Re: thinking about moving from rack to laptop...advice please!

[Mark Sottilaro <zerocrossing@gmail.com>]

Me too.  Before I I wanted to use my drum machine as a carrier for a
vocoder, it involved a bunch of reconfiguring of a very complex set
up. 9 out of 10 times I'd think of something and realize the work I
had to do to move things around and repatch everything and I'd give
up.  If a cool idea took nearly an evening to set up and get working
right, and there are not many evenings I could spend doing music in
the first place, you have to make sacrifices.  Sometimes I'd buy
duplicates of gear for dedicated processing just to get more
flexibility.

Now, I don't make those sacrifices.   Oh, and that vocoder?  When I
bought the hardware one it was a single entity.  Now it can be as many
as my processor allows.  Same with all the synths and effects.  A
configuration that would take all night to set up and thousands of
dollars to duplicate now happen in minutes.

Yeah, some degree of tactile response has been lost and that's a
shame.  Novation and Automap have done a lot in the way of making the
software world better, but it's not perfect.  I imagine at some point
things like the Jazz Mutant Lemur will be inexpensive enough to become
commonplace and then it's game over: Computers win.  Even now, I'm so
used to programming effects and synth software with a mouse that the
only time I need "control" is via floor pedals (2 Behringer FCB1010s
and a IK Multimedia Stealthpedal do the trick)  I'm an
instrumentalist, not really a knob tweaker.

On Wed, May 27, 2009 at 11:23 PM, Michael Peters <mp@mpeters.de> wrote:
>> the rack is really heavy and i'm not getting any younger....
>
> hi Sim,
>
> these is the main reason why I ditched my rack and replaced everything 
>with
> software (I'm using Bidule too but on a Windows laptop). You probably 
>won't
> be able to recreate everything exactly as it was but then, you'll be 
>finding
> many new exciting possibilities. I'm very happy with this and still
> experimenting ... and contrary to what Andy says, all these new
> possibilities sparked my musical imagination big time.
>
> -Michael