No you're right. I must be out of my fucking mind to suggest and support the notion that people record music with real instruments. Make sounds. Record sounds. What was I thinking? It's way easier and more convenient for everyone to just use sims and samples. Why learn anything at all? Why bother with the tedious minutia of placing a mic? That would be stupid. God forbid a loud sound startle someone. Just draw your notes with a mouse. It's all the same!
Where do you draw the line? The world is filled with examples of "fake" instruments that have gone on to become "real" instruments in their own right.
Electric pianos were originally designed to mimic real pianos. They did a terrible job of it, and their sound became desirable on their own.
The Mellotron was one of the first "samplers." It used tape to play samples of real flutes, strings, etc. It has a sound all its own, though, and now it's a desirable vintage instrument. And there are even VSTs to emulate it --- the thing was designed to emulate something else in the first place.
MIDI is simply digital data that's converted in some way to produce a sound. It's no different in that regard to recording digitally. The "real" sound wave is captured by the mic, converted to an electric signal, converted to digital data (on digital systems), and "recorded." How is that different?
If you really want to be a purist, then you should play acoustic guitars and only do it live to people every time, because recording
anything in a studio is already a perversion of "natural" sound.
I love "real" amps just as much as you, and that's always what I prefer to do. But if everyone stuck their hand in the sand the way you're doing and shouted "
This is the only way to do this! Everything else is bullshit," then we wouldn't even have amplifiers in the first place, let alone multi-track recording. LOL .... How is that "real?" When's the last time you saw someone singing lead vocals, singing back up vocals, playing drums, playing 3 guitars, and playing bass all at the same time?
Both of those inventions --- amps and multi-track recordings --- were considered illegitimate at one time by many people. And ... oh yeah, so was digital recording at one point (and of course it still is by some people).