Hardware

I recently decided to take the plunge and get a hardware synth to stop my dallying and futzing around with software emulation of synths.

For several years now, I’ve intended to lean less on pre-loaded patches and work on an understanding towards how a patch is created from the basic soundwave (sine, saw, square, pulse, etc.) and massaged into the sounds you hear in music — whether it is someone like Depeche Mode or cinema’s Vangelis.

I have played with the software synths on my digital audio workbench (DAW), and purchased a few other software variants in an attempt to find something that “clicks” with this wee walnut I store where most folks store a brain.

Not a one clicked.

With each attempt to wrangle a synth into submission, I grew more frustrated. It was obvious that the problem was not the synthesizers, as they all sounded great with pre-installed sound patches. I had to admit something was wrong with my limited brain capacity. Even following careful instructions found online, I was unable to even make a simple bass or piano that sounded like something I might try on my own music.

I had to admit, something was missing upstairs.

After having played around with GForce’s emulation of the Sequential Prophet 5, a flash of insight crossed that tortured grey matter of mine… I needed something more tactile and visual.

It is that whole adding a physical activity to improve my learning and retention. You know how they say that folks learn in some balance of hearing it, writing it down, verbalizing it, reading it and etcetera? I am one of those people who learns best by reading and doing, and less by other methods. I drove my professors crazy during class and seminars with my doodling when I wasn’t writing. Taking notes is dandy, but not always required. My hand moving while someone is talking… that’s another matter altogether. Retention goes sky high with a doodle, while sitting and listening makes my brain more like a wide-pore sieve instead of a dreamcatcher. Little sticks when I just listen politely.

So, I finally took a plunge and bought a physical synth. A real one. Not a fancy piano like my previous synths have been. Something with knobs and controls. And, after I sat down and explored the sound banks installed, I promptly made myself forget they existed and started learning what makes certain sounds. And other onboard tools that it has that I have been meaning to learn (not strictly required for sound creation, but helpful).

It also doesn’t look like a synth to your average person. For one, there are no obvious keys — some of the controls double as a decent keyboard, but they are not arranged like keys. It is a box with knobs, buttons, soft pads and two screens:

It has a more expensive twin that has your keyboard attached, but I have a “dry” midi keyboard and shaving off a third of the price by foregoing the “aftertouch” element seemed worth it, especially as I am not performing live, only recording.

This thing is an absolute amazing beast of a machine that I will not outgrow anytime soon. Three oscillators (i.e., sound sources), two filters, five envelopes, five LFOs, on-board effects, eight-voice polyphonic, analog emulation, arpeggiator, digital wavetables, cv/gate inputs, with free PC/Mac software for offloading your patches or adding new ones…

And if that all made little sense, I’m finding I don’t know as much as I thought as I dig into it. It only makes a little sense to me now. Enough that I know I have a pretty powerful learning synth in my hands. Plus the visual wave pattern under that big dial helps me visualize what I am doing to the sound waves as I manipulate them (note to synth makers, software or hardware: that feature is key to people like me who are trying to understand patch creation). Tactile, visual, aural.

I’ve learned a lot in the time since I picked this up, but I’m still all babysteps. I’ve only created about three patches of my own and two are bass guitars. And yet, I have learned a ton about what goes into not only the sound of each (they are two different approaches to bass sounds), but with how to use the sounds and modify the construction to suit other uses.

And folks wonder why that little walnut is screaming something about my being a slave driver.