Hello, 2018. Goodbye, Hardware.

I know a lot of my musician friends have spoken poorly of the Arturia Matrix 12 plugin, but I'd like you all to go stuff it. I've been having a ton of fun with it these last few weeks.At this point, I'm willing to call you guys out and say it's all in your head if you can't enjoy the sound of a software synthesizer as much as a hardware one. Your aging ears aren't so golden as you think.Yeah, I guess this means I've gone to the dark side. The convenience of software is matched by is awesome sound and I'm just tired of maintaining all this infrastructure for hardware synthesizers. It just doesn't make sense.So, in the new year, I'm going to be cutting down my keyboard rig to only a few essentials: Modular, Kronos, PEK (sentimental value) and DSI Pro2. I'm not going to sell the other instruments, but mothball them. I want to keep the connected rig down to just what is needed for writing, and that which I can mix using just my MOTU interface (on the fence about selling the 01v96). My goal is to eliminate my patch bays (I've always hated the damned things).physical gear creates the need for infrastructure: Power, midi ports, audio routing, etc. Having gear means you need more gear to make it useful. I am finally seeing the true gift that software give you: if you have a DAW, adding a plugin will not require any more infrastructure than a bit of disk space that you (likely) already have.I don't know why it took me so long to come around to it, but there is no going back now.