Mark Mothersbaugh on Classic Hardware vs Software Emulations

[Seafire Mk2]

I've had to do it. Moving from Orion's 32 bit environment to a 64 bit host meant leaving behind my favourite ever synth, WaspXT, as well as all the VSTi I had made for myself in SynthEdit.

You didn't use the 64bit Orion?

[TechHaus]

You are very mad about the limbo thing, damn.

I’m not mad, I’m just amazed you thought that lame joke was a flex. You're like a toddler showing off a drawing that belongs on the fridge. Good job, buddy. So proud of you

Imagine being so desperate for a win that you have to convince yourself I'm 'mad' about a boomer-tier limbo joke. It’s genuinely hilarious how proud you are of that absolute swing-and-a-miss. Here’s your participation trophy for comedy, you tried your best

You're so mad you pulled out the millennial speak on me.

You keep swinging and missing. I absolutely love playing weddings, bar mitzvahs, dinner parties and everything else. I am certainly not embarrassed by it in anyway and most certainly don't try to hide what I do. In fact you wound even know I did that if I didn't openly talk about it. No one asks me to play the limbo, but I lost certainly would if requested.

If the check clears, I'm there, and the pay is fantastic. It’s pure comedy that you think doing what I love for great money is somehow a burn.

But I get it—when you have to grind out a standard 9-to-5 day job every week, seeing someone actually get paid to have fun and do what they love probably does make you project a little bitterness so I forgive you for your continued efforts to make fetch happen

Me partying after a hard week of working 9-5, while Ivy does what he loves.

[VOODOO U]

I get paid to cover other artists work and the person or venue paying me to do so also pays the artist

Ok. Ill give this venue the benefit of the doubt. But this person you speak of, you expect me to believe some dipshit neighbor paying you to sing Elvis is going to pay a licensing fee so the original songwriters get paid? I wasn't born out of some chickens ass yesterday so stop yapping like a f**king annoying Chihuahua. You're playing cover songs at private occasions and poor Madonna is not getting paid for your cover of shoo bee doo. And save your breath in explaining to me about "venues". It's not what I'm talking about and you know it.

No one is being a f**king thief.

As long as you get paid to perform another's work and refuse to compensate the original songwriter(s), you are a thief. And that is exactly what happens at weddings, bar mitzvahs, and your local laundromat bleach party.

Why are you advocating for a system that would pay artists and songwriters less?

Not sure what system you're talking about but less is better than nothing at all.

[_leras]

I don't know which other services show streaming numbers, but the album is a bomb on YouTube Music. And that's with like sooo much promotion - everyone wrote / talked about their album on every medium.

I hope people are buying physical vinyl copies of the BoC album so they can make a couple hundred grand off the hype, at least. They could make more in like 2-3 shows! (I have a few of their old records on vinyl so I supported).

The new BoC album Inferno?

I have no idea how well it's doing. I'm usually quite twice it or leave it with BoC,

but,

This is really a fantastic album. Maybe my favourite new electronic music released this year.

[dk9_beatz]

good post

[andrelafosse]

[legendCNCD]

Indeed. The KVR sauna. Where people go to work out their differences. Although the hostilities here point to the fact that the BONY-birds unification didn't go well. Perhaps a referee needs to be placed in the sauna to enforce the ground rules.

Actually... in Finland, many things are done in Sauna, one of them was back in the day, deals with other countries top men!

[BONES]

It's more that replacing the sound of some discontinued freebie from 2005 is just coming close, but the Memorymoog sounds exactly the same as it did in 1987 when I got it.

Has it got DCOs? But I thought the whole idea of a synthesiser was that you could make it sound like anything you want it to? The fact that my software doesn't sound like my old hardware is, overall, the best thing about it as far as I'm concerned.

Yep, again I was more referring to losing a certain sound, like your scenario with the Wasp, the Trinity goes with you to a new DAW, therefore you're good.

No, the Trinity was my DAW. An actual, real Digital Audio Workstation. And when i bought it, the workstation it replaced had to go to make room for it, just as the ESQ-M had to go to make way for the M1. Every time I bought a new piece of hardware, it had to replace at least two existing pieces of hardware. Those were the rules. Otherwise I'd be needing a warehouse to put it all in today. OTOH, I can easily have several hundred softsynths on my SSD, so I never need to sell an old one to make room for a new one. So for 15 years I had to change all my sounds on a fairly regular basis, the sounds were never that precious to me. I couldn't afford for them to be and I was always confident that Id' find something better in the ne synth than I'd been using previously. That didn't always work out but the songs did always manage to end up sounding better on the new rig, just a bit different here and there.

I have orders of magnitude greater continuity of sound working ITB than was ever possible working with hardware. Even with WaspXT and my SE synths, I may not be able to use any of them in Studio Pro but Orion still installs and functions perfectly, so they are not lost to me entirely. I've just moved on to bigger and better things, rather than being stuck in the past, afraid to move on.

... but samplers I just don't get why anyone would want to deal with hardware samplers?

I suppose it depends on the sampler. I had an ASR-10, it was really just a synth with sample memory. The Korg workstations were ROMplers, of course, so they took care of a lot of sample-based stuff that I'd use Kontakt libraries for today. And the Trinity could do multi-track recording, so it was a DAW in every way.

You didn't use the 64bit Orion?

Yeah, the move was more about VST3 than anything. We completed our 2020 album in both Orion and Cubase, using most of the same instruments, and then just picked the best versions of each song. We ended up with only two of the Orion versions making it onto the album, both making heavy use of WaspXT.

The reason I bought Bitwig was because it could host 32 bit plugins natively but it was such a shitfight that I decided in the end to make a clean break. Every time I open Orion these days, I hate it. There are so many clunky things in its workflow that I somehow managed to convince myself were OK at the time, but now drive me nuts in about 2 seconds. It's been way too long now for me to go back.

[IvyBirds]

I get paid to cover other artists work and the person or venue paying me to do so also pays the artist

Ok. Ill give this venue the benefit of the doubt. But this person you speak of, you expect me to believe some dipshit neighbor paying you to sing Elvis is going to pay a licensing fee so the original songwriters get paid? I wasn't born out of some chickens ass yesterday so stop yapping like a f**king annoying Chihuahua. You're playing cover songs at private occasions and poor Madonna is not getting paid for your cover of shoo bee doo. And save your breath in explaining to me about "venues". It's not what I'm talking about and you know it.

Oh, I see where the breakdown is happening now. You think you’re standing up for the "little guy" by demanding that songwriters get "paid what is due."
​That is adorable, but here is the reality check: you aren’t arguing that they get paid what is due. You are arguing that they should be paid for things they literally have no legal right to. You are demanding they be paid more than what is due.
​Let me break down this incredibly basic concept for you one last time:
​Songwriters, publishers, and PROs (ASCAP, BMI, PRS, etc.) sign contracts that explicitly outline exactly when royalties can be collected. The bedrock of those agreements—and global copyright law—is that creators are paid for public performances.

​They are not owed a dime for private life.
​When a family or individual hires a musician to play a song at a private backyard party or a closed wedding reception, no copyright has been infringed, and no licensing fee is generated. Under Title 17, Section 101 of the U.S. Copyright Act, the law explicitly protects the "normal circle of a family and its social acquaintances."

​By insisting that private gatherings magically require a license, you aren't fighting for artists' rights. You are inventing a fictional world where songwriters own a monopoly on what people hum in their living rooms.

​The artists themselves agreed to this system. The global licensing agencies set it up this way. The law codifies it. But please, carry on desperate for a "win," hallucinating fake laws, and demanding artists get paid for private events they have zero legal claim to. It’s a spectacular look for you.

As long as you get paid to perform another's work and refuse to compensate the original songwriter(s), you are a thief. And that is exactly what happens at weddings, bar mitzvahs, and your local laundromat bleach party.

Let me spell this out slowly for you: A songwriter cannot be stolen from if they never had the legal right to that money in the first place.

When songwriters sign up with ASCAP, BMI, PRS, or SOCAN, they grant those agencies the rights to license public performances only. The artists themselves explicitly agree to a system where private events—like weddings and bar mitzvahs—are completely exempt from licensing fees. By US law (Title 17, Section 101), a private circle of family and friends is not "the public."
The performer isn't a thief. The client isn't a thief. They are operating exactly within the legal framework the artists and the licensing boards created and agreed to. This is true all over the world not just in America

Lumping a private family event like a wedding in with a commercial laundromat just proves you’ve completely lost the plot. You can keep throwing a tantrum and screaming "thief" all you want, but your feelings don't rewrite federal law or the music industry's entire legal infrastructure.

Why are you advocating for a system that would pay artists and songwriters less?

Not sure what system you're talking about but less is better than nothing at all.

Oh, wow. "Less is better than nothing at all." Thank you for putting your absolute financial and administrative illiteracy on full display for everyone to see.
Let me explain the math here, since basic economics seems to be as foreign to you as copyright law.
Right now, the system uses blanket licenses for public performances. It is simple, it has minimal overhead, and because the administration costs are low, the maximum amount of money actually flows directly into the songwriters' pockets.
The fictional system you are advocating for—where licensing agencies would somehow have to track, police, and audit every single private wedding, backyard birthday, and bar mitzvah on earth—would require an army of investigators, lawyers, auditors, and administrators.
Do you think that massive corporate enforcement army works for free?
If a songwriter is owed $0 for a private event under the current law, and your brilliant idea creates a system that collects $50 but costs $100 in legal paperwork and overhead to chase down, the artist gets nothing. In fact, the ballooning overhead of trying to police private life would eat into the royalties they already collect from actual public venues.
So no, "less" is not better than nothing when your broken logic literally bankrupts the system and leaves artists with less than they are making right now.
But please, keep pretending you’re the champion of songwriters while actively cheering for a bureaucratic nightmare that would starve them out of their actual royalties. It’s truly a masterclass in confidently knowing absolutely nothing.

TL;DR: No one here supports the rights of artists and musicians more than I do, and I will always advocate for them to get paid every single cent they are actually due.
That is exactly why I strictly follow the law and the exact licensing and royalty system that the artists, songwriters, and PROs explicitly designed and agreed to. If you want to keep hallucinating a bloated, legally illiterate fantasy world where artists get screwed by massive administrative overhead just so you can pretend you "won" an internet argument, be my guest. The actual laws of reality aren't changing for you.

[sjm]

So not a fan of sequencers either then?

Not for live use by rock/pop bands absolutely not. It's no different than prerecorded tracks, especially if you are selling expensive tickets in arena tours

For someone like Tangerine Dream playing Berlin School on stage back in the day sure as they were using the sequencer as an instrument

In the studio as part of the songwriting and recording process sure they are a handy tool

This is a horrible uninformed post (as was the comment about Peter Hook/synth bass lines). What you are actually asking for is an inauthentic experience in some cases.

No I am asking for real musicians playing real music in a live setting. What's in authentic is paying for live music and having prerecorded tracks instead

One of the bands I grew up listening to as a teenager was Carter USM. You've probably never heard of them, but it's essentially a kind of pop punk band with 2 members. When they play live, it's those two members and no one else. They have 2 guitars and 2 mics. Everything else is pre-programmed synth parts in massive rack. The drums? Programmed on a drum synth. The bass? Programmed on another synth. The pads, the melodies? All pre-programmed synth playback.

And yet nobody has a problem with that. It's how they made the albums. They played the guitar parts, they sung the vocals, and they programmed everything else on a synth. In fact, that's The Sound(TM). Just like with the Peter Hook live bass lead over a sequenced synth bass.

So it's how the made the RECORD then not how it was performed live. Two guys played the guitar parts, they sung the vocals, and they programmed everything else on a synth. So why not have actual musicians then play everything else live? You know actual have live music ?

People are paying to see the band live, not some randos cluttering the stage playing parts that were never played by a musician in the first place.

Are they paying to see the band live? Or paying to hear prerecorded tracks. Because you are contradicting yourself. You seem to be advocating that they not get to see a band play live and yet you say they are paying for it. Ever think that's why no one has heard of those bands? Because when the general public goes to see live music they expect to see live music?

I'm not sure what you're confused about. There's musicians (the band members) playing live and backing tracks (the sequenced stuff created by the band members). You were complaining about exactly this, and I think it's a load of bollocks. It's sequencers used by rock bands to deliver the sound of the band. Why don't you try reading a post first, and then replying.

As for no one having heard of the bands, I said you'd not heard of them. Carter USM went to number one in the UK with their album. SoM never hit number 1, but still had albums and singles in the top 10. Just because you're ignorant of something doesn't mean everyone is.

[IvyBirds]

So not a fan of sequencers either then?

Not for live use by rock/pop bands absolutely not. It's no different than prerecorded tracks, especially if you are selling expensive tickets in arena tours

For someone like Tangerine Dream playing Berlin School on stage back in the day sure as they were using the sequencer as an instrument

In the studio as part of the songwriting and recording process sure they are a handy tool

This is a horrible uninformed post (as was the comment about Peter Hook/synth bass lines). What you are actually asking for is an inauthentic experience in some cases.

No I am asking for real musicians playing real music in a live setting. What's in authentic is paying for live music and having prerecorded tracks instead

One of the bands I grew up listening to as a teenager was Carter USM. You've probably never heard of them, but it's essentially a kind of pop punk band with 2 members. When they play live, it's those two members and no one else. They have 2 guitars and 2 mics. Everything else is pre-programmed synth parts in massive rack. The drums? Programmed on a drum synth. The bass? Programmed on another synth. The pads, the melodies? All pre-programmed synth playback.

And yet nobody has a problem with that. It's how they made the albums. They played the guitar parts, they sung the vocals, and they programmed everything else on a synth. In fact, that's The Sound(TM). Just like with the Peter Hook live bass lead over a sequenced synth bass.

So it's how the made the RECORD then not how it was performed live. Two guys played the guitar parts, they sung the vocals, and they programmed everything else on a synth. So why not have actual musicians then play everything else live? You know actual have live music ?

People are paying to see the band live, not some randos cluttering the stage playing parts that were never played by a musician in the first place.

Are they paying to see the band live? Or paying to hear prerecorded tracks. Because you are contradicting yourself. You seem to be advocating that they not get to see a band play live and yet you say they are paying for it. Ever think that's why no one has heard of those bands? Because when the general public goes to see live music they expect to see live music?

I'm not sure what you're confused about. There's musicians (the band members) playing live and backing tracks (the sequenced stuff created by the band members). You were complaining about exactly this, and I think it's a load of bollocks. It's sequencers used by rock bands to deliver the sound of the band. Why don't you try reading a post first, and then replying.

As for no one having heard of the bands, I said you'd not heard of them. Carter USM went to number one in the UK with their album. SoM never hit number 1, but still had albums and singles in the top 10. Just because you're ignorant of something doesn't mean everyone is.

Look, since reading comprehension clearly isn’t your strong suit, let me spell it out for you slowly: there is a massive difference between musicians actually playing live and glorified karaoke artists pressing "play" on a laptop. If I wanted to pay hard-earned money to sit in a room and listen to prerecorded, sequenced tracks, I’d stay home and listen to Spotify. People pay for live concerts to see human skill, spontaneity, and actual musicianship—not a band hiding behind a digital safety net because they can't replicate their own sound in real life. Calling that a "load of bollocks" just proves how incredibly low your standards are for live entertainment.
And your brilliant counter-argument is bringing up UK album charts from decades ago? Talk about a desperate, completely irrelevant pivot.
Using album sales to defend a cheap live performance is genuinely hilarious. Selling copies of a studio-engineered record has absolutely zero to do with whether a band can actually deliver an authentic, high-quality live experience on stage. A band could have ten number-one albums and still deliver a lazy, track-heavy, soulless concert that rips off the fans.
But please, keep aggressively defending mediocrity and corporate playback. Just because you're happy paying top dollar to watch people mimic a computer screen doesn't mean the rest of us have to accept a cheapened experience.

[sjm]

Look, since reading comprehension clearly isn’t your strong suit,

Rich coming from the guy who couldn't comprehend what I wrote last time Is your live gig a comedy act?

People pay for live concerts to see human skill, spontaneity, and actual musicianship—not a band hiding behind a digital safety net because they can't replicate their own sound in real life. Calling that a "load of bollocks" just proves how incredibly low your standards are for live entertainment.

What you call "people", everyone else calls "IvyBirds". Take a moment to see if you can spot the difference. You are one person, split personality disorder or not.

And your brilliant counter-argument is bringing up UK album charts from decades ago? Talk about a desperate, completely irrelevant pivot.

Which invalidates it how? Because it never happened? Because people didn't enjoy the gig? Or because turd-slinging helps mask your embarrassment at being ignorant? What's your point exactly?

As a side note, the last two SoM gigs I went to (all pretty recent) had thousands in attendance.

Using album sales to defend a cheap live performance is genuinely hilarious. Selling copies of a studio-engineered record has absolutely zero to do with whether a band can actually deliver an authentic, high-quality live experience on stage.

Ah, we're back to the winning "IvyBirds can't read argument". Did I write that, or did I respond to your point that nobody had ever heard of them. I would suggest that it's hard to be number when nobody has heard of you or your music. You might buy music blindly, but that's probably not what most of us here do.

But please, keep aggressively defending mediocrity and corporate playback. Just because you're happy paying top dollar to watch people mimic a computer screen doesn't mean the rest of us have to accept a cheapened experience.

You are free to find it a cheapened experience. Personally, I don't see the point of raising concert prices just so some randos can try and replicate the machine precision of a sequencer for no benefit beyond satisfying your purity points. Given that none of the attendees cared, why do you think they need you to act as their spokesperson arguing for an experience that they couldn't give a hoot about. Nobody is forcing you to step outside your blinkered world and embrace other types of music. But please don't appoint your self as some kind of arbiter as to what is and what isn't a worthwhile experience for others. It's your inability to see past your oversized ego and realise you aren't the only person in the world that is the reason you end up posting such drivel all over KVR, degrading the experience for everyone else. Why are you on a one man mission to demonstrate Dunning-Kruger in action?

[machinesworking]

It's more that replacing the sound of some discontinued freebie from 2005 is just coming close, but the Memorymoog sounds exactly the same as it did in 1987 when I got it.

Has it got DCOs? But I thought the whole idea of a synthesiser was that you could make it sound like anything you want it to? The fact that my software doesn't sound like my old hardware is, overall, the best thing about it as far as I'm concerned.

OK you're fücking with me here! You're contradicting your own conclusion even.

Yep, again I was more referring to losing a certain sound, like your scenario with the Wasp, the Trinity goes with you to a new DAW, therefore you're good.

No, the Trinity was my DAW. An actual, real Digital Audio Workstation. And when i bought it, the workstation it replaced had to go to make room for it, just as the ESQ-M had to go to make way for the M1. Every time I bought a new piece of hardware, it had to replace at least two existing pieces of hardware. Those were the rules. Otherwise I'd be needing a warehouse to put it all in today. OTOH, I can easily have several hundred softsynths on my SSD, so I never need to sell an old one to make room for a new one. So for 15 years I had to change all my sounds on a fairly regular basis, the sounds were never that precious to me. I couldn't afford for them to be and I was always confident that Id' find something better in the ne synth than I'd been using previously. That didn't always work out but the songs did always manage to end up sounding better on the new rig, just a bit different here and there.

OK I hear you, yes there are literal physical limits to hardware to those of use without buttloads of money and warehouse space.
So we're talking different issues here, I'm talking things like being able to revisit old or unfinished songs, in that scenario a SysEx patch for a hardware synth and a DAW on a computer would pretty much survive for decades.

I have orders of magnitude greater continuity of sound working ITB than was ever possible working with hardware. Even with WaspXT and my SE synths, I may not be able to use any of them in Studio Pro but Orion still installs and functions perfectly, so they are not lost to me entirely. I've just moved on to bigger and better things, rather than being stuck in the past, afraid to move on.

You're DAW hopping here as an example, I've been using DP with minor excursions to Live etc. since the 90's. So it's more about something like the Pro53 patch not being replicable in another soft synth perfectly VS not having access to the MIDI and audio from a sequencer.

... but samplers I just don't get why anyone would want to deal with hardware samplers?

I suppose it depends on the sampler. I had an ASR-10, it was really just a synth with sample memory. The Korg workstations were ROMplers, of course, so they took care of a lot of sample-based stuff that I'd use Kontakt libraries for today. And the Trinity could do multi-track recording, so it was a DAW in every way.

Sure I was talking about using an Akai or Emax even. They do sort of have a sound but the hassle of using them is just not worth it IMO. In around 2000 when I started recording on the computer more so than soft synths it was obvious that computers were vastly superior to hardware in terms of sample mangling.

[IvyBirds]

Personally, I don't see the point of raising concert prices just so some randos can try and replicate the machine precision of a sequencer for no benefit beyond satisfying your purity points. Given that none of the attendees cared,

How do you know none of the attendees cared? Did you ask each and everyone of them that? Or do you think that just because you didn't care no one else should either

And what about all the people who weren't there? The people who bought the record and took it to #1 as you said but decided not to buy a ticket? Did you ask all of them if they care or not?

Finally did you ask the band? Towards the end of the career they did exactly what I am suggesting and added a drummer and a keyboard/synth player so even the band blows up your narrative