Hacker News Reader

Comment by readingnews | Hacker News Reader

I think that something is actually lost when we go fully digital. Consider, with a real analog synth, one can reach out and change pitch, speed, sustain, attack, release, tone, heck, the actual waveform, amplitude and frequency, ON THE FLY, with more than one pattern. It is not too easy to do that inside a computer (e.g with a GUI). It is not the same feel and is limiting in nature (I can not click on more than one at a time, but I have two hands).

Also, they had quirks that made them more interesting. Your digital counterpart will never have a spurious noise or that thing that makes your album magical compared to others because your Arp Odessy or DMX or 808 had a "problem".

View on HN

You can get a hardware MIDI controller for super cheap: an array of button, knobs, and faders that you can map to whatever software functions you want: https://www.korg.com/us/products/computergear/nanokontrol2/

But of course those have their downsides too: a panel of identical, nondescript, unlabeled knobs can be confusing during a live performance; some software doesn't react well to changing synth parameters mid-note; and I have found that, for whatever reason, my MIDI controller tends to have just enough latency to be annoying.

> Your digital counterpart will never have a spurious noise

Well, I've definitely had spurious noises with digital equipment...but software malfunctions don't exactly tend to sound magical.

Also, 7-bit precision can lead to audible stepping artifacts. (I think there's a way to do 14-bit CCs, but not all synths and controllers support it.)

Pitchbend in the MIDI protocol is a 14bit word by default.

The MIDI 2.0 protocol has finally been designed and is just now beginning to be implemented in new hardware and software, so this shortcoming is about to be a thing of the past.

That's true, pitch bend was 14 bits from the beginning, but that's a special case.

I'm not terribly optimistic about MIDI 2.0; it has a lot of things to like, but I'm expecting the major synth manufacturers to be pretty slow about actually making MIDI 2.0 products, and even then they may just implement the parts they care about, leaving us with an incompatible mess.

Maybe I'm wrong and we'll have a new era of expressive electronic instruments-that-aren't-piano-like. We'll see.

You can plug in a USB MIDI controller and assign physical controls to any parameter of any plugin in your project. I've done it a lot with my BCR-2000, quite the beast with its 32 encoders, but lots of fun and notoriously used by Daft Punk in concerts. I'm actually on the lookout for something more portable now, I find I usually end up focusing on fewer than 10 controls.

There is no reason that we can’t program digital synthesizers so that they have problems or degrade over time like their analog counterparts.

People prefer things to work perfectly, though.

I also agree with your point about the hands on control of analog synthesizers but it has to do with the user interface, not the method of sound creation.

An analog synth controlled through digital GUI would suck to use just as much as a VST does.

There's no reason these parameters can't be changed on the fly with a digital instrument. They can have knobs too.

Also, many synths today will allow you to dial in a degree of noise, interference, pitch drift, or other artifacts if you want. People still inject those qualities deliberately into their recordings. Even when the original recording was crystal clear.

Or how the sound from the noise generators would slightly change depending on the ambient temperature affecting the analog circuitry.

Or the pitch. Using an analog synth on stage without a consistent power supply could be a nightmare.

Yup. As someone who has gigged an (original) ARP Odyssey, I can attest that this is indeed the case, even with a consistent power supply!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com