Deep Synth Thoughts

Things have been relatively quiet over here in synthland recently--it's hard to find the desire to write about synths while your country crumbles around you. But let's pretend none of that is happening for just a second, mm'K?. Throughout synth history there are related synths that, "on paper" purport to be the same thing internally, but in fact sound very different. Think the brighter oscs and more aggressive filter on the MKS-80 rev4 versus rev5, or the slower envelopes on the CS-15 (compared to the 5/10/30). Sometimes these things are just good fodder for the anoraks to one up themselves down the pub; sometimes these things actually result in real differences in sonic potential. Today's piece is about the latter. The Microbrute (mB) is a stripped-down, diminutive version of the Minibrute (Mb; read my ode to the OG brute  here ) with a couple of obvious "balancing" features, i.e., the CV ins/outs, and the legit sequencer geared toward live use. It...

Happy new year folks! New year, new me? Nope. In fact, for my first post of 2025, I thought I would dredge up a 5-year-old thread I made on a forum that I no longer frequent. The contents of the post are still accurate, the only real (a very real) difference is that not long afterward vintage synth prices went skyhigh during the COVID pandemic thanks to homebound investors with nowhere else to put their money. Prices have come down somewhat since and there's still plenty of good vintage synths to get for decent prices but forget about every buying some things for less than multiple 10s of Ks. Anyway, on with the post:  Decoding vintage synth seller lingo: a user guide Given how increasingly difficult it is to navigate the vintage synth market these days, particularly for first time buyers, I thought it would be helpful to provide an extensive, if not exhaustive, list of terms used by sellers  that one might run across in places like  eBay  or Reverb, and their actual...

I've mentioned before that I have a bad habit of rebuying things.. twice... thrice... quadrice?! Ninety-nine percent of the time said item doesn't stick around for long--my gut was never wrong, it was just my memory that was failing. Well here's an exception to the rule that is worth celebrating: my third time's a charm go around with the OG Korg MS-20 MK1.  MS-20s have always been a perma-cool and low-rent DGAF synth. Scraping and abrasive, they were the counterpoint to the Rolands and Moogs in the heyday of techno and then the indie-electro resurgence in the '00s. It's hard to believe that at one point they were commanding upwards of $3500 in the mid-aughts, but then they were the perfect synth for a leather-jacketed johnny come lately with zero synthesis experience looking for maximum on-stage poseur potential. Turn up the resonance and turn the filter and your neck to neck with the guitarist in terms of loudness.  I was never particularly interested in that...

In pursuit of analog poly greatness, it's easy to overlook a LOT of other synths, particularly VAs. I'm not an analog purist by any means, but VAs have usually just been something I ended up trying because of easy access or latent curiosity; not because of any great need for 20 voice pads or complex multitimbrality. And that means a lot of them have simply gone under my radar for a loooong time. So in an effort to be a little more au courant , I made an educated decision last year to buy a NEW VA. A few things didn't really click with me with that one and so rather than return or sell, I thought about checking out something I'd actually been curious about for a long time, the Nord Wave 1. In a case of wonderful serendipity, someone wanted the Gaia and had a Wave to offer and ta da, I had a Wave.  I am no stranger to Nords. I had a NL2R when they were still somewhat fresh (so fresh actually that I kind of forgot what I even thought about it, "dry" is my only li...

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 that are meaningless in the context of actual music. My eyes literally roll out of my head across the fl...