My "Letter Of The Week" in Future Music from 2004

Back in 2004, I composed a rant on the raging debate of Hardware Vs Software to Future Music magazine. To my delight (and surprise) it was not only published but won “Letter Of The Month” !!

I stumbled across it this evening and thought I would share for posterity and also to marvel at how much my attitude to the debate has shifted to an “embrace all” paradigm.

Enjoy.

Picture the scene, if you will. It’s just past the mid 90’s. A young man, late 20’s, drummer by trade, has some disposable income burning a hole, and he decides to do what he has promised himself for many years. He walks in to his local newsagent and spies a copy of a magazine called “Future Music”. He grabs it, pays for it and takes it home. He can’t believe how far the music industry has come since those early days of electronic music. The most advanced computer he ever used for music making was a Commodore 64 running a piece of software called “Electrosound”. It’s like a dream….all this stuff, all this potential. And then he sees a huge Turnkey ad, at least 10 pages worth of hardware…..synths, modules, samplers, desks….pages and pages.

Well, that man was me, and I bought a Roland SC88VL, Evolution MK149 keyboard and a copy of Evolution Audio (free with the keyboard) and rushed home, hooked it up to my Pentium 1 PC and started making music. In the intervening years, I picked up a Prophecy, CS1x, SU10, RM1x, Akai S6000, JBL monitors, Event EZBus, Cubase (and it’s many upgrades…free and otherwise ..Grr), A Yamaha DTXpress drum kit, new PC and bits of software like ReCycle.

Now, with one thing or another (Life, actually) getting in the way, my music making, which only ever amounted to a hobby, just dried up. I tried at times to reignite my muse, but the flame had gone out.

Until just recently. One day, I thought I’d try searching again for some decent samples for my S6000. I stumbled across a site called Hollow Sun (www.hollowsun.com) and lo & behold, there were more than 300MB of samples to download, all in glorious Akai S5/6000 format !! Well, as the saying goes, “have broadband, will leech”, I started to download the lot and even contacted the site owners to thank them for their generosity (I am now good friends with them and do some work for them on the side). This site concentrates on samples of vintage kit, along with some not so vintage stuff and some things that aren’t even synths ! Well, I was like the proverbial pig in muck, and all of a sudden I started to get itchy fingers and started writing again. It even spurred me on to create my own S5/6000 users forum, which is now gaining members at a rapid rate (www.akaipro5k6kuser.proboards30.com)

So one of the first things I did was go out and buy a copy of FM. I’d bought an issue here and there over the preceding years, having been an avid reader for about 4 or 5 years. And it was then that it hit me.

And it hit me HARD.

The world of electronic music making had changed drastically. Those ten or more page adverts of Turnkey were still there, but now they were full of software synths, software plug in’s, software effects, soft this, soft that….everything had gone soft. So much so, in fact, that there were hardly ANY keyboards or rack mounted modules or samplers anywhere ! My flabber was well and truly gasted !

Now, don’t get me wrong. I’ve been a supporter and advocate of computers in music since the early 80’s. If it wasn’t for software sequencers like Cubase, I couldn’t do any of the things I do. But it seems to me that the whole world has gone soft crazy ! Just like it did in the mid 80’s, when everyone went digital. I sometimes wonder if the same thing will happen afterwards. Will people eventually realise the advantages of hardware over software, as people did in the 90’s when they realised that analogue was actually rather good and digital had robbed them of the creative edge. Take a look at how many “Hardware Controllers” are now available. People are obviously disenchanted by using a mouse to turn a knob or slide a fader. There are hardware controllers for almost every software synth or sequencer available.

Do you think we’ll see a revolution of hardware equipment like we did with analogue ? I actually think it has already started. Look at E-MU. This once king of hardware samplers, bought out by Creative and reduced to manufacturing chips for their sound cards, with the occasional “dance” module released here and there. Now we have “Emulator-X”. A software sampler, with hardware DSP and connectors. Clavia have their Nord Modular, Symbolic Sound have Kyma X, and more manufacturers are bringing out software based synths which require a dedicated piece of hardware to use them, or vice versa. Take Roland’s VariOS system, for example.

The main reason for this, as you pointed out last month, is that piracy is rife. I bought a 2 CD set of samples from eBay the other week. I though I was getting an original Sample CD set, but in fact, I got a fully functional copy on CD-R, along with “cracked” versions of Cubase SX 2, Nuendo, Gigasampler, Acid Pro 4, Ableton Live 3 and some other bits and bobs. And all I paid was a tenner ! As an Akai user, I find their ak.sys software a very handy tool. It doesn’t replace the need for me to use the front panel completely, but combined with it, I have a very flexible control method. But ak.sys isn’t developed anymore. The latest Mac release was done by a third party, and us PC users don’t expect another update again. Why ? Well, who needs an Akai sampler, when you can get a pirated software sampler for next to nothing and do it all for free.

Add all this to a burgeoning PC, heavy under the weight of all these “software plug ins”, whose CPU is drained of every ounce of mathematic calculation, unless of course you are truly minted and can afford the latest processor every 3 months to satisfy your software’s demands, and you are witnessing the sad demise of quality instrument production and many software developers going out of business because 1 in every 400 copies of their software is an illegal copy. I may be a hardware nut, but there are some great software products out there. But these are becoming more expensive as the developers try to recoup their losses.

I don’t have the answer. I don’t even know if there is an answer. I’m quite happy here in my bedroom studio, with my hardware, that doesn’t crash, can’t get a virus and doesn’t slow down when things get busy. But I feel many “new” musicians are missing out on true music making, when they sit goggle eyed, staring at monitors, using pirated software, stealing other peoples loops and passing the whole lot off as their own.

You can’t beat knobs

Or sliders. Or keys. You can’t beat human interaction. Tactility.

A generation of kids with RSI in their right wrists. Mouse Wrist Syndrome !

Well, that’s my two ‘penneth in the Hardware Vs Software debate. It will rage for some time, but I have a feeling I know where it will end up. I’ve seen it before. It’s all just a little bit of history repeating itself.