Loopy Pro: Create music, your way.
What is Loopy Pro? — Loopy Pro is a powerful, flexible, and intuitive live looper, sampler, clip launcher and DAW for iPhone and iPad. At its core, it allows you to record and layer sounds in real-time to create complex musical arrangements. But it doesn’t stop there—Loopy Pro offers advanced tools to customize your workflow, build dynamic performance setups, and create a seamless connection between instruments, effects, and external gear.
Use it for live looping, sequencing, arranging, mixing, and much more. Whether you're a live performer, a producer, or just experimenting with sound, Loopy Pro helps you take control of your creative process.
Download on the App StoreLoopy Pro is your all-in-one musical toolkit. Try it for free today.
Why are digital musicians obsessed with analog?
I’m writing an article and I’m looking for thoughts about why we love analog so much.
- Why is analog considered more “authentic,” (or not)?
- Apparently digital recreations of analog sounds are acceptable, but…
- … What is an analog sounds anyway?
Regarding the last one, I have a cassette deck that sounds fantastic, nothing at all like the wobbly, dusty tape “emulation” apps around.
Any comments? I will probably pull a few good quote out of this thread, so let me know if you prefer that I don’t.
Comments
Oh yeah, the news hook for this is Strymon’s new Brig, which looks great.
I don't have the answer, but 2 things to consider.
I'm an old gamers, and I'm obsessed with NES games because I'm nostalgic like, probably, every human on earth. Nostalgy is a big thing. NES games are old with crapy graphics with often big flaws. So many actual games are better, but NES = my youth.
Also, if we only think about guitar pedal.....Analogic was always good, and digital were awful (at first). So, for a long time, digital multi-effects were awful. But now, digital guitar pedal are extremely good. But in the mind of some people, digital = bad because they have a bad experience with the first attempt of digital effect.
DOUBLE POST
I wonder if some of the appeal is as much about the immediacy of many analog device interfaces as it is their sound?
Objectively, modelling is so good now that almost no one could actually tell by ear alone whether a sound had analog or digital origins.
But old analog gear also often has much more comprehensible, one knob per function, formats, so there is a much more immediate feedback loop between the operator and the unit.
Consider the ongoing popularity of the original SH101 synth. Classic sounds, but also such an immediately obvious and tweakable control surface to access and create those sounds, you can just get in there and start tweaking, by ear, without reference to a manual or a menu screen, and what you do has immediate effects upon the sound. It’s instinctual.
Modern, more powerful machines often aren’t. The learning curves are steeper. And making music is all about immediacy and flow, isn’t it?
I think this is a great point. The digital gear I like the most is pretty much one-knob-per-function. I have a Strymon Iridium digital amp pedal and it sounds amazing, and everything is done with six knobs and two switches.
Great post.
major difference for me is that i can twist knobs on real analog like in any random way and it aways sounds good, sound doesn't break, even in total extreme knob positions (like resonsance of filter at max, modulating filter with audio rate LFO to the level it sounds like bit crusher - but still it sounds great, not like totally broken unusable)
on digital synth i almost always needs to be cautious about some combination of parameters settings, cause in always starts to manifest some disadvantags like aliasing, non harmonic distortion, digital clipping, stuff like that.
Of course there are few rare examples, but they are very rare.
“Digital” musicians are obsessed with analog, but crucially their (non-musician) audience who listens to & buys their music really couldn’t care less about it.
ill probably pull a few good quote out of this thread, so let me know if you prefer that I don’t.
Ha, yes. Nobody but the musician can even hear the difference on the record.
Couldn't agree more!
But that is a digital pedal, right?
Correction : and the musician fool themself in thinking they hear a difference.
I watch this YouTube channel called Specter sound studio. A recording channel for heavy metal recording. He as tested at length all the components that can influence a metal guitar sound. The player, the guitar wood, the strings, the pickup, the cable, the amplifier and the speaker. He as proven without a shadow of a doubt that the speaker is the biggest contributor to metal guitar tone.
But some people in his comments section still bring the same old tired trope. It's all in the hands, tone wood affects makes the tone, the pickup makes the sound.
Digital emulation of analog is for the most part not very good. That doesn’t make the emulation useless but it’s not a worthy replacement.
Digital isn’t bad either, there is a lot to love about it. I typically try and stay in the analog domain as much as possible because the sound is much more how I want it to be. An example is to watch a comparison of a Space Echo plug/pedal vs the real thing and listen for how the repeats sit, they are present but never in the way while the emulations end up blurred and as a result puts the original signal in a different space.
I hate the whole “nobody will notice in the mix” thing. Come make music in my studio and realise what a difference there is in sound before anything ends up in digital. It’s a different world.
Why are digital musicians obsessed with analog?
cannot afford analog and think " when i got this and that, iam successfull." 🤣
s.o.u.n.d
There’s definitely interesting things at play with this; largely that we, as humans, often want what we can’t have, and emulations are close enough that they give us that satisfaction without costing too much or taking up space. They can also be in some ways superior; no random detuning, or broken capacitors/crackly pots etc, but I’m many ways nothing like the real thing. I’ve gone back towards hardware as I like just to close my eyes/brain and just play, tactility is really special, and as a digital artist, I spend way too much time starting at screens anyway… also with modular stuff, I really find that there’s such massive range within tiny increments of change that you just can’t get to with emulation, the numbers just aren’t big enough, especially if you’re using a MIDI controller. However this can be a blessing when you’re trying to work quickly, especially in actual production…
Once ‘perfection’ - a completely noise free audio recording in this case - has been achieved, there is nowhere left to go but backwards and the anomalies of the earlier attempts to achieve that perfection suddenly appear more interesting and unique in comparison as they are now the non-standard. Plus nostalgia.
Would be interesting for you to consider the difference between digital musicians keen on ‘analog’ who are old enough to have extensively used analog equipment in the past, when it was state of the art, and those who are keen on it but have never actually used any analog hardware themselves.
Yes, but it‘s the musician who might spend hours and hours with the sound to create what finally passes the audience in a couple of minutes...
unless one has actually listened there isn‘t much to discuss...
I first started recording with a Tascam 688 and Atari ST over 30 years ago. It was a huge pain fraught with huge issues when something wouldn't work. Regardless, the music I recorded back then, while feeble in performance and mix skill, had something special about it. After those days I recorded fully ITB and everything from those early ITB days still sound harsh and sterile. Now I use a lot of analog emulation and it gets me closer to the days I remember. When a simple guitar track sounded bearable straight away. Even with digital hardware, the Tascam produces more tolerable results than I get today without some analog emulation.
I think many of the “tropes”/justifications people make are quite historic now.
There was a time in the 90s where plenty of people realised the initial move to digital synths and FX had some drawbacks like poorer user interfaces (less knobs and sliders, maybe none) along with sounds that were often static (no magical subtle nuances from unstable analogue gear).
Truth is there are a lot of undesirable analogue synths out there, not every filter sounds great. Most of them ended up in a dustbin. There are plenty of digital synths that are quite bland, (dustbin too) but plenty of modern digital filters sound great and digital synths can do things analogue simply cannot.
I would quite like a small modular setup, maybe a convenient Moog Mother 32 for a bit of hands on Analogue magic, but most the music I listen to, I know for a fact the artists tend to use both.
The majority of tracks I have finished were largely digital. If something was ever analogue, it got sampled and generally further processed digitally.
Im sure a nice sized modular set up is great fun! So is a Waldorf Iridium.
My personal advice to anyone worried about not having real analogue gear and thus being second rate..
Its nonsense.
Be pragmatic.
Theoretically , analogue has a bit more chaos from the natural realm of how electrons flow.
In practice we are now in a time where computer DSP can throw in even more magic.
Cyclists have a saying (they get G.A.S. too!)… the best bike is the one you’ve got.
I would probably rephrase the question to "Why are electronic musicians obsessed with analog"? If you call yourself a digital musician, then you are very likely not obsessed with analog.
Coming back to the question: There are both analog and digital synths with a great sound. I am not a purist, but one reason why I love analog gear is the DIY aspect. Working with electronics for over 50 years, I have great fun playing with analog audio, control voltages and gate pulses. A lot can be done with simple electronic components and no need for a Eurorack. Modding a piece of analog gear is much easier than trying to modify digital kit with it's custom programmed chips. Although I am making a living from programming computers, I dearly enjoy NOT having to do this here (apart from a few Arduino based synth projects I started during lockdown).
Imho the „obsessed with analog“ phrase refers to countless emulations of studio gear.
In fact today it‘s a crucial aspect to get a product any market acceptance at all.
So it‘s 1st of all a photorealistic GUI of some „famous“ device and only after that an attempt to recreate the performance of that unit in digital.
Which in most cases fails, but no one heard the original anyway...
Because digital is so pristine it lacks character
did you mean, why are SOME digital musicians? nostalgia is key. and belief in magic.
i'm much more obsessed with digital sounds, with fm, with physical modeling, with granular, with whatever comes next. and as i learnt from empirical engineers, i don't believe in any black box magicality. proof is in double blind tests. people who claim to prefer analog, often in random controlled studies actually don't. on another point people do like what they're used to. EG vinyl which by objective measure is terrible yet SOME continue to swear to preferring it. (again in random controlled study they actually don't, but that's another story). everyone will say whatever they say, but prove it in a double blind test.
also stepping of values .. .when you make very slow cutoff sweep with knob (very noticeble on high resonance) on digital synth, very oftern you hear individual steps as value is changed - it is not countinuous change .. same applies with modulations .. other range of spectrum for same problem are very fast modulations .. fast LFO modulations for example .. because many digital synths use updating of mod source value -> mod target paramter for with low frequency(for example just few times per second) again fast modulations are sounding just plain bad.
With analog this is not the case, no matter if it is very slow sweep or super fast modulation, because it is happening in analog domain it is always super smooth.
Sounds like nerdish detail but this is exactly what then makes difference in result sound.
I think it's analog, a bucket-brigade device, like the new Boss pedal that came out recently (DM-101)
(edit) it turns out I'm completely wrong
The Brig is a digital emulation of BBD-style delays. The Boss pedal is an actual analog pedal though, AFAIK.
All the experimentation I did on synths in the 70s was in shops on analogue gear of the day
In the early 80s I made an analogue modular (Digisound 80) (only partly finished due to lack of dosh, and built it into a semimodular case because I envied the 2600)
By the mid 80s I bought a Yamaha CX5m and from then on I was digital (FB01, SY77, Proteus, HR16b, QY20 etc) but by the 90s I returned to analogue by buying an Oberheim Matrix 1000
Now, one of the powerful differences I noticed back then was that sequences going into the Matrix 1000 sounded what I would’ve termed ‘organic’ back then not because of any intrinsic difference in the sound itself (although it is more ‘powerful’ in sound), but because of the behaviour – bits of sequence on certain patches would basically carry on across notes, and the modulation would seem to be independent of notes and note-ons, it was like some big machine behind it all which had a mind of it’s own (well, the matrix modulation busses) and no digital synth I had or knew of behaved like this – all the digital synths at that point made a sound, the sound executed and ended, and new sounds initiate and execute, but it seemed like the same exercise each time, there didn’t seem to be any overarching ongoing mechanism that the notes inherit from, it was basically an identical repeat each time – it might as well have been a sample (in the case of the proteus and the HR16b, it was)
I think a modern digital is different and does indeed have more going on in the modulation areas which prevent it from being so sample-like, and more like an organic ‘machine’ with unpredictable emergent behaviour – so now, with a well thought out digital, this difference simply isn’t there
By the way, I love my Opsix, it’s by far my favourite synth, and I actually bought it while I was waiting interminably for the Behringer Pro 800 to be released (which it has been now, but forever it was a wait) and I don’t really need to think about buying the Pro 800 at all now because I’ve got the Opsix – just because one’s analogue and the other is digital is irrelevant now