Music has gone vintage-chic. Fat, bleep-y 60s- and 70s-era synthesis sounds are hot, and it’s no fad—classic electronic sounds are here to stay. Audio electronics inventor Bob Moog is now a virtual God, with a movie and soundtrack out. But maybe you can’t afford shelling out a few grand for the original, or $2000+ for a new Moog synth. And you don’t want to have to boot your computer just to make music with a software instrument. Take heart: new hardware rivals software for sound quality and even price.
Witness the cute-as-a-button Alesis Micron (reviewed at createdigitalmusic by veteran tech writer Lee Sherman): LED-glowing controls, full-size keys, comfy knobs just waiting to be handled, and a street price of just $400. This thing can pump out near-exact replicas of vintage instruments, including the distinctive sound of an analog filter. Quite simply, fun to play.
This week also brought news of something new: Creamware’s $900 clone of the Moog Minimoog (plus a $1000 Prophet 5 clone), in a keyboard-less sound module. Even if you’ve never heard of the Minimoog (1970) or Sequential’sProphet 5 instrument (1978), you’ve heard the sounds in nearly every kind of music of the past three decades: everyone from Jethro Tull to The Talking Heads to Jefferson Starship to Pink Floyd to Kraftwerk to Brian Eno to Yes to Kool and the Gang to Nine Inch Nails to film composer Hans Zimmer to minimalist composer Phillip Glass to . . . well, you get the idea. Creamware converted its software + PCI card solution to hardware, complete with physical knobs so you can get nice and twiddle-y without a mouse. CDM mostly likes the Creamware offering, but it will have a tough time competing with instruments at the same price (or cheaper, like the Micron) that bundle a keyboard and other features.
Whither software? Hardly. Both of these instruments emulate analog sounds with digital technology. The music hardware basically is a software + hardware solution in a specialized package, running on number-crunching DSP chips. And once the sound addiction sets in, most people are using some combination of hardware and software instruments. Either way, with lots of new analog toys in hardware and software, you can party like it’s 1979.
Peter Kirn, editor of createdigitalmusic, checks in regularly with gear too cool for only music geeks to be in the know.
