The Toxicity of Synth Culture

[Guy Rowland]

Nicely made and argued video.



This YouTuber, Bloom Music, isolates three pillars of complaints against last year's Moog Messenger:

"It's just another monosynth"

"It's InMusic junk"

"Moog-vation / Moog-station"

I mean, I have enough (soft) monosynths, but I hope I'm not so much of a jerk as to whine about every company that makes a new one.

As the maker of the video says at the end, this applies to more than just the Messenger, more than just synths, the online discourse in our entire industry is loathsome.

We live in a time of abundant - and cheap - wonders. My 15 year old self would explode at the limitless sonic world I have at my fingertips. Yet it seems the majority of online discourse is permanently offended and does nothing but whine about how AWFUL everything is. Permanently frustrated at these evil companies who exist only to pour scorn on their own boundless creativity.

How my heart bleeds for them.

[Lawrence]

I didn’t watch the video, but in your opinion has there been a breakthrough soft synth released in, say, the past few years?

I find myself with a surfeit of (very good) options. More acquisitions seem like collecting to me.

[Guy Rowland]

I don’t watch the video, but in your opinion has there been a breakthrough soft synth released in, say, the past few years?

I find myself with a surfeit of (very good) options. More acquisitions seem like collecting to me.

There's a new synth out there, Ultra, which has a completely different type of oscillator - an Ultrawave. It's well liked too. I listened to the demos and didn't hear anything distinctively new though in truth.

https://ultra.audio/

I'm not expecting a breakthrough soft synth ever again - for that matter I don't hear any synthesis breakthroughs of any kind ever again. It had pretty much all been done by the 90s - it's just better, cheaper, faster, more versatile.

[Lawrence]

My first polysynth was the PolyMoog. It wasn’t a very successful instrument but I was beyond desperate for it.
$3000 plus tax-all the money in the world.

When I think of what 3k buys you now-it’s just unreal.

[Piet De Ridder]

I like Ultra. Apart from being an outstanding synth, it’s also uniquely great to restore/revive/improve poor samples. In fact, it were the exciting results I got while testing this feature with the Ultra trial version, that made me decide to buy the thing.

Example: big fan of Ladi Geisler “knack bass” sound as I’ve always been — the bass sound that is such a defining ingredient of the Bert Kaempfert Orchestra sound — , I sampled, many years ago, every isolated bass note I could find on the Kaempfert recordings, and made an EXS-patch with them (EXS is the built-in Logic sampler). While the result has proven somewhat useful, there was of course an awful lot wrong with it: notes had no decay, depending on the original recordings there were distinct sonic differences among them, most samples were very noisy, they all had traces of the pronounced reverb on those recordings, and, worst of all, I only had a very limited number of more or less usable samples (spanning barely one octave, from E2 to E3, with a few gaps in between)
Enter Ultra. I fed the best samples into Ultra, tweaked what needed tweaking, did whatever needed doing, and the result is that I now have a much-much-much better sounding knack bass instrument: the timbre is much more consistent across its range (and all the gaps have been filled convincingly), all the noise has gone, the samples have considerable more sustain and decay, the low frequency content is much stronger too, and the instrument has been given a set of parameters that respond to velocity making it infinitely more playable than the in comparison ridiculously primitive EXS-original.

Here's an illustration of the difference btween the EXS original and the Ultra-version.

On the subject of new synths: a week or two ago, I bought a new one. And, as it happens, it is a monophonic one: Unusable Engineering’s Curves & Membranes. Very happy with it.


__

[Guy Rowland]

I’d watched the tutorial video of how the new ULTRA oscillators work, and that sounds like a perfect use of it, Piet. I remember thinking that it could better replace samplers for some instruments. And I think that’s where I see it – of course it’s a fully capable synth, but its real innovation is in sampling more than synthesis. I never found a “wow, never heard that before” moment when listening to the sounds it can do, but I may very well have missed something.

I'd never heard of Curves and Membranes - looks very clever and an elegant, unique way to program. Again though, sonically... I don't know what I'm expecting, but I don't really hear anything revolutionary. And that feels unrealistic on my part - as I say, I'm not sure I've ever thought "what is THAT?" perhaps since the 80s actually,