Quote:
Originally Posted by
djalexg
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Mike also championed the Waldorf Wave, Roland synths and others, expensive Manley outboard gear, UA hardware etc.. Any great artist understands what is necessary to make great art.
Controllers are not the same or really comparable to an analog synthesizer. Thats a strawman fallacy if I ever heard one.
I dont hear any daw made dub techno today that truly wows me. I'm not refuting that great music can't be made by brilliant artists using plugins and the daw and I often come across dub techno that I suspect is made this way but it just lacks the wow factor in the end. The depth, warmth and detail and that is why people still talk about Basic Channel, Parallel 9, Deepchord, Vainqueur, Huckaby etc..
Expensive hardware is great -- I've owned plenty of it over the years -- and certainly does contribute positively to one's overall sound in many cases. But to your point: a great artist understands what is necessary to make great art, and I'm pretty confident that someone like Mike wasn't out there telling up-and-comers that they won't be making great art until they bought their first Manley compressor.
Controllers can absolutely be used to manipulate software synths and DAW mixing environments in similar fashion as their hardware counterparts. Turning the cutoff pot on a Prophet 5 produces the same sonic result as turning a controller knob midi-mapped to the cutoff on Repro 5 (and besides, most P5 chords in old school BC tracks were probably sampled to begin with). Moving a volume fader on an old mackie mixer produces the same result as moving a controller fader midi-mapped to the channel volume in Ableton. Can software and controllers reproduce 100% of the behavior of hardware? No, of course not. Does the entire concept of dub techno as a stylistic form hinge on those specific areas where software doesn't quite cover hardware? I argue no, and so would Rod Modell, but you're welcome to disagree.
Again, though, we've gotten down the old boring hardware vs software debate, which was not the original thread of this discussion. I'm in complete agreement that the sonic charms of old hardware are not 100% captured by software. If dub techno, to your tastes, is inseparable from those sonic charms then sure -- odds are you're not going to dig some contemporary ITB stuff the same way you would old Deepchord or whatever. But that's a matter of taste, not praxis. My point is that the tools to make dub techno, whether pure hardware, pure software, or hybrid, have never been more accessible today, so the reasons why contemporary dub techno tends to fall short of the high bar can't simply be attributed to the gear (or lack thereof).