Have digital synths ever sounded good?!

[GuitarGeek]

A keyboard player buddy recently got (what I think is) the latest Nord (it's an 88 key). The piano sounds alone blew me away! I think the biggest stumbling block between real acoustic pianos and digital models of them has been the lack of sympathetic vibrations the strings produce on an acoustic. This Nord added that to the equation. Some of the models (Steinways, Yamahas, Bosendorfers, etc.) were breath-taking!

Yeah, it's kinda like the thing with sampled drums, where you didn't get the sound of all the other drums vibrating in sympathy. Eventually, the people making the samples figured out that you had to set up a full drumkit, and put up mics and let the snares rattling bleed into the bass drum mic or whatever, when doing samples.

The really cool thing about the Nord digital piano is, at least as I can understand from their website, it can also take all the samples from their library. So your digital piano can not only do the Steinway thing, but also the Clavinet thing, the Fender Rhodes thing, the Wurlitzer thing, the Mellotron thing, etc, ALL in one keyboard. That's kinda cool I think. It's expensive, but it's gotta be cheaper than owning an actual Steinway (and certainly easier than traveling with all of those keyboards).

[klothos]

I remember when Roland released LA synthesis in the late 80s, every other tv theme song was reworked with the breathy synth sound. That's what I would call a massive impact of technology.

The D-50 had a factory patch called "Digital Native Dance" and I can't tell you just how many songs - and TV commercials! -- I have heard this patch on, but there are tons including one by Michael Jackson...Here is another one I remember (heavily processed through a gated flange of some sort -- fast forward to 1:52)

[trurl]

Don't forget the scores for the first few season of Star Trek: TNG... D-50 patch 1, bank 1, right out of the factory, Fantasia! It was all over that show. That was the sound I heard when I first demoed a D-50 that made me say yes, I will sell my family to get one of these. That was certainly the first digital synth that made a deep impression on me; I was all analog all the time up until then, not counting my Mirage.

[klothos]

Quite honestly Kurzweil kicked everyone's ass back then. Unfortunately, they never really progressed further than the K2600 series other than pianos. Now Yamaha on the other hand with the Motif series...

I actually agree with you about Kurzweil but they were mostly overpriced out of most working stiffs price-ranges at the time......Ensoniq also offered some excellent boards, including the TS-12 ( I still have mine!!) and the EPS-16 Sampler/WS

Don't forget the scores for the first few season of Star Trek: TNG... D-50 patch 1, bank 1, right out of the factory, Fantasia! It was all over that show. That was the sound I heard when I first demoed a D-50 that made me say yes, I will sell my family to get one of these. That was certainly the first digital synth that made a deep impression on me; I was all analog all the time up until then, not counting my Mirage.

Oh, yes, for sure: "Fantasia", "Digital Native Dance", "Glass Voices", "Atmosphere", and "Soundtrack" (the last two were even incorporated in some facsimile on every GM Sound Module since then) along with the Korg M-1s "Universe", "Lore", and "Organ 2" (probably the most overused patch EVER by every techno house boy of the mid 90s) have all got to be the most recognizable patches in the history of synths

[GuitarGeek]

Talking about overused keyboard sounds, one that sticks out in my mind is the Fairlight "orchestra hit", which was a sample of an entire orchestra playing a big block chord. Seemed like that sound was on every record for circa 1984-1986.

And when I think TV shows with bad keyboard sounds, I always think of Doogie Houser MD. The theme sounds like something like a ditty the composer must have played for the show's producer, as if to say "Well, that's the basic idea, we could get a band, and..." and the producer said "No, let's just use what you juts played as the theme, don't do a new arrangement, don't hire a band or anything, in fact, do the entire score of the show with just that". So the show has these sort of rambling quasi-improvised cues, all of which are played with one of those tacky digital "Rhodes" keyboard sounds. I assume it's the DX-7, but I guess it could be almost any of them.

BTW, I would have thought the analog filter sweep would be the most recognizable patch, particularly when it's done on a bass note.

[GuitarGeek]

Oh, and wasn't there a point where like every new age record had a faux shakuhachi patch used somewhere. I remember the joke in Keyboard magazine where they said the stock movie soundtrack cue at the time was to have a couple bars of shakuhachi whenever there was a shot of a sunrise in a picture.

[Frankie]

(Sigh) OK, but can anyone cite specific examples on record where a digital synth sounds good?! If I asked for examples of great analog synth tracks, there'd be an outpouring of love for 70's era Tangerine Dream, Klaus Schulze, ELP, etc. But somehow no one seems to be able to do the same for, say, the DX-7 or the D-50.

I vaguely recall that there were a couple of tunes on Van Halens OU812 album with some pretty cool rhythmic bits on them.

[PeterG]

A to OP Q: yes.
Q: what's with the hating of digi-synths?

[klothos]

BTW, I would have thought the analog filter sweep would be the most recognizable patch, particularly when it's done on a bass note.

Yeah, true Certainly if someone was watching late 70s B-Movies or Saturday Morning TV shows like "Land Of The Lost" ... I should have been more specific and said that those Roland and Korg patches were the most popular (and often over-used) factory presets in digital synth history

[rcarlberg]

Q: what's with the hating of digi-synths?

To be fair, the factory patches were WAY overused at the time.

[progmatist]

To be fair, the factory patches were WAY overused at the time.

I remember reading a quote from a Yamaha repair technician who said the vast majority of the DX7s he worked on had only factory patches. Nothing modified, no third party patches. That's mainly because the DX7 was difficult to program.

[rcarlberg]

I remember reading a quote from a Yamaha repair technician who said the vast majority of the DX7s he worked on had only factory patches. Nothing modified, no third party patches. That's mainly because the DX7 was difficult to program.

And the factory patches sounded pretty good.

[No Pride]

Every time I watch Seinfeld I think of the DX7.

I used to like the "jazz guitar" patch on it too. The electric piano sounds, not so much.

[klothos]

I remember reading a quote from a Yamaha repair technician who said the vast majority of the DX7s he worked on had only factory patches. Nothing modified, no third party patches. That's mainly because the DX7 was difficult to program.

Thats both a "Yes" and "No"....Digi Synths certainly had more parameters to work with, especially depended on what synthesis was used. i personally don't care for the Algorithimic approach of FM synths ( and i still dont when programming my Native Instruments FM-7 {DX7 Clone softsynth})

LA Synthesis was also just as difficult but sometimes original patches came out by accident just by moving the PCM Timbre samples around....

but 1980s/1990s Roland did offer add-on Patch Editor hardware (the PG Series - example: the PG-1000 for D-50 users) for people that were from the knob/slider era of programming that wanted deeper patch editing capabilities without going blind looking at the menu screen...Nowadays, there is all kinds of software available for classic and contemporary boards, particularly with USB capability

[GuitarGeek]

I remember reading a quote from a Yamaha repair technician who said the vast majority of the DX7s he worked on had only factory patches. Nothing modified, no third party patches. That's mainly because the DX7 was difficult to program.

There's a similar comment on the I Dream Of Wires documentary, where someone says that if you buy a second hand DX-7 off E-bay today, it's almost guaranteed to have all the factory presets present.

Of course, one of the things the DX-7 did get right, was that cartridge interface, so if you did want to make your own sounds, you could save them to the cartridge. And there was also a wave of third party cartridges (some of them, actually, programmed by the same guys who programmed the DX-7's factory presets) that you could buy that had other sounds on it.

But I think once again, as is also mentioned in I Dream Of Wires, a lot of musicians and producers didn't have the imagination to do anything "new". Most of the time they wanted the synth sounds they heard on some hit single or whatever. So if some idiot in LA used that damnable "Rhodes" sound on a record that went to number one in 1984, every other idiot afterwards wanted that sound on his/her record.

[GuitarGeek]

but 1980s/1990s Roland did offer add-on Patch Editor hardware (the PG Series - example: the PG-1000 for D-50 users) for people that were from the knob/slider era of programming that wanted deeper patch editing capabilities without going blind looking at the menu screen...Nowadays, there is all kinds of software available for classic and contemporary boards, particularly with USB capability

Yeah, I mentioned the Patch Editor hardware in an earlier post, and specifically that the DX-7's patch editor was larger the DX-7 itself.

[GuitarGeek]

Yeah, true Certainly if someone was watching late 70s B-Movies or Saturday Morning TV shows like "Land Of The Lost"

Or listened to classic rock radio at any time, because songs like Tom Sawyer are loaded with filter sweeps.

[GuitarGeek]

I vaguely recall that there were a couple of tunes on Van Halens OU812 album with some pretty cool rhythmic bits on them.

I don't know about rhythmic bits, but I thought the keyboards on that recorded sound pretty bad. The faux organ sound on Feels So Good was a bit on the tacky side (but then, maybe Eddie was going for more of a Farfisa sound than a Hammond), and there's that annoying keyboard set up he used on When It's Love or whatever the actual title of that song was. I seem to recall he said he played a piano MIDIed up to like two or three synths, but the piano is buried under the synths, which I don't think sound very good.

I know there's one or two other keyboard songs on that record, but I don't remember what they sound like (probably been about 20 years since I heard OU812)

[GuitarGeek]

Incidentally, the "they didn't change the factory presets" thing predates digital synths. I remember reading years ago that when the first Prophet-5's started coming to Sequential Circuits for maintenance, they noticed that the majority of them presets hadn't been changed. And I imagine it was the same thing with the Oberheim, Korg, etc programmable analog synths, too. I remember Eddie Van Halen, for one, saying he didn't have time to "look for sounds", he just used whatever patches were already programmed into the instrument. I believe the Jump patch, for instance, was a stock factory patch on the OB-Xa.

[trurl]

That wasn't digital though. Eddie was OB-Xa, all the way. There was some kind of digital something happening on Love Walks In though.

I don't know about rhythmic bits, but I thought the keyboards on that recorded sound pretty bad. The faux organ sound on Feels So Good was a bit on the tacky side (but then, maybe Eddie was going for more of a Farfisa sound than a Hammond), and there's that annoying keyboard set up he used on When It's Love or whatever the actual title of that song was. I seem to recall he said he played a piano MIDIed up to like two or three synths, but the piano is buried under the synths, which I don't think sound very good.

I know there's one or two other keyboard songs on that record, but I don't remember what they sound like (probably been about 20 years since I heard OU812)

[klothos]

I believe the Jump patch, for instance, was a stock factory patch on the OB-Xa.

That wasn't digital though. Eddie was OB-Xa, all the way.

Oberheim OB-X was an analog sound source....Same with Roland JX3P, JX8P, Super Jupiter: analog sound sources..............there were hybrid analog/digital boards in the mid-80s, namely Ensoniq ESQ and SQ series.........Peavey DPM-3 and 4 series was also a hybrid; although primarily digital, it did have a single oscillator sound generator (by the way, I was a BIG fan of this synth's capabilities back when it came out; the actionplayed like shit tho) ........Roland D-Series had analog filtering, which isnt the same thing: a user can call up a PCM sample bite of a basic sine, saw, or square wav and manipulate it through analog filtering, but it did not generate analog

[Zeuhlmate]

Juno 106 was also a hybrid.

[klothos]

Juno 106 was also a hybrid.

Damn! Forgot about that one!!! I think that was the first hybrid.

[progmatist]

Thats both a "Yes" and "No"....Digi Synths certainly had more parameters to work with, especially depended on what synthesis was used. i personally don't care for the Algorithimic approach of FM synths ( and i still dont when programming my Native Instruments FM-7 {DX7 Clone softsynth})

What made the DX7 difficult to program was people were trying to recreate real instruments. That's a rapid departure from the early days of the Moog when guys would throw away the manuals, which were a similar road map. It was far more difficult to mimic sounds with oscillators than it was with actual samples, like the Ensoniq ESQ-1. I myself tried to create a guitar patch on my DX27 in the summer of 87 while out at sea. I set up a storage oscilloscope, played my 73 Strat through it, then tried to duplicate the waveform from the keyboard. I spent a couple of days of spare time on the project. In the end, the waveform looked pretty close, but it didn't quite sound like a Strat. It did however create a great bass sound when I transposed it down an octave.

[klothos]

What made the DX7 difficult to program was people were trying to recreate real instruments.

I think this is an indirect point to this thread:

One of the biggest differences between the 70s and 80s+ was that guys like Emerson were throwing away the factory Patch cards that told them how to patch "sax" and "violin": they didnt want a synthesizer to emulate sax or string but, instead, embraced the synthy sounds that didnt sound like any instrument and took pride in creating these sound-like-nothing-ever-heard-before sounds.

On the other hand, many keyboard players in the 80s-til-now were just oppositte: as technology improved, they were trying to synthetically reconstruct real instruments

Interesting................