Are Analog Synths Overrated?

[koolkeyZ865]

Don't get me wrong, I love the traditional analog stereotype. Warm, full, and organic. But oh my god, the elitism within the analog GAS community is unbearable. No form of synthesis is inherently superior to the other. Everything has its place and does its own thing well. Analog synths are not the end all be all for absolutely everything.

[ignatius]

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fetishism is useless but there's plenty of good things to be said and heard in reagards to analog synths but who cares?  digital is fucking awesome too.  hardware.. software whatever. it's really about the tracks not the gear right?  i've heard awesome stuff done with cheap lofi broken gear and shitty stuff done w/high end gear and a nice studio.. some people can make anything sound good.. can jam w/any old thing.. 

 

ignore the interent fetishes... it's a waste to have that argument.   people do tend to have a trajectory when they get into synths though.. but a lot of other people just look at everything as a tool.. "it does a thing.. is that a thing i can use?" 

[sweepstakes]

I mean kinda but they're also pretty great. I swear there truly is a noticeable, pleasant difference vs. VA/DAC. It pains me a bit to say it because it seems so trite, but if I had to choose one synth it'd be an analog monosynth. Digital is fantastic but the digital synths I've used are just not quite as alive, and the sweet spots are narrower and harder to find. It could certainly be down to which digital synths I've used vs. which analogs.

[hello spiral]

yes

[whosebrian]

As a listener I can't pick them apart.

[nice]

digital really rejuvenated it for me. basically all aspects of analogue that irked me about the original were fixed and new aspects and levels of detail came to light

[Ragnar]

since I work with modular synths on the laptop digital = more patching possibilities anyway unless you've got a synth the size of aaron funk's????

[auxien]

Analog synths probably are overrated, but not by too much. Analog sounds, if you're in the room with the instrument, do often sound and 'feel' different than a digital counterpart. Beyond being in the room with the instrument, I think the differences often come down to character of filters and processing and ultimately just the way the artist approaches the instrument differently...I'm speaking very generally here now though.

 

Digital is great, analog is great, blah blah, it's all what you do with them blah blah

[Guest Chesney]

Yes and no. There are amazing digi's and really shit analogues too as well as poor digi'd and amazing analogues.

 

A lot of the people that get annoyed at elitism in gear are mostly people that have never experienced high end or reverred gear so it's easy for them to just have say, Ableton, some cheap monitors, a cheap digi synth or whatever and think they sound awesome and can do everything they need, which they do and can but there are whole levels above and to the side of what you have experienced and many people who like to talk on the internet have experienced so much more.

So it's not the gear, it's the peoples perception of what they know and what they think they know about sound and the influence of trends and opinion.

people are very fickle and can take internet opinion as fact so comments can easily steer trends and also ruin gear reputation or build into hype even if the people talking have no first hand experience.

Basically, all gear is great if you learn, experiment and find use, you'll personally find what you like and prefer in time. Too many people use gear through the eyes and ears of others, that's why basic gear like juno's and 101's are so crazily priced.

 

What a load of babble ha.

[Tricone RC]

yes

[omnii]

For me analog synths are better learning tools and more fun to play than VST's.

I feel like my music got way better when i started working with analog monosynths but they also totally changed the way i worked.

I would credit the change in workflow equally to the sound. I love the sound but few of my songs are from 100% analog sources.

I could see myself going back to totally digital when i have learned everything i can from my analogue synths. At that point i might make my best stuff ever due to the freedom that digital provides.

I try to stay open to everything. I have been tinkering around with some FM recently and i feel like all this stuff works best together.

[flacid]

Yes. 

[TubularCorporation]

 

yes

 

 

 

 

(but digital synths are, too)

[Auditor]

Imo, yes. If I could afford it I would probably buy a Kronos and sell all my other hardware. I have a Roland FA-08 and can get it to sound as good as, if not better, than a Sub37

[Squee]

To me it all comes down to how easy a synth is to use. Being able to fiddle around with knobs and homing in on the sound you want is so much easier with analog/hardware than it is with software.

[pcock]

 

god fucking dammit this dissapearing post thing is starting to infuriate me. 

[xox]

imo best results come from combining digital synts with analog filters and analog saturations. monomachine has great character but when you touch it with a bit of a quality analog goodness, like vemona retroverb lancet, it really sounds spacial. i find digital synth much more interesting, especially if they have the character, like mnm, cause to me they're much more emotional and deep, they manage to reach the level of abstraction that i usually need much easier then analog synths. when i have a perfect, polished analog sound, my melodies tend to sound simpler. it's not a coincidence that the whole '90s idm and those beautiful hidden feelings came from harsh digital sounds. same goes for effects to me. it's the reason i like mono spring reverbs... the more they make my sounds claustrophobic the more i try to escape that claustrophobic state with a melody.

but at the end therez really no rules imo

[bendish]

so much marketing hype nowadays

 

yea id probably get a kronos too and nothing else or one of those 4 grand make noise all in ones that im never ever going to be able to afford

[Guest]

If someone has enough money to buy thousands of dollars worth of analog gear to make sure they have the warmest minor D chord to play for their friends after five or six beers at 3:30am, good on them! Not worth the money, IMO though.

[sweepstakes]

Funny, I expected this to be more contentious but I find myself agreeing with some point made in pretty much all the posts in here. By the way, the only analogs I've used are cheap analogs, nothing fancy. I do think there is something special there, but I also agree about the flexibility of digital. Generally analog lets you dial in values more finely, and digital gives you more parameters although they are more coarse. One is deep and one is wide, I guess. Either one can be more expressive and/or appropriate, depending on the situation. 

 

I feel like at the core of this duality, for me, is a pressure, some kind of push/pull effect I desire. Like, with digital, out of the gate it is a bit harsher, more aloof, but there's some latent "intelligence" there that I can tease out of it fairly easily, some kind of sarcasm or introspection or melancholy or overanalysis. With analog it's mostly big and dumb but way more agreeable, it's the chick or dude at the party that gets along with everyone. Sometimes I want the asshole to come out of its shell and be friendlier, sometimes I want to convince the social butterfly to go run off on some secret adventure with me.  It's rare that I just want to let them be who they are, lol, I guess that just bores me. And I've always found it more fun IRL to try to make cool kids weirder than the other way around, so maybe that would go some way to explaining my current preference for analog. 

[drukqs]

it's not a coincidence that the whole '90s idm and those beautiful hidden feelings came from harsh digital sounds. same goes for effects to me. it's the reason i like mono spring reverbs... the more they make my sounds claustrophobic the more i try to escape that claustrophobic state with a melody.

yee.

[TwiddleBot]

I think it's kinda interesting how many musicians I've heard say they really liked Blade Runner 2049. While there was Yamaha CS-80, they also used a fair amount of hybrid or digital synthesis, like U-He Zebra and Diva softsynth plugins (Diva is pretty great IMO but CPU intensive).

[TubularCorporation]

I definitely get the analog "mojo" hype for sure, I've yet to hear any virtual analog that sounds as good as a quality analog synth for similar types of sounds, BUT the idea that analog is BETTER is just silly.  Digital, analog, hardware, software, hybrid, mechanical, whatever - all of it's good unless it isn't, and even when it isn't that doesn't necessarily mean it isn't musically useful (I'm still waiting for someone with an actual audience to make the Akai Rhythm Wolf their signature sound just out of contrarianism).

[koolkeyZ865]

What people seem to forget is that there's no such thing as inherently bad gear anymore. Now that samplers, EQ, and FX exist and are widely available for everyone to use, you can make basically anything and everything you want sound really really good when you put some time and thought into it. Just use and tweak what you have, even if it's a Rhytm Wolf or an out of tune Timbre Wolf.

[TubularCorporation]

For me, part of the appeal of hardware is that you can just keep using it until it breaks without having to worry about your interface constantly changing as updates roll out, OS updates making it unusable in the future, or worst of all having to deal with the direction the software market in general is going, away from actual ownership toward temporarily leasing access, in-app purchases to access features, always-online licensing requirements and things like that. I think there's a lot to be said for an instrument just being what it is and staying that way.

 

But yeah, agreed, there is no inherently useless gear.