Oberheim Etude #1: "Marathon Man"

Published on Oct 10, 2018 Kris Lennox

"Straight-up, in-your-face synth hero in this piece. Full-on 80's mode. :)

Something of a LH stamina-fest! Yes, quite the marathon.

Presently I'm preparing the scores for review. What I'm creating for each piece is introductory text/explanation of the musical/technical points, plus the score - and I'm hoping to also have a 'player-friendly' version of each score i.e. all note names added to help those who may struggle with notated music. Very involved, but hopefully worth it.

Given there is no developed repertoire for the synth (I mean as in sheet music i.e. a quantifiable recorded form of the music that can be passed from player-player), it is difficult to say what a 'good' synth player is, as there is no established technical yardstick. With these etudes I'm covering the technical/musical difficulties encountered in synth writing (which isn't necessarily 'play fast'), and sometimes pushing those difficulties slightly further (you likely won't encounter an octave bassline with the jumps/constant nature as of this work - but if you can play a work such as this, 'typical' synth bassline writing is, relatively speaking, easy).

The end result is: if someone can play all 12, they'll have the ability to play almost anything/everything written for synth.

Guaranteed gigs/session work :)

The works are also good for pinpointing any weaknesses in playing. And hopefully also enjoyable as audio! No point writing music that sounds terrible!

The works aren't written necessarily to be played on an Oberheim - they can be performed on any 49-key synth. Even a MIDI controller/soft synth is fine. Personally, I'd love to hear what other players would do with them, in terms of patch/overall tone.

I'm also working on a set of monophonic works. I'll post one soon.

It would be nice for the audio for both sets to be available as an album/digital download. Let's see how things unfold.

All best
Kris"