Hardware-Software Hybrid Users Poll

[grandmasterbird]

Even though I work in IT and spend a lot of time in front of a computer screen, the ability to quickly jump in/out of projects in a DAW makes it the best option for me. It's so much easier and quicker to pick up an old project and continue right where you left off, with every mixer setting, effects chain, synth patch etc. instantly recalled with the project. I wouldn't have the time or energy to deal with a complex hardware setup without instant recall. By the time I've got everything plugged in and routed the way it should be, I'd be about ready for bed.

That said, I have have a handful of hardware synths, but they all feature MIDI and patch memories, so they are also more or less instant recall. They're also permanently plugged into my audio interface on separate channels, ready to record. They're fun to jam on and I sometimes incorporate them into songs, but I primely use plugins.

This echoes my setup- although I love hardware I find software so much quicker and easier to work with. For me the most important thing is getting the ideas from my head down and coming out of the speakers quickly, and I have found hardware can sometimes slow things down in that regard.

So the hardware I mostly use (alongside vst's) has patch memory and is permanently wired in ready to record quickly at the end of the session. Either that or I sample the sounds in moments of not writing, ready to go in the DAW via a sampler.

But the hardware I have and use I don't think I would ever part with. I love the sound of them and that's why they remain.

[ghettosynth]

Even though I work in IT and spend a lot of time in front of a computer screen, the ability to quickly jump in/out of projects in a DAW makes it the best option for me. It's so much easier and quicker to pick up an old project and continue right where you left off, with every mixer setting, effects chain, synth patch etc. instantly recalled with the project. I wouldn't have the time or energy to deal with a complex hardware setup without instant recall. By the time I've got everything plugged in and routed the way it should be, I'd be about ready for bed.

Yep, and this was an even more frustrating problem in the past when gear was large and across the room. What it neglects to account for, however, is that when we have instant recall, we condition ourselves to think that complexity in the setup doesn't matter because we can pick up wherever we left off. The thing is, if we go too long then trying to understand what we did becomes its own task. Ask any programmer who has to look at code that he wrote six months ago but failed to document.

I'm not saying that it's wrong, I feel this too, what I'm saying is that the feature has a tendency to interact with our psychology in a way that causes us to dismiss the costs to some extent. It's something of a form of digital hoarding.

So, for me, going back to hardware ala modular and other 19" rack synths just forces me to finish things over a few days. What I can go back to is working with the captured STEMs. What I can't go back to is re-patching everything and I don't try. There is something freeing about this.

For me, it cost some money. I spent some cash on a CQ-18T even though I don't "need" it just to capture STEMS without having to worry about latency. I even spent the stupid price on the terribly thought through rack ears so that it is in my wall of studio.

What changed for me was not "modular", per se, although I did get a bit more serious about modular hardware a few years back. I've had modular and semi-modular gear since the mid 90s. What changed for me is how much modern gear fits into a 19" rack and that I no longer have many patch bays. So, my studio hardware wall is treated very much like one big modular, so to speak.

Everyone is different, but I complete more music and move my conception of projects up front. This helps to avoid opening the DAW to just make something without conceptual intent. I have (had) far too many unfinished projects that started this way.

To be clear, I still do all final mixing in the DAW. I don't own any serious studio mixing hardware, EQ, or Compressors and friends, and probably never will. Well, I have some lower budget leftovers from my hardware studio days and a couple of cheap vintage pieces, but, I see those mostly as additions to my modular than as studio pieces. I do not long for the days when I had to re-patch through flakey 1/4" switched patch bays.

[Uncle E]

Lately, I've been having a good time moving Maschine projects between the software and hardware. Being in the different environment gets me doing different things, plus it's just nice to break up the rut.

[Constructed Identity]

In the last couple years it has been going more and more hw since the software doesn’t really excite me anymore. Still 60-40 since I use drum synth VSTs and old favorites.

I'm kinda the opposite...

I consistently get more satisfying results using hardware for Drums/Percussion. For synths, both hardware and software can give me satisfying results.

Have you messed with Drum Computer? It is three sound sources that you can mix together to make anything... It takes some getting used to...but it is amazingly versatile for percussion. (and I see it's on sale)
Drum machines are easier to get a handle on but don't have the depth.

[machinesworking]

I started on this in the 80's and always used a computer for sequencing so when 2000 or so came around and I had enough cash to get a sound card and Reason I started working with a hybrid setup. Right away I stopped using hardware samplers as much because personally recall was much better than loading disks on the Emax II. I will never get the "hardware is better" argument? Digital Synths are basically no different than soft synths, and they've been around since the 70's at least.

I've started buying more hardware though, nothing in software is quite like the Landscape Noon, mostly computers are great, and soft synths sound great but a great interface is a lot of fun. I do end up talking myself out of some hardware because I can do it in software.

One last bit of irony, I ended up getting an MPC for drums, and as a workstation, then an unbeatable deal on a Push 3 standalone. For a year the Push 3 wasn't capable really of writing a song on, and recently the MPC3 software ditches a ton of things I use, like time signatures. So my attempts at ditching a "computer based" DAW ended up with two hardware pieces with computer based DAWs and waiting on the software to mature.

[kritikon]

Absolutely I'll agree with you that "hardware is better" is a silly statement on its own. Digital hw synths in most cases from my experience are far harder to use than sw versions. Though I hate diddling about with a mouse, any digital hw synth I've either got or have had in the past have been several orders easier to program in sw. TB really honest, I wouldn't have bought a couple of the recent Korg hw synths if I'd known they were later to be released as native.

However, there's this assumption by a few that the argument has already been won that VA sounds indistinguishable from analogue. And it's only an assumption, often by those that have little or no experience with analogue. To me it's often light or day - so many VA synths sound extremely and obviously digital. Yeah, simple analogue synths such as Junos etc can easily be replicated digitally. But stray off into anything even slightly different/character and digital still sounds flat, metallic and characterless. A small handful of VAs are now getting very close...Korg Multipoly springs to mind - BUT it emulates Obies which to my ears were pretty vanilla basic synths anyway. They have very little aural magic to my ears, and was always the case...tbh I never understood why OBXas were so revered . Even Korg can't do their own MS20 filters digitally. I'm lucky enough to be able to A/B a couple Korg digitals with MS20 filters against real MS20s. Even the Behringer MS20 leaves the digitals in their wake. You'd have to be tone deaf to not hear it. However, yeah they can do the Polysix filters well enough - but again, Polysixes were extremely vanilla and basic character. A sw Monopoly can sound just like a real Monopoly even with filter play...until you abuse the sync/cross mod and then again the sw utterly fails.

So, yeah sw can replace many basic analogues easily. Junos, 101s, Polysixes, Obies even many of the boring Moogs, but they don't do well against analogues with depth and character.

As for samplers etc...I totally agree. Can't see why anyone would use hw for that. Same for FX. Same for rhythm, unless you're doing weird experimental drums. I wouldn't go back to analogue drum machines or any kind of drum machine if you paid me, though a 909 holds great nostalgia value. Still a pita to use though, compared to anything my DAW can do.

Just commenting that I laugh when I see the usual posters trying to say all sw has reached peak VA already. I can rattle off quite a few synths that have not been reached by sw yet. Even the good ol' OScar with digital oscillators...sw falls down with the filtering and overdrive. Hate to say it but even my beloved impOSCar doesn't really emulate an OSCar properly. It gets close enough for anyone who doesn't care, but it doesn't sound the same.

And that's the point - most don't care. And that is perfectly OK. But I do care and in my little closetted world it makes a difference for me. I hear the difference, really very easily. It smacks me in the face, it's so obvious. It mostly makes a f**king huge difference in the user experience. That's probably more important than the sound TBH. If I had to use all sw with a mouse on a DAW as my only means of making music, I'd stop. Again. It was enough to put me off music in the past and I took a break because the whole sw experience was so fkn awful for me. . But I'm sensible enough to use sw where it beats hw without it killing the joy.

[AdvancedFollower]

Even Korg can't do their own MS20 filters digitally. I'm lucky enough to be able to A/B a couple Korg digitals with MS20 filters against real MS20s. Even the Behringer MS20 leaves the digitals in their wake. You'd have to be tone deaf to not hear it. However, yeah they can do the Polysix filters well enough - but again, Polysixes were extremely vanilla and basic character. A sw Monopoly can sound just like a real Monopoly even with filter play...until you abuse the sync/cross mod and then again the sw utterly fails.

So, yeah sw can replace many basic analogues easily. Junos, 101s, Polysixes, Obies even many of the boring Moogs, but they don't do well against analogues with depth and character.

Where digital still struggles is audio-rate stuff like extremely fast LFO's, and especially using VCO's or noise as modulation sources which is common on the MS20. There are some newer plugins that do it really well but they do use a ton of CPU, even on modern system. The much less powerful CPU's in standalone digital synths just don't have enough power do do it at a high enough resolution.

Overdrive/saturation also used to be a big problem for digital, but it has gotten much better in recent years (again at the cost of very high CPU usage with the highest oversample settings).

Fortunately audio-rate stuff isn't super common in my music, and when I do use it it's usually for special effects that are going to be drenched in other (digital) effects anyway like distortion, reverb etc.

It's also worth keeping in mind that audio rate modulation can sound very different between two analog synths too, or even the same analog synth on different days because even a tiny change in the tuning can have a huge effect on the sound.

[kritikon]

Too true that sw can do stuff but at huge CPU cost. I tried out Ocelot clipper at its highest oversampling and it literally brought my 3 yr old laptop to its knees. Most other plugins do the same. Even at 4X the hit is appreciable, whether it be dynamics or straight distortion. Unusable. Possibly if I had the latest greatest processors it would be more usable, but definitely not IRW.

Audio rate mod, yes. I really do love me some Wavestate, but its high rate LFO is just nasty. Same on anything digital I've heard...it seems to just sound like an added-on thin extra plastic layer, not anything like actual modulation. As you say, not a commonly used effect fortunately.

[machinesworking]

Throwing this out there. Like I posted earlier I've always run a "hybrid" setup, never even owned a hardware sequencer back in the day, always a computer.

The threads that talk about analog VS digital, software VS hardware almost always miss the point. I've started developing a free form improvisational setup with 4 volatile hardware synths (Landscape Noon, Hades, Metal Fetishist, and Wretch Machine if you're curious), using a Beatstep Pro for sequencing. I'm literally only using the Push 3 for mixing, and an amp sim plu JMP-1 for guitar.

I have a monster computer setup and it's absolutely fantastic for all kinds of music where I spend a day or a month writing a carefully crafted song, yet it doesn't touch the Beatstep and small dedicated hardware synths with WYSIWYG interfaces when it comes to improvising a 45 minute set with zero planning. Yes, the music isn't inherently as complex as the stuff I take a month to do, but it's far more fulfilling, bombastic, etc.

Not an either/or equation, but I have to say the admittedly anecdotal evidence is striking. The immediacy of a hardware one control per function interface is great for performance.

[ghettosynth]

Throwing this out there. Like I posted earlier I've always run a "hybrid" setup, never even owned a hardware sequencer back in the day, always a computer.

The threads that talk about analog VS digital, software VS hardware almost always miss the point. I've started developing a free form improvisational setup with 4 volatile hardware synths (Landscape Noon, Hades, Metal Fetishist, and Wretch Machine if you're curious), using a Beatstep Pro for sequencing. I'm literally only using the Push 3 for mixing, and an amp sim plu JMP-1 for guitar.

I have a monster computer setup and it's absolutely fantastic for all kinds of music where I spend a day or a month writing a carefully crafted song, yet it doesn't touch the Beatstep and small dedicated hardware synths with WYSIWYG interfaces when it comes to improvising a 45 minute set with zero planning. Yes, the music isn't inherently as complex as the stuff I take a month to do, but it's far more fulfilling, bombastic, etc.

Not an either/or equation, but I have to say the admittedly anecdotal evidence is striking. The immediacy of a hardware one control per function interface is great for performance.

I was discussing this earlier, in one of these threads. That's my primary motivation for a "DAWless" setup. It's not that I like work DAWless all the time, it's that the DAW does change how improvisational composition works. For me though, there is a tradeoff between the value of such a setup, the flexibility of such a setup, and the size. I like the slightly smaller size, of modern devices, especially the 3U synths.

[cryophonik]

When you guys are working DAWless, do you usually record them, or are they primarily one-and-done improv performances? Not that it matters to the question of this thread - I'm only asking out of curiosity. Personally, like to fire up a drum loop on my Elektron boxes and noodle around on my other synths or my bass, but I never record them (I probably should, though). Usually, it's nothing other than playing for fun, exploration, and keeping up my chops, but they also sometimes result in the basis for a song idea that I will then quickly record into Logic for future use.

[zerocrossing]

When you guys are working DAWless, do you usually record them, or are they primarily one-and-done improv performances? Not that it matters to the question of this thread - I'm only asking out of curiosity. Personally, like to fire up a drum loop on my Elektron boxes and noodle around on my other synths or my bass, but I never record them (I probably should, though). Usually, it's nothing other than playing for fun, exploration, and keeping up my chops, but they also sometimes result in the basis for a song idea that I will then quickly record into Logic for future use.

That's how I used to work. Get a drum machine or some groove box working and start filling RAM buffers up in hardware audio loopers. Now I do exactly the same thing, but do it in a DAW environment. It started when I ordered a looper that did not do what the company's marketing and CEO said it would do. It was an expensive bit of kit... I think around $1,200. After a lot of back and forth and months of waiting for firmware updates, I got the company to take it back and issue a refund.

In its place, I bought a laptop and interface that was designed to be a stand-alone audio looper, powered by Mobius, a free plugin. It worked fine, but it was a bit clumsy. Then, another Mobius user remarked that it was sort of silly for me to be using a workstation keyboard as the hub of my setup, when the laptop could take over those duties if I ran the Mobius software as a VST inside a DAW. They were right. It was profoundly better than what I'd been doing. A short while later, circumstances forced me to go full ITB, and I really enjoyed the workflow. It was only later that I started putting back hardware instruments into my setup, but I focused on analog instruments, as during that time period (2005ish) analog emulations weren't that great. Now I keep them around because they still sound great and offer things that software doesn't do, or do as well. If push came to shove, I'd probably be OK to go back ITB, but there's nothing really pushing me to do that, so I'm happy with my hybrid setup.

(Mobius is back, btw, as a 64 bit plugin, and I've been getting back into it. Really great software.)

[ghettosynth]

When you guys are working DAWless, do you usually record them, or are they primarily one-and-done improv performances? Not that it matters to the question of this thread - I'm only asking out of curiosity. Personally, like to fire up a drum loop on my Elektron boxes and noodle around on my other synths or my bass, but I never record them (I probably should, though). Usually, it's nothing other than playing for fun, exploration, and keeping up my chops, but they also sometimes result in the basis for a song idea that I will then quickly record into Logic for future use.

For me, a part of the value is that I get away from turning on the recorder when I'm "ready." I use my mixer to just record everything, including the stereo performance track, turn on the recorder at the start of the session and then just jam. I take the SD card down to my DAW setup and then finalize. Sometimes that's nothing, sometimes that's quite a bit of work. If I'm just patching, I don't bother recording.

[zerocrossing]

The threads that talk about analog VS digital, software VS hardware almost always miss the point.

Very true. Saying that a computer isn't hardware is ridiculous. Sometimes I like to say, "is my UAD interface a hardware effects processor?" It's running plugin software, though it's designed to run on that specific platform. Now that they're porting their software in a native format, the line gets even more blurry.

What they're saying is that they don't like the configuration of that kind of hardware setup. That's fine. Everyone has their own ideas about how things should work, but to say that one way is inherently better than another is just silly. I have hardware that does things and makes certain types of sounds better than software, and software that does things and makes certain types of sounds better than hardware.

The immediacy of a hardware one control per function interface is great for performance.

To a certain contingency, this is very true, but there are people who are performance oriented that don't touch a knob on a synth during a performance. If it can't be done with a keyboard and an expression pedal, I'm not interested. It's just not how I think. My hands are for articulating notes, and in general, I need both. The exceptions to my rule are a Expressive E Touche and the Morphee pad on my PolyBrute, and those really don't see that much action in comparison to my Rise 49.

[justin3am]

For years I've been attempting to bring the immediacy of DAWless performance to a DAW centered environment. I've had varying levels of success. I want the experiencing of manifesting sound and music on the fly but I also want the ability to deeply edit the performance after the fact. This gets really tricky when you are playing with outboard synths and outboard processing.
One thing I learned early in my exploration is that if something isn't ready to use when inspiration strikes, it may as well not exist. It seems straight forward to connect gear so it's ready to us on the fly but what if you are stricken with the idea to reroute something... if you have inputs/outputs connected directly to interfaces, rerouting may take you out of the flow state. So a patch bay starts to make sense. Do you have more than one synth which is played from a keyboard? Using a master keyboard can make it easier to play multiple instruments from one position, but it adds complexity, now you're thinking about MIDI patch bays and splitting out performance data from system real-time data.
Each step in this direction leads to 4 more steps appearing which iterate the path in new directions. How do you solve the problem of recording dry and processed sounds at the same time? How to reamp though an effect chain that is being automated? There is more than one solution, each one requires a different approach to the gear you are using and they all have draw backs. Balance between ease of use and flexibility is difficult to maintain, with the more stuff that comes into play.

My upcoming release was written, recorded, edited and mixed on an all hardware setup, largely based on what I was using in the early 2000's. Performing everything through the big mixer and recording to hard disk recorders was so much fun and presented challenges which inspired me to try new things. The editing and mixing on the other hand.... Syncing MIDI sequencers to the hard disk recorder was a pain so, overdubs were limited. Editing on the Alesis HD24XR doesn't give you any visual representation of the waveform, so I was bouncing audio to my Octatrack, editing on it's little screen, and then punching that in to the original track. I'm glad I learned how to do this stuff back in the day but I'm glad to be working at my DAW again! At least when it comes to the aspects of production which are more deliberate and detail oriented.