This works in live performances due to the diminished sound quality possible in the outdoor venue.
In that concert, I have created my own 24bit ARP2600, Andromeda, Jup8 & Oberheim samples for the Wave and the iPad. I do have an outdoor performance scheduled, where I will be using a MiniMoog Voyager, Digital Mellotron and a Nord Wave alongside a Synthstation/Sunrizer/AniMoog stack in the iPad, triggered using an Akai 49 key and midi/usb bridge. However, that is in a very controlled environment. In the studio, I often use vintage gear alongside newer digital gear blended into whatever sound is required for the song. The sample libraries just do not have the color and depth that I require, nor my own sound. In those cases when I need the sound of an analog, vintage or otherwise, I make my own samples. I do however, use VSTs and Virtual synths and samplers in live environments. For vintage, I would never take an ARP 2600, Minimoog Model D, or any 20+ year synth, to an outdoor concert with questionable power and humidity. and way different to another ms20 owned by the same producer.Īnologue is fantastic and does have a tiny, tiny edge over emulations, but if you’ve ever had to lug a hammond (or CS80 – jesus) up a flight of studio stairs in the middle of the night, or discovered that every eighth note on a jupiter 8 wasn’t working because one of the cards inside broke and took 6 weeks to repair, or wanted, y’know, more than one minimoog playing simultaneously, or polyphony, or midi, or blah, blah, blah.įrom a purist point of view, not least because of the degree of interaction, the originals are better, but from a purely utilitarian perspective, the copies are pretty awesome.Īlso, it puts an very good approximation of classic sounding gear within the range of mere mortals, i just saw a jupiter 8 on ebay for $10k, and christ knows what a moog modular goes for.Īs a performer who plays both vintage and VSTs for many years, each have their strengths and weaknesses in different situations. as an example (not an arturia one) i once used recall sheets made of a real MS20, and the virtual one sounded closer than the MS20 it was recalled from, a couple of years later. theres a difference, for sure, but the sampling analogy is way off. In fact, it’s now a remarkable imitation that I would happily use and be confident that you would never realise that it was not the ‘real thing’.”Īctually, i have used them (all except the moog modular) and i don’t think you could say it’s night and day. Today, it sounds and responds like the hardware original. “In March, I made the point that although MMV looked like a Minimoog on screen, it didn’t really sound like one. On the other hand, there are people like Gordon Reid, who knows quite a bit about synths, writes about them for a living, owns a real Minimoog, and wrote the following back in July 2005: Even Arturia itself seems to have been bitten by the hardware bug (see: Minibrute.) And Synthtopia is also to blame for feeding the analog beast. On one hand, messing with Arturia’s (and others’) clones of vintage analog synths made me want to get some real analog hardware. The pitch isn’t regular, you have lots of problems – it creates accidents, and accidents are always exciting in music.”
They have a lot of good qualities, but they can’t match the original Minimoog, which has a kind of texture in sound and an untamed feel to it. The new Moog Voyager and all those kinds of instruments are great, but they’re tamer in a sense. That was true for acoustic instruments, and it’s also true for electronic instruments – there are certain things you can’t replicate.Įven the Moog, or a Fender electric guitar, could be made today with a great sound, but it can’t match the vintage one. Lots of synthesizers are analogue and have a unique sound for me, like the modular Moog, Minimoog and Memorymoog and the big modulars, like the ARP 2500 and the ARP 2600, and the VCS3 and the AKS, if you’re talking about the first old analogue synthesizers.Īt one stage in time, people were craftsman – they had a special know-how, and skills that that you had to learn. “Down the years I’ve collected a lot of different synthesizers. In a new interview, synth music pioneer Jean Michel Jarre explains why, despite all the advances in electronic music technology, he still has a love for vintage gear: