| Having not tried one yet, wich should definetely make me keep my mouth shut, my only problem with the Oasys is the price. I dont even want to think about what a fully loaded akai S1000 or S6000 or emuIII or whatever synth of the year cost when introduced. And they all have been clearly outdated both in sound and features.
Hey, just a simple iBook, which comes free with Garageband3, and a $99 midiKB runs around what a $200,000 Synclavier could do then.
That's not the case for instance with a $3,000 guitar or amp, they hold their value both in sound and dollars.
I personally think that the age of Keyboards, as we knew them, is gone. They're Dinosaurs which have been superseded by a new animal: computers. After all they were not that dissimilar to a computer, one that run a single program (play sounds) from a OS in ROM.
2-8MB of sounds? Current libraries run on the GigaBytes league.
It's the way it is. The only exception to this are the old analogue synths, they still can't be replicated with digital technology.
Thus my advice of having a decent hardware KB with nice touch and sounds that play instantly, a stable laptop (Mac, which btw does a thousand other things) and soft thingies/libraries -or just build your own-, plus a decent fast interface with nice converters.
If you need filters, i'd say get them from an analog fx processor, or get an old synth, minimoog.. you_name_it, and you're done.
but what do i know? I'm not peter gabriel, I just studied economics.
PS: i know it's sad for the KB manufacturers, now they have to compete with software, something people can unfortunately pirate relatively easy leaving no money for anyone.
My opinion is that current KBs are just the "dongle", the only secure way to sell softsynths/ ROM libraries. |