Analog superiority?
I had a fun experience last night. A friend of mine that runs a new-media firm was on a project crunch, and needed a sound bite for some animated DVD menus. He described the project to me, and it sounded like a fun little diversion.
So, Josh sent the animation files over, along with an .mp3 sample from the project. There was a little synth sound that he wanted to reproduce, but the music he was using was some generic industrial backing music. The equivalent to royalty-free stock.
I sold my keyboards years ago, but have been doing a lot of ProTools work for the last 8 years (ProTools is to audio what CS3 is to digital imagery). I have a small library of virtual synths, both through ProTools and GarageBand, and thought for this small of a project that GarageBand would do the trick.
I then spent 2 hours trying to find the right sound or combination of sounds for a 3-second, 4-note sequence. Two hours. The thing that was killing me the whole time was that when I heard the sample Josh sent, I knew exactly what patches I would have used, had I still had my Super Jupiter and DX-7 - my old, old keyboards.
To be fair, there was no way to do what I was doing last night with my old gear - at least, not without a lot of setup. I’d have to patch the MIDI together, run the audio through my ProTools rig, play the sequence, then start pulling the sounds together - pretty much what I did, without all the setup time, sitting on my living room sofa next to my wife. However, I’d be lying if I said that there wasn’t a bit of romanticized memory thinking, “I know exactly what I’d do if I still had that synth!”.
So, I got the project finished, uploaded the files, got the “works for me!” from Josh. Still wasn’t satisfied with the sounds, but the client was. Here’s my question to you:
What bit of “analog” gear do you occasionally pine for? Your old Brownie camera, or Bristol board? A calculator instead of a spreadsheet? Adam just sold his despised digital drums that he bought while living in an apartment. Kyle dreads every Adobe upgrade and the bloat that comes along with it. What is it for you?