Why use physical drum machines and synths?

[tame elm]

Now this might seem stupid but I was wondering… why do people still use physical drum machines and synths for making songs instead of digital ones that are just inside your DAW? In my mind, drum machines just play digital sounds anyways and are way clunkier to use compared to say a Logic interface. And synths are just fancy oscillators and computers have those too. Wouldn’t it be easier to just get some plugins and use a MIDI controller? Surely there is a good reason people don’t just do that.

[outer wagon]

Portability and performance

[distant latch]

you answered the opposite of the question r

the answer is that every synth, including software synths, all sound slightly different because of the algorithms or hardware involved

many software synths are made to reproduce the kind of sounds you can get from hardware synths, but they can only get so close

the actual hardware inside the phsyical synth, including signal attenuation and the sort of 'entirely-analog' experience, is very difficult to emulate properly in software, but even so, it is just emulation

[outer wagon]

My synths are more portable and less expensive than my laptop and the things on my laptop. Live performance on synths and drum machines also arent as bottlenecked by ram or processor speeds because theyre more specialized

[distant latch]

software for example has the capability to just straight up produce perfect square waves, whereas in an analog synth they're going to be slightly wonky due to voltages being imperfect or hardware being older, which gives the sound certain character that some people really like

it's similar to the question 'why do people play on pianos when super good piano vsts exist'

or 'why do people use tube amps when you can emulate them digitally'

[outer wagon]

Thats also what i meant by live performance. Sure midi controllers cover that but drum machines & synths are kinda their own performance practice

[distant latch]

yeah

especially when we start talking about modular synths where you're literally plugging things into other things

[outer wagon]

And you cant use software emulations indefinitely, youre gonna be bottlenecked by the abilities of your computer, synths are specialized so all you have to do is record em and maybe pass midi or cv into them from the computer

Many synths are also collectors items

Bc history go brr

[outer wagon]

Ironically i prefer virtual modular synthesis bc less risk of breaking things and far less expensive but ye also that

[distant latch]

yeah. i feel like hardware modular synth is something that if i ever got into i would go broke immediately

[outer wagon]

The gateways to modular are guitar pedals & semimodular synths

[distant latch]

luckily for me my fingers are too stupid for me to have ever had any luck learning guitar

[outer wagon]

Also circuit design if youre into that

Virtual modular is fun bc it feels like doing electronics but without having to actually learn electronics

I should get a pack of electronics for beginning synth circuit design soon, ive been meaning to do that for a while and kept forgetting

Bc grabby thingies are gonna feel nicer than tappy & clicky thingies

[tame elm]

Okay you answered synths but what about drum machines?

[outer wagon]

We were talking about both

Drum machines kinda technically are synths

[tame elm]

Are they? I always thought they just play an audio file for their sound

[outer wagon]

Some synths do just be samplers. But also many drum machines actually synthesize their sounds, especially the classic early ones

Drum synthesis is a whole thing

I dont want to get into it rn

[distant latch]

check out uhhhh

whats the big synth one, is that 808? pretty sure 808 were all synthesized back in the day

[outer wagon]

Yea those were before affordable sampling

808s, 707s, 606s, etc

[distant latch]

yeah and then 909 had actual samples

[distant latch]

but like i dunno, it depends. again like even the ones that play samples have other features that are useful, like advanced sequencing, and as R said it's nice not to have to waste a buncha CPU / RAM doing everything on a laptop in a performance environment

a lot of it comes down to personal preference though

i personally do everything digitally

[outer wagon]

Its kinda reciprocal too, nowadays drummers have developed ways to sound more like synthesized drums or sound like they already have some effect applied to them like compression

Im not too familiar with it but one example that stands out to me is that jdbeck song where they tuned the drum super high and weighed it down a ton to make it sound like it was a drum from kirby

[tame elm]

Isn’t that a lot of effort without any benefit?

[distant latch]

depends on what you want the sound to be 🙂

if you need 'a snare sound' or 'a kick sound' and anything's fine, then yeah digital is probably better or at least more cost effective

[tame elm]

Maybe my ear isn’t quite as developed as I like to think.

Are the sound differences really that big?

[distant latch]

tbf i dont know many live performers who prefer to use drum machines over like.. a prerendered drum loop or something

those seem kinda old fashioned to me at this point

[tame elm]

I was talking about composing in a DAW 🙃

[distant latch]

oh, well yeah. i dunno. i use samples when i write in a daw for sure

i'd tag someone else in this question but i dont actually know anyone who uses a bonafide drum machine in any of their music

[tame elm]

Haven’t used them much but I find drum machines super clunky im general 😅

[distant latch]

i think it's prolly one of those things that once you get used to it you get real fast and start to prefer it

[tame elm]

Could be

[outer wagon]

Its a big difference because its a whole other avenue to explore the sound from. Physical drum articulation goes a lot deeper than samples

[tame elm]

And the difference in sampled vs synthesised drums?

[outer wagon]

Thats kind of a good thing too. In hip hop the "wonky drumming" of drum machine artists like j dilla were extreeemely influential

Again to the point that drummers had to replicate their style

[distant latch]

that's a good point. anything where you physically perform a thing rather than sequencing is going to be preferable to some people

[tame elm]

Just use a metronome for your drum part and call it a day.

I unironically did that once.

Well kinda ironically

[outer wagon]

This is all before touching on the live performance aspect of it, like launchpad lightshows with artists like shawn wasabi

Performance isnt just something on the way to the sound, its an event

And a spectacle

[distant latch]

yeah. the question is more geared towards composition, but involving performance techniques in your composition (which is a huge upside to composing in daw vs. notation) can really improve it

[outer wagon]

Idioms be idiomal

[wintry pebble]

which song is this

[outer wagon]

You can sniff my butt https://youtu.be/EJDARjzHhZE

Theres a lot of speculation in the comments and elsewhere on how the drum sound was obtained. iirc its mostly a mix of tuning and weights and maybe some other things