What is analog sound? Examples plz

[BertKoor]

fyi, the reason analog saw waves sound kinda special is because they are not exactly the same as mathematically pure saw waves but rather a rough approximation. Getting them mathematically correct is relatively easy to do digitally.

[j wazza]

fyi, the reason analog saw waves sound kinda special is because they are not exactly the same as mathematically pure saw waves but rather a rough approximation. Getting them mathematically correct is relatively easy to do digitally.

exactly, similarly to how lots of instruments make sounds that are close to saw waves (at least in terms of the harmonics but not the waveform) but they arent perfect saw waves and these imperfections can give sounds some lushness. of course there are ways to get imperfections in digital synths too with some work, but imperfections are natural to analog and real instruments, with a good virtual analog or physical model someone has already done the work of emulating that to give the vst those imperfections

digital has lots of benefits too, its not just mathematical saw waves, digital gives you more control, you can make any spectrum or wavetable you want, physical modelling can make new instruments that havent been heard before but still sound like they could be an instrument, and its much cheaper, takes up less space, you can save and load presets and it stays perfectly in tune, this is some of what bones was getting at but he saw it as disagreeing with what i said when its not, digital, analog and virtual analog are all great with their own positives and negatives

[zerocrossing]

analog can sound very different from other analog, warm or cold etc, but it all has certain qualities compared to digital like more depth, fullness, thickness, richness and more texture and imperfections

What a load of absolute bollocks. I can get far more of all those things from a softsynth than you can from any analogue hardware. As I've said dozens of times, I can stack 384 saw waves in ArcSyn for a depth, a fullness, a richness, a thickness and texture that will shame any analogue synth.

these qualities are a result of the sound being in a physical medium, like air in a room or electricity in a synth, tape or vinyl etc, rather than code

This is also completely ridiculous. Both use electricity, both make the air vibrate, via speakers, so you can hear their sound. I could play you a thousand different synth samples and you wouldn't be able to pick which were analogue and which were digital more than random chance would allow. This is just a simple, provable fact.

What I like most about the "old" and analog sound ist that it isn´t that "present" and "harsh". Often damped somehow. It´s smoother and "fuller". Just like in the example.

Really? I think it just depends what you listen to. I thought the sounds in that example video were all terrible. This example is an OB-X or OB-Xa and to me it sounds very harsh and nowhere near thick or full enough. But it was probably the best they could get out of their analogue gear.

It's a f**king brilliant song, though!

You miss an important point. Regardless of technology, different synthesizers sound different. Can we agree on that? Maybe the difference is subtle, maybe obvious. There’s no law that says you need to care about such things, but can you grasp that some do? Your assertion that no one can tell the difference is rubbish. There was a Diva vs. OB-6 comparison a while ago and I instantly knew which was which. I’ve used Diva long enough to know that sound, but I’ve also used various hardware analogs enough to have a good feel for them too. Does it mean that I’d get it right 100% of the time? No, as there are a lot of sounds that don’t necessarily show off the differences, but if you care, and obviously you don’t, you desire the places where true analog had a different tone.

In my perfect world, software would totally get it perfectly. I really don’t love the clutter or the workflow of hardware synths, but it really isn’t totally there yet. For instance, I’ve been searching for a hybrid wavetable synth that’s in the style of the old PPG Wave or Microwave 1, but for various reasons, buying the hardware doesn’t work for me. I can get in the neighborhood, but every time I heard a demo of one of those vintage synths, I instantly felt frustrated that nothing I had in software or hardware was doing it for me. Then Waldorf launched the M. I was skeptical, because their last hybrid, the Quantum, didn’t really do much for me. But when I listened to the demos… instant love. They nailed the character I was looking for, and put it in a box that had the kind of features I like. Would I have been happier if they released a really good emulation? Yup. It would save me a lot of money and space, but I’m no longer willing to wait patiently for things. Life is too short. Happy birthday to me!

[HAL76]

What I like most about the "old" and analog sound ist that it isn´t that "present" and "harsh". Often damped somehow. It´s smoother and "fuller". Just like in the example.

Really? I think it just depends what you listen to. I thought the sounds in that example video were all terrible. This example is an OB-X or OB-Xa and to me it sounds very harsh and nowhere near thick or full enough. But it was probably the best they could get out of their analogue gear.

It's a f**king brilliant song, though!

That is electronically amplified guitarish "music" and this kind of noise is off topic here. This typical harshness is imho also rather a question of the musicians character and their "state of mind" than the gear used to generate it.

I´m soo glad that these dark days are over. Really!

[HAL76]

"I hope to give you an unbiased explanation of the differences" (between digital and analog.

Addition: what a fail!

[BONES]

serum is mostly a wavetable synth with some analog wavetables

Serum is a V/A - it has some oscillators that run through filters and into an amp. It just uses wavetables instead of generating simple waveforms. It's not that different, really, to something like an Ensoniq ESQ-1, just a lot more evolved. Many early VSTi V/As used wavetables to do things like variable pulse width (and PWM) because the processor overhead to generate/modulate a decent waveform in realtime was too high.

what i think of as the most extreme digital opposite of the analog sound, a mathematical saw wave, if you want to keep purposefully missing that point and tell me im arguing a different point, i dont need to defend your straw man, theres no logic to saying this means everything must sound the same, i already said that lots of it sounds different

Every V/A that generates it's own oscillator waveforms uses mathematics to do it, just as it uses mathematics to make filters and envelopes and everything else. And the people who engineer hardware synths, even analogue ones, use mathematics to work out how it all functions. Mathematics rules everything, be it software or hardware, analogue or digital. It's all maths.

ive seen that youre always unreasonable, foul mouthed and over confident in all of your posts so i see no benefit to carrying on this conversation with you

Yeah, because your deluded and you simply don't want to discover the reality of the situation. And the reality is that any half-decent digital synth is more than capable of sounding just as rich, just as warm, just as full and everything else as any analogue hardware synth. Moreso beacuse there are fewer limitations. e.g. SEM only has two oscillators so any richness, depth, etc. that you want has to come from just wo osc. OTOH, bx_oberhausen can stack up to 32 union layers of those two oscilltors, which allows it to be richer and fuller than anyone could ever have hoped to manage with the SEM it emulates.

Of course, the reverse is also true - it's the easiest thing in the world to make an analogue synth sound cold and harsh and thin. And remember, you are talking to someone who currently owns four analogue hardware synths and one hybrid (digital oscillator, analogue filter). so I do have some f**king clue as to what I'm talking about. My $2000 Analog Four, for example, is an incredible synth capable of some amazing sounds but it runs out of voices long before it's able to sound as full and rich and textured as something like Union, which I paid $5 for. My Uno Pro Desktop is probably my all-time favourite hardware synth but it's the same. It sounds amazing for what it is but, ultimately, it can't compete with freebie softsynths like GR-8 because it only has three oscillators.

if you want to see what i think

I don't give a flying f**k about what you or anybody else thinks, I only care about what is true and very little of what you've had to say is based in any kind of objective reality.

fyi, the reason analog saw waves sound kinda special is because they are not exactly the same as mathematically pure saw waves but rather a rough approximation. Getting them mathematically correct is relatively easy to do digitally.

Yes but nobody does that, do they? Developers try to make them sonically interesting. As I noted yesterday, some VSTi offer multiple different saw waves so if all they were doing was running a simple mathematical expression to create an exact sawtooth shape, all those different waveforms would sound the same. But none of them sound the same, do they? Just as the sawtooth wave from one VSTi to the next doesn't always sound exactly the same. These simple facts lay open the stupidity of this entire discussion for anyone who cares to take an objective look.

exactly, similarly to how lots of instruments make sounds that are close to saw waves (at least in terms of the harmonics but not the waveform) but they arent perfect saw waves and these imperfections can give sounds some lushness.

Point me to one VSTi that only has a perfect saw wave and no other sawtooth options. I've never heard one, they all have their own different qualities, just like hardware. Look at the way a DX7 makes a sawtooth wave, for example. It's not a simple thing and the waveform you end up with can be as accurate or as approximate as you like. But it's still 100% digital. The thought that if you do it digitally it ends up being cold and boring is absolute bullshit and you guys have to know that. You can't possibly be so f**king blind that you don't see it. You are just willfully ignoring reality.

[BONES]

You miss an important point. Regardless of technology, different synthesizers sound different. Can we agree on that?

Not really, no. I'll agree that they can sound different, not that they must. As I said, I can use any of 8 or 9 different VSTi to generate the strings we use in most of our songs and it really doesn't matter which one I use, I can always get a sound that nobody listening would be able to tell apart from any of the others. If it were otherwise then we'd all be able to sit back and listen to any song and pick every instrument with which we were familiar. But we all know that none of us can do that. You might recognise a preset if someone uses it without modification, e.g. the Beat It! intro, but that's about it.

There’s no law that says you need to care about such things, but can you grasp that some do?

What I grasp is that some people are determined to hear things that are not there.

if you care, and obviously you don’t, you desire the places where true analog had a different tone.

That's the tail wagging the dog and it makes no sense. I have songs that need instruments to play parts and in my 40 years of doing this, I have come to understand that it just doesn't matter in 99% of situations which instrument I use to do what. A recent example would be a piece my bandmate sent me where he had used Hive for the main bassline. It sounded really good but I don't like using Hive so I spent 10 minutes recreating that sound in JP6K. I sent him an mp3, I told him I had tweaked the bassline a bit but even listening for it, he said he couldn't tell the difference.

I’ve been searching for a hybrid wavetable synth that’s in the style of the old PPG Wave or Microwave 1

That's simply setting things up to fail, as well as putting the cart before the horse. In my hardware days, I never wanted to buy a new synth to sound just like an old one. I always wanted the next generation of synths to surpass what I'd been doing previously and that is how it almost always turned out (with a couple of poor choice exceptions). When I'd outgrown my ESQ-M, for example, if I'd insisted that what I replaced it with had to sound exactly the same as it, I'd never have found anything, I'd never have moved on.

I think in the end, we're confusing "different" and "better". Of course every synth is different but I don't subscribe to the belief that any one synth is intrinsically better than another, just because of what it is. I am always confident I can get whatever I need from whatever synth I have in front of me. What it almost always comes down to is how much effort one thing might require over another, not which will do the job better.

Here's another example I can give you. When I got my Uno Pro, I was in the middle of working on some covers and I used Uno Pro in Underpass (John Foxx song) to do a big, ballsy bass pad that serves as the intro, all on its own, and also reappears at the end of the song, underneath the rest of the arrangement. So it was a tricky sound to sculpt, it had to be big enough to work on its own but it also had to cut through a fairly dense mix without drowning anything else out. I got something that sounded great out of Uno but later, when I was working on the song for our last EP, I couldn't be arsed setting Uno up so I put bx_oberhausen in its stead. I got the basics sorted out, lots of bottom end and enough mid-range to cut through the mix, but it sounded a bit weak compared to Uno Pro - three oscillators against two. All it took was a quick upping of the unison, which not only made it sound a lot fuller and richer but the unison detune added a bit of extra movement to the sound that Uno Pro couldn't quite match. And that's how it's gone for all my hardware - it does the job well enough for live work but it would feel like selling the songs short if I tried to use hardware in production.

That is electronically amplified guitarish "music" and this kind of noise is off topic here.

How is an OB-X "off topic"? Because it's a genre you are unfamiliar with? Would you rather I posted my all electronic cover of the song? I'm happy to do so if you'd like and then you can see how much better GR-8 sounds than an OB-X.

This typical harshness is imho also rather a question of the musicians character and their "state of mind" than the gear used to generate it.

Well, of course, and that's my point. The gear is unimportant, it's what you do with it that matters.

I´m soo glad that these dark days are over. Really!

The Dark Days are just beginning, my friend, and Killing Joke is still here to guide us through them. This brand new song has had 10 times more views in a couple of months than that other one has had in 11 years. I did like the other one, though.

[kmonkey]

I am just trying to realize are some of you old time experienced users just having fun in this thread or are you really beating this dead horse topic yet again? How come you fail for this analog-digital as if you don't know better?

[Unaspected]

I am just trying to realize are some of you old time experienced users just having fun in this thread or are you really beating this dead horse topic yet again? How come you fail for this analog-digital as if you don't know better?

Some of us.

The ones falling for it hardest probably have the most experience.

[kmonkey]

I am just trying to realize are some of you old time experienced users just having fun in this thread or are you really beating this dead horse topic yet again? How come you fail for this analog-digital as if you don't know better?

Some of us.

The ones falling for it hardest probably have the most experience.

Haha touche

[j wazza]

serum is mostly a wavetable synth with some analog wavetables

Serum is a V/A - it has some oscillators that run through filters and into an amp.

this would mean every synth ever is a va

what i think of as the most extreme digital opposite of the analog sound, a mathematical saw wave

Every V/A that generates it's own oscillator waveforms uses mathematics to do it, just as it uses mathematics to make filters and envelopes and everything else. And the people who engineer hardware synths, even analogue ones, use mathematics to work out how it all functions. Mathematics rules everything, be it software or hardware, analogue or digital. It's all maths.

this misses the point of what a mathematical saw wave means

[Unaspected]

serum is mostly a wavetable synth with some analog wavetables

Serum is a V/A - it has some oscillators that run through filters and into an amp.

this would mean every synth ever is a va

what i think of as the most extreme digital opposite of the analog sound, a mathematical saw wave

Every V/A that generates it's own oscillator waveforms uses mathematics to do it, just as it uses mathematics to make filters and envelopes and everything else. And the people who engineer hardware synths, even analogue ones, use mathematics to work out how it all functions. Mathematics rules everything, be it software or hardware, analogue or digital. It's all maths.

this misses the point of what a mathematical saw wave means

I suspect that a better way to express the waveform j wazza wishes to evoke is a mathematically naïve sawtooth: A ramp from 0 to 1 scaled and shifted to range between -1 and +1.

Whereas a more analogue looking sawtooth could be the same run through an appropriately tuned APF and LPF. The result would require scaling and shifting but if you're doing this you're probably going to have some form of saturation at either or both the oscillator and/or summing buss gain stage. Might benefit from direct bias adjustment though.

Plenty of ways to achieve all kinds of waveforms and as BONE suggests, you can arrive at them all with the correct mathematical formulas.

[j wazza]

I suspect that a better way to express the waveform j wazza wishes to evoke is a mathematically naïve sawtooth: A ramp from 0 to 1 scaled and shifted to range between -1 and +1.

Whereas a more analogue looking sawtooth could be the same run through an appropriately tuned APF and LPF. The result would require scaling and shifting but if you're doing this you're probably going to have some form of saturation at either or both the oscillator and/or summing buss gain stage. Might benefit from direct bias adjustment though.

yeah i guess thats what i mean, a mathematically perfect saw wave

yeah you can get similar waveforms to analog that way but it still isnt the same with just that, analog waveforms are more complex, and theres also the drift etc

Plenty of ways to achieve all kinds of waveforms and as BONE suggests, you can arrive at them all with the correct mathematical formulas.

yeah im not disagreeing with that part or that all synths use maths

[melomood]

It's nice to see Killing Joking recapturing that undercurrent of the sublime they had back when

continue

[vurt]

serum is mostly a wavetable synth with some analog wavetables

Serum is a V/A - it has some oscillators that run through filters and into an amp.

this would mean every synth ever is a va

what i think of as the most extreme digital opposite of the analog sound, a mathematical saw wave

Every V/A that generates it's own oscillator waveforms uses mathematics to do it, just as it uses mathematics to make filters and envelopes and everything else. And the people who engineer hardware synths, even analogue ones, use mathematics to work out how it all functions. Mathematics rules everything, be it software or hardware, analogue or digital. It's all maths.

this misses the point of what a mathematical saw wave means

arguing with bones, is very much like "having sex with a gorilla"

it can be painful and is on the gorillas terms. but is also amusing to spectators.