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And now, instead of just playing samples as above, we’re already deep in real synthesizer territory. It must allow you to program new sounds intuitively (2). However, this is hardly intuitive in any way – or have you ever tried to draw the sound of a church bell hit by a rubber mallet on a screen? Or any sound, for that matter? We need something different. A solution like that existed even for the Commodore 64 home computer. Starting in the 80s, most of the samplers of that era allowed you to use a CRT and a lightpen and draw any possible waveform on it – and then play back these sounds.
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The first idea would be: It needs to be able to generate every possible sound – both imitating existing instruments or sound effects, and creating new ones (1). So why is this the case?įirst, we might have a look at what this perfect synthesizer must be like – which requirements it needs to fulfil. Which could be used to replace all the synthesizers I own or even all the synthesizers which exist. Still, to this day, I have not encountered a synthesizer that would do it all. They come quite literally in all sizes, with different synthesis approaches, different feature sets and, of course, different price tags. If we look both at today’s landscape of synthesizer products and the years past, there’s an almost unmanageable variety of synths. If you’re not familiar with those concepts, look for some literature recommendations at the end of this text.
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Note: this text requires some basic knowledge of synthesizer technology – ADSR, oscillator, LFO etc. Which leads to my main question: Why is there so many of them? Why isn’t there, with today’s advanced technology, a perfect synthesizer? Is that even possible? And while today large music instrument retailers list around 200 products in their synth category, some experts believe that for specific applications, you still need one of those countless synths from days gone by. They’ve also come a long way from the Elisha Gray invention of 1876 to today’s superpowered synth workstations like Korg’s latest Kronos flagship.Įspecially since Moog’s Minimoog of 1970 gave us the first really useable synth, the endless stream of new synth releases has been summing up to the upper hundreds, if not thousands. Synthesizers – or more specifically, music synthesizers (and that’s the only synths we’ll be discussing here) – have been around for a long time.