Is the Virtual Instrument era over?

[ramseysounds]

This is a topic for discussion and interaction, and most of the responses have been helpful.

I'd suggest that the only responses you have found helpful are the ones that you agree with. As others have said, this is all speculation on your part, without anything to back it up and there will be no positive outcome. Bones sums you up best with the phrase 'bullshit'.
I'm out.

[BONES]

Ad hominems are not useful in civil discourse. I would prefer you bring illumination, and not heat, to this discussion.

You can't possibly think anyone is taking this seriously? It's ridiculous on the face of it.

Cars have a constant demand cycle, are pretty much required in most places, and new models are released every year and people buy them. Try again!

Actually, you have no idea what you're talking about. In the 1950s and '60s, a popular new car would have a new model every year and a whole new platform every 2-3 years. These days, even though they sell 10 times as many cars as they did back then, car-makers will use the same platform for 8-10 years and a new model will only come out every two years or so. So even though sales go up and up every year, model cycles get longer and longer.

It's the same in this market. As the market matures and the technology improves, it becomes harder and harder to keep up the pace of improvement, so model cycles get longer and longer. In fact, I'd suggest that if sales were bad, then the best way to improve them would be to release more regular updates. But if sales are humming along nicely, there is no need to keep pumping out updates or new products. Again, the slower pace is a sign of a mature market.

I'm not sure about what it is like in the "land down under", but in the US, people don't even buy from brick and mortar stores anymore for the most part.

Surely that proves my point? If hardware was going really well, there'd be room for both but that is clearly not the case.

Sweetwater is the current market leader and they have quite an array of VI hardware

And yet they have very few new hardware synths listed. Last year's additions to Roland's Boutique line, for example, are only a few rows down from the top when you search by "newest". It's hardly a feast, is it? They even have a "NEW" stick on Polybrute, which is more than two years old now.

And if you look at the news archives, you will see that from year to year, the amount of news been pretty consistent. Look at the same month from year to year and see how long the scrollbar handle is in your browser. Surely if we'd passed the peak, we'd see a drop-off in news? Or maybe a frantic rush of news to try and revive flagging sales? But we see neither. It's very consistent, in line with a mature market.

It is a trend...and there are a lot of people doing it. Catch up!

I don't believe it is and I see no evidence of it. All the bands I go to see use laptops, it's 25 years or more since I saw an electronic act that was wholly hardware-based, although it's only 21 years since we last performed with our hardware set-up.

youtu.be/j4MP6eJFiCc - 3,197 views.
youtu.be/gfICQeozR8I - 55,926 views.
youtu.be/Jm6j7aNqJso - 3,585 views.[/quote]
I've put the number of views in there so you can see just how little interest there is in this. Ricky Tinez's numbers might look OK but he has 146,000 subscribers, yet only one-third that number have bothered watching that video, which is more than 6 months old. They are pretty poor numbers by any standard.

... a lot of people are buying hardware instruments from companies like Korg, Roland, Yamaha, Akai, Waldorf, Modal, Oberheim, Arturia, Sequential, Behringer, Moog, ASM, Electron, Novation, etc.

How do you know this? If you take Waldorf as an example, you can see their instrument release timeline on Wikipedia and the last few years have been quite lean by their standards. There is no indication at all that they are doing better than they have in the past.

Others have said it is because they have resale value and you can sell them easily and buy something else. That is not something that is easy to do with many plugins unless there is a lot of demand for what you are selling and the dev allows transfers.

That's just bullshit. I used to lose more money every year selling hardware than I spend on plugins in two years. And the second-hand hardware I've bought has been for less than half what it was worth new, so nobody was making money buying those things new.

Whenever I see a band with someone playing keyboard, it is almost always a hardware synth.

And that's what you woudl see if you came to see us but that's just what I play on stage, 95% of the sound is coming from my laptop. My hardware synths are literally nothing more to me than stage props, something to add to the theatre of a live performance. I would never even consider using them in our recordings.

[waiting man]

FACTS:

- Very few new synths are being regularly introduced (except for Cherry Audio)
- VST2 has been killed off and VST3 only adoption is glacial
- CLAP looks promising but universal support is up in the air
- Flagship synth major updates have slowed to a crawl
- There has been a huge resurgence in the sale of hardware synths
- DAW-less production has become a big trend
- Modular rack synths continue to be popular
- The VI market has reached saturation and is not growing
- Economic turmoil means less discretionary spending
- Interest rates are going to slow credit card purchases

Your thoughts?

I miss the days when the ozone layer was a thing.

[fisherKing]

FACTS:

- Very few new synths are being regularly introduced (except for Cherry Audio)
- VST2 has been killed off and VST3 only adoption is glacial
- CLAP looks promising but universal support is up in the air
- Flagship synth major updates have slowed to a crawl
- There has been a huge resurgence in the sale of hardware synths
- DAW-less production has become a big trend
- Modular rack synths continue to be popular
- The VI market has reached saturation and is not growing
- Economic turmoil means less discretionary spending
- Interest rates are going to slow credit card purchases

Your thoughts?

I miss the days when the ozone layer was a thing.

it's still a thing; you can 'layer' modules in ozone easily...

[jules99]

You can look at it less from a technical and more from a musical point of view? Which acoustic instruments have not been emulated or sampled accurately so it would make sense to re-create them virtually? When it comes to Western (US/European) instruments most of the popular acoustic and electronic instruments exist in some virtual instruments. As these parts of the world are a tiny minority and many cultures and regions are catching up economically, that might result in a huge influx if new virtual instruments.

Also, with AI slowly creeping into music production, services like Splice will be in hot water soon, as there will be plugins (can't really call them instruments, can't call them effects either) that will create hundreds of variations of a single loop. On your computer. Others will replace the timbre of an instrument in real-time, so a saxophone can sound like an organ in your DAW instantly. These might be virtual instruments in their own rights, but they could also be hybrid devices, something not a virtual instrument anymore, not quite and effect.

Virtual instruments that emulate Western instruments might be dead, but there is so much more to come. You're just looking at it with senior glasses.

[kevvvvv]

Nice discussion this.

Brought all sorts of deeply-held yet relevant views out of the woodwork.

Is there any chance left for the solo dev to bring out a new synth?

Not much.

Every startup-to-mid-mature dev synth I've tried lacks features like no inline help, no adjustable display, no posh browser

- so I end going to the old time devs who mostly bring very pro-featured gear with new crazily ergonomic GUIs

btw I think Bones is right about synth bands using gear mostly for show

[FigBug]

Is there any chance left for the solo dev to bring out a new synth?

Not much.

I'd say Peter V / Dawesome have has had pretty good success as a new developer with Abyss & Novum. He has some fresh ideas when it comes to UI.

But if you do a new 3 osc subtractive synth with a bunch of knobs for the UI, don't even bother.

[gaggle of hermits]

Is there any chance left for the solo dev to bring out a new synth?

Not much.

the market for virtual analogues and hybrid/sample-heavy VIs might be saturated but there's a lot of room for stuff that's based on machine learning that the big guys won't put a lot of money into until they see the money is there.

[pdxindy]

Is there any chance left for the solo dev to bring out a new synth?

Not much.

Vital

Plasmonic

[vurt]

Is there any chance left for the solo dev to bring out a new synth?

Not much.

Vital

Plasmonic

while i don't agree with the idea kev posted, i think brian is a special case here, already having a history.
not sure about matts previous work experience though?

but there will always be new comers, only a few will go on to success, same as before.

[Uncle E]

Is there any chance left for the solo dev to bring out a new synth?

Not much.

I'd say Peter V / Dawesome have has had pretty good success as a new developer with Abyss & Novum. He has some fresh ideas when it comes to UI.

Teaming up with Tracktion was a good move. They've been around for over 20 years and that may have something to do with these having the niceties of more mature products.

Similarly, Cherry Audio is Acoustica, which has been around for around 20 years. I'd say Cherry Audio is a great indicator of which way the wind is blowing. They're doing great with no sign of slowing down.

[jamcat]

Unfortunately most are wrapping VST2 products or aren't implementing many of the supposed advantages of VST3.

And you have firsthand knowledge of this how?
Name these VST2 wrapped as VST3 plugins.

Err - the easy way to tell is any VST3 instrument which doesn't work when the VST2 component is deleted! Rob Papen's stuff would be an example iirc? Also, in terms of usage, the example I used is how I find it extremely annoying just how many "supposed" VST3's don't actually properly suspend their processor load on idle, even with the option enabled in the host. Worse, it can introduce stability issues etc! YMMV (? ... )

Yeah, I don’t have any plugins like that, and I have a lot of plugins.

The developers who were spreading that lie were the ones doing it. That’s hardly “most.”

It was just a bunch of noise from a handful of developers making excuses for why they can’t code.

[dellboy]

Hardware synth worship is the False God of the Middle Class Poser Muso who can afford to spend £1,000s on machines that are no longer necessary.

On that note, why does anyone need to own every VST in existence? Some of these VSTs cost serious money, into the hundreds of dollars, and yet we read that some people must have them all. Why? Is it not the same thing as collecting hardware synths but in digital form? Whats the difference?

[Propellerhands]

FACTS:

<............>

Your thoughts?

My thoughts? Laughing out loud.

Nobody has money or spare space for hardware synths except select few. FACT.
Producing with VSTs is much easier. FACT
Making half-assed low quality plugins is best business model ever. FACT
Charging insane amount of money for zeroes and ones is much more rational and enviroment friendly than producing physical tangible goods in china. FACT
Bears. Beets. Battlestar Galactica. FACT

[vurt]

woohoo im a select few!!!