First of all, I'm Danish, so my way of speaking might seem a little odd to you but I hope I make myself understandable. I also hope this is the right forum and this is a relevant discussion to you also.
Being a musician, composer and producer I praise the computer every day. I remember when studios where the only place to get a decent sound of my recordings and it wouldn't be to hard to recognize a home made mix frokmk a pre-mix out of a demo-studio. We've got everything now: "Native" effects like reverb, delay, phazers and compressors, and more exotic ones like vocoders and pitch-correcting tools (what an amazing thing when you think about it). You won't need a real synthesizer to get those cool pads or clean leads and with "Virtual Guitarist" (from Steinberg with wizoo's samples) you don't even a real guitar! When I look at Vocaloid the future seems even more fantastic than I ever imagined.
All of these things won't work without a sequencer with VST/DX/AU/RTAS-capabilities. The work that went into developing these programs count endless hours and a lot of time invested in just getting ideas on how to improve the sequencer to make it even more complex. From my point of view choosing a sequencer is all about how you like to work and how much you like the interface and the way it behaves.
And that's where my thoughts has been the past years. I'm forced to work with a rather complex program which demands a heavyly equipped computer to work smooth and make my (and others) ideas come through. My way of working is dictated by the software and to be honest I haven't found the "major" sequencers very natural to work with. First of all they have all kinds of features I will never need (somebody else will probably, but not me), second I wouldn't say that anyone of them could come close to what you'd find in an analogue studio when it comes to set up things and wire them together, and third (and most important) I can't trust any of them. Yes, ProTools on a Mac is VERY stable, but I wouldn't say "un-breakable". Of course some of the stability depends on the effects used and how you use them. To be honest I sometimes use more time on working out the program so it will run at its best than doing music.
To be fair I would like to mention a sequencer that I recently came to think as a step in the right direction: Tracktion (http://www.kvr-vst.com/get/358.html). It works closer to "real life" than any of the others, and the way it handles effetcs seems logical to me they way it should be. The way it presents things to me seems very logical and sometimes even inspirering. But it's (like the others) a matter of compromizing, because it still lacks some features. It's for sure one of the programs I'll have a close look on form now on. I hope it will be more modular in the way it builds up features so that I could go out and buy a sequencer that only has the things I need and nothing else.
What do YOU think? Do you feel the same way? And what should we do about it? How can we change things? Is it even possible to change things as they are now? Or am I just an old grumpy man that will find no joy in anything no matter what?
