CyberGene

I don’t know why but every time I see this thread, I read its title as “Nord Stockholm syndrome”.

All that can be replaced by a single MacBook Air M1/M2 with U-He and Arturia plugins. It will be more reliable and easy to program and will sound the same to most people. But it wouldn’t look that cool 😎

My vote also goes to the Numa X. I have a Numa X Piano 73 and I love it for being very lightweight and compact, yet having great feeling Fatar TP-110 that’s so much better than the TP-100LR it replaces. The electric piano sounds are fully modeled and while I’m very skeptical about physical modeling for acoustic piano (on the Numa they use a hybrid approach of sampling + modeling for the acoustic patches which gets best of both worlds), the full modeling works really great for Rhodes and is very tweakable. For the money you also get uploadable sounds like on the much more expensive Nords, aftertouch, embedded USB audio interface to use with either iPad or a laptop with external VST-s, one of the best MIDI implementations and tons of other great features.

Sounds a bit nasal and thin to me. Not my type of Rhodes but I’m not a Nord user either 😀

Well, there's exactly what you want, the Trigon-6 😀

Proper title would attract more people.

For me there will always be Moog and the rest of the synth companies. And when I hear something like what Wendy Carlos did with the Moog Modular on Switched on Bach, or the Minimoog in the Pink Floyd records, it's just magic and no other synth comes close. That's a personal and a very biased opinion, of course. However, all that being said, when I can (and I did) purchase a Behringer Model D for €250 that sounds exactly like the records (yeah, yeah, it's probably not 100% the same as a a real Minimoog but then there are no two real Minimoogs that sound exactly the same), then something is really wrong with Moog's business model. When a reissued Minimoog Model D costs €6000, then apparently that business model is not sutainable. I'd love to own a real Minimoog but sorry, I just can't 😕

Agree. I didn’t articulate it well. I actually meant Moog as a company when I said “hand-made analog synths assembled in a high wages country by cool looking dudes”. I see a lot of hipster videos about their factory and I just can’t imagine this thing ever working in the long term. I’m sure Sequential are much better as a business model but they are still a rather niche synth manufacturer.

+1. And you forgot to mention Novation which already make one of the best modern synths (I owned the Peak), so Sequential was not a new endeavor for them. OTOH the way a Moog sounds is unmatched IMO. However I’ve never owned one and would be very cautious purchasing one reading a lot of negative feedback regarding their quality 😕

Well, Sequential are under Focusrite, that’s how things work when you’re not big and powerful enough to sustain yourself with a niche thing such as expensive hand-made analog synths assembled in a high wage country by cool looking dudes 😎

I’m in absolutely no position to suggest you should pay it out of your pocket. At least in this current state of what appears to be a high monthly cost that is not negligible. I was wrong to compare it against my own forum which is really cheap because I created it with the sole purpose of offering just a simple forum functionality whereas you’ve already established a much more elaborate website with other people involved and those people get paid. If for some reason you decide to downsize it and leave only the forum on, I believe it can be pretty cheap though. I am myself paying something around $10-15 a month which includes hosting, domain, AWS storage. But then I’m also maintaining it myself and I’m a software engineer, so maybe not a fair comparison. All that being said, I believe any forum should be free. If there are high costs, they should be covered either by the owner on good will, or a cheap solution be sought, there are actually free forums. For instance, there’s Free Flarum. There’s nothing wrong with asking for donations though. I just hope that if for some reason the donations are not regular and don’t cover your costs you would rather seek a downsizing and cheaper solutions rather than closing it. Maybe it’s just an OCD on my side but I’m not OK with the idea that a forum can be run for free, yet we’re donating for it. It’s not about me paying $5 a month, as already said that’s less than a lunch. It’s just that I’m really obsessed with efficiency and frugality. Again, apologies for kind of suggesting what’s not my business.

I mostly browse the forum on my iPhone 13 Pro Max which is the biggest iPhone, yet the forum is so cluttered the main topics are well beyond the bottom: Also, I live in Europe and I’m not interested in the US ads. So, I just blocked all banners and subforums I’m not interested in. Here’s how it looks: If you think it can help the forum, I can click on the ads once a month. Not sure about donations though. I only use the forum functionality to read regular user posts and to post myself and I think that functionality alone should be free.

I’ve been tempted many times by the MPC One but whenever I start searching for reviews I see it predominantly used for hip-hop. What makes it so good for hip-hop and why isn’t it more popular for other genres?

Congrats and welcome to the club 🙂 Make sure you install the latest firmware if it isn’t already. It’s probably the reason why I like the Numa now, apparently they improved the touch response a lot among other fixes and additions.

That’s a pretty nice idea indeed. But it’s all too similar to Facebook, or even more to MySpace for those who remember it, it was like a proto-Facebook but more music oriented. But that was also its Achilles’ heel. It’s just too complicated and resource demanding to be used for something specific. That’s where Facebook got a win, they abstracted it to the level of using all these functions in a more flexible way for basically anything. One can argue Facebook already does all that. I for one deleted my account permanently after years of using FB due to the growing polarization and hostility. It all started friendly in 2008 to end up as an activist battle field for anyone arguing with anyone, and especially their closest friends, about anything and not accepting any other view than their own. I feel so much better without Facebook. But back to feature rich music oriented social network. That’s so difficult to implement and sustain that it will indeed be possible only if you have way too much cash to waste for the luxury of it 😉 But it’s a really nice idea, no doubt about it.

That’s a good analogy since the model shifted entirely to streaming services. You subscribe and you have every album in the world anywhere. You have curated playlists or just random shuffle. The analogy to this is Facebook. You have all the groups and people in the world and there’s all kinds of content in a single feed. And a forum is like an old audio player. You have one forum for this, another forum for that… it’s like changing CD-s. You can think that changing from CD-s to MP3-s is good but that still won’t work. Don’t get me wrong, I love forums. But I grew with forums. Younger people prefer short videos or tweets or FB posts - you have everything in the world in a single place. There’s no way you can appeal to them with a specialized forum, no matter how well you polish it. They don’t like wasting time going to a separate place on the Internet to just chat with people about something specific. That’s not how their mindsets work now. I have a young kid and I see they work in an absolutely different way than us. They are much more flexible, broader in interests and possessing multitasking than us and can switch focus in a matter of seconds. And they prefer to just browse through a feed with music, games, cats, parties, pics, fun… and filter it in a split second while scrolling through it visually.

Here’s my two cents, although I already said pretty much the same earlier. A forum is as an obsolete thing and you can’t grow it anymore. You’ll have to deal with that realization. I’d be happy to be proven wrong though. With the above in mind you should stick to the bare minimum and just “keep the lights on” and downsize/cut everything else. The cheapest hosting tiers are good enough for maybe 100 simultaneous users posting at the same time or even more and I think this forum is much below that number. Forums are made by their members, and not for their members. Or in other words, we all contribute to the quality of the content, we help each other and we shouldn’t be expected to pay for that. There are support forums of companies selling services and products and they can charge you for the staff members helping you but this is not the case here. Which is why any money paid by members should be entirely voluntary and in the way of donations. Ads are OK, but just consider for a moment that I, for one, live in Europe. Is an American ad relevant to me and vice versa? If you go with subscriptions are you going to limit only the posting abilities of non-paying members? Because if you also limit their browsing you will basically block Google and other search engines from crawling and indexing the forum which will certainly kill the forum in no time. Once again, I believe this forum should stay free for anybody, also ad free and downsized to the bare minimum of just providing a simple forum functionality for its members. Maybe no upload space, no real-time updates and all these things that I know for sure require hardware resources. I just don’t think there’s profit in forums nowadays, so once you’re fine with that realization you would basically see the needed steps yourself. I know this sounds a bit pessimistic but stop for a moment and think about all of it. I’m just trying to be realistic actually.

I just added a P.S. above about separating “premium” features for subscribers but still keeping the base functionality free.

I don’t think forums can really grow these days. Younger folks are on social networks and video sharing platforms. Forums are mostly for the older generations and some forums are still around to serve the existing members but you can’t really hope to grow them. That’s why I suggested downsizing. Alternatively, you can introduce subscriptions but frankly I wouldn’t pay for a forum either, even though this one is my favorite. I may not be right but you’ll certainly lose a lot of members if you introduce subscriptions. Heck, people don’t even want to subscribe for Logic Pro on the iPad and it’s a tool they will use for making money, e.g. gigging. And now we’re talking about a forum. And I personally hate ads and use AdBlockers all the time. Maybe you should just seek sponsorship? P.S. How about paid features? For instance allow picture/file upload only to paid members whereas the free tier users should upload image/files on external services, etc?

A year and a half ago I created the PianoClack forum as a spin-off of PianoWorld forums due to their unfair moderation and poor web experience. I pay the hosting myself and I maintain the forum myself. It has costed me around €5 a month so far. No ads and no need for subscriptions or donations. Unless hosting becomes too expensive for some reason. I see no more than 100 active users here and that’s a reach. You should consider downsizing both the hardware and people resources IMO.

As a relatively younger guy who was mostly into acoustic piano and Rhodes up until recently, I started digging into synths only 3 years ago. I owned and sold a few of the latest (and still current) synths but my game-changing synth without a doubt is the Hydrasynth because its intuitive layout and great modulation options taught me almost everything about the basics and the depths of synthesis that I struggled to grasp before.

I played some of the acoustic piano patches in a rehearsal room a few days ago and they sounded terrific through the stereo PA system there and the other guys even pointed it out. Even the default piano sound which I previously disliked (when playing on headphones at home) sounded very realistic and warm. I’ve had so many issues with acoustic piano patches on various boards in the past that sounded great on headphones but it all went wrong through PA speakers. Not with the Numa though! Another score for Studiologic, I’m really becoming a fan. (Posting this while on a vacation in Naples 🇮🇹🍕❤️)

AFAIK some of the GEM engineers and product managers are now working for Studiologic which I believe I read somewhere under a Studiologic video on YouTube. Maybe they also obtained some of their technology.

I don’t see issue with editing in any music recording either but the accent here is “this is how Joplin played his rags in terms of feel, rhythm, tempo, ornamentation…” and that’s where we should be rather conservative.

While that’s a valid analogy, see some of the quotes earlier in the discussion regarding piano roll authenticity in general. These are basically rudimentary MIDI recordings and unlike an audio recording, they can be edited completely without leaving a trace. Try editing an audio performance of a solo piano by changing pitches, timing and velocity. It’s possible only with relatively recent software (including ML/AI algorithms) and I’m still not sure it would sound convincing. Also, Joplin was really harmed neurologically by the syphilis by the end of his life, so in 1916 by many accounts he was almost unable to play, so those piano rolls were certainly edited.