Mike brings up an interesting point about jamming. When I had a rather large hardware synth set-up there was in fact quite a bit of jamming. Not only with my own ideas but also with other like minded musicians and composers. It was very cool because all the instruments were wired up and in the mix and they each had their own set of controls for serious sound manipulation. It was very easy to jam and record the results of it to which I have many hours of experimentation recorded.
The challenge today would be receiving multiple signal or data flow from multiple players and getting that into a powerful computer with multiple VST's set up to respond accordingly. Another idea might be to have multiple players each with their own controller and computer (laptop) handling the synth set-up for each. A common clock could be routed around so that each person could either lock onto it or ignore it. Kraftwerk for example play like like this and don't carry all the analog gear around any more!
I had all the analog stuff and there is a fair bit of tolerance and maintenance involved as well.
There is still something to be said of having a great external instrument to play as it tends to make you focus on it and the music a bit more so than fiddling around with VST's in computers. The Fairlight concept is really good. When you sit down behind that you are about to engage in a fantastic musical instrument and it feels like that rather than a computer. It just makes you want to play it and I think anything that does that is very good. My new Kurzweil PC3K certainly has that effect on me and so many of the keyboard instruments mentioned here will also inspire the same way.
The original MS20 certainly had a profound effect on me when I first got it and I used it for 25 or more years afterwards too. I expanded mine with the MS50 expander, the SQ10 analog sequencer and the vocoder as well as an MS10. All these things worked very well together and are capable of very interesting and complex sounds. You really had to commit to tracking things then and there because you could never recreate the same sound exactly the next day!
I love the analog modular VST's though. They are amazing and very versatile too. You just need an interesting controller to talk to them. The M Audio Axiom 61 is well geared up for lots of control. What is vital is DAW software that allows you to painlessly and quickly map controllers to software parameters. Some DAW's make this too hard and people tend to shy away from it.
Before investing in that MS20 I would want to know that every control on the front of that thing was sending midi data of some kind into your sequencer. Then it would also be a great controller with lots of knobs that could be used for a multitude of functions in other VST's etc...
If you don't mind spending a bit of money here is another real analog synth that I was considering at one stage.
http://www.davesmithinstruments.com/products/prophet12/ This would keep you busy for a very long time!
post edited by Jeff Evans - 2013/06/01 19:24:03