Title link takes you to a new page on the Rhodes Chroma site featuring composer Marco Rosano. He recently finished an album featuring Bach performed completely on a Rhodes Chroma. You will find info on Marco, the album, and his thoughts on the synthesizer as a musical instrument. He asks the age old question on whether it is an instrument in the truest sense. Before I scoffed at the question even being asked, I realized what he was talking about. He wasn't talking about the fact that it produces sound, but rather the sounds you create are instruments in and of themselves. He states:
"One morning, I woke up and I decided to create a new musical instrument; I started up my synthesizer and I built a musical instrument that did not exist before, with unique and unrepeatable features, with miltiple human-machine interfaces, with original timbric properties, new sounds, new emotions never felt before."
This was exactly the epiphany I had discovering my first synth, an Oberheim Matrix-6 back in 1986. At first, like many getting into synths, I thought of it as a keyboard/piano device with a multitude of synth sounds. I went through the presets and then started going under the hood. I thought what a great instrument. Then it clicked. It's not one instrument. Each sound was technically its own instrument. Each sound depending on how it was programmed could be played with a completely different technique. I then realized a synthesizer was not just a device that could be used to synthesize sound, but it could actually create brand new instruments never heard before. That realization blew me away. The Matrix-6 has velocity, release velocity, aftertouch, RAMP generators, Tracking generators, 3 Envelopes, 3 LFOs and more, all available as sources in it's Matrix Modulation. Depending on what and how you assigned these modulators, you in effect had to learn how to play the sound. For example, I'd set the release velocity to extend the release so when releasing keys slowly, the sound would sustain, and while releasing them quickly the sound would cut off immediately. I developed different techniques for different patches - and I of course realized
it's not a piano! (I actually put up a post about this back on July 25, 2005).
Update: On the flip side, I often come back to a patch I programmed and think, "what the heck was I thinking?!" It usually takes some effort to rediscover the magic behind the patch and how it was created. Usually it's just an evolution of technique and sound as I just get lost playing something.
So, the next time you program your synth, try creating a new instrument.
The image in this post was taken from
Marco's MySpace page. It reminds me of the duality between sound and instrument. And the Rhodes Chroma? I finally got to play one. With it's modulation capabilities, the weighted wooden keyboard and its rich analog sound, it is one of the most expressive synthesizers I have ever played if not the most expressive. Listen to some of the tracks by Marco and hear some of what it is capable of. Listen for the subtleties. An instrument like that is a dream to play.
