Music Hardware #

While you could make all of your music with just a computer, you’ll probably want some tools that make your life as a musician easier and let you explore ideas faster. Like I said back in the Audio Effects Chapter , in my experience, making music depends on a really quick brain to input device feedback loop. Being able to turn a physical knob and mash physical keys will often lead to better results if only because you’re able to try things both faster and by physically interacting with something that you may not have thought of otherwise. It’s why guitars, MPE keyboards, and Eurorack are so great: they all give you a crazy amount of control and expression that is literally at your fingertips. The brain to input interface there is just so much better.

There are also a few things that do simply work better when done via analog hardware vs digital tools. Namely distortions and compression/limiting - Distortions because of limited bandwidth and compression/limiting because you can’t fix a signal that’s already clipped digitally.

Similarly, it’s possible if you’re doing complex processing that you’ll push the limits of what computers can even practically do. If you can offload some of that work to other equipment, you can use that processing power on something else.

Finally, it might be that there’s just annoying limits with routing in your tools. For example, a lot of streamers will use vocal processing units like the DBX 286s since it can sometimes be difficult to get the software to route though effects before being recorded/streamed.

So, while I don’t think you should go crazy deep into hardware and spend your life savings, there’s some things that just make sense to get, like a good keyboard MIDI controller, some knobs, and at least one realllly expressive instrument like a guitar or MPE controller. Something that really lets you feel what you’re playing.

A quick note before you read anything further: you can only hear an analog signal. At the end of the chain, everything needs to be analog, as ultimately sound waves exist not as the 1’s and 0’s of binary, but as waves of pressure in the air- which is an analog medium.

To start, let’s look at an all-analog signal path. Here, a guitar string is plucked, the signal is picked up by the guitar’s pickup (as the metal string causes a magnet to move, generating a weak electrical signal), the signal is amplified (twice), and then the amplified signal is used to move a speaker cone, which in turn moves the air, so you can hear it.

Note, I’ve drawn a light gray cable along side all the analog signals. This is the ground cable. Audio circuits are no different from any other circuit, and require a full, well, circuit. A circuit is a full loop, with ground. Where the cables come out of the amplifier, I’ve drawn these two wires much more distinctly, with a red wire- meant to visualize the ‘live’ wire that carries the signal- and gray wire the ground. This is by convention. If you ever have to wire up an amplifier, you’ll probably see one red and one black wire, representing these in turn. In many cases (but definitely not always), things will still work if you get these backwards, but you’ll end up with audio that is out of phase, as your signal is quite literally flipped. In the case of a guitar amp with a single speaker, this probably won’t matter. But, if you have two speakers (left and right) and only flip one, this is very likely to make things sound awful.

Hopefully that made sense, now let’s look at a digital setup. Keep in mind, even the most digital of paths needs to end in analog so that there’s something for you to hear.

Here, a digital keyboard is hooked up to a laptop, presumably running some sort of sound-generating software - Maybe a DAW or VCV Rack. Here I’ve shown the audio interface (labeled DAC) as an external box hooked up over USB, but this could also just be internal to the computer. All computers or phones will have an internal audio interface, it’s just that most musicians end up attaching their own that offer better features.

Here, everything on the blue cables is digital, it’s only 1’s and 0’s. The first cable is only carrying information about what note you’re playing and knobs you’re turning, while the second one (between the laptop and the DAC) is carrying digital information that represents the audio, but it hasn’t yet been turned into an analog signal. That’s the job of the DAC. It takes those 1’s and 0’s and turns it back into an analog signal.

Often you’ll hear the terms Audio Interface, Sound Card, and DAC used interchangeably. They’re not all the same thing, but generally it’s the part that turns the digital signal into an analog one. If you’re plugging a guitar or microphone into your computer, the terms Audio Interface and Sound Card still apply, but in that case you’re using an ADC. I’ll come back to this in a bit.

If you’re confused about how digital 1’s and 0’s can represent an analog signal in the first place, refer back to samples in Chapter 2 - Sound Sources . For more information on how Digital to Analog and Analog to Digital conversion works, check out this video from xiph.org.

Some devices may have almost everything in this chain internally. This is true of a lot of digital instruments, like the Elektron Digitakt pictured here:

The Digitakt is a drum machine that uses samples saved internally as .wav files. It’s basically just a very specialized computer in a box.

Though, the really confusing thing to beginners is when the device is digital, but has both analog input and outputs. Just like there’s a DAC (Digital to Analog Converter) for analog output, you’ll often be working with ADCs or Analog to Digital Converters to take your analog input and use it on your computer (or internally, like in a digital guitar pedal)

For the most basic possible example, let’s look at a bit-crusher and sample rate reducer pedal. These pedals basically just hook a DAC directly into an ADC, then let you purposely mess up the conversion.

Hopefully that was enough to get you up to speed on the basics of analog vs digital. Unfortunately, while some gear is obvious (A normal acoustic guitar is analog, a MIDI controller is digital) some music gear really blurs the lines, or even twists them outright. The Behringer DeepMind line, for example, is a purely analog synth with digital control’s and a big ol’ screen. Meanwhile, the Modor NF-1 is a digital synth that looks and tries to emulate the sound and feel of analog equipment. Plus, there’s a ton of synths now that have analog oscillators and filters, but then do DSP (Digital Signal Processing) based effects or the other way around- with digital oscillators and analog filters. What I’m trying to say is, it’s complicated.

There are a lot of ‘Analog Purists’ out there, who will claim an analog oscillator just sounds better, or that it adds something extra to their sound. To some extent, they’re not wrong. But, I think this is also largely because people are comparing often free digital sources and effects to analog ones and, as with most things in life, you often get what you pay for. I’d actually argue that in most cases, paid digital tools and hardware is a better value than the analog gear. Plus, digital tools won’t suffer as much from the issues with tuning, latency compensation, the need to worry about a noise floor, etc. Digital aliasing might be a problem, but even that can usually be worked around.To point out my own hypocrisy now, I’m really into Eurorack, which is an inheritly analog, and stupidly expensive, medium. Making music isn’t all logic. If you think a certain tool will just work well for you, you shouldn’t deny its value just because something else may provide the same function. Form matters. Your enjoyment matters. To me, there was inherit value in the joy of working with real patch cables and the physical knobs, even if VCV Rack is the ‘better’ tool and doesn’t cost a full months rent per module.Okay, So, yes. There is some concern about everything in (1) with digital stuff. Latency compensation with digital tools is still a thing. Your midi controler will still have a delay. A digital hardware synth will still send an analog audio signal out, which will have some latency. MIDI clock may not get distributed around your system perfectly, resulting in issues as well. I’m meaning in general. Like, if you want to record a guitar in and hear any DSP effects you have on the chain in your DAW in real time, you’ll have to compensate for that full round trip time, which can easily set you off beat a solid amount when recording in. Plus, most analog instrument are not balanced audio, so there will be some noise getting in compared to the complete lack of noise in a software source/effect or the very minimal noise of that from a balanced audio source. If you have no idea what this means, that’s fine, I’m about to go over it. This is just to prevent some really early ‘um, acktually’.

All that is to say, analog gear is generally a bigger PITA to deal with than digital gear, and often the claims for why to go analog are total shit; however, some of the issues with analog gear are actually just issues with any hardware music tool. What I’m trying to say is, in most cases, whether or not a tool is analog or digital shouldn’t really factor into your choice of what to buy. Your choice should be determined by what sounds good, what is enjoyable to play, and if the device offers all the features you need and want. In very few cases will a device being analog be a ‘feature’ that matters.Distortions and anything with feedback is the most obvious counter point, and I’ll concede on that one. Digital distortion, drive, and feedback based effects are almost universally worse sounding and eat up a ton of digital resources on your computer. Instead, the feature that matters with analog gear is often the hands on feel that usually comes with a device being analog, like all the articulations that a player can get out of a guitar.String bending, plucking, strumming up or down, palm muting, how hard you pluck, whammy bars, harmonics (a type of playing), slapping the strings, slapping the body, tuning live… The guitar is an extraordinarly hands on instrument, it doesn’t make just one sound. At the same time, this isn’t exclusive to analog instruments anymore, as MPE controllers (I’ll get to them later) have made it possible to get a TON of expression out of a digital controller, arguably more than I can out of my guitar- so again, the guitar being analog isn’t the feature that mattered. When buying gear, try to dig down and ask yourself why you want a tool - for how it sounds, how it feels to play, etc. - and ask yourself if there’s competing products that meet the same needs, then you’ll easily avoid the elitism that analog purists bring with them.If you pick the analog gear because it does offer something better, looks cooler, or it’s cheaper for some reason there’s obviously no shame in that. Your decesion was still educated. That’s what matters.