THE JOY OF SYNTH

Just look at this sexy little beast. It’s the Arturia MiniBrute 2, an analogue synth that I bought a couple of months ago.

It’s funny how trends tend to be cyclical. Twenty years ago I had a Korg X3 and a Roland D5 synth. You had to plug them in to the recording device just as you would a guitar, and play the parts in real time, or have a sequencer trigger them.

Then came recording ‘in the box’ - all synths and samples were actually inside your computer and you just needed a little MIDI keyboard to play them. No more cables!

Then vintage synth sounds came back in vogue - but this time companies (like Arturia) began to offer software emulations of the old analogue behemoths the likes of Jean Michel Jarre, Kraftwerk and Tubeway Army used to use in the 70’s. A whole array of venerable instruments hiding on your hard drive, each with a ton of sounds carefully crafted by pros, with none of the hassle associated with those ancient temperamental beasts.

And then suddenly analogue synths are back on the market and within the reach of the average home musician. Sure, they are much less convenient than software emulations - they have to be plugged in and recorded as audio files, the captured performance not being open to change after the fact, they way you can do with MIDI soft synths. They are also tricky to master. You have to know what you are doing. You even have to wait for them to warm up and tune them.

But it’s visceral and thrilling to be playing a real instrument and flying by the seat of your pants. The Arturia MiniBrute 2 comes with no patches - you must create all sounds yourself, and there is no memory on board to store them. But that’s what makes it fun - it’s ephemeral - each performance is unique.

There’s also something incredibly alive about analogue synths - so much so that I have on more than one occasion had to pull the mains on the beast after it went off into its own world of squawking feedback loops.

I’ve got a long way to go to master this machine (just look at all those sliders and knobs), and I can’t say I’m going to use on every song from now on, but you can be sure it will be making an appearance on future albums. I’ve already got a couple of skeletal tracks recorded with hand-crafted sounds, which is a very satisfying thing.

So - having an analogue synth is like having vinyl : not really necessary, a bit of a hassle, but oh so cool and more ‘real’ than digital.