Disclaimer: super-subjective topic here … no facts or evidence are involved…
Curious what you all think … I’ve been feeling like we’ve just lived through a kind of Second or Third Golden Age of synthbuilding.
[First Age being when many important categories of gear (analog, FM, sampling, wavetable) became available as commercial products, back in the ‘70s and ‘80s; then a possible Second Age after that, when romplers/software synths/grooveboxes were pushed forward….]
… bringing us to the era we just lived through (another Golden Age?) where all the previous categories of electronic music gear became available at once in some usable new form—not always affordable, exactly, but in many cases financially reachable … all sorts of good (or good-enough) analog synths, sampling synths, FM and wavetable synths, grooveboxes and drum machines …
Someone who just arrived in electronic music in the 2020s might not see the current range of available instruments as a big deal, but looking back I can remember before, say, 2012 (my personal dividing line, playing a Minibrute in a store, real analog with lots of faders), that one couldn’t always obtain every category of synth—the old gear was aging out and becoming expensive on ebay, and the new gear didn’t exist yet.
Not sure if anyone else will relate—I just feel very grateful to have access to good instruments and be able to try on the different flavors of electronic musicmaking … and I hope this menu of different synth colors isn’t drifting away again as synth economics become more difficult for both buyers and companies. (Of course there’s always laptop musicmaking without hardware, people will make music if they want to …)
I think that’s pretty much spot on. We have such a vast landscape of gear available to order (or pre-order), it’s just crazy and the used gear market is still massive.
I agree with your sentiment that we currently live in “a golden age of synth”, in the sense that there’s never been a greater - or for that matter wider / more diverse - selection of hardware electronic instruments than now. Great times for sure!
Born in the Seventies and growing up in the Eighties, I guess I see the “previous golden ages” differently from you. The Seventies and Eighties were a time of much exciting technological developments within the music industry, continually shifting focus and trends. However, I usually refer to the rompler era of the late 80s and onward as “the Dark Ages of Synth”, for several reasons: Knobs went away, interfaces shrunk while the number of functions increased, and the focus shifted to replicating exisiting instruments rather exploring new sounds. The race to produce new exciting sounds became a race to offer the most pristine sound quality, the most voices, the largest memory etc. Depressing times for a synth enthusiast - except that knobby and more experimental synths from yesteryear were cheap and readily available
Yeah, the system brought that one up when I was starting the thread. I guess that thread is sort of the “glass half empty” version of my take. I’m more appreciating what we’ve got, vs. focusing on how it might be fading. But yeah, it might be fading.
That’s interesting. I started out with synths in the late ‘80s, and what I had was the cheapest thing, which was used and budget knobless digital synths with two line displays. There wasn’t really any other affordable choice that I was aware of; probably the fanciest synth anyone I knew had was a Prophet 600 or a Matrix 6—knobless analog synths. Then a little later I was mostly dealing with software synths, and knobless DCO polys I didn’t fully know how to patch.
I didn’t really appreciate the wonder of knobby/slidey analog synths until bumping into the original Minibrute in a store. (That came out in 2012, per Wikipedia.) Working with a lot of sliders just felt … better.
Maybe where I see it differently from you is that I like having romplers for certain timbres that don’t synthesize easily. Sometimes I want to replicate existing instruments (rompler), while other times I want a new or synthy timbre. That’s just taste tho.
I you would have asked about markets I’d say that the question itself is a top signal since sentiment usually kicks in after the fact. There are hurdles with global shipping and more so i might be tough for a while but I still think you’re right. It’s definitely the best time so far considering gear, both price and availability. I think that is valuable since being denied access doesn’t help, there are other problems to agonize over if we need a muse.
With the price increase, we might go back to that era. I’m wondering how many small companies are living on life support right now. We might see a shift in the Matrix. Renowned stores are closing, big companies get bought for cheaper labor (and probably less quality components), more companies are launching unfinished products, etc.
It’s a truism among investors that the people who’s actions decide the direction of stocks, bonds and crypto act before the general population catch onto the narrative. Therefore exclamations on social media and headlines become warning signals that too many people are into the trade and it’s best to get out. I meant the analogy to mean that since you’re bringing it up, we’re at peak synth.
Yes, I wonder about that too. For a while, there was this sweet spot where a lot of people would pay what was needed for reasonably solid quality, reintroducing the more niche forms of synthesis, and even some innovation. If margins shrink and small companies go away, I agree with you that it could all go backward.
Looking back at all the pioneer synth companies is a little like looking back at the Age of the Dinosaurs—really impressive organisms can still die. Even Korg and Roland had their corporate hard times, although they survived. But AFAIK, only Yamaha and Studio Electronics have persisted without visible financial trouble across the different eras.
I’m still a real newbie with a lot of all this having just gotten into synths from about 2018.
I’m super excited that even as all these new and pretty affordable synths are being developed I’ve also been playing a huge game of catchup learning about the older stuff that’s always been there playing a role in all the music around me.
While it does seem like things may soon be going into a lull again as the economy craps out, it really has felt like such a lucky time to get into this.
It’s really hard for me to separate the individual topic from the spread of hypercapitalism / hyperconsumerism in which the availability of more toys has coincided with the extraordinarily rapid growth of technology and also the increase in cost of living and rapid inflation.
I agree that there has been an incredible focus on finding what people will pay for and separating them from their money. That has resulted in more kinds of toys available to more kinds of people and more options for putting yourself in debt to get your hands on them.
Perhaps that does herald a golden age but I’m not positive that what it reflects is a good thing in the traditional sense of “golden age”, more like the first hedonism of synth production has just come to a close and next? Who knows. Hopefully that leads us somewhere positive.
From my perspective, as a 36 y/o having been in the box since around 2010 and just starting my hardware journey two years ago, I must say that I feel like synths are getting worse for dawless setups. It seems like multitimbrality was an obvious feature back when, but today it’s marketed as some kind of massive feature (Hydrasynth Deluxe for example) and even when you find a decent, compact multi-timbral unit with decent effects and different sound engines, then you can’t count on individual outs.
Synths definitely are a part of the economy but are they really a cause of people ending up in debt spirals? It’s of course possible to get one on credit but most people are more burdened by house and car payments. I’m assuing that you’re taking a hobbyist perspective, not a professional studio owner or collector. In a sense, synths are inherently hedonistic as they are not productive for other people (unless you release a heavenly track that lifts the spirits of all mankind but that’s kind of rare).
@ex True but that new normal includes far more than it forgot, like Elektron’s sequencer/engine combo. I agree that it’s silly though. I got a regular hydrasymth for the poly aftertouch since that also is one of those forgotten features you have to dig for.
Sure, I don’t know anyone here’s personal path getting there and I’m not belitteling anyone. It just seems like synths are not required for survival like a place to stay so it seems fair to make a distinction, right? The distinction is important since it can seem like synths are more important than survival at times. They are not and there is no end to the benefits of reevaluating that.
Yeah I think it’s been a golden age for hobby/consumer synths… but yeah there is still some of the top of the line digital stuff from the 2000s that doesn’t really have proper replacements. The more underground stuff existed too so stuff like wiard 300 series, frac rack, early euro rack. Alesis andromeda got you cover for some analog poly goodness. But yeah the market was different and the products reflected that. Way less focus on next years model. Still amazing what some smaller companies are putting together today though.
I got into eurorack some years ago and it seemed like a vibrant scene with endless new small or very small companies. I was expecting some of them to go into other modes like desktop synths, pedals or whatever is trendy but I haven’t seen an explosion at all. Maybe much of culture shutting down in 2020 has something to do with it but other than youtuber collabs and the odd DAW integration, I don’t see it. Expert sleepers are crossing borders and there are others like Pittsburg modular but I have never been impressed by their stuff.
Is the modular scene an isolated dud or are we waiting for something to happen? I can’t think of a more creative space for device design.
