My sense of digital oscillators and wave shapes is based on ten years with the Evolvers, a month with the Prophet 12, and a little recent experience with the Korg Minilogue XD. Plus a thousand YouTube videos. When in the thick of synthesis, I'm as enamored with digital tones as anyone. I've carried on for years in praise of the PEK, including its aliasing, and have made many videos using it to the best of my improvisational ability. But when I step back from all such music and consider the whole picture, and when I recall the Prophet '08 - its overall quality and the music I've made with it - a distinction consistently strikes me: namely, digital is harsh and analog is warm and smooth. It's the lesson of my latter musical life and experience: digital is harsh and analog is warm and smooth. After ten years of making this music, that's my conclusion. As far as I can understand, it's not based on a prejudice or presumption, but on an honest assessment.
The digital pads I've designed and used over the years have had their own sort of magic, but it's always been a harsh magic. Whereas, whenever I've limited myself to the Prophet '08s, the sonic results have had a memorable gentleness, nobility, and sweetness about them, and with no edges. Hence, I regularly indulge in a daydream in which I have nothing but pure analog instruments, and that all my fundamental tones are derived from that happy limited selection of sawtooth, pulse width, and triangle/sine.
This has nothing to do with the old can-you-tell-an-analog-oscillator-from-a-digital-one? debate. We've had that heated discussion/argument here more than enough times, and it's perfectly fruitless because it goes nowhere. Besides, by now I know nearly all of your positions, and you know mine. But this is not that argument. I'm referring only to the overall effects the two different types of synthesis have on one musician.
It's as if I'm not quite ready to do it yet, but for now, I will enjoy that daydream in the anticipation that possibly, some day, I'll have an all-analog music room and the harshness will have been removed.