2 Oct
2014
2 Oct
'14
3:57 p.m.
On Thu, Oct 2, 2014 at 5:24 AM, <gordonjcp(a)gjcp.net> wrote:
his is fucking retarded.
Modular synthesizers are dead. No-one except a few propeller-hatted
autistic loonies who you wouldn't want to sit next to you on the bus use
them. Why? Because they're a pain in the arse.
euro-rack modular synthesis is a big growth area for small companies right
now. doesn't mean they are in widespread use, but to call them dead is
pushing it a bit.
Bob Moog realised this very early on, and he (didn't really) invented the
damned things. What he realised was that everyone who uses a modular
spends a day making silly farting noises and then gets on with having a
couple of oscillators patched to a mixer, followed by a filter and finally
followed by a VCA, with maybe an envelope for pitch, filter cutoff and
amplitude. So having realised this, Moog developed the Minimoog synth
which was effectively pre-patched in a hardwired configuration that was
what, as it turns out, most people actually used.
a process very similar to the contrast between mixbus and ardour. mixbus
represents harrison's accumulated experience about what people do when
mixing, ardour represents a totally open-to-whatever approach.
interesting that they both use substantively the same codebase, eh?
I think the design should be led by someone with experience in observing
what people actually do with the tools that are presented to them. It's a
sad fact that UX is a difficult and expensive thing to get right. Car
manufacturers learned this a long time ago - how many of you drive a car
with a manual choke (me, okay) or manual ignition advance (no-one unless
you're into *really* old ones).
it is all relative - in the US almost nobody drives a manual transmission
either.
Did Bob Moog "dumb down" the Minimoog? Well, you could say that yes he
did. But you'd be all kinds of wrong.
Moog's biggest contribution to analog synthesis, other than the filter, was
to add a keyboard. Buchla was ahead of Moog in actual synthesis, but was
opposed to the idea that such a capable instrument should be constrained by
the limitations of a keyboard. Moog thought that was stupid, and Moog won
that argument hands down, even though in some deeper sense, Buchla was
correct. UX ... all the way.