Gear snobbery: Digital VS Analog

[tiny_tove]

To quote Martin "Gear snobbery is an entire thread of its own. How much contempt there can be over the use of laptops yet people think nothing of someone who just performed a set consisting of entire tracks dumped onto a SP 404."
Digital vs analag
Pro/against laptop
Pro/against software

Let the battle begin.

[GEWALTMONOPOL]

To paraphrase a Cat Rapes Dog album sleeve note, gear is there for us to buy, use and experiment on. All of it!

Except Kaoss Pads. I direct my snobbery against those. Maybe others have a use for them but I saw too many Mongoloid Kaoss Pad Solos (MKPS) at that shit Broken Flag festival a few years ago to ever want to see or hear one again. Yeah, my hatred is for Kaoss Pads.

[Leatherface]

Creativity first.
I prefere a digital "genius" that a analog badass.
I see a first part of a live performance last year, the guy made a really poor and boring noise performance, with 5.000€ analog gear on his table.

Personally digital or analog is not really important when i buy gear, the most important is the sound and the versatility.

Like Rhys Fulber said: "All those new synths still won't make your music better"

[GEWALTMONOPOL]

The saturation one can achieve with a good soundcard is like nothing else. Amazing yet so simple. And I'm not talking about plug ins. Fuck that. The multi layering from a soundcard into a mixer and then throw effects on top of that. Very fucking tasty!

[tiny_tove]

I enjoy passing digitally recorded stuff into analog gear and vice-versa.
Or using both digital and analog version of the same sound on two separate tracks.

[GEWALTMONOPOL]

A friend of mine told me how on a forum there were a bunch of guys who did little else but wank themselves and each other off over various bits of vintage reel to reel they procured for mega money and how this was the only true method of recording. Maybe in between they actually managed to get some recordings done, but who knows?

I own a truckload of analogue synths. Some fancy, some less so. I think they look and sound beautiful and I can lose myself in them for hours. Nothing could replace them and I intend to stick to them for life. When I die I will come back and live inside them like a ghost in a machine. That's how much I love my analogue synths. I love them a lot.

Still, much of the analogue snobbery I see is just retarded. Like for example the absolute tool who said that if it's a sampler it must be analogue. Or the numerous people I've had come up to me and go "hurr hurr a laptop, I thought you was foh real" and then drool over a SP 404 where the guy behind it presses play and lets the sing back commence. "Yes chief, this huge and complex set up with 3 mixers filled to the brim, pedals, mic's, cables everywhere, gear and gear again is totally fake because there's one or two or three laptops in the system. Never mind that it took 2 months to assemble and rehearse because the guy after me pressing play on his SP 404 is the real deal.".


Yup, retards!

[tiny_tove]

Maybe in between they actually managed to get some recordings done, but who knows?

ahah This is exactly what scares me about the "modular" revival. I know many people wasting thousands euro to buy any module available and spend hours on muffwiggler (excellent forum by the way), post samples with nonsense titles on soundcloud and get fat.

I mean. I got my own modular set-up was in order to attempt to obtain unusual sounds. with the correct modules (trogo!!!) you can turn that mass of iron and cables into a killing machine, but you have to focus, let yourself be amazed by what you can create, and there is no need to hassle other people with that.

Sometime I think this return of modular gear is a conspiracy to neutralize experimental people.

[Duncan]

"Yes chief, this huge and complex set up with 3 mixers filled to the brim, pedals, mic's, cables everywhere, gear and gear again is totally fake because there's one or two or three laptops in the system. Never mind that it took 2 months to assemble and rehearse because the guy after me pressing play on his SP 404 is the real deal.".

Ah, but this can be the other end of the argument that's as lame as the pro 404 line: that complex systems and loads of time spent building them somehow equals something better or more valid in and of itself.  The backstory of how all that gear - laptop or tangled pedal/synth chain - came to be on stage means fuck all to the person who only has the set itself to go on.

Any kind of fetishism over gear - at least to the point where it strongly influences your experience of a live set - is probably pretty stupid.  A strong feel for sound, performance and composition is what I like...real time demonstrations of how bits of gear work? not so much.

[Andrew McIntosh]

I take it this is mostly about gear in a live setting? Because when it comes to recording I couldn't give a rat's, but when it comes to live I could give several.

Basically, fuck your gear and give me entertainment! The one thing I'm sick of is people setting up the same stuff they've got in their room (or studio, if you insist) then trying to get the same sound and vibes they get when they're "in the moment" at home. When I paid my hard earned I want a gig, I want things to happen, I want energy and power, and I don't care if you've just plugged a walkman into the p.a. as long as you are doing something and giving me something.

I've used raw meat, metal buckets, plastic bags, rubbish bins full of broken glass, a portable cd player, faulty synthesizers that never work the way I want them to, crappy microphones, effects pedals on their last legs, whatever was in the drawers in the kitchen - what the fuck ever. And I've sat down to see people with entire shop front window's supplies of the very latest most expensive christmas-lights-lit gear and have been bored shitless. Then you simply say "good set" and mainly chat about the gear, because that's what it all seems to be about with gigs like that.

I still hate laptops live, too. So I'm a bigot, so what.

[SinkSlopProcessing]

I've used raw meat, metal buckets, plastic bags, rubbish bins full of broken glass, a portable cd player, faulty synthesizers that never work the way I want them to, crappy microphones, effects pedals on their last legs, whatever was in the drawers in the kitchen

Here, here. Household detritus is a criminally overlooked source of material. The sounds that can be acheived from ordinary objects interests me more than all the gadgets on earth.

Now there's a gear debate worth having: metal buckets vs. plastic buckets. Broken glass vs. spoons. Etc.

Discuss.  

[cantle]

Basically, fuck your gear and give me entertainment! The one thing I'm sick of is people setting up the same stuff they've got in their room (or studio, if you insist) then trying to get the same sound and vibes they get when they're "in the moment" at home. When I paid my hard earned I want a gig, I want things to happen, I want energy and power, and I don't care if you've just plugged a walkman into the p.a. as long as you are doing something and giving me something.

^This, I couldn't agree more.

[THE RITA HN]

Whatever gear you use, always put more work into your sources rather than your gear.
IMO - I want to hear the artist's ideas, not the gears' ideas.

For this argument:
For me, the same straight forward analog chains used for years help me to challenge what goes through them.

[GEWALTMONOPOL]

"Yes chief, this huge and complex set up with 3 mixers filled to the brim, pedals, mic's, cables everywhere, gear and gear again is totally fake because there's one or two or three laptops in the system. Never mind that it took 2 months to assemble and rehearse because the guy after me pressing play on his SP 404 is the real deal.".

Ah, but this can be the other end of the argument that's as lame as the pro 404 line: that complex systems and loads of time spent building them somehow equals something better or more valid in and of itself.

Maybe but I never said that.

To comment of some other peoples points. A sample from a  laptop or a sample from a SP 404 is still a sample and both are as digital as each other. Of course using a shit sound card on a laptop is going to impact on the quality of the sound but that's like opting for cheap shit mics or shit cheap mixers instead of good ones. I used to have two EPS racks both for live and recording. They weigh a ton and are clunky as hell to work with plus the sound quality is nowhere as good as the laptops with Motu cards I use. Obviously because they are old and technology has taken giant leaps since the EPS's were made in the 90's. Still somehow a laptop is seen as a lesser machine than those two. By some. It's just a fucking sound bank at the end of the day.

Another point to make is that it sometimes seems the ones who talk about analogue vs digital don't even know the difference. Hence theories on "analogue samplers". So we have a laptop with a Motu soundcard. 8 outputs. They go through a mixer. They also go through various pedals, perhaps an amp, there are bit's mic'ed up and so forth. What we have in the end is a hybrid. Various bits of technology in use to test things and eventually achieve a finished result. There also seems to be the misconception that a laptop is all internal, soft synths etc made strictly from what software is available on the computer and nothing else. No in-betweens. The idea that a soundcard takes you through an external and very much analogue mixer or that a hand held digital recorder is transferred from SD straight into an editing programme with no loss what so ever seems too hard to grasp.

Then what about digital synths? They started making them in the 80's. Do they sound shit? Some of them du but far from all. Although a fucking pig to work it, the DX7 is a great sounding digital synth for example. Anyone listening to Front 242 or Severed Heads using one, or Coil for that matter, claiming they sound "digital" and weak need to rinse their ears.

Back on the laptop situation though. Not for making excuses but I stopped using them live a while back because they are a bit too unreliable in live situations. In the studio for editing and recording they are fantastic tools to use.

[tiny_tove]

agree on everything, especially the bit about digital synths.

some are awful, some just don't fit the kind of sounds we are discussing here (although I have got to learn that any sound source if properly treated can become a killing machine), but some are absolutely fantastic, maybe they do not fit the harsh tag, but we are discussing a wider range of atmospheres.

Bitcrushers, granular synthesis - just to name a couple - all rely on digital engine and are quite useful in many situations.

[martialgodmask]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7_KYEtspRa0

A digital v analog gear snobbery thread can't be complete without a mention of Behringer! Maybe this is more appropriate for the small synth thread but I'm sure plenty to go at here too ha!