CLASSIC SYNTH V SOFTSYNTH
This month, we grapple with the eternal question, the big Kahuna, the chicken and egg of the music tech world: classic synth versus softsynth…
〉If we can get historical for a moment, there have been many key moments in the development of music technology: guitar amplification, the introduction of magnetic tape, multi-track recording, computer-based recording… And then there is the sub-strata relating to synthesis, which could take up an entire issue in itself.
Over the last few years, the reemergence of hardware synthesisers has raised plenty of eyebrows. The market is bustling with radical new analogue and digital designs and reissues of absolute classics. And it’s this latter category we’re focusing on here, and the question we repeatedly ask is: “why would you spend thousands on a reissued piece of hardware, from 40 or 50 years ago, when you can buy the software for a fraction of the price?”.