queen refused to use them. The Musicians Union tried to ban them. Then the computers caught up with them. Synthesizers have been mocked, scorned, and dismissed throughout their history, but somehow they are entering a new golden age.
A new wave of synthesizer makers has emerged, creating machines that are more ambitious and often more extravagant than their beep-making predecessors, feeding the appetite of a growing group of enthusiasts.
Thousands of them, including Portishead’s Adrian Utley, gathered in Bristol this weekend at Machina Bristronica, a festival “of knobs, buttons and discussions”, to touch and even make devices that their designers believe sometimes cross the line of musical instruments to conceptual art.
Less than a decade ago, anyone wanting to discover the latest in electronic music had to make a pilgrimage to Berlin’s annual Superbooth fair, but there are now several in the UK. SynthFest UK was held in Sheffield last week, and Synth East in Norwich opened its doors for the first time last year.
“A lot of people started making electronic music through the computer,” said Ben Chilton, co-founder of Machina Bristronica. Over the past 20 years, software like Cubase, Reason, and Ableton Live have made it easy for anyone to make music on a computer or even on their phones. Software synthesizers are heard in nightclubs everywhere.
“People were selling their synthesizers when computers were exciting, and after a few years they long for something they can play,” Chilton said. The ability to shape sounds on the fly in a performance, rather than feeling like you’re programming a machine, is behind the resurgence of synthesizer hardware, he added.
Synthesizers have inspired generations of musicians in different ways. Pink Floyd created a menacing soundscape in dark side of the moon with a synthesizer that came in a briefcase. The Human League, Gary Numan and Cabaret Voltaire pioneered the ’80s synthpop sound that was later powered by the Yamaha DX7. And although Donna Summer’s I Feel Love brought the Moog to the club, modern dance music would have been very different if DJ Pierre and Juan Atkins hadn’t discovered they could push the Roland TB-303 (intended as a bass substitute) to create the squelchy sound. Acid house sounds.
Modern synthesizers fall into two categories. Stand-alone desktop synthesizers typically have a keyboard and many knobs, dials, and faders for the player to make the instrument rise and rise. Then there are synthesizers assembled from different modules: some to generate sounds, others to manipulate them. Modular synthesizers can be simple things or extraordinary masses of wires and metal, like a £15,000 colossus created for film composer Hans Zimmer this year for his BBC Radiophonic Workshop relaunch. In 2013, Sound on sound reported that there were around 730 modules available for Eurorack, which has become the modular standard. Now there are more than 16,000.
Yesterday also marked the 60th anniversary of the Moog modular, the first commercially available synthesizer. Until 1964, anyone interested in the possibilities of electronic music had to build their own machines, as Delia Derbyshire did with the Radiophonic Workshop when she used BBC tapes and test equipment to create the doctor who theme melody. Robert Moog’s synthesizer was followed by the Buchla Easel.
“At first they were designed with home organists in mind, but in the mid-’70s people realized they were instruments in their own right: (Jean-Michel) Jarre, Tomita, Vangelis,” said synthesizer historian Oli Freke. and author of Synthesiszero evolution.
Not everyone liked them. Some musicians feared being replaced and some bands took a stand. Queen played “No Synths!” on the covers of four of their albums, and in 1982 the Musicians Union passed a resolution to ban
Now that almost any sound imaginable can be conjured from a computer, the endless variety of options has led creators to opt for more limited devices. Tom Whitwell, former editor of Mixmaghe now makes synth modules as Music Thing and today he’ll be demonstrating his latest gear, a portable modular synthesizer, at Machina Bristronica.
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The growing interest in synthesizers is due to the post-pandemic boom and easy access to Chinese factories, said Whitwell, whose devices have been used by Radiohead’s Thom Yorke, James Blake and Ryuichi Sakamoto.
“The barriers are much lower,” he said. “I can design something, send a couple of files to Shenzhen and three weeks later these magical circuit boards will appear for £25. It means you can try weirder and weirder things with very little risk.”
He will help Machina Bristronica attendees make a Mikrophonie, a Karlheinz Stockhausen-inspired musical prank that captures the sounds of synthesizer switches with a microphone to feed them back to the machine.
The key to the success of synthesizers is that they allow people to play again, said Jack Edwards of BeepBoop Electronics. “It rekindles this spark of interest in the environment and the universe, like a child,” he said. “It is a conversation between the performer and the instrument. You take advantage of something that words cannot describe.”
