There is more than one right way to do almost everything.

Me? I have nothing but outboard synthesizers and synth modules.

Why?
  • Longevity - I have synths from the 1980s that still work perfectly. Back then I was using an Atari/ST, Motorola Mac, and DOS/Win3.1PC. Software synths become dinosaurs when the OS gets upgraded. Scores of them that were darlings of the day no longer work. Now you might ask why do I want to keep old synths? Some of the sounds in those synths are surely dated and for all practical purposes worthless, but others sound great, have never been duplicated, and those sounds are real gems.
  • Better sounds - Since the software synth has to 'do the math' to manufacture each and every note using the computer's CPU, many of them use shortcuts in the process to save CPU cycles. The external hardware synths store the sounds in ROM (sometimes RAM as in the case of my samplers) so the sounds do not need to have anything left out to save CPU cycles
  • Latency - Since the sounds are stored in RAM and do not have to be computed by the CPU, the average latency of a hardware synth is 5ms. That's the amount of time sound takes to travel about 5 feet. Software synths can have a latency of almost a half second, 100 times greater. Add a second synth and the soft-synth latency goes up
  • Mix and match part 1 - Because the external synth sounds all about the same, you can use one synth for the bass, another for the drums, and another for the piano and they will all be synchronized. Soft synths? One might have a latency of 400ms, another 100ms, and another 230ms - that isn't going to sound right
  • Mix and patch part 2 - Since the sounds are all stored in ROM and therefore do not have to involve the computer's CPU in creating the tone for each and every not played in your song, you can mix and match many more synths to get the perfect tone of each instrument with no additional latency, no taxing the CPU, and therefore more efficient other computer functions and less possibility of a crash. I might do a song with my own sampled bass sound on my Akai S900, the right/left snare pair on my Peavy SP, the nice muted guitar on my Ketron SD2, the rear Telecaster pickup sound on my Edirol SD90, conga drums on my Roland SC55, the wonderful Doctor Solo on my Roland MT32, the nuanced sax on my Yamaha VL70m (the only synth I've ever used for sax sounds), the very edgy FM Rhodes on my Korg DS8, and the fortissimo horns on my Korg i3 without a shred of latency, without a hiccup on the computer waiting for the CPU to do its thing, and without a computer crash or lock up due to too much going on inside
I can't do that with software synths.

Insights and incites by Notes

Bob "Notes" Norton smile Norton Music
https://www.nortonmusic.com

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