Analogue vs. Software - blindtest

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One more comment:

If you are more interested in creating music than analyzing sounds, all of this will matter little. A friend of mine who makes some of my favorite tracks only uses stock plugins in logic, and doesn't even really understand synthesis that well, but he is a musician first and foremost. He's focused on his vision, not the tools at his disposal.

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I like both, but software gets the edge (for me) in terms of flexibility, features and integration.

Software like ACE is just so damn close to expensive hardware without the hassle. An underrated synth compared to the other awesome by U-he synths.
I will take the Lord's name in vain, whenever I want. Hail Satan! And his little goblins too. :lol:

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I wonder, does bazille (however it's spelled) have the same tell tale digital artifacts that ACE does when doing audio rate modulation? I dare not download the demo. Too many synths as it is :cry:

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stillshaded wrote:I wonder, does bazille (however it's spelled) have the same tell tale digital artifacts that ACE does when doing audio rate modulation? I dare not download the demo. Too many synths as it is :cry:
I haven't noticed any, but then I don't have golden ears and tend to intentionally work toward noisier tracks anyway. To me Bazille works great as an FM synth, for instance.

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wagtunes wrote:Out of the box, with no FX, most sounded like crap, IMO. There were a few exceptions but I can count them on one hand. And almost all of them I couldn't afford anyway. My only experience with them was playing them in the music stores. But the ones I could afford, meh. They never did much for me. You really needed to process the hell out of them to get them to sound like the records I used to listen to.
That speaks more about the sound design choices you like than the character of instruments. Of course most synths get a bit "sweetened" before they hit a mix regardless to their form. At the very least you'll probably hit it with a little EQ. One of the things about most software synths is that you can tell the developer is afraid of alienating people with less powerful machines so they cut corners on built in effects to save processor cycles. There are exceptions, but for the most part I prefer to go to a third party plug in if I need anything more than some basic delay. I played you a track that was a Studio Electronics demo and you were pretty impressed. If there's a plug in that emulates their synths, let me know about it because I find they sound fantastic and there's not a single plug in that I think captures that.

I don't know about you, but for me it's [hardware analogs]... well, it's all about the bass. Here's where I rarely use any processing. Even when I do, I'll use a crossover to syphon off some of the upper mids and highs for processing and leave the mids and lows alone. I have no idea why so many bass presets are slathered in effects. I guess if you've got a solid sub bass in the mix as well they would work. Anyway, here is where I'm very likely to use an analog over a software synth much of the time. My ATC-X has a third EG and I'll use it to modulate cross modulation in the attack phase to give the sound a bit of "snap." I just like the way my analogs do things like this a bit more than software. Could I get by with Monark and Diva? Yeah, I could. I don't want to though. Also, ARM of the filter is fantastic for a lead sound that rips through a mix. Again, I could get by with software, but IMO a hardware analog gives things a little bit of magic.
wagtunes wrote:By the way, the Korg MS-20 VST is identical in sound to the hardware. At least to my ears. It is hands down my favorite hardware synth emulation.
Have you done a side by side with the original MS20? Like I've been saying, if you take that MS20 and do some audio rate modulation stuff with it, it fails. To me, it sounds cleaner and less dirty than the original when driven. Diva and Reaktor do a much better MS20 filter, IMO, but I bet Korg could give the plug in a once over and bring it up to speed. That said, is the KLC MS20 a good synth plug in? Yeah. Like the ARP 2600v is. Good synths but not so good at being emulations.

Then there are the more "experimental" types of sounds that really rely on things like wave folders, ARM, distortion and high resonance. Reaktor gets very close, but you've got to run it at at least 96 kHz to get it to sound good. This can lead to tapping out your CPU in a hurry. It's why I went to an XITE-1 system. I may even pick up a System 1m. It also looks like a bit of hands on fun, the price is low, and with an additional Plug Out like the System 100 (which I think sounds damn good even in VST form) it might even replace a couple of hardware analogs.

So, if you don't care about the above, and you clearly don't, I agree, you will be fine using software. I like to push things to where they "break" and that's when most software is "breaking bad." The stuff that does it well has a high CPU cost. I like to work "live" with low latencies so that's why it doesn't always work for me.
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What exactly is "audio rate modulation"?
I am not into modulation, but would like to try it just for fun in order to see how it works and sounds 8)

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stillshaded wrote:One more comment:

If you are more interested in creating music than analyzing sounds, all of this will matter little. A friend of mine who makes some of my favorite tracks only uses stock plugins in logic, and doesn't even really understand synthesis that well, but he is a musician first and foremost. He's focused on his vision, not the tools at his disposal.
Care to provide a link to your friends music?
Dúnedain

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4) The cost of anything should take the time value into account. The time from sitting down with an analog device to making music for me is roughly 10 seconds. Once I get fiddling with the computer I can be half an hour deep into menu diving and fiddling with settings on a complex chain of all the excess choices I have in the box before I even start to record. Some people might enjoy that 1/2 hour and not call it a "cost," so as with every single point that I've made, it's idiosyncratic and surely doesn't apply to everyone.
For me it's the opposite. Takes 10 seconds to get a vsti up and running. Takes a lot longer for my analogs to warm up (10-30 minutes), then more time to setup routing through sound card and daw, then more time to fix timing issues to adjust for latency. Then I have to record the audio, etc. So softsynth is about 10 seconds, analog hardware about an hour.
He's focused on his vision, not the tools at his disposal.
The better you know the tools the closer to the vision you get.

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fluffy_little_something wrote:What exactly is "audio rate modulation"?
It's when you modulate something at audio rates. Audio rates generally being above 20hz. They are called audio rates because you can hear them. Below 20hz is below human hearing range.(ok, some can hear down to 12hz in lab conditions, but 20hz is the commonly accepted standard)
fluffy_little_something wrote: I am not into modulation,
So you don't like sounds made with envelopes, LFO's , velocity, etc or when knobs get tweaked ?
.
Last edited by Acid Mitch on Fri Feb 05, 2016 3:05 pm, edited 1 time in total.

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So, what is a good example of such a modulation? An LFO @50Hz on pitch? 8)

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fluffy_little_something wrote:So, what is a good example of such a modulation? An LFO @50Hz on pitch? 8)
Yes, 50hz modulating pitch or anything else, like filter cutoff. Only at that rate your LFO is technically no longer a Low Frequency Oscillator, and is acting as an oscillator, as it's at high frequency - not low frequency.
There are exceptions , but most LFO's won't go that high and most Oscillators don't go below audio rates.

FM relies heavily on audio rate modulation, so if you've heard sounds from any synths that do FM, then you've heard audio rate modulation.

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Just checked Sylenth, they go up to 144Hz.
I remember TAL's free Elektro, its LFO's go much higher. Just checked their site, 400Hz.

To me it seems that audio-rate modulation sounds a bit unmusical for the most part, especially with high amounts. But it varies from note to note 8)

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fluffy_little_something wrote:
To me it seems that audio-rate modulation sounds a bit unmusical for the most part, especially with high amounts. But it varies from note to note 8)
It can do but it depends how it's implemented in your synth and how you use it. That's why some people say that programming FM sounds is hard. It is quite easy to get dissonant or unmusical results, but it's hard to deny the amount of musically useful sounds created that way that have appeared in so many hit recordings.

The reason your getting different results from note to note is because you've got key tracking going to the modulation target and not the modulation source.

Here's some random vids. Without audio rate modulation you'd just be hearing sine waves.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zGgKodoBnHo
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dmB26__zXyY
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xIn-n2ebENo


You can get excellent bell sounds by modulating filter cut off at audio rates, but you probably want higher amounts than the synths you quoted can do. Try something like Timewarp 2600, or Uhe ACE.

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Yes, I still like the DX7 Rhodes and synth bass patches :hihi:

But FM stuff is not very intuitive to me, so I have never gotten into it, and probably never will :roll:

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fluffy_little_something wrote:What exactly is "audio rate modulation"?
I am not into modulation, but would like to try it just for fun in order to see how it works and sounds 8)
https://soundcloud.com/xhip/sets/audio-rate-modulation

I've done a simple demo of this, sorry for the random keyboarding but if you want a nice melody to play create one or recommend one. The thing it needs is solo high notes (>1000hz), solo low notes (<100hz), chords and legato (>200hz), chords (>1000hz). Unfortunately my random playing didn't meet this perfectly but it should be good enough.

There are three things in the example.

0:00 - clean
0:20 - xmod

0:40 - clean
0:45 - audio rate modulation to pitch

1:05 - clean
1:15 - filter cutoff FM by input signal

Of course you can mix these although you start to get a lot of what sounds like noise and so it often becomes a lot less useful. Most of the noise is aliasing noise, oversampling helps although there is still a component that appears on its own with too many sources of modulation applied in too many ways.

To compare aliasing noise vs. without, I've rendered at both 48k and 192k (4x). You may want to download the original MP3s to avoid distortion due to soundcloud.

Now a description (and keep in mind these are only a few of the possible audio-rate modulations you could do):



- X mod (cross modulation)

This is typically exponential frequency modulation between oscillators at audio rate. In my example I've used differentiated linear modulation which would be available in a modular using many additional modules and a linear pitch input, although likely wouldn't be available on every standard synth.

Cross modulation is useful to produce the same sort of sounds you get from FM. It can be used to make a sound slightly more "dirty" such as when you modulate a pulse by a ramp or similar with very light settings.

In this case I've used quite extreme settings and a sine as the modulator with ramp as the carrier. The result is that the ramp is turned into a pulse! (In terms of harmonic content.)

The difference between xmod and other sorts of pitch modulation (by LFO, etc) is that the audio oscillators are typically very stable, key-tracking and with pure, anti-aliased fixed waveforms.

In an analog synthesizer (semi modular or entirely modular, or in rare cases not modular) the LFO like any other component is free of aliasing, although not always capable of audio-rate pitches and the highly accurate key-tracking of an audio oscillator.



- audio rate modulators (aka, LFOs that aren't low frequency)

This is typically useful when you don't want pure/accurate modulation but rather "close enough", such as when you want to add a little random or irregular variation or often in other words "a little dirt".

LFOs in software are often not running at audio-rate, and they are also not often anti-aliased. Likewise they are rarely capable of key-tracking or accurate tuning.

Once again, in an analog synthesizer there is no aliasing so this isn't a concern at all.



- modulation of parameters (like cutoff) by audio signals

This is useful to again you might say "add a little dirt", for timbre modification and the like.

When using pulse width modulation there is also a variable offset to the waveform which is controlled by the width modulation source (LFO, etc) which can then be fed indirectly to whichever parameter is modulated by the audio signal.

Mostly this is useful for predictable timbre modifications along the same lines that you might use a waveshaper or distortion. The modification depends entirely upon the signal itself and so is somewhat "linked" to the signal as opposed to if you had used a separate signal source such as an LFO, where the modulation would then be independent.

This property allows modulation by audio signals to provide timbre modifications without adding "noise", in terms of adding uncorrelated or distracting elements to the sound.

Again, although the signal itself may be anti-aliased in software the concern is the additional harmonic content generated by the modulation itself.

In an analog synthesizer there is no aliasing created this way as the available bandwidth is infinite.



You should notice the huge difference between the native rate and 4x over-sampled rate in all these cases. The aliasing created at the lower rate creates a lot of additional noise as well as dissonant harmonic content.

While rendering the native rate worked at approximately 16x (16/1) the natural rate, by oversampling 4x it was reduced to only 4x (4/1) the natural rate.

Obviously the need to maintain a processing time less than the natural rate (1/1) is required for live performance without buffer issues.

Such things are never a concern with analog synthesizers while you can see the trade-off involved in 4x magnification of processing cost is significant. Adding the extra cost may push the system over the edge and make real-time performance impossible.

For example say at 3/1, 3/4 (with 4x cost) = 0.75, or 0.75/1. Now it takes more time than is available to render the output.
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