_During the last weeks I've been rediscovering some old and forgotten equipment lying around in my studio, and... I'm starting to have doubts. Doubts of the so-called excellence of modern sound. Maybe I'm entering the age when all new becomes bad and all old gets the shimmer of coolness and all, but I don't really think so.

I won't go so far to say that all those people who have been raving about the enormous benefits of analog summing and the ultimate power of analog equipment are the true prophets - but I am starting to understand that they might have a point.

_Picture this. After a hellish battle in the basement I finally succeeded to find an old CD-ROM for the Ensoniq ASR that I've been searching for for some time (for those who are interested, the library is called The Art of Transwaves).

My reaction went from WTF? to WTF!! in less than one minute.

How is it possible that ancient technology can cause such a reaction? I can think of the following reasons:

1. Nostalgia. Since many of us started off in music with old Akais and EPS:es - there is a risk of confusing good with the cozy feeling of "coming home".
   
   
2. Hype. There are many people who - for years - have been looking down on modern technology, saying it all sounds rubbish.
   
   
3. Drugs. The creators of old equipment put some sort of ecstasy inside the audio that fools us that what we hear is good.
   
   
4. Mojo. The instrument has its own soul and attitude.

Apart from point 3 - I would guess the answer is a mix between 1, 2 and 4. But when I look at the virtual instruments created today I think the last point is what this is all about.

I believe we've become too obsessed about technology that we've lost track of its original purpose.

Take this whole thing with Apple iPhones and iPads for example. The applications are from a technical perspective extremely cool, but I still haven't found anything that make me actually create something with it. There is simply no connection. It's just toys I play with a few minutes, but it never becomes anything more than that.

But it's not just so easy to say 'Avoid all new. Buy old analog equipment and all will be fine'.

There were lots of crap released in the 80s and 90s.

I got a similar reaction when I again tried to incorporate my uber-old Windows PC with its Creamware DSP cards into my workflow. After playing around with John Bowens synthesizers for less than one minute - I was totally sold. I am not joking. Totally sold.

There is much to be said about Creamware/Sonic Core and I won't go into that whole sad story. But you want to get incredible sounds? Get a Sonic Core DSP/Creamware DSP card, get Minimax, Solaris, Quantum Wave and Flexor. Again - I am not joking. It's so damn good I started to wonder why I'm spending my time with all my plugins.

Naturally, I won't be switching over to the ASR and bid myself crazy on a second hand Atari (but the thought have occurred to me). But come on? Considering the technical advances that have been made during the last 20 years - wouldn't we be living in sound-fucking-paradise by now?

This is how I think it is.

• A good instrument has mojo.
  
  
• Mojo is not something determined by processing power or advanced technology. It can be made by dsp-circuits, tubes or rubber bands.
  
  
• Mojo is the space between the lines. The silence between the words. It's about good taste and a deeper understanding of what's working and not.

When people are ranting about UAD and their expensive DSP-cards - I feel they are missing the point. Yes, they are hellishly expensive. Yes, there are alternatives. But that doesn't make UAD bad in any way.

Good instrument designers such as Bob Moog, John Bowen and Roger Linn all share this sense of what's working. I also think that when economics become too involved it cripples the creative process and muddles the perspectives. Creating a good instrument is not about reaching out to the largest possible group of buyers. I mean... everybody knows about the E-mu Emulator. But who the f**k cares about their rack sound modules?

A good instrument is a good instrument even if it's based on inferior technology.

The same can be said for the music itself as well.

I'm such a clever guy.

During the summer we will have a prize draw - with the chance to win a unique, personal soundset for a synthesizer of (almost) your choice.

All you have to do is go to our Facebook page and 'Like' it. It's worth liking anyway. If you do this before the 1st of august 2011 - you'll be in for the draw. The first of august the winner will be selected and notified.

The prize is a soundset designed for you and you alone. This bank of sounds will  not be on sale or distributed in any way. A personal sound bank in one copy only.

Also note that all participants will be awarded with a free sample pack with unique contents not available in any other way.
 

Available synthesizers:

• AAS Ultra Analog
• Ableton Analog
• Ableton Operator
  
• Arturia Jupiter 8
• Arturia Minimoog V
• Arturia Prophet V
• Audiorealism ABL Pro
• Fxpansion DCAM Synth Squad Amber
• Fxpansion DCAM Synth Squad Cypher
• Fxpansion DCAM Synth Squad Strobe
• Gmedia Imposcar
• Lennardigital Sylenth1
• Linplug Albino 3
• Native Instruments Absynth 5
• Native Instruments Massive
• Native Instruments FM8
• Novation Bass Station
• Ohm Force Symptohm
• Plogue Chipsounds
• Refx PlastiCZ
• Rob Papen Predator
• Schwa Olga
• Spectrasonics Omnisphere
• Spectrasonics Trilian
• Synapse Audio Dune
• Synth Magic Sounds of the Quadra
  
• Tone2 ElectraX
• U-he Ace
• Waldorf Largo

If no synthesizer of the above attracts your attention, it's possible for us to buy a license of for example Zebra, Oddity, Alchemy, Minimosta, or Korg Monopoly. No promises but it might be possible. Ask and we will reply.

So what are you waiting for? Steer your horses to facebook.com/plughugger/ and be a part of our summer goodness.

Rules and additional information

1. You may only participate once. People entering from multiple accounts will be disqualified without pardon.
2. The soundset is so personal that you cannot resell it or redistribute it. If we aren't making any money from it - neither should you.
3. The direction of the soundset is decided mainly by us - but we promise to listen to your ideas. This limitation is set since we have our strengths when making sounds, and we never have been good making sounds for finnish tango or Rockabilly. We are tech-heads and the sounds will be in that direction.
4. The soundset will contain 64 sounds.
5. The soundset will with all certainty take a couple of weeks to finalize, but to give some room for family matters and other natural disasters, the soundset will be delivered no later than the end of september 2011.

Last week was an interesting one to say the least. Music software giant Native Instruments succeeded with first pissing off a whole community, and then releasing something so damn weird you started to wonder if the people running Native Instruments are making their marketing decisions while being drunk.

What happened last week was this. Flagship product, super synthesizer and central sound organizing hub Kore is being discontinued.

As we all know, software instruments come and go, applications for making music come and go. There is no strange things about that. But the way Native Instruments pulled this off made me wonder how connected they are with its user base.
 

Firstly, if you push something so hard as Native Instruments have done with Kore, actively promoting that this was the ultimate synthesizer/tool in the studio and "Kore definitely has a very central role both in our technological portfolio and in our product strategy", you are making a commitment. A long term commitment. The quote is from Stephan Schmitt, the founder of Native Instruments and was made during version 2 of Kore. Kore 2 is where we are at now and there will not be any Kore 3.

It certainly doesn't help that a couple of months before the discontinuation, the most well-known administrator at Native Instruments forums assured publicly that 'Kore is far from being dead'.

In a grand gesture Native Instruments showed their path forward by announcing that Maschine will continue the legacy of Kore and for a limited time, Kore users can crossgrade into Maschine.

It doesn't even cross the minds of the people in charge of Native Instruments that many users who are using Kore aren't even remotely interested in Maschine. They are totally different products with totally different uses.

A bitter pill indeed to swallow for many users, but let's play along with the proposal.

• Exactly which functionalities of Kore will be moved over to Maschine? Native Instruments tells us advanced browsing functions. Is that all? Nobody knows.
• Will the Kore-packs work on, or be converted to Maschine? Maybe some. No clear answer.
• Will Maschine be able to read all the thousands of mapped up Kore presets? Who knows?

But the insanity of last week didn't stop there. The craziness culminated in the release of three highly acclaimed and respected vintage compressors for Guitar Rig 4. Yes, you read it right. In order to use these compressors you have to insert Native Instruments flagship guitar-processor and work on your vocals, drums and everything else from there. And according to the press release, there will be more to come.

It is surprising how ignorant Native Instruments have become. Anyone with some level of presence in music production forums knows how happy people became when IK Multimedia finally separated the processors from their T-Racks and released them as separate plugins.

-Hooray, said the people.

-Let's build our next generation of studio tools inside a guitar plugin, said Native Instruments.

It's usually said we who live in a market economy vote with our money. While this is true, the reality is more complex. Some products comes into our ownership without us actually wanting them. In the example of Native Instruments, the Komplete bundle. While I own Komplete 7 - how many of the included products would I have bought separately? Maybe half. Maybe less. How good value is a bundle like Komplete then? Even you get it for a bargain price. Stuff you won't need is still stuff you don't need, even you got it for a no-brainer price. I had to resist very hard not to catch on the latest D16 groupbuy. I didn't need any of them - even if I got six effects for the price of one. I'm not using Battery more than I did before I didn't own it.

With this in mind, I cannot escape wondering if Battery (for example) wouldn't have been discontinued due to lack in sales if it wasn't included in the Komplete bundle. Or FM8. Or Reaktor for that matter. I wonder if Native Instruments view a sale of one separate product equal with one sale part of Komplete? It's obvious to me that a person who buys a specific product is a potentially more dedicated user of that product, than a person who buys a whole bundle are equally enthusiastic about all titles in the bundle.

Why is it so important for Native Instruments to discontinue Kore in the first place? It's not like Kore have seen more updates than Battery or FM8 during the last five years.

So, to leave this whole tragic story behind us, I want to draw a few highly personal memos.

1. Never listen to the beautiful songs companies sing about you - their valued user, their dedication and all the marvelous things they will do. This is all bullshit. Judge companies on what they do and what they have done. Never buy something based on promised updates or possible developments.
2. Do checkups on forums and see how the temperature is. Native Instruments is infamous for their lousy email support. You get a pre-written, generic answer that only make you irritated. The phone support on the other hand, is a whole different matter. Top notch from my own experience. Do your research.
3. Consider hardware for your most valued tasks. The only real protection against this type of problems is - naturally - not to use software. Hardware will always be hardware even after the latest OS updates and computer revisions. While this for many is simply not an option, I think it is a good idea to have a few hardware processors and instruments in your studio.

It's a damn shame really, this whole development with Native Instruments. In the early days they had an entirely different spirit. Pro-5 came out - people raved about the sound. B4 created major headlines. FM7 came out - people went wild. They did things no-one else did and they did it well. At that time, Native Instruments could do nothing wrong. Today their clearest replies goes out to suspend users in their forum who voice their frustration.

And to all the people who are happy that more focus are set onto Maschine, keep in mind that Native Instruments assured the users that Kore was a central part of their product line not long time ago - exactly what Native Instruments are saying about Maschine today. Which - what the last few days of announcements have shown - means nothing.

As always, my highly personal thoughts. But I am honestly quite sad about all this.

For about ten years ago I had a discussion with a friend about finding the perfect workflow. Already then he was totally fed up with the clutter of traditional daws - Cubase specifically - and all he wanted was a way to combine the ease of use of old tape recorders with the possibility to do edits, overdubs and the occasional use of plugins.

Lately I've been thinking a lot about workflow and I've come to the conclusion that a perfect working environment has to give you both ease of use and as well as a certain amount of resistance/problems/limitations.

Let me just give you a few examples.
 

Native Instruments Maschine. A totally fantastic product. It combines the best of both worlds. Software and dedicated hardware. It hosts plugins. It has a built-in sample librarian. It's everything I want. Still - me and the Maschine aren't compatible with each other. I cannot put my finger on it, but there is no love flowing between us. It's like that gorgeous woman you've just started flirting with. She's sexy. She's intelligent. She got style. You really want to like her, but honestly - she's boring the hell out of you.

Fxpansion Geist. No dedicated controller. No tag-based sample librarian. No hosting for plugins. But it charms me every time I use it. We are extremely well tuned together and if it wasn't for Geist I wouldn't have been able to put together so much new material for my latest Bloatfield album. It just did what I wanted without any fuss.

Virus TI - fantastic features. VST integration. Huge amounts of power. No big love. I like the presets - whenever I try create presets myself, I always feel like doing something else. Like reading a book. Or stare at birds. I don't dig the oscillators. Nor the filters. Nor the LFOs.

Roland Juno 106. I can play with this thing forever. In a death-match between a Moog Voyager and a refurbished Juno I honestly can't tell which will come out alive. Both are seriously fantastic instruments.

My latest addition to my studio recently came in the form of an Elektron Octatrack. A common criticism among the haters goes along the lines of ' 1490 dollar for this? I can do this on my laptop/controller/cell phone/garden hose/etc'. But this is missing the point. There is a reason why certain equipment stays in your studio for years and others just pass through.

Mojo is not something you can measure in features, gigahertz, number of knobs. The more I think about it, the more I start to suspect that less features gets you closer to goodness. It provokes you to think in different ways.

Today we have everything we need to create anything we want. We are no longer confined with one option, floppy disks, insanely stupid operating systems or no more memory. The battle is now in the usability domain and how to shorten the distance between an idea and realizing it.
 

-Hello, my name is Carl and I'm addicted to music gear.

-Hello Carl.

-I haven't bought anything new for 14 days now, but I am starting to feel weak. I think I need a fix real soon.

Everybody I know of who are into making music are more or less gear-o-holics. There are always convincing reasons why to get that new audio interface, master keyboard, hardware synth, vintage compressor or that new microphone. Whenever I start speaking to my wife about something I JUST HAVE TO BUY, she smiles broadly and prepares for the ride. She have heard it all before.

I won't be wasting your time by telling you that you don't need anything more. Of course you don't. Damn it - you don't even need new strings for your guitar. Does it sound out of tune? All the better.

But that files under creativity and is not the purpose of this post.

No, the point of this post is to plant the seed of question about controlling digital equipment. I will tell you things that you most likely won't agree with, but I have seen the light and now the gospel has to be spread.

The truth is: midi controllers are a nearly pointless piece of equipment, that will not help you create better music in any way.

 

Let's back the tape a few decades to the time when analogue synthesizers were all the news. Let's forget about the sound, the instability of oscillators and their inability to only have one preset set up at a time. What everybody love with analogue synthesizers is their directness. You turn one knob and it does what you expect, nothing else. No holding down shift and a whole range of sub-features gets available. No menus where you have to dig deep to find the most rudimentary of parameters. It simply does what you want it to.

During the last couple of years I've started to develop a certain allergy to gear with displays. Or rather, the hell also known as sub-menus.

Let me elaborate. First came the analogue synth with lots of controllers. Then came the digital synth with a tiny display and barely no controllers. Then the market swung back in some sort of sideway manner and suddenly all the fashion was midi-controllers. Now we could control the resonance and the cutoff at the same time. Now we could map our favorite parameters to a select number of hardware controls. Now we had the best of the digital and analogue worlds.

For years I've been looking for the perfect controller. I've been through most of them. Novations, Bitstreams and Evolutions. Some are better than others, but they all suffer from the same problems. No controller is big enough to host all parameters in the average software synthesizer these days - and even if they could - you still cannot escape using your screen, since the controllers don't give you feedback on trivialities such as oscillator waveform, lfo speed, which modulator modulates what and so on.

My reasoning here, is why use a controller when you cannot escape from the screen in the first place. -Ahh, says the slick marketing guy with the piano key necktie. -The enemy here is The Mouse. Who wants to draw in modulation curves with the evil mouse? Using knobs are much more precise and gives you much more feeling.

Is the mouse really such a bad tool for setting up your software synthesizer or creating those controller changes? I actually don't think so. Unless a controller is 100 percent dedicated to its purpose, I see very little benefit from using them. Actually, the opposite. I feel they are complicating things.

During the analogue days - we had maximum control, limited functions, and maximum overview.
With the digital synths - we had minimal control, more functions, and minimal overview.
Along came the software synths and effects - we got minimal control, radically new opportunities with near perfect overview.
With controllers we get better controls, radically new opportunities spread over two control surfaces.

What is the benefit of scrolling, clicking and searching for parameters on a multi-purpose external controller when you can just grab the damned parameter on screen?

In theory it's useful to have 50 presets on your controller that can program your software synths. But that's theory and this is real life. In the real world, I have never seen any musician program their sounds from a controller. 99 percent control the cutoff and the resonance. And that's it. Just to be clear. I do see the value of controlling a sequencer such as Ableton Live with external controllers. What I am talking about here is sound design.

The guy from Synth-Project has understood what this is all about.

I know most of you won't agree with me here, but it's ok. Think about it. In any case, I think that I by now successfully have convinced everybody that I need to get rid of my midi controllers and as soon as possible buy that refurbished Juno 106. Any objections? No, I didn't think so. We gear-o-holics have a tendency to stick together.

The last three days with the Solaris have been most interesting.

People who regularly read this blog knows I am a serious fetishist when it comes to bass sounds. It would be expected that I would churn out bass sound after bass sound - but this have not been the case. Melodic sequences and soft timbres slowly evolve from my little studio - which is kind of weird, since I normally rarely make those kinds of sounds.

It's not difficult to create bass sounds with the Solaris - you can, and when you do the results are impressive. But it requires a closer attention to details than with other sounds. I wouldn't go so far to say the Solaris is a pad and lead machine, but it most definitely pulls you toward those kind of sounds.

 

My biggest wisdom I've learned during the last days is that the Solaris has its own modus operandi. While the oscillators, filters and envelopes all behave as expected - the way you connect the parts of the synthesizer is not.

Roughly, I would say there are three kinds of synthesizers.

1. Fixed architecture. Think Minimoog or DX7. You can modulate some parameters but the oscillators, filters and the general structure is the same.
2. Semi modular architecture. There are fixed oscillators, filters and modulators but you can connect them in any way you like.
3. Modular architecture. You can add any number of oscillators, any number of filters and connect these in any way you like. Total freedom.

As I said in my previous post, the Solaris is a semi-modular synthesizer, which in all honesty isn't true. It's actually somewhere between a semi-modular and a modular. If you think semi-modular, but comes with a whole wardrobe full of oscillators, filters and modulators you come close to what the Solaris is.

It's a whole bag of tricks capable creating sounds ranging from Lord Voldemort On A Very Bad Day to Twinkle Twinkle Little Star.

But with freedom comes complexity and it's no coincidence the most well-known synthesizer in the world - the Minimoog - is also one of the most simple. While me and many others with me are used to do routings in a modulation matrix, the key to master the Solaris is to understand there is no modulation matrix.

No modulation matrix?
Yes, no modulation matrix.

'Unlearn what you have learned' as the raisin-like Jedi Master would have said.

While I'm used to do routings in one convenient place telling the synthesizer that 'this module sends its output to that module' - you have to think backwards with the Solaris. You go to the desired module and select from which module you want to input data from. Not to, but from.

The lack of a centralized modulation matrix is both positive and problematic. The good thing is that you have a much more direct control and you never need to stop by the matrix all the time just to see what leads where. The problematic part is clarity and when you leave normal synth structures, you will find yourself on occasion scratching your head wondering what is connected with what.

To give a few examples. Creating a classic ocillator-amp-filter-effect sound from the Solaris dead easy. You can naturally connect the oscillators and connect them with four serial filters if you'd rather like that - or have two oscillators filtered by one filter, two oscillators filtered by another filter and then filter the whole lot by one global filter. Setups like this are very easy to achieve and it doesn't take too long before you start to think - 'Let's connect this with this one, patch the result into a virtual mixer, then take that sound use a band pass filter, and then route the whole lot into another virtual mixer and finally put it through a global filter'.

As I said. With power comes complexity. The nice thing with the Solaris is that you don't have to go complex if you don't want to. You can stay on the subtractive road and still not emptying the resources of the Solaris. But the question is rather, how can you not to? Any synth freak will start pushing and connecting things in the most perverted of ways. And so it should be and this is where the Solaris excels.

And keep in mind that I'm still scratching the surface of the Solaris. I haven't started using FM, AM, samples or even the real treat yet: the Rotor oscillators.

Here are a few sounds I've made the last days.

 

Spring is typical. I mean, really really typical. Months go by and you work in a comfortable tempo, all is well and then suddenly - bam! Everything is happening at the same time. The magazines I work for want more material, I'm asked to make a gig so cool that I possibly cannot refuse and on top of that I get an email from John Bowen asking me if I could help him create some sounds from his hardware synthesizer, the Solaris, for the upcoming Frankfurt Messe.

You simply cannot say no to any of these things. And on top of that I decided to write a small diary of my thoughts on the Solaris.

I won't spend any time explaining the capabilities of the Solaris - read up on John Bowens webpage - but I'll try to sum it up. The Solaris is a hardware synthesizer built on dsp-chips. While the structure is fixed, that's only half the truth. The modulations are so extensive it would be closer to call it semi-modular. It has a large number of oscillator types, ranging from all the basic waveforms to wavetables from Waldorf and the original waveforms from the Prophet VS, to digitally reproduced waveforms from CEM-circuits and more. The filters stretch from Moog and Oberheim emulations to nasty comb filters and multimode variations. I could go on forever. In all my years working with synthesizers, I've never found anything like the Solaris.

Day one
Visually, the Solaris is very beautiful. The unit I got sent to me was black with led illuminated modulation and pitch wheels. When I first read about the development of the hardware Solaris, I was a little bit suspicious about the six displays and I was afraid editing would be a messy affair - but I am happy to say that the displays are not for show and make sound design easy.
Actually, due to the huge amount of modulation capabilities I doubt if this would have been possible in any other way. I know people who like working on the Virus TI - I don't. Although the layout is easy to understand from an academic point of view, I've always found myself lost among the menus and always ending up using the software editor.
Looking just at the number of parameters available, the Solaris dwarfs the TI - but thanks to the six displays - I never found myself lost in the same way as with the Virus. Each display is dedicated for specific tasks, such as filters, envelopes, lfos, oscillator and mixer. The largest display is located in the middle and it is here you do settings that affect the whole synthesizer.

Sound design on a new architecture is like walking in a cave with minimum lights. You have to feel yourself around and the first sounds that emerge often shows the obvious highlights of the capabilities.

Here are my personal favourites from the exploration of day one.

• the comb filter is massive and coats a simple sawtooth with a thick layer of attitude.
• just like with the Virus and Waldorfs synthesizers, the arpeggiator allows different rhythm patterns as well as swing.
• while the standard oscillators are good, my pulse went slightly higher with the CEM oscillators.

A few more thoughts

• When I'll buy my own Solaris - I will be buying the white model. While the black is nice - in a dimly lit room, I found it a bit difficult to read the labels of the knobs and buttons.
• While the lfos contains all settings one possibly can wish for, I still haven't found the magic spot yet. But that is just a matter of time I suppose.
  

Writing about and reviewing products is a subject that is brought up in forums and reader correspondence, and it generally follows the same story. Someone has read a magazine, got annoyed because 98% of the products got at least 8/10 ratings and/or a fancy award. Conclusion - the reviewers are in the pockets or the advertisers or simply bribed.

After working in the publishing business as a daily job for many years, I have to say that - sadly - I still haven't met a music technology journalist who drives a BMW or bloating around in a Hummer.

Writers in this genre are not bought, nor incompetent.

 

So why is it then that people doing this for a living only write good reviews? One suggestion that you often hear is that the standards of today is so high, that rarely anything can be considered bad - which of course is a pile of bs. The releases today contains as much crap as ten years ago.

Another misconception is that people believe that the producers and distributors bribe you with free software. Free licences, yes. Bribing - no.
Getting free software is great, but to be honest - it's a terrible pointless bribe.

Any reviewer of music tech is so damn overloaded with software, that if a company would try approaching one saying, if you write nicely about us, you'll get our delay effect FOR FREE, would only result in a laughter-attack of cataclysmic proportions.

I have huge trunks of software boxes up in the attic that never see the light. The worlds first commercial software synthesizer by Dave Smith: Reality. Damn, I still have the box of Generator sitting on my shelf: the very first product from Native Instruments - that later transformed into Reaktor. Would it amuse you to know that it came on two 3.5-inch floppies?

But nostalgia aside. If the fine gentlemen over at Kurzweil would knock on my door and say, hey write a good damn review of our latest PC3-keyboard YOU WILL GET IT FOR FREE, I would probably say yes, Mistah! Gimmegimme Oh-Sweet-Baby-Jesus. But only because I would hail that product to the skies anyway.

To end this fluffy tale about the honesty of reviewers, I'll explain the major reason why reviews tend to be positive.

No one wants to waste time on rubbish. And when it comes down to it, neither do you.

The typical reaction of that I hear is that negative reviews are as informative as positive ones. While I do agree with this in theory, the human mind doesn't work like that. If this humble blog would only review the worst of software, smash the poor piglets into pulp, no one would visit this blog rather than to see their most hated software developer getting it.

My time is limited and so is yours, and more importantly: in a magazine where you have to fight yourself bloody to convince that damn editor that Maschine v2.0 or Spectrasonics new product Megasphere is worth way more than a rotten 2000 character review - there is simply no room for writing about crap.

Writing about bad products is bad business from every possible angle. Nobody wants it. Not the reviewer, nor the magazine and at the end - not even the reader.

What drives these people - myself included - are two things 1) you get paid to do what you probably would have done anyway, 2) the pleasure of knowing that people actually read your babble.

It's not about money or incompetence. If it would be all about money, then most of these magazines, blogs, developers would not exist.

As widely known, the real recipe of success and earning good money is to simply give people what they what. Writing about software plugins is, from an economical point of view, futile. No one will every get rich from it. A blog dedicated to Lady Gaga will generate more revenue than one about Mr Oizo.

The sad truth about music tech writers is they do this because they like it, and they like writing about things they like.

It's that simple really.