Would You Not Buy A Synth Because It's Not Skinnable?

[pekbro]

I wonder if anyone would even be able to make a living from that. Anyway, the practical solution would be to make a tool via programming that can be used to build skins. *If you are not doing it
that way, then you are probably working way too hard.

[BONES]

I don't eat semen, so why on earth should I use shite product?

That's disappointing, I was sure I read on a toilet wall somewhere that you swallowed. I f**king love oysters, if for no other reason than Worcestershire sauce.

What I read here is that you allow your monitor to decide which plugins you will use, rather than choosing your plugins and finding a monitor that works for them. To me that is totally arse-about.

And thus stop choosing plugins after finding that monitor?

Well, I can't say I've ever had a plugin that wasn't useful on any of my monitors, because I choose my monitors sensibly. i.e. No scaling, everything at 100%, always. I had a Surface Pro a few years ago that had to scale everything to be usable but I got rid of it pretty quickly.

It's at this point ridiculous to think about running any resolution smaller than 1920x1080.

You have to remember that a lot of people would have still been using CRTs, which you could run at any ridiculous resolution your graphics card could manage. 2400x1600 wasn't uncommon on a 17" screen.

This sort of thing though is why I don't bother upgrading my monitors, it's obvious that anything over 1080p is a problem for certain plug ins, unless you're an owl.

Precisely! The issue is that if you are scaling everything, you are just using up graphics resources for no real benefit. Whilst that's a bigger problem for me with my work, it still means less battery life from your laptop.

And all 1080P screens are the same size in your universe?

If you are choosing your monitors correctly, they should be of similar apparent size. I run FullHD on my 13.3" ROG Flow Z13 without any problems. I'd want to get up to about 27" before I'd consider a higher resolution. But if I was using an external monitor, it would be further away from me so, as I said, apparent size would likely be similar. 1080p on my TV, which is about 2m away, also makes everything about the same apparent size as my laptop/tablet screens.

I do keep a 1080p monitor in my studio for plugins that are not scalable but I shouldn’t have to in what is soon going to be 2023. The majority of waves and Universal Audio plugins are not comfortable to use on my main screens which why I have transitioned away from those that aren’t. Plenty of fish in the sea and most plugins are pretty reasonably priced theses days. I’m hoping to ditch my 1080p monitor this year once I replace a few more plugins with alternatives that scale.

But, like THE INTRANCER, you are allowing your monitor to decide which plugins to use, which seems totally arse-about to me. Surely, like most of us, you put a fair amount of thought into the specs for your computer, to support what you want to use it for? Given that, why would you go with a monitor that restricts your options? You wouldn't go with a low-power processor or 4GB of RAM, so why go with the wrong monitor?

Above all, making music should be fun.

Why? It's art, it should be a struggle. If it's not, what is it really worth at the end of the day?

I don't think it's comparable to hardware, unless you're talking about the little displays some of them used to have. Having a tactile instrument in front of you that you can manipulate with both hands is way different than looking at something on the screen.

Maybe to you but not to me. And the reason is that you don't often have a hardware instrument "in front of you", unless you get up and move over to where it is. It's a lot more disruptive to your workflow. OTOH, when working ITB, you absolutely have it all right "in front of you", all the time.

IIRC bands like Tangerine Dream actually used to have people program their Synclaviers for them because it was so time intensive.

Depeche Mode do the same. The rest of us can only imagine what that would be like.

I'll add to my post that if someone is in the business of designing skins and not actually making music, then they will naturally consider skinning an essential thing for them. It's a completely different discipline from creating music which takes a lot of time, patience, knowledge, and skill. You can create a piece of music in a few hours, or a few days and be done. Creating music is very easy in comparison

In my experience it's the opposite. I could whip up a whole new skin for Orion in a day or two, it takes me 6 months or more to get a song to the point where I am happy with it. The original DUNE skin, for example, is something I whipped up in a few hours and refined as per Rich's wishes. It wasn't really hard or time-consuming at all.

which is probably why there are so few skin designers - (if it was easy every one would do it). It gets complex when you need to script GUIs (understanding how everything links together, the rules in what you can and can't do and how to do it) and in some cases work on the graphics as not all developers do things the same way.

It's not hard, it's just boring. I honestly don't know how I ever found the patience to do it, it was so repetitive and boring. I used to obsess over it but now I just hate the thought of having to do it. It's something I couldn't force myself to do today.

[kritikon]

It's quite a few years since I was in Sydney...they obvs don't clean those toilet walls very often.

[Synthman2000]

That's fair commentary I have no issue with it and understand it. Name 1 synth you don't use cause of the GUI. Personally I would use black on white or vice versa synth if it sounded great.

Something nice to look at is fine but I tend to respect the developers vision and the character they see fit for a synth. I refer back to hardware, layout and how it looks is something you just had/have to put up with.

Hive 2 is a synth I don't use due to the interface. Feels too cluttered for me. The only u-he synth I don't like for that reason. Cherry Audio's Dreamsynth and Sines were deleted from my system not long after I opened those interfaces. Just awful.

I don't think it's comparable to hardware, unless you're talking about the little displays some of them used to have. Having a tactile instrument in front of you that you can manipulate with both hands is way different than looking at something on the screen. IIRC bands like Tangerine Dream actually used to have people program their Synclaviers for them because it was so time intensive.

Oddly I like Hive GUI but it is a synth I do not own as I was not sold on the sound. Though I have many other u-He synths.

[3lu5iv3]

i prefer skinnable synths but non skinnable synths are okay if it's good.

[Synthman2000]

Here is a juxtaposition.. would you buy a synth even though the GUI is fiddly and tricky to navigate if it made you feel a certain way ? Like walking in the footsteps of others or futuristic or retro ?

Ease of use is not everything.

[THE INTRANCER]

Ease of use is not everything.

Ease of use can mean many things, but it's of paramount importance if you want a user to be able to understand and control what they have in front of them and have the expected results.

[vurt]

Here is a juxtaposition.. would you buy a synth even though the GUI is fiddly and tricky to navigate if it made you feel a certain way ? Like walking in the footsteps of others or futuristic or retro ?

Ease of use is not everything.

to a degree, yes id buy a less than immediate synth if the sound moved me
but if something is almost impossible to look at with giving me a headache, then i have to pass.
im quite happy with basic too, i use bidule, which isn't the most exciting thing to look at, but it does everything i need (i know it's not a synth per se, but first example that came to mind)

[BONES]

Here is a juxtaposition.. would you buy a synth even though the GUI is fiddly and tricky to navigate if it made you feel a certain way ? Like walking in the footsteps of others or futuristic or retro ? Ease of use is not everything.

For me, a really cool looking instrument GUI will definitely pique my interest. It will get me to at least try the demo version but, beyond that initial attraction, it won't hold much sway over my decision to buy it and use it.

GR-8 is a good example. It was a Dev Challenge instrument, along with dozens of others, that stood out because of the very slick looking GUI. So it was the first one I downloaded to try out. If the GUI had been less impressive, I may not have bothered with it at all but, as it turned out, the sound matched the looks and it is one of my most used instruments these days.

[Michael L]

Like walking in the footsteps of others?

This reissued 2009 synth connects me to The Footsteps of The Ancestors.
I give thanks for those who walked that path later to improve GUIs.
Without their teachings, I would have the false belief that GUIs are irrelevant.

krishna.jpg

[rod_zero]

I think I changed diva skin once I thought i was a waste of time, since it kind of breaks up the visual muscle you develop by using the synth, specially if you collaborate with people who don't use the skin.

the deal breaker is the quality of the GUI, and for how much I love u.he, repro tweaks page is a skeumorphic design nightmare.

[pixel85]

If GUI sucks (unreadable, eye-killing or unintuitive) I'm not buying it no matter how good it sounds.
As majority of synths doesn't have skins, I never bothered about having this option.

The only exception is Hive 2 because it's skinnable, but still, no matter what skin this synth has the most horrible GUI imo. I can deal with modular no problem amd with Hive I have to search with magnifier to find basic options (where tf I can shift phase of a sine wave?) I tried it again today and nope, I'm not gonna buy it because of GUI even that I like its sound. In Massive X I can do everything 100 times faster than in Hive 2.

[jamcat]

I'm not going to dork around with skins. Most I'll do is choose a dark colour scheme for my free Voxengo plugins.

But if I'm buying a plugin, it needs to have a professional GUI, and not place that burden on me.

[bambu]

I don't care about skins, i just need one to be usable or good to use, don't need shiny stuff and usually when plugins offer skins i stick with default

[sQeetz]

I don't care if it's skinnable. But I care if its original GUI looks nice. A lot, actually...
If it looks like s***, I don't care how good it sounds.