Hollow Earth

In the extensive research I did about Synthesisers over the last two years, as well as in other places, I checked out a lot of Synths on YouTube. It's actually surprisingly instructive! The alternative is, to my mind pretty woeful. The cult of Synths, as maintained by places like this site (love it though I do) is based upon what kind of technical pyrotechnics a synth is capable of. That's to say how many VCO/DCO chips it has, how extensive its Polyphony is (how many notes you can play at the same time), how elaborate its MIDI interface is, how deeply it can be programmed etc etc ad infinitum/tedium. These people talk about Synths like they are PCs (which has a faster graphics card or Pentium chip) or even Cars (Torque and Horsepower). In terms of musicality this is utterly infuriating and hopelessly wrongheaded, because of course the only criteria is how nice they sound. An antagonist would reply bolshily "Oh you're just not programming Synth X properly" but I fundamentally disagree- every Synth (or instrument for that matter) has a character and there is no getting away from that.....

The most utterly lovely sounding synths I came across were made by a guy called Tom Oberheim. You can Google him if you want to find out more, but not only were the Oberheim Company Synths fantastically musical and gorgeous-sounding, the ones he made for Marion Systems were beautiful-sounding too. I'm not a fan of the Moog (eugh) or even of the Roland Synths (a nasty kind of sound IMHO) and that's total heresy but these Oberheims are beautiful. The most interesting thing, and this runs totally counter to the ethos of Vintage Synth is that the most expensive ones (with all the "features" natch) are not the prettiest-sounding. Oberheim himself must surely be an artiste, because counter to the logic of business, he's said as much himself.