U-he repro vs phase plant

[Ploki]

'Uber' probably feeds the confusion as the English use of the word is generally meaning 'the best' (a superlative) rather than 'complex and flexible' which is I think what some people are referring to (including me). The 'Swizz Army Knife' analogy does imply 'lots of pretty basic tools', 'jack of all trades' which isn't necessarily true, particularly with synths Like Zebra (and I would also argue Phase Plant)

I think he was probably referring to another more historic meaning of the word Über and his reluctance to use it.
And not the ride-sharing platform

I like how this thread boiled down to purely semantic masturbation tho

Pretty outdated concept compared to the many features and synthesis forms Zebra, Synthmaster and Phaseplant are embracing to qualify for the Workhorse title.

Again, I see it completely differently. The synths you name are far too complicated for me to consider as "workhorse" synths. My workhorse synths are the really simple ones I can get sounds from very quickly. Synths like JP6K and Union come to mind when I hear "workhorse" because you will find them in pretty much every song I do, often on more than one part. I only get the big boys out, even Thorn, when I can't get what I want from one of the workhorses.

I think both of you are right here.
Workhorse means simply something you use constantly and can get done shit quickly with it.
That means it needs certain amount of flexibility - but not too much, to hinder workflow, it needs to be absolutely stable, it needs to be light on resources and robust.
It's also much more personal because flexibility and how much it hinders your personal worfklow depends on how your mind is wired and how much you're quick with certain workflows.

I mean, if you're an electrician, a hammer won't be your workhorse tool.

[SLiC]

This made me laugh, a quote from the new Pigments 3 leak (https://www.musicinstrumentnews.co.uk/2 ... igments-3/)

''Pigments 3 sets the new softsynth standard; a producer’s playground, a composer’s workhorse''

[jcolle]

Never use phase plant, but if you produce nostalgic song repro will work so well. I love it sound!

[Hyperwave00]

Never use phase plant, but if you produce nostalgic song repro will work so well. I love it sound!

+1

[Hanz Meyzer]

Hm, both, Pigments and also Phase Plant use a ton of cpu, unclear to me why that is. It does not seem to be caused by the sound quality Would prefer then any U-He synth or MSoundFactory.

[BONES]

Phase Plant certainly can use a lot of CPU but if all you add is one oscillator, it hardly uses any at all. That's what's great about it - it only uses as much CPU as you need to get the job done. As for u-He synths, they're OK but I rarely find any use for them. I don't really know why but, even when I start out with Hive or one of the RePros, I usually end up using something else.

Though I was thinking of the one put forward somewhere a workshorse is like a swizz army knife that you do not need to replace for exactly that reason.

To me that is a jack of all trades. Like an adjustable wrench, as opposed to a set of open-end spanners. It's a tool I'll use if all else fails, never my first choice. The adjustable wrench is too big, too cumbersome so I reach for something more nimble most of the time. And why go through the process of adjusting it to fit the bolt head when I can see it's a 12mm bolt and go straight to my 12mm open-ender? Even a swiss army knife is a compromise. It's something you carry in your pocket because it's easier than carrying around a toolkit, not because it's the best way to cut down a tree or open a can of beans or trim your toenails or scale a fish.

We are not pros. No deadlines that require fast solutions.

Time is definitely a factor in my life. We already have a reputation for being slack when it comes to releases and that's something I would really like to fix. To that end we've set ourselves the goal of releasing an album every two years until I turn 70. So that's one next year, then 2024, 2026 and 2028, as opposed to 2003, 2005, 2009, 2016 and 2020. Hopefully I'll be retired at some point, which will give me a lot more time but, for now, I don't have the time or the energy to be dealing with complex synths or synths with hundreds of presets, or any of that stuff the market seems to demand of developers, unless I really need to. Mostly that stuff is a distraction more than anything.

We can allow ourselves to be irrational and be inspired from a nice GUI, workflow or whatever only. A lot of the proces is intuitive, we grap a synth from the collection and see if we can get it where we want. We usually do, because we know them well enough, but we are ready to replace them, if they fail.

Absolutely, that's a big part of my process - try out half-a-dozen different synths and see which works best. And it doesn't stop for me when the album is finished - a lot of the songs on last year's opus will have completely different instrumentation when we finally get to play them live.

Focused does not necessarily means "simple" if what you focus ain't that. However, Repro 5 is an emulation and focused as such,

That was certainly the developer's focus but it doesn't have to be ours. An electric piano is focused, a 2 osc polysynth like RePro 5 can do anything. I'd imagine more than half the presets that ship with Zebra are things you could do equally well in RePro 5 so it's just a matter of degree. To think of it in such black and white terms is really limiting yourself, don't you think?

Apparantly thia is the most shared view around too, so it can even be communicated and understood.

Flat Earth theory is also ridiculously popular these days, that doesn't make it right or helpful.

these are just tools of musicmaking. lets compare the music the user made with them!

Yeah, fat chance.

I even had a flirtation with trying to make money from music (I owned a small studio) but it never made a profit and I very quickly realised I didn't like 'having' to do music full time (hell is other people, especially when they are 'the talent'!!)

Yeah, I always realised that what I do could never be commercially viable and having had the opportunity to gig with most of the big names in our genre has just reinforced that for me. Bands like KMFDM have achieved more than most in our genre but they have to tour constantly and release albums very regularly just to keep going. They'll never own a nice car like mine, they are basically slaves to a decision they made 30 years ago. I mostly feel a bit sorry for them because most of them have nothing to fall back on, whereas I've had three different careers outside music.

I am 55 now- wife

Just a boy!

[zerocrossing]

there’s no mouse that will allow you to make a change like increasing filter cutoff while decreasing resonance at the same time,

Macro knobs. Grab it with your mouse and as set up in the image it increases Cutoff while decreasing Resonance. Adjust to taste.

Any synth with an X-Y Pad will do the same thing. Grab the Puck with your mouse........


Vital Matrix.png

Right, but that’s always going to be two locked parameter shifts, which isn’t what one might want.

[TribeOfHǫfuð]

@Bones, man. I love to hear about how you work, but you do not have to make up objections to my sayings for that purpose. Apart from different preferences in semantics, I can hardly imagine the two of us being so different when it comes to practise. At the end of the day, I am sure your terms and procedures work best for your stuff. However, being in from the prime 80s myself, I am pretty sure my choices work best for me. I have never let anyone tell me how to do anything, and that is why I have a well-paid job, friends of my choice, and a pile of gear that I really cannot regret buying because it was all related to practical needs and options from the beginning. I have actually only had a few gear regrets in my life. Being a poor student in the 90s, you better had to make the right choice. Refund policies were not like today. As you have said elsewhere, your choices are not at least practical as a touring musician, e.g. using software for logistic reasons. I am much like that myself, pragmatics rules, concrete needs and not a lot of hype, hysteria, myths, nor semantic nitpicking. I do not make music with words but musical tools.

Cheers, mate.

[Peraqsha]

so what is the point of this comment ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

You're right, there was no need for it. Apologies.

[zerocrossing]

Is this thing still on?

[BONES]

Being a poor student in the 90s, you better had to make the right choice. Refund policies were not like today.

The good thing about those days, though, was that you could develop a relationship with your local music shop. Mine used to let me take things home for a week to try them out in my set-up. Big things, like a Korg Trinity (which I bought). They even let me take home Cubase and try it out, in the days when it came on a CD. (For the record, I hated it. I returned it after a few weeks and went back to Fruityloops.) There are no local music shops any more, at least not in my town (of 5 million people) so we need that consumer protection.

[TribeOfHǫfuð]

Yup. Fortunately my fav shop during the 90s showed understanding too. In principle, you could not return an item once bought, however, they knew that if I came the day after with no smile on my face, we could all be happy by letting me find something else. They knew I payed up front with savings and did not cheat them with loans and installment payment. Local stores are certainly missing all over here too. The last big shop we had went bancrupt some years ago, so now we either have to order from Germany or Britain.

[pdxindy]

there’s no mouse that will allow you to make a change like increasing filter cutoff while decreasing resonance at the same time,

Macro knobs. Grab it with your mouse and as set up in the image it increases Cutoff while decreasing Resonance. Adjust to taste.

Any synth with an X-Y Pad will do the same thing. Grab the Puck with your mouse........


Vital Matrix.png

Right, but that’s always going to be two locked parameter shifts, which isn’t what one might want.

Yeah... the relationship is fixed... you cannot decide on the fly which two parameters or switch on the fly to a third parameter or adjust the relationship between the two.

[Teksonik]

there’s no mouse that will allow you to make a change like increasing filter cutoff while decreasing resonance at the same time,

Macro knobs. Grab it with your mouse and as set up in the image it increases Cutoff while decreasing Resonance. Adjust to taste.
Any synth with an X-Y Pad will do the same thing. Grab the Puck with your mouse........
Vital Matrix.png

Right, but that’s always going to be two locked parameter shifts, which isn’t what one might want.

We've already moved on from this subject but again I was responding to "there’s no mouse that will allow you to make a change like increasing filter cutoff while decreasing resonance at the same time".

I simply pointed out that statement as written is incorrect and gave examples. You can move the goal posts if you like but that doesn't change my response.

Let's just allow this dedicated hardware synth vs computer hardware synth debate die please.

[AnalogGuy1]

No midi controller can match the hands on immediacy of dedicated hardware controls.

Of course it can - it's the exact same f**king thing - - you turn the knob and the value of the parameter changes. If it didn't, you couldn't use it at all. What the hell is wrong with your brain that you can't make that work?

See, here we are back to the same place you always come to. You cannot accept that different people have different experiences/priorities than you and so anyone that doesn't think like you there must be something wrong with them... and then you get aggressive and personal about it. Same reason you have been suspended from KVR twice recently.

I respect the heck out of pdxindy, and I have no idea why BONES launched an ad hominem attack. However, I agree with BONES on the rational portion of his statement: whether a knob is forced to be permanently dedicated to a particular function, or has been temporarily mapped to a function, it's just as immediate to use (within the tolerances of human perception). What's different is that it might take a person a moment to remap his/her brain to understand that Knob A does Effect B after a new patch is loaded. My guess is that this second part is what pdxindy was referring to. That might be a bigger problem for people who are creatively playing with synth sounds (perhaps pdxindy's use-case) than for people who are going through a setlist and have hardwired in their brain that if playing the Cars "Moving in Stereo" that the big knob now controls the morph of the sawtooth to strings (which is more my use-case, and perhaps that of BONES).