In the 80′s the new hotness for keyboard players was to have a stack of keyboards in front of you, and on the side of you. That’s how you got all those Flock of Seagulls / Fusion sounds. Carrying 5 keyboards to a gig got old really quick, and synth modules or “rackmount” synths came into fashion. All the power of your Kurzweil K2000 in a 3 space rack.
I had my racks filled with synths, as probably most folks did. Like most users, I found probably about 5 sounds out of the hundreds in each synth that I actually liked, and there was a lot of studio real estate wasted on each of these. Not to mention the fact that I had to wire in audio and midi from each synth, and make sure it had power. A big fat hassle!
The year 2000 brought us something new though, not a Y2k bug with planes falling out of the sky- but the advent of the soft-synth, the synth plug-in.
“Laaaaaaaaahh……” and the Heavens opened up.
I was thrilled. I barely had the computer horsepower to run any at the time, but oh what a dream. Here is the short list of what synth plug-ins gave us:
• Save settings with song.
• Patch Names in the Computer
• All the processing power and memory of your computer
Let’s look at each of those benefits individually:
• Save settings with song.
WOW. This was amazing! I used to have to record the midi of the instrument into the computer, then make sure the program change was also saved into the track (making sure of course that I had the correct bank select message specified for that synth) – if I edited the patch for that track I had to save a new user program in the device with a proper name, and then make sure that I saved all changes as well as double checking the saved program change into the song.
THEN when I opened the song up to play it again I had to make sure that the synth was on and plugged in and routed through the mixer/interface properly, the midi interface was working and that the program changes and edited patches all came through properly. Of course I had to make sure that the levels hadn’t gotten bumped so my mix wasn’t thrown off.
WOW that was a lot of work, but we DID THAT with every single song. Now with a soft synth all you have to do is save your song, then re-open it and everything is exactly as you left it. SOOOOO much easier.
• Patch Names in the Computer
All those thousands of sounds, all littered through my modules across the room while I sit at my desk. It was a big fat pain to remember patch numbers and or to walk across the room while I was in the heat of melodic inspiration. Then came what should have been wonderful: the Editor/Librarian. I had Galaxy Plus editors and then I had Unisyn, and then I had SoundDiver. They all had their moments of OH YES! IT’S WORKING!! But usually had their moments of “WHY THE F#$K IS’NT THIS SYNTH SUPPORTED?!?!”
What the Editor/Librarians were supposed to do was to call up the names of all the patches in your synth, and place them into your sequencer on your computer so you could simply call them up by name at your desk. You could also edit your patches, and so forth and in theory they were very cool. In practice they were a major distraction and totally sucked.
What is beautiful about the soft-synth plug-in is that every patch name & every single thing about the patch is sitting right there in front of you on the screen. Fantastic editors are graphically displayed and you don’t have to be confined to tiny green display and 4 buttons to edit your sounds. Now you have the whole visual aspect of the computer. You folks who just came to the synth party have a lot to be thankful for!
• All the processing power and memory of your computer
This is really the icing on the cake, but becomes the nuts and bolts of the whole matter. Soft synths are WAY more powerful than our hardware synthesizers ever were before. You can get inexpensive soft synth plugins these days that are every bit as good as some of the hardware we used to sell for hundreds of dollars.
In particular, I remember there being a big “ooooohhhh” regarding the piano sound of the Alesis QS8. It featured a whopping 8 mb of piano sample data, and it was a full 6 seconds before the samples looped. (starts repeating the sound rather than just playing a straight recording) This was a major big deal back then, as a lot of piano samples were maybe 3mb or less. That keyboard went for about $2000 and the rack version was about $750.
Well nowadays you can pick up “Ivory,” a soft synth piano for only $320. It features over 30 GIGABYTES of piano samples. That is actually 3840 times more data than the QS8. Dang. Hard to comprehend something that is 3000 times bigger than anything. Your ear sure can hear the difference though! Most folks can hardly tell the difference between that and a “real” piano. If you didn’t have the huge hard drive on your computer and tons of processing horsepower, you could never do all that!
So anyhow, I hope you enjoyed my walk down synth memory lane. I’m sure glad we have these modern tools to work with!