faetal on 3/11/2020 at 14:10
As with most things in life, it fucking depends.
I tend to put a bit of saturation and tape simulation on most of my soft synths and they sound great. My most used synth when writing is the Wavetable synth that comes with Ableton, and this is with a Prophet 6 and Virus TI (2 amazing and high price synths) on offer.
Synths are wonderful and I love them, but VSTs can be dragged straight into a project and keep their settings afterwards (I have to resort to using (
https://non-lethal-applications.com/products/snapshot) this when I include the Neutron, or any Eurorack stuff, as well as bouncing down to make sure I captured what I had in the moment).
That said, there is an x factor with having hardware you love. I find that having physical stuff I can
play with, means I spend more time in front of music equipment, which leads to me doing more actual music work. It warms me up and gets me ready to write. I also get a lot of stress relief from it. I can have a really busy 14 hour day at work, and after an hour of making patches on the P6, or putting together a useless but amusing wall of bloops with the modular, I'm good as new.
Go to a shop and try some out - it'll either grab you or it won't.
faetal on 3/11/2020 at 14:11
Quote Posted by Jason Moyer
I have a Mother-32 so the Werkstatt would probably be redundant, but it seems like a really nice synth. I dunno what Moog's secret is, but of the pile of analog kit I have their stuff easily has the best raw tone of anything.
True this. I paid €90 for Behringer's knock off of the Moog system 55 low pass filter, and I swear to god it just makes everything I put through it just sound so much more soulful.
demagogue on 3/11/2020 at 14:34
Speaking of physical systems, just in the last few days I guess it's the velocity control on my MOX8 keys somehow screwed up, so that maybe once every 50 or 100 hard hits or whatever, it weirdly either changes the voice or puts some kind of chorus on it. I don't really understand it. But it suddenly reminded me how completely dependent I am on the equipment working like it's supposed to. It's my workstation for almost everything I do musically, and one little thing puts it all in jeopardy.
It's kind of maddening. It's a bulky, expensive keyboard, and I know everything about it. So it's not easy to just quickly replace either. I've been trying to record a set of tunes too, so now I have half of them done, and it makes me worry trying to record the other half now. Since I can be 5 minutes into a perfect tune and suddenly the voice changes and it's ruined. =L
I guess it's just one more reason this year has been the fucking Chad of the new millennium.
PigLick on 3/11/2020 at 15:01
Having worked in music stores for the last 15 years I have played around with the real article a lot, and I love em, but the incredibly high price tag prevents me from actually owning any, so my only recording experience is with software.
faetal on 3/11/2020 at 17:17
I see it as worthwhile as good synths don't drop in value much over time if you keep them maintained as there will always be someone who wants them.
It makes our apartment a more interesting place to do leisure, plus I see it as my kids getting to inherit a decent music lab as soon as they are old enough to benefit, should their inclinations lean that way.
There are plenty of fun synths to be had for little money too. Werkstatt obvs, minilogue, bass station 2, Sirin / minitaur, Sub Phatty / little phatty, mother 32, erebus / nyx - and that's just off the top of my head.
It's also transformed my music too. I've owned synths since around 1997, but I've mostly not made my own sounds much (other than noise / esxperimental patches obtained by just fucking about with no clue), whereas since I decided to point my mid life crisis at synths, I've learned to use them properly and now almost all sounds I used that aren't sample-based are made from scratch. Feels more like an instrument rather than a sound making box that way.
Jason Moyer on 3/11/2020 at 19:35
Software is fine if you like working that way. You're not going to give up anything sound-wise. The appeal of hardware is generally the same as the appeal of a violin or a guitar or drums in that context though. Why learn to play violin when you have amazing sampled orchestral libraries now that sound as good as the real thing (and probably better if you don't know how to record one). Why play guitar when you're just going to run it through a modelling pedal/amp/software anyway. It's because sound quality isn't the only aspect of creatively expressing yourself with a musical instrument.
Aja on 3/11/2020 at 20:31
I don't think I could tell the difference between good software and good hardware in a blind test, so yeah, I'm thinking it's mostly about the physical interface (which for me is huge, though). I've always kind of wanted a Moog; the closest I have is a DIY low-pass filter (
http://yusynth.net/Modular/EN/MOOGVCF/index.html) based on this. I don't think mine works 100% the same as the original, but it has it a good sound.
demagogue on 10/11/2020 at 10:27
Alright, the creator (Brian Clevinger) of my beloved DAW Absynth, which is what I used to make a lot of the sounds I posted here if I didn't use CVC, has dropped a free demo of his latest creation, (
https://rhizomatic.xyz/index.php/downloadplasmonic/) Plasmonic, which is built around synthesizing the natural physics of sounds (like string plucks and wind chambers), so you can synthesize sounds that are both really alien but really organic at the same time. This is one of the DAWs I've been most hyped about, so I'll play with it and try to report on what I think.
faetal on 10/11/2020 at 11:46
Is that the correct use of DAW? I thought that only covered things ike Cubase, Abelton etc?
Cool news about the plugin though :) I do love some physical modelling.
demagogue on 10/11/2020 at 11:53
I am very ready to believe I've always used it incorrectly to refer to any synth app, probably because for a long time I recorded directly from apps like Abysnth and maybe sometimes imported the sound files instead of opening them directly in Cubase as a plugin and recording there, although today I record most things in Cubase.