[filoeleven]

I went with softsynths for a while, and you certainly get a wild variety of sonic possibilities for a lot less money. They are fantastic for sound sculpting. If I was going to do a movie soundtrack, or sound design for games or something, I would likely rely on them almost exclusively.

However I found myself really missing the immediacy of knobs and buttons, especially when I got back into playing my Korg MS-2000 with other people. That's not a true analog synth, but it has a front panel that is comparable to them. I have used MIDI controllers to try to get the same kind of feeling from a softsynth, but there's something to be said for having your control surface's layout match that of your synth--I never had the same kind of intuition about keying in or tweaking a sound via MIDI controller as I do with the Korg.

I dream of an interface that can be physically rearranged so that its knobs and sliders mirror the layout onscreen. Like a tactile touchscreen. A good synth's signal flow can be understood by "reading" its control layout, whether it's hardware or software, and for me at least, there is a huge loss when mentally mapping a well-designed interface to a boring row of eight unlabeled knobs.

[gtani]

Knobby synth (ms2k, sh201, jp8k or 8080, Supernova, ESQ1, DW6k/8k, AX60, KS4, AN1X etc etc) + knobby/easily mapped controller (i use Axioms and Novation SL Mark 2 even tho the pots/faders/encoders have proved not especially reliable) is a great combination.

(And when korg/roland/Yamaha/teenage/Waldorf/DSmith come out with new stuff, i'll spend some time on sonicState's youtube channel and the forums (Wigglers, Slutz, /r/Synthesizers) to see what the excitement's about.

[baldfat]

I know this is 4 days late BUT have you looked at Native Instruments' keyboards? They are made to solve just this issue with their software.

https://www.native-instruments.com/en/products/komplete/keyb...