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Modern vs vintage synth
I've read that iWAVESTATION is a "vintage" synth but to my ears, it sounds "modern". Can anyone tell me what is a modern synth and which app sounds the most "modern" actually?
Comments
Well it is vintage in that it is 26 years old, and that is a lot in the synth world. In terms of sounds, it is pretty unique in what it does, and in my book that alao pushes it towards the vintage era, but in a good way. As synths and workstations have developed, they have become so polished and all-encompassing that they all became pretty interchangable. The earlier synths had more character and their own quirks and feel which made them more individual.
Modern vs Vintage mostly refers to when they were actually made or if they're softies, if they're intentionally modelling old hardware or not. Wavestation is 1990 vintage. How you use it is a different story.
Modern synths are associated with modern genres. Most notable would be Native Instruments Massive which pretty much defined Dubstep.
Vintage to me equates to analogue, modern to digital. So I'd class the iwavestation as a modern synth. I'm old though, so anything later than 1978 is modern to me.
Well if we go by one definition, then it's something of quality made in the past, or the best of its kind. I can appreciate the first part as it's not always defined strictly in years, even though 'quality' is subjective. The best of its kind, is deceiving in some ways, especially in the synth world. Not only is this subjective, it's also untrue of many synths classed as Vintage by many.
I would like to add other elements that may be part of the equation. Take for example uniqueness. Many synths classed as Vintage are often those that have unique feature sets or have been used in unique ways that set them apart from their peers. Synths that have featured heavily in the history of sound design. Synths that have become part of the 'Vintage music making history' in a sense.
The Wavestation can claim to have been unique in many ways at its initial price point and time of production. It has a rich history. A history of not only use, but of design and who designed it. So, while it was of decent 'quality' in many aspects of the term, it probably will never be 'the best of its kind' as compromises were made to price it. This however, does not detract from the fact it's a synth from the past that had and still has something to offer.
Sound wise is the thing though. Some of what a Wavestation does is quite unique when compared to synths as a whole (yes there are many with similarities though). As a whole though the Wavestation certainly has a specific feature set. The problem is that the sounds that it has been used for are certainly easy to recognise and as such, if you use it in a similar fashion it may appear 'old hat' instead of 'Vintage'. Let's see if someone here comes up with something that takes that 'Vintage' whole and makes it modern musically (whatever that may entail)
vintage and analog and dated, could be interchangeable based on tastes. for example, hendrix's tone, or harrison, or clapton, etc. is old, old, old, but to my ears still fresh as anything. love it. cc deville (poison), steve vai, hair metal bands...much newer but, even though i enjoyed it at the time, really dated and makes me cringe now. same goes for analog synths. new fresh music that i like use these vintage synths and sound great to me. but most of these dx7, wave station, m1, yamaha d50, etc really don't float my boat.
likewise, even though i am primarily a keyboardist, i never cared for the popular synth sounds of the late 80's and 90's. i disliked depeche mode and duran duran etc and jumped from billy joel and stuff like that right into hair metal, and by the time i was playing in bands (93ish) i was onto the rhodes, hammond, wurly kick and didn't touch synths until much later.
but to each their own, now with spotify i can follow wormholes into super specific things that sound good to me, and avoid any sound that is not perfect to me.
to me the oddesei is way way fresher than the m1 but i spent years turning away from those 90 synth sounds in disgust so maybe i am just conditioned
It is subjective.
good stuff. I feel like it's unintended 'get to know me' day on the forum. I enjoyed reading your trajectory. In the 80s, I was loving Depeche Mode while hating hair metal.
I reckon the difference between hair metal sounds sounding dated vs hendrix/harrison still sounding fresh is mostly from the quality of the music associated with those sounds. Or more specifically, the songs. Subjective, of course but I appreciate that in your comparison you called out really really technically gifted guitar players of the hair metal era. Really kind of makes the point. It's fun to imagine what CC Deville would have done if he'd been playing with the Jesus and Mary Chain or something.
I think 'vintage' is either a vapid sales bullet point or an indication that, by default anyway, the item is evocative of an era. Certainly many of the presets in iM1 and iWavestation are evocative of their respective eras. Specific to synths, think this sort of thing will forever be easier to notice on non-subtractive based synths, particularly those with presets.
Heh.. I was just enjoying Prodigy's "Music for the Jilted Generation", which I consider modern electronic music. Then I realised half this forum probably wasn't even born yet when it came out. I'm getting old...
If we want to get pedantic (yes, let's) the literal definition of "vintage" relates to the year of a wine's creation, particularly wine of noteworthy quality. The word is generalized from there, so if someone is going to the trouble of programming a replica of the Wavestation 26 years later and others are finding a reason to pay money for it then I would say that its "vintage" (i.e., noteworthiness) would be hard to dispute.
I'm pretty sure most regulars here were well past their youth by the time that album came out.
I was at college then, but all about guitars at that age...
Only problem for the most part here, we are 'vintage', yes our views are valid, having lived through the evolution of electronic music, but it would be very interesting to hear what our more youthful members think about vintage and modern. How they define them, maybe it all seems fresh, but modern?
Valid point as the definition of words often changes with time.
What constitutes modern synths? What are the ones being made today that characterize the 20teen years of the 21st century? Is a synth of today a fully analogue one (you might think so)? A solely DSP-based one? A completely FPGA based one? A cpu/gpu based one? Is it one that adopts the model of a subtractive synth? An additive or wavetable or sample-playing synth? Physical modeling (actually, not much of that around these days)?
I think the break point for the purposes of thinking about this sort of thing shouldn't be the age of the unit, nor the generation that grew up with it. I actually think it should be when the limitations were in place and when they were lifted. Initially, integrated circuits were quite unreliable and also expensive to manufacture given the feeble advantage of integration that they offered (nowhere near LSI that followed later when yields improved). So the first real synths were transistor based because there were no realistic alternatives to that. Only a short while later were the first integrated circuits used in the form of opamps and transistor arrays. Soon, decent ICs both for analogue and for digital logic offered an obvious cost and performance advantage and those were what synths were built from. At that point, polyphony was the goose that laid the holy grail that everyone was after. Multiple integrated synth chips proved only just manufacturable, affordable, and stable enough - some of the time - when stacked together to make a polysynth, but the limitations were evident. Similarly, big-order VLSI later offered the possibility of getting everything onto one primary chip, which meant that FM and similar architectures were also viable as well as wave-based oscillator integration, and more importantly, lower cost (low enough to sell huge amounts of consistent low-maintenance high performance synths). DSP based synths were the obvious path, of which Yamaha and Korg heavily pushed development.
For me, a modern synth is one with many design restrictions and build limitations removed that otherwise would represent resistance against making what we desire. I would say that happened not at the Fairlight or Synclavier or even the lower cost Emulator, or even the Yamaha GS-1, but around the time of the DX7.
Hehe...
I remember when I head this song sampled in the early Amiga Demos
Ouch, born -72...
it's really hard (or rather impossible) to discriminate between modern/vintage.
I'd consider 'granular' a significant mark for modern, but then there's iVCS3 (a very convincing emulation of the analog EMS Synthi) that's probably based on granular algorithms.
As mentioned so much time has passed since the first digital processors (Fairlight, Lexicon, etc) that such gear may be considered 'vintage'.
The Wavestation was famous for it's fx unit, but so much used in TV/Movies that people recognized those sounds, so at some point it fell out of fashion.
And also it's the hands and ears using the gear. Greatness can coax beauty out of most anything. Case in point, a cr78 drum machine would be utter cheese, but these dudes make it shine:
I always think of vintage as a marketing term that means the synth/filters have an analog sound.
Exactly.
There were a couple 'how old is everyone' threads a while ago and it turned out the majority was well over 40.
Here is one... https://forum.audiob.us/discussion/3231/poll-on-age
And another... https://forum.audiob.us/discussion/11803/how-old-is-everyone/p1
Also, greatness aside it can just be very subjective/biased. When I first got DM1 a couple years ago I instantly gravitated towards the cr78 sounds and found it stoic and minimalistic in a very classy way. Loved it instantly with no baggage, knowing nothing about it or who ever used it etc. I don't know any radiohead, nor did i ever hear of the cr78 prior to DM1. Maybe some warp records stuff used it in the 90s when I really started to explore the range of electronic music and that gave me the soft spot for that sound,no idea. But yah, despite its age, in my little world it sounded fresh and cool.
Are you sure you've never heard of the CR78?
Long before Radiohead got ahold of a CR-78 someone much cooler was using one to make great music - John Foxx on his classic album, Metamatic.
Toast.
Not by name.
I was listening to Ultravox! just last night. Gawd, they were so good in the Foxx days!
And he's still using the CR-78!
http://thevinylfactory.com/vinyl-factory-releases/drum-patterns-and-memories-12-artists-reflect-on-iconic-drum-machines/5/
My kids love Hiroshima Mon Amour from Ha! Ha! Ha!. I have heard that it's CR-78 and that it's TR-77 on that song. Either way a great use of an old "rhythm machine" from nearly 40 (!) years ago.
Systems of Romance is classic!