Vintage Gear or AU / VST ?

The constant maintenance is greatly exaggerated. If we're just talking synths a good once over every decade is plenty and the rewards of real analog with the ability to set up your gain stages to taste before digital capture outweigh the maintenance cost. Not every old synth has the dreaded juno106 red goo on the filter chips!

That said I have no problem using virtual synths. When I'm using a daw sequencer they're handy for mocking up an arrangement and if the benefits of replacing some of them will be minimal I'll leave them...

There's also workflow to be considered. Knob per function instruments with an integrated keyboard/wheels/joystick are a real pleasure to work with. While my modal us purely digital and something like serum covers a lot of the same ground just as well, the interface is just so rewarding that I would never sell it...

Looking at your gear it seems we're on the same page here.

I'm going to reiterate gain staging. I'm pretty analog over here and I have a lotif interesting processors from many eras. The ability to add a little 70s opamp saturation or overdrive a vacuum tube on your peaks before ever converting to digital is a big benefit of analog gear. Lots of components interacting in controlled ways... it takes a lot of work simulate these little touches with plugins. There are some believable plugins for certain things and a few general purpose plugins that work a treat if you know the exact balance of harmonics you want yadayada, but there's no simulation of the weird, low headroom 4558 opamp input of a 70s univox stage echo.

I use VST's as well as outboard Strymon's for post-FX. I've tried vintage rack FX units before (Boss SE-70's, SE-50's, Eventide Eclipse, Lexicon MPX-1, etc.) and oh my god, they were so unreliable that even with clean power being fed to them, the maintenance upkeep just kept on dragging me back rather than allowing me to make progress with music. I don't miss them at all.

Whatever unique characteristics that hi-fi vintage rack units had, those FX algorithms are better off forgotten IMHO.

An eventide eclipse is aging, not vintage... I own tape echoes older than the 1st eventide harmonizer and a few digital reverbs that still work well but are my age

Right, but still, while the Eclipse had some interesting reverb effects, it couldn't do preset spillovers to save its own life, not to mention the fact that the input jacks on the unit I had were completely shot to shit.

Fortunately Eventide did us all a good favor and discontinued that POS. I don't miss it at all. Nowadays the Strymon BigSky just slaughters any Eventide reverb.

So far, the only product I'm truly impressed with from Eventide thus far are the PitchFactor and Micropitch pedals, which have that one stereo detune algorithm that made the 80's chorus tones famous.

Having said that I do want to give the TimeFactor or the H90 a spin. While I'm a big fan of the Mobius and BigSky, the TimeLine I find that it gets drowned out too easily in the context of a metal mix. Just with the guitar by itself it sounds great for ambient music, but for a prog power metal context...I want something that's much more articulate and cutting.

80s detune? Spx90 symphonic. Way cheaper than an eventide!

The eventide 2016 reverb us pretty iconic... I recently spent time with an h9 pedal on a session and I think we unplugged it on that session after it wasted hours fiddling. It might be on 1 song subtley. I was always more of a lexicon guy...

I've heard from others that the SPX90's power supplies are known to fail easily. Not sure how true that is, but considering my pisspoor luck with the used market, it's not something I'm willing to consider.

Myself, I'm more of a Strymon guy. Reverb and chorus, to my ears, nothing beats the BigSky or Mobius in terms of the Cloud and Shimmer reverb, as well as the stereo Multi chorus algorithm. I just can't find myself going back to Eventide reverb considering how unique Strymon's reverb algorithms sound, really...

I've never had a problem with an spx90 I or II. I don't know where this stuff comes from. I guess they're getting old but the newer spx units are also great. Typically if a PSU dies on old gear it's just a voltage regulator or drying electrolytics. Not a biggie.

I'll buy a strymon when they make a rack unit with a proper bipolar power supply. I guess there's no percentage in the studio market anymore. It's not like I can't do a great shimmer with aputch shifter and a reverb i already own. Got a pile of multi fx and reverbs...

Once the idea is solid on my vintage gear I move it to a VST because it gives me the utility to collectively save state (i.e., I have a Yamaha DX7, Roland D-50, Korg M1, and a Roland Juno-106. I also have the VST versions of these synths that I use in my DAW. Even though I use my vintage gear to generate ideas, all of the sequencing and printed tracks are derived from the VST’s; I don’t track with my vintage gear because it is much more efficient to use VST’s in production).

Weird, I'll go the exact opposite route

Shimmer reverb is actually quite a lot more complex than one would imagine. I once tried to emulate a shimmer reverb on the HX Stomp before by routing the reverb and pitch shifter in parallel. It didn't sound the same as the BigSky's shimmer reverb for sure, mainly because not only do you have to take the pitch shifter's polyphonic tracking capabilities into account, you also have to account for the diffusion that's involved with the ambient reverb.

Even IF it is possible, with a pitch shifter and a reverb, PLUS a parallel splitter, that's at least 2-3 elements involved. With the BigSky, you can do all that in one unit. It's quite impressive to see how far the technology has come. (Except Fractal Audio, 'cause let's not mince words here, the Axe-FX's shimmer reverb sucks. The Ursa Major algorithm is a joke compared to the BigSky IMHO.)

While the Helix may have improved on the shimmer reverb with the 3.15 firmware update, I'm still not 100% convinced to downsize my Strymon's into a Helix Rack or HX Effects. I personally find that the Helix still tends to cut corners with the fidelity of chorus and reverb effects - they don't scream "pristine" to my ears. I've yet to hear someone dial in a Helix preset that sounds leaps better than Strymon's.

Did you really try to guitarsplain the Eno/Lanois/Edge shimmer verb gimmick to a recording engineer? Do you know how many times I've been asked to add this cheeseball effect to a perfectly CV lean mix? It was really trendy about 20 years ago, man. Not parallel, all series... I usually setup an octave maybe with some dry underneath (50% or less) with a little modulation or modulated delay for extra cheese and then set up a hall verb on a unit with nice tails with at least 20ms predelay. You do not want dry pitch shift transients poking out, its 100% wet. I've been known to destroy the transients of the day signal with a fast compressor like an 1176 before the digital units just to maintain the easiest possible sound like on Joshua Tree. Ony desk I'll spmetimes return the effect to a channel and then use the aux end the shimmer is on to return a little of the effect to the input to create a feedback loop. I think this has been documented ad nauseam by Eno and Lanois at this point.

I'm sure the strymon stuff is great at this particular moment in digital history but it's still in pedal format. It looks convenient if you play in a band and use a pedal board. I have a studio and don't really play anymore. When they make a rack unit with 2 stereo processors, a detailed user interface ir plugin controller, digital i/o so I can bypass their converters if I want and a dedicated high voltage PSU I'm a be up on that. Right now they're just pissing me off by ignoring non-guitarists. I play, but I'm pretty happy with a tape echo and an ac30. W as en I'm mixing I need stuff like big sky but with plenty of knobs and i/o

Bit of both really! Of course, I do all the recording and production itself on a DAW (usually Ableton and a Focusrite Scarlett interface). I'll almost always use MIDI for the keyboard (but there are exceptions, my synth can be used as a regular or a MIDI one). For drums, I have a MIDI set (saves a lot of space and doesn't wake the neighbours), though I'll occasionally add extra percussion manually (eg. with a tambourine or bongo drum).

However, I record all the guitar and bass using real instruments, some of which are real relics over 50 years old! I feel a guitar VST could never replace a real guitar, and I'm especially drawn towards a more vintage sound. I also prefer using physical effect pedals over VSTs, not only do they sound much better, they are much easier to operate, and can be used for live instances too. For some simple effects like compressors, eq, or additional reverb/delay I'll use VSTs though. Obviously I record the vocals myself too, but add the effects with VSTs (most commonly, a compressor and a bit of reverb, occasionally a very subtle autotune if needed).

So I would say the optimal solution depends on what kind of music you're making, but as a rule of thumb, I'd say use modern gear to save money and space, and use vintage gear to get the sound you want without it sounding too robotic, best is to have a blend of both!

Sitting home on a Friday... BUMP. Lets get some plugin heads arguing!

And who would want to emulate them? They're easy and fun to play!

I have to agree, real instruments just sound so much better and natural. What's even better? Real amps! I'm tired of hearing people using the same Kemper, Axe-FX, Quad Cortex, Helix tones, etc. Let's bring back real tube amps that sound authentic and amazing!