If you look around my studio, you’ll see I have something like 20 guitars, three basses, a banjo, and a mandolin.
But for keyboards, I only own 3 – a Yamaha MX88, an Arturia Keylab Essentials 49, which is just a controller, and a Casio CDP 100 digital piano, which is currently sitting in storage.
Why so many guitars and so few keyboards? The biggest reason is that virtual plugin guitars are lame – the real thing is so much better. And believe it or not, every one of my guitars sounds different. They’re like golf clubs. You need the right guitar for the right sound.
But synth plugins are not lame – many of them sound really good. I’ve got a pretty good collection of virtual synths, and I like them a lot. I made a video explaining why I prefer plugins to hardware synths, but here’s a quick summary – they’re far cheaper than hardware, they sound close enough for my ears, and they don’t need to be repaired when the capacitors go bad.
They’re also easier to deal with in a recording if you want to go back later and make changes.
So why do people so often prefer hardware over software? The simple answer is that our brains prefer the hardware. But the reasons have to do with levels of abstraction, and cognitive load.
I learned about these concepts as a programmer, and once you see what they mean, it’s easy to see how they apply to keyboards.
There are many different programming languages, and some are more designed for beginners than others. One of the simplest programming languages is LiveCode. This example is from the LiveCode website.
Say you have a list of items separated by commas, and you want to sort the list in reverse alphabetical order. Here’s what that looks like in LiveCode:
sort lines of theText descending by last item of each
Even if you’re not a programmer, this seems understandable. The only abstraction here is that the list of text items is in a variable named “theText.”
Now here’s an example where we use PHP, the most popular programming language on the web. PHP is considered to be fairly easy to learn for programmers:
$theText = explode(“\n”, $theText);
uasort($theText, “sort_item_3”);
$theText = implode(“\n”, $theText);
function sort_item_3($line1, $line2) {
$line1 = explode(“,”, $line1);
$line2 = explode(“,”, $line2);
if($line1[2] == $line2[2]) return 0;
else if($line1[2] > $line2[2]) return -1;
else return 1;
}
Don’t worry – I’m not going to go through this line by line. Let’s just say that you need to come in with a bunch of background knowledge to understand this. You need to know what a dollar sign means, you need to know what functions are and what conditional logic is, and some other concepts.
Having all of these abstractions increases the load on your brain, meaning the cognitive load.
On my Yamaha MX88, there’s a volume knob. There’s not much cognitive load associated with that – turn it clockwise and the keyboard is louder. Turn it counterclockwise and the keyboard is softer.
When we learn analog synthesis, we learn about oscillators, envelopes, filters, etc. With the basic concepts down, we can take most standard synths and make sounds with them.
Beyond the basics, we get into more complicated combinations and things get more difficult. At that point, we’re either dealing with a bunch of patch cables, or a bunch of menu diving.
Patch cables are easier to work with in some ways, because they’re physical. You can see them.
If you’re menu diving in a keyboard, things become more abstract. Once you leave that submenu, you can’t see it any more. Submenus require adding a level of abstraction. We can do it, but for many of us, we prefer when we can see a knob or connect a patch cable ourselves.
There’s something very appealing about a synth where everything has a dedicated knob or slider. What’s appealing is that it reduces our cognitive load by removing a level of abstraction.
So now let’s take the best case scenario for a plugin setup. I’ve got an Arturia Keylab Essentials 49 keyboard controller, and I’ve got it connected to an Arturia software clone of the Roland Juno 60.
Arturia has tried to reduce the levels of abstraction here by using a design which looks just like the real synth. This is called skeuomorphic design. If I know how to use a real Juno 60, I know how to use the plugin.
Better still, Arturia has already mapped many of the controls on this keyboard controller to work with the synth plugin. So I can either click the filter slider on the screen and move it, or I can move the physical filter slider on the keyboard.
They’ve done everything they can to make it easy for me. But it’s STILL not as easy as using the actual synth, because the whole model of using a plugin is a massive level of abstraction.
When you buy a hardware synth, you plug it in and you connect it to speakers or a headphone and you’re ready. But the journey to get to where I am with the Arturia setup is far, far more complicated.
First you need a compatible computer and you need to know how to use its operating system. You’ll also need an audio interface and some powered speakers.
Then you need to buy the keyboard controller and you need to be able to connect it to your machine, so you’ll need to learn about USB or MIDI interfaces. Now it’s time to download, install, register, and configure the software, and that’s not an easy, fun process.
Once you’ve got the whole thing up and running, the final level of abstraction is that instead of just moving the filter slider, you have to take your mouse or trackpad, move the cursor on the screen until it is in exactly the correct position, click the mouse button and hold it down, and then drag at just the right speed to achieve whatever accuracy you need.
Instead of taking a slider with your hand and moving it, you’re taking control of an input device which controls a “pointer” on a screen, where you need to navigate the pointer to an exact spot, then click and drag using just the right amount of fine motor skills.
That makes it sound harder than it is. No, it’s not hard, but it does provide a level of abstraction that slightly increases cognitive load. Multiply that by every interaction you have with any knob or button, and you’ll see that it IS harder to use a plugin.
But what about those pre-mapped sliders of the keyboard controller? You’d think they’d be the perfect solution, but they’re not. The slider mapped to the filter might be all the down already, but the plugin doesn’t care – it has a patch where the filter is wide open.
If I want to close the filter by moving the slider down, it’s already down. So I’m going to need to move the slider up to take control of the filter on the screen in order for the slider to actually do anything. Then I can move it down.
So the knobs and filters do not show the actual status of their corresponding settings. That makes them a heck of a lot less useful.
Real hardware keyboards are just easier. That is, until you get into the third submenu down for one parameter out of 80 on a complicated patch. At some point, a software interface can make synth programming actually easier, because you can see so much more at the same time.
A little screen on a synth isn’t as user friendly as a 27 inch 4K monitor. Programming the Yamaha MX88 is a little tricky with software. Programming it on its built in little screen is torture.
Side note – Most DAWs are designed to look like real mixing boards with real outboard gear. One exception to this is Ableton Live, which looks more like an interface to program your home sprinkler system.
This is part of the reason that people new to Ableton Live find it confusing. It requires you to learn a different way of doing things. I would say, though, that once you learn Ableton Live, it’s a great DAW, especially for electronic music.
So there you go. People will say that they don’t want to use a computer to make music because they use a computer all day at work, but I believe that the REAL issue is caused by levels of abstraction increasing cognitive load.
But if you’re willing to put up with the increased complexity of the world of plugins, I believe that the reward is more than worth the effort. And you can simulate 80 thousand dollars worth of vintage synths for around $600.
If you want a huge variety of synths, plugins make that possible without paying crazy money.
That said, I really do want to buy an analog synth with knobs and sliders on it, without a screen, some day very soon. I just want something simple and new. But it won’t cause me to give up my plugins. I kinda want both. Why wouldn’t I?