Software vs. Analog in 2025 – Has the Balance Shifted?

[pchase]

I don't know how old you are, but that kind of thing can come bite you in the ass in your old age. A friend of mine showed me this cool, custom synth cabinet that he made for his keyboards. It's like a big dresser with drawers, each one holding a synth or two. Like you, he claimed to not be bothered by sitting on the floor to get to some, but I'd fear future repercussions.

Why would you be concerned about sitting on the floor? Humans have been sitting on the floor for 100,000s of years. Sitting on chairs all day is what we haven't been doing and the problems it can cause are well documented.

[IvyBirds]

I don't know how old you are, but that kind of thing can come bite you in the ass in your old age. A friend of mine showed me this cool, custom synth cabinet that he made for his keyboards. It's like a big dresser with drawers, each one holding a synth or two. Like you, he claimed to not be bothered by sitting on the floor to get to some, but I'd fear future repercussions.

Why would you be concerned about sitting on the floor? Humans have been sitting on the floor for 100,000s of years. Sitting on chairs all day is what we haven't been doing and the problems it can cause are well documented.

And for 100,000s of thousands of years life expectancy was just 35 years or less and people didn't have Synths or beer

[seafire]

And for 100,000s of thousands of years life expectancy was just 35 years or less and people didn't have Synths or beer

That's why they died so young

[vurt]

why were they sitting on the floor if they had no symths?

[ghettosynth]

And for 100,000s of thousands of years life expectancy was just 35 years or less and people didn't have Synths or beer

That's why they died so young

I definitely prefer hardware beer over software beer, although, the latter is probably better for your health.

That image above with the Behringer controllers is the stuff that nightmares are made of. I thought that might be a good idea at one point as well. I have two of those. They have seen very little use because there is something to the combination of stimuli when performing. Both what you see on the hardware and it's physical location combine with respect to developing fluency and muscle memory.

I have had more than a few of those setups with my most recent being reducing performance synths to common parameters for 8 knobs for ableton/maschine mapping. It's really not the same.

For me, the win with hardware today, and I've gone back to a mostly hardware setup for performance and composition for particular styles, is that there is a lot of modern hardware that fits into 3U to 5U and it makes it easy to create workstation walls that are easy to rearrange.

I still do not do "DAWLess" from start to finish which I think is pointless. I record everything to individual tracks as well as the performance mix on my Allen and Heath CQ18T, then unplug the SD card and load the tracks into my DAW to produce the final output, that is, if there is a point to that, sometimes there isn't. Sometimes the journey is the joy and I don't give a shit about refining it into a product.

The win is not about which is easier or harder with respect to how knobs map. The win is how much my enjoyment and motivation stays up with this approach. Again, I don't do all music this way. I still do a lot of ambient purely ITB and for that I rely largely on the 8 knobs of Ableton/Push for any kind of real time manipulation.

[justin3am]

I don't know how old you are, but that kind of thing can come bite you in the ass in your old age. A friend of mine showed me this cool, custom synth cabinet that he made for his keyboards. It's like a big dresser with drawers, each one holding a synth or two. Like you, he claimed to not be bothered by sitting on the floor to get to some, but I'd fear future repercussions.

I'm 42. I do struggle with back pain; I'm tall and overweight, which doesn't help. But oddly, I feel more comfortable standing or sitting on a gym mat than I do sitting in a chair. In a chair I tend to sit on my tailbone, where on the floor I sit farther forward.

I'm good about doing stretches and stuff everyday and as long as I'm not sitting on the hardwood, I'm fine for a few hours. I also tend to be fidgety, so I get antsy if I have to sit in the same position for a long time.

[pchase]

Japanese people like sitting on the floor in the current millennium and have famously high life expectancy and like beer

[vurt]

Japanese people like sitting on the floor in the current millennium and have famously high life expectancy and like beer

some of them use synths too.

[justin3am]

I don't play mine on the floor often, but, every once in a while I've been there. Did a show, holy shit, decades ago now, where it was some art opening and they wanted me to perform on some sort of ceremonial rug on the floor in the center of the gallery. I setup three work stations in a triangle facing inward. I enlisted two of my friends, and we sat on pillows at the workstations doing an ambient jam for about three hours. To be clear, we were facing each other, but, could see some part of the audience in the gallery over the other performers. So, we were facing inward, that is. Every 5-20 minutes we would get up and move to the next workstation to pickup from the point that the workstation was left in. To be clear, this was in the 90s so there were no "workstations" as they are known today. I simply mean collections of synths, drum machines, and effects from the day synced via midi clock and all routed into a Mackie 1202.

I'm only sharing because I want this thread to remain visible to me and because perhaps one or two of you might find the idea of the performance worthy of sharing, or not, whatever.

I do put rack gear all the way down to the floor, but that's because it is the kind of gear that doesn't get touched.

Yeah, I love those kinds of jams. I usually bring out my Costco brand noise table when jamming with friends these days, but it's a really neat experience to jam in a circle with all the gear in the center.

I also have rack equipment that that doesn't get tweaked at all, near the floor level. That's the realm of set-and-forget processors, or things with software editors.

[thecontrolcentre]

Why would you be concerned about sitting on the floor? Humans have been sitting on the floor for 100,000s of years.

I broke both of my legs, one of my hips and crushed a vertibrae in a motorbike "accident" 13 years ago. Sitting on the floor is a distant memory these days.

[IvyBirds]

Japanese people like sitting on the floor in the current millennium and have famously high life expectancy and like beer

Japanese people tend to be significantly shorter than people from other regions, traditionally they have built significantly smaller houses with significantly lower roofs and ceilings than Western Houses. This meant there was not enough space or height to build a western style hearth/fireplaces so they used an "irori" or sunken hearth, typically found in the center of a Japanese home's living room to heat and/cook

Because it was sunken into the floor it was warmer to sit on the floor and sleep on the floor on mats than on chairs so a culture of sitting and lying on the floor developed

Published studies indicate typical people in Japan have greater instances of knee problems than people in America, and that 42% of Japanese adults suffer from lower back pain

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/P ... %20%5B2%5D.

So while they may sit in the floor more often they pay the price for it with knee damage and still suffer from back issues

[pekbro]

I tend to play my synths while hanging upside down from the ceiling.

[mxbf]

1
Personally I don't actually think "blind tests" prove anything. They hit one note, do a filter sweep, and thats it. You don't really know what sounds good until its being played expressively and performed on, especially in the context of a track. But people think because its hard to differentiate between 1 note being plucked that proves there's no difference.

2
The thing is, really what matters is the quality of the track. An amazing track using cheap ass VSTs that "sound" slightly less amazing is always going to trounce a pretty good track that uses the best hardware on earth. It's just going to be slightly harder to get there using cheap shit than it is with stuff i can't afford.

3
You can pretty much just whip out a Sub 37 or TEO-5 and play anything and it will basically immediately sound like "holy shit", your ears will perk up, something deep inside of you will be like "WOW" and you will just have this inexplicable response to the depth and beauty of the sound. Whereas if you whip out Zebra and play some basslines, I mean come on guys. I have never, ever had a "wow" moment playing a VST.

4
For some reason I find "hardware supremacy" very funny to play up. But honestly for the longest time I was the DAW purist, even trying to use Garageband stock shitty sounds back in 2009 and just committing to that as an aesthetic. But once I got actual synths and hardware and started building up a studio, the hybrid setup became so much fun to just jam in compared to fiddling with VSTs. Truth is, I think I need to go back to DAW purism for a while but its not as fun.

[whassup]

1
Personally I don't actually think "blind tests" prove anything. They hit one note, do a filter sweep, and thats it. You don't really know what sounds good until its being played expressively and performed on, especially in the context of a track. But people think because its hard to differentiate between 1 note being plucked that proves there's no difference.

2
The thing is, really what matters is the quality of the track. An amazing track using cheap ass VSTs that "sound" slightly less amazing is always going to trounce a pretty good track that uses the best hardware on earth. It's just going to be slightly harder to get there using cheap shit than it is with stuff i can't afford.

3
You can pretty much just whip out a Sub 37 or TEO-5 and play anything and it will basically immediately sound like "holy shit", your ears will perk up, something deep inside of you will be like "WOW" and you will just have this inexplicable response to the depth and beauty of the sound. Whereas if you whip out Zebra and play some basslines, I mean come on guys. I have never, ever had a "wow" moment playing a VST.

4
For some reason I find "hardware supremacy" very funny to play up. But honestly for the longest time I was the DAW purist, even trying to use Garageband stock shitty sounds back in 2009 and just committing to that as an aesthetic. But once I got actual synths and hardware and started building up a studio, the hybrid setup became so much fun to just jam in compared to fiddling with VSTs. Truth is, I think I need to go back to DAW purism for a while but its not as fun.

Blind tests, I agree.

Wow effect:
That one is very interesting. I had wow effects where I didn't expect them and even worse: where I didn't want to have them!
I spare you the details of my last few wow moments and anti-wow moments as these things are so subjective and it doesn't make my point.
My point is that a lot of things can contribute to the wow.
In the end when all comes down to simply listening some folks come along and bang some cool stuff outta the cheapest junk gear that later will become classics. Bono singing into a SM58, pick your example.
Other way round too. I was watching a comparisson video these days and it took me a bit: While the copy and the original sounded quite close overall it sounded poooo.

[DJErmac]

I really have a true love for nonsense and absurd humour.

This japanese people sitting on the floor debate in the hardware VS software thread officially broke my brain.