MSH, welcome to Analog Only. Peace. I really cannot speak for anyone else but I want to welcome you as someone who I hope will hang around and because I think that you have a lot to offer.
Thanks, but I've been here before!
We are in general users of digital as well as analog. We are pro analog for a number of reasons.
There are a LOT of good reasons to be pro analog. Many have been listed, and I argued with almost none of them. Just a choice few, really
OK, I get that some people have been burned by digital hype. There is analog hype too. The number of times Sgt. Peppers was used to promote cassette multitrackers is a good example. I read those ads back in the day, but the main focus there was the FOUR tracks, not the sound quality! And the first cassette multi I used was a real POS. You couldn't punch without a giant audible pop, so you had to leave an empty "punch" track, and be quick on the faders during mixdown. For some reason, the monitoring barely worked at all. It didn't seem to erase real well, so when we recycled a tape, we got a recording with two tracks of backwards Anthrax, mixed in real quiet. That was cool though, because we had four tracks! And I still have those recordings!
So I beleive the hype, even though I don't believe it
Things were much better when I bought the 424mkII in 1997. I used it for yeas after I got digital in the studio as a portable recorder, up until I bought the HD24 in 2004.
I think all this stuff is great . . . man, the things you can do these days for no money at all
I spent a lot of time tuning and repairing pipe organs.
OK, you officially need to visit the beach, because what I know of pipe organs is literally almost nothing. And I can't play keyboard.
But I've picked up a few stops cheap, one of them a real beater, but I banged most of the pipes into sounding a note. Next I need to start building windchests . . . when I get some time
I tell ya, I don't get the pipe organ hobbyist crowd, many of them want the real thing, but time and space and money are a problem . . . so they wire a real console for MIDI to drive a sampler? Sure, I'd love a Silbermann in my house too, but I'd rather have 4 real short-scale ranks than a bunch of samples.
So I use MIDI to control the pipes, that's how I get in done with digital
So I can compose in notation or with a guitar MIDI controller, or one finger at a time on the keyboard, and get a sequencer to play back the piece in its fully glory
That is, when I ever finish the thing . . .