Hard vs Soft – The Life of a Synth!
Tried out the synth sounds on the Novation X-Station 61 today for the first time. I owned this keyboard for about 9 months, but didn’t have the urge to try out the synth action. I was mostly using it as a midi controller for Reason 4.0. Why only as a midi controller you may ask? Well, its a long story about going all digital and moving with the times and new technology.
Let me give you a little background. During my DJ days I started off with records and a turntable, then sold my records and turntables and bought cds and a Numark dj cd player, then got rid of the cds and the cd players for a computer, mp3s, and a midi controller. I always believed that I should change with the times and leave old technology behind where it belongs, in the past. Until one day while hanging out at a friend’s house I decided to mix a couple of tracks on this turntable set-up just for the fun of it. Something happened, something unexpected, something not so unpredictable, I was having more fun mixing on a turntable than I had for the previous 5 years mixing on a computer. So I decided to a get a hybrid setup, turntables with time coded vinyl, so that I could still use my MP3s, but would now use turntables to mix. Lesson learned, sometimes old school can be fun. While its not really old school because time coded vinyl is fairly new technology. (Traktor Scratch baby!) Now on to my synth issue.
Well being that I love music and all, I decided to throw my hat in the ring and try to create some music (about 9 months ago). I didn’t know where to start, I knew nothing about music creation and didn’t really play any instruments. Reason I say “didn’t really play any instruments” is because I took some piano lessons as a kid but didn’t retain anything because I couldn’t pay attention to the super boring teacher. Anyway, so I decided to buy some equipment, one of the biggest decision was whether I should go down the analog/hardware road or up softsynth creek. I decided that it would be software! I got a midi keyboard, a digital audio workstation and Reasons. So I got to work on creating beats/riddims, and for the first few months everything was great except for two things. One, there was a little voice in my head telling me to buy a real synth and two, a brethren telling me that hardware is the way to go. I listened to neither and stuck with Reason because it was the cheapest and must efficient way to go. Besides, I didn’t have a problem with how it sounded. I’ll be damned if I was going to get caught up in this hardware crap. First it would be Hardware synthesizer, next it would be hardware effects, then hardware mixer, etc., who knows when the bleeding…I mean spending would stop. Well I was pretty content until this same brethren bought a synth, recorded it, put the recording on his i-pod, and let me hear the recording. I noticed something right away, the synth sounded deeper and warmer than anything that I heard in Reason. So I ran home to my Novation, loaded up the on-board synth and proceeded to experiment. Guess what happened…the same thing…deeper and warmer. So now I am starting to realize the advantages of having a hardware synth, but I haven’t caved into the warmness just yet.
I am going to fire up Native Instruments Komplete and a couple of soft synth that I haven’t tried yet and see if they give me the same warm feeling. Stay tuned.
