on being horrible at synths
I had a bit of a funky rehearsal mid-week where nothing was working right. The the middle part of the music--where synth, was being eaten by guitars and reverb. There was really nothing for me to do, being canceled out, couldn’t hear me, blah blah blah.
So I went home and took a really good look at what I do, how I do it, what I’m trying to do, and where I’m trying to live within the confines of this band being the synth player/keys player — and I say “synth” because it’s supposed to be synth.
I’ve covered it a bunch here, but I go from being a Moog guy to a Roland guy, but I also love my Mopho X4 and I kind of went to the river with it. What is this thing good at?
Just because of the filter and how different it is. It’s four voices of a Prophet, pretty classically, and it’s about modulation. I really dug deep into what does the Prophet do best, and it’s not anything I’ve done before because I’ve paid attention to what Vince Clarke does with it, which is kind of not what the Prophet does but at the same time what the Prophet does.
It’s a mellow synth, but the filter will go crazy. It has a smaller sweet spot that a Roland, but it’s chill, kind of a simple setup with a lot of modulation as well.
This all led me back to the old Gordon Reid SOS articles on synthesis, which are amazing, and kind of exposed that I do have some real, fundamental deficiencies in from-scratch patch creation. I really need to reboot from the ground up.
So, I started with a string patch of his and it was a bit mind-redefining — not mind-blowing, but nothing I’ve never used or done — but it has allowed me to start to redefine how I think about patch creation in general as I’m kind of a preset monster.
Declared it before, but I really do want to go through the entire series. It’s all such a brilliantly written thing and resource. The way these patches are created from the ground up and thought about, anywhere from what the original intent of the instrument was to where a synth can take it, are amazing.
For anybody interested in synthesis I think at this point it’s beyond required reading.
We can make fun of the internet, but it’s great to live in a time where the information is out there and you’ve got magazines like Sound On Sound — which incidentally I started reading 10–15 years ago and didn’t understand anything until I eventually did — and I’m appreciative.
Whatever the main lesson here is, the one that pops up every time holds the most true: It’s not the synth. It’s you (me).