As the last couple of decades have led to making music in software, some of the materiality of physical instruments is lost. No matter how much you love your hardware synths, odds are you spent at least a little time looking into the void of a computer screen. And to the public, much of that is obscured by the back of a display. Instruments face outward; computers face inward.
Enter online photo sharing. Screen grabs can make software rigs visible. For example, someone’s been busy putting together a monster bass channel strip in Ableton Live:
Contained: the synth source is Vember Audio’s Surge digital synth, fed into Ohmforce’s Ohmicide saturator/distorter, Waves’ C4 (a multiband parametric compressor), L2 (ultramaximizer) and Maxx Bass (bass enhancement), and Ableton Live’s own Auto Filter and Saturator. Kids, don’t try this at home. I’m amused because this is hilarious, goes-to-eleven overkill.
Got some screen grabs you want to share? Add them (and anything else music-related) to the Create Digital Music Flickr pool, and drop us a line if you think we’ll find it especially interesting.
I’ll be interested to see if tools like plasq’s upcoming Mac utility Skitch also catch on for this purpose.