Oh man, you don’t have to tell me! spends rent money on UAD plugins
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If you want real knobs and dials, they will cost you.
In other words, we can blame audiophiles, those crazy people responsible for the existence of $10,000 pixie dust coated audio cables. Because if the software looks like it’s analogue, then it must sound better than software that looks like an actual computer program. Especially if the bits in the analogue looking software are artisanally crafted from electrons quantumly entangled with ones from genuine vintage audio equipment.
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These people laugh at a lot of the woo audiophiles believe in while still believing in their own version of woo. In other words, they are just normal people.
What’s not cool and expensive about aerospace control panels?
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Nobody knew what “skeuomorphism” was until Apple moved away from it and suddenly everyone hated it.
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I find that music sounds warmer and more resonant when played through an interface with simulated glowing preamp tubes.
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So you own a bunch of Nomad Factory plugins too?
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People rag on audiophiles all the time, but all I know is that nothing sounds more transparent or has a lower noise floor than my Funk Logic Palindrometer.
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I would totally skin my desktop to look like the Butch Vig Vocals plugin.
Chris Randal of Audio Damage has written lots about the issues of plugin interface design and the change over time of how they look in his blog
I have an old Mackie C4 unit which is a midi controller with 32 knobs that I’ve got mapped to the controls of my standard set of Logic plugins. Truthfully its a workaround but for me its better than screwing around with a pointer on screen.
Plenty still do just that.
Ugh. Ableton’s UI is for me the definition of ugly even though it has its own standard.
Used to be expensive but Garbage Clone CompanyBehringer made cheap knob midi interfaces for ages and for at lest 5 years you can get small cheap ones from Korg and others that work pretty well if your needs are small.
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Surely there could be some middle ground? I’m new to all this but after a cursory 6 hours trying to get to square 1 with Ableton, I’d sum it up as: a recipe for tears.
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Well, there are two ways to win at scrabble : knowing the best words suited to the letters you have or make your longest possible “word” into a real one.
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Sure. But after 8 years, they’re doing it as an informed decision, and not because they’re oblivious to the existence of hardware controllers.
Oh God yeah. I find it drab, but it’s what the author seems to want, and he’s definitely seen screenshots/tutorials of it at this stage in his career.
I’m barely more experienced than that, but yeah, it’s a difficult beast until it starts to register. I found the inbuilt tutorials invaluable (and just messing around in general with the thing), but I’d love to find a decent how-to book for it.
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I’m from the generation when recording studios generally didnt even have channel automation on mixing desks, when analog tape was the norm. OTOH I’m young enough to remember the first samplers and did own a low end Akai keyboard version of the S700.
What this means is that the UI of Logic and other DAWs make sense to me because they mimic what I grew up with. The Mackie MCUs are how I mix because its a physical interface that replicates what I grew up with. Purely computer must has now been around long enough that there are generations that did not grow up with physical interfaces, who grew up mousing around on the screen.
Whether its an informed decision or just what you know best may differ by individuals.
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I miss Kai Krause.
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I believe that the interfaces were made this way to appeal to older musicians with a lot of disposable income. Musicians historically are image driven and they love the look of their vintage guitars, amps, and effects. So it was only logical to make the interfaces look like the cool old hardware fx units they model. So they appeal to all the guys that want the vintage studio experience at an affordable cost. It is understandable that it can look cluttered and odd to those younger musicians who grew up recording with PCs who never valued the vintage studio experience. The software designers should allow skins so that you can streamline the visual appearance but it may be that they consider their interface as a sort of advertising (and a lot of ego). To me the hodge podge is reminiscent of the racks of analog fx in old studios. I don’t complain because the “bang for the buck” is so big in these “soft fx” and the power they offer in a good host is way beyond what you could in a vintage studio. A bit of clutter is a small price to pay. IMHO
Look into the trackers. Milkytracker’s the most famous free one, renoise is a tracker on so many steroids it’s a full DAW.
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There’s no mystery to why people want this – it makes things seem more real than if they were invisible. The value of a tool is in what the user will create, so you need your users to picture themselves using it, and you need that picture to look new and exciting. That’s why early Wired readers were so excited about Kai’s Power Tools (for Photoshop, long before this was the norm for audio software). Actually, it’s also why regular early Wired advertiser Silicon Graphics spent so much on sexy industrial design for its workstation hardware.
As you add non-trivial complexity, custom UIs become violently unworkable. But a lot of audio software is, like, a guitar pedal whose only settings are “on” or “off”. And, a lot of audio software competes directly against equivalent hardware products. So that kina makes sense. And I’m sure it doesn’t hurt that, by inflating the value of screen real estate within Reason, it helps to justify why each individual plugin should be a separate commercial product.
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How could they value what they never had?
More likely the represtation of the familiar because it’s already familiar. Don’t reinvent the wheel.
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