As a part-time synthwave musician, it's impossible for me to resist vintage synths and sounds. I recently got addicted to the presets for the Prophet VS, for instance, which I have access to thanks to the Arturia Prophet V.
Sadly, most of my equipment, including the Prophet V, is software-based, and I'm starting to realize that this is the way to go when it comes to lasting a while. Yes, it's nice to have the real deal in your studio or home, but then you have to deal with servicing it every so often, an action which is particularly difficult for products that are no longer supported by their manufacturers.
Strangely enough, it's also some of the features that I can find fault with with vintage synthesizers. The past few days, for instance, I've been experimenting with my Roland XV-3080, a product that is currently listed as a legacy product and will be for a few more years, and have come to realize that either its SmartMedia card reader is dead, or both cards I had were. If the former, it wouldn't surprise me: I don't know why Roland wanted this over their own ME memory cards because SmartMedia is extremely sensitive to the slightest dirt and fingerprints.
The only comfort I have with this setback is the fact that the Roland XV3080 is like any other hardware synthesizer with MIDI in that you can send SysEx messages to store patches elsewhere, such as a computer, which I guess I'll have to do not only because the User bank has some useable sounds, but also because some of the SRX cards includes patches from the prior SR-JV80 cards, these bonus patches only being accessible through a rare CD instead of being built into the card.
Then there's the whole reason why MIDI exists: to make it easier to sequence multiple synthesizers. With the exception of later versions of the Prophet 5, which originally came out in 1978, it perplexes me how and why some nostalgics can work with the synthesizers made before 1983 when later equipment is easier to manage. This is also one of the big things holding me back from acquiring the rare Emulator I: it's one of the only samplers that did not have MIDI because of its release date of 1981, whereas the first MIDI-based keyboards came out two years later.
Meanwhile, for software, the only real problem one would have that I can think of, other than possibly losing your license file on your computer, is the fact that everything on a computer is getting updated on a regular basis, which, then again, may not be too big of a deal if you use mostly samplers, as the sounds can be accessed externally and therefore, the samplers themselves usually have alternatives.
I apologize to any other nostalgics who read this and took offense to it: I guess one could say that I'm somewhere inbetween the crowds of the past and the present, even if I do lean more toward the former.
Sadly, most of my equipment, including the Prophet V, is software-based, and I'm starting to realize that this is the way to go when it comes to lasting a while. Yes, it's nice to have the real deal in your studio or home, but then you have to deal with servicing it every so often, an action which is particularly difficult for products that are no longer supported by their manufacturers.
Strangely enough, it's also some of the features that I can find fault with with vintage synthesizers. The past few days, for instance, I've been experimenting with my Roland XV-3080, a product that is currently listed as a legacy product and will be for a few more years, and have come to realize that either its SmartMedia card reader is dead, or both cards I had were. If the former, it wouldn't surprise me: I don't know why Roland wanted this over their own ME memory cards because SmartMedia is extremely sensitive to the slightest dirt and fingerprints.
The only comfort I have with this setback is the fact that the Roland XV3080 is like any other hardware synthesizer with MIDI in that you can send SysEx messages to store patches elsewhere, such as a computer, which I guess I'll have to do not only because the User bank has some useable sounds, but also because some of the SRX cards includes patches from the prior SR-JV80 cards, these bonus patches only being accessible through a rare CD instead of being built into the card.
Then there's the whole reason why MIDI exists: to make it easier to sequence multiple synthesizers. With the exception of later versions of the Prophet 5, which originally came out in 1978, it perplexes me how and why some nostalgics can work with the synthesizers made before 1983 when later equipment is easier to manage. This is also one of the big things holding me back from acquiring the rare Emulator I: it's one of the only samplers that did not have MIDI because of its release date of 1981, whereas the first MIDI-based keyboards came out two years later.
Meanwhile, for software, the only real problem one would have that I can think of, other than possibly losing your license file on your computer, is the fact that everything on a computer is getting updated on a regular basis, which, then again, may not be too big of a deal if you use mostly samplers, as the sounds can be accessed externally and therefore, the samplers themselves usually have alternatives.
I apologize to any other nostalgics who read this and took offense to it: I guess one could say that I'm somewhere inbetween the crowds of the past and the present, even if I do lean more toward the former.
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