New old stuff

[Magnus Danielson]

From: Haible Juergen <Juergen.Haible at nbgm.siemens.de>
Subject: RE: New old stuff
Date: Tue, 29 Aug 2000 15:00:28 +0200

> 	>I'm engineer, no musician. I'd never dare to explain some musical
> 	>question, if I'm not absolutely sure what it is all about.
> 	>Many books about synths are written by musicians, and many of these
> 	>contain misunderstandings, errors and crap.
> 	>A lot of prejustices come from that and spread arround, like
> 	>synth X sounds weak, filter Y is too bright, oscillator Z sounds
> fat and so on.
> 
> Amen to that.
> It's funny in retrospect to see how many synths got that "weaker than a
> Moog"
> attribute in Matthias Becker's book. 
> 
> (Great book nevertheless)

Personally, I think there are many issues to the whole issue. I have so far
never seen any really good description of what makes a synth "fat" or even a
good definition of what is meant. Similarly the term "thin" doesn't have a good
technical definition even if it seems to be implied that something that sounds
"thin" sounds "not fat" and vice versa. I _think_ I know (now) what people mean
by these terms, and I also _think_ I have a clue of some of the things that
makes the difference.

But, when we techies makes a perfectly ultra-stable synth, then people accuse
us of doing "cold" synths, thus, not having the "warmth" of some semi-crappy
synth that tech-heads at best describes as a mediocre solution, done to be
cheap and all that.

For me, part of the "magic" about a synth is not only how it sounds, but how it
behaves and how it allows for a creative mind to acheive something with ease
and fun. Personally, some of that got lost behinds menues, but that is MY
personal view, even if some of those gear sounds very well when put into the
right hands.

For me, there are alot of subjective comments about synths and it to some
degree come with the territory, but I don't take such statements as anything
else than subjective comments. If I know where someone stands on synths and
their sound, I can better build my understanding of what to expect.

If someone could come up with good universal definitions and technical
descriptions of "fat", "thin", "cold", "warm" etc I would really like to hear
them and put them down on paper.

Cheers,
Magnus