[sdiy] Advice

[Richard Wentk]

At 12:53 03/02/2004 -0500, Glen wrote:
>I made the bold suggestion that if they ALWAYS had to heavily compress, or
>otherwise significantly alter, ANY particular synth, then it was a sign
>that particular synth had failed to produce the sound they actually wanted.

Considering that the 303 was originally built to produce oompa oompa bass 
lines, I'd say that's a fair assumption. ;-)

People use 303s to create a kind of music that its designers never 
anticipated, and if they have to use processing to do that - so what?

For my money, a design is right if people want to keep making music with 
it. To say that's wrong is like saying that no one should fuzz up an 
electric guitar because Les Paul just didn't get the idea right.

>Perhaps in the future we should design synths with this idea in mind?

Absolutely not. The whole point of the exercise is that engineers are 
usually the worst people in the world to try to anticipate in what creative 
ways musicians are going to abuse their ideas. If engineers could think 
like musicians they'd *be* musicians. While there's some cross over, the 
mindsets are usually sufficiently distinct to make foresight difficult.

If I were to play rock guitar (which I don't, particularly) I'd rather find 
my own fuzzed up sound than rely on someone else to put only one kind of 
option into a guitar. Likewise with outboard - there are going to be 
countless different kinds of compression used on a 303, and they're all 
going to sound different.

Unlike engineering, there is no right answer, most flexible parameter 
space, or most likely compromise. It's all up to individual interpretation 
- and that's the whole point of all of it.

There is absolutely a case to be made for envelope curves that vary between 
lin/log/exp. One of Reaktor's biggest drawbacks is that the attack in an 
ADSR is a simple linear slope. Last time I looked it's not even a proper 
exponential.

But diddling with envelopes is still not going to get you compression, 
which often relies as much on various kinds of dynamic distortion as it 
does on simple envelope mangling.

Richard