i was lusting after a modular for a few months but after following the scene a little for a few months more i’ve decided there are infinitely better uses for modular money.
most of the patches sound wack and people seem to be way more concerned about looking cool than actually making cool music. i bet they’re fun but man, shit’s expensive and generally sounds unimpressive.
in terms of pure utility for $ can’t really beat just using a computer
I guess it all depends on what you want to get out of ‘gear’ in the first place.
As a means to an end, most hardware is a terrible ‘investment’.
When I dont turn my modular on for a few weeks I start to think to myself, damn, maybe I should sell this thing. Then I power it on and all of a sudden 6 hours have gone by and im fully inspired. Hard to put a price on tbh. Def not a good or smart investment by any means, but fuck its fun.
weird timeline we live in where behringer is killing it with affordable analog clones (and eurorack modules apparently?) while Roland keeps shitting the bed with digital modeling
Roland so dropped the ball. All of my early gear was Roland. They could have seriously capitalized on some of their classics or introduced future classics.
Micro Freak looks cool, but I have no idea why they made it so that you can’t stack the 4 oscillators if it has the ability to calculate them. Seems like a big miss IMO. Also, the marketing is a bit misleading saying it’s a collab with Mutable Instruments. They just took their open source code from the Braids (I think) and added a few more macro oscillator models and called it a day. Not illegal because it’s open source, but the author of the code doesn’t consider it a collaborative effort at all.
I’m glad analogue is making a comeback though because it still beats the shit out of digital imo. I remember on the old forum Digital Mark or whatever the bell ends name was said there was some soft synth that was as good as the analogue version and nobody could tell which was which but when I listened to the audio samples I got like 6/7 right (the only one I missed wasn’t marked as switching between them).
IMO, we are at peak analog now. There are sooooo many analog synths being made these days, at every price bracket and level of complexity and while great and versatile, subtractive synthesis can only cover so much ground. The market for them has got to be near saturation. I don’t think analog is going away, it’s firmly ensconced in modern music, but I think we are going to start seeing a lot of hybrid and even all digital synths making a comeback in hardware.