Should we ditch VST/AAX instruments altogether?

[Uncle E]

This is fantastic.

[stoopicus]

This is fantastic.

Yeah I really really like them. Probably my favorite:

[CrystalWizard]

Yes ditch AAX and VST and just go with CLAP.

[Lbdunequest]

Wow guys you really love eating member berries, you sound like rambling grandpas. Have you ever thought that emotional link to the music and your youth is what makes you think that todays music is bad? Have you ever thought that its dificult to impress an old person with music because you already heard similar ideas in the past that impressed you and now its not much new? Old music is great ,not better or worse, but so is today's music.

[Daru925]

Fish are friends, not food!

In 20 years grandpas remembering fondly of the beauty, subtlety and poetry in skrillex dubstep that's been lost in the void. Now itchol' kwap! Back in my times we used REAL software, not this overpriced shitty emulation of the emulation that ott was.

tbf i dont connect much with todays electronic music, but i'm aware i'm biased.

Oh and hell no im not ditching vst and going ukelele in my toilet for recording authenticity, when i can finally afford a somewhat decent and fun to use orchestra, forever trapped in a plastic box. I agree with the hoarding part, but the other extreme is equally unappealing.

[woodsdenis]

“It doesn't matter if you are an 8 grade pianist, eventually when you record your performance via midi, you'll have even the smallest amount of latency (lets even say 2ms“
A moot point in the overall conversation, even if you recorded a live piano onto a digital medium there is still latency, a lot more than 2 ms in some cases. Analog is however different.

[Lbdunequest]

Back in my times it was better

In 20 years grandpas remembering fondly of the beauty, subtlety and poetry in skrillex dubstep that's been lost in the void. Now itchol' kwap! Back in my times we used REAL software, not this overpriced shitty emulation of the emulation that ott was.

tbf i dont connect much with todays electronic music, but i'm aware i'm biased.

Oh and hell no im not ditching vst and going ukelele in my toilet for recording authenticity, when i can finally afford a somewhat decent and fun to use orchestra, forever trapped in a plastic box. I agree with the hoarding part, but the other extreme is equally unappealing.

I did not said that whats in the quote...

[GeneralQ]

(English is not my first language, fyi)


It doesn't matter if you are an 8 grade pianist, eventually when you record your performance via midi, you'll have even the smallest amount of latency (lets even say 2ms).
And then you'll have two choices:
Quantizing, or leaving the performance as it is, with the tiny delay.
Each option will ultimately not be 100% identical to your original performance, as it could have been if it was recorded with a real piano via microphone, or with an external synth via direct audio signal.
When recording with midi, you are going to sacrifice some humanity in your performance, and any attached "fixes" are still mechanical in their nature and won't be 100% identical to your natural, instantaneous performance.


Lets admit it: modern music is mostly rubbish.

I think we reached an absurd time where we have companies that are excited to announce that their product "includes over 14,000 sounds!" or " a massive 600 GB of sounds and over 18,000 instruments" as if its a necessity to create music, and an endless amount of customers who are willing to fill in their credit card number in order to get their hands on another piece of code that produces sounds which the majority of it they'll never need, hear or use.

What kind of setup do you have that you don't get latency when you are recording your guitar with audio ? You will have latency with audio as well and most likely even more than with midi because it takes more computing power to process audio than it takes to process a few midi notes. So that argument doesn't make a lot of sense.

The 600GB of Ni Komplete (I guess you are referring to this) is because they heavily rely on multisampling to get those instruments to sound realistic. There are single pianos in there that have 30gb. In the future we might see physical modeling or additive synthesis replacing multisampling. What I don't understand in your argument is how the size of instruments is related to the quality of music from your perspektive.

The last thing I want to touch on is the "Modern music is all rubbish". This is something I only ever hear from 50+ year old people that stopped caring for music 30 years ago. Have you tried not listening only to the radio and maybe search for artists outside of the most popular mainstream ones ? There are millions of great artists these days creating great music across all genres ever known to mankind. But they will only get recognition from people that are passionate about music, because they don't have millions of marketing budgets.

[stoopicus]

In summary,

(...Should we ditch VST/AAX instruments altogether?...)

No, unless you're on a Mac; then yes, go with Audio Units instead.

[stoopicus]

What kind of setup do you have that you don't get latency when you are recording your guitar with audio ?

Excellent point. The speed of sound in air is about 34cm/ms. So, even Beethoven's closest audience members were suffering from about 10ms of latency

[BBFG#]

"millions of artists creating great music..." Well, definitely millions of people hacking things to call their own, but great is highly subjective and very questionable.
And most of it suppresses the better of it into obscurity.

Maybe the real question should be to ditch music forums to spend that time developing the talent and honing the skills instead.

[revvy]

Love modern music-making technology and new artists.

Also love old tech and old artists.

I love music and music-making.

[neverbefore]

“It doesn't matter if you are an 8 grade pianist, eventually when you record your performance via midi, you'll have even the smallest amount of latency (lets even say 2ms“
A moot point in the overall conversation, even if you recorded a live piano onto a digital medium there is still latency, a lot more than 2 ms in some cases. Analog is however different.

latency doesnt matter with live perfomance, consistency is what counts. There is latency in the transmission to the mic and noone cares because it is consistent. (Within reason, a latency of months would be very difficult to deal with on the other hand I have performed without really hearing what I am doing but only with feeling the finger action and that was fine - particularly within say a rock / pop setting - more sensitive classical guitar performance is another thing even tho transmission from the guitar to the body is important)

[egbert101]

People go on about latency but never earlency. Earlency is when the sound plays back before you press a key!

If you really love music then go ahead and dig down into the past, especially pop, soul r&b and all the stuff that isn't specifically electronic music, and you will realize that there was indeed something more within it than technique, production and expensive equipment.

Electronic music was great at the pioneering stages because of that cultural background, and is risible now because that cultural background is missing. Same reason why we don't go to the moon now, that we don't make good movies now, and there is no good art now.

Anyway, time to put on my slippers, smoke my pipe and read my newspaper!

[Deisss]

What kind of setup do you have that you don't get latency when you are recording your guitar with audio ?

Excellent point. The speed of sound in air is about 34cm/ms. So, even Beethoven's closest audience members were suffering from about 10ms of latency

On top of that, if that 2ms is stable over time, who cares, the performance remains exactly the same, most of the time below 50/100ms ish you will not be able to tell you've got a delay. And most recording setup can go very easily below that treshold nowadays.

Wow guys you really love eating member berries, you sound like rambling grandpas. Have you ever thought that emotional link to the music and your youth is what makes you think that todays music is bad? Have you ever thought that its dificult to impress an old person with music because you already heard similar ideas in the past that impressed you and now its not much new? Old music is great ,not better or worse, but so is today's music.

There is one point where this is vastly not true, modern music has shifted towards "small phrase, rememberable to the maximum" and that makes it very poor to a trained ear on classical music for example.
While I somehow disagree, because on the other side the complexity of the sound generator (synth or not) has vastly increased to compensate (and arrangement is also much better and complex), I also agree that modern music is overall poor on that point, to very poor, as a fact not what someone like or not.

Tho, if you dig a bit I can hear a lot of still very much good to great music being done today in about any genre.