[plurgid]

I say I'm a musician on the side, but truthfully I've been messing with sound instinctively since I came out of the womb, and I only picked up programming and design and stuff later on. As such, I gravitated toward electronic music doodads almost immediately.

This issue of "falling down the LCD well" has been at the forefront of electronic music for a while. Synthesizers were cool in the 70's because they had knobs, and any abstract logic involved was done by you, so you had to be into it.

Then the 80's and 90's came along and we got stuff like the DX7 and innumerable "workstation keyboards" that were little more than a tiny display and two or three buttons. Maybe a jog wheel if you were lucky.

These were unambiguously cleaner from a design perspective, but what people began to realize is that the screen was too much of an abstraction. Then of course DAWs came along and even the synthesizers themselves moved into the computer physically.

Music, like life in general, is visceral, and the screen is not. Musicians became frustrated with the lack of physicality.

The modular synthesizer approach of the 70's has made a HUGE resurgence with the eurorack standard.

Not everyone, but LOTS of people actually PREFER a gigantic mess of tangled wires with physical plugs and knobs to a sterile pure-logic implementation on the computer that can do all the same stuff cheaper and in a more reproducible way.

I suspect we'll see a similar sort of resurgence of physicality across every product that has been absorbed into the computer screen.

[8bitsrule]

As a life-long musician, I found that the tedium and aggravation of fighting the software and associated hardware to get it to do what I wanted - a wholly left-brain activity

- was taking up half my time.

And that was after the learning curve of trying to adapt to the melange of hardware, interface, and software options.

That time and energy was taken away from creativity and experimenting with music to improve its richness,interest, and originality.

Modulars can be more expressive in expert hands (seldom the case). But making good music requires a different kind of expertise. And I hear that difference - and the cost of all the lost creative energy - on the radio every day.

[jefurii]

The first time I heard about Eurorack was when the guy behind the Audio Damage plugins remarked on his blog that part of why he he was making the move to Eurorack was that hardware couldn't be pirated.

[Adamantcheese]

I'm somewhat sad that modular synthesizers are so expensive, even semimodular standalone units. They're really fun pieces of equipment to play with.

[wilsonnb2]

The Korg MS-20 mini sells for $450, the Moog Mother-32 sells for $600, and the new Behringer Neutron will sell for $300 when it comes out. Semi modular synths are pretty cheap these days even though they aren't quite as cheap or popular as non modular synths like the Arturia Microbrute or the Korg Monologue.

[ricardobeat]

What’s expensive to you? With 2-3k you can gather an amazing array of equipment these days, unthinkable 10 years ago.

[Adamantcheese]

A basic modular system with all the basic oscillators and filters you'd find in a standard VST plugin set will cost roughly 5 thousand if not more. It's a bit expensive really, but I suppose that's the cost of analog in a digital world. It might just be me and my reluctance to spend money but it seems like prices would be dropping for equipment if it was making as big of a comeback as it is, but prices seem to be relatively stable, sometimes more expensive as new small scale manufacturers come out with modules.

[ricardobeat]

Five grand? No way. Take a look: https://www.bax-shop.nl/producten.html?keyword=analog+synth&...

[closeparen]

Well into the era of digital mixing consoles, the complex tactile control surfaces remain. Faders and knobs are the right abstraction for working with sound. Contrast with lighting, which has become almost entirely keyboard driven; faders are now optional add-one for some of the most popular consoles like the Ion.