Well, there vintage emulations such as the moog modular, oddity, the pro series, lounge lizard, B4 which can be usefull. The downside is only for those who know what the original sounds like and are looking for that exact sound, hence normaly they would buy the hardware real thing instead of the plug, this mostly goes for the older engineers, studio owners and musicians that choose for those instruments for the simple reason that they like it since it doesn't sound like the next instrument in the same catagorie. It's knowing make n model in order to decide which instrument you're going to spend money on or what instrument you as looking for in the first place. How to know make n model is to play them. Listening to vst's doesn't give me any impression of the original instrument and as far as new skool hybrid synths goes, I have yet to be impressed ( well, besides the granulair synthesis ) by a plug that made me drop aside my synths, seriously hell no. I think if you're going to do this right, you'll save up and buy that synth you like and the one that brings quality sound no matter what it costs. cuz that the tool you imagine making music with. Same reason musicians pay to play a memorymoog, a b4, a mellotron or a fender rhodes. One in good condition costs a lot of money, but it's his bread or his preference. My background in music has always been synths, ima real gearfreak with a preference for vintage cause it covers all the basics to 2day's electronic music technology. I didn't care for the music but for the tools, since with all these tools you can make all the music you want. There's more heads like me that are not specificly into hiphop and I find a lot of them being an engineer, know what I am talking about when discussing synth make n models and about what kind of sound I am looking for at that moment. Vst's can't give you that since mostly they sound flat to me, lacking a character, formants, the resemblence of the original and lacking the analogue depth a real thing can offer. The truth in this is that hardware vintage synths can not be emulated exactly since you can consider a true emulation as a formula of chaos theory, old stuff wasn't as pinpoint accurate hence them sounding so good. All the newskool synths etc are based upon all these old instruments ( like the nova, virus ) or on rompler technology, which is simply the best way to records an instrument and synthesize it in a hybrid solution, things like the triton, motif, fantom etc. etc.
The only disadvantage to the original instruments I meant here is that they're old, need special care n fixing/tuning which makes them relativly expensive. It's when you care enough to choose between quality appeal or settling for a " sound " you were looking for.
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