Roland is doing just fine selling digital emulations of their classic gear. But they aren't exactly amazing innovative instruments. I look at Roland today as the Gen-X Harley-Davidson: Selling nostalgia gear to aging dudes hitting their mid-life crisis.
Korg has some missteps (the Electribe 2 could be so much better), but seems to still want to make unique, interesting instruments. I'm disappointed in the build quality of the wavestate/modwave/opsix, but their other gear is top notch.
> I look at Roland today as the Gen-X Harley-Davidson: Selling nostalgia gear to aging dudes hitting their mid-life crisis.
So true, and it huuurts. :D
However, one very valid selling point for gear (old or new) is that it is still, by far, a better user/musical experience than software emulation, even with multiple innovative controllers. Either because a screen lack multiple physical points of control, or because software/plugins rights managements are _always_ getting in the way.
Of course, only if you do something with it and it doesn't pile up in a too small room.
What’s an innovative instrument and does that matter when making music? There’s quite a fetishization of gear happening nowadays, making and buying gear for gear’s sake.
By now one can see that subtractive is king, because it’s easy to understand, sounds great and one can hear it everywhere. And subtractive’s pretty much done, manufacturers are just tinkering with filters, modulation and effects at this point. Popular VSTs nowadays are mixing several types of engines (Pigments) or expanding the set of oscillator waves (Serum). In HW we see more of the same or subtractives.
Subtractive will never get old and Roland classics like the Juno, Jupiter or SH-101 just sound good. The Roland drum machines sound good. I never owned any classics and don’t revere that “Roland sound”, but at the end of the day they sound good, so they’re good - and more importantly they’re enough.
All the innovation happening in sound synthesis seems like over engineering and developing things for the sake of novelty.
An innovative instrument is one that's trying to sound like 2022 and not 1982.
I love the hardware Roland sound. Especially the Juno 60 which is one of the sweetest sounding synths ever made. The Jupiters and Junos are musical in a way that other synths never quite matched.
But the Roland Cloud and Zencore versions are close, but... eh. And Roland Cloud Manager is an absolute clusterfuck of a product. It seems like Roland are all about the money now, and they don't even like their customers all that much.
Meanwhile... I bought ModWave Native yesterday and it's the most fun I've had with a synth for a long time. It sounds nothing like a 1982 throwback. The wonderfully bonkers gravity-well based KAOSS modulation makes the sounds organic and unpredictable, far away from any traditional ADSR/LFO combination.
I don't think it's gratuitous or over engineered at all. It's in a nice spot where there's some interesting added complexity on top of a recognisable wavetable engine.
It also works much better as a VST than as hardware because there's more polyphony, it's easier to edit, and it doesn't take up any space.
There’s nothing inherent to the Juno 60 (to take something with the simplest architecture) that makes it sound like the 80s vs 2022. For electronic music it’s the drum beats, melodies, arrangement, the modulation, filter use and effects that have changed with the times.
Wavetable’s popular right now, so credit due to Korg for putting that out in HW format. On the other hand there’s also Waldorf which built their company over decades around this type of synthesis both in HW and plug-in format. ;-)
The thing with wavetable is that it works much better as a VST. One look at the front panel of the modwave lets me know that fiddling with the dozens of buttons and knobs would not be fun for me.
Anyway, there’s hardly anything revolutionary happening in synths. My theory’s that Roland recognized that and are focusing on workflow, availability, interoperability, etc.
Personally I don’t get it why there’s so many new synths being built…
Korg has some missteps (the Electribe 2 could be so much better), but seems to still want to make unique, interesting instruments. I'm disappointed in the build quality of the wavestate/modwave/opsix, but their other gear is top notch.