Archive of the former Yahoo!Groups mailing list: MOTM

Dear all -

I've been holding my tongue on this issue because I'm not sure what
the value of my contribution would be.

So now I'm going to ramble a bit, OK?

I guess I've come to this - whereas I'm a relative newbie where
Synthesis (with a capital synthesis), MOTM, and DIY stuff is
concerned, I'm an old hand at composing, arranging, producing, etc. -
and it seems to me that Kenneth Elhardt hit the nail on the head when
he said "The synthesizer was supposed to be a device to create any
sound you want, but nobody uses it that way." And upon reflection,
that's the way I see it too.

See - I'm essentially just a folk musician. My roots - my bringing up
- was in folk and blues and gospel. And I've always known that my
true talent was my voice and my ability to write songs.

And so - so far as instrumentation, I'm an opportunist - and a
self-proclaimed idiot - certainly not a synth aficionado. In the
recordings I've done and records I've produced over the years, I've
used synthesizers both ways... for the recognizably synthesizer-like
and electronic sounds (back in the late seventies and early eighties)
and also for imitative sounds (more recently). When I needed a
synthesizer, I hired a synthesizer guy (synthesizer gals have always
seemed in particularly short supply) - for sure when I wanted a
clarinet I hired a clarinet player 'cause I can't play clarinet.
Truth is, I can't do anything better than someone else... I'm not
smarter, I'm not stronger, I'm certainly not as good a guitar player
or piano player or anything player (not that it stops me from playing)
- except, again, I can write a song probably as good as anybody -
'cause that's my talent - and I also have a knack for knowing what I
want to hear - and for being able to hear how things will sound before
they're played - in my head.

When I pick up an instrument, I noodle around with it until I get
something I like - then I use it. That's the opportunist piece.
And there's a long tradition of this, of course. It starts in the
way-back sitting around the fire - you find out that banging some
bones together makes a cool sound - you do it while you sing.
Eventually you stretch some old skin over a frame and you bang on that
while you whoop it up at midnight to the stars - this is is the root
of music - and poetry. You blow through a shell or a hollow reed and
you make a cool sound and you're on your way. Soon you're tempering
the clavichord. And soon you're discovering how to build electronic
gadgets and boom! Being human, you figure out cool stuff to do with
it. The way I see it - it's inherent in the human being. We're
hard-wired for it.

Like that, when I inherited that old Synthi-A from Froggy via (my
high-school friend) Dennis K - well - I sat and fiddled and fiddled
until I got cool sounds and very cool treatments of sounds. I could
have used something else to do it, I guess, but because I'm nothing
more than a folk musician, I just messed around 'till I got a sound I
like and then worked it into my next recording.

One of the most inspiring compositions I've ever heard was by Dennis
K. It was just sounds he made with Froggy's Synthi-As (he had two).
It was nothing but machine noise. It was raw oscillators and filters
and sequences put together in such an undeniably musical way that it
transcended everything I'd ever heard. A fantastic little example of
sounds that could only be made with a synth, put together into a form
that was undeniably music.

That said - some years ago, I spent around 20 or so hours with Dennis
creating a montage of imitative sounds that conveyed the ocean...
except that the swells and waves, the wind, the birds, the distant
clang of a buoy, the sound of rope creaking - they were timed to the
music. We used some samples - we could have done it all with samples
probably faster and much, much cheaper. But what we were able to do -
because we didn't over-use samples - was control the nuances of the
sounds so that they were recognizable yet just off center... surreal,
I suppose. We used a midi controller synced to a smpt stripe on the
analog recording machine - you know - it was old-fashioned... and my
point is we went to great lengths to get the sounds from an analog
synth. (Jeeze - I should bake that tape and listen to it <g>)

So look - all this is a long way of saying... I'm not a great
visionary or tech guy - I'm not a great guitar player or music
theorist - but I have a deep, passionate love for sound. And there's
just nothing like analog sound - nothing. There's nothing like a real
clarinet. And there's nothing like an analog synth imitating a
clarinet. And there's nothing like an analog synth doing anything at
all - like chirping and burping and grinding out the nastiest - and
the most sublime sounds. Like the noise of the universe - which is
what we were singing to those years ago when we were banging those
bones together - we're still doing it - just the gadgets are a little
different.

And if I'm allowed to futher wax philosophic: Isn't that what we
humans do? Don't we listen to the noise of the universe and interpret
it through our frail and divine human-ness? Any gadget that helps us
along the way seems like a good idea to me - from some drum for us to
bang on - to some clarinet for us to blow through - to some piece of a
gadget that allows us to synthesize just about anything we want to
hear? And isn't that the ultimate cool-ness of it all?

You guys all know synths far better than I probably ever will. I
don't even aspire to be as good as you guys - I just want to be able
to noodle around - and get some sound s I like. From my experience, I
know that the more possibilities I have, the better - within reason.
So - I also know the trap of having too much flexibility - too much
granularity... you can get caught and bogged-down in the details of it
all.

But then, again some people get into that. Like Roger Pelligrini just
said "I did the same sort of spectral analysis thing and it took a
long time! On the other hand, I was so pleased with my quasi-imitative
sound, not just as a good brass sound, but as a great synthesizer
sound." Hey - I mean - I'm fanatic about mixing. I drive everybody
crazy going over and over and over my mixes - but when I'm done - well
- most often people tell me that they're the most perfect mixes
they've ever heard. I just spent the better part of two weeks
figuring out the best way to tune and mike my piano according to its
peculiar inhamonicities, etc. <shrug> So it makes sense to me that
Roger and others might go to great lengths to find a sound.

But so far as I see it, it's not about having ultimate control -
ultimate granularity... it's about having just enough. Paul's design
of the 450 has intrigued me from the first. Maybe something like that
- or something like the Moog filter you guys were mentioning. You
guys are the experts - you'd know best what such a module should be like.

The folk-musician/producer/musical-opportunnist in me tells me I'd
find very cool things to do with such a gadget. I always seem to.

Bill (Will read this and rolled his eyes - I've explained I'm just
doing my parental job: finding the most efficiant way of embarrasing him)