Does Anyone Really Believe that "Vintage Gear" is Better?

[Anderton]

Do any software amps sound noisy, hummy?

 

Depends on the input signal. If you're using a high-gain amp sim, it will amplify the crap coming into your pickups as easily (and accurately) as a standard amp. This is one reason I tend to prefer humbuckers. I can use EQ to emulate single-coil timbres that come very close.

 

[Mikeo]

As far as musical instruments go, what ever they made in the 50's and 60's, they still make today. Only better and with less issues. One just needs to pony up a bit and dig into there wallet.

 

 

 

It's nice to own vintage gear, if it's solid and trouble free, and not in need of repair. I have a few early reissues guitars from Fender, that are now 30 plus years old.

 

I'm having my 18 month old F5G mandolin looked at this week this week, through an authorized Gibson service center, as the top might be sinking a bit too much. I'm making the 2 hour drive to upstate NY. So far no real buzzing or frets bottoming out and it sounds pretty killer. Just some curling around the f holes and a significant height difference. Like I tell my wife, 5- 6 grand ain't what it used to be. We will see what happens from there. It might not last me a lifetime, like I thought. I have had no issues with a 30 year old Flatiron, I bought new back in the day.

 

Gibson should try to get back into the banjo biz. I can't really play the banjo, but there were at one time they were cats pajamas of banjos. Gibson Dobros were very nice too.

 

Many amps are just made better today, and sound better, with less issues.

 

A solid band, a good producer, and engineer will make the best of both vintage recording gear, as well as any modern equipment.

 

 

 

 

[Geoff Grace]

Like I tell my wife' date=' 5- 6 grand ain't what it used to be. [/quote']

If you were to take the $3,200 I spent in 1983 for my Oberheim OB-8 and adjust it for inflation, you could buy an OB-6, a Prophet 12, a Moog Sub 37, and have over $100 remaining for cables—which any dealer would probably throw in for free after purchasing all those synths at regular price.

 

Best,

 

Geoff

[Mikeo]

If you were to take the $3,200 I spent in 1983 for my Oberheim OB-8 and adjust it for inflation, you could buy an OB-6, a Prophet 12, a Moog Sub 37, and have over $100 remaining for cables—which any dealer would probably throw in for free after purchasing all those synths at regular price.

 

Best,

 

Geoff

 

 

 

[Anderton]

Or you could take that $3200 and buy a hardware synth, and a zillion software synths

[Geoff Grace]

That's kind of what I've done, although the hardware money went into a computer and SSDs to house all that cool music software, along with a high-quality AD/DA converter, keyboard controller, studio monitors, and headphones.

 

Best,

 

Geoff

[Phil O'Keefe]

I'll also be 104 by then...

[Phil O'Keefe]

Or you could take that $3200 and buy a hardware synth' date=' and a zillion software synths [/quote']

 

And while you could probably still use the hardware synth in 20 years, the same is not likely to be the case for all those softsynths.

[Anderton]

Very possibly. But...I was talking to a tech-head about hardware that's dependent on Android or iOS apps, and how I was concerned the hardware would become a doorstop if Apple or Google gets fickle. He claimed that it's trivial to write emulators for those kinds of applications if the need ever arises.

[Phil O'Keefe]

He claimed that it's trivial to write emulators for those kinds of applications if the need ever arises.

 

But will anybody want to?

 

How many people are still running a sequencer program from the first decade (or two) of computer MIDI sequencers? Last I heard there isn't a whole lot of people asking for a port of Dr T's to run on current generation PCs, and I suspect that not only will today's sequencers / DAWs experience the same thing in twenty or thirty years, but so will the virtual instruments. What will be technologically possible by then will be so far advanced beyond what they can do today that it will make it look/sound like 8 bit sampling in a 64 bit world. With the possible exception of some future retro / revival movement that relies on early 21st century tech, I doubt that anyone will bother with or even care about the VI stuff we're currently using. If they do, I suspect you're right - they'll just emulate it instead of re-manufacturing hardware or porting the software over.

[Ernest Buckley]

By 2066 singularity will be here and you will be the plugin

 

I would say within the next decade (2026), most of us will be working in a virtual studio. We will all be accessing our studio tools via a virtual reality in which we wear goggles and headphones that emulate famous recording studios from around the room. So for example, you can buy the Hit Factory Virtual Studio and have access to the same mixing board, outboard gear, etc... that once existed... of course, they`ll also the Abbey Road studio.... By 2050, we`ll be working in virtual reality with other musicians across the world, except it`ll seem like they are right there in the room with us. Holograms may be even part of the game by then.

 

I do believe controllers will continue to evolve as well and we will soon see a controller that connects somehow to a frontal cortex and we`ll be able to think a melody and it`ll play in our virtual room. The computer screen will also die away and soon we`ll be mixing on holographic screens that project out of our phone or something...

 

Vintage gear will be classified in the same category as the horse and wagon... out of date, expensive, ineffective, but romantic...

[dboomer]

Kurzweil actually predicts 2029. It's just hard to get my head around exponential expansion.

[Anderton]

Yeah well...I believe this is the same Ray Kurzweil who had a hard drive hidden until the table, and streamed samples from that, when the first Kurzweil was demoed at AES. At the time, I was blown away to be able to play a sampler with no detectable split points. It was unprecedented at the time, and I wrote about what I experienced in glowing terms.

 

Years later a Kurzweil employee said I'd been purposefully deceived, and that the samples were not playing from RAM as had been claimed. They had reprinted my glowing quotes, and I felt used.

 

Kurzweil the company also appropriated my technique to emulate Minimoog envelopes and was upfront that the idea was taken from a column I wrote for Keyboard, without credit.

 

They're entitled to do that, of course. But contrast that to Line 6, which based an effect on something I'd written in Electronic Projects for Musicians that was legally "dedicated to the public," but they still credited me. Or Steinberg, who virtualized my Quadrafuzz and again, though it was dedicated to the public, insisted on crediting and compensating me. Or Hartley Peavey, who wanted to use one of my circuits and I told him to go ahead, no problem. He said "I can't do that." I told him seriously, it was fine. A few weeks later a TriFlex PA, Peavey amp, and T-60 showed up because he felt he owed me something. Or iZotope...before they introduced Trash, they said it was based on my work, and they wanted to know if I would be upset if they copied it. I told them that I would instead be flattered and proud to be associated with people who take intellectual property that seriously.

 

So "genius boy" Ray Kurzweil...no, I don't have a very high opinion of him.

[dboomer]

You weren't the first (or last ) journalist to be tricked. I could tell stories, but I won't. In the long run they were just little stretches in time and those products did perform as advertised.

 

How do you feel about Stevie? After all, maybe he was behind it all

 

Sorry cuz I too know how it feels not to get credit for your ideas (although I total fairness I did get paid for them).

[Anderton]

You weren't the first (or last ) journalist to be tricked. I could tell stories' date=' but I won't. In the long run they were just little stretches in time and those products did perform as advertised.[/quote']

 

Actually what bothered me was that the shipping product did not perform the way it did in that demo .

 

Sorry cuz I too know how it feels not to get credit for your ideas (although I total fairness I did get paid for them).

 

It's not so much about me not getting credit, it's about others taking credit. A lot of my circuits and such have been used in a variety of products without credit, that's fine with me.

[Phil O'Keefe]

It's not so much about me not getting credit, it's about others taking credit. A lot of my circuits and such have been used in a variety of products without credit, that's fine with me.

 

Yeah, but it's completely different when someone tries to take credit for an idea that came from someone else. That's going way too far IMHO.

[techristian]

Here is a recent EBAY ad to illustrate the madness. DX1 for $7999

 

http://www.ebay.com/itm/Yamaha-DX-1-FM-Digital-Synthesizer-/172398333438?hash=item2823bdcdfe

[UstadKhanAli]

Yeah well...I believe this is the same Ray Kurzweil who had a hard drive hidden until the table, and streamed samples from that, when the first Kurzweil was demoed at AES. At the time, I was blown away to be able to play a sampler with no detectable split points. It was unprecedented at the time, and I wrote about what I experienced in glowing terms.

 

Years later a Kurzweil employee said I'd been purposefully deceived, and that the samples were not playing from RAM as had been claimed. They had reprinted my glowing quotes, and I felt used.

 

Kurzweil the company also appropriated my technique to emulate Minimoog envelopes and was upfront that the idea was taken from a column I wrote for Keyboard, without credit.

 

They're entitled to do that, of course. But contrast that to Line 6, which based an effect on something I'd written in Electronic Projects for Musicians that was legally "dedicated to the public," but they still credited me. Or Steinberg, who virtualized my Quadrafuzz and again, though it was dedicated to the public, insisted on crediting and compensating me. Or Hartley Peavey, who wanted to use one of my circuits and I told him to go ahead, no problem. He said "I can't do that." I told him seriously, it was fine. A few weeks later a TriFlex PA, Peavey amp, and T-60 showed up because he felt he owed me something. Or iZotope...before they introduced Trash, they said it was based on my work, and they wanted to know if I would be upset if they copied it. I told them that I would instead be flattered and proud to be associated with people who take intellectual property that seriously.

 

So "genius boy" Ray Kurzweil...no, I don't have a very high opinion of him.

 

I don't know the guy at all, and know very little about him, but this sort of description is really disappointing, both as a person and as an innovator. Sometimes, someone's apparent public persona isn't quite how the person is.

 

[UstadKhanAli]

As for the original question...

 

People like well-designed gear, modern or vintage.

 

So some vintage gear sounds better. Some modern gear sounds better.

[Anderton]

I've actually had my eyes opened a bit about vintage gear, because I've been checking out the Gibson 2017 guitars. Unlike Phil, I know very little about what influences tone on guitars. I pick one up, I play it...if I like it, I don't really care too much about why I like it. But comparing for example a guitar with an old-school nickel-plated bridge compared to a modern titanium bridge, or one with weight relief compared to one with no weight relief, there are definite differences. So maybe a lot about "vintage," at least with guitars, has to do with manufacturing materials and production methods that were common at the time - and quantifiable.

[UstadKhanAli]

Isn't there also something about the wood mellowing on an old guitar that gives it a different tone that a new guitar can't touch?

[Iamthesky]

Then again, you have to be careful what you mean by "vintage" gear. Many people seem to use it as if it means "analogue", yet I'm sitting here in the studio looking at a ton of vintage gear, classic signal processors used on famous recordings, and nowadays that means digital too, as well as analogue. After all, 1991 was 25 years ago; isn't 25 years enough to be called vintage?

[MikeRivers]

Then again' date=' you have to be careful what you mean by "vintage" gear. Many people seem to use it as if it means "analogue", yet I'm sitting here in the studio looking at a ton of vintage gear, classic signal processors used on famous recordings, and nowadays that means digital too, as well as analogue. After all, 1991 was 25 years ago; isn't 25 years enough to be called vintage?[/quote']

 

In my state, a car 20 years old can be licensed as "classic" and one 25 or more older is "antique." That's defined by the Division of Motor Vehicles. But when it comes to recording, there isn't a Division of Gear, so it can be whatever you want it to be. Among digital reverbs, the EMT 250 (1976) is probably fairly called "vintage," and maybe a Lexicon 224 (1978), but an Alesis XT (1985)? Probably not.

[nice keetee]

on my local craig's list anything over 15 years old is listed as vintage:

[Anderton]

Isn't there also something about the wood mellowing on an old guitar that gives it a different tone that a new guitar can't touch?

 

Yes, this is indeed true. Gibson's Acoustic and Memphis have started using a thermal wood aging process so that even a new guitar can have a head start on that process. I'm personally interested in how this works, and hope to write an article for Gibson.com about what the process involves.