Deep Synth Thoughts

There's been a little gap since my last entry, but that's partly because my last post--the title of this one--was simply so profound that it ended up becoming an article for Greatsynthesizers.com. Check it out  here .

It's 2023... the synthesizer market is SATURATED with analog monophonic synths offering "warmth" and "fatness" and "character". It's arguable that there's never been so many cheap and cheerful new analog synths to pick from and that's not even considering the offerings in Euro land.  With so many new options, how does one choose? Don't. Instead buy the thing that kicked this all off (new analog monosynths that is, not reissues, a la MS-20) and get on with your life. What is that thing? It's the humble Arturia Minibrute.  When it was released a lifetime ago, a lot of people weren't impressed. It was too gnarly, too aggressive, and not the Moog clone that (apparently) people only ever want. But hindsight has worked out in its favour and I can't think of any other modern analog monosynth that can still hold its own both in terms of sound but also connectivity.  No specs review here, simply a Top 8 list of reasons why the MB is

I love wavetable synthesis a la PPG/Waldorf. It's not always a needed sound in my music (actually it rarely is) but from a purely synthesis POV it's probably my favorite type of sound--to me, it just harkens back to the earliest days of academic additive synthesis experiments and the notion that somehow digital synthesis could recreate anything . And yet it always sounds 100% synthetic; there's literally no equivalent for a wavetable sweep in the analog/acoustic domain.  So I get excited when someone comes out with a new version of this but there's also the issue of redundancy. A common theme among my gear decisions is that one thing usually does something better than some other thing and to that end you don't need both. This isn't an argument for one synth to rule them all, just the notion that synth people are obsessed with subtle differences between pieces of that are meaningless in the context of actual music. My eyes literally roll out of my head across the

So I bought another Quantum... which by default means I already owned one. I had no intention of buying another one, until I did. And then the fact that the MK2 versions make MK1 prices much lower than new pretty much sealed the deal.  But anyway, I'm not here espouse the virtues of the Quantum, which is arguably the best hybrid synth ever made. I'm here to talk (briefly) about simple vs. complex synths, and why the Quantum is probably the best "simple" complex synth ever made.  Sometimes simple synths are great; sometimes that's all you need. In my particular genre du choix , simple/short/staccato is standard. More complex sounds are almost always samples. I've been moving more and more toward this approach in the last few years--very limited studio time (thanks kids!) means I'm more interested in getting the next track done (or writing a blog, apparently) than diving down the programming rabbit hole. The downside is that you're either stuck with the

For my first post, let's get this out of the way: I don't have GAS, I have have SAS: "Synthesizer acquisition syndrome". And it's serious, I love synths and I just want to try every one ever made. An easy goal! I also rarely keep anything. I don't covet synths as material objects and I often buy stuff simply to try, fully aware of the fact that I will probably turn it around in a few weeks, days, or even minutes. My gut is usually right about these things. Rarely it's wrong and I end up revisiting something a few years later, but in those cases it's just because I want to have that sound palette back in my setup again, even if just briefly.  The GRP A1 was a class "A" example of my insatiable SAS and also immediate gut feeling about gear. A new small analog synth by a company I like for a "low" price? Insta-buy . And after 15 minutes of use, Insta-sold . But what did I learn in that brief timeframe? Well, it's small. Too small f