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I really don't understand the "rich people" sentiment at all. You've already mentioned guitars, but it's true for pretty much any traditional instrument – don't even get me started on the money string players are willing to spend on just their bows alone. That doesn't mean violinists are all independently wealthy, they just have different priorities. If anything, hardware synths are much cheaper now in real dollars than they were during their vintage heyday. For instance, the 1973 Moog catalog lists their VCO module at $320. In today's terms that's nearly $1800 for one lousy oscillator!

Personally I use both hardware and software, and appreciate the strengths of both. It's nice that modern computers let you do so much so cheaply, but I don't want to use SuperCollider or PD to emulate an analog synth any more than I want to replace my upright piano with a digital keyboard.

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A guitar is a user interface for expressing yourself through sound. If you want that user interface for a digital synthesizer, well, you can hook up an electric guitar to a synthesizer and process its output, and you could probably do quite a bit better if you sample the pickup for each string separately. But you still need the electric guitar! You don't save any money that way! And the guitar enables fluent, improvised expression in a way that analog modular synths don't. (Everything I said for guitars goes for violins, too.)

By contrast, the user interface for modular synths is a bunch of knobs and cables. Going to physical knobs on a USB controller and virtual cables on a touchscreen is purely an improvement, and one that vastly expands your expressive capability.

So, guitars are on some axis more expressive than Pd, and less expensive; while analog synths are, in my view, less expressive than Pd, and more expensive. Why would you want to use a less expressive, more expensive instrument that works the same way? Maybe as a conspicuous-consumption status symbol or some kind of meta-level meditation on the nature of modern society, but not to make music.

Your digital keyboard will probably sound a lot better than your upright piano if you get a good set of samples for it and reasonable speakers and headphones. (Well, who knows, maybe you're patching bells and belt grinders into your upright piano. That's harder to do with a digital keyboard...)

Also, I hope you weren't reading any ill will into my "rich people" phrase. I have nothing against rich people. I used to be one. Many of my family and friends are rich people. I might be a rich person again myself someday. I just feel like this article is only relevant to rich people — for those of us for whom spending a few thousand dollars is a significant decision, modular analog synths are silly!

This is such a bizarre argument to make. An analog synth is typically going to be far more expressive than Pd: most if not all of its settings are immediately available via a physical knob, where with Pd you have to configure a mapping for each parameter--and by default it won't be labelled, so you have to put stickynotes all over the place, and if you change anything, move them all over again. Which you can do! But it's a lot of time spent, which you have to keep on spending as you change your Pd configuration.

But that's bracketing out the issue of the sound. Digital synths just don't sound like analog synths, not yet. (The gap is closing every year, sure.) Modelling the subtle variations of an analog synth is a difficult, processor-intensive task, and there's a qualitative difference between the sound of the best digital emulations and the cheapest analog devices. I use both digital and analog synthesizers, and I find that creating usable sounds is much faster with analog. Which translates into more expressiveness, because it's much more possible to change sounds on the fly.

> I find that creating usable sounds is much faster with analog

This is a huge part of it for me too. It's so much faster to make a noise that 'sounds right', sits in a mix without excessive EQing (or sometimes any EQing), and requires very little support from additional effects units and has a natural modulation. The fact that you have to let a lot of synths 'warm up' first kinda indicates the magic that holds them together.

This also translates to the mixing, I use an analogue mixer too, and the summing of the channels 'just works'. Everything sits in the mix better and I spend less time making it work like I used to in-the-box.

That removal of technical hurdles helps keep the creative juices flowing, where previously I'd walk away from a track in frustration because I couldn't 'quite get it right'.

Totally with you on the analog summing. It's kind of funny that people love the sound so much, an analog summing mixer often finds its way into the mastering process even if the original production was all digital.

I didn't necessarily think you were being unfair to "rich people", I just don't buy the idea that only the wealthy have access to non-virtual instruments. It might make the difference between a new(er) and a used car for someone on a budget, but that's old hat. Musicians have been saving up to buy gear for generations.

Choice of instrument is a very personal decision, and of course there are practical considerations (I'm not going to be lugging an acoustic piano on stage any time soon). If you like virtual instruments and usb controllers best, more power to you.

For many modular synth enthusiasts the interface is actually primary, over other considerations such as the mechanism of synthesis and sound. A growing number of modules are digital, with only the control voltage I/O in the analog domain. For these the appeal is still the same; something you touch with your hands, immediacy, freedom from the tyrrany of endless options, something you can't check Facebook on, etc. Speaking for myself, I feel like I'm using a different part of my brain when I plug a cable into a physical jack as opposed to dragging a virtual cable across a plate of glass. That's not even to get into the question of how it sounds, which is still relevant. I disagree with your characterization of acoustic piano vs digital sampling, although it's not really worth getting into the nuances here.

> So, guitars are on some axis more expressive than Pd, and less expensive; while analog synths are, in my view, less expressive than Pd, and more expensive.

Your arguments are quite aggressive in my humble opinion. Clearly those of us who are arguing from the point-of-view of experience are all entirely incorrect, and we should dump our synths because we can't possibly be expressive with them?

We all find our own preferred route to music composition - nobody is right or wrong, music is such an emotional pursuit that once you find something that works for you, do it. I also play the guitar (and I own three of them), but I much prefer the direct nature of being able to generate new sounds on my synths and interact with them live.

And although there are many very impressive software based music applications, they all work from the premise of approximating infinite sound-waves. There will always be artificats, no matter the resolution. Then there's the 'real world' effects on sound in analogue machines: heat, resistance, interference, impurities... these give the lauded analogue machines their 'character', and that is what the human ear likes.

There are myriad attempts at digital emulation of that character; some are very close, some close enough that you couldn't tell in a blind test, a lot are miles apart, especially when it comes to synth emulation (rather than outboard effects and mixing desks). I use a DSP from Universal Audio [1] that emulates a lot of outboard effects units and class channel-strips, and mostly they're very good, some are exact.

I think most people using analogue hardware knows that digital is improving at a very fast rate. However the improvements are primarily from trying to attempt to emulate classic analogue gear.

> Your digital keyboard will probably sound a lot better than your upright piano if you get a good set of samples for it and reasonable speakers and headphones.

How can any emulation sound better than the real thing? Surely the real thing sounds as close to itself as it can be?

[1] http://www.uaudio.com/store.html

I'm sorry that my arguments were aggressive. I didn't mean to hurt anybody's feelings. And, on the contrary, I've learned a lot that I didn't know from reading this thread — not that you'd know it from reading my participation in it!

> all work from the premise of approximating infinite sound-waves. There will always be artifacts, no matter the resolution.

I think this argument is kind of a red herring, and it leads to people dismissing analog enthusiasts as ignorant. With 24/192, the sampling artifacts are well below the level of Brownian noise from individual oxygen molecules bouncing off your eardrums at all frequencies up to three octaves above your hearing range (and nearly an octave above dogs' hearing range). Whatever artifacts you're hearing are coming from the analog part of your digital equipment, not from the digital approximation. You can do the math and verify this yourself.

The much more interesting part of the discussion for me has been about the other aspects of the subjective experience that people have brought up: of modules that you "can't get a bad sound out of", of the wabi-sabi beauty of slight unpredictability, of the continuity and low latency of analog-synth responsiveness, and of the destructiveness of the misguided application of Macintosh user interface guidelines in realms where they really, really don't work.

I wrote:

> Your digital keyboard will probably sound a lot better than your upright piano if you get a good set of samples for it and reasonable speakers and headphones.

And you quite reasonably asked:

> How can any emulation sound better than the real thing? Surely the real thing sounds as close to itself as it can be?

Well, yeah, if you load your digital keyboard with upright-piano samples, it won't sound any better than the upright piano. But upright pianos sound kind of terrible, especially down in the bottom octave and a half where they're almost missing the fundamental. Instead, you can load in a sample set from a Steinway concert grand. Maybe, with some digital waveguide synthesis, you can even simulate the change in tonality as the piano warms up. (My own poor attempts at digital waveguide synthesis of piano sound always come out sounding like, at best, a twelve-string guitar. But in DSP I'm just a dabbler, and there are people who dedicate their lives to this stuff.)

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