Actually, I dig the Hammond Organ when it’s used in blues-type numbers, like the Allman Brothers. It’s Modeski, Martin & Wood’s poppy organ sound I’m not fond of.
Heh, small world! I was actually in the Triangle British Brass Band, but the concert was at NC State. Did you play under J. Perry Watson?
Nailed it.
Also, most if not all of the electronic drum sounds from the 80’s.
The Moog Theremini solves that problem: it can be set to latch onto the notes of any programmed scale, with a control for how much wiggle room there is around each precise note.
This thread was a bunch of “awww, but I like the sound of x!” until about halfway down the first page, then I began to remember those damn Yamaha DX sounds, and the other early digital FM synths. On page two, I find some like-minded individuals, but you guys are fixated on specific sounds.
It’s all of them that are awful. The pianos, the bass, the brass, the percussion, the strings, the electric piano. All of them are terrible affronts to my sensibilities. When Depeche Mode was new, the first few notes of every song they put out were enough to make me want to go on a blind rampage of murder. The middle notes may have made me want to do worse things, like wield hunger as a weapon against humanity, but I always changed the station before I found out. Years later, when people started to cover their songs with different instruments, I found out that they were often actually pretty good songs. Too bad they made the originals with that shitty DX7 and its pals.
Since this hasn’t been mentioned yet…when solo acoustic guitarists seem to go out of their way to squeak-slide their fingers on the strings. I suppose there is a good reason for it, but it sets my teeth on edge.
Speaking of synthesized piano sounds, the one that really annoyed me was the Korg M1’s piano sound, which ended up being used on a lot of house and dance music, but also in other places. You can here it in this clip. I can spot that piano sound a mile away, and it annoys the crap out of me for some reason. I used to own a Korg M1, and it was a great instrument (I regret leaving it behind in Hungary), but that sound particularly grated on me.
As for DX sounds and the like, I’ve actually grown back to enjoying them. There was a time I hated all that early digital synthesized sound, but I’ve swung back to appreciating both 70s analog and 80s (and beyond) digital sounds.
Well, it’s more like that if you want to play it like a serious instrument, you have to practice like it’s a serious instrument. It’s not a “pick up and start plucking out a tune” type of thing. Like you said, if you look up “theramin virtuoso” on Youtube, you can find many examples of it being played well (and it is quite amazing to watch.) But, yeah, it still sounds like a theramin–like a cross between an operatic voice and a violin. I think it’s a pretty damned cool sound in small doses.
Really nobody realizes that’s a harmonica? Of course that’s a much hated instrument too.
My vote for this question is always vibes. All you can really get out of the instrument, even in the hands of a master like Lionel Hampton or Milt Jackson, is a monotonous plink. It’s too limited to be a useful melodic instrument, and doesn’t groove hard enough to be a successful percussion instrument. Even on the rare occasion it’s used correctly, an electric piano/celeste would have been a better choice.
Well, I’ve always like early analog synths, myself. They sound like machines, and they’re pretty full sounding. I just can’t get around how nasty the early digital synths sounded. No smoothness to them and limited processing power, egad the decay of any instrument that sustained was just so predictable.
It was like the uncanny valley for me. The old analog synths could make noises that were kind of like normal acoustic instruments, but no one would be fooled for a second into thinking it was one. When the digital synths got close, but nowhwere near close enough, it’s hair-raisingly creepy to me. It’s almost like watching an animated corpse. When people use those sounds today as a reference to that time, I’m still revolted.
They’ve gotten much better as processing power, sampling, etc. took off – but those early years were rough.
And yes, that Korg piano sound is exactly what I’m talking about.
I’m the daughter of a piper and grew up with bagpipe music. As a result, I now find it warm and comforting and reminiscent of ‘home’.
My contribution to the list of irritating instruments is the penny whistle. In Gaelic music, where it belongs, it works. It provides the poignancy that threads through much of Gaelic music. But when people try to insert it into other musical genres, it sounds utterly artificial and out of place.
Well, what I think you have to do is not use those early digital synths as imitations of acoustic instruments–just use it as another tonal color and create new sounds. As much as I hate the Korg M1 piano sound, I think the house crowd glommed onto it because it was unique sounding and had a great attack to it that cut through the mix. I can’t stand it primarily because the M1 was my first synth, and I know what that piano sound sounds like on its own and after it frustrating me for so long to try to play piano music using that waveform, I just grew to hate that sound. Somebody who is not as intimately connected to it might not have the same aversion.
I don’t have a DX-7, but I’d love to have one in my possession for some of the glassier, digital sounds, especially as pads and for those early 80s so-obviously-synthy brass sounds that you hear in a lot of dance music from that era. From that era, I do have an Ensoniq ESQ-1, and I just love all the noise you can make with it. 
It’s a digital synth, but it does have an analog feel to a lot of the sounds.
I mean, to me, it’s all colors to use in your palette.
Haven’t seen any complaints about the digeridoo yet. My #1 MOST HATED SOUND. I fucking hate that thing, it fills me with rrRRAAIG!
I agree in theory, because it’s a synth, and I imagine that someone’s done work with it that doesn’t make me run in pathological hatred. It’s a versatile instrument, after all. But I’m not actually aware of any such work. The aforementioned Depeche Mode were actually pretty good about endeavoring to make sounds that weren’t trying to be acoustic instruments, but they still sound just awful to me.
True, and my mother couldn’t stand any fuzz guitar. My dad liked it, his tastes tended toward the thin early ones like the Maestro, and the further you got from that, the less interested he was. My interest in fuzz is generally the inverse of his. In digital synths, they don’t start to turn me on until the late 80’s, at the earliest.
But, if you’re into that sort of thing, there’s plenty of software DX7’s, even a free patch editor.
Trumpets and cornets as typically used in jazz. Nails on chalkboard.
Piccolo. Flutes in general (the flute choir should be considered a form of aggravated assault) but piccolo especially. Just no.
My dogs would agree with you. They run for the hills whenever I pull out my piccolo to practice.
This has always irritated me to no end, and I’ve sometimes wondered if I was the only person who didn’t like it.
Many years ago, I heard an NPR interview with a guitarist whose name I’ve forgotten. Why were they interviewing this particular guitarist? Because he made a point of not letting his fingers squeak-slide on the strings! That concept was deemed so unusual and exotic that NPR devoted airtime to it.
My cats feel the same way when I sing.
A side benefit of only playing flat wounds! I don’t think they do it on purpose, it takes effort not to squeak with round-wound strings. And piezo pickups don’t help—they tend to capture that sound well.
I hate string squeak…both the sound and the feel. Thankfully, the jazz sound I seek is achieved by silky smooth flat wound strings.