Virtual Instruments-Virtually There
What's Missing in Soft Synthesis?
This month, I expect to be helping to cut the ribbon on a brand-new lab in a brand-new music building at my school. It will be equipped with a dozen Intel iMacs, each loaded with six different software packages for recording and editing music, audio and video. The keyboard at each station will have a dozen or more knobs and sliders, and the synthesizer will be-well, actually there won't be any of those.
Five years ago, I wrote in this space that software synthesis was threatening to overtake hardware. Now, at least in the case of this lab, it's a fait accompli. All of the sound generation in this lab will be in software form.
The all-software studio has become eminently practical for great number of people in a great number of contexts.Developers ranging from kids working in their bedrooms to multinational corporations are coming up with new virtual instruments and processors for every conceivable purpose, imitating old tools and designing startling new ones. The quality of the sounds and the interfaces ranges from awful to brilliant, and the prices range from zero to well, still a lot less than you'd pay for a top-tier hardware synthesis. And the correlation between price and quality is by no means linear.
