Anyone Using an Old School Workflow?

[Captain]

I've been in Logic ( and now Reason) for so long at this point I don't remember the days with Romplers, Samplers, & Sequencers. Is anyone DAWless or is everyone pretty much digital or hybrid? The reason I ask is I was thinking of incorporating more old gear like an Akai S2000 and some romplers and stuff like it was 1994. I for some reason have the desire to produce some stuff that's done the old way. I'm wondering if people have spent more time sorting out issues with the older stuff than actually producing. Ironically Reason and its rack has rekindled my interest in old gear.

 

[containercore]

I've got an MPC 1000 with JJOS (v3 if anyone's curious) but it needs a new padbed so it's been out of commission for a while. I don't see much need using anything more oldschool than that, unless you're like a hip hop purist and believe the audio output of the MPC 60/3000 has mystical properties that can't be replicated with EQ/compression. I do miss just how solid my old MPC 2000 felt back in the day, they really used to build those things like panzer tanks, but I don't miss how slow it is. Even with JJOS I think it's kind of a lateral move from working in a DAW sometimes, but some things are undeniably faster or more fun on an MPC. Rackmount samplers feel absolutely pointless unless you're making a youtube video or something or once again believe that the S950 performs some kind of atavistic magic on your audio output imparting it with sovl particles. As for rackmount synths, it ends up being faster 9 out of 10 times to edit from a computer using MIDIquest or similar. Desktop synths are a different story.

Yeah I definitely need to get this thing back in action.

 

[Dr. MacGutsy]

I'm more or less all hardware with the exception of using LMMS of all things as a sequencer (weird, I know). Everything I own uses MIDI in some capacity so it integrates really well into my workflow. Really the best of both worlds in my opinion. If you're looking to go true dawless all you really need is gear with MIDI, clock, and CV to cover all your bases. You might not even need that if your gear has internal sequencers, but it doesn't hurt. If you're using some real old school proprietary gear you'll probably need more if you're going to integrate it into any other manufacturer's gear, but that's unlikely. The Korg Volcas are a decent enough introduction if you're looking to play around with some hardware synth jams. Even just a drum machine and a synth with a clock will let you do some really cool stuff. I used an RX-15 and Microkorg for years.

 

[MySpace Tom]

For me, hybrid is the way to go. The DAW can do everything if you want it to, but total reliance on it can lose a lot of fluidity in making music. On the other hand, going down the purely-hardware route takes a long time to set up and can be difficult if some screw-up happens during recording. It's nice to record cool sounds and edit them in place, record more cool sounds, incorporate them too, and rince-repeat until the track is finished or turns into a pile of garbage that will never escape my hard drive

The topic makes me think of Quoth who was a regular on the now-dead Litany.net forums. I remember him posting about doing a bunch of work on a Korg Electribe and was trying to go from DAW to DAWless. He had some posts where he made tracks using nothing but hardware. The results were good and he had a great time doing them