Re: [LAD] Experience driven design and Linux Audio

From: Paul Davis <paul@email-addr-hidden>
Date: Thu Oct 02 2014 - 16:57:33 EEST

On Thu, Oct 2, 2014 at 5:24 AM, <gordonjcp@email-addr-hidden> wrote:

> his is fucking retarded.
>
> Modular synthesizers are dead. No-one except a few propeller-hatted
> autistic loonies who you wouldn't want to sit next to you on the bus use
> them. Why? Because they're a pain in the arse.
>

euro-rack modular synthesis is a big growth area for small companies right
now. doesn't mean they are in widespread use, but to call them dead is
pushing it a bit.

>
> Bob Moog realised this very early on, and he (didn't really) invented the
> damned things. What he realised was that everyone who uses a modular
> spends a day making silly farting noises and then gets on with having a
> couple of oscillators patched to a mixer, followed by a filter and finally
> followed by a VCA, with maybe an envelope for pitch, filter cutoff and
> amplitude. So having realised this, Moog developed the Minimoog synth
> which was effectively pre-patched in a hardwired configuration that was
> what, as it turns out, most people actually used.
>

a process very similar to the contrast between mixbus and ardour. mixbus
represents harrison's accumulated experience about what people do when
mixing, ardour represents a totally open-to-whatever approach.

interesting that they both use substantively the same codebase, eh?

>
> I think the design should be led by someone with experience in observing
> what people actually do with the tools that are presented to them. It's a
> sad fact that UX is a difficult and expensive thing to get right. Car
> manufacturers learned this a long time ago - how many of you drive a car
> with a manual choke (me, okay) or manual ignition advance (no-one unless
> you're into *really* old ones).
>

it is all relative - in the US almost nobody drives a manual transmission
either.

>
> Did Bob Moog "dumb down" the Minimoog? Well, you could say that yes he
> did. But you'd be all kinds of wrong.
>

Moog's biggest contribution to analog synthesis, other than the filter, was
to add a keyboard. Buchla was ahead of Moog in actual synthesis, but was
opposed to the idea that such a capable instrument should be constrained by
the limitations of a keyboard. Moog thought that was stupid, and Moog won
that argument hands down, even though in some deeper sense, Buchla was
correct. UX ... all the way.

_______________________________________________
Linux-audio-dev mailing list
Linux-audio-dev@email-addr-hidden
http://lists.linuxaudio.org/listinfo/linux-audio-dev
Received on Thu Oct 2 20:15:01 2014

This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.8 : Thu Oct 02 2014 - 20:15:01 EEST