I'm finally at the end of my 25+ year long road to finding the perfect studio for me, and the workflow that works best.
I recently talked about having only 3-4 synths... I actually decided that I can easily make a piece of Ambient music with just ONE synth, when I do harddisk recording in layer style, so the number has now been reduced to just ONE!
Yes... ONE synthesizer (with build in keyboard always), routed into my Lexicon PCM92 for FX, and then from there into my DAW's soundcard for recording. A bit of EQ on my DAW may be used if necessary, otherwise nothing else.
It's probably the smallest setup you can have with external gear I'd say, but it's very intuitive, and it's easy to deal with... synth must have a well working frontpanel editor because SoundDiver WILL be history... do not want to make editors anymore, it takes too long time and has too many compromises.
The ideer is to only buy keyboard synths in the future... because I still want a few more synths that finds my interest and compliment each other... I might use just one on a track sometimes, at other times I'll swap the synth while making a track... but the ideer is that at any one time, only ONE synth is connected.
The REV2 is the first and only synth I've got for this setup for quite some time... it will take some time to save up for other keyboard synths since they are quite expensive, but sometime early next year I hope to buy a Prophet 12 Keyboard as my second one... in the future I'll be looking out to see if I can find a used Poly Evolver Keyboard as well, but that might be hard to find... just have to keep my eyes open... A Quantum may also be a candidate at some point, but in general, very few manufacturers deliver the needed criteria for what I want.... Polyphony, and 100% analog or Hybrids... I want no 100% digital keyboards... if I ever get one, it'll be a Roland - V-Synth GT once again... it's the only digital synth that seriously catch my interest...
So next week will be a time for creating presets for REV2, and also sort in all the Prophet presets available to store the best of them in the REV2's memory... thank god DSI has started to allow you to overwrite the factory presets... I REALLY need those slots when I'm not using SoundDiver as a browser ever again... A lot of preset must also be created for the Lexicon PCM92, so that I have a lot of ready made presets fit for Ambient... that is the cool thing about recording it directly into the DAW... this way I have no limits anymore... I can use the synth as many times as I want, and the FX can be changed for every sound I want something special for.
This setup is really relieving my studio stress level... technically everything is kept to a minimum... minimum cable clutter, no external mixer.... just ONE synth standing in the middle of my desktop, connected to the PCM92 placed right above it on a shelf where I can easily reach it, which is right below my 4K monitor which I have mounted on the wall to save shelf space.... a mouse and a qwerty keyboard in front of the keyboard... and that's it... a pair of small monitors is to be bought and placed on the shelfs two ends, otherwise the rest will be just inspiring art decorations to further fuel my imagination when composing.
This also made any MIDI interface redundant... I need only one MIDI port, and that is included in my RME AIO soundcard, along with both the stereo analog I/O I need for speakers, phones and the synth.
Everything is kept at a minimum... I like this
Rant over...