Have Modern VST Instruments Replaced Your Hardware Synths ?

[pdxindy]

I was just saying it matter of factly, of course its just a small sampling of musicians and in
no way indicative of anything. just something i have observed across a range of success levels in the music biz. i would love to be able to talk music software with my friend the multi-millionaire guitarist or the 40 year studio musician guy etc, but i cant.

*i kind of thought of "the funny thing is part" as a qualifier, but i guess not.

No need for a qualifier... this isn't a court of law even though sometimes people can get overly enthusiastic about policing others which might make it seem so.

There are millions of people who play instruments like pianos, guitars, flutes, violins, etc., etc., etc... who have no experience with software synthesis and never even think about it.

Of the few dozen musicians I know, most perform live (at least pre-Covid) and if you mentioned the names of the 5 most popular VST synthesizers they would likely have no idea what you were talking about.

[pekbro]

Its just a fact i wonder about. Even the guys at the one music store on Maui have no idea about software based music production. And yeah it doesn't say much for them, but thats life in the sticks. Of course this is Maui, everyone comes here to put in a show or owns a house here. The music industry is always here, even if they are mostly taking a break. Yesterday i was talking to the caretaker of Sammy Hagar's house, and probably 5 weeks ago, I was chatting with Jimmy Buffet, who is mostly a business man these days for example.

[vitocorleone123]

A: still no

[vurt]

A: still no

to driving or food? im lost

[vitocorleone123]

A: still no

to driving or food? im lost

Oh, sorry. I meant to the actual thread topic.

Didn’t mean throw you heheh

[zerocrossing]

I’m not sure if this means anything, but there was a time when for various reasons, I went 100% ITB. I was a bit apprehensive at first, but open to the possibilities. I found it was excellent. It totally replaced my hardware synths, but at the time, I had no analog synthesizers at all. I went along very happily for a while that way, but I did start hearing demos of hardware instruments that were exciting and something that I wasn’t quite getting from my plugins. I didn’t change my mind about my plugins. They’re still great and only getting better. I just added some hardware synths that I found inspired by. That’s it.

[zerocrossing]

I can’t confirm or deny that.

The point I was trying to make is that there are some people on this forum (well, every forum…) that speak with the authority of someone who’s got decades of Grammy winning albums under their belt, and when you listen to their music it’s poorly done and derivative. I’m joking around, of course, as my music isn’t amazing either, but I also don’t pretend to have all the answers to everything for everyone. In other words, if you’re going to tell me that x is definitively better than y, you’d better be making some great sounding tracks.

I don't think it's necessary to be a master chef to know when the food's been badly cooked. If you're claiming to be able to cook like one, that's different.

It’s not, but I see an awful lot of sh!tty cooks and long lines at McDonald’s. I hear really bad commercial preset demos coming from people who speak with authority while denying that there’s a possibility that hardware can be better than software synthesizers. I’m not even saying that there’s something noble or necessary about writing and producing great music. Everyone should just do what makes them happy, but I have to laugh when a bunch of novices declare themselves to be experts.

[jancivil]

well "can be better" is far from definitive, ie., pretty wide open. Better for what, is always my question.
A real minimoog is probably better for stage for a couple reasons, it's better for me to not have one and better to be a control freak about it and write automation and edit it til it's right. I def separate a live impetus with a constructed project. You don't go doing a live performance and cheat by editing, well not in classical music anyway (not sure pop is ever real anymore), but a huge part of what I do in the DAW is tell a great lie. Same difference exists between theatre and film.

[andrelafosse]

...a huge part of what I do in the DAW is tell a great lie. Same difference exists between theatre and film.

To me, unless we're dealing with a live, direct-to-2-track recording, then the entire paradigm of recorded music is a series of fabrications. Whether it's the space sounds sit in, or the spatial relationship between them, or the subtleties of details that go into making a "natural" tone sound the way it does on a recording.

That's not even get into passing off consecutive performances (i.e. overdubs) as simultaneous events, and everything beyond that point...

[jancivil]

it was far from immediate for me to embrace editing as a way of life. I thought of the whole thing as a tape recorder and mixer with a lot of goodies after the fact. So I had shit chops after being out of it a long time, and wasn't very happening as far as getting much of a contiguous performance down in one take, so I finally adapted. I've been ITB since I got in. Except for other contributions like voice or a sax solo that was way beyond what can be done even today with a sample library even if you're me.

[jancivil]

...a huge part of what I do in the DAW is tell a great lie. Same difference exists between theatre and film.

To me, unless we're dealing with a live, direct-to-2-track recording, then the entire paradigm of recorded music is a series of fabrications. Whether it's the space sounds sit in, or the spatial relationship between them, or the subtleties of details that go into making a "natural" tone sound the way it does on a recording.

That's not even get into passing off consecutive performances (i.e. overdubs) as simultaneous events, and everything beyond that point...

right you are!
well said

[pdxindy]

I’m not sure if this means anything, but there was a time when for various reasons, I went 100% ITB. I was a bit apprehensive at first, but open to the possibilities. I found it was excellent. It totally replaced my hardware synths, but at the time, I had no analog synthesizers at all. I went along very happily for a while that way, but I did start hearing demos of hardware instruments that were exciting and something that I wasn’t quite getting from my plugins. I didn’t change my mind about my plugins. They’re still great and only getting better. I just added some hardware synths that I found inspired by. That’s it.

My hardware synths are all analog, or analog/digital hybrid... well, except for the Elektron Digitone.

I've used dozens of software distortion algo's. On the sound character scale they are all clustered fairly close together. Then I do some parameter locking of the analog distortion on the Rytm and these gorgeous crunchy tones effortlessly flow out of it without a hint of digital harshness. No need for subtle tweaking to find a particular sweet spot, you just cannot make it sound bad. And basically it never repeats exactly, like any organic system.

I love my software instruments. I also love the analog hardware synths I have. They got something sonically that software doesn't. Doesn't mean I always want that something, but I don't want to be without it either.

[BONES]

Even the guys at the one music store on Maui have no idea about software based music production.

You live on Maui, you lucky bastard! You can have a Koko Brown whenever you feel like it. They've stopped bottling it so I can't get it here any more.

[BONES]

I found some things about the Analog RYTM to be not very intuitive, but a small investment in an iOS video series by MacProVideo got me up to speed in a few hours. If you can’t learn an Elektron instrument, you probably should find a different hobby. That said, I can see why people don’t prefer to use their gear. I still do all the sound design in their software editor (Overbridge 2).

Exactly. There is simply no reason to make the effort to learn the AK's sequencer, not a single tangible benefit for me or anyone else with a computer, I imagine.

They have a sound that is plain and simply not approximated in software.

Not in my experience and that's the problem. All the interest I found in my AK was in the way the presets were made, not in the way it sounds, which I now find to be quite anodyne. To even suggest it's "not approximated" is absurd on the face of it because no two synths are the same. Invader doesn't sound like Obsession and Thorn doesn't sound like DUNE but I could play you 1,000 sounds made randomly from one or the other and you wouldn't know which was which. Ditto for any decent softsynth and any decent hardware synth. e.g. I could do the same with Invader and Analog Keys - 1,000 sounds and you wouldn't know which was hardware and which was software. That's the whole point of synthesisers - they can sound like anything. You have to really go looking for the differences and mostly they are in areas that are quite unmusical or irrelevant.

People like to cite overdrive/distortion as a hardware advantage and, yes, the analogue overdrive in Analog Keys and Uno Pro probably have no equivalent in software but, at the same time, the analogue distortion in AK sounds nothing like the one in Uno Pro, either, and neither of them sound like the distortion in any of my VSTi, nor do they sound any better. They are just different. But even then, they are not so different that you couldn't use either in pretty much any situation.

That's what I realised over the weekend. I'd been desperately trying to find a few parts I could play with patches from the AK and I was particularly interested in showing off that distinctive analogue overdrive it has. But it didn't matter how much effort I put into it, I just couldn't get it to fill the void left by whichever softsynth I had turned off to make room for it. On it's own it sounds big and nasty but when you try to replace an instance of Union, with 12 voice unison per oscillator and it's good pre-filter distortion, AK just can't do it, even with 4 voice unison. Interestingly, Uno Pro does much better without unison or sub-oscillators. I think it's down to the drive in the AK killing off the bottom end a bit, which doesn't happen with the Uno Pro. That said, even where I tried to use AK in higher registers where that wouldn't matter, it still didn't sound as good as Ana 2 or Hexeract, which are two more softsynths with really good distortion/saturation effects. So as of last night, I've replaced Analog Keys in my live rig with KeyStep. I'll still use Uno and Uno Pro in a few songs each but everything else will come from software. At the end of the day, it's the only way to do our songs justice.

If you're interested, I can record a bit of each and you can hear what I mean for yourselves. It might take me a couple of days, though.

My point was made to your point about not having presets as being a defect, and I’m saying that there are a lot of people who like it because it doesn’t have presets.

I imagine they would be people who don't write and perform actual songs. Anything more complicated than a Waldorf Rocket is a liability on stage where, at the very least, you need instant recall of sounds for your next song and sometimes it's handy to be able to switch presets between verse and chorus or chorus and middle-8, too.

BUT, I can give you some lame examples of the wonder beneath it, my Polivoks, the most aggressive beast I have owned.

I think we have very different ideas of aggressive but you have reminded me that I really need to plug my Trueno back in and see what I can do wit hit. It's filter is supposed t be very Polivoks-like and it does do some nasty things. But, again, I lost interest in it because, as an analogue monosynth, it just couldn't cut it against softsynths with massive unison.

Yes, I know, but its close enough now for people to decide if they want to pay extra for something like the Model D, which is a real piece of metal and silicon hardware in the real material world, or pay for a licence for thousands of lines of intangible computer code. In the past the cost difference was way beyond justification for the average person, but not any longer.

Yeah but why go for something as lame and limited as that when, for similar money, you could have something like a Uno Synth? The only use I could think of for a Model D would be as a door stop.

I love my software instruments. I also love the analog hardware synths I have.

Me, too.

They got something sonically that software doesn't.

No they don't. You only perceive that because of your previous statement. It's a distortion of reality. Maybe it's a nice analogue distortion and not a harsh digital one but it's a distortion nonetheless.

[zerocrossing]

...a huge part of what I do in the DAW is tell a great lie. Same difference exists between theatre and film.

To me, unless we're dealing with a live, direct-to-2-track recording, then the entire paradigm of recorded music is a series of fabrications. Whether it's the space sounds sit in, or the spatial relationship between them, or the subtleties of details that go into making a "natural" tone sound the way it does on a recording.

That's not even get into passing off consecutive performances (i.e. overdubs) as simultaneous events, and everything beyond that point...

All art is fabrication and lie, though it can be coupled with craft that requires a high degree of physical dexterity. Once I decided to do a progressive rock track that basically involved playing that I’m not skilled enough to do pull off. The end result sounded great to me, but I never did it again. It just didn’t feel fun to me. I’d rather spend a day noodling around with my mediocre playing than crafting a perfect track in my DAW, though I’ve done it for clients.