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

[Papuzzo]

Great music comes from great musicians, not great gear.

I think we're all in agreement on that, aren't we?

I would hope so, but too often musicians hear other musician's work and the first thing they ask is "WOW! What gear did that musician use?" Today when I hear a great musician my first question is "Who taught you? Tell me how you got to this point." The gear really is irrelevant unless someone's goal in life is to just copy others who are capable of creating original works.

[whassup]

Great music comes from great musicians, not great gear.

I think we're all in agreement on that, aren't we?

I would hope so, but too often musicians hear other musician's work and the fist thing they ask is "WOW! What gear did that musician use?" Today when I hear a great musician my first question is "Who taught you? Tell me how you got to this point." The gear really is irrelevant unless someone's goal in life is to just copy others who are capable of creating original works.

This!

[crimsonwarlock]

...call yourself PWMpusher

[_leras]

I like the aesthetic of mixing more with older music. There's lots of recent music I like as music, even if the current approach to production and mixing is less appealing to me. One of the downsides of digital is it allows people to obsess over every micro-detail which can suck to life out. But that is more a human problem than a digital problem.

Yeah, there used to be a lot more space and dynamics - which sounds great when it's turned up.

The continuation of the loudness war is most definitely in playing fewer sounds at the same time and moving things out of the way. This alone limits musicality.

We've gone from side chain compression, to volume ducking, to soothe like targeted EQ ducking, and now inverse ring modulation (?) to squeeze kick and bass into the same space.

I'm not sure the final outcome is really any better sonically.

[_leras]

Way too often people equate expensive gear with serious musicians.

Nah, it's like the expression 'a bad workman blames his tools'. The reality is a good workman has sought out and invested in the right tools.

All the strads in use are with serious musicians. Any musician who plays multiple hours a day will invest in an instrument that has better action or better tone.

Even among non professional and aspiring electronic musicians there is a search for the best sound and tone.

That's not to say that people don't start out using what they can get hold of, or with what they know how to use. Or that there aren't people out there with amazing studios that only really noodle around.

[whassup]

...call yourself PWMpusher

I do man, I do.

[whassup]

Way too often people equate expensive gear with serious musicians.

Nah, it's like the expression 'a bad workman blames his tools'. The reality is a good workman has sought out and invested in the right tools.

All the strads in use are with serious musicians. Any musician who plays multiple hours a day will invest in an instrument that has better action or better tone.

Even among non professional and aspiring electronic musicians there is a search for the best sound and tone.

That's not to say that people don't start out using what they can get hold of, or with what they know how to use. Or that there aren't people out there with amazing studios that only really noodle around.

Yep. And then there was Ed v Halen. Couldn't afford any pedals back then. Formed his style. Just sayin.

And yes, I am in for best tone. For the context. Whole situation. So no hardware synth for me right here and now. That might change as it did before. I allow myself room to change my perspective on things.

[zerocrossing]

Lot's of great musicians use junk because it evokes a certain vibe. That's not really the point of this topic, though.

It is though. The point of using that gear is: "this gets the sound I want with the least fuss".

From the OP:

I wonder if the need for analog hardware has diminished. Or does analog still provide something meaningful that software cannot fully replicate, whether in terms of sound, workflow, or creative experience?

Like character, "fuss" is also subjective. I find the fuss of using old analog gear to be worse in many ways, when compared to hardware. Any hardware, actually. I'd answer the OP's questions like this:

The need for has diminished for the people that don't care for it. Analog does provide something meaningful that software cannot fully replace, though in terms of sound, not always, workflow and creative experience (are these not the same?) definitely, if that's your thing.

You can't argue with workflow, unless you're the few people who only own plugins with dedicated controllers, and even they are forced to work differently when they want to add an effect to the sound. So, you can't even really argue this point. The workflow is apples to oranges and you either like one, the other or both. (I'm allergic to raw apples, and all raw fruit from deciduous trees )

No-one at the time bothered to find the recipe on a quality compressor to emulate what they got accidentally off a talkback-mic compressor for that 80s snare sound. Yet the recipe isn't much of a secret.

I can't say how close it is, and I don't really care for that sound, but here you go:

https://korneffaudio.com/product/talkback-limiter/

Their Echoleffe Tape Delay is fantastic.

For Boards of Canada it turned out the most effective way to get the wobbly sound of those old adverts was to loop the video through the same kind of video recorder. With some work you can do it in software but it takes a bit of work to set up.

Didn't they just sample from the original material which was already on video and 16mm film? I'd argue that there are plenty of tools to get you the BoC sound that are fantastic and easy to use. I can't really speak to how accurate they are, because I don't own any of the original hardware, and I honestly don't care enough. Speakerphone, Dirty Tape, Sketchcassette, Neold Warble, etc, are fine for my needs. Is it as fun as manipulating 8mm film clips live, ala Negativland? Depends on your preference. It's super fun to watch them do it live, and something that I absolutely would hate under any circumstances.

Using an analogue synth for some pitch and voltage instability is in the same ballpark.

Plugins are not a monolith, and the quality of one does not speak for all. Some can be frighteningly close, some very far. Some nail a specific piece of gear, some just create a similar vibe. As always, use the right tool to get you to your goal in the way you like to be a-gett'n.

Adding cross-modulation into filter FM at high resonance with mic-input feedback and it gets tougher to pull off in software, not least because different analogue circuits will crap out in different ways under those conditions once you go past the "slightly overdriven" point.

This is undeniably true, but I'd also ask you what filter FM at high resonance with mic-input feedback sounds in an all analog setup. I'll tell you, it sounds terrible. So software won't get you the same kind of terrible, but maybe it still can be exploited for how it "craps out," even if the failure is not the same.

But "terrible" can be useful in art, of course, and it depends on the goal of your art. I'm in the influenced by Einstürzende Neubauten, Boredoms, Axiom Records, etc, camp of artists, so that's why I find having some analog around can really get me that madness, but if you're goal is to do John Carpenter style Synthwave, then I believe it is 100% unnecessary if you don't care about the workflow. When IvyBirds starts talking about the music he plays, he's talking about pure old school pop music, often played in a live setting. In that case, I'm totally with him. Hell, I saw Thomas Dolby back in the early 00s and he was using a Virus (C?) and two Power Mac G4s to do his whole great sounding show, and I think one thing we can all agree on is that software emulations have gotten significantly better since then, and modern computers much smaller, more powerful, and stable.

(P.S. Dolby's system crashed once during the show, but like the true professional he is, he used the time to interact with the audience and toss out a few tee shirts. If anything, it made the show more enjoyable.)

[zerocrossing]

Great music comes from great musicians, not great gear.

I think we're all in agreement on that, aren't we?

I would hope so, but too often musicians hear other musician's work and the first thing they ask is "WOW! What gear did that musician use?" Today when I hear a great musician my first question is "Who taught you? Tell me how you got to this point." The gear really is irrelevant unless someone's goal in life is to just copy others who are capable of creating original works.

Yeah, no doubt, but that is something a small but ferocious group of music nerds do. I'd be lying if I didn't say that when I hear a musician doing something that sounds cool, I don't look to see what they're using. My wife and daughter always roll their eyes at me when I glance at a band and say something like, "ah, the ol' [name of some gear they've never heard of]"

That said, I learned a shitload by trying to emulate my favorite artists. There was this dude I was in a band with for a while who was obsessed with getting the Beatles sound and performance as precise as possible. He'd even make us make the double tracked vocal mistakes (Lennon evidently didn't know his songs all that well. ) He sort of forced me to find an old Vox Buckingham, which was super hard because they made a solid state one that was fairly common in the USA, but I had to have the tube one or I basically couldn't be in the band. Rickenbacher 320, of course, and he was even mad that I picked the red sunburst one because I couldn't find a black one. He showed me how to hear how the different chord voicing could totally change the sound of a part. He was a tyrant, and absolutely a psychopath, but he did teach me how to listen and use my stuff to get a specific sound, a skill that I still use.

I did get really sick of it at one point, and he could tell, so I was jettisoned from that band in one of the most monumentally assholic ways one could ever imagine. He literally started rehearsing a different set list with a different guy and as I was waiting to go on stage, he announced the new situation to me. I had the guitar strapped on and everything. I looked him up a while ago and he was in prison in Florida for cocaine trafficking.

[Gamma-UT]

No-one at the time bothered to find the recipe on a quality compressor to emulate what they got accidentally off a talkback-mic compressor for that 80s snare sound. Yet the recipe isn't much of a secret.

I can't say how close it is, and I don't really care for that sound, but here you go:

https://korneffaudio.com/product/talkback-limiter/

Their Echoleffe Tape Delay is fantastic.

That wasn’t the point I was making and I think the way you’ve interpreted it has coloured the rest of your post. What I meant was Hugh Padgham didn’t go “that’s a great sound but we need to get it done properly on the best gear”, even though they could easily have rung SSL to get a tip on what settings would work with maybe a studio FET compressor. Instead they just went with what they heard because it did the job and everyone liked it.

It’s now got a bit silly with emulations when maybe it would make more sense to get the feeling rather than a precise copy of the sound.

[zerocrossing]

...call yourself PWMpusher

I do man, I do.

The worst sounding PWM I’ve ever heard was on a Deepmind 12.

[zerocrossing]

Way too often people equate expensive gear with serious musicians.

Nah, it's like the expression 'a bad workman blames his tools'. The reality is a good workman has sought out and invested in the right tools.

All the strads in use are with serious musicians. Any musician who plays multiple hours a day will invest in an instrument that has better action or better tone.

Even among non professional and aspiring electronic musicians there is a search for the best sound and tone.

That's not to say that people don't start out using what they can get hold of, or with what they know how to use. Or that there aren't people out there with amazing studios that only really noodle around.

Yep. And then there was Ed v Halen. Couldn't afford any pedals back then. Formed his style. Just sayin.

And yes, I am in for best tone. For the context. Whole situation. So no hardware synth for me right here and now. That might change as it did before. I allow myself room to change my perspective on things.

I’d bet money on the EVH story being apocryphal. My first electric guitar and amp set me back $60 in the 70s, and I was able to make enough money on a paper route to buy a used Big Muff Pi.

[IvyBirds]

Way too often people equate expensive gear with serious musicians.

Nah, it's like the expression 'a bad workman blames his tools'. The reality is a good workman has sought out and invested in the right tools.

All the strads in use are with serious musicians. Any musician who plays multiple hours a day will invest in an instrument that has better action or better tone.

Even among non professional and aspiring electronic musicians there is a search for the best sound and tone.

That's not to say that people don't start out using what they can get hold of, or with what they know how to use. Or that there aren't people out there with amazing studios that only really noodle around.

Yep. And then there was Ed v Halen. Couldn't afford any pedals back then. Formed his style. Just sayin.

And yes, I am in for best tone. For the context. Whole situation. So no hardware synth for me right here and now. That might change as it did before. I allow myself room to change my perspective on things.

I’d bet money on the EVH story being apocryphal. My first electric guitar and amp set me back $60 in the 70s, and I was able to make enough money on a paper route to buy a used Big Muff Pi.

He said that himself in an interview with the Smithsonian Museum of American History. He said

“The main reason I squeeze so many, you call them tricks, whatever, out of a guitar is out of necessity. I couldn’t afford the pedals, the fuzz box and all the toys everybody else had. So I did all I could to get all the sound I could out of my fingers.”

You can see the whole thing here, it's a fantastic watch



Edit: Looks like YouTube doesn't like that video being embedded so you have to click it and watch it on YouTube, still a good watch

[zerocrossing]

No-one at the time bothered to find the recipe on a quality compressor to emulate what they got accidentally off a talkback-mic compressor for that 80s snare sound. Yet the recipe isn't much of a secret.

I can't say how close it is, and I don't really care for that sound, but here you go:

https://korneffaudio.com/product/talkback-limiter/

Their Echoleffe Tape Delay is fantastic.

That wasn’t the point I was making and I think the way you’ve interpreted it has coloured the rest of your post. What I meant was Hugh Padgham didn’t go “that’s a great sound but we need to get it done properly on the best gear”, even though they could easily have rung SSL to get a tip on what settings would work with maybe a studio FET compressor. Instead they just went with what they heard because it did the job and everyone liked it.

It’s now got a bit silly with emulations when maybe it would make more sense to get the feeling rather than a precise copy of the sound.

Ah, I see. Many happy accidents have happened because some people experimented with gear that wasn’t designed for the job, designed poorly for a job, or was built cheaply and had a flaw that was exploited for good. Is the wide variety of software something that can lead to similar “accidents?”

I think so, but in a different way. Even looking at Diva, it’s pretty far off from the inspiration for the modules. It all doesn’t sound as good as the originals, but it also allows for new sounds and exploration, and sounds great in its own right. Arturia purposefully puts in features and expands parameter values to allow for experiments. Lots of developers making things that aren’t emulated. I experiment with things that would be hard to do with hardware, unless you had a huge rack of modular gear.

Another thing is, it’s easy to point to the happy accidents, and forget about the many sad accidents. How much junk was tried and failed?

[zerocrossing]

Way too often people equate expensive gear with serious musicians.

Nah, it's like the expression 'a bad workman blames his tools'. The reality is a good workman has sought out and invested in the right tools.

All the strads in use are with serious musicians. Any musician who plays multiple hours a day will invest in an instrument that has better action or better tone.

Even among non professional and aspiring electronic musicians there is a search for the best sound and tone.

That's not to say that people don't start out using what they can get hold of, or with what they know how to use. Or that there aren't people out there with amazing studios that only really noodle around.

Yep. And then there was Ed v Halen. Couldn't afford any pedals back then. Formed his style. Just sayin.

And yes, I am in for best tone. For the context. Whole situation. So no hardware synth for me right here and now. That might change as it did before. I allow myself room to change my perspective on things.

I’d bet money on the EVH story being apocryphal. My first electric guitar and amp set me back $60 in the 70s, and I was able to make enough money on a paper route to buy a used Big Muff Pi.

He said that himself in an interview with the Smithsonian Museum of American History. He said

“The main reason I squeeze so many, you call them tricks, whatever, out of a guitar is out of necessity. I couldn’t afford the pedals, the fuzz box and all the toys everybody else had. So I did all I could to get all the sound I could out of my fingers.”

You can see the whole thing here, it's a fantastic watch



Edit: Looks like YouTube doesn't like that video being embedded so you have to click it and watch it on YouTube, still a good watch

My bullshit detector is pegging the meter. People love to create origin stories about themselves that show them heroically overcoming adversity. If you can afford an electric guitar and tube amp, you can find a bit of cash for a fuzz. Just think about it for a minute. It’s not a convincing story.