Hardware has some benefits not available in a computer (probably never will). To some degree emotional but that is actually a good thing. So it’s not just about the quality, it’s for the sake of the feeling of using them.
I’ve had some units but sold them. I kind of miss my JD800 with all the sliders but it had sysex and the regular “inconvenieces” like no total recall like with softies and it was huge. But sitting in front of it and actually touching it was real cool. And it was digital, no oldschool analog monster. Had a Virus too.
The JD-800 is a very cool synth.
You could go for the ‘big’ brother JD-990 that is all the JD800 is, and a lot more. But it’s a 2U rack synth. One of the best old digital synths from Roland. Especially with the Vintage card on board.
Depends on what you want to do and how you want to do it. Personally, I don’t mind programming a synth sometimes, but if there are presets that inspire me, I’m good at performing, at playing with expression, I don’t need to ‘make up for it’ by trying to do what other people are already good at… and yet for some sounds it’s really preferable to have some synth with a bunch of knobs I can tweak in real-time… Otherwise when I’m in another mode, I can get things moving quickly in Renoise and tweak the hell out of things and get exactly what I want techno-industrial-idm, whatever, and I’m happy to either use the simplest free soft synths or midi or just raw samples tweaking them. Sometimes I combine the two approaches and use different software tools for sequencing depending on mood or style.
Sometimes I have been afflicted with ‘gear lust’ simply because I baulked at ‘following the muse’ and using/mastering what I already have…
So many incredible sounds. So many seminal dance music sounds too - all the classic pianos, strings, plus some really distinctive sounds lurking in the wave banks - like you can find the lead to No Good and One Love (actually the same wave afaict - on the exp board) if you go digging and use a tonne of fx processing.
You don’t get many s/w instruments with 7 effects units in series - especially not with that big, 90s Boss/Roland sound - which are flexible and distinctive enough to really become a part of the synth and voice architecture.
I’ve got an XV-3080 too, and in a lot of ways it’s inferior - the convertors sound muddier (I think they tweaked them to try and make it sound more analog), the filters sound darker, effects are nowhere near as good - but that thing’s got so many great waves, and can take tonnes of expansion boards, loads of polyphony, and actually really quick and easy to program, so that’s been my go-to sound module for a long time.
They’re all such great modules though. There’s so many dance music producers and film/tv composers who do everything bar drums off a JV or XV sound module. Above anything, it’s just the quality, variety and usability of the waves. I’ve had s/w ROMplers which use up Gig’s (where the JD I think was only 8-12mb) of waves, and where you can’t find anything you’d actually be able to use… Waves like Soft Pad and Syn Vox are behind a million classic sounds, and they’re still versatile enough to be used a million more ways today.
For me, hardware sound-creation is one of the main parts of making a renoise song. First create a bunch of weird synthesized sounds, sample a drumloop and the rest flows automatically…
I couldn’t live without my hw and renoise combi
