Hardware Studio Vs Software Studio

[THE INTRANCER]

What's more important to you as an artist, the software you use or the hardware, be that something you've built yourself or acquired?

What piece of hardware could you not live without?

What piece of software could you not live without?

[Ayra]

Personally I used very few hardwares in my life, that's because of comfort in mixing sessions and because of reusability of plugin instances in chains. The very best solution for me is acquiring the takes with a good channel strip and from here works only with my plugins inside the DAW

[qtheerearranger]

Soo I'm someone who use to use a lot of hardware synths. My friend owns a commercial studio and I have loaned him all of my old synths. Minimoog voyager, prophet, sub37, phantom, and many more. I get a nice deal out of it by getting to use the studio whenever its not booked for free. While analog synths especially something genuine like a voyager or prophet have such a thick and rich sound. I don't deny that for a second. For me personally, I just prefer serum vst. When you have one synth that you can control and shape however you want other synths kinda seem limiting. I'm mobile a lot more traveling around the country. I'm just at a point where I prefer to be able to recall my work on the road etc.

I also need to emphasize, I've seen keyboardists in the studio absolutely do things with the prophet that I would never do. I'm an edm guy so when I see a more traditional keyboardist play something on the prophet my jaw is usually dropped. I guess it depends on what sorta sound you seek to create.

[vurt]

as an artist, ill use whatever is available.
even when i was literally homeless, i had two instruments, a guitar and a whistle.

[D-Fusion]

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[rod_zero]

As someone that grew up using software I discovered I am not patient enough to deal with all the process of using hardware, specially important to me is to have total recall to continue working, and being able to change automation later. Doing that with HW is a PITA, and some times you want to use the same synth for various tracks, and I hate it.

So for me SW is more easy and fun to use, I still like to keep an instrument for playing around but I rarely record it.

[Uncle E]

Sorry, mine are the most boring and obvious answers:

What piece of hardware could you not live without?

A computer

What piece of software could you not live without?

A sampler

[pekbro]

my vape pen currently... gotta have that

[synthique]

I have a lot of old and new hardware that I used to try to get all working at the same time, all into patchbays and into a mixer/DAC for recording into the computer. Trying to do that in a tight space is a no-go. I do not want to crawl around behind patch bays trying to route a hundred patch cables and deal with all the noise floor issues.
If I had a big room with a big table where the cable management problem would be minimal, ie 2-3 peices of gear going directly into a 4 or 8 input DAC, MAYBE syncing the midi clock to the DAW, but ideally just using it as a tape machine until it's time to do some re-arranging or mixing in the DAW.
It's a lot less headache to use the DAW as a dumb tape machine rather than try to arrange everything in the DAW and get all the hardware synced with offsets for the DAW's latency/midi latency. If you have an hour or two to work on music, you don't want to spend it flocking around with making hardware and software get along.
I will record basic stuff to 2-track tape like it's 1988 and use the DAW just to convert it to wav files.

[jlgrimes11]

What's more important to you as an artist, the software you use or the hardware, be that something you've built yourself or acquired?

What piece of hardware could you not live without?

What piece of software could you not live without?

25 years or so ago using hardware like the mpc series sequencers were fun but there is just so much you can do now with a DAW like Ableton.

Without something like Ableton as a DAW, I do feel lost now.

[cryophonik]

25 years or so ago using hardware like the mpc series sequencers were fun but there is just so much you can do now with a DAW like Ableton.

...which explains why the music is sooooooo much better today than it was before people assembled their music one mouse-click at a time while staring at a computer monitor.

[BONES]

I'm not quite sure what you're getting at but there is still plenty of good new music to be had, you just have to work a bit harder to find it.

[kritikon]

25 years or so ago using hardware like the mpc series sequencers were fun but there is just so much you can do now with a DAW like Ableton.

...which explains why the music is sooooooo much better today than it was before people assembled their music one mouse-click at a time while staring at a computer monitor.

Joe Dolce's Shaddapayaface (or whatever it was called) managed to get to no.1 and keep one of the 80's classic and best songs (imo) at no.2 - Vienna, just in case you forgot. This what is laughingly called a song was written, performed and recorded entirely in the analogue world without the aid of any DAW or sequencer. Goes to show that musical vomitus doesn't need DAWs to be bad. There was plenty of shite around before DAWs already.

[Uncle E]

Shaddapayou!

[cryophonik]

25 years or so ago using hardware like the mpc series sequencers were fun but there is just so much you can do now with a DAW like Ableton.

...which explains why the music is sooooooo much better today than it was before people assembled their music one mouse-click at a time while staring at a computer monitor.

Joe Dolce's Shaddapayaface (or whatever it was called) managed to get to no.1 and keep one of the 80's classic and best songs (imo) at no.2 - Vienna, just in case you forgot. This what is laughingly called a song was written, performed and recorded entirely in the analogue world without the aid of any DAW or sequencer. Goes to show that musical vomitus doesn't need DAWs to be bad. There was plenty of shite around before DAWs already.

Well, yeah. Humans have made crap music since the dawn of our species. That doesn’t refute my point, unless your implication is that the amount of crap music today is decreasing, rather than exponentially increasing, due to the lowered barrier to entry of music production.

And, I’m not even saying that it’s a bad thing. It’s great that anybody who wants to make music can do it with very little investment these days. The tradeoff is…

…there is still plenty of good new music to be had, you just have to work a bit harder to find it.