On Thu, Oct 2, 2014 at 5:24 AM, <gordonjcp@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.