Discuss.
Panos, the Wonder Child, should figure prominently in this.
Live from The Necropolis seems incongruous.
But then again, creating music with computers didn’t necessarily seem like it made much sense until they started actually doing it.
Stepping into foreign thread territory (synthies are things this guitarist can’t grok) to make sure there is an link to this documentary:
I Dream of Wires: I Dream of Wires (2014) - IMDb
I think I saw it on Amazon Prime. A history of synthesizers. Coulda sworn I started one of my WordMan Geek-Reviews a book/doc on music, but it must’ve been a letter to a friend.
Any SynthHead would see this as essential. Discusses the different schools of thought on synthetic tone generation - should it conform to the Western Scale or push boundaries? All the way through Moog ascendence, the banality of digital synths in the 80’s and the reemergence of modular synth rigs. Very cool.
Thanks! I missed this! I know what I’m watching when I get home from work tonight!
::dusts hands together::
My work here is done.
Hehee, I’m not sure how serious Eddie was when he started the thread given the clip he provided, but it would be great if we got a long synth thread out of it. Thanks WordMan, I gotta watch that too.
XD!!!
Yeah, I’m hoping there’s more discussion.
Not sure what Mr. Emerson (r.i.p.) would’ve thought of Lords of Synth. I knew about Wendy Carlos, but only now found out that the two other clowns were also send-ups of actual “synth-giants” (for lack of a less Olympian way of putting it)
Curious if anyone here was a keyboardist and used, say, an ARP 3000 or Jupiter-8 Roland, or one of those mini-moogs.
Or if anyone’s used a mellotron, which isn’t a synth, but I associate it more with synths than just straight-up keyboards.
Too much of the early/mid-80’s, btw, makes me think of gross, over-produced, synth-driven, dung-turd tunes.
(did someone just say Depeche Mode? or was that me?)
The announcers’s names were also references to Tangerine Dream (referring to the late Edgar Froese, and the album titles Tangram, Zeit, and Alpha Centauri).
Here’s the latest addition to my Moog arsenal: Mother-32.
Huh! You three-tiered maniac!
How in Emmylou Harris’s good graces do you cart that thing around? I googled a bit and saw a Eurorack case, but couldn’t figure out that puppy would fit in there.
Also - you weren’t ever a Depeche Mode fan, were you?
I’m vacillating over whether I should screen every poster about that.
Also, buddy in “Lords of Synth” didn’t look AT ALL like Gerald Ford, I’m just now remembering.
Hehehe, I knew where the others’ names came from, but I wasn’t aware of the TD references in the announcer’s names. Thanks, Biffy, that’s the kind of joke that’s still funny after it’s explained to you. 
Well, I’ve fooled with someone else’s mini-moog, does that count? Other than that, the most prestigious hardware synth I’ve played on regularly is the hallowed Casio SK-1. However, I’m planning on buying my first analog synth soon, I just need to figure out what one. If anyone has any recommendations for a new sub-$1000 analog synth, I’m listening.
-scabpicker,
Who hated Depeche Mode with the fury of a 1000 suns when they were contemporary. Since then, covers of them have made him realize that they’re pretty good songs made horrible by the extremely nasty synth sounds. So, I hate the original recordings with the fury of something like 995 suns now.
In that spirit, I found the email I sent to the friend who turned me on to I Dream of Wires - here it is:
[QUOTE=me in an email]
Really enjoyed it from an “immersion in the history and more current world of synthesizers” standpoint. So much great information – to be clear, I had NO clue that Buchla even existed, let alone an East Coast/West Coast approach, which undercut very different approaches to Electronic Music. All of that was cool. It made total sense why Moog’s approach, both Western scale applications of synthesis and the modular approach, became the dominant approach. Freakin’ hippies in SF 
I have quibbles as a movie fan and as a Synth Outsider, but all within the context of really liking it.
-
Didn’t like the narrator’s voice. Flat and kind of dispassionate. This is a love letter to geeks. I have no problem with a bit of geeky passion in the narration. -
Modular synths and how to build sounds:
o The description of Moog’s intro of the “ladder stepped transistor filter” was presented as a huge deal. I get why: near as I can tell, it equipped the synths with a Tone control – yes, a sophisticated, great sounding one, but at its most basic, a Tone control. I wish they had just said that.
o I wish they had done a better job with modularity. Build a sound, and do it in a plainspoken way. “You start with a module that generates the sound, then you add a module to shape its basic tone profile, then you add a module or two which are effects on top of that, etc.” As a guitar player, it is the equivalent of plugging in a guitar, getting a clean tone out of the amp, then crunching it up using the amp’s settings, then adding a box or two as spice on top of that – voila, there’s Tone X. To make Tone Y, see how easy it is to change this setting or swap out this box? They call the documentary “I Dream of Wires” but they never freakin’ showed how to actually connect the wires and make the sound. Argh.
The whole “dark time of the all-in-ones” was really funny to see. So it goes in all instrument groups. What, your guitar doesn’t weigh 12 pounds, have a super-skinny neck and a locking trem?! What’s wrong with you, man?! I had no idea Euro-Rack even existed, but immediately grasped the power of what it represented. I could totally seeing you getting one of those.
Thanks for the recommendation.
[/QUOTE]
Discuss!
Been trying, several times now, to get “I Dream of Wires” to load, but still just get a spinning “loading circle” (for lack of whatever else to call that thing). 
That makes a lot of sense as far as it goes, but it doesn’t really hit the mark.
To get my biases up front, my initial training in synthesis was with a Buchla set-up in college. There were no keyboards. There were sets of pressure pads that could be tuned to a scale and used as a crude keyboard to control the pitch of a VCO–*but there was nothing tying them into being pitch controllers. *They could be used as control voltages for any function. Ditto for the sequencers. When you’re supplied with a whole lot of inputs, a whole lot of outputs, and a whole lot of banana plugs, you have a whole lot of scope for experimentation.
And that’s the real power of a modular system. You’re not locked into a simple signal path of sound source -> filters and modulators -> envelope generator -> output. You’re dealing with control voltages that can be dialed in and routed anywhere you want. From a guitarist’s point of view, it’s like if you plug in one way, your flanger is a flanger, but if you plug in another way, your flanger takes control of your whammy bar. Or if you plug in a third way, it starts picking your high E string over and over. And what makes that useful is that it’s still flanging at a cycle that matches the tempo at which it’s picking your string.
Meanwhile, elements that you might think of as “sound sculpting” modules analogous the the stomp boxes in your guitar chain can themselves become sound sources, as when you have a resonant filter turned up to the feedback point, or LFO modulation brought up to where its own pitch overwhelms the sound of the signal it’s modulating.
Nor is this flexibility limited to true modular systems. Even standalone keyboard synths like the Minimoog, where the signal path is relatively hardwired, still give you a wide range of choices for which variable is going to be controlled by what other variable. Each modulation bus, for example, gives half a dozen choices each for what’s going to be modulated, what’s going to do the modulating, and what’s going to control the modulation.
Did Depeche Mode get their start this way?
First of all: cool - thanks! I only get a bit of that, but it helps.
Second: so, you see my point about how cool it would be to walk through the build of a tone. ? And then, take that set up, and with one or two big unplugs/replugs, show how the sound goes in a completely diff direction. ?
Third: Depeche Mode - I can ask. My friend worked with Vince Clark. He said Vince did everything manually, dialing up synth tones by setting pitches and modulation using programming, as I recall. But that was a story over a beer.