Lately the VST instruments and effects market has been quiet indeed. This is not to say that new releases were somehow nonexistent: lots of new stuff is coming out every week. Lots of new old stuff, that is.
Let’s take a few examples. The Darklight II sampler , or rather its paragon Fairlight, was some thirty years ago a rarity: only established people like Kate Bush and Peter Gabriel could afford one. Now the same sounds are available for everyone with a fraction of the original price.
Yes – the same sounds. So what is really going on here is that a sampler is being sampled in order to make a ‘new’ product. The result is some sort of paradox: a loyal rendition of an original instrument, which in fact was not an original instrument but a collection of some of the early samples.
Another good example is the Scarbee Rickenbacker bass offered by Native Instruments. The goal – an impressive one for sure – has been to faithfully create similar sounds to the original instrument.
What makes this goal questionable is that the simulation perspective misses a lot of possibilities offered by digital environment. For example, as far as I know the Scarbee rendition has no ‘strum key’ for fast playing. I am aware that the original instrument lacks one too, but this is no excuse to leave one out. After all coming up with something ‘better than the real thing’ should be the mission when making VST instruments out of ‘originals’.
If this sounds odd, try the following. Think about building an instrument as coding: creating a framework for ‘software’, which in this case would be the player. So called ‘real’ instruments were once the state of the art items built by the latest knowledge, skills, and materials.
This same attitude should be present when imagining VST instruments: coming up with completely new sounds and concepts instead of repeating the past. After all this was the attitude for example the Beatles pretty much had in their time.
Also Les Paul – the guitarist responsible for coining the idea of multi-track recording – once said in this documentary that his primary motive as a musician was to make something no one else had done before. These guys didn’t just sample the past – why should VST vendors?
Missing Sample 