interesting, i wasn't aware they reached such a point like playing with real robots while behind the scenes, to me it's a total scam but you can bet the kraftwerk freaks will keep paying big bucks to their heroes, kraftwerk is a Cult at this point.

i've been a big fan of them when i was young, up to Man Machine at least, too bad they got lost along the road.

laptops : sure, they're just a tool, but at this point it can pretty much be the only tool in your bag along with your keyboard so it's quite a different story.

you're totally right in your reasoning about laptops not being a musical instrument etc, all i can add is that this is true for a beginner but once we talk about laptops in production/studio situation we're forced to think about workflows and finished products and therefore the need for a solid digital setup is obvious and totally justified or at least it will for the mix engineer who's transforming the raw song made by a band into a finished polished product, either way there's no way to avoid Digital in 2017.

sure so much people feel more at ease with wood and iron instead of laptops and plugins, but ultimately is it our business ? no, frankly not at all ... sure when i was young i had a kind of religious attachment to my gear and they were mostly analogs by the way, but one day i finally accepted i had to move on and sort my priorities, if you're good at something you'll be good also on a laptop, and if you dont then you better double check if you were good in the first place .. i've done good things even on a 50$ two octaves keyboards if that matters .. and many songs mixed only on headphones .. so what ? of course my workflow is my workflow and not yours or anybody else but really we're not talking about rocket science.

indeed the journey is the real Trip, but ultimately you will want to release a product instead of collecting a bunch of rough ideas and draft songs.

i remember fondly just a few years ago i needed a whole room for all my gear, expensive stuff to make stuff that today i can do for free with a few clicks on a laptop, i'm SOOO amazed at the progress in audio technology, we must be grateful to live in such a time in history instead of being scared and going back to Moogs and Jupiters.

look, i totally regret selling my analogs too ... i also had a huge amount of old comic books when i was young, and tons of Legos, and two Arcade cabs, and a couple vintage scooters, all worth a lot of money now but all sold for a pittance and/or for lack of space .. and now i regret, yes, i would love to play with my synths now but seriously for how long would i play them ? soon, very soon i would get bored by the analogs, i would take them for granted, and ultimately i would pack them up and sell them again because they're a thing of the past and of my past, i dont wanna live forever in the past, this stuff belongs to museums and collectors, i mean do you expect me to play Jupiters and Juno for the next 50 years ? no way, i'm all for constant change for the better, the whole role of technology is to make our lives easier and better, i totally embrace technology with open arms, analogs are dead and forgotten as far as i'm concerned.

everybody here is excited at the idea of integrating an analog in their setup, i'm excited at slimming down my setup to the bone, i can already produce with a laptop on a table and a small keyboard and a good pair of headphone, i could fit it all in a laptop bag and make music on the top of a mountain and this was not possible just 10 years ago, what can i ask more ?
see, to each his own.

 

Unless the mind/spirit is quantum? ;)

 

I bought a little analog synth recently,i m happy with it , it brings me some inspiration
Is this what it's all about
I love spire
And serum but can't use serum in livegigs,too cpu ungry when sending program change
Some friends are all hardware purists , sounds like vegan to me, they are always in the search of the definitive config
I like to play with some ergonomic hardware. and the power and of vst mapped to controllers
A synth like spire will be unafordable for me and i use two instances for my liveset
I wish i could find another synth like an used dsi for exemple to complete the palette evolver please!
If you want to produce sell and so on, go on vst, but if you're in a musical view try everything that could increase creativity and relationship with your live audience

 

Well. There you are then. Might not be so favourable if you had to pay for all the stuff you use.

If I want something different then, I record samples, or pull them off the net and hit them with FX, and load them into the sample player. I'd rather stick to somewhat smaller drives.

I was thinking more on the lines when your OS supersedes the vst, and it doesn't work anymore, not the sounds. There are no obsolete sounds, just old ones.

Millions of people around the world discover old sounds for the first time every day and love them. Forget your obsession with it has to be a new sound, it doesn't.

When hardware manufacturers start trying to emulate VST's instead of the other way round, and remember that at the end, you still need to convert to analog to hear it.

 

if i had to pay for all my software i would probably end up using free plugins or making my own plugs, of course they would never sound as good as commercial plugs but i would find a good compromise, after all we tend to use cracked apps just out of lazyness, if we were serious in our quest for the ultimate audio setup there's a shitload of free stuff that sound "good enough", i mean enough for publishing commercial tracks at least, the only requisite is being a power user.

on old sounds : since sounds are the backbone of a song, limiting your sound to old/classic sounds is hardly the best option if you want to make "modern" stuff, can you make a SuperSaw on a Juno or a Moog ? no .. and neither you can do sounds like a Nord Lead or a Virus .. see what i mean .. you'll be stuck in classic sounds ... and while everybody like classic synth sounds they've been already heard a million times and add nothing to your song in the end, they're evergreen but not as evergreen as a good piano or a vintage guitar.
would i use the synth sounds you find in the early Jean Michel Jarre songs ? probably i would keep just 30% of them, but the others noo, they sound ridicolous today especially the sweeps, the german electronic of the 70s instead is still very evergreen and sounding great, big difference ! disco music sounds are hit or miss, 50% are still good, but then again do you really need a 3000$ analog synth to get those sounds ? any soft synth can do them, they're the bread of butter of any synth plugin actually.

talking about wavetable synthesis, it's funny nobody mention it, they always praise subtractive synthesis, maybe because a vintage PPG Wave won't come with knobs and sliders ?
and what about a real Fender Rhodes ? not enough knobs ? and still it's probably the most classic evergreen sound of the 70s along with the Hammond, but ohh noo everybody is salivating at Junos and Jupiters.

yes, millennials are now re-discovering classic synth sounds and while they're at it they're also glorifying out of proportion the 80s in general which is something that just doesnt make any sense to me and anyone else who lived and enjoyed the 80s in first person, it must be that modern music is so bad they're forced to look back to the 80s just as me and others look back at the 70s for rock and funk ?

i might be obsessed with modernity but think about this : if you heard the same stuff for decades will you want to hear it again for the next decades again and again ? i dont think so .. when you'll be a bit older you'll probably agree on this, it gets boring to listen to a million tracks with classic juno and 808/909 sounds, trust me.

hardware manufacturers are stuck in their little market niche, at best they add some oscillators and poliphony and built-in FX, that's what they always did, or they revamp small monophonics at premium price, see the success of the Moog Mother.

 

like vegans ? HAHAHAHAHA exactly !

 

What about acoustic instruments like guitars, pianos and cellos and drums etc then? they have been making the same sounds forever... does that mean they are not relevant and cannot make interesting or modern music today?

Of course not. The sound that an instrument makes is not as important as how it is played/used.

 

acoustic instruments are used every day for contemporary music but they dont pretend to be "new", they're all locked into their respective musical niche.
piano is universal and used everywhere, guitar is hardly found in electronic music, acoustic drums are rarely heard in Electronic and EDM in particular.

i use many libraries to make acoustic sounds, if we talk about synth bass i probably use many "classic" synth bass but there's a catch : they never sound 70s or 80s after they go thru my FX chain, i wouldnt like too much the raw unprocessed classic sound.

where the melody is king, yes the sound is of secondary importance.
where the sound is king, viceversa .. simple as that .. i made some songs with minimal melody where the sound is the most important factor, in that case it must be carefully chosen and FXed.

as far as i'm concerned FX are so important today that they should be seen as a musical instrument, they way you can totally change or revamp a boring sound is incredible and cannot be done on analog unless you spend a lot of money for nothing.

if you ask me, FX are the very reason to go Digital, sounds are dime a dozen.

 

I don't use just classic sounds, as I use sounds that I feel match the song I'm composing at the time. As my style is somewhat lo-fi and clunky, those are the kinds of sound I tend to use, whether the be old or new, analog or digital. It's what you're doing with them that matters in the end.

I think I may have in an earlier post, but wave table isn't the same as subtractive though, as it relies more on morphing.

But you're comparing apples and oranges. Rhodes and Hammonds aren't synths; Junos and Jupiters are.

Icould listen to the UK top 40 from any time in the 80's, except maybe the Christmas period and not skip through to many songs, and not be bored. I don't I could get through this weeks top ten without wanting to turn it off.

Maybe you should try broadening your scope of listening then.

Supply and demand, If the demand is there. While software manufacturers spend most of their time trying to emulate the sound of hardware.

 

This was the first synth I ever bought, with money i earnt doing 2 paper rounds and working in a shop while I was at school.

 

this thing looks super fun

 

Sounds pretty good too!

 

Would love to have one again.

 

Ha, beat you!

 

hahaha i remember that .. i played it in a music store decades ago, the italian synths were pretty popular for a while due to their lower price but they had nothing to envy from the major brands, the Elka Synthex was used by all the top electronic musicians for instance.

 

yes, what matters is what you do with sounds, but then again .. my bread and butter is Omnisphere and for serious things i use Reaktor and other specialist plugins, how could i ever be impressed by 80s synths ? cannot, what i can do with Digital is just unlimited, hardware synth dont even come close.

and price is not such an issue, i've almost only cracked apps but i would't mind paying 500$ for Omnisphere or Reaktor, they're worth every dollar.

Wavetable is not very popular because of its complexity but it's well worth the effort !

Rhodes and Hammond are electro-mechanic, not synths, but so what ? they're big and heavy and vintage, i'm surprised nobody here talk about rhodes and hammond.

UK top 40 in the 80s was so full of mega hits, it's incredible how much great music came out, i was glued to the radio every day, the standards were so high compared to today's crap !
i'm not surprised many young guys look at the 80s as the best era for music, in many ways it was unique and will never come back.

i'm totally against plugins who keep emulating old stuff, they should look forward instead, there are many amazing new FX coming out, who gives a shit about the umpteenth emulation of old compressors and EQs ?? each week i see a new EQ or compressor, what the fuck ? there are probably 2-300 commercial EQs already, i stick with Fabfilter out of lazyness, i wouldnt have time to try them all.

 

there's one on Ebay for 300$ in germany :

http://www.ebay.com/itm/Analog-Synh...612693?hash=item3f7702d015:g:kkgAAOSwB-1YvYsJ

 

If anyone can point me to a K Station with international shipping, please do, i've always wanted one

 

@Averell
I do not believe you were there really. You keep referring to analogs as the 80s synths. The 80s may have seen seen a few analog synths released but mainly it is known for the advent of the digital synths,samplers and MIDI. The 70s was the analog decade by far. Every second phrase you write is either misinformed or biased from what seems as a 20smthng yo point of view or even simply wrong. You suspiciously and continuously sound like a googler who reads copied future music. And if you were there from back then you would certainly have some music to showcase for yourself and definitely would use original gear not warez. You said you are not here to see who's dick is bigger. You gotta understand that when you are asked for musical proof, is not about who's dick is bigger but about having a dick in the first place.
Don't get me wrong. Every forum needs its troll. It just gets to my nerves that every other post, it's you again there saying whatever the heck you please with no coherence or evidence.

 

Even if a VST sounds just like the real thing, I'd say go for it if you think it will inspire you. Also, it's easy to pick it up and take it to another room (especially one where you're not distracted by a computer with internet access (although with smart phones this is becoming less and less of a thing).