Analog Synths sound dated?

The Roland Fantom is fantastic but i find those sorts of high end keyboards a little fiddly and in the end not worth the thousands you can spend on them.

If i was to go for a new Moog i'd definitely go out and buy the LittlePhatty it is a fantastic piece of kit that i saw Oliver Wakeman use with Yes and it had an incredible sound that cut through everything like a proper moog should.

I like saying that none of us are ever complaining about Mozart's Violin Concertos. ... so sorry Petrucci that we have to trash some stuff you do ... it's undeserved!

 

Ah, yes. The "Doogie Howser" DX Rhodes!

Yeah ... but by the time that you run some of Trilian though one of those Galen-Kruger stacks ... and all of a sudden, you don't know the difference ... damn ... Stanley Clarke never sounded that good!

 

Technology changes and improves and gets better with time. The main difference, is that the old "analog synths" had sounds, that no other instrument could do ... and that is going to be its legacy and the main reason why the instrument will not go away.

 

The hard part, though, is that almost all synthesizers sold in music stores are total crap and even in the case here in Vancouver, the guy did not know what "analog" was ... I think he did, but he had no idea that music existed using it, or what it really was! That's how bad he sounded!

 

I would say that what hurt synths the most in those days, was that they were trying to replace the bass (first -- which led to sequencers according to Tangerine Dream and Roland), and then, almost at the same time, to replace the strings, or add strings to other music, most of which would be considered popular music -- since most popular music could not afford a string section for their work in order to delineate their thoughts and wishes.

 

But, sooner or later, it will mean that you and I can see Turandot done by synthesizers and get rid of some of the egos that usually plague so many of those operas, and spend more time on the staging and details to take the card board attitudes out, and ... voila ... as good as a rock opera and then some ... and with the synthesizer you will be able to get louder and lower and have a greater flexibility on the presentation of the music in order to accentuate the details better ... which is very difficult to do when you are dealing with 100 stooges!

 

It goes both ways ... but some purists, and I ain't no weergeen, only those old sounds and the moving of the LFO knobs (for example) make it an instrument ... and yeah ... I agree to an extent ... but let's not get silly and say that other work was not done that is also very good. People like Vangelis, Sakamoto, Tangerine Dream and Klaus Schulze, were absolutely massive in the development of these instruments ... and you ought to research Edgar Froese's stories about the echo tapes and other adventures! I'm just hoping that he writes them down before he leaves us, because the stories are priceless ... albeit there is a perception that he is not bringing his kittykat side out, and ...

 

I frankly don't care if it's dated or not, most of the things I like ARE considered very dated, I'm not too interested in modern things.

 

All I know is that I love the sound of synths. Moog and Arp especially. I'm not as fond of modern software synthesizers that find their way in a lot of contemporary pop and rap music. I'm puzzled as to why people call the Moog cheesy while listening to crappy pop music riddled with Yamaha Software Synths.

 

I'm still not tired of playing around with the Jupiter 8v software ... and have been mixing it up with other things ... yeah ... endless fun is about the only word for it and then some ... dammn it ... I have to go to work in the morning!