doesn't offer some sort of patch management.

If your synth uses sysex or nrpn make sure that your DAW supports those as well or you will have trouble.

You'll have cables malfunction, knobs break, you'll have to find space for the hardware, you'll have less powerful options for synth editing, you'll spend lots of money on good midi interfaces and sound cards, etc.

They're really time consuming to maintain and use. So if you're going for less problems I would just work on fixing my computer. Maybe try bitwig as it doesn't crash when a plug crashes, but unless you are going towards hardware for hands on control I wouldn't recommend it.