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