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

[DJErmac]

Yes, I was thinking about another man I deeply respect while posting.

Aaah, Mr. Jarre. I had the pleasure to seeing him live

No way !!!!
He’s one of the artists, along with Vangelis, who made me believe in electronic music when I was still a child in the 80’s.
A Jarre show is in no way a simple music concert, it’s something unique, insanely visual, where synths rule the world for a couple of hours (and for a significant hundred of dollars also...)...

[vurt]

i saw him back in the 80s, my uncle took me.

[cryophonik]

OK, so on a different, but closely related topic: total recall.

How important is it to you? For me, it's certainly convenient and I use it for all my soft synths and effects, but don't even care about it for hardware synths, which get the majority of the duties in my music. I usually treat my h/w synths the same I'd treat vocals, bass, guitar, or any other outboard instrument in that I usually dial in what I want and bounce it straight to audio. That said, when I'm playing a part live and tweaking parameters, I'll usually record the MIDI along with the audio so that I can go back and tweak the MIDI, maybe add some other automation, etc. and re-bounce it as needed, but I do that in one sweep, save the audio, archive the MIDI, and move on. No total recall needed.

[DJErmac]

i saw him back in the 80s, my uncle took me.

Lucky you !

Well, Jean-Michel Jarre praised Spectrasonics Omnisphere. Even if everybody knows him for vintage analog stuff, with signature sounds coming from Elka Synthex or Eminent-310, this guy is still following digital development.

And to my personal view this is exactly how we should behave with sound stuff : embrace evolution. Species who never evolve generally disappear. Does it mean throwing analog to thrash ? What for ? If it’s still useful for something, if it works well for something, then use it. Just like we’re still using things that were created ages ago. I believe cars are still using wheels. How we’re being clever with our choices is how long we will last and be able to claim the top. The on-stage patch recall is an example indeed. But no need to be fast in studio. Use your brain.

[vurt]

i saw him back in the 80s, my uncle took me.

Lucky you !

tbh, i hated it and was bored.
i was a 14 year old metal head at the time, so didnt appreciate much of it.

as to the thread, yup, do what thou wilt.
patch recall is great, if youre in the kind of band that plays "hits" with signature sounds, most things though, if its a bass part, a bass patch will work, no one is gonna complain you used a triangle instead of a square, as long as it throbs
If they pulled out laptops and not a table full of weird delays and other fx, id be quite disappointed. as its part of their sound to be a bit chaotic and never quite the same.
but if its an act where the kb player is using a laptop as a sound engine, thats fine.

[Uncle E]

One patch per synth:

[DJErmac]

i saw him back in the 80s, my uncle took me.

Lucky you !

tbh, i hated it and was bored.
i was a 14 year old metal head at the time, so didnt appreciate much of it.

Sorry to hear that. You had an abusive uncle. Taking a metal head to a Jarre concert must be deeply shocking as a kid. Jarre never got that Motorhead vibe right.

[crimsonwarlock]

No way !!!!

Yes way

He’s one of the artists, along with Vangelis, who made me believe in electronic music when I was still a child in the 80’s.

Seeing Jarre on TV late seventies made me decide to build my own synthesizer (as buying one was completely unfeasible at that time). I never got to see Vangelis live , but I did see Klaus Schulze live in the eighties.

[BONES]

It was stated as fact that "Analog without recall is faster than Synths with recall", you are making the assumption that only meant specific locations and circumstances that were not shared

You can do that when you make the effort to get to know people.

I can also point out that recall in the studio is faster. I can also point out that recall in your living room is faster, I can also point out that patch recall on a rocket ship heading to another galaxy would be faster

Again, you're making assumptions. If all you need to do is change one switch - saw to pulse - or turn one knob - cutoff or resonance, maybe - to get the next sound, it will be just as quick as changing patches.

It's easy to work within boundaries if the need arises. With the Rocket in Germany, that came purely out of rehearsal, when I realised it wasn't going to be any slower to repatch the synth between songs than it would to use a softsynth with the correct patch pre-loaded by the DAW. It made the process feel a little more organic, more authentic, which was enough to make it worth doing. All upside, no downside. Even today I'd take the Rocket on tour over the Uno, Analog Keys or MicroMonsta. It's just more fun and feels worthwhile, where a synth with patch memory feels unnecessary, like I may as well just use a plugin. To be clear, I'd never buy a serious hardware synth without patch memory but there are definitely occasions when it's not going to slow you down in the studio or on stage.

The only thing I truly despise is the snobbism in gear

x100

and that was one of the things that kept me from buying the original OP1 in the longest.

The Teenage Engineering thing? I don't know what prices are like where you live but they are absurdly expensive here, which means I've barely looked at them over the years. And I f**king hate the way Elektron stuff works. I see no point, no advantage, in trying to reinvent the wheel. I don't want to have to read every word in a manual any more, I just want to get on with it.

What works works.

Amen to that.

They usually have the Layout of a SH-101 or a Juno or have 2 oscillators with a Saw, Square and a triangle waveform, 1 filter, 1 Lfo and 1-2 Adsr envelopes and even the Model D with 3 oscillators is so simple to use that Presets are not needed.

You're making me take IvyBird's side and I f**king hate that! You try patching a Model D on stage between songs and see how long it feels like. And you'll never get it just right, it will always be kinda, sorta the right sound. You need a synth that's easy to work with and I'd suggest the SH101 is about as hard as you'd want to make it on yourself on stage or even in a studio. The Ropcket works for me because of the way it's designed. There are two knobs that have a huge effect on the timbre and you set those to cardinal points to get what you want - 0-50 controls, 51-75 is something else and when you twist all the way around you get 8 voice unison. It's quick and easy enough that you can do it during the intro to the next song. Beyond that, though, it just gets too complicated.

If you know your synths well enough it takes less time to create the sound you want compared to browsing thru 100s of presets in hope that you will find the perfect one

That's a very specific situation and one that, honestly, never comes up for me. I don't often know what sound I want, I'm always looking for something that will work. Sometimes it's faster and easier to go through a bank of presets, at other times it might be easier to patch it from scratch. But once you find the right sound, you want to be able to reproduce it easily, whenever you want to play the song you made it for and a preset is almost always going to be way more convenient for that.

[IvyBirds]

[
Again, you're making assumptions. If all you need to do is change one switch - saw to pulse - or turn one knob - cutoff or resonance, maybe - to get the next sound, it will be just as quick as changing patches.

No it won't and even then you are taking about the absolute most simple synth possible. this is not an assumption

But hilarious you have done from it being faster to now being just as quick, and that is only if you don't overshoot anything. If I recall a patch everything is EXACTLY where I want it to be. If I am turning a knob on a the cutoff of resonance it's pretty easy to either over or undershoot that, which means I have to test it, which means that test is either going through the front of house PA, or I have to mute the mix going to FOH and just listen in my monitor and then unlute that. If something is off I have to readjust

It's easy to work within boundaries if the need arises. With the Rocket in Germany, that came purely out of rehearsal, when I realised it wasn't going to be any slower to repatch the synth between songs than it would to use a softsynth with the correct patch pre-loaded by the DAW

Wait you mean it wasn't faster? And it should take less than a fraction of a second to switch your patches in a live setting, I can do it so fast it's not noticable and is down to milliseconds, if it taking you longer than that for you, then you are doing it wrong

But thanks for admitting that even with the most basic synth possible it still wasn't faster

Switching patches in a live set with software should be so fast you can do it on the fly I the middle of a song as you go from intro to verse to bridge to chorus, that's one major advantage with software, and I am not just switching presets on multiple synths in a few milliseconds but also splits and MIDI channels coming from the controller

[DJErmac]

Music <=> Rules
Work so much together that we all simply need to follow an online tutorial to make a hit.
Just listen to AI music if you’re doubting that...

[wikter]

Plugin technology has advanced enormously. We now have highly accurate analog emulations as well as innovative tools that offer entirely new possibilities. With that in mind, 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?

The answer is the same since the first virtual instrument I tested around 1997: they're all instruments. Use them. Make music, have fun or enjoy collecting. Acoustic, electric, Analog, digital, virtual... Who cares?
Good night.

[wikter]

If there's one thing I've noticed from Internet discussions, it's this: If you don't have a real 1928 Steinway, a hardware 1965 Moog synthesizer, a 1954 Stratocaster through a Dumble amp, a boutique handmade 5 string bass, a string section with all Stradivarius level instruments all going through the most expensive Neumann mics into an SSL G console connected to a room full of old rare compressors, EQs and reverbs and recorded at Abbey Road onto tape, your music will suck.

Your sound may suck. Ask Bruce Springsteen about Nebraska sound. Then, learn about marketing.

[BONES]

There’s an easy workaround : one patch per synth. If you need 35 different patches live, simply bring 35 synths with you. No need to repatch anything live, simply run everywhere on stage. Easy !

AKA, the Rick Wakeman solution. Of course, the other thing people used to do was use the same sound over and over, just like everyone else in the band. When I first started playing live, I'd set up my Axxe for bass and I would use that same patch for the whole set. Nobody cared, why would they? It's only in more recent times that people have become used to dialing in a different patch for every occasion but it's mostly our own vanity, nobody listening to the music will care.

For example it's pretty much impossible to turn a simple single VCO or DCO synth into a multiple oscillator, modulation powerhouse

There are other solutions, though. Have a look at the Rocket to see what I mean - it's ostensibly a single oscillator monosynth but it can do Hard Sync and 8 voice unison. You can reduce complexity to something that's much easier to work with. The fact that Rocket never achieved much, sales-wise, though, would suggest that people probably aren't interested in that, which is a shame.

really simple to turn the powerhouse synth into a basic synth, where you have everything turned off but a single oscillator, a basic envelope or two, maybe a single LFO and a basic filter

That was the original idea behind DUNE's GUI - a simple synth with all the controls right in front of you, with complexity available under the hood when you need it. Interestingly, it was also the thinking behind the way the ARP Odyssey is laid out - they wanted something that would be quick and easy to repatch on stage. Once you get your head around the layout, you can see how that might work. Of course, that was something you did in 1979 because you had to, not because it was the best way imaginable to do it. Once synths like the OB-X and Prophet V hit the scene, nobody wanted to know about their old synths anymore. Patch recall was a revolution. I still love my Rocket, though, for the exact reason that it's not a 1979 solution to a problem, it's very much a 21st Century take on simplicity.

Yes, I was thinking about another man I deeply respect while posting.
jean-michel-jarre-performs-in-monte-carlo-harbour-monaco-as-part-of-G4D3NW.jpg

I had no idea who that was until I saw his name in the image file name. Seriously, no f**king clue. I was actually thinking it might be the dude from Genesis or something. I know who he is but I think the only one of his songs I'd actually recognise is the one he wrote for Sweet.

All that stuff - JMJ, Vangelis, etc. - sounds so anodyne to me, it's just generic electronic music from the 70s. It was all so completely swamped by Punk that, to all intents and purposes, it ceased to exist down here. For me, the only real standout form that scene is Giorgio Moroder - Midnight Express and I Feel Love really stand head and shoulders above the other stuff in my mind and always have.

OK, so on a different, but closely related topic: total recall.

Which one? Paul Verhoeven's original or the remake? Or Dick's short story?

patch recall is great, if youre in the kind of band that plays "hits" with signature sounds, most things though, if its a bass part, a bass patch will work, no one is gonna complain you used a triangle instead of a square, as long as it throbs
If they pulled out laptops and not a table full of weird delays and other fx, id be quite disappointed. as its part of their sound to be a bit chaotic and never quite the same.
but if its an act where the kb player is using a laptop as a sound engine, thats fine.

^^^^^^^^ THIS ^^^^^^^^^

[BONES]

No it won't and even then you are taking about the absolute most simple synth possible. this is not an assumption

More assumptions. Even complex synths have switches and knobs. Most of the parts I play live are really just variations on a few themes, so going from one song to another might only involve a slight tweak to the filter or a simple adjustment to an envelope or modulation depth. Even having to do all three is the work of a few seconds and becomes as much muscle memory as remembering where the keys are without having to look.

If I recall a patch everything is EXACTLY where I want it to be.

Except the knobs and switches on the synth's interface. That's why I sold my Korg Minilogue and Monologue - the patch memory became more effort than it was worth. I definitely prefer my analogue synths with digital interfaces. A matrix style interface, which I first experienced on Yamaha's CS1x, is definitely the way to go with hardware synths. Interestingly, Rocket and CS1x are the only synths I've ever sold and then had to re-buy when I realised how much I missed them.

If I am turning a knob on a the cutoff of resonance it's pretty easy to either over or undershoot that, which means I have to test it, which means that test is either going through the front of house PA, or I have to mute the mix going to FOH and just listen in my monitor and then unlute that. If something is off I have to readjust

Easily done when you start playing the part - get it close and then make fine adjustments as you go.

I can do it so fast it's not noticable and is down to milliseconds, if it taking you longer than that for you, then you are doing it wrong

I tended not to do it at all, I let the sequencer take care of it most of the time and that did, indeed require longer than just doing it myself, as I had to load the next song, then wait for the sequencer to hit the patch change message. Much quicker to just do it myself during the outro to the previous song.

Switching patches in a live set with software should be so fast you can do it on the fly I the middle of a song as you go from intro to verse to bridge to chorus, that's one major advantage with software, and I am not just switching presets on multiple synths in a few milliseconds but also splits and MIDI channels coming from the controller

That will depend on the instrument. Try switching patches in Kontakt and see how quick that is with a big sample library. There are quite a few others that can be a bit tardy, too. Same with hardware, of course. If I need to play two different sounds in a song, I'll use two different controllers or, rarely, use a key split. And I'll use two instances of the instrument, changing patches is a very archaic way of doing things.